From the Vault: The Ark of the Covenant

What was the Ark of the Covenant? A mere ceremonial vessel for sacred items? A radio for speaking to God? The golden chest of the ancient Hebrews has fascinated historians, theologians, scientists, dreamers and Nazi-punching archeologists for ages. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider some of the more thought-provoking ideas concerning its nature. (originally published 12/6/2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and its Saturday.
Time to go into the Old Vault, and this time
I'm being lashed by tongues of flame. That's right. This
is going to be the first episode of our two
part look at the Ark of the Covenant. Uh. This
was a fun pair of episodes. I remember we were
exploring some very strange historical hypotheses, trying to to explain

(00:29):
the myth of the Great Arc that would strike people
dead with blasts of fire or lightning. Uh. This was
a lot of fun, so we hope you enjoyed it.
And it originally aired in December of And the Philistines
took the Ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer
unto ash DoD. When the Philistines took the Ark of God,
they brought it into the house of Dagon and set

(00:52):
it by Daygon. And when they of ash DoD arose
early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his
face to the earth before the Ark of the Lord.
And they took Dagon and set him in his place again.
And when they arose early on the morrow, morning. Behold,
Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before

(01:12):
the ark of the Lord and the head of Dagon,
and both the palms of his hands were cut off
upon the threshold. Only the stump of Dagon was left
to him. Therefore, neither the priests of Dagon, nor any
that come into Dagon's house tread on the threshold of
Dagon and Ashdad unto this day. But the hand of
the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he

(01:35):
destroyed them and smote them with immrods, even Ashdod and
the coast thereof. And when the men of Ashdod saw
that it was so, they said, the ark of the
God of Israel shall not abide with us, for his
hand is sore upon us, and upon Dagon our God.
They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the

(01:56):
Philistines unto them, and said, what shall we do with
the ark of the God of Israel. And they answered
a letter, the Ark of the God of Israel be
carried about unto God. And they carried the Ark of
the God of Israel about thither. And it was so
that after they had carried it about, the hand of

(02:16):
the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction,
and he smote the men of the city, both small
and great. And they had immerrods in their secret parts,
Immerrods in their secret parts, Immads in their secret parts,
emmerrods in their secret parts, Emmerads and their secret parts.

(02:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Scuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick.
And if you couldn't guess by that opening, obviously we're
gonna be talking about the Ark of the Cove today. Robert.

(03:01):
I think it was when I came back from Thanksgiving
break that you were like, we're doing the Ark of
the Covenant on the show, and I was like, what
the heck are you talking about? Now? You know, I'm
always up for an exploration of some kind of weird
ancient artifactor or something like that. So so we're we're
good to go. But why did you want to talk
about the arc on this show, Robert, Well, it's like

(03:23):
nothing we've gone after before. Jeah. I was like, um no,
that the arc is. I guess it basically comes down
to the arc has along fascinated me. I grew up
watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones movie.
I had it on VHS and I would sit there
and watch segments of it in slow motion. Pretty Much
every special effect in the film I would watch in

(03:45):
slow motion, from the melting of Nazis to just uh,
you know, more practical stuff as well. Uh. And you
like sit your parents down and your grandparents into a
frame by frame face melting analysis, that sort of thing. Yeah,
it just it always fascinated me. And then if you're
setting in church, and I grew up attending church, you
you pick up the Bible and you flip around, you

(04:07):
look at you read the interesting passages, and certainly the
passages about the Ark of the Covenant are some of
the more fascinating. Uh. This just there's just they just
resonate with mystery and like what is this about? And
so I feel like throughout my life I have come
back to it, and uh, in each time I've I've
looked at it with new eyes. And more recently I've

(04:28):
been thinking, uh, you know what, what are some scientific,
possible scientific explanations, even if they're a bit fringey in
places regarding the arc surely they exist, and lo and
behold they do well. The way that the ARC connects
to a lot of scientific topics is very interesting. Generally,
it tends to connect to them and kind of uh yeah,
like you say, fringy often kind of like uh pseudo

(04:52):
pseudo scientific kind of ways, but gives you a good,
mysterious jumping off point to talk about real science. So yeah,
we want to talk about the myth to we want
to talk about some weird fringe and pseudoscience believes people
have had about the arc and how that connects to
weird ideas about ancient technology, to talk about real science
and technology potential in the ancient world. And uh, I

(05:12):
think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Now, I
have to admit it. As much as I love the
discussion module our Facebook group, it is associated with stuff
to build your Mind. I actually checked in with the
Movie Crushers this is the group associated with Chuck Bryant's
Movie Crush podcast, because I was curious what is what
it was, what it is like a to have never
seen Raiders of the Level Lost Arc, and also what

(05:36):
it is like to have seen Raiders of the Lost
Arc but with some sort of underlying understanding, pre existing
understanding of the Ark of the Covenant, because I can
relate to to neither of those, like the Ark of
the Covenant as it's revealed, and Raiders of the Lost
Arc has pretty much always been there in my life. Essentially,
Raiders is a book of the Bible in a way. Yeah,

(05:56):
really Like I saw that, and then later on I
learned how to read and came back into and learned
what the Bible had to say about it. But you know,
in Sunday School, we just never got the m Rod's.
I don't know why they left the mrods out. I
would have loved that when I was seven. Well we'll
get we'll get to this. But I think one of
the issues, of course his translation. In some translations they're

(06:18):
referred to as tumors. I think that's where I encountered
the first time, and I was like, whoa, back up,
The Ark of the Covenant is giving the enemies of
God tumors, uh, And that's what that's one of This
was post Raiders, but then I was but then I
was like, oh, I'm really hooked now, Like this is
this is even more uh, you know, Eldric Harror heaped
upon the mystery of the arc. It makes you want

(06:39):
to imagine an alternate universe in which Raiders of the
Lost Ark was not made by Spielberg and Lucas, but
was made by David Cronenberg. And so when they opened
the arc, it's kind of like the tumor gun from Videodrome. Yeah, exactly.
I think that. Again, that's one of the things about
about The Ark of the Covenant is is it's just
so weird, and we're going to keep touching in on
that weirdness, and we're also going to keep referring to

(06:59):
Raid is the Lost Arc throughout this episode because this
episode more than anything that we've covered before, because it's
just free license to talk about that movie ad nausea. Yeah,
there's a lot of fascinating stuff just in the original
arc mythology, but the the Indiana Jones treatment of the
story partially merges it with something kind of like Pandora's Box,

(07:20):
Like it becomes just a container of unknown and unutterable mystery,
where there isn't quite so much that feeling in the
Bible stories, though it is a strange and sacred object
of profound power. Now, two of the big questions that
are generally mold over concerning the Arc. Uh, first of all,
what was it? And then secondly where is it now? Now,

(07:41):
we're mostly going to ruminate over the first question, because
the second is one of those questions that tends to
lead to one of two places. Either the fact that
it's simply lost to history, likely destroyed in some prior age,
or or hidden away and lost, assuming that there was
such an object, and that's the other possibility is that
it simply did not exist um or it leads one

(08:01):
to various speculative or even downright conspiracy theories involving you know,
the Knights Templars perhaps, Or there's the notion that it's
it's currently hidden out of sight in the chapel of
the Tablet in northern Epethiopia, which is possible, but there's
no no proof or that it was taken to Heaven,
an answer that requires more of a speculative lead than
the notion that the Arc, like so many treasures of history,

(08:23):
simply failed to survive history. Now, one of the main
things that we're going to be exploring in this look
at the Arc is that the Ark of the Covenant
is yet another one of these ancient stories, these objects
of ancient myth, which there have been great efforts by
modern writers to ground the myth and what we now
know about science and technology, reimagining what the ancients believe

(08:45):
to be magic as some kind of lost powerful science
or technology. And we've discussed before some of the risks
of technologizing the myth. Uh, it's not necessarily always wrong,
but it's an impulse, that's not all. It's also not
always justified. There's a sort of naive way of reading
ancient texts that says, Okay, let's take what they say

(09:07):
happened basically at face value, but posit a different explanation
for it than they would have. And while this can
be a fun exercise, I love doing it, I personally
enjoy we shall always remember not to start feeling like
this is a necessary and especially not like it's a
parsimonious exercise, when in reality, ancient histories of all kinds,

(09:28):
religious texts, myths, and so forth are likely to be
full of narratives that are the result of creative imagination
and things like exaggeration across time and retellings. In other words,
there's no event that you necessarily have to explain because
the events described in these ancient stories often just didn't
take place. Right, We can't treat a description of the

(09:49):
arc in uh in the whole Testament as being the
same as say, you know, fossil evidence or a or
a crater, right right, We we just don't know. I mean,
it might be based on something that actually happened, but
we don't know. But if we take the route of saying, well, okay,
if these stories are based on something people saw, are
based on something that actually happened. When we look at

(10:11):
history that way, ancient history with a bit of science
under the belt, there is this insatiable itch the retro
sci fi hermonutic, which I've been looking for a concise
name for, and I think I just realized the perfect
one for for this era of that which I'm gonna
I'm gonna start calling bronze punk. Yeah, so you've got yeah,
you've got steampunk for the Victorian era, You've got adam

(10:32):
punk for the atomic age. And I think we should
have bronze punk as the name for this retroactive technologizing
of the time period of classical civilizations in the ancient
Near East, including the Hebrew Bible and its contemporary civilizations
and texts. So with those important caveats, I think we
should begin a bronze punk adventure into the Ark. Bronze

(10:53):
Bronze Punk does have a lot of of of opportunity here.
It gives us a chance to bring back uh Talus,
the Bronze automaton. Oh, that's a classic example we would
tell us. I think they'd be bronze Punk. I don't
want to be too rigid about the time period that
applies to either, because a lot of the stuff we're
talking about here I think would technically be bridging Bronze
Age and Iron Age and the regions that are affected.

(11:15):
But all that aside, yeah, anything, it doesn't need to
stand in the way of tall Us battling the Ark
of the Covenant. I would say, well, before we get
into all these supposed Bronze punk explanations of what the
arc might have been if it existed, and if some
of the stories about it are based on things people saw,
we should just explore the myth, like what is the

(11:37):
story of the arc and what do the text say
about it? All? Right? Yeah, well we're talking here about
the airon Hobart, the Arc of God, the Arc of testimony,
the Arc of the Covenant, just a few names that
we used to describe it. Here a gold plated wooden
chest used by the ancient Hebrews to house the two
stone tablets of law given to Moses by God, and

(11:59):
it was also said to contain a couple of other
holy relics, such as Aaron's rod, a magical item used
by Moses brother, as well as a pot of man,
the supernatural food stuff that fell from the heavens to
feed the Israelites in the desert. Now, in addition to
being made of gold, to the other decorative element that
is a signature of the art are the two cherubim
that are depicted atop it. Now I'm not quite sure

(12:22):
why this has happened, but in modern English usage cherubs
or cherubim that has come to mean naked baby angels
like you would see on those cards or the creepy
little statues people put on their dressers. But cherubim are
not naked cute baby angels, right right, even though, like
if we describe something as bearing cherubic today, we're we're

(12:45):
describing so it's got like a baby with fat cheeks,
or maybe an adult with a fat with fat cheeks
and kind of a baby's face. But really it should
be a horrifying adjective to to heap on something. It
should mean that it is an object or personification of
just holy wrath. Right. Classical example would be angels stationed
outside the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword to

(13:06):
keep people out. That's right. I mean that that is
a chair of the true chair of forget the Renaissance
art here that they're kind of like God's supernatural heavies.
But as with any sort of mythological creature, you do
see a lot of variety in the way they're depicted,
ranging indeed, from the bestial to the more humanoid. Depictions
of the art tend to favor of a version of

(13:29):
winged humanoids. But we could, and perhaps we should, do
an entire episode on angels and religious traditions in the future,
because there's so much the fascinating material there. So we're
talking about creatures that would have been first or second
circle in the hierarchy of angels, and their descriptions include
or tend to include the form of a lion, the
form of a man, the form of an eagle, or

(13:50):
any hybrid of these forms I've actually seen it described
that they sometimes are representative as having four faces, yes,
and the four the four faces would flude the lion
to represent the beasts of the wild, the man to
represent the world of humans. I think, an oxen face
to represent the world of domesticated animals, and then an

(14:11):
eagle face to represent the world of birds, which I
guess are somehow different than wild animals. Yeah, these depictions
of of the chairbs often look kind of like emblems, right,
with like folds of multiple wings and haloed heads of
these creatures and a human poking out. Now. According to
Carol rose Um Folklore's who I frequently side on the
show in her book Spirits, Fairies, lepre Cons and Goblins

(14:33):
and Encyclopedia, Hebrew religious writings state that images of cherubim
guarded the ark of the Covenant as well as Solomon's
temple and their divine messengers attending spirits and disseminators of knowledge.
Now it's possible. Rose points out the cherubim or derived
from the Assyrian Lamassu or sea dow, and these were

(14:54):
the female and male, respectively, benevolent demons in ancient Assyria
and Babylon. They would have protected palaces and temples, and
they were there often depicted as winged bulls or lions
with human heads, and they mostly remained invisible, and we
were assigned in the manner of guardian angels to protect
an individual human from the evil uh two ku. There

(15:17):
are some amazing carvings of these in the met in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I believe from the palace
of the Assyrian king Ashurbanapoul the second, or maybe not
the palace, but I think commissioned by that king, and
that they are fearsome and wonderful to behold, Yes they are,
and to come back to Raiders of the Lost Arc.
These are of course, presumably the the the entities we

(15:38):
see flying around after the Nazis opened the Ark of
the Covenant at the end of the film. The Cherubim yeah, yeah,
because they first thought of like like women, uh, you know,
sort of beautiful ghost women. And then of course the
face changes and it becomes this kind of snarling, skeletal
lion type face, and then of course, uh, it's death
for all who view the Ark. Now for a for

(16:01):
an artifact that has come to be imbued with so
much mystery. Retrospectively, the Bible actually does just straightforwardly explain
how to build the arc. It's like minute specifications on
what you're supposed to do to make one. Yeah, and
also it almost makes you wonder, like, what's the big
deal about losing it, because clearly you have you have

(16:23):
a strict set of instructions on how to build another one. Well,
I mean I think they were just like magical beliefs
about the sacredness of what it contains. Oh yes, certainly,
but but that ultimately is the thing, right. The art
is a container, a fancy container, perhaps even a holy container,
and if you're approaching with that worldview, but just a
container for other otherwise holy relics. That is one thing

(16:45):
that I think makes it very fascinating and kind of unique.
And there are probably some other great artifacts like this,
but fascinating in that it is, uh, this artifact with
all this significance, but it is essentially just a vessel
for other things. It's a container, it's not a statue. Well,
should we read the instructions from Exodus in case anyone
wants to build along as we as we do the podcast,

(17:08):
Let's build it all right, get your your cubit ruler ready,
and they shall make an arc of ship him. Would
two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof,
and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and
a cubit and a half the height thereof. And thou
shalt overlay it with pure gold within and without shalt
thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown

(17:30):
of gold around about, And thou shalt cast four rings
of gold for it, and put them in the four
corners thereof, And two rings shall be in the one
side of it, and two rings in the other side
of it. And thou shalt make staves of ship him
wood and overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put
the staves into the rings by the sides of the arc,
that the arc may be born with them. The staves

(17:53):
shall be in the rings of the arc. They shall
not be taken from it. Now I want to jump
in here and say they say that this is exactly
the kind of description of the arc that is disappointing.
When you're a child, you've seen raiders and then you
want to read about in the Bible, and you just
find this this kind of boring description of how to
build one. Oh, there are better stories. We got them rods.
We're gonna get to some more later. Well, this this

(18:14):
description is about to get a lot more interesting, and
certainly we'll tie into some stuff we're gonna discuss later.
And thou shalt put into the arc the testimony which
I shall give thee. And thou shalt make a mercy
seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall
be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half
the breadth thereof. And thou shalt make two cherubims of

(18:36):
gold of beaten work. Shalt thou make them in the
two ends of the mercy seat, and make one cherub
on the one end, and the other cherub on the
other end. Even of the mercy seat, shall he make
the cherubims on the two ends thereof? So otherways, make
the two cherubs face each other on the ends of
the mercy seat. Believe a space, because that space is important.

(18:58):
Anyway continues, And the cheruban shall stretch forth their wings
on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and
their faces shall look one to another toward the mercy seat.
Shall the faces of the cherubims be, and thou shalt
put the mercy seat above upon the arc, and in
the arc, thou shalt put the testimony that I shall
give THEE, and there I will meet with THEE, and

(19:21):
I will commune with THEE from above the mercy seat
from between the two chaerubims, which are upon the ark
of the testimony of all things which I will give
THEE in commandment unto the children of Israel. Okay, so
this thing is a container, as we've been saying, but
it's also a chair, and it's a chair for God himself. Right.

(19:44):
The ideas that that mercy seat is where God is
going to manifest. It sounds from the instructions like there
is going to be a presence of the Lord there
and Uh and Moses, Um and perhaps you know some
other priests. H whoever is is in charge, whoever is
authorized to do so, will actually commune with God. It is,

(20:04):
in the words of Belloc, a radio for speaking to God,
a transmitter. But it's really more like a video phone
than than just a transmitter. Right, Yeah, it's like FaceTime,
you know. On that note, let's take a quick break
and when we come back, we'll discuss the story of
the Arc, because that too will be important as we
get into some of these scientific ideas regarding the arc.

(20:27):
Than all right, we're back, all right, So if the
Arc was actually built, about when do we think that
would have happened. It would have been about three thousand
years ago. Now we've seen the instructions in the Bible
where they believed God had sent his people. Uh, you know,
the detailed plans on how to make the arc. But
what do they do with it once they've got it? Well,

(20:49):
after they've they've built it, they carried around with them
and they use it as a central part of their
religious observations. I mean, it's essentially a mobile alter piece, right,
I mean, it's it's a it's a temple that you
can pick up in move. So think back again to
that part about the mercy seat. This is the point
from which God speaks to the children of Israel, and
if Raiders is any indication, it's also from Wendcey sends

(21:10):
out his smiting laser beams of Holy Nazi frying death.
Now the wording here is interesting because it is the
and I'm possibly a butchering this of course, but the
hawk Copperette well, and kaufer that's k k pH a
r means to cover, but kapareth means a thing of
wiping out or cleansing. So they carried a bit before

(21:33):
them when during the Exodus, and it was said to
clear impediments and poisonous animals in their path, and it
was even said to stop the flow of the river
Jordan's so that they could cross into the Promised Land.
But it was also conceived of as a kind of
a magical weapon of war. Right, yeah, they marched with
it at the Siege of Jericho. Of course, you know,

(21:54):
they were blowing those trumpets, but still the arc was there,
and as they're blowing those trumpets, eventually the walls come
tumbling down. But then in five and five BC, the
Babylonian Empire conquered the Israelites, and the arc was supposedly
taken from the temple in Jerusalem and from their advantishes
from history. So if it did indeed exist, as as

(22:18):
to some degree as the stories are told, this is
where it stops. We don't know what happens after this, right,
this is this is where it becomes the Lost Arc. Now,
as with any Bible artifact of any significance. I would
bet that there are some people out there who claim
to have found it. Yes, and but but before we
touch on those, I do want to point out just
a wonderful fragment of a quote here came to It

(22:40):
came to us from a National Geographic Society fellow, Fred Hybert.
He told the website National Geographic that it's not really
something that you can go after. You can't really search
for the arc because the arc exists at quote the
crossroads between myth and reality. And I think that's that's
essential to keep in mind for the entirety of this episode.

(23:02):
In the next well, I would say, for example, I
think the arc probably has a better chance of being
in some way based on a real historical artifact than
something like Noah's Ark. But people constantly go looking for
Noah's Ark, and every time they go looking, they find it.
You know, there's well, here's some wood on a mountain
and turkey here it is, right, And likewise, the arc

(23:24):
is simply essentially just wood and gold. Uh. And it's
not it's even less of a feat to build. Like
we have the instructions you could, if you had the materials,
you could build one today. So even if we were
to uncover an ARC candidate, it's not really possible to
tell that if you have the arc of the Covenant.
I mean, there could probably be multiple arcs out. They're
saying that they're the arc, yeah, I mean there And

(23:46):
there have been cases where they where market artists have
found something that is like an arc, a box that
has perhaps excited a few people here and there, but
ultimately you know, it doesn't pan out. I mean, I
suppose if you had a strong candidate, you could do
carbon dating on the on the relic, perhaps the wood,
especially if there are any humans of the wood remaining,

(24:07):
to at least know if it's old enough. Yeah, to
know if it's it's old enough. But again, it could
just be another box from that time period. That being said,
some of the possible final resting places for the arc
include has already already alluded to St. Mary of Zion
Cathedral in Oxom, Ethiopia, under the care of the Ethiopian

(24:29):
Orthodox to a head O church, and more specifically, under
the care of a single caretaker who alone gets to
see the arc. Naturally, that means no one gets to
verify what they actually have or don't have much less
study it. Some claim that it was hidden beneath the
First Temple in Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroyed it in
five eighty six b C. But this can't be verified either,

(24:51):
because that means it would be somewhere beneath the Dome
of the Rock Shrine, which of course is a holy
site in its Lam. Now, there's another claim mentioned in
that nat Geo article that I sided earlier, that it
was buried beneath the hill, and not just any hill,
but the very hill that would later be known as Galgatha,
the place of the Skull, right, which is the place
where it is said that Jesus was crucified right And

(25:13):
according to this story, when he's crucified, his blood like
drains down into the hill and eventually to the Ark
itself buried beneath him. And uh. This relates to a
quote unquote find of amateur adventurer Ron Wyatt, who lived
nineteen who claimed to have found, among other things, Noah's Ark,

(25:34):
the Ark of the Covenant, the Tower of Babel, the
graves of Noah and his wife, as well as the
blood of Christ itself. Needless to say, one should take
his account with all the salt that Wyatt claimed to
have also discovered at the ruins of Sodom. Uh. Yeah,
he was not a true archaeologist. Now, this guy is

(25:55):
not unique and essentially being um, somebody who is a
hologist for their religion who goes out. I mean I
mainly know of this within within Christian you know, like
somebody who's basically a Christian apologist, a defender of the faith,
who goes out seeking artifacts. That has always struck me
as a kind of odd thing to want to do.
I guess I get it on the level of these

(26:17):
are people who are trying to prove that the Bible
is literally true and everything, all the stories in it
literally happened on Earth a certain number of years ago.
But it seems like kind of a profaning of the
the orientation towards their myths if they're going out and
saying like, I'm going to find the bones of this
person who's the you know in the stories that I believe,

(26:39):
or I'm going to find the wood left over from
the boat. Yeah. I mean, I guess you can approach
it from a few different points of view. I mean
I always the way I always approach it is that
that the you know, the deep mythology of a given
faith need not be factual to have power and uh,
and therefore there's no reason to go and try and
find fragments of it or expect them to be there

(27:00):
be there. Uh. You could, I guess, approach it as
someone who needs to find those items because that again
supports their religion. Perhaps the racist doubt. If only I
could find a piece of the arc, then I know
it was real and I can silence these doubts. The
other way of looking at it, of course, is someone
who has no doubts whatsoever, and they're like, hey, the
arc was obviously real. Um, I gotta prove it to

(27:23):
everybody else. Yeah, I need to prove it to everybody else,
or I just I just want to find it. It's
out there somewhere. Why has nobody found it. I'm going
to be the one to do it. And to your point,
if you go into this read these regions, there is
just so much history that, especially somebody who's just bumbling
around and they don't really know what they're doing, they're
going to find something that they can pass off, they
can believe in. I don't know, they end up being

(27:44):
kind of like the villains in all the Indiana Jones
movies who want to possess some powerful, mysterious saction artifact,
but they want to possess it for some earthly purpose,
like you know, then I can show everybody this thing
or something. It's sort of the more all of Raiders
of the Lost Ark at the end that Indie Indie
loses his his sort of profane curiosity and he realizes

(28:08):
I can just let this thing be sacred and not
have to look inside and not have to want to
own it and control it and show the world. Yeah,
I think that's a that's a solid read on Raiders
of the Lost Dark. You know, well, while we're talking
about Raiders, so let's let's go ahead and uh and
discuss a few of the details about it, because I'm
I'm assuming most people have seen Raiders, but I know

(28:28):
there are some individuals out there who just haven't seen
the film yet. Uh, And I certainly encourage everyone to
see it because it is a damn near perfect motion picture.
Is there a better action adventure movie? I can't think of.
I mean, you could, you could say Star Wars, right,
you can point to other maybe things of that nature.

(28:49):
But but I mean, it's such a tentpole film in
terms of like big summer action films. It is the
film that so many other motion pictures have have tried
to be. This of course with a film came out
in eighteen eighty one, directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by
Lawrence Kasden's story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. U.
Philip Kaufman, by the way, is the person who reportedly

(29:12):
brought up the idea of using the arc in the story,
and he was he was also the grandson of German
Jewish immigrants to the US. Spielberg's parental grandparents were Jewish Ukrainians.
Uh So, I one would assume that the that this
played into the the use of the arc in the film,
but also some of these themes regarding the you know,

(29:33):
the struggle of the Jewish people against depression. Yeah. Well,
one of the unspoken subtexts to the film, I think
is that ultimately the arkans up fulfilling its destiny as
the weapon that protects the Jewish people in the end,
it's it's destroying Nazis, right, and it's recreating a tale
that will touch on in a bit the idea that
the Arc is stolen by an enemy force and then

(29:54):
uses its power against that enemy force. Yeah, it's sort
of a retelling of the of the Amrods story. Almost. Yeah.
I should also point out that John Williams did the
score for the film, and I'm usually I'm I'm kind
of over John Williams scores for the most part. I
don't know what you're talking about, dude, how can you
not love John Williams. Well, the thing is in rewatching

(30:16):
portions of this film for this episode. I I still
I have to give him all the credit in the
world because that that the scene when they finally opened
the Arc and the Arc unleash's it's um, it's wrath
upon the Nazis. The music is perfect in that it
just really adds to the sense of just holy mystery
that is unfolding there. Take any movie with the John

(30:36):
Williams score and take the score out, replace it with
something else. You wouldn't have half the movie. But what
if it was Tangerine Dream. I can only imagine it
it might be just a little better. Maybe. Well, I
love Tangerine Dream too, but you're wrong about this time. No?
Well maybe so. Now key scenes in the film for
our purposes, because there's a lot of stuff in there
that is of course added on and uh um, you know,

(31:00):
historically inaccurate, certainly, h But there are a few key
scenes that that that match up with a lot of
stuff we're talking about here today. There's a scene in
which the Arc burns the swastick off of the crate
containing the arc. And then of course there's that fabulous
scene at the end where the Nazis open the arc
uh and those Cherubim emerge, and then you also have
the burning light of God finally emerging as well and

(31:22):
just eradicating everybody that has their eyes open. And the
idea of a fire that burns people emerging from the
arc is absolutely biblical. And will explore more of those
stories later on. Now, a side question that I saw
come up on the internet. Does Indie actually impact the
situation with the Arc and the Nazis at all? Because
outside of saving Marian's life Marian the romantic interest, does

(31:47):
he accomplish anything? No, And I think that's the genius
of it. The movie ends with with Indie. It doesn't.
It's an action movie that doesn't end with a fist fight.
There's no fight of any kind at the end. The
the hero of the movie at the end is completely powerless,
and his victory at the end is assuming a posture
of humility in the presence of the Sacred Yeah, totally,

(32:10):
because to remind everybody, at the end, he and Marian
are tied up. The Nazis have the Arc and UH
and Belloc is opening it in the full regalia and
in fact wearing some version of the vestiments that are
described UH, alongside the instructions for the for the construction
of the Arc, and then the Arc just murders all

(32:32):
of the bad guys and UH and Harrison Ford is
left to pick up the pieces. Okay, we can't just
fully turn this into a movie crush episode. Now we've
got to get back to so we should probably get
into exploring some of the weird scientific tangents people have
gotten into on the subject of the Arc, and one
of them that you can clearly look at is the

(32:53):
idea of the m Rods and what happened with the
Arc in the presence of the Philistines. If you assume
this story is based on any kind of historical memory
or even an exaggerated version of something that people remembered, right, Yeah,
because this is getting to one of my favorite things
about the Arc, the idea that it brings plague and
or madness to those who should not possess it, that
it is a dangerous artifact. So should we explore the

(33:16):
idea of the arc as a sort of bio weapon. Yeah,
let's talk about the Arc as plague bearer. I just
want to remind everybody that previous passage that we read,
and it was so that after they had carried it about,
the hand of the Lord was against the city with
a very great destruction, and he smoked the men of
the city, both small and great, and they had immrods

(33:37):
in their secret parts. Now, let's talk about those emrods.
So those immrods are often interpreted as hemorrhoids. That would
there seems to be a cognate issue there, and a
lot seems to have been written about them over the years,
in part because it seems like anytime you have a
hemorrhoid paper, and there are a lot herroid papers out there,

(34:01):
the doctor's writing them often like to throw in a
little bit of biblical flavor at the beginning. Yes, how
many times has this story been cited in the International
Journal of Hemorrhoid Research. Right, yeah, right at the very
beginning of any paper, because you're ultimately just going to
talk about swollen veins and the lower part of the
rectum and anus. But then you can make it a
little magical right at the start. You can hook readers. Right,

(34:23):
So for people who don't actually know, can you just
briefly explain what a hemorrhoid is? Yeah, it is swollen
veins and the lower part of the rectum and anus. Okay, Yeah,
that's all it is. Yeah, that basically. I mean you
can get more detailed in describing what causes them and
of course the treatments that that are necessary. But it's
been a problem for a long time. Obviously, it's something

(34:45):
that may have been described here in the Bible, uh,
and just throughout human history people have had to deal
with hemorrhroids. Now, if the story actually does mean that
the Philistines got hemorrhoids, I know it's been translated in
other ways, But if it did mean that, would the
story be best interpreted as something that's supposed to be humorous?

(35:06):
Is it like a joke on the Philistines? You know
this comes down? Oh man, you you kind of end
up asking a big question about humor there, right, because
I don't think hemorroids are ever humorous to the individual
that has them, right, But clearly we have a lot
of jokes about hemorrhoids. It's really funny when your enemies
get one, I guess, I mean it's it's it's kind

(35:28):
of an insulting curse from a powerful god figure. Right,
It's not just like causing them to go blind or something.
It's giving them this this annoying health problem. And then
there's this other part to it as well. So the
Philistines suffer these after they steal it and they locked
it up in the temple of Dagon, and we see
the statue of Dagon fall over multiple times. Um and

(35:52):
the arc of course not only mutilated there with their
god's statue, it also caused these these imrods as well
as a plague of rampaiy mice. The emerrods again are
also sometimes referred to as tumors. So a lot of
people have have looked at these examples and tried to
figure out what could possibly be going on here, because

(36:12):
if these these imrods be the hemorrhoids or some sort
of a tumor. Well, that's that's a symptom. That's something
we can look look to that we can analyze via
modern medicine, and then maybe we can look at some
of these other elements and try and piece something together
as well. Now, just to be clear, once again, we
mentioned this earlier, but we don't We don't have direct
evidence that this story actually happened. We right, We don't

(36:34):
know that this is based on something that people remember,
but it could be it could be based on some
kind of historical event. Right. And likewise, a lot of
a lot of work has been done looking at Okay,
we had we had immerrods and we have mice. What's
the connection there, when in reality you could have two
separate stories then end up being combined into a story
that has immerrods and mice. So, as I said, a

(36:57):
number of people have written about this. Two of the
earlier ones were ninety century historians Gaston Maspero and Archibald
Henry Says, who summarized the quote. The Philistine soothsayer, being
consulted at the end of seven months, ordered that the
solemn sacrifices should be offered up and the arc restored
to its rightful worshippers, accompanied by expiatory offerings of five

(37:19):
gold mice and five gold tumors, one for each of
the repentant cities. So they're not only saying, here, take
your arc back because it is causing mice to be
everywhere and has given us some weird growths. They're saying,
here it is back, but also here's here's some golden
mice and some golden hemorrhoids or or tumors or something

(37:39):
uh too, sort of as payment or perhaps warning who
whoever gets the arc next. Now, I don't want to
get too far ahead of things here, but I can't
help but notice, if you've got mice and you've got
tumors or lumps of some kind, I'm going to start
thinking about bubonic plague. That's right, because bubonic plague does
result in bu bos, which are swellings of the lemp notes.

(38:00):
So that could sort of be classed as something like
a tumor. You get a lump under your skin, right,
And if you if you want to do a Google search,
you can find images of these uh, these swellings, and
indeed they look kind of like like lumpy tumor like growths.
Frank R. Freeman, in a two thousand five Royal Society
of Medicine article highlighted some some other writings on the topic,

(38:21):
including a two thousand argument by JP Griffin that it
was in fact plague that was afflicting the Philistines here.
But then one W. M. S. Russell insisted that the
tumors were emorrhoids due to dysenterry and that quote the
rat carrier of the plague wasn't in the region at
the time of the described events, but that quotes Since then,

(38:44):
advances in archaeology have shifted the weight of evidence towards Griffin. Moreover,
the emmrods of the King James Bible appear in all
modern translations as tumors, So if you're just trying, really
trying to make it work as hemorrhoids, you're probably out
of luck. Right. It seems like like tumors are more
likely interpretation, and that leads a number of people to say, well,

(39:05):
maybe it was it was bubonic plague. Here's another quote
from Freeman. Recent archaeological evidence has caused a rethinking of
plague in the ancient Near East. Fossilized remains of the
plague flea have been found in large numbers in Amarna, Egypt,
and since a Marna was occupied for only a few years,
we can date this contact between human beings and plague

(39:27):
fleas accurately to about fifty b C, which is before
the events described in the Book of Samuel. Moreover, archaeological
studies in the Nile Valley indicate that our rattus was
introduced at this time, probably via ships from India. Evidence
of bubonic plague has not been seen in Egyptian mummies,
but all the vectors were in place. Okay, so this

(39:49):
is saying based on some evidence we have there. The
historical setting is is there like you could imagine that
there could be bubonic plague at the right time in
the right place for this to be what is what
is described in the story about the arc in the Philistines.
That being said, I don't think anybody is arguing that
the arc was full of plague infested mice. This would

(40:11):
just be a situation where the soothsayers made sort of
a connection between plague mice and the illness, but instead
of connecting those two things together, they just assumed they
were both curses of the Ark. Now, in the minute,
I do want to come back and discuss the possibility
of bio warfare and germ warfare in the ancient world. Yes,

(40:33):
and now before we get to that, I do I
do want to also mentioned that one doctor Otto news
stator In considered that the swellings described here might be possible.
It might possibly be due to syphiletic infection, which is
that the Philistines would have contracted syphilis from the Ark
of the Covenant or lahore again, that an outbreak of

(40:54):
syphilis lined up with the presence of the arc or
was attributed to the presence of the arc in some action.
Is there anything that syphilis doesn't explain? But I mean, yeah,
if we go back to to our earlier discussions of
syphilis on this uh this podcast, it it seems like
you can pretty much describe just about everything. The only
thing is you probably get into an argument about when

(41:16):
syphilis would have impacted a given region. No, by that,
I didn't mean that syphilis is a good explanation for everything.
I just people have tried it on everything. It's like
every powerful force in human history. For sure. Every historical
event has a syphilis hypothesis, as will come up repeatedly
in this episode. It's not necessary to invoke bronze punk

(41:38):
biowarfare explanations to justify legends of the ark. But it
is certainly, I think plausible that forms of biological warfare
were practiced in the ancient world. That who knows that
the ancient Uh, the ancient Hebrews, or any of the
other peoples of the time period could have figured out
how to do germ warfare and could have used it.

(41:59):
And in fact, we have some pretty interesting evidence that
it did actually happen, at least in one case UH
in the second millennium BC. That's right, we're talking about
the Hittites of Asia Minor going back to whatc around then,
so I think in the fourteenth century BC. So there

(42:19):
was an epidemic at the time in the fourteenth century BC,
known to historians as the Hittite plague, that spread throughout
the Middle East, And historical records of this pestilence appear
in correspondence Stella to the Egyptian pharaoh aknat In from
around thirteen thirty five BC, and they say that there's

(42:39):
a horrible plague that's spread throughout the land. It's affecting
some Phoenician cities, and there was a fear that it
was being spread by donkeys, which led to them barring
people from infected cities from coming into other cities and
from preventing donkeys from being used in traveling caravans. And
so there is a paper I wanted to talk about

(43:00):
published in Medical Hypotheses in two thousand seven by a
microbiologist named Zero e gin No trevis Sinato called the
Hittite plague an epidemic of tularemia and the first record
of biological warfare. And this is a really interesting hypothesis.
So Trevisano believes that the evidence indicates that the Hittite

(43:21):
plague was in fact an epidemic of tularemia, which is
a bacterial infection caused by the Bacterium francis sella to lawrensis.
Tularemia can spread between animals and humans, so it's potentially
zoonotic infection UH and it can spread via several routes,
including tick bites and by just direct contact or inhalation

(43:42):
of infected aerosols. It has different symptoms depending on the
route of transmission, including high fever and ulcers and swelling
of the lymph glands and the pneumonic version of this
infection leads to a cough, chest pain, difficulty breathing, and
can definitely be deadly to Tularemias is actually often known
to kill off large numbers of rabbits, which has led

(44:04):
to it being commonly known as rabbit fever, and especially
without modern medical intervention, primarily antibiotics, it can be fatal
to humans, so it is a deadly dangerous disease. Trevis
Sinato says that after the outbreak of this plague hit
the Phoenician city of Simura, the Hittites also known as
the nest Shites, attacked the area and looted it. So

(44:25):
you've got the city weakened by disease. The Hittites say, hey,
some free stuff, so they run in. They attacked the
city and they looted, taking along live stock among the
many spoils of war. But soon after they returned, the
Hittite raiders were hit with an outbreak of disease that
Trevis Sano. Trevis Sinato also thinks was to laremia, and

(44:46):
this would make sense because they brought the livestock. The
animal hosts were arcs if you will, for the bacteria.
Then while the Hittites were weakened with this epidemic. Another
people known as the r za Ones attacked them. Then.
Trevis Sinato writes that their historical records that indicate strange
incidents and when like wandering rams appeared in our Zawa,

(45:10):
and the Arzawans, of course wouldn't pass up free live stock,
so they incorporated these rams into their flocks. But then
they were hit with the disease, probably to laremia and
Trevis Sinato also mentioned the story that there was this
Arzawan leader called Hsidas who was struck by a divine
thunderbolt in the knee, disabling him. Quote. A ruler infected

(45:32):
with the plague and symptoms thereof being observed in the
knees or in a region euphemistically and or puritanically described
as the knees fit the metaphor. Oh. This is the
idea where like if an individual is wounded in the
in the groin, they describe it as the knee instead
or like the foot to like often in the Bible,
the use of the word foot is clearly a euphemism

(45:54):
for the genitals. So here's Trevis Sinato's hypothesis. It's the
the hit tights who experience with this epidemic. Deliberately planted
disease carrying rams among their enemies in order to deliberately
spread the rabbit fever the tularemia and weaken those enemies.
And if that's true, it seems like it worked. The

(46:15):
Lands were unable to defeat the Hittites after the fever
hit them, and we've got historical records that the Hittite
king wished plague upon the lands and that there was
this Hittite scapegoat ritual in which a ram and a
female attendant were sent out on the road, spreading disease
where they went. So we don't have direct evidence that

(46:35):
the Hittites knew exactly what they were doing, you know,
that they knew they were spreading disease, or that they
understood how the spread of disease was happening. So while
the evidence for this is very interesting, I would not
say it's a proven case of germ warfare, and that
it doesn't seem like this has become accepted theory about
what happened in this case, but it does seem like
a very promising hypothesis. But despite not having a germ

(46:59):
theory of disease, I think it's certainly feasible that ancient
people's could work out basic principles of epidemic transmission, such
as that infected or maybe cursed animals would spread the
disease to people that came in contact with, and using
this basic knowledge, it's possible that ancient people's could have
deliberately spread diseases among their enemies. And it's clear that

(47:21):
later armies with not much more scientific understanding than the
ancient people's had did this. Yeah, indeed, I mean two
of them. The most probably famous examples of this would
be throwing dead things, be they animals or soldiers uh
over the walls into a besieged city, or throwing that
kind of stuff down a well to try and destroy

(47:41):
poison uh an enemy's drinking water. Yeah. So I just
wanted to mention a few examples that are cited in
a paper called the History of Biological Warfare by Friedrich Frishnecht,
and this these would all be before the germ theory
of disease, but he mentions that in eleven fifty five,
Emperor Barbarossa poison water wells with human bodies in Italy.

(48:02):
In thirteen forty six, the Mongols catapulted bodies of plague
victims over the city walls of Kafa and the crime
Crimean peninsula, And in fourteen the Spanish mixed wine with
blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French enemies
in Naples a cocktail. So while I would absolutely say
that we do not need to resort to explanations like

(48:26):
this to explain the origins of these stories, at the
same time, I think it's fascinating and highly plausible that
there could have been cases where ancient people's used biological
or germ based weapons to hurt their enemies. Like you
can imagine a vessel or a container as some kind
of biological trojan horse, tricking enemies into taking home some

(48:50):
disease vector with them. What if you you get people
to steal your arc and it's actually a box full
of rabbit corpses covered into laremia tis. Yeah, I to
I would have assumed they look inside it before they
take it home. I mean that just seems like like
this is common sense. Well, maybe you make a crafty
one with like some hidden you know, containers on the

(49:10):
compartment stuff on the hidden compartments, with grates for the
ticks to get out. You can. You can get really
creative with this. So there no instructions about that, though
in the biblical account, it's true there are not. Again,
but I'm not saying that this actually happened and explains
the story. I don't think you need to go there.
All right, we're gonna take one more break, and when
we come back, we'll talk a little bit about radiation

(49:33):
and uh, the idea of the arc being indeed a
radio for talking to God. All right, we're back. So
I I mentioned earlier, you know, the influence of fiction
on our considerations of the arc, and I definitely remember
being I guess this was like junior high reading Stephen
King's The Stand and then also looking around in the

(49:57):
Bible and thinking about the arc of the Covenant because
of was this this wonderful sequence throughout the later portions
of Stephen King's The Stand And which what was his name?
Do you remember this character? Which character? The character is
dragging the the atomic bomb across the trash trash can man? Yeah,
Donald Merwin, Albert that's good. Do you remember his whole name? Yeah?

(50:17):
I just remember him just being like the melty bomb guy,
because he's just he's just ravaged by radiation, sickness, and mutation.
He's just his skins basically dripping off his body as
he drags this, uh, this bomb into the final scene
of the entire book. Well, based on a kind of
atomic age monster movie understanding of how radioactivity works, you

(50:39):
could certainly imagine somebody looking at the story of oh
the you know, they took this, this thing killed people
and sometimes at one point people took it and they
got tumors. This must be radioactive. Maybe it's a plutonium bomb. Yeah,
it sounds like something right out of a Fallout game
or a plan of the Apes movie. Right, yeah, Um,

(51:00):
But of course we we can't really seriously consider any
explanation that involves an ancient atomic weapon. No, there's just
no explanation for why that would have occurred, right. I
think the use of germ warfare among the ancients, even
though they might not have had a germ theory of disease,
I do think it's plausible given what they could have
figured out just based on experience. It is not plausible

(51:23):
at all that they I mean not even close, that
they came up with any kind of highly radioactive materials, right, Because,
of course, the other side of the equation is, hey,
we have naturally occurring radioactive materials. Perhaps they just dug
that stuff up and stuff the arc full of it,
because I mean, certainly there are you have sites like
Ramsar Iran that did have a lot of naturally occurring

(51:47):
radioactive materials there, but they still don't produce anything near
the high level doses required to cause radiation sickness. Digging
uranium out of the ground even it's not going to
be anything like that. The highly radioactive elements we would
find in like nuclear reactor fuel or nuclear weapons exist
only in extremely tiny trace amounts naturally, and to produce

(52:10):
significant amounts of something like uranium two thirty five or
plutonium two thirty nine, you have to subject naturally occurring
rocks containing mostly more stable elements like uranium two thirty
eight to some kind of process. Right, You've got to
like bombard it with neutrons and a reactor, or you've
got a centrifuge it to separate out the more dangerous
you two thirty five. The greatest natural terrestrial source of

(52:34):
human exposure to ionizing radiation seems to be radon gas.
Radon is one of the radioactive decay products of uranium,
along with other elements like radium and thorium. And I
just haven't found any evidence of a natural terrestrial radiation
source strong enough to cause acute or noticeable radiation poisoning

(52:55):
within a short span of time. Exposure to natural terrestrial
radiation source can be dangerous, for example rd on gas,
but this is more because it tends to increase something
like your risk of cancer over long periods of time.
For example, rate on gas is believed to be the
number one cause of lung cancer among non smokers and

(53:15):
the number two cause of lung cancer overall. So even
the most potent natural radiation sources, they're not gonna do
anything to you that you could detect, I think without
modern science. So I find it extremely unlikely that anybody
in the ancient world could have an acutely lethal radiation
source in a box. I think we've got to rule

(53:36):
that one out. Take that junior High Robert Lamp I'm sorry, no, no, now,
you made me feel like it's jerk. No, no, no,
this is this is this is not at all. I mean,
this was something I was curious about when I was
in junior high. And then later on you get to
look into it and realize that, well, that didn't really
pan out. Now, I do want to mention something that
I think we should come back and explore in a

(53:57):
future episode, which is the idea of natural nuclear reactors.
I don't believe any exists today, but there is evidence
that billions of years ago, long ago in Earth's history,
when the when the elements in the Earth's crust were younger,
there were some natural fission reactions that were sustained within rocks,

(54:19):
in in rock formations within the Earth's crust, like a
I know it, at least one side in Western Africa,
there are these two billion year old natural fission reactors
that we found. All this evidence of that there was
essentially a nuclear fission reactor happening naturally under Earth's crust,
and that's led to even these really strange hypotheses like

(54:40):
alternative hypotheses for the origin of the Moon, which say
that it was the result of a natural fission reaction
explosion in Earth's crust billions of years ago, which that
I know that is not a favorite hypothesis, but it
has been put forward. I believe this was also the
underlying science in the the more recent American Godzilla film.

(55:02):
Oh wait what, Yeah, I believe so, Like the idea
was that Godzilla is this ancient organism from back when
you had naturally occurring high levels of radiation on Earth,
and they ate radiation and that's their the whole reason
for being gigantic radiations viewing monsters. What's the I don't
think they get into. The one I've seen recently is

(55:22):
shin Godzilla, which is absolutely amazing, But they don't really
explore the origin, do they know? I don't think they do.
They're more they're hyper concerned with the present. How do
we react to this? What do we have legal authority
to do? Where to hold the meeting? Yeah, that sort
of thing. So those are both really fun movies in
their their their own right. So at this point, let's

(55:44):
let's come back to again that that fabulous quote from
Belloc and it's a transmit to a radio for speaking
to God. As a little more than Peter Laurie. But
you know, any of the idea the more earthly indies
says you want to talk to God, will go see
them together? Right now? Yeah, you know, it's it's a

(56:05):
fun moment in the film, but the the idea is
central to the whole purpose of the art, because we've
discussed already it's described as not only a place to
how sacred relics, but as a focus of ritual, an
altar of sorts, a mobile altar God manifests upon the
mercy seat and speaks to the priests, instructing the priests

(56:25):
of God's will. Okay, so if this is how they
believed the art to function in their worship, what are
the ways you could interpret this? Well? I think the
most likely explanation of all would be that it just
would simply serve as a focal point of devotion, in
the same way that any altar or any statue or
religious work of art does so, without the need for

(56:47):
supernatural occurrences or ancient you know, technological devices or weird
traps or what have you know, bells and whistles required.
You know, I also can't help but compare it to
the notion of a focal point or a drift in yoga.
And this is where you're you're not even looking necessarily
at anything in particular. Maybe you're looking at a you know,
a line on the wall or just a point in space,

(57:10):
and you're focusing your attention on that and in doing
so hopefully entering some sort of meditative state. Right. The
goal is to to center consciousness, to crowd out other
thoughts entering right. And I imagine a lot of our
listeners out there you've had that experience either by focusing
on nothing, focusing on and say a clock on a
wall or a wall socket, or perhaps some bit of

(57:33):
religious art, uh, you know, an altarpiece across what have
you in a various Hindu iconography as well, like these conserves,
just a way to to focus our mind and also
think about perhaps what is illustrated in the work itself.
And this is you know, all ultimately very much a

(57:53):
form of induction or a formally ritualized procedure whose function
is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention. I also
can't help but think that with a golden item like
the like the arc. You so you have the arc,
it's covered in gold. You have it in a like
a dark pavilion, and what kind of illumination do you
have around you? Well, you might have burning sacrifices, so

(58:16):
they're indoors. You generally probably have firelight, but you could
also have a sacrifice burning at the altar that would
be a sort of like a fire there. And I
have to think also that there there would generally be
smoke in this environment. You burning something in sensors, so
you have you have, you probably have smoke, you have

(58:36):
some some firelight of some sort. You have this gleaming
golden artifact, not even getting into the cherubim that are
on it, but it seems like that the light would
play off of it in curious ways. The smoke would
add to the mystique. It sounds like an environment that
is generous to the creation of altered states of consciousness

(58:56):
exactly again with no drug or or magical interpretations required. Yeah, exactly. Now.
I know some of you out there that have listened
to the show for a while are probably thinking at
this point, well, what about the bicameral mind, right, because clearly,
this whole time, Yeah, this whole time, we've been talking
about a way of speaking to God, a way of

(59:17):
hearing God's voice, right, so it it seems like it
would naturally be a part of all that. Well, first
of all, it's just refresh about the bicameral mind and
the idea of bi cameral hallucinations. Uh, even the origin
of consciousness. In the Breakdown of the bi Cameral Mind,
Julian James, the late Julian James argued that ancient humans
heard hallucinated voices and that human consciousness as we know

(59:39):
it today began roughly three thousand years ago as a
cultural invention, which of course would kind of line up
with the time frame that we're talking about here with
the arc. It's an unproven hypothesis, and um, we've discussed
some objections to it in the in past episodes, but
it remains possible that at least some aspect of it
is correct. In a way. It's a very safe kind
of idea for j Aims to have proposed, because there

(01:00:01):
was and remains no real way of proving or disproving it. Right.
You can't prove it because it's in history. But I
do think it's subject to undermining by evidence. I mean, like,
one of the things that I think would help undermine
it is if you can just find more and more
ancient examples of people demonstrating inner consciousness in ancient literature.

(01:00:24):
I mean, like he he pointed to some examples of
ancient literature and said, oh, they're remarkably devoid of the
idea of an inner, inner voice or inner thoughts. So
I think one pretty easy way of saying now he
was probably wrong is just to look at ancient texts
that do show signs of of consciousness and and inner
inner monologue. And then also he was very open about
the fact that he basically just looked at Western and

(01:00:48):
classical examples, classical literature, classical architecture for evidence of the
bicameral mind. He didn't really look at Eastern examples because
he did not speak the language. Now you mentioned, and
we've said this before, the it's it's one of these
ideas that is probably wrong, but really interesting and could
be correct in some ways, like some sub parts of

(01:01:08):
the the hypothesis could have something to them. I think
that I've been convinced that James is probably wrong about
his model of consciousness, where consciousness came from and all
that very likely wrong there, but could very well be
right about the idea that ancient religions involved much more
visions and hallucinations than modern religions do. I think that

(01:01:30):
that's entirely plausible. And there's a lot of about reading,
at least about ancient religious practices that seems to indicate
that that maybe is true. Yeah, because there is there's
a lot of listening to the voices of the gods,
seeking the voices of the gods, and we still see
it reflected in our in in hymns and prayers that
are said every day asking to hear some voice. Even

(01:01:52):
though we do not hear the voice, the voice does
not actually speak to us in our minds. Yeah, and
so yeah, I think even if the main part of
his hypothesis, the idea of, you know, the development of
consciousness in these different stages, if that's completely wrong, he
could have been on on the right track looking at
all these ancient examples of the almost ubiquitous religious visions

(01:02:16):
and hallucinations in ancient worship right now. M James's ultimate
argument was that modern consciousness was a learned development tied
to metaphorical language and that and that this change wouldn't
have occurred all at once. Then it would have been
something that spread, and it wouldn't have affected like everybody
within like a given talent at once. It wouldn't be

(01:02:37):
like everybody, ope, you got the the new consciousness shot,
all right, we're all good to go. You would have
had a lot of confusion, a lot of a bit
of chaos. The voices of the gods, they grow fainter,
but then they can be reached again via various practices
like essentially was becoming harder to hallucinate right now. James
did mention the arts specifically in his original book. He said, quote,

(01:02:59):
poetry then was divine knowledge, and after the breakdown of
the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization.
Poetry commanded where prose could only ask it felt good.
In the wanderings of the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt,
it was the sacred shrine that was carried before the
multitude and followed by the people. But it was also

(01:03:20):
the poetry of Moses that determined when they would start
and when stop, where they would go and where stay.
And this is of course referring to the fact that
the Moses would speak to through the arc. It authorized
his decision making. So James didn't really get into the
arc all that much in the book or in other
papers of his that I've seen. It's possible in missing

(01:03:40):
something because I haven't read everything that James wrote, but
I did run across some, uh, some writings by Brian
J McVeigh, a scholar of Asia specializing in Japan, and
he also studied under Julian James as a graduate student,
and he discussed this a bit in his paper Biblical
Evidence of Bicamural Mentality Vestiges of super Religiosity in the

(01:04:03):
Old Testament. He discussed how the art could have functioned
as an object of hallucinatory focus or o h F,
and a portable one at that for the ancient Hebrews
as they wandered the desert and wandered out of the
bicameral mindset. So this is his quote from the paper's
describing what an o h F is quote hallucinatory aids,

(01:04:25):
broadcast instructions, commandments, warnings, speaking idols, living statues, effigies treated
as if alive, fed, paraded, taken on journeys and into battles.
These emitted holy power and authorized decision making. In some cases,
portable oh F were used, the example being the Israelites
Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, again,

(01:04:48):
as I said a minute ago, you you don't really
have to accept the bi cameral framework for for consciousness
and the the origin of these hallucinations in order to think, well,
maybe that they're they're just physical objects that aid the
mind in having religious visions or religious experiences much in
the in the like in the example of induction, like

(01:05:11):
we were talking about earlier with the object of focus
in say Hindu or Buddhist meditation. Yeah, exactly. The bicameral explanation.
As fascinating as it is, it's not completely necessary for
understanding why individuals would carry around a sacred item, carry
it into battle and uh, and also use it in

(01:05:31):
their rituals. Isn't it so interesting the way religions around
the world, so many of them have what you might
call scene setting, all these all this paraphernalia, the like
different clothing, different sights and smells, physical objects to hold
or be in the presence of, to look at, smoke, uh,

(01:05:56):
you know, uh, washing of the body, like all these
different things that are in order to get you into
a different mind state than you are. The rest of
your life. You're out walking around getting your groceries, going
to work, doing your stuff. But when you enter a
religious space, you have to go through a process and
surround yourself with things that put you in a different

(01:06:19):
state of mind. And this seems to be core to
to not every version of religion around the world, but
a whole lot of them. Oh yeah, I mean, if
it's not a particular icon a representation, because certainly there
are religions that that frown upon that and depicting individuals
or deities, etcetera, there's still is often like a focus

(01:06:40):
on architecture or space. Oh yeah, exactly, like in ISLAMI
you're generally you're not gonna have representative art, but you
do have a lot of attention to the creation of
a sacred feeling environment. Uh. You know, the interior architecture
of many mosques around the world is is beautiful and
it puts you in a different mind state. All right, Well,
hope fully we've put everybody in a different mind state

(01:07:02):
today as we discussed the Ark of the Covenant, and hey,
here's the fun part. We're not done. There's gonna be
another episode on the Ark of the Covenant, looking at
a particular idea, the idea that okay, what if the
Ark of the Covenant was a machine. I'm gonna give
a spoiler. We don't think it was a machine, but
there there that does lead us down some other interesting

(01:07:24):
paths that that will be a lot of fun to explore,
all right. In the meantime, you can check out all
the episodes of stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's
we will find them all. That's we'll find links out
to our social media accounts, including the discussion module page
that I mentioned earlier. Obviously, we'd love to hear from
everybody about the Ark of the Covenant, um, your thoughts

(01:07:46):
on it, crazy theories you've read about it, your thoughts
on Raiders of the Lost Arc. All of it is
fair game. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like
to get in touch with us directly to let us
know feedback on this episode or any other to uh
say hi, let us know where you listen from. To
suggest a topic for the future, you can always do

(01:08:07):
that at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for moralness and thousands of other topics. Is it
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