Anna Katherine Green - "The Mayor's Wife"

Emma D. E. N. Southworth - "Capitola The Madcap"

Sam Vaknin - "Moral Deliberations in Modern Cinema"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1580 82"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

I >> Ignatius Donnelly >> Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel




But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology
assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come
from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There
were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the
poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into
a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a
great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air,
and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth,
before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and
from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru,
from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1] where no rain ever falls, in
consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand
wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of
condensation.

Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of
temperature between night and day, settling

[1. "American Cyclopædia," vol. xiii, p. 387.]

{p. 322}

like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.

What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these
traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human
history--to the age before the Drift!

After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next? We go
back to the first chapter:

Verse 21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature
that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their
kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was
good."

Verse 22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply,
and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the
earth."

Verse 25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and
cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth
after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 7. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul."

We return to the first chapter:

Verse 27. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 8. "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and
there he put the man he had formed."

Verse 9. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree
that is pleasant to the sight and good

{p. 323}

for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the
tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Verse 10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden," etc.

Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a
glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended
to Spitzbergen.

Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden
of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for
he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not
eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of
Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the
creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we
have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man,
"male and _female_"; and here we have him making woman over again
from man's rib.

Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were
not ashamed."

It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from
storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the
Drift.

Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in
the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great
creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the
dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of
Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by
the theologians.

He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we

{p. 324}

have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita,
the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have
seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain
rayless ones, or Darklings. And the woman ate of the fruit of the
tree.

This is the same legend which we see appearing in so many places and
in so many forms. The apple of Paradise was one of the apples of the
Greek legends, intrusted to the Hesperides, but which they could not
resist the temptation to pluck and eat. The serpent Ladon watched the
tree.

It was one of the apples of Idun, in the Norse legends, the wife of
Brage, the god of poetry and eloquence. She keeps them in a box, and
when the gods feel the approach of old age they have only to taste
them and become young again. Loke, the evil-one, the Norse devil,
tempted Idun to come into a forest with her apples, to compare them
with some others, whereupon a giant called Thjasse, in the appearance
of an enormous eagle, flew down, seized Idun and her apples, and
carried them away, like Ravana, into the air. The gods compelled Loke
to bring her back, for they were the apples of the tree of life to
them; without them they were perishing. Loke stole Idun from Thjasse,
changed her into a nut, and fled with her, pursued by Thjasse. The
gods kindled _a great fire_, the eagle plumage of Thjasse caught the
flames, he _fell to the earth, and was slain by the gods_.[1]

But the serpent in Genesis ruins Eden, just as he did in all the
legends; just as the comet ruined the Tertiary Age. The fair world
disappears; cold and ice and snow come.

Adam and Eve, we have seen, were at first naked, and subsequently
clothe themselves, for modesty, with fig-leaves, (chap. iii, v. 7;)
but there comes a time, as in the

[1. Norse Mythology," pp. 275, 276.]

{p. 325}

North American legends, when the great cold compels them to cover
their shivering bodies with the skins of the wild beasts they have
slain.

A recent writer, commenting on the Glacial Age, says:

"Colder and colder grew the winds. The body could not be kept warm.
Clothing must be had, and this must be furnished by the wild beasts.
Their hides must assist in protecting the life of men. . . . The
skins were removed and transferred to the bodies of men."[1]

Hence we read in chapter iii, verse 21:

"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make _coats of
skins and clothed them_."

This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the
Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before
Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the
garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen
upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a
rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he
must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the
ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and
fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly,
the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and
it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and
thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving
stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just
as in Job we are told:

Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing
into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."

[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.

2. Chap. iii, verse 18.]

{p. 326}

Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for
their food."

Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they
gathered together."

And God "_drove out the man_" from the fair Edenic world into the
post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and--

"At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and _a flaming
sword_, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life."

This is the sword of the comet. The Norse legends say:

"Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim. It is
a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and
situate at the end of the earth. Surtur holds his empire there. _In
his hand there shines a flaming sword_."

There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the
present land of stones and thistles.

Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which
accompanied the comet in Genesis?

Yes, but it is strangely out of place. It is a distinct description
of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from
heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity;
but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time
long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely
populated world. It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge
as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the
Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by
the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have
completely overwhelmed it. So we find the story of Lot and the
destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time

{p. 327}

of Abraham, when Egypt and Babylon were in the height of their glory.
And Lot's daughters believed that the whole human family, except
themselves, had been exterminated; while Abraham was quietly feeding
his flocks in an adjacent country.

For if Lot's story is located in its proper era, what became of
Abraham and the Jewish people, and all the then civilized nations, in
this great catastrophe? And if it occurred in that age, why do we
hear nothing more about so extraordinary an event in the history of
the Jews or of any other people?

Mr. Smith says:

"The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely
admits of explanation. It has been generally supposed that his
daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed,
except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought
so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to
conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those
problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of
a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]

The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent,
and probable.

We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race,
according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness. In
the Norse Sagas we read:

Brothers will fight together,
And become each other's bane;
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil;
Hard, is the world,
Sensual sins grow huge."

[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 388.]

{p. 328}

In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was "the
profligacy of mankind" that caused God to send the great disaster.
So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot's time, God resolved
on the destruction of "the cities of the plain," Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and
Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind:

Chap. xviii, verse 20. "And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom
and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous"--

therefore he determined to destroy them. When the angels came to
Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites.
The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the
people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the
houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the
hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly "to the
mountain, lest they be consumed."

There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably,
where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but
soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and
his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot's
intercession seems to have been of no avail:

Verse 24. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah
_brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven_."

Verse 25. "And he overthrew those cities, and _all the cities of the
plain_, and all the _inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew
upon the ground_."

It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality;
and Lot "_dwell in a cave_, he and his two daughters."

And the daughters were convinced that they were the

{p. 329}

last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth,
notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse
21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently _was_
overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish,
committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two
great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the
Ammonites.

This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an
empty and desolated world..

To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:

1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of
them.

2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.

3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the
people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it
was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for
her children.

4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.

5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.

6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.

7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a
conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and
Muspelheim.

What next?

We return now to the first chapter of this dislocated text:

Verse 2. "And the earth _was without form, and void_."

That is to say, chaos had come in the train of the comet. Otherwise,
how can we understand how God, as stated in the preceding verse, has
just made the heavens

{p. 330}

and the earth? How could his work have been so imperfect?

"_And darkness was upon the face of the deep_."

This is the primeval night referred to in all the legends; the long
age of darkness upon the earth.

"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The word for _spirit_, in Hebrew, as in Latin, originally meant
_wind_; and this passage might be rendered, "a mighty wind swept the
face of the waters." This wind represents, I take it, the great
cyclones of the Drift Age.

Verse 3. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

The sun and moon had not yet appeared, but the dense mass of clouds,
pouring their waters upon the earth, had gradually, as Job expresses
it, "wearied" themselves,--they had grown thin; and the light began
to appear, at least sufficiently to mark the distinction between day
and night.

Verse 4. "And God saw the light: that it was good; and God divided
the light from the darkness."

Verse 5. "And God called the light day, and the darkness be called
night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

That is to say, in subdividing the phenomena of this dark period,
when there was neither moon nor sun to mark the time, mankind drew
the first line of subdivision, very naturally, at that point of time,
(it may have been weeks, or months, or years,) when first the
distinction between night and day became faintly discernible, and men
could again begin to count time.

But this gain of light had been at the expense of the

{p. 331}

clouds; they had given down their moisture in immense and perpetual
rains; the low-lying lands of the earth were overflowed; the very
mountains, while not under water, were covered by the continual
floods of rain. There was water everywhere. To appreciate this
condition of things, one has but to look at the geological maps of
the amount of land known to have been overflowed by water during the
so-called Glacial Age in Europe.

And so the narrative proceeds:

Verse 6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

This has been incomprehensible to the critics. It has been supposed
that by this "firmament" was meant the heavens; and that the waters
"above the firmament" were the clouds; and it has been said that this
was a barbarian's conception, to wit, that the unbounded and
illimitable space, into which the human eye, aided by the telescope,
can penetrate for thousands of billions of miles, was a blue arch a
few hundred feet high, on top of which were the clouds; and that the
rain was simply the leaking of the water through this roof of the
earth. And men have said: "Call ye this real history, or inspired
narrative? Did God know no more about the nature of the heavens than
this?"

And Religion has been puzzled to reply.

But read Genesis in this new light: There was water everywhere;
floods from the clouds, floods from the melting ice; floods on the
land, where the return of the evaporated moisture was not able, by
the channel-ways of the earth, to yet find its way back to the oceans.

"And God said, Let there be a firmament _in the midst of the waters_,
and let it divide the waters from the waters."

{p. 332}

That is to say, first a great island appeared dividing the waters
from the waters. This was "the island of the innocent," referred to
by Job, where the human race did not utterly perish. We shall see
more about it hereafter.

"7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament:
and it was so.

"8. _And God called the firmament Heaven_. And the evening and the
morning were the second day."

The Hebrew _Rokiâ_ is translated _stereoma_, or _solidity_, in the
Septuagint version. It meant solid land--not empty space.

And if man was not or had not yet been on earth, whence could the
name Heaven have been derived? For whom should God have named it, if
there were no human ears to catch the sound? God needs no lingual
apparatus--he speaks no human speech.

The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been
for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of
the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "_in the
midst of the waters_," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it
was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents.

What next?

"9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

"10. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of
the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

This may be either a recapitulation of the facts already stated, or
it may refer to the gradual draining off of the continents, by the
passing away of the waters; the continents

{p. 333}

being distinguished in order of time from the island "in the midst of
the waters."

"11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding
seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is
in itself _upon the earth_: and it was so."

It has been objected, as I have shown, that this narrative was false,
because science has proved that the fruit-trees did not really
precede in order of creation the creeping things and the fish, which,
we are told, were not made until the fifth day, two days afterward.
But if we will suppose that, as the water disappeared from the land,
the air grew warmer by the light breaking through the diminishing
clouds, the grass began to spring up again, as told in the Norse,
Chinese, and other legends, and the fruit-trees, of different kinds,
began to grow again, for we are told they produced each "after his
kind."

And we learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this
mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and
their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, water,
and ice?

And on the fourth day "God made two great lights," the sun and moon.
If this were a narration of the original creation of these great
orbs, we should be told that they were made exclusively to give
light. But this is not the case. The light was there already; it had
appeared on the evening of the first day; they were made, we are
told, to "divide the day from the night." Day and night already
existed, but in a confused and imperfect way; even the day was dark
and cloudy; but, with the return of the sun, the distinction of day
and night became once more clear.

"14. And God said . . . Let them be for signs and for _seasons_, and
for days and years."

{p. 334}

That is to say, let them be studied, as they were of old, as
astronomical and astrological _signs_, whose influences control
affairs on earth. We have seen that in many legends a good deal is
said about the constellations, and the division of time in accordance
with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which was made soon after
the catastrophe:

"90. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in
the open firmament of heaven."

That is to say, the moving creatures, the fishes which still live,
which have escaped destruction in the deep waters of the oceans or
lakes, and the fowls which were flying wildly in the open firmament,
are commanded to bring forth abundantly, to "replenish" the desolated
seas and earth.

"23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

"24. And God said, Let the earth _bring forth_ the living creature
after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the earth
after his kind: and it was so."

God does not, in this, _create_ them; he calls them forth from the
earth, from the caves and dens where they had been hiding, each
_after his kind_; they were already divided into species and genera.

"28. And God blessed them," (the human family,) "and God said unto
them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the _earth_."

Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking. But
how could the word "replenish" be applied to a new world, never
before inhabited?

We have seen that in chapter ii (verses 16 and 17) God especially
limited man and enjoined him not to eat of the

{p. 335}

fruit of the tree of knowledge; while in v. 22, ch. iii, it is
evident that there was another tree, "the tree of life," which God
did not intend that man should enjoy the fruit of. But with the close
of the Tertiary period and the Drift Age all this was changed: these
trees, whatever they signified, had been swept away, "the blazing
sword" shone between man and the land where they grew, or had grown;
and hence, after the Age of Darkness, God puts no such restraint or
injunction upon the human family. We read:

Ch. i, v. 29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb
bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and _every
tree_, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; _to you it
shall be for meat_."

With what reason, if the text is in its true order, could God have
given man, in the first chapter, the right to eat the fruit of
_every_ tree, and in the following chapters have consigned the whole
race to ruin for eating the fruit of one particular tree?

But after the so-called Glacial Age all limitations were removed. The
tree of knowledge and the tree of life had disappeared for ever. The
Drift covered them.

Reader, waive your natural prejudices, and ask yourself whether this
proposed readjustment of the Great Book does not place it thoroughly
in accord with all the revelations of science; whether it does not
answer all the objections that have been made against the
reasonableness of the story; and whether there is in it anything
inconsistent with the sanctity of the record, the essentials of
religion, or the glory of God.

Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the
whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of
stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret
"days" to mean vast periods

{p. 336}

of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the
morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really
subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation,
and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day
when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days
which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its
previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events
arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of
reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the
Jews received their traditions divided it into days.