Pre-Adamite
Encyclopedia
Pre-Adamite hypothesis or Preadamism is the religious belief that humans existed before Adam
, the first human being named in the Bible
. This belief has a long history, probably having its origins in early pagan responses to Abrahamic claims regarding the origins of the human
race.
Advocates of this hypothesis are known as "pre-Adamites", as are the humans believed by them to have existed before Adam.
and an Egyptian
pagan
"Apollonius the Egyptian" (probably Apollonius Dyscolus
), who argued that the world was 153,075 years old. Figures such as this occur regularly in Greek
and Roman
literature, as do the claims that the world and mankind have always existed.
The most serious early challenge to biblical
Adamism came from the Roman Emperor
Julian the Apostate
who, upon his rejection of Christianity
and his conversion to Theurgy
, a late form of Neoplatonism
, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed Coadamism or multiple-adamism (see polygenism
). Genesis 1:27-28 might allow for co-creation of multiple pairs, if the word "them" were construed accordingly: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;..." In addition, if a framework of strictly sequential chronology were adopted in interpreting the order of these texts from the ancient Middle East, it might be argued that Adam, and therefore Eve, are created a little later than the humans created in Genesis 1:27-28. On the other hand, Eve is called "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20. These are matters of interpretation.
St Augustine’s
book The City of God contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is called "Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years", while that of book XVIII, chapter 40 is "The Egyptians’ abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years". As the titles indicate, Augustine clearly believed that pagan ideas concerning the history and chronology of both the world and the human race were completely absurd and incompatible with the revealed truth that man's existence on the earth was not yet six thousand years old. Augustine’s position on this matter was supported by most rabbis and also by the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as myths and fables not requiring any considered refutation.
(c. 1130-1140), a book by the Jewish Spanish
philosopher Judah ben Samuel Halevi
, features a debate between the King of the Khazars
and a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim
theologian in which the King attempts to find out which is the true religion. The King asks the "friend" (the Jew) whether he is concerned that the Indians claim to have buildings and artifacts that are millions of years old
. The rabbi dismisses these beliefs as unworthy ideas held by a dissolute and unreliable people with no fixed form of religion, or book "concerning which a multitude of people held the same opinion". In this same work Halevi attacked a number of ideas that appeared in a book called Nabatean Agriculture, written or translated by Ibn Wahshiyya
in 904. The ideas, attributed to the Sabeans
, were that people lived before Adam, that Adam had parents, and that he came from India. Halevi dismissed these notions simply by saying that these people did not know of the Revelation
contained in Scripture.
The presence of belief in men before Adam amongst the Familists, a religious community in Friesland
, was noted by John Rogers in 1578.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno
argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopian
s had the same ancestry that God must have either created separate Adams or that Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races. Coadamism however should not be confused with Preadamism (see Polygenism
).
The claims in Nabatean Agriculture mentioned above were also discussed by Maimonides
in his Guide for the Perplexed
through which they became known to the 17th century French Millenarian Isaac La Peyrère
who, because of his influence on subsequent thinkers and movements, is usually credited with formulating Pre-Adamite theory. In his Prae-Adamitae, published in Latin in 1655 La Peyrère argued that Paul's words in Chapter 5, verses 12-14 of his Epistle to the Romans
should be interpreted such that "if Adam
sinned in a morally meaningful sense there must have been an Adamic law according to which he sinned. If law began with Adam, there must have been a lawless world before Adam, containing people". Thus, according to La Peyrère there must have been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Hebrews. The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained Cain's life after Abel
's murder which, in the Genesis account, involved the taking of a wife and the building of a city. This account of human origins became the basis for 19th century theories of polygenism
and modern racism
.
Some date the origins of racial theory precisely to 24 April 1684 when François Bernier
distinguished four or five races (with no hierarchical distinction between them) in an article (‘A new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it') published in the Journal des sçavans
. Because of widespread theological opposition to the pre-Adamite theories of his friend, La Peyrère, Bernier published his paper anonymously.
pre-Adamism was adopted widely as a challenge to the biblical account of human origins, whereas in the nineteenth century the idea was welcomed by advocates of white superiority. A number of racist interpretive frameworks involving the early chapters of Genesis have arisen from pre-Adamism. Some Pre-Adamite theorists held that Cain left his family for an inferior tribe described variously as "white Mongols
". Pre-Adamites also claimed that Cain took a wife
from one of the inferior pre-Adamite peoples. The idea that Cain’s mark was blackness arose in 18th century Europe and was also popular in 19th century America.
. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair of Eve with the Devil (see Serpent Seed
).
In 19th Century Europe polygenism and Pre-Adamism were attractive to those intent on demonstrating the inferiority of non-Western peoples, while in the United States
they appealed to those attuned to racial theories who found it unattractive to contemplate a common history with non-Whites.
Scientists such as Charles Caldwell, Josiah C. Nott
and Samuel G. Morton
, rejected the view that non-whites were the descendants of Adam. Morton combined pre-Adamism with cranial measurements. As Michael Barkun explains:
In 1860 Isabelle Duncan, wrote Pre-Adamite Man, Or, The Story of Our Old Planet and Its Inhabitants, Told by Scripture & Science. Her book was a mixture of geology
and scriptural interpretation, the book was popular to a number of geologists because it mixed biblical events with science. She suggested that the pre-Adamites are today's angels. Being that they were without sin (for sin did not enter the world until Adam disobeyed God) there was no reason for them not to have been at least raptured into heaven, anticipating what would again occur with the second coming of Christ. Duncan also believed some angels sinned and fell to become (demons), Duncan supposed that such an upheaval would leave geological scars on the earth. The developed concept of ice ages, pioneered by Louis Agassiz
, seemed to provide evidence of such events, drawing the line between the pre-Adamic era and the modern one (which she posited as beginning about 6,000 years ago).
Following the American Civil War
Southerners were increasingly receptive to arguments supportive of black inferiority. In 1867 Buckner H Payne wrote a pamphlet under the pen name Ariel entitled The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status?, in which he argued that the Negro is a pre-Adamic beast of the field (specifically, a higher order of monkey) which was preserved on the Ark
. In 1891 William Campbell
under the pen name "Caucasian" wrote in Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races that the nonwhite peoples were not descendants of Adam and therefore "not brothers in any proper sense of the term, but inferior creations" and that polygenism
was the "only theory reconcilable with scripture". Following Payne, Campbell viewed the great flood
as a consequence of intermarriage between the white (Adamic) and nonwhite (pre-Adamic) peoples "the only union we can think of that is reasonable and sufficient to account for the corruption of the world and the consequent judgement".
Lester A Hoyle wrote a book in 1875 called The Pre-Adamite, or who tempted Eve? he claimed in the book that there had been five distinct creations of races, of which only the fifth the white race of which Adam
was the father had been made in God’s own image and likeness.
In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the Vanderbilt University
theistic evolutionist and geologist
Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 tract Adamites and Preadamites for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.
The Irish lawyer Dominick McCausland
, a Biblical literalist and anti-Darwinian polemicist, maintained the theory as a means of upholding the Mosaic timescale. He held that the Chinese were descended from Cain, and that the "Caucasian" race would eventually exterminate all others. He maintained that only the "Caucasian" descendants of Adam were capable of creating civilisation, and tried to explain away the numerous non-"Caucasian" civilisations by attributing them all to a vanished "Caucasian", race, the Hamites.
In 1900 Charles Carroll
wrote the book entitled The Negro a Beast or In the Image of God. Carroll concludes in the book that the White race was made in the image and likeness of God and that Adam gave birth to the White race only, while Negros are pre-Adamite beasts and could not possibly have been made in God's image and likeness because they are beastlike, immoral and ugly. Carroll claimed that the pre-Adamite races such as blacks did not have souls. Carroll believed that race mixing was an insult to God and spoiled God's racial plan of creation. According to Carroll the mixing of races had also lead to the delusive errors of atheism
and evolution
. Carroll claimed that Miscegenation
became in time "the parent of atheism, with it's theory of evolution".
The Scottish millennialist George Dickison wrote the book The Mosaic account of creation, as unfolded in Genesis, verified by science in 1902. The book mixed science with a scientifically enhanced reading of Genesis, the book lists geological discoveries which showed that men existed before Adam
had been created and that the earth was much older than the 6,000 year old span of the Adamic race. Dickison welcomed scientific discoveries from fossil evidence and the palaontological record and used them as evidence for pre-Adamism.
The ideologies of British Israelism
, which developed in England
in the 19th century, also sometimes involved a pre-Adamic worldview, though this was a minority position. According to this model the pre-Adamites were viewed as a race of inferior bestial creatures apart from Adam, who was the first white man and son of God. In this narrative Satan
seduces Eve and the resulting offspring is a hybrid creature called Cain. Later Cain flees to East Turkestan to establish a colony of followers intent on realizing the Devil’s plan for domination of the earth. Further elaboration of this myth involved the identification of the Jews with Canaanites, the putative descendants of Cain (although the eponym
ous ancestor of Canaanites is not Cain but Canaan
). It followed that, if the tribes of Judah
were supposed to have intermarried with Cain’s descendants, then the Jews were the offspring of Satan as well as sundry nonwhite pre-Adamic races.
In the United States, British Israelism developed into the aggressively anti-Semitic Christian Identity
movement in which the Jews were increasingly seen as outside the domain of humanity.
, an occultist, Paschal was of Malagasy
and Native American ancestry, he was a spokesman against slavery. Paschal was a believer in pre-Adamism he wrote the book Pre-Adamite man : demonstrating the existence of the human race upon the earth 100,000 thousand years ago! under the name of Griffin Lee in 1863. His book was a unique contribution towards pre-Adamism because it wasn't strictly based on biblical grounds. Randolph used a wide range of sources to write his book from many different world traditions, esoterica and ancient religions. Randolph traveled to many countries of the world where he wrote different parts of his book, in the book Paschal claims that Adam
was not the first man and that pre-Adamite men existed on all continents around the globe 35,000 years to 100,000 years ago. His book is different than many of the other writings from other pre-Adamite authors because in Randolph's book he claims the pre-Adamites were civilised men while other pre-Adamite authors argued that the pre-Adamites were beasts or hominids.
Non-racist pre-Adamite theories have also been held by a number of mainstream Christians such Congregational evangelist R.A. Torrey (1856–1928) believed in the Gap Theory and that pre-Adamites had survived into the present day. He thus advocated a local Flood.
Gleason Archer
a Biblical scholar, was a believer in pre-Adamism. Gleason writes in his 1985 book A Survey of Old Testament Introduction: "To revert to the problem of the Pithecanthropus, the Swanscombe
man, the Neanderthal
and all the rest (possibly even the Cro-magnon
man, who is apparently to be classed as Homo sapiens, but whose remains seem to date back at least to 20,000 B.C.) it seems best to regard these races as all prior to Adam’s time, and not involved in the Adamic covenant. We must leave the question open, in view of the cultural remains, whether these pre-Adamic creatures had souls (or, to use the trichotomic terminology, spirits)." Gleason goes on to assert that only Adam and his descendants were infused with the breath of God and a spiritual nature corresponding to God himself, and he says that all mankind subsequent to Adam’s time must have been literally descended from him. However, he retains the concept of pre-Adamic races (e.g. Cro-Magnon man), and says, "They may have been exterminated by God for unknown reasons prior to the creation of the original parent of the present human race".
More recently these ideas have promoted by Kathryn Kuhlman
and Derek Prince
among the Pentecostals, John Stott
among the Anglicans and the old earth creationist Hugh Ross
.
Immanuel Velikovsky
was a believer in pre-Adamism. He wrote a book called In the Beginning; in the book Velikovsky describes catastrophes which had occurred before those described in his first book, Worlds in Collision
. In the first section of the book, his chapter titled The Pre-Adamite Age discusses pre-Adamism. He wrote that the "talmudic-rabbinical tradition believed that before Adam was created, the world was more than once inhabited and more than once destroyed" he also wrote that according to the evidence from many different traditions Adam and Eve
were not a single human pair and there must have been many of them.
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
, the first human being named in the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. This belief has a long history, probably having its origins in early pagan responses to Abrahamic claims regarding the origins of the human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
race.
Advocates of this hypothesis are known as "pre-Adamites", as are the humans believed by them to have existed before Adam.
Early development
The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between Theophilus of AntiochTheophilus of Antioch
Theophilus, Patriarch of Antioch, succeeded Eros c. 169, and was succeeded by Maximus I c.183, according to Henry Fynes Clinton, but these dates are only approximations...
and an Egyptian
Aegyptus (Roman province)
The Roman province of Egypt was established in 30 BC after Octavian defeated his rival Mark Antony, deposed his lover Queen Cleopatra VII and annexed the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt to the Roman Empire. The province encompassed most of modern-day Egypt except for the Sinai Peninsula...
pagan
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
"Apollonius the Egyptian" (probably Apollonius Dyscolus
Apollonius Dyscolus
Apollonius Dyscolus is considered one of the greatest of the Greek grammarians. He was born at Alexandria, son of Mnesitheus. The dates for his life are not known...
), who argued that the world was 153,075 years old. Figures such as this occur regularly in Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
literature, as do the claims that the world and mankind have always existed.
The most serious early challenge to biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
Adamism came from the Roman Emperor
Roman Emperor
The Roman emperor was the ruler of the Roman State during the imperial period . The Romans had no single term for the office although at any given time, a given title was associated with the emperor...
Julian the Apostate
Julian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....
who, upon his rejection of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
and his conversion to Theurgy
Theurgy
Theurgy describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more gods, especially with the goal of uniting with the divine, achieving henosis, and perfecting oneself.- Definitions :*Proclus...
, a late form of Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed Coadamism or multiple-adamism (see polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
). Genesis 1:27-28 might allow for co-creation of multiple pairs, if the word "them" were construed accordingly: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;..." In addition, if a framework of strictly sequential chronology were adopted in interpreting the order of these texts from the ancient Middle East, it might be argued that Adam, and therefore Eve, are created a little later than the humans created in Genesis 1:27-28. On the other hand, Eve is called "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20. These are matters of interpretation.
St Augustine’s
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
book The City of God contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is called "Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years", while that of book XVIII, chapter 40 is "The Egyptians’ abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years". As the titles indicate, Augustine clearly believed that pagan ideas concerning the history and chronology of both the world and the human race were completely absurd and incompatible with the revealed truth that man's existence on the earth was not yet six thousand years old. Augustine’s position on this matter was supported by most rabbis and also by the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as myths and fables not requiring any considered refutation.
ca. 1000 - 1700
The KuzariKuzari
The Kitab al Khazari, commonly called the Kuzari, is one of most famous works of the medieval Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, completed around 1140. Its title is an Arabic phrase meaning Book of the Khazars...
(c. 1130-1140), a book by the Jewish Spanish
Spanish people
The Spanish are citizens of the Kingdom of Spain. Within Spain, there are also a number of vigorous nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the country's complex history....
philosopher Judah ben Samuel Halevi
Yehuda Halevi
Judah Halevi was a Spanish Jewish physician, poet and philosopher. He was born in Spain, either in Toledo or Tudela, in 1075 or 1086, and died shortly after arriving in Palestine in 1141...
, features a debate between the King of the Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
and a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
theologian in which the King attempts to find out which is the true religion. The King asks the "friend" (the Jew) whether he is concerned that the Indians claim to have buildings and artifacts that are millions of years old
Dating Creation
Cultures throughout history have attempted to date the beginning of the the world in the past, so methods of dating Creation have involved analysing scriptures or ancient texts.-Ancient creation dates:...
. The rabbi dismisses these beliefs as unworthy ideas held by a dissolute and unreliable people with no fixed form of religion, or book "concerning which a multitude of people held the same opinion". In this same work Halevi attacked a number of ideas that appeared in a book called Nabatean Agriculture, written or translated by Ibn Wahshiyya
Ibn Wahshiyya
Ibn Wahshiyya was an Iraqi alchemist, agriculturalist, farm toxicologist, egyptologist and historian born at Qusayn near Kufa in Iraq.Ibn Wahshiyya was one of the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, by relating them to the...
in 904. The ideas, attributed to the Sabeans
Sabians
The Sabians of Middle Eastern tradition were a monotheistic Abrahamic religious group mentioned three times in the Quran: "the Jews, the Sabians, and the Christians." In the Hadith they are nothing but converts to Islam, while their identity in later Islamic literature became a matter of...
, were that people lived before Adam, that Adam had parents, and that he came from India. Halevi dismissed these notions simply by saying that these people did not know of the Revelation
Revelation
In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing, through active or passive communication with a supernatural or a divine entity...
contained in Scripture.
The presence of belief in men before Adam amongst the Familists, a religious community in Friesland
Friesland
Friesland is a province in the north of the Netherlands and part of the ancient region of Frisia.Until the end of 1996, the province bore Friesland as its official name. In 1997 this Dutch name lost its official status to the Frisian Fryslân...
, was noted by John Rogers in 1578.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopian
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
s had the same ancestry that God must have either created separate Adams or that Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races. Coadamism however should not be confused with Preadamism (see Polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
).
The claims in Nabatean Agriculture mentioned above were also discussed by Maimonides
Maimonides
Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn in Arabic, or Rambam , was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages...
in his Guide for the Perplexed
Guide for the Perplexed
The Guide for the Perplexed is one of the major works of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or "the Rambam"...
through which they became known to the 17th century French Millenarian Isaac La Peyrère
Isaac La Peyrère
Isaac La Peyrère, or Pererius, was a French Millenarian theologian and formulator of Pre-Adamite hypothesis.- Life :Born into a Huguenot family in Bordeaux, and possibly of Jewish descent, La Peyrère was a lawyer by training and a Calvinist by upbringing, though he later converted to...
who, because of his influence on subsequent thinkers and movements, is usually credited with formulating Pre-Adamite theory. In his Prae-Adamitae, published in Latin in 1655 La Peyrère argued that Paul's words in Chapter 5, verses 12-14 of his Epistle to the Romans
Epistle to the Romans
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
should be interpreted such that "if Adam
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
sinned in a morally meaningful sense there must have been an Adamic law according to which he sinned. If law began with Adam, there must have been a lawless world before Adam, containing people". Thus, according to La Peyrère there must have been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Hebrews. The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained Cain's life after Abel
Cain and Abel
In the Hebrew Bible, Cain and Abel are two sons of Adam and Eve. The Qur'an mentions the story, calling them the two sons of Adam only....
's murder which, in the Genesis account, involved the taking of a wife and the building of a city. This account of human origins became the basis for 19th century theories of polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
and modern racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
.
Some date the origins of racial theory precisely to 24 April 1684 when François Bernier
François Bernier
François Bernier was a French physician and traveller. He was born at Joué-Etiau in Anjou. He was the personal physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for around 12 years during his stay in India....
distinguished four or five races (with no hierarchical distinction between them) in an article (‘A new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it') published in the Journal des sçavans
Journal des sçavans
The Journal des sçavans , founded by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe, that from the beginning also carried a proportion of material that would not now be considered scientific, such as obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports...
. Because of widespread theological opposition to the pre-Adamite theories of his friend, La Peyrère, Bernier published his paper anonymously.
Age of enlightenment
During the Age of EnlightenmentAge of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
pre-Adamism was adopted widely as a challenge to the biblical account of human origins, whereas in the nineteenth century the idea was welcomed by advocates of white superiority. A number of racist interpretive frameworks involving the early chapters of Genesis have arisen from pre-Adamism. Some Pre-Adamite theorists held that Cain left his family for an inferior tribe described variously as "white Mongols
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
". Pre-Adamites also claimed that Cain took a wife
Wife
A wife is a female partner in a marriage. The rights and obligations of the wife regarding her spouse and others, and her status in the community and in law, varies between cultures and has varied over time.-Origin and etymology:...
from one of the inferior pre-Adamite peoples. The idea that Cain’s mark was blackness arose in 18th century Europe and was also popular in 19th century America.
ca. 1800 - present
Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament believed in a type of biblical polygenismPolygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair of Eve with the Devil (see Serpent Seed
Serpent seed
The doctrine of Serpent seed, dual seed or two-seedline is a controversial doctrine according to which the serpent in the Garden of Eden mated with Eve, and the offspring of their union was Cain. This belief is still held by some adherents of the Christian Identity theology, who claim that the...
).
In 19th Century Europe polygenism and Pre-Adamism were attractive to those intent on demonstrating the inferiority of non-Western peoples, while in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
they appealed to those attuned to racial theories who found it unattractive to contemplate a common history with non-Whites.
Scientists such as Charles Caldwell, Josiah C. Nott
Josiah C. Nott
Josiah Clark Nott was an American physician and surgeon. He was also an author of surgical, yellow fever, and race theories.-Biography:...
and Samuel G. Morton
Samuel George Morton
Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Morton, reared a Quaker but became Episcopalian in midlife, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1820. After earning an advanced degree from Edinburgh University in...
, rejected the view that non-whites were the descendants of Adam. Morton combined pre-Adamism with cranial measurements. As Michael Barkun explains:
- In such an intellectual atmosphere, pre-Adamism appeared in two different but not wholly incompatible forms. Religious writers continued to be attracted to the theory both because it appeared to solve certain exegeticalExegesisExegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...
problems (where did Cain's wife come from?) and exalted the spiritual status of Adam's descendants. Those of a scientific bent found it equally attractive but for different reasons, connected with a desire to formulate theories of racial difference that retained a place for Adam while accepting evidence that many cultures were far older than the few thousand years humanity had existed, according to biblical chronology. The two varieties differed primarily in the evidence they used, the one relying principally on scriptural texts and the latter on what passed at the time for physical anthropologyPhysical anthropologyBiological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
.
In 1860 Isabelle Duncan, wrote Pre-Adamite Man, Or, The Story of Our Old Planet and Its Inhabitants, Told by Scripture & Science. Her book was a mixture of geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
and scriptural interpretation, the book was popular to a number of geologists because it mixed biblical events with science. She suggested that the pre-Adamites are today's angels. Being that they were without sin (for sin did not enter the world until Adam disobeyed God) there was no reason for them not to have been at least raptured into heaven, anticipating what would again occur with the second coming of Christ. Duncan also believed some angels sinned and fell to become (demons), Duncan supposed that such an upheaval would leave geological scars on the earth. The developed concept of ice ages, pioneered by Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
, seemed to provide evidence of such events, drawing the line between the pre-Adamic era and the modern one (which she posited as beginning about 6,000 years ago).
Following the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
Southerners were increasingly receptive to arguments supportive of black inferiority. In 1867 Buckner H Payne wrote a pamphlet under the pen name Ariel entitled The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status?, in which he argued that the Negro is a pre-Adamic beast of the field (specifically, a higher order of monkey) which was preserved on the Ark
Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is a vessel appearing in the Book of Genesis and the Quran . These narratives describe the construction of the ark by Noah at God's command to save himself, his family, and the world's animals from the worldwide deluge of the Great Flood.In the narrative of the ark, God sees the...
. In 1891 William Campbell
William Campbell
-Canada:* William Campbell , Scottish-born Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Upper Canada* Lord William Campbell , Scottish-born Royal Governor of Nova Scotia and South Carolina* William A. Campbell -Canada:* William Campbell (jurist) (1758–1834), Scottish-born Chief Justice of the Supreme...
under the pen name "Caucasian" wrote in Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races that the nonwhite peoples were not descendants of Adam and therefore "not brothers in any proper sense of the term, but inferior creations" and that polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
was the "only theory reconcilable with scripture". Following Payne, Campbell viewed the great flood
Flood geology
Flood geology is the interpretation of the geological history of the Earth in terms of the global flood described in Genesis 6–9. Similar views played a part in the early development of the science of geology, even after the Biblical chronology had been rejected by geologists in favour of an...
as a consequence of intermarriage between the white (Adamic) and nonwhite (pre-Adamic) peoples "the only union we can think of that is reasonable and sufficient to account for the corruption of the world and the consequent judgement".
Lester A Hoyle wrote a book in 1875 called The Pre-Adamite, or who tempted Eve? he claimed in the book that there had been five distinct creations of races, of which only the fifth the white race of which Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
was the father had been made in God’s own image and likeness.
In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...
theistic evolutionist and geologist
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 tract Adamites and Preadamites for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.
The Irish lawyer Dominick McCausland
Dominick McCausland
Dominick McCausland LL.D. QC was an Irish barrister and Christian author.-Career:By profession a barrister, McCausland obtained a B.A. in law at Trinity College, Dublin in 1835 further followed by a doctorate in 1859...
, a Biblical literalist and anti-Darwinian polemicist, maintained the theory as a means of upholding the Mosaic timescale. He held that the Chinese were descended from Cain, and that the "Caucasian" race would eventually exterminate all others. He maintained that only the "Caucasian" descendants of Adam were capable of creating civilisation, and tried to explain away the numerous non-"Caucasian" civilisations by attributing them all to a vanished "Caucasian", race, the Hamites.
In 1900 Charles Carroll
Charles Carroll
Charles Carroll may refer to:*Charles Carroll , Continental Congressman from Maryland*Charles H. Carroll , U.S...
wrote the book entitled The Negro a Beast or In the Image of God. Carroll concludes in the book that the White race was made in the image and likeness of God and that Adam gave birth to the White race only, while Negros are pre-Adamite beasts and could not possibly have been made in God's image and likeness because they are beastlike, immoral and ugly. Carroll claimed that the pre-Adamite races such as blacks did not have souls. Carroll believed that race mixing was an insult to God and spoiled God's racial plan of creation. According to Carroll the mixing of races had also lead to the delusive errors of atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
and evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
. Carroll claimed that Miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
became in time "the parent of atheism, with it's theory of evolution".
The Scottish millennialist George Dickison wrote the book The Mosaic account of creation, as unfolded in Genesis, verified by science in 1902. The book mixed science with a scientifically enhanced reading of Genesis, the book lists geological discoveries which showed that men existed before Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
had been created and that the earth was much older than the 6,000 year old span of the Adamic race. Dickison welcomed scientific discoveries from fossil evidence and the palaontological record and used them as evidence for pre-Adamism.
The ideologies of British Israelism
British Israelism
British Israelism is the belief that people of Western European descent, particularly those in Great Britain, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The concept often includes the belief that the British Royal Family is directly descended from the line of King David...
, which developed in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in the 19th century, also sometimes involved a pre-Adamic worldview, though this was a minority position. According to this model the pre-Adamites were viewed as a race of inferior bestial creatures apart from Adam, who was the first white man and son of God. In this narrative Satan
Satan
Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...
seduces Eve and the resulting offspring is a hybrid creature called Cain. Later Cain flees to East Turkestan to establish a colony of followers intent on realizing the Devil’s plan for domination of the earth. Further elaboration of this myth involved the identification of the Jews with Canaanites, the putative descendants of Cain (although the eponym
Eponym
An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...
ous ancestor of Canaanites is not Cain but Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...
). It followed that, if the tribes of Judah
Tribe of Judah
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Judah was one of the Tribes of Israel.Following the completion of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelite tribes after about 1200 BCE, Joshua allocated the land among the twelve tribes....
were supposed to have intermarried with Cain’s descendants, then the Jews were the offspring of Satan as well as sundry nonwhite pre-Adamic races.
In the United States, British Israelism developed into the aggressively anti-Semitic Christian Identity
Christian Identity
Christian Identity is a label applied to a wide variety of loosely affiliated believers and churches with a racialized theology. Many promote a Eurocentric interpretation of Christianity.According to Chester L...
movement in which the Jews were increasingly seen as outside the domain of humanity.
Non-racist Pre-Adamism
Non-racist pre-Adamism can be traced back to Paschal Beverly RandolphPaschal Beverly Randolph
Randolph also edited the Leader and the Messenger of Light between 1852 to 1861 and wrote for the Journal of Progress and Spiritual Telegraph .2 as anonymous.3 under the pseudonym "Count de St. Leon".- References :...
, an occultist, Paschal was of Malagasy
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
and Native American ancestry, he was a spokesman against slavery. Paschal was a believer in pre-Adamism he wrote the book Pre-Adamite man : demonstrating the existence of the human race upon the earth 100,000 thousand years ago! under the name of Griffin Lee in 1863. His book was a unique contribution towards pre-Adamism because it wasn't strictly based on biblical grounds. Randolph used a wide range of sources to write his book from many different world traditions, esoterica and ancient religions. Randolph traveled to many countries of the world where he wrote different parts of his book, in the book Paschal claims that Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
was not the first man and that pre-Adamite men existed on all continents around the globe 35,000 years to 100,000 years ago. His book is different than many of the other writings from other pre-Adamite authors because in Randolph's book he claims the pre-Adamites were civilised men while other pre-Adamite authors argued that the pre-Adamites were beasts or hominids.
Non-racist pre-Adamite theories have also been held by a number of mainstream Christians such Congregational evangelist R.A. Torrey (1856–1928) believed in the Gap Theory and that pre-Adamites had survived into the present day. He thus advocated a local Flood.
Gleason Archer
Gleason Archer
Gleason Leonard Archer, Jr. was a Biblical scholar, theologian, educator and author.-Early life:Archer's father was Gleason Archer, Sr., the founder of Suffolk University in Boston. Archer graduated in 1938 with a B.A. from Harvard University and received an LL.B...
a Biblical scholar, was a believer in pre-Adamism. Gleason writes in his 1985 book A Survey of Old Testament Introduction: "To revert to the problem of the Pithecanthropus, the Swanscombe
Swanscombe
Swanscombe is a small town, part of the Borough of Dartford on the north Kent coast in England. It is part of the civil parish of Swanscombe and Greenhithe.-Prehistory:...
man, the Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
and all the rest (possibly even the Cro-magnon
Cro-Magnon
The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans of the European Upper Paleolithic. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiometrically dated to 35,000 years before present....
man, who is apparently to be classed as Homo sapiens, but whose remains seem to date back at least to 20,000 B.C.) it seems best to regard these races as all prior to Adam’s time, and not involved in the Adamic covenant. We must leave the question open, in view of the cultural remains, whether these pre-Adamic creatures had souls (or, to use the trichotomic terminology, spirits)." Gleason goes on to assert that only Adam and his descendants were infused with the breath of God and a spiritual nature corresponding to God himself, and he says that all mankind subsequent to Adam’s time must have been literally descended from him. However, he retains the concept of pre-Adamic races (e.g. Cro-Magnon man), and says, "They may have been exterminated by God for unknown reasons prior to the creation of the original parent of the present human race".
More recently these ideas have promoted by Kathryn Kuhlman
Kathryn Kuhlman
Kathryn Johanna Kuhlman was an American faith healer and evangelist.-Early life:Kathryn Johanna Kuhlman was born in Concordia, Missouri, to German-American parents...
and Derek Prince
Derek Prince
Peter Derek Vaughan Prince was an international Bible teacher whose daily radio programme Derek Prince Legacy Radio broadcasts to half the population of the world in various languages...
among the Pentecostals, John Stott
John Stott
John Robert Walmsley Stott CBE was an English Christian leader and Anglican cleric who was noted as a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement. He was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974...
among the Anglicans and the old earth creationist Hugh Ross
Hugh Ross (creationist)
Hugh Norman Ross is a Canadian-born astrophysicist and creationist Christian apologist.He has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics, and later established his own ministry called Reasons To Believe, that promotes progressive and day-age forms of old Earth creationism...
.
Immanuel Velikovsky
Immanuel Velikovsky
Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar of Jewish origins, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950...
was a believer in pre-Adamism. He wrote a book called In the Beginning; in the book Velikovsky describes catastrophes which had occurred before those described in his first book, Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
. In the first section of the book, his chapter titled The Pre-Adamite Age discusses pre-Adamism. He wrote that the "talmudic-rabbinical tradition believed that before Adam was created, the world was more than once inhabited and more than once destroyed" he also wrote that according to the evidence from many different traditions Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
were not a single human pair and there must have been many of them.
See also
- AntediluvianAntediluvianThe antediluvian period meaning "before the deluge" is the period referred to in the Bible between the Creation of the Earth and the Deluge . The narrative takes up chapters 1-6 of Genesis...
- Cradle of civilizationCradle of CivilizationThe cradle of civilization is a term referring to any of the possible locations for the emergence of civilization.It is usually applied to the Ancient Near Eastern Chalcolithic , especially in the Fertile Crescent , but also extended to sites in Armenia, and the Persian Plateau, besides other Asian...
- Fertile crescentFertile CrescentThe Fertile Crescent, nicknamed "The Cradle of Civilization" for the fact the first civilizations started there, is a crescent-shaped region containing the comparatively moist and fertile land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia. The term was first used by University of Chicago...
- Garden of EdenGarden of EdenThe Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
- HamHam, son of NoahHam , according to the Table of Nations in the Book of Genesis, was a son of Noah and the father of Cush, Mizraim, Phut and Canaan.- Hebrew Bible :The story of Ham is related in , King James Version:...
- Human history
- JaphethJaphethJapheth is one of the sons of Noah in the Abrahamic tradition...
- PolygenismPolygenismPolygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
- Race
- ShemShemShem was one of the sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible as well as in Islamic literature. He is most popularly regarded as the eldest son, though some traditions regard him as the second son. Genesis 10:21 refers to relative ages of Shem and his brother Japheth, but with sufficient ambiguity in each...
- SlaverySlaverySlavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
- Sons of NoahSons of NoahThe Seventy Nations or Sons of Noah is an extensive list of descendants of Noah appearing in of the Hebrew Bible, representing an ethnology from an Iron Age Levantine perspective...
External links
- A.J. Maas, "Preadamites", Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) : CatholicCatholicThe word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
view - "Neanderthal Man: Pre-Adamite, Co-Adamite, or Adamite?", 29 Creation Research Society Quarterly (Mar. 1993) : Protestant creation scienceCreation scienceCreation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology...
view - Hugh W. Nibley, "Before Adam", Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute : Latter-day Saint view