Review: How the SunGod Reached America

Submitted by Aluta on Monday, 15 July 2002 Page Views: 4407

How the SunGod Reached America c. 2500 B.C. by Dr. Reinoud M. de Jonge and Jay Stuart Wakefield

Simply put, the authors of this book posit that one people went around over the course of more than two millennia and built nearly all the megalithic structures in the world, encoding in them their nautical knowledge, and spreading the idea of sun worship wherever they went.

True, neither author is an archaeologist, but cowboy archaeology can be an exhilarating enterprise, and far-fetched premises are not necessarily a deterent to the enjoyment of a book. With good photos and charts, juicy ideas to ponder, and some ingenious jumps that show us old data in new ways, even an unconvincing book can be a good read. Books of the new paradigm genre can often be read with profit simply for the light they shine on the workings of the human mind.

Not so this book. Maybe I should have been suspicious as soon as I saw the word "SunGod", with no space and a capital G, as if it were a brand name, copyright pending. I did start to get suspicious when the people whose works we'd be examining throughout the book were dismissed on the first page of text with this remarkable sentence, "We do not know who they were but they are defined as 'megalithic' because they left behind "big rocks".

So many people these days are knowledgeable about and interested in megaliths that any reasonable person proposing an all-encompassing new theory ( and maybe we're straying into oxymoron territory there) would only step into the fray if armed with a broad knowledge of the current state of the field, impeccable research, and a good sense of humor. These authors, apparently choosing to disregard the last paragraph of Burl's preface to his Prehistoric Avebury,* have chosen instead to bludgeon us into submission with repetitious examples. Perhaps they have forgotten that the reader is allowed to close the book.

Essential to the premise is the authors' unsubstantiated assertion that as many as five thousand years ago the culture in question arrived at exactly our system of latitude and longitude and from then on encoded it , by numbers of stones, by sighting angles (yes, exactly our system of geometry, too, with full knowledge of the exact numbers of degrees in any angle), and by certain lines in petroglyphs.

In light of this, they re-interpret the megaliths one by one. The famous three-spiral petroglyph at Newgrange is a depiction of the three island groups of the Azores, while--eat your hearts out, Brits--Stonehenge was built to celebrate the discovery of America.

Did one seafaring culture build all the megalithic structures in the world? As is always observed, great populations of dedicated, well fed people were required to erect the huge stones. The enigmatic people of the book could not sail in, push a few boulders upright, then skim off across the waves. They would have had to engage a large population that had never been to sea, a population much more involved in the mysteries of the earth from which they daily gained their sustenance. And this not just in one place, mind you, but everywhere they went.

The assertion that sun worship was spread by these seafarers is also curious, if not racist. No culture could remain unaware of the sun's importance in everything from bringing the day to nurturing crops to creating the seasons with its intervals. That structures around the world are oriented toward the sunrise is not proof that one special people spread the idea of honoring it. More likely it shows that humanity is all one people, who naturally notice and honor it.

One might use this book as a textbook in a course on writing books proposing new paradigms, as a negative example. Future writers of such books, if you want to make your point, take note:

o You cannot determine dates for anything by using projections generated by your own unestablished theories.
o You cannot dismiss places where the facts don't conform with your theories merely by speculating that its creators erred for this or that reason.
o You cannot (using examples from the left side of the ocean) use material from earlier researchers (ex.: Fell and Trento) without addressing questions raised about their work by a later work (ex. Manitou by Mavor and Dix) that is widely seen to have refuted many of their assertions.
o Nor can you, while we're over there, dismiss a commonly held perception such as the inaccurate rebuilding of "America's Stonehenge" because it fits your theories better the way it is now.
o And you definitely cannot say that the people were pre-literate, then wrote in both Egyptian and Libyan glyphs, then possibly in English, as well as speaking Welsh in at least one place, without doing a great deal of explaining. Have mercy on those faithful readers who may actually want to believe.

Are there ideas worth examining in this book? Yes. For example, the assertion that the petroglyph found along the Neversink in the Catskills of New York depicts the three rivers is ingenious and possibly correct. Rivers were central to the lives and beliefs of the pre-Columbian Lenape of the area, a people known to have created petroglyphs.

In fact, even the idea that some megalithic structures and petroglyphs around the world might contain information on seafaring does not deserve automatic dismissal. It's just a shame these authors have written a book that makes it seem that way.

* Burl writes: "This book is not intended to be an archaeological report or a catalogue of finds. It is meant to be read. Continually in mind have been the wise words of William Stukeley: 'The writers on antiquities generally find more difficulty, in so handling the matter, as to render agreeable to the reader, than in most other subjects. Tediousness in anything is a fault, more so in this than other sciences.' "

Contributor Bio for Aluta: Well, Clonehenge. Other than that I like ancient sites, ancient stones, long walks and good conversation.

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