I Have Landed (22 page)

A highly original history of life shown in three successive scenes, bottom to top: dinosaurs, large mammals of the Ice Age, and modern creatures. By Isabelle Duncan, 1860
.

Nonetheless, I have located nary an informative word about Isabelle Duncan. I may well have missed something, and I would be grateful for any assistance from readers (whose commentaries, expansions, and corrections have given me so much pleasure, and granted me so much enlightenment, over the years).
⁸
I can at least say that other scholars who devoted far more time to the search came up equally empty-handed. Rudwick himself simply writes, “The author is now obscure, but in its time the book was evidently not: it had reached a fourth edition within a couple of years.” The most important scholarly work on the Pre-Adamite theory, R. H. Popkin's biography of the movement's founder
(Isaac La Peyrère (1506–1676): His Life, Work and Influence
[E. J. Brill, 1987]), gives a short summary of the contents, but only refers to the author as “one Isabella Duncan”—the conventional way to say “I know her name, but otherwise zilch, zippo, nada, goose eggs, and bugger-all about her.”

Given the barely post-Darwinian date of Duncan's book
(The Origin of Species
had appeared the year before, in 1859), one might assume that Duncan
wrote to introduce lay readers to new discoveries in geology and anthropology, and to prepare them for assessing (whether pro or con) the onslaught of Darwin's revisions to traditional views about human history. But her motivation arose from an entirely different, and now nearly invisible, source—the subject of our second riddle: an old theory of biblical exegesis that can be traced to some of the early church fathers, but that arose in explicit form amid the millenarian movements of the mid-seventeenth century, and then kicked around (attracting at least the passing interest of such famous characters as Spinoza, Voltaire, Napoleon, and Goethe) until geological discoveries about the earth's great age, combined with anthropological findings of prehistoric human artifacts, pushed the subject into a renewed light of Darwinian debate.

The problem that inspired this so-called Pre-Adamite theory—the claim that humans existed before Adam, and that the man described in the first chapters of Genesis only denotes God's later creation of the Jews and other allied peoples—must have occurred to anyone who ever read the Bible with a critical eye. Several passages in Genesis, if taken at face value, seem to imply the existence of pre-Adamites. The subject may never come up in polite company, but if Adam and Eve mark a unique creation as a single pair, then whom did their son Cain marry? His unnamed sister, we must assume (at least if we wish to avoid the even more repugnant Oedipal alternative). But can we accept such incest at our very roots (although, admittedly, the story of Lot's daughters indicates some affinity for the theme within the Book of Genesis).

More explicitly, why did God need to place a mark upon Cain after he killed his brother Abel? God punishes Cain, who had been “a tiller of the ground,” by ordaining that the soil, having imbibed his brother's blood, will never produce a crop for him again—and that he must therefore become “a fugitive and a vagabond . . . in the earth.” But Cain begs for mitigation by pleading “every one that findeth me shall slay me.” So God relents and places the famous mark upon him: “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (Genesis 4:15). But why did Cain need such a fancy ID, if no one else (except, perhaps, a few unnamed sibs) then inhabited the earth?

Moreover, what interpretation should we give to the two famously ambiguous passages of Genesis 6? First, the statement in verse 2 “that the sons of God saw the daughters of men . . . [and] took them wives.” (Now, are the sons members of Adam's line and the daughters of some other stock, or vice versa? In either case, the comment seems to designate two distinct lineages, one perhaps pre-Adamic.) Second, the initial phrase of verse 4: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The Hebrew word
Nephilim
may be ambiguous, and King
James's translators may have goofed in imputing gigantic proportions, but one can easily read the comment as a reference to some kind of pre-Adamic stock.

At an opportune time in the midst of millennial anxieties sweeping Europe after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Isaac La Peyrère, a French Protestant intellectual in the employ of the powerful Prince of Condé, joined these traditional doubts with a new exegetical argument to launch the pre-Adamite theory in 1655. His book, published in liberal Amsterdam and translated into English the next year (under the title
Men Before Adam)
, created a goodly stir and caused its author a peck of trouble. La Peyrère was arrested and severely questioned. He finally accepted what we would call a plea bargain today—namely, that all would be forgiven if he converted to Catholicism, repented his pre-Adamite heresy, and apologized personally to the Pope, which he did (to Alexander VII) early in 1657.

The put-up nature of the job stands out in two tales, probably true according to Popkin, about La Peyrère's meeting with Alexander VII—that the General of the Jesuit order told La Peyrère how he and the Pope had “laughed delightedly” when they read the book, and that the Pope apparently said, upon meeting this “dangerous” heretic: “Let us embrace this man who is before Adam.” In any case, La Peyrère never abandoned his theory, lived another twenty years, and died near Paris as a lay member of the Seminary of Oratorians. (In his later defenses of the pre-Adamite theory, La Peyrère followed the cautious route that Galileo had rejected thirty years before. He simply stated that the idea held great interest, made eminent sense of all the evidence, but could not be true because the Church had so decreed.)

La Peyrère proposed his theory from a millenarian and universalistic perspective. If God had created Adam as the progenitor of Jewish history, and if other races had previously existed, then the Jews must lead all people to a final redemption. La Peyrère focused upon the traditional Christian belief that a Jewish conversion would herald the blessed millennium. This time must now be at hand. The Jewish Messiah would soon appear and, in league with the King of France, return to Jerusalem in triumph, where both men would reign over a unified and fully Christian world. France, as a tolerant nation, must seek and welcome a Jewish influx, for if these favored people could be gathered together without constraint or persecution, then their Messiah would surely come.

Ironically, in stark contrast with La Peyrère's messianic view that all people, Adamite and pre-Adamite alike, would be equally redeemed, most subsequent (especially nineteenth-century) invocations of pre-Adamism used the doctrine to support racism—particularly the “polygenist” theory that each major human race arose as a separately created species, with Adam as the final progenitor of
superior white folks (the latest with the mostest, so to speak), and several earlier Pre-Adams, one for each lower race (the firstest with the leastest). In other words, whites are Adamites; all other people are inferior pre-Adamites.

My interest in the history of pre-Adamism stems from its status as such a radically different way to treat a subject so central to the sciences—the origin and history of human diversity. In our secular age, we feel convinced (and rightly so, I would argue) that the empirical methods of science must be employed to answer such basically factual questions (while religion takes legitimate interest in entirely different spiritual questions about the meaning of life, and ethical inquiries about the proper conduct of life). But pre-Adamism rep-resents, for someone trained in science, a “weirdly different” approach—one that should be called basically literary or hermeneutic rather than religious per se, even though analysis focuses upon a religious text, namely the Bible.

Pre-Adamite theorists formulated and justified their arguments by interpretation of scripture, rather than by appeal to factual information from the burgeoning sciences of anthropology and geology (although supporters of pre-Adamism also used the data, first of voyages of exploration leading to contact with diverse peoples throughout the world, and then of the fossil record and the discovery of deep time, to buttress their fundamentally textual thesis). I find the notion of such a parallel tradition fascinating, primarily for what it reveals about the diversity of human approaches—some ultimately fruitful, others doomed by false premises from the start—to difficult common problems. Pre-Adamism and science run on two parallel tracks, working by entirely different initial assumptions, methods of argument, and standards of proof. The two approaches also span roughly the same period, for La Peyrère's founding document appeared at the dawn of Newton's generation, the traditional origin for modern science as a dominant worldview; while the triumph of an evolutionary account by the end of the nineteenth century removed the underpinnings of exegetical pre-Adamism as a theory about actual datings and timings for the origin of various human groups.

Thus we must understand La Peyrère's theory not as a kooky exercise in biblical apologetics, but as a courageous and radical claim within the conventional theology of his day (in both Catholic and Protestant circles). For, by arguing that the Pentateuch—the Bible's first five books, traditionally attributed to Moses as sole and divinely inspired author—only described the local history of the Jewish people, and not the entire chronology of all humans, La Peyrère challenged a precept that almost no scholar had ever dared to question in public (though private doubts and thoughts had always been rife): the conviction that the Bible, as
the inspired word of God, means exactly what it says. In so doing, La Peyrère helped to open the floodgates to a major theological movement that has swept the field of religious studies ever since, again in parallel with science (by using rational literary, rather than rational empirical, techniques): “higher criticism” and other exegetical approaches dedicated to interpreting the Bible as a fallible document, cobbled together from numerous sources of varying reliability, but subject to deeper understanding when all questions may be asked (and answers sought without fear), and no dogmas need be obeyed
a priori
.

We sense the difference and distance between these parallel roads of exegetical and scientific approaches to human prehistory when we describe the foundation of La Peyrère's argument—a claim that scientists might read as almost laughably arcane and irrelevant to any “real” inquiry about human origins, but that played an important role in this different hermeneutical tradition of literary interpretation. La Peyrère cited the usual arguments from Genesis, as noted above, but he centered his theory upon a novel, if peculiar, interpretation of a single passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (5:12–14):

Now, here's the rub: traditional (and probably accurate) readings interpret “the law” as referring to Moses' receipt of God's word in the Pentateuch. The passage then states that although Adam had sinned, his sin could not be “officially” imputed to people until Moses received the divine word that specified the nature of Adam's transgression, and the price that all subsequent people must pay (the doctrine of original sin). Nonetheless, all pre-Mosaic people had to suffer death as a result of Adam's sin, even those who lived righteously and never disobeyed God in “the similitude of Adam's transgression”—and even though they had not yet received the law from Moses, and therefore could not fully understand why they must die.

As we say in the modern vernacular, “I got no problem with that”—but La Peyrère did, and for a definite (if entirely idiosyncratic) reason. La Peyrère insisted that Paul's invocation of “the law” referred to God's instructions to Adam, not to his dispensation to Moses. Now, if “sin was in the world” before
the law, and Adam first received the law, and if only people could sin—well then,
ipso facto
and QED, people must have existed before Adam's creation. Most folks today, scientists and theologians alike, would consider this reading as a woefully thin foundation for such a radical chain of consequences. But so be it;
autres temps, autres moeurs
(other times, other customs), as they say in La Peyrère's country.

We need this background, and this concept of science and literary exegesis as parallel tracks in the exploration of human prehistory, to understand Isabelle Duncan's book and theory with any sympathy—for her ideas sound kooky even beyond La Peyrère's vision about the King of France all buddy-buddy with a Jewish Messiah in a blissful world to come. Yet, when we understand that her argument emerges not from science, but from a tradition of biblical exegesis trying to harmonize itself with science, then her mode of reasoning becomes clearer (even though her particular claims don't, and can't, improve in plausibility). Rudwick states this important point in writing of Duncan's book: “Such a theory may now seem bizarre, but it belongs . . . to a flourishing Anglo-American subculture of biblically based cosmological speculations, often with powerful social and racial implications.”