More (and Considerably Less) on Ogham

[Thomas Vieth]

You might wanna check out Joseph Campbell: Occidental Mythology (that's 
vol III of his The Masks of God) and Robert Graves: The White Goddess on 
the origin of the Celts which seems rather adventurous in itself.

Thomas Vieth
Down with Triolahidi
Long live Hollerodullyo


----Original Message Follows----
From:	"Sherwood, Harrison" <hsherwood at btg.com>
To:	"'pynchon-l at waste.org'" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: More (and Considerably Less) on Ogham
Date:	Fri, 27 Jun 1997 17:57:03 -0400
It's been a slow day at work, so I poked around on the Net for info re.
Barry Fell, Ogham, and pre-Columbian Celtic visitors to America as
referred to in _Mason & Dixon_.
Folks, it doesn't look good.
Sci.archaeology just hates Fell _and_ Celts. They don't want to know.
Fell had (apparently he's dead) a Ph.D., but it was in Comparative
Anatomy (as in, ...let's compare...!) . 
There was a web page dedicated to Fell debunkery at
http://www.artzero.com/gnomonicon/stiebing.htm, but the site
overall--something called "Gnomonicon: The Modern Book of Ancient
Knowledge"--looks just about as nutty as Fell himself. 
In short, the Celts-in-America thing has been shot full of holes, quite
a few times by quite a few people. David T. Hughes, Ph.D. a member of
the Dept. of Anthropology at Wichita State University, goes so far as to
say in anthro-l,
(http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/anthropology/anthro-l/archive/februar
y-1996/0155.html): 
>The concern I have encountered is that in two states various 
educators>of the
public schools have made attempts to adopt _America B.C._ as THE>final
answer on many American Indian questions. My problem with that,>other
than the at times gross inaccuracies and inadequacies of basic>text, is
that by being hyper-diffusionist (of the grand sort just short>of van
Danikenism) it denies the inherent creativity of the people and>implies
that there is some sort of incapacity to the Indians who were>being
contacted -- potentially reviving (albeit subtly) many of the
old>racist debates.
Well, just ex-key-uuuuse the living shit outta _me_! (I like that "final
answer" phrasing: oooh! that's subtle, Dave!)
Now as to the question of why Thomas Pynchon should allude to what
cannot possibly be anything _other_ than Ogham inscriptions and the
notion of pre-Columbian European astronomer visitors to America, well, I
guess he's just a goddamned von Danikenist racist.
-----
And yet, and yet...
I find this intriguing abstract from a paper published at Wake Forest
(http://www.wfu.edu/~cyclone/):
>THE ALGONQUIN LANGUAGE, which anthropologists have shown genetically 
related
to the 
>Old World, cannot predate sea transmission, although Algonquin ethnic 
stock
may. 
>Many tribes and cultures confederated by way of Algonquin as a ritual
language and 
>trade koine, which was not adopted or imposed until the Iron Age....
>Celtic, which was a component of Algonquin, also occurs on Burrows 
Stones if
their 
>ogam proves Celtic. (It does not read as standard Gaelic.) An earlier
Mediterranean 
>layer could derive from Libyan and/or Saite Egypt and Carthaginian 
Empire but
not 
>earlier than 800 B.C....
>While many anthropologists refuse to admit endless parallels as 
evidence of
>consequential transoceanic connection before Columbus, they cannot
regard Old World >languages independently invented in ancient
America--anthropologists themselves >having discovered the genetic
relationship of native American to Old World tongues >(which had not
evolved before the Bering land-bridge submerged and could not have
>remained recognizable after 12-15 millennia)....
Wow. Maybe the jury's still out.
Harrison



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