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Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins

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Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins adam’s ancestors Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context Ronald L. Numbers, Consulting Editor david n. livingstone 5 Adam’s Ancestors Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins the johns hopkins university press Baltimore © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Johns Hopkins Paperback edition, 2011 9876 5 4 3 21 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition of this book as follows: Livingstone, David N., 1953– Adam’s ancestors : race, religion, and the politics of human origins / David N. Livingstone. p. cm. — (Medicine, science, and religion in historical context) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8813-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8018-8813-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology—Religious aspects. 2. Theological anthropology. 3. Human beings—Origin. 4. Human evolution. I. Title. bl256.l57 2008 202´.2—dc22 2007033706 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn-13: 978-1-4214-0065-5 isbn-10: 1-4214-0065-0 Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or specialsales@ press.jhu.edu. for Frances This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix 1 · beginnings Questioning the Mosaic Record 1 2 · heresy Isaac La Peyrère and the Pre-Adamite Scandal 26 3 · polity The Cultural Politics of the Adamic Narrative 52 4 · apologetics Pre-Adamism and the Harmony of Science and Religion 80 5 · anthropology Adam, Adamites, and the Science of Ethnology 109 6 · ancestors Evolution and the Birth of Adam 137 7 · bloodlines Pre-Adamism and the Politics of Racial Supremacy 169 8 · shadows The Continuing Legacy of Pre-Adamite Discourse 201 9 · dimensions Concluding Reflections 219 Notes 225 Bibliography 255 Index 287 This page intentionally left blank Preface The idea for this book was born one afternoon in March 1999 at the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley. I got into a conversation with Ronald Num- bers, who mentioned an exploratory essay I had published a few years earlier on the idea of humans before Adam. Ron suggested that I might return to that theme to try to flesh out the story and write a full history of the scheme. The journey on which I embarked that afternoon has taken me to many intel- lectual destinations, some strange, some familiar, all fascinating. And while I am sure that I have not said everything that could be said about the idea of pre-adamic humanity, I am greatly indebted to Ron for encouraging me to embark on this expedition. Along the way I have benefited enormously from his continuing interest and support and from the help I have derived from many friends and scholars. I owe an immense debt to Colin Kidd both for making his Forging of Races available to me prior to publication and for numerous bibliographical leads. The stimulus of his scholarship on the history of ethnic identities has been inspirational. Another afternoon conversation, this time with Andrew Holmes, proved to be invaluable in helping me sort out a coherent struc- ture for the entire book. The fact that he also persistently drew my atten- tion to numerous fugitive publications has only placed me more deeply in his debt. The care that Nicolaas Rupke took in reading the entire manuscript and saving me from some embarrassing errors is both typical of his erudi- tion and scholarship and a mark of his valued friendship. I have benefited greatly, too, from many enlightening conversations with good friends such as Diarmid Finnegan, Frank Gourley, Nuala Johnson, Mark Noll, and Ste- phen Williams, some of whom took the time and trouble to read portions of the manuscript and offer the best of advice. Luke Harlow willingly provided me with useful bibliographical leads on some American dimensions of the subject; Simon Schaffer directed me to some important seventeenth-century ix work; Philip Orr brought his dramatist’s eye to bear on the entire text and offered excellent counsel; Jeremy Crampton awakened me to dimensions of the story with which I was unfamiliar and shared with me some of his un- published work; and Martin Rudwick read several parts of the manuscript, offering sage and salient advice on several points. I am also extremely grateful to Gill Alexander and Maura Pringle for their skill in working with illustra- tions and to Elizabeth Gratch for patient and careful copyediting. To all these colleagues and friends I record my appreciation in the certain knowledge that, whatever its imperfections, Adam’s Ancestors is the better for the help they have willingly given. But my greatest debt is, as always, to Frances, Emma, and Justin, who have had to share too many dinners with the ghosts of Adam’s ancestors. x Preface adam’s ancestors This page intentionally left blank 1 5 Beginnings Questioning the Mosaic Record In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them . And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it . And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. ver since 1611, when the King James Bible first appeared, these words have introduced Bible readers to Adam, the father of the hu- Eman race. With sonorous majesty these words give voice to a doc- trine that has circulated since ancient times, stretching back through the Geneva Bible and Miles Coverdale’s translation, Saint Jerome’s medieval Latin Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint, to the Aramaic Targums of the early Hebrews. It is the doctrine of Creation, the story of beginnings—of the heavens and the earth, of light and dark, of sun and moon, of plants and animals. It is a chronicle that positions humankind at the pinnacle of the 1 narrative. It tells how we came to be here, what life was like in the morning of the earth, why human beings come in male and female forms, where evil originated, and how ugliness entered the world. And here, in the cradle of creation, stands one individual, Adam, the first man. To leave nothing to the imagination, pictures in Bibles would soon give visual expression to the world’s first couple, newly minted, fresh, pristine, unspoiled. Take, for instance, the magnificent Bible published by the Edin- burgh-born John Ogilby (1600–1676), sometime dancing master, theatrical impresario, translator, bookseller, publisher, and cartographer. The author of a series of folio travel books on various countries—Britain, Japan, and Africa among them—and a road atlas of England and Wales under the title Britan- nia in 1675, when he was in his seventies, Ogilby reissued in 1660 the large folio Bible published by John Field the previous year.1 This hugely expen- sive text, illustrated with what were called “chorographical sculps,” included a plate engraved by Pierre Lombard depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden at the moment of their fall from grace (fig. 1). The lavish abundance of Eden’s original perfection, not to mention its portrayal of both the harmonious and the fabulous, only served to anticipate the colossal cost of their banishment from its glories. Other illustrations reinforced this picture of the world’s first occupants enjoying the glorious surroundings of the Garden of Eden, with its lush veg- etation, peaceful river, and tree of life. In 1615, for example, Jan Breughel the elder (1568–1625) placed Adam and Eve in a tropical paradise surrounded by bountiful plant and animal life. In his Historie of the Perfect-Cursed-Blessed Man of 1628 Joseph Fletcher showed them strolling peacefully among cam- els, elephants, and lions. In 1629 John Parkinson, himself an apothecary with an extensive physic garden, used an illustration of a superabundant paradise superintended by Adam and Eve as the title page of his work on plant cul- tivation in flower gardens, kitchen gardens, and orchards (fig. 2).2 Such por- trayals, of course, were the latest expression of a long-standing convention in Western religious art: Adam and Eve were to be found in stained-glass win- dows, in large medieval maps known as the mappaemundi, and in tempera wall paintings. Later they would feature in works of natural history such as Johann Jakob Scheuchzer’s Sacred Physics (1731–33), in which the cycle of creation was pictorially depicted using the best available scientific evidence and culminating in “Homo ex Humo”—the creation of man, the “most no- ble of all creatures, the Microcosm or epitome of all this great World,” from the dust of the earth in a world “clothed with trees and shrubs, and orna- mented with flowers and fruits.”3 To this Zurich medical practitioner and 2 adam’s ancestors Fig.
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