A depiction of a Pict warrior, painted as described in Roman history.
From the Official Webpage of a Scottish Clan (Fair Use)
The Case of the Picts
Armstrongism, History and Apophenia
By Scout
Revisiting Armstrongist lore is not one of my ardent pursuits. But once in a while, when critical analysis is needed, the education in pseudo-history I got when I was an Armstrongist shines. Armstrongist lore, by my definition, is not the information that flowed from Pasadena. It is rather the colloquial re-interpretation of the information from Pasadena found at the congregational level. The Pews, in some ways, had their own derivative Armstrongism. I understand this. People want to make what is important to them their own by placing their mark on it. Many outside observers do not realize that Armstrongists are indoctrinated with a totally homegrown view of the history of mankind which was then modified in the congregations for local use.
With that background, l will present an incident for your consideration. I was at a gathering years ago in a home in Big Sandy, Texas. There were a bunch of people there and we were sitting around talking. The conversation turned to British-Israelism at one point. And a guy I knew sitting near me did a riff on Native Americans. He stated that Native Americans were brought to North America by Israelites from the British Isles. They were considered by the Israelites to be clowns. They were kept around for entertainment aboard ship. Israelites would get them drunk and then laugh at their drunken antics. The crowd at the gathering seemed to be entertained by this riff. I was shocked and dismayed at the blatantly racist comment and that it was well received by the listeners. But the atmosphere at the gathering did not invite debate. A minister and a sidekick showed up a little later and the gathering acquired a quasi-official ambience.
The question I am considering in this essay is how did such dubious lore originate. This is a broad question and I will focus on only one phenomenon. What I am going to write about is called “apophenia”.
Apophenia in Armstrongist Historical Interpretation
Apophenia refers to making fabulous connections between unrelated facts usually based on pseudo-facts and quasi-logic. Think of the movie “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe. Apophenia is the illogical engine that drives conspiracy theories. Herman Hoeh stepped into this realm in his teleological interpretations of history that were intended to support orthodox Armstrongist viewpoint that exalted Northwest Europeans.
An example of apophenia as related to anthropology is Hoeh’s identification of Native Americans as Canaanites based on skin color. The argument goes like this: Native Americans are red in skin color, Phoenicians are also red in skin color and Phoenicians are Canaanites; therefore, Native Americans are Canaanites. The problem is, Native Americans are not red; they are brown. The idea that they are red arose in the middle Eighteenth Century to distinguish them from Whites and Blacks. Before that time, the idea that Native Americans had red skin was unknown. And Phoenicians acquired their redness connection due to a red dye they manufactured from a certain ocean snail. Genetics tell us that the modern-day Lebanese are descended from Phoenicians and the Lebanese are not red in skin color. The only red-skinned people I have ever seen were Whites who had high blood pressure. My guess is that connecting Native Americans, by hook or by crook, to the Canaanites fit so well with British-Israelism that its juiciness could not be resisted.
Another example is apophenia as related to names. For instance, the idea that the occurrence of the name “Dan” that is found in some form in various locations in Europe must refer to the Israelite Tribe of Dan. And these names trace their migration pattern. This association by name overlooks the fact that there is really no certain etymology for the name Dan. Research takes us rapidly into myth. One fact is certain: population genetics indicates that the Danes are unrelated to the ancient people of the Middle East. So, name similarity alone cannot validly connect the modern Danes to the ancient Israelite Tribe of Dan. To assert there is a connection based on the similarity of names without credible supporting history is a case of apophenia.
Armstrongist Apophenia and Native Americans
In Herman Hoeh’s Compendium of World History, Volume 2, Chapter 7, Hoeh asserts that Native Americans are an amalgam of two peoples. They are descended from the Biblical patriarchs Tiras and Canaan. Hoeh has described the connection to Canaan in two different ways. In the Compendium he states that some of the tribes that came to North America were Hivites. On the other hand, Hoeh sent me an excerpt from a historical writing once that indicated that some African Tribes believe that Tiras married one of the daughters of Canaan. I have since lost the short excerpt that he sent me. It is sufficient to say that I could not at that time challenge an assertion like this even though it was at odds with physical anthropology. Not only was it arcane history, difficult to challenge because of the paucity of relevant historical data to attack, it also came from an evangelist rank minister.
In this same chapter, Hoeh also provided a historical account for how the Native Americans came to populate the Americas. I will not repeat the pseudo-history in detail here. Suffice it to say, Hoeh believed that Native Americans were brought to the Americas by their “Israelitish” (If in quotes, read as Northwest Europeans.)They were brought across the Atlantic Ocean rather than out of Asia through Beringia and then into North America as science would have it. One migration was of the Picts. Hoeh advanced the idea that Native Americans were first located in Scotland where they were known as painted Picts. And the Picts consisted of two co-residing peoples: a ruling group which was Caucasian from Thrace and a wild, primitive, subordinate group with painted bodies which was Native American. Conflict with Romans in Britain resulted in population turmoil and the Native American Picts were transported by boat to America by their “Israelitish” overlords. Apparently this migration was where the riff I heard in Big Sandy fit into the pseudo-history. While Hoeh’s creative connection of historical references might have revealed, though unlikely, some kind of actual migration, it was not a migration of Native Americans. This will be addressed below.
Hoeh relies extensively on “the early Spanish writer” named Ordonez to establish the Pict-Native American connection. He does not cite this Ordonez in his bibliography nor does he give his full name in the text. I have been unable to identify this author, after a reasonable effort, in order to review the origin and quality of his historical ideas. I am left to wonder why Hoeh did not give us a clear citation. IF you know anything about Ordonez, let me know.
In creating the connection between Native Americans and Middle Eastern peoples, Hoeh also used apophenia related to names. He noted that the name of the Biblical patriarch Tiras is found in the name of the Tarascan Indians of Mexico as Taras. There are many other examples of such dubious connections. In short, I would class Hoeh’s writing on this topic as apophenic rather than historical.
Who are the Picts?
To place this issue in modern historical context, it would be good to determine what is now understood about the Picts. The Picts were a confederation of ancient Celtic tribes. They lived in Eastern Scotland. They left us very little in the way of intelligible records. But they did leave their bones in the ground. Excavations from the 5th and 7th centuries AD, when the Picts were still on the land, indicate that they were not different from the surrounding populations. In other research, Dr. Jim Wilson, a geneticist, identified the Pictish haplogroup as R1b-S530. This is a subclade of R1b-M269 which is the general haplogroup found throughout Northwest Europe. Though wild and primitive, the Picts were homeboys in Britain, part of the common racial fabric of the isles. The R1b-M269 population derives from Pastoralists who came off the Pontic Steppe anciently and overran Northwest Europe. They are known as Atlantics and notably occupied the British Isles thousands of years before Abraham. This, of course, contradicts the exotic origin for the Picts that Hoeh posited based on connecting references in ancient history. It is worth noting that Hoeh did not have genetics to aid in his research.
Who are the Native Americans?
The other piece of the picture is the identity of Native Americans. Genetic evidence supports the idea that Native Americans are a composite of two Eurasian peoples. When they first left Beringia, the huge land bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska, to populate the New World, they were a mix of East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian. The people in the former group were mongoloid in appearance and the latter were Caucasoid in appearance. The Ancient North Eurasians are identified with the people of the Tarim Mummies. Some scientists approximate the mixture for Native Americans at 70 percent East Asian and 30 percent Ancient North Eurasian. This is why Native American physical anthropology has an affinity for Asia, but their facial appearance is generally not Asian. Tracks found recently at White Sands, New Mexico support the presence of Native Americans in the New World as early as 23,000 years ago.
Genetic analysis tells us that ancient Native Americans were a highly homogenous people. They are almost all y chromosome haplogroup Q-M3 or Q-L54. Haplogroup Q is not found in association with Picts in Scotland. I asked Google AI if haplogroup Q is associated with the Picts in Scotland and it replied succinctly:
“No, Haplogroup Q is not associated with the Picts in Scotland. Haplogroup Q originated in Central Asia and Siberia and is most common in Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Recent genetic studies on Pictish remains have instead linked them to other haplogroups that are common in Britain and Ireland.”
Haplogroup Q does occur in ancient Britain but it is associated with the Vikings. While the Nazis admired the Scandinavians as being the Nordic archetype, they did not realize that Scandinavians carry a measurable amount of Siberian and North Asian ancestry. (If someone tells you they are a racially pure Scandinavian, you are justified in being skeptical. People got around.) But the y chromosome haplogroup Q subclade associated with the Vikings is Q-L804 which is different from the Q subclades among Native Americans in the New World.
The Upshot: Why Does Apophenia in Historical Interpretation Make a Difference?
Is Hoeh’s view just folklore like Beowulf? Or a harmless church chatter? No, it was apophenia-influenced historical interpretation passed off as historical realism. As such, it affected people’s lives. Like who gets to marry whom. And which peoples are acceptable by some idiosyncratic standard, with an affinity for White nationalism, and which are not. Let me clarify that I do not believe that Hoeh’s apophenic conclusions about history were done with malevolence. I believe that at the time he wrote the material, Hoeh thought he had discovered the “real” history of the World. But archaeology and genetics tell us it wasn’t.
The object lesson is that when historical interpretations are going to affect people’s lives profoundly, caution is imperative. If apophenia knocks on the front door, it should not be let in. The two-volume Compendium of World History was Hoeh’s dissertation for his Ph.D. from Ambassador College. But something is missing. In the interests of caution, Hoeh’s committee should have also required him to show why orthodox history was wrong. That is the missing volume three of the Compendium.
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