Table of Contents
On The 5th Kind, Regina Meredith asks Paul Wallis about a seal found as he wrote The Eden Enigma, named in the talk for Yeho’ezer. Once an Anglican archdeacon, Wallis says Jewish ancestors honored many beings, helpful and predatory, and that the word polytheism misses a memoir of contact. Between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE other cults close and worship shrinks to Yahweh, with one king, one priest, one temple, and the dues gathered so the realm is easy to rule. An Assyrian genie on the seal did not trouble an owner who still thought the Elohim had faces. Egypt’s earlier turn, he tells Meredith, was the thirteenth century BCE and was devotion to the sun itself. A Hawaiian tale is then a land seizure: title cancelled, rent imposed, money issued by the newcomers. He says that plot is the present. British Ghana, his family story, repeats it through schools and banks. He will not say elite. The Dark Crystal, bird rulers feeding on Gelflings, is the picture he prefers.
Key points
- Wallis reads the Yeho’ezer seal as a relic from before Jewish worship was reduced to Yahweh alone.
- He refuses the textbook word polytheism and calls the older layer a memory of many powerful beings, some of them harmful.
- The reform, in his account, also piled king, priest, temple, and taxes into one cult that was easy to rule.
- A Hawaiian story of arrival gives him the model of conquest by cancelled land rights, rent, and a currency the invaders issue.
- British Ghana, drawn from his family, is the recent case of occupiers teaching the occupied to call them a higher class.
- The Dark Crystal is his sketch of those same factions as feeders on other people, not as an elite.
Short quotes
Was it the southern wall of Temple Mount?
Paul Wallis, Wallis on the seal and the elite
He asks whether the seal turned up on the southern wall of Temple Mount. Watch at 1:16
It's a very ancient story in which these beings come and colonize the lands of their ancestors.
Paul Wallis, Wallis on the seal and the elite
In the Hawaiian tale, the newcomers’ arrival means older households lose the ground. Watch at 5:24
Well, I think because the invaders become the department of education and they call themselves the elite.
Paul Wallis, Wallis on the seal and the elite
Classrooms run by occupiers are, for him, how invaders train everyone to treat them as a superior rank. Watch at 7:34
Video by The 5th Kind. Watch on YouTube.