‘I’ve just found a holy book!’

Sacred texts have a habit of being discovered unexpectedly

Every so often in the history of religion, something very unusual but very convenient happens. Someone finds an old text containing sacred knowledge which has unfortunately been hidden until that moment. He - it is usually a he - then makes the newly discovered knowledge known to those who need to hear about it. Sometimes he founds a new religion based on it.

Discovery stories of this kind have a distinct role to play in the history of religion, and it is worth looking at them more closely.

The ‘Book of the Law’

The oldest and most famous discovery story of all appears in the Bible. The year is 622 BCE. King Josiah of Judah sends an official called Shaphan to tell the high priest Hilkiah to carry out a straightforward accounting task in the temple of Jerusalem. But something unusual comes to light in the process. Here is the story in the King James Version:

And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, that the king sent Shaphan… the scribe, to the house of the Lord, saying, “Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may sum the silver which is brought into the house of the Lord….”

….And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it…. And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, “Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book.” And Shaphan read it before the king. And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.

And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Michaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asahiah a servant of the king’s, saying, “Go ye, enquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us.”

The ‘Book of the Law’ looks to have been something like an early edition of the biblical book of Deuteronomy. King Josiah realised that the people of Judah had been failing to keep the laws of God set out in the text, and this gave impetus to a religious reformation which played a key role in the development of what we now know as Judaism.

There are several ways of explaining what was going on. The story could be literally true: a neglected old holy book really could have been found hidden in the temple. Alternatively, religious reformers in Josiah’s reign could have planted it there and/or pretended to discover it. Another possibility again is that the whole story is a later invention. We will probably never know what actually happened.

The ancient pagan world

Our earliest discovery story from Western Europe refers to events that allegedly took place in 181 BCE. Numa Pompilius was a legendary king of Rome who was believed to have lived in a much earlier period (753-673 BCE). He was credited with being the founder of the Roman pagan religion. In 181, a chest was found buried in the vicinity of the Janiculum Hill in Rome; it contained books that were alleged to have been written by Numa. The exact number of the books is disputed, and our sources cannot decide whether they contained material relating to Roman religious law and ritual or treatises on Greek Pythagorean philosophy. In any event, the authorities decided that the books were religiously subversive, and they were duly burned on the orders of the Senate.

It is difficult to know what to make of this strange little episode. It is entirely possible that some books really were discovered, although no-one believes that they were actually written by Numa. Our sources attest that forgery was already mooted as an explanation in ancient times - apparently, the books did not look very old. One popular theory is that the books were planted with the intention of proving that Numa had been a pupil of Pythagoras, in order to link traditional Roman religion with the prestigious world of Greek philosophy. Interestingly, an argument can also be made in the other direction. A few years previously, in 186 BCE, the Roman state had taken action to suppress the Greek cult of Dionysus. Perhaps what was really going on was a nationalistic attempt to distance Rome from the Greek world. After all, the books were destroyed. If this is the true meaning of the story, it is an exception to the usual pattern, as it serves to delegitimise the discovered texts.

The Greek cultural world had its own discovery stories, several of which relate to Egypt. Papyri containing magic spells written in Greek claim to be copies of documents from the archives of the prestigious old Egyptian temples. The Greek-speaking writer Philo of Byblos (c. 70-160 CE) claimed that his Phoenician History was based on the writings of a long-dead Phoenician priest called Sanchuniathon, who had allegedly drawn on secret writings of ‘Taautos’ (the Egyptian god Tahuti). A Greek treatise on alchemy known as Physica et Mystica claimed to have been discovered in a temple in Egypt with the assistance of the spirit of a Persian sage, Ostanes. A divination manual, the Oracles of Astrampsychos, claimed that it had been composed by Pythagoras and that it was found in a temple by another Persian sage. An Egyptian prophet called Bitys claimed to have found a book written by the divine figure Hermes Trismegistus in a sanctuary at Sais on the Nile. An important collection of magical treatises known as the Kyranides likewise claimed to have come from God through Hermes Trismegistus; it was said that they were originally inscribed in Syrian characters on a column of iron.

Christian discovery stories

The coming of Christianity led to a new genre of Christian discovery stories. The best-known example is found in a text called the Apocalypse of Paul. In 388 CE, an angel appeared to a nobleman who was living in St Paul’s old house in Tarsus. The angel overcame his initial misgivings somewhat forcibly and made him dig in the foundations of the house. The man found a marble box, which ended up in the hands of the Emperor Theodosius and was discovered to contain an account of Paul’s heavenly visions. This tale was already doubted in antiquity: the Christian writer Sozomen investigated it and found it to be baseless. Another Christian discovery story is found in the prologue to an account of Jesus’ passion known as the Acts of Pilate. The supposed author, Ananias, claims that he discovered the original Hebrew version of the Acts in the Jewish archives, and that he then translated the text into Greek.

Later in Christian times, magic spell-books or grimoires made use of discovery stories. The following passage, for example, is found in the seventeenth-century Lemegeton:

These Bookes were first found in the Chaldean & hebrew tongues at Hierusalem, by a Jewish Rabbi, & by him put into the greeke Language, & from thence into ye Latine, as it is said &c.

Similarly, the introduction to the magic book known as the Key of Solomon tells of how the treatise was buried with the king and subsequently rediscovered by “certain Babylonian Philosophers”; and a grimoire attributed to St Cyprian was supposedly found in a village priest’s bookstall after the text was personally revealed by Lucifer.

A number of apocryphal texts dealing with the early history of Christianity have supposedly been discovered in more recent times. These include the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, which is said to have come from the Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Hemis; The Crucifixion, by an Eye-Witness, from a Greek monastery in Alexandria; the Letter of Benan, from a tomb in Saqqara in Egypt; and the twenty-ninth chapter of Acts, from the Ottoman archives in Constantinople. We might also mention that the American prophet Joseph Smith provided a traditional discovery story for the Book of Mormon (1830): an angel called Moroni showed him the location of some golden plates which were buried in a stone box.

Discovery stories as a trope in modern times

By the 1700s, the motif of discovering a hidden religious text had become so well known that it was satirised by the German writer Christoph Martin Wieland in his short story The Philosopher’s Stone (1786), which was turned into an opera by a team of composers who included Mozart. Some years previously, the French priest Jean Terrasson had published a best-selling novel, The Life of Sethos (1731), which dealt with secret quasi-Masonic initiations in ancient Egypt. This purported to be a translation of an ancient Greek manuscript which had been found in a library. At around the same time, the English writer Robert Dodsley published a popular book of moral advice entitled The Oeconomy of Human Life (1750), which claimed to have been translated from an Indian Brahmin text found in the Dalai Lama’s temple in Tibet.

The people behind the Occult Revival in the nineteenth century reached instinctively for the discovery story as a way of validating the texts that they put before the public. Take the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), an influential fringe-Masonic body that was founded in London around 1866. One of the SRIA’s leading lights, Robert Wentworth Little, was said to have taken the order’s rituals from documents that he had found in Freemasons’ Hall, where he worked. The true father of the SRIA may have been the occultist Kenneth Mackenzie, who claimed that he had been initiated as an authentic German Rosicrucian and had the real secret Rosicrucian rituals in his possession.

The best-known occultist discovery story was the one that formed the creation myth of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - the most influential occult group of all. By 1887, some mysterious papers written in an old cipher had come into the hands of a London doctor, William Wynn Westcott. The origin of these papers has proven to be something of a mystery. The most romantic version of the story traces them to a bookstall on Farringdon Road. (Not coincidentally, the narrator of the Rosicrucian-themed novel Zanoni (1842) had claimed to have come by certain mysterious cipher manuscripts through a London bookseller.) Internal evidence attests that Westcott’s manuscript cannot have been written long before its supposed discovery. In any event, among the manuscript papers was the address of a German Rosicrucian adept called Fräulein Sprengel. No-one has ever managed to find independent evidence of Sprengel’s existence, but Westcott nevertheless managed to exchange a series of letters with her in which she authorised him to establish his own Rosicrucian lodge. The letters were almost certainly forged: Sprengel was Westcott’s girlfriend in Canada.

A discovery story also underlies one of the key texts that inspired the development of contemporary Paganism, Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia (1899). This was a small book that made some big claims. Leland revealed to the world what he claimed was the Vangelo, or gospel, of a witch religion that had somehow survived into nineteenth-century Italy. He thought that the text might be a translation of a mediaeval or even an ancient Roman work. As to its contents, the Vangelo featured a supernatural female figure called Aradia who was the daughter of the goddess Diana and served as a kind of Pagan messiah. The text had a socially radical bent: it was opposed to the Catholic Church, the feudal class system, and conventional sexual mores.

Leland appears not to have invented his source material himself, and the character of Aradia had a genuinely old pedigree in Italian folklore. The passages of Italian that Leland quotes in his book seem to have been transcribed imperfectly from an oral source. The pre-publication drafts of Aradia also seem to show that he treated the Vangelo as a special text: he did not attempt to revise it like other material. No-one today, however, believes that the Vangelo was the genuine sacred text of a sect of revolutionary Italian witches. Its contents very probably drew on authentic peasant traditions, but in its current form it seems to have been put together and creatively elaborated by an informant of Leland by the name of Maddalena.

One person whom Leland influenced was Gerald Gardner, the founder of the Pagan witch religion Wicca. In the course of publicising Wicca to the world, Gardner quoted from several apparently authentic witch documents, including a liturgical text known as the ‘Charge of the Goddess’; a mythological narrative known as the ‘Legend of the Descent of the Goddess’; and a set of rules known as the ‘Old Laws’ or ‘Ardanes’. Gardner presented himself not as a religious prophet but as an anthropologist with secular academic credentials. Yet he was using a very old religious motif to validate documents that he had almost certainly composed himself. The Charge of the Goddess, for example, can be shown to have been constructed largely out of material drawn from Aradia and the writings of Aleister Crowley.

This article would not be complete without making reference to Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s magnum opus is based on a (slightly) older story about a secret society called the Priory of Sion. As is by now widely known, the secret of this society lay in its claim to preserve the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Yet it is also now known that the Priory was established no earlier than 1956 by a French hoaxer called Pierre Plantard. An important part of the story is that Plantard and his accomplices took care to provide the public with spurious ‘rediscovered’ texts, including a set of so-called Secret Dossiers that were deposited in the French Bibliothèque Nationale.

Some reflections

Discovery stories are seductive things. Even when we don’t believe them, we wish that we did. They are exciting and mysterious. They announce the disclosure of hidden secrets. They offer us the irresistible chance of accessing a higher realm and a past that is otherwise lost. A discovery story works, in essence, by harnessing this seductive pull in order to increase the value of the text to which it is attached. A discovery story substitutes a text’s true but mundane origin for a false but more compelling one.

The main reason why a discovery story confers a higher value on a text is that it signals a link with past times. Gerald Gardner correctly intuited that his Wiccan material would not have been taken as seriously if he had admitted that it had been created more recently than Casablanca. It is a truism of human nature generally that we instinctively revere cultural products that are old; and it applies all the more in religious and esoteric circles, where age carries a particular cachet.

As we have seen, some discovery stories claim that texts have been discovered in temples: Josiah’s ‘Book of the Torah’ is the foremost example here. A temple might be considered to be the obvious place for a religious or esoteric book, but there seems to be another idea at work here too. The text is presented as coming forth from a physical place of sanctity. The temple itself is speaking.

As well as harnessing the inherent power of age and place, a discovery story may serve to explain the absence of the text that has allegedly been discovered. If it is so important, why have we never heard of it before? The answer must be that it was lost or concealed. The Apocalypse of Paul must have been left buried on St Paul’s old property. The Vangelo must have been kept hidden from the witchfinders.

A writer who invents a discovery story is taking a big risk, one that may undermine their whole project. They are making a permanent commitment to an attackable position - a position, indeed, that positively invites scrutiny and challenge. It may only be a matter of time before the deception is exposed. Ironically, in spite of their habit of setting aside limitations of time, discovery stories may be only temporary products. The author of the Apocalypse of Paul was already exposed in antiquity. Gerald Gardner’s narrative has posed as many problems for the legitimacy of Wicca in recent times as it has solved.

Yet when reading some discovery stories, one might doubt whether we were necessarily meant to take them literally. Is the author smiling at us knowingly? Are we expected to recognise the deployment of a literary device? Is a preoccupation with lineage and legitimacy something to be played with and satirised?

There is a long line of precedents for the claim that one has discovered an old religious text that one is required to make known to a world that is in need of it. The trope of the discovery story is too powerful and tempting to remain out of use for long. It is only a matter of time before the next such story makes its appearance.