John Last is a freelance journalist based in Padua, Italy.
Riddled with agonizing jaw cancer at the age of 83, Sigmund Freud labored tirelessly from his deathbed on a final testament. Published in the summer of 1939, as an ascendant Nazi Germany made its final preparations to invade Poland, it was neither a guide to psychoanalysis nor a personal memoir, but an unusual work of pseudohistory called “Moses and Monotheism.”
Inspired by archaeological discoveries in Amarna in Egypt, Freud posited that the monotheism of Moses was, in fact, of Egyptian origin: an evolution of the worship of the sun god, Aten. Even more scandalously, he asserted that ancient Jews had murdered Moses and perpetuated this monotheistic faith not from religious devotion, but from an unconscious sense of unresolved spiritual guilt.
While Freud was mercifully not alive to see it, the reception to his final far-flung theory was chilly, to say the least. William Foxwell Albright, who would later go on to authenticate the Dead Sea Scrolls, called it “totally devoid of serious historical method.” Rowan Williams, later the Archbishop of Canterbury, called his conclusions “painfully absurd.”
But Freud’s outrageous tale did exert a profound influence on one of his disciples: a Russian student of psychoanalysis named Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky was so perturbed by reading “Moses and Monotheism” that he soon gave up his earlier pursuits and began a misguided quest to find historical proof of Exodus.
Velikovsky thought he found what he was looking for in the Ipuwer Papyrus, a fragmentary text from Egypt’s 12th dynasty that appeared, to him, to describe one or more of the 10 plagues of Moses. There was only one problem — the papyrus predated the time of Exodus by some 500 years. But Velikovsky was not to be discouraged. His solution was simple and convenient: Like his old master, he reconfigured the past.
“The written history of the ancient world is composed without correct synchronization of the histories of different peoples of antiquity,” he confidently argued in the introduction to his 1945 work “Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History.” Velikovsky would be the one to clean up this “disarray of centuries, kingdoms, and persons”; in one stroke, he erased several hundred years of ancient history, perfectly lining up Exodus and Ipuwer.
“The impulse to revise history arguably grows ever stronger. There is, after all, a reason that these outlandish ideas never really seem to die.”
Velikovsky’s pseudohistory was received by academics even more derisively than Freud’s. But it enthralled some measure of the masses outside the ivory tower. University departments tried to ban his books and boycott his publisher, but Velikovsky still found himself the subject of documentaries and the star of speaking tours until his death in 1979.
Long after Velikovsky’s demise, his ideas continued to inspire pseudohistorical societies across the Western world. In one such group, Germany’s Society for the Reconstruction of Human and Natural History, the concept of chronological revisionism took another great leap forward.
In 1996, Heribert Illig, the editor of the journal ZeitenSprung (TimeLeap or TimeJump), published the work that would come to define the rest of his life: “Das Erfundene Mittelalter” — “The Invented Middle Ages.” The book goes beyond the historical revisionism that even Freud and Velikovsky thought possible — he suggests that 297 years of medieval history were an elaborate fabrication, the result of a conspiracy between Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II. Both men, Illig reasoned, had desired to rule in the auspicious Year 1000, and thus ordered the continent’s monasteries to fabricate vast numbers of documents attesting to a long fictional history of Carolingian kings. While Velikovsky had been content only to tamper with ancient history, Illig revised the very timeline of modern life. To him, the year was not 1996, but 1694.
Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, one of Illig’s co-conspirators, coined the term “phantom time” to describe this allegedly nonexistent historical period. In a 1995 paper defending Illig’s work, Niemitz outlines the dubious assemblage of evidence that supported such radical revisionism. What is immediately striking about it is the way it plays on genuinely enduring questions in medieval research: architectural anachronisms, dendrochronological gaps and the mountain of medieval copies and forgeries that cast even highly reputable sources into doubt.
Such criticisms can — and have — been addressed by thorough historical research. But animating Illig and Niemitz’s skepticism is something much harder to resolve: a profound sense of distrust in the work of professional history. “Why did the ‘stupid’ scientist and researcher not notice this gap before? Why did some outsider have to come and ask this question and start finding the solution?” Niemitz asked his readers. “Because there exists an unexpressed and unconscious prohibition against questioning the chronology as if it were unimpeachable.”
Illig’s school of history never achieved the reach of Velikovsky’s. His books were never translated and his theories almost immediately discarded. “Should we throw historical revisionists in jail?” one reviewer asked bluntly, categorizing phantom time alongside Holocaust denial. “I knew from the beginning what I was doing to myself,” Illig told the German daily Die Welt.
And yet, the impulse to revise history arguably grows ever stronger. There is, after all, a reason that these outlandish ideas never really seem to die. The uncomfortable truth is that the questions they pose about historical orthodoxy do gesture toward some long-standing discomforts within the discipline — and, outside it, an enduring distrust of “experts” among those enlivened by conspiracies, hidden “histories” and veiled “truths.” It turns out there is a phantom haunting Western historiography. It just isn’t the one that Illig thought it was.
The Dubious Mantle Of Objectivity
Doubts about the accepted chronology of human events are much older than Illig, Velikovsky or Freud. Already by the end of the 17th century, the Jesuit scholars Jean Hardouin and Daniel van Papenbroeck argued that, given the near-ubiquitous practice of forgery in medieval clerical circles, virtually all written records before the 14th century should be considered the invention of overeager monks.
Two hundred years after Hardouin and van Papenbroeck, the historian Edwin Johnson claimed that the entire Christian tradition — including 700 years of documented history during the so-called “Dark Ages” of Europe — had been the invention of 16th-century Benedictines justifying the privileges of their order. Around the same time, British orientalist Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot was so discouraged by the state of historical records that he proposed the timeline be reset entirely to begin with the accession of Queen Victoria, just 63 years prior. Time B.V. (before Victoria) could only be definitively determined back to 1666, he argued, when the London Gazette began daily publication.
As the medievalist Thomas Tout once wrote, it is only natural that many scholars have found themselves “baffled and confused by the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and otherwise mutilated documents” that form the premodern historical record. In the medieval world in particular, forgery “was almost the duty of the clerical class.” Driven by faith, aspiration or vanity, rich houses and monasteries alike faked thousands of documents, often to vouch for their own greatness. Thus the University of Paris invented a fictional charter from Charlemagne; Oxford from Alfred the Great; and Cambridge (trying a little too hard perhaps) credited none other than King Arthur himself.
Today, the work of people like Hardouin, Johnson, Arbuthnot and Illig is usually dismissed as “hypercriticism,” a school that takes as its starting point a kind of universalizing doubt inspired by the very real unreliability of evidence from the distant past. “By dint of distrusting the instinct of credulity, one begins to suspect everything,” the 1898 French textbook “Introduction to the Study of History” explains.
Such extreme doubts were in many ways the impetus to develop history into a more rigorous and scientific discipline — one ostensibly based not on received wisdom, folklore or providentialism, but expert consideration of the evidence of the past. One origin point for the modern historical method is Jean Mabillon’s 1681 work “De re diplomatica,” a direct response to Hardouin that pioneered various techniques of textual criticism still in use today. Such work continues — in 2019, one scientific study filled in gaps in the dendrochronological record in direct response to those who, like Illig, claimed they were proof of historical conspiracy. “All of us are, to some extent, the heirs of 19th-century empiricism,” Levi Roach, a historian and expert in medieval forgeries, told me.
Indeed, many contemporary medievalists still trace the origins of their profession to an ambitious project of investigative sourcing called the “Monumenta Germaniae Historica,” initiated in 1819. To assemble the “Monumenta,” hundreds of scholars fanned out across the continent, searching abbeys and town halls and scrutinizing the medieval records they found using the then-new tools of textual criticism. The result remains a key reference point for any historian studying the last 1,300 years or so of European history.
“Many scholars have found themselves ‘baffled and confused by the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and otherwise mutilated documents’ that form the premodern historical record.”
The historians who produced the “Monumenta” aspired to elevate their work to the standard of an objective science and remove from it the moralism that defined an earlier generation of writing about the past. At the end of the 19th century, the English historian Thomas Hodgkin felt the need to defend himself against this “influential school.” “Would you bring back into historical science those theological terms and those teleological arguments from which we have just successfully purified it?” he imagined them asking when he dared to view the history of Italy through a providential lens.
Yet the Victorians’ “purification” of history was never quite as complete as they might pretend. After all, history is, at its core, an art of storytelling. And as the would-be scientists of history were still defining their craft, they worked in uneasy proximity to much more popular literary works.
In the same year as the project that spawned the “Monumenta” was started, another work was published that would forever change the work of history: Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe.” Ostensibly, “Ivanhoe” is little more than a romantic romp for Victorian boys, a fictional tale of a Saxon lord and his adventures with the likes of Robin Hood and Richard the Lionheart. But Scott viewed his project in a much grander sense. The book begins with an unusually detailed historical sketch that presents it as a new experiment in scholarship, supplementing dry facts drawn from medieval chronicles with new imaginary action.
Published in 1819, the impact of “Ivanhoe” was immediate. The Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin wrote that Scott’s influence could “be felt in every province of the literature of his age.” With its mass appeal, “Ivanhoe” soon made “medievalism the center of English experience,” according to the critic Stuart Kelly; it inspired mock medieval tournaments and a fetish for chivalric display and was widely credited with spurring Britain’s Gothic revival, which would define conservative aesthetics and values well beyond the Victorian age. The works of history that followed undeniably bore Scott’s influence: a reactionary love of English premodernity that viewed the Anglo-Saxon societies of Merrie Olde England as, in the words of György Lukács, a “social idyll” fostering “peaceful cooperation among all classes” and “the organic growth of culture.”
“Ivanhoe” could only have such influence because of its pseudohistorical qualities, its pointed reinterpretation of limited data from the past. Many Victorians genuinely believed Ivanhoe and other historical fictions like it were true reconstructions of the otherwise inaccessible inner lives of medieval people, fulfilling a duty of historians to visualize the attitudes of the past. “It is difficult to decide which of the two confluent forms of historical narrative, the novel or ‘straightforward’ history, contributes more to the shaping of the other,” the historian Billie Melman has written.
I’m a collector of outdated history, and my bookshelf is filled with examples of the darker side of this marriage of objective research and evocative storytelling: grand and “scientific” surveys of history from the ancient world to the present that invariably describe the progress of humanity from “primitive” backwardness to “oriental” superstition to “enlightened” Christianity in our “civilized” (and always European) present.
“History is, at its core, an art of storytelling.”
Today, we can clearly see these works as the imperialist propaganda that they were, even if their authors truly believed they occupied the position of a distanced and analytical professional. But in their own time, this veneer of objectivity provided cover for grand projects of historical revisionism. The Confederate monuments of the American South were erected in an effort to rewrite the history of the Civil War and to valorize the “Lost Cause” legend that implied some dignity in the South’s failure. The fascist historiography that built on Victorian pseudoscience interpreted virtually every aspect of history through the lens of racism and portrayed European states then less than a century old as inheritors of ancient empires. Such projects coexisted with less successful though no less problematic causes, like baking powder magnate Eben Horsford’s effort to fabricate Leif Erikson’s landing in America — motivated by his deep providentialist belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
It’s easy to point to statues of Confederate “heroes” or the eccentricities of figures like Hosford and call them abuses of history, but they are not the only legacy of the discipline’s pseudoscientific past. The development of philology, a tool of linguistic analysis still key for dating sources, is virtually inseparable from the evolution of scientific racism. The same is true of historical sub-disciplines like anthropology, comparative religion or even archaeology. “Historians … like to believe that the ‘facts’ of the past act as constraints on the narrative. But these facts are also artefacts, human-made, since they’re meaningless without interpretation,” the historian Adam Stout writes in “Creating Prehistory,” which outlines the Victorian-era professionalization of archaeology. “Deciding what matters about ‘the past’ is also politics.”
Even the “Monumenta,” the Old Testament of scientific historiography, has as its roots in a nationalistic project. Its scholars were charged to search for German history well before any such country existed. The records of France, Holland, Italy and Spain were fair game so long as they affirmed a mythopoeic role. As the historian Patrick Geary writes in “The Myth of Nations,” a work exploring the development of European nationalism, the “Monumenta” “set the parameters within which Germany would search for its past.” It also came to presage its future. The myth of a German Europe became fundamental to the expansionist violence of two world wars and remains foundational to Aryanist fantasies from Lombardy to London.
Many other such national projects do exactly the same, whether their subjects are Balkan legends, Russian religious texts or neolithic Central Asian settlements. Each has helped give rise to racial essentialism and national exceptionalism. Such historical pseudoscience helped define the shape of history for the better part of a century, even as the discipline continually claimed a dubious mantle of objectivity.
All of this has been well known to many historians since at least the 1970s, when more critical approaches to historiography became a crucial part of their training. “Every historian at the graduate level and above is trained in understanding how different historical moments are contextualized and understood by historians,” Louie Dean Valencia, a history professor at Texas State University, told me. “To understand the history, you actually have to understand how it’s been told.”
But the rest of us, for the most part, aren’t trained to look at history this way. Though the works of Charles Dickens shape our image of the Victorian past, many works of history outsold his at the time. The way these popular histories described and shaped the past forever changed the way they, and we, remember the societies that predate us. Today, they are more than just pseudohistorical tall tales: They are a dark abyss of fictions at the center of our culture, the way we view ourselves in relation to others. Without context, it is easy to fail to realize just how wrong “history” can be. Suddenly, radical doubt is not looking so strange a reaction after all.
History As It Essentially Was
Today, new historical conspiracies blossom every day. You need only go on the internet to find them. On TikTok, an agitator named @momillennial_ achieved 15 minutes of fame for brazenly asserting that the entirety of Roman history was “a figment of the Spanish inquisition’s imagination.” (Not to be outdone by Freud’s pseudohistorical blasphemy, she also said the name of Jesus Christ could be translated as “clitoris healer.”)
On the conspiracy website The Unz Review, which boasts dedicated sections for “vaxxing & AIDs” and “Jews, Nazis, and Israel,” an author by the name of “The First Millenium Revisionist” suggests that Roman and medieval history was invented by Latin popes “in order to steal the birthright from Constantinople.” Directly citing the work of phantom time theorists, the author’s lengthy articles are also diligently footnoted with references to critical and even anticolonial literature — the critiques of serious historians again misused to cast broad doubt on accepted historical facts.
In the introduction to a collection of essays on the proliferation of “alt-histories” like these, Valencia suggested that the critical vein in history that has developed since the 1970s may be partly to blame. “Postmodern thought and false equivalency” have together given way “to a ‘crisis of infinite histories,’” he wrote. “Postmodernity left us with a construction of time that is neither cyclical nor progressive, shattered into alternate and competing timelines.”
Put another way, the very tools that historians developed to divorce their discipline from Victorian abuses of objectivity may have alienated them from the very object of their study at the exact moment that armies of amateurs and bad actors are seeking to retrieve it. Glance today at the social media site once known as Twitter and you will be instantly bombarded by a horde of statue-faced accounts representing the spectrum of “dirtbag” history, from the anti-modernist nostalgia of Cultural Tutor to the outright Nazism of Bronze Age Pervert, each reflecting in their own way the worst impulses of Victorian historiography.
Like their antecedents, they easily rival academic history in popularity. “This nostalgic construction of a past that never was, severed from historical fact by conscious irony and anachronism, is now ubiquitous in the modern memory,” Leland Renato Grigoli, the editor of the American Historical Society’s “Perspectives on History,” has written. Revisionism is rapidly going mainstream.
But it is not only amateurs who are reviving Victorian historiography. New scientific disciplines like archaeogenomics are enabling the resurrection of 19th-century ideas about the homogeneity of ancient societies that Nazis once used to justify their race theories. “We archaeologists have found ourselves facing a veritable rollback of seemingly long-overcome notions of static cultures and a biologization of social identities … connected to the massive impact of ancient-DNA studies,” the archaeologist Martin Furholt wrote in 2020. Meanwhile, amid a conservative academic backlash to anti-colonial scholarship, a full third of the British public — and similar numbers in France, the Netherlands and Japan — think colonized countries were better off being oppressed.
In many places outside the West, the very tools once used to deconstruct the Victorians’ arrogant view of history are now being used to build up new edifices of false certainty. In Narendra Modi’s India, the tools of postcolonial criticism are being employed in service of a new Hindu essentialism that erases centuries of religious diversity. In China, they have been used, at times, to construct vast new historical conspiracies to support a broad notion of Chinese exceptionalism. This is to say nothing of the way postcolonial ideals of reparations and ethnic self-determination have been employed — indeed, weaponized — in defense of Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Without context, it is easy to fail to realize just how wrong ‘history’ can be.”
This wave of new revisionism is even disrupting our ability to accurately record our present. In the blinding rush of images from Gaza and Ukraine, propaganda, pseudohistory and politics mingle inseparably from the real documentation of events, existing simultaneously as data point and live analysis, history made and history observed. This sheer hypertextuality has rendered the historian’s quest for evidence-based objectivity nearly impossible. How should one define what is inane or consequential? That is to say nothing of the internet’s ephemerality: deleted tweets, AI sludge, videos of war crimes lost to anonymous moderation.
In reckoning with the history of our present moment, we may not be so different from the beleaguered medievalist who must find some meaning in a singular fragmentary text amid a mountain of forgeries and misconceptions. Some of us may even succumb to our own kind of phantom time conspiracy, applying doubt wherever history is not clean enough to be satisfactory, inventing implausible alternatives to assuage the need for certainty.
To survive in this kind of world, the discipline of history may need to evolve again. “If history does not break the boundaries set by its 19th-century origins, it will die out as a discipline,” Grigoli told me. But which boundaries are best to break? Should history lurch further in the direction of dispassionate objectivity? Or should it risk new alt-histories by adopting an even more critical posture? The solution may be neither. If the runaway success of historical conspiracies is any evidence, the answer may be something quite unpalatable to historians: to channel the power of history as a form of narrative and politicize its present.
To do so, historians may need to resurrect a form of history of a much older and more fickle kind. As Victorians labored to establish the scientific credentials of historians, a certain strain of historiography was deeply suppressed that now appears to be resurging in the pop-revisionism of our moment: the idea that history is not simply a record, but a kind of sacred oracle.
In an exploration into the “pre-history of history,” the French historian François Hartog noted that the earliest roots of history were in the work of priests and prophets. Like the modern historian, the Mesopotamian soothsayer “was guided by an ideal of exhaustivity (to collect all the examples), and was always looking for precedents.” “Divination and historiography seem to have shared or inhabited (peacefully enough) the same intellectual space,” he has written. “Before being a science of the future, [divination] is first of all a science of the past.”
It should be no surprise that the oracular tradition shares so much with history. After all, before the modern method, one dominant historiography was providentialism, which saw the hand of God behind the rise and fall of empires. Even without God, a providential teleology is rife in the politicized historiography of Hegel and Marx; one need only reverse its flow to divine the results of any action.
The oracular power of history stems from its romantic truth, not from its factual accuracy — which the progenitors of the modern discipline understood well, even if their inheritors did not. Leopold von Ranke, one of the pioneers of evidence-based history, is remembered for his guiding principle that historians should describe the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, often translated as “how it actually was.” But, Grigoli explained, this is a mistranslation. “What it actually means is as it essentially was — as you could feel it to be.” In the words of Walter Benjamin: “To articulate what is past … means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”
We are certainly now in a moment of danger where our grasp on past and present is tenuous. But if history is indeed an oracle, we must be careful what future we portend. One influence underlying the resurgent abuse of history is the (generally) far-right philosophy of Traditionalism, which imagines history in great cycles not of progress but decline, and where modernity is a gross degeneracy from a world of ancient and pure values — the past to which we must RETVRN, the great America we must make again. Julius Evola, a key thinker in the school, used this belief to power an apocalyptic fervor in his followers to bring about the final collapse of society and usher in the end of the dark age, the Kali Yuga. This is historical conspiracy at its most harmful: one that drives train station bombers, mass shooters and “accelerationists” like the ones that planned to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
“To survive in this kind of world, the discipline of history may need to evolve again.”
In thinking and writing about Traditionalism, I’ve often been struck by the sheer imaginative power of these far-right groups. It is no wonder they love works of fantasy — they construct their own as worlds to live in. But in a way, they really appreciate how closely fiction and history are intertwined.
While in the past their views may have been countered by equally imaginative narratives from the left — like the liberatory progressivism of Whig historians and Marxist theorists — today it feels as though that ground is too often ceded in favor of “trusting the science.” Even centrist historians have had to abandon the naive optimism of the 90s when the arc of history “bent toward progress” even if it was not altogether finished. It is revealing that the 1619 Project, arguably the most impactful progressive revision of the American narrative in decades, was the work not of historians, but journalists. When the profession has ceded its domination over the public narrative of history, amateurs will take over.
Maybe that amateurism is not such a bad thing. After all, it was the bedrock of the discipline before Victorians taught us to scorn it. “‘Amateur’ just means a person who loves a thing,” Grigoli said. “That’s what it means in the 18th century. It’s only in the 19th century that it becomes negative.”
If the work of narrativizing history to serve the present is not really the job of historians at all, perhaps they could just play the specialist, examining bits and bobs of evidence, their knowledge filtering down to us like pebbles in a stream. Leave the telling of history to the madmen, hobbyists and poets (or, more likely now, the grifters, politicians and economists).
But I, for one, am not so sure. “The longer we treat our field as sterilized objective truth, we lose more students to the alt-right,” Valencia wrote four long years ago. History may be safer inside the ivory tower, but the rest of us are out here fending off the phantom pasts conjured up by pseudohistorians with their own malign agendas. Maybe we don’t need more historians. But we could certainly use some exorcists.
