“Discussion soon began again of a Vinland voyage, since the trip seemed to bring men both wealth and renown.” — The Saga of the Greenlanders (c.1200)

“But even now is Madoc on the seas; /He leads our brethren here; and should he find/That Aztlan hath been false… oh! hope not then, /By force or fraud, to baffle or elude…” — Robert Southey, Madoc in Aztlan (1805)

“And behold this last, whose branch hath withered away, I did plant in a good spot of ground; yea, even that which was choice unto me above all other parts of the land of my vineyard.” — Jacob, 5:31 The Book of Mormon (1830)

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” –Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Dighton Rock State Park, a little less than fifty miles from Boston, contains Massachusetts’ second most famous boulder.

Reverend John Danforth first came across it in 1680 on one of his nightly perambulations. The roughly five foot tall, forty ton, hexagonal shaped stone was illustrated with overlapping, etched pictograms, inscribed with varying degrees of depth. Of a seemingly occult nature, the hieroglyphics were untranslatable to Danforth and have borne variable interpretation ever since.

That old Puritan divine, Cotton Mather, having an interest in ancient things pulled from the ground (he once hypothesized that a mammoth tusk was evidence of antediluvian Nephilim), also commented on the rock. He wrote that among “the other Curiosities of New-England… is that of a mighty Rock” upon which there are “very deeply Engraved…. strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.” Mather, who did not let never having seen the Dighton Rock stop him from theorizing about it, was simply one of many to confront this enigma.

A mad dribble of curving lines intersecting with rectilinear X’s, the far right depicts two squiggly figures capped with lackadaisical smiley faces (and are those other abstract mounds next to them also people?). Towards the left there is a broad shouldered figure, lacking differentiated limbs, but with a hard, angular arrow for a body. Some of the lines are organized such that they might suggest Latin letters: there’s an “O,” an “R,” an “F,” possibly an “N.” One can almost make out the word “Orfins,” or depending on if that last letter is seen as circular, perhaps “Orfio” (A reference to the Orpheus myth, or the Middle English narrative of Sir Orfeo? Mather never conjectured that far). Whatever this stone signified, ever since Danforth many have been in agreement – whoever created it was not native.

For three centuries the rock has been a Rorschach test, with amateur scholars, observers, and tourists seeing a multitude of progenitors. Some read Babylonian cuneiform, and others the alephbet of Phoenicians, Nordic runes, or the Ogham of the Irish. In 1783, Yale president and Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles matter-of-factly noted in an itinerary that he had “Visited Dighton Rock charged with Inscriptions & Character which… is Phoenician or Carthaginian,” and in his “Election Sermon” delivered a few days before, he considered the civilizations which visited the Americas before Columbus (his argument in the service of a pernicious white supremacy).

In the early nineteenth-century, Danish archeologist Carl Christian Rafn claimed that the engravings were Norse.[1] In 1912, Brown University Psychology professor, Edmund B. Delabarre, “translated” the faint, indecipherable letters as a message from the lost sixteenth-century Portuguese navigator Miguel Corte-Real, who conveniently informed posterity that he “became a chief of the Indians.”[2]

Creative (and agenda-serving) readings aside, historian Duncan Hunter has reiterated what should be obvious, that Delabarre’s theory was “as wrong as every other theory has been, save one: the markings, as they were initially observed in 1680, were made… by Indigenous people.” Ockham’s razor indicates either Algonquin or Lenape origins, for as Hunter says that would be “the least cumbersome and most plausible explanation.” Yet the Dighton Rock remains an artifact in the collective reliquary of pseudohistory, an exhibit speaking to lost lands and hidden histories, of when (with apologies to Blake) those feet in ancient time did walk upon New-England’s mountains green. Yet, parsimony has never been as attractive as fantasy; as recently as 2002 British naval officer and noted crank Gavin Menzies claimed that a sailor in Zheng He’s Chinese Imperial Navy had actually made the carvings in the fifteenth-century.

These amateur and pseudo-historians have seen the Dighton Rock, and relics like it, as evidence of European contact before colonization. They embrace a panoply of dubious theories, such as that the etymology of “Guatemala” came from Buddhist missionaries honoring Siddhartha of Gautama or that “penguin” is a word with Welsh origins; that conquistadors encountered blonde Indians in the Appalachians or that Roman statuary lay at the bottom of Rio’s harbor; that Rosslyn Chapel upon the Scottish lowlands has a medieval depiction of corn, or that Viking rune stones dot the Midwestern prairies.

The significance of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories is that they freely play with an idea of America that can be told and retold. Some of those theories have empirical merit, the vast majority do not, but a figurative appreciation of these stories are what I call the “antecolumbian imaginary,” a discourse written in a particular spatio-temporal poetics whereby individuals and communities can rediscover America or, more accurately, reinvent it. But this reinvention is never ideologically neutral, and whether the antecolumbian imaginary evidences utopian strivings or something more noxious is a complicated issue (arguably the very same issue that defines the American project itself). Focusing on the material reality or non-reality of pre-Columbian contact theories ignores the manner in which fictionality is threaded throughout our normative, sanctioned models of early modern colonialism.

In this way, the antecolumbian imaginary is related to the sociologist Benedict Andersen’s perennially useful concept of nation-states being constituted as “imagined communities.” In his 1983 monograph on the subject, Andersen argued that the nation-state developed as a means to bind groups of people over a large area, united in the fantasy of commonality based on nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, and so on. Setting out to answer how subjects living in a vast country could regard themselves as members of the same community, Andersen’s critical term gives us a way to understand how ideas of commonality and connection were created to provide social cohesion in increasingly centralized states. He argues further that such “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.”

Anderson claims that such a process is at the core of the formation of any nation state, but “America” has some unique considerations regarding that operation, always as much a mythic designation for a place as it was an actual location. “America” was invented long before it could ever have been discovered, and the truer atlas that circumscribes it is a work of romance rather than of geography.

America was the first part of the globe not to fit into the tripartite structure of antiquity’s geographic divisions, reflected in the seventh century writer Isidore of Seville who could confidently explain that the Earth is “divided into three parts, one of which is called Asia, the second Europe, the third Africa.” Many exegetes claimed that the geographic divisions corresponded to the three sons of Noah and were thus part of biblical history, but even a scholar like Isidore could conjecture about mysterious unknown worlds, writing that “there exists a fourth part, beyond the ocean, which is unknown to us.” In that sense, belief in the continents existed before they were ever colonized, and “America” has more in common with Eden, Atlantis, Thule, Brasil, or Cockaigne, than it does with Britain or France. More in common with Thomas More’s “Utopia” for that matter, another imagined community that was conceived of less than a decade after Waldsmueller and Ringmann christened the new continents, and which was importantly located in the western hemisphere.

In his 1958 book The Invention of America, Mexican historiographer Edmundo O’Gorman asked “When and how does America appear in historical consciousness?” According to O’Gorman, “America” is a mythic concept that was invented in order to be overlaid upon actual continents, marking them as radically other. He thus ingeniously explains how America was, in fact, an idea that had to be created, not a land that was simply waiting to be discovered.

For O’Gorman, Columbus did not so much discover America as it was, rather had to be invented by explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci (whose name was given to the continents) and cartographers like Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller (who gave the continents that name).

Dubious relics like the Dighton Rock thus remind us of a salient reality; that America is a mythic trope which stretches back to Plato’s Atlantis out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and which radiates forward to whatever new myths we will need to construct to save ourselves. America has never been anything so much as a gathering of fictions masquerading as facts, and a collection of facts better understood as fictions. Which is to say that there is a mythic “America” which must be separated from that actual land mass bordered by the Atlantic and the Pacific and stretching from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. What the antecolumbian imaginary offers is a way of revising that received script of what constitutes “America;” a method of amending that epic narrative, whether to explicate or erase the original sins of colonialism, to make the story more encompassing, to probe the contours of America itself, or for some other reason.

What makes artifacts such as these and the attendant pseudo-historical hypotheses that surround them so problematic, is that interspersed with these romantic dreams, illusions, inventions, and legends related to the peopling of these continents is the violence done to native peoples; both as a function of colonialism itself and the stories we tell about colonialism. The Dighton Rock’s problematic status is not so different from that of more historically legitimate artifacts. After all, “objectivity” can be a chimera as concerns artifacts both respectable and apocryphal. Though the Dighton Rock is not as universally known as that other pebble just a few yards from the Atlantic in Plymouth, it is no less “real.” For, though there is scant reliable evidence that any pilgrim’s slipper ever graced that particular stone upon disembarking from the Mayflower, it remains the cornerstone on which we pretend that the New England colonial project was inaugurated.

Ever inhabitants of epistemological uncertainty, fiction taken as fact can have catastrophic effects on actual people. As such, the antecolumbian imaginary, even in dreaming of alternate American histories, can, in its desires, reinscribe violence as completely as history did in actuality.

Take the popular tale of the twelfth-century Welsh prince Madog, ab Owain Gwynedd, or Madoc. Elizabeth’s court astrologer John Dee writing in 1576’s The Limits of British Empire (the first treatise to use that particular designation) claimed that Madoc “Sought, by sea (westerlie from Irland), for some forein, and – Region to plant hymselfe in with soveranity: with Region when he had found, he returned to Wales againe.” Dee recounts that Madoc, and thus his descendants, were the claimants to “Farguara; but of late Florida,” as well as the “Apalchen” mountains and other “notable portions of the ancient Atlantis, no longer – nowe named America.”

Madoc became a mainstay of the English antecolumbian imaginary in writers like George Peckham, Humphrey Gilbert, and Richard Hakluyt. The good Rev. Stiles wrote that “There is a Tribe that speak Welch to this day & have a Writing rolled up in Skins,” and Cotton’s son Rev. Samuel Mather claiming that Madoc “left Monuments there both of the British Language and British Usages,” constructing a fantasy of European colonials unsullied by colonialism. Until 2008 a historical marker in Mobile Bay, Alabama read “In memory of Prince Madoc a Welsh explorer who landed… in 1170 and left behind with the Indians the Welsh language,” and contra all historical, genetic, and linguistic evidence, one can find scores of internet sites claiming that tribes such as the Mandan were actually Celtic. These unsubstantiated claims of Welsh-speaking Indians drape indigenous lives in the mantle of whiteness. This is the malicious core of the antecolumbian imaginary.

Predictably, there has also been a tradition of conflating the Cherokee, Pueblo, Navajo or Apache with Reuben, Simeon, Zebulon and Naphtali. Evidence of the ten lost tribes of the Kingdom of Israel dispersed by Assyrian invasion in the generation before the Babylonian captivity have proliferated since Europeans first encountered Native Americans. Historian Tudor Parafit writes that, “the identification of the indigenous Americans as members of the Ten Lost Tribes played a significant part and was to remain part of a general discourse in North America until the time of Jefferson.”

The unlikely pair of Bartolomeo das Casas and Torquemada both figured the Native Americans as being the lost Israelites, and in Puritan New England missionary John Elliot famed for his villages of “praying Indians” conjectured that those same “Indians” were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Leaders such as Rhode Island founder Roger Williams parsed supposed Hebrew words in the Algonquin tongue, and the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania William Penn matter-of-factly wrote that as concerns their origins “I am ready to believe them of the Jewish race; I mean of the stock of the ten tribes.”

The hypothesis was so popular throughout the history of English colonization in the Americas that it was instrumental in the policy of Jewish readmission to England during Interregnum. Drawing from apocryphal and misinterpreted proto-anthropological data concerning Native South Americans who kept dietary laws similar to kashrut, who commanded menstruating women to purify themselves in a mikveh-like ritual baths, and whose language was filled with apparent Hebrew cognates, Dutch rabbi Israel ben Manasseh held that the Jews had been dispersed throughout the entire world, and that millennium would only arrive once they were readmitted to that final realm of England.

As with all instances of the antecolumbian imaginary there is the violence of erasure – native peoples configured into something that they are not as if an invented identity is preferable to reality. But the Jewish-Indian theory also demonstrates the mercurial nature of the antecolumbian imaginary, for it audaciously situates the geographical scandal of the fourth part of the world unmentioned in the bible directly into sacred history, by most completely transcribing “America” into that atlas of paradise.

Paradise isn’t a real place though, and a history of humanity could be written entirely of the bloody results of those who took metaphor for reality. America may have been Eden to the explorer, but it was the poetry of those descriptions which allowed Europeans to deliver such violence onto the people who already lived in these lands, writing them off as superfluous or merely a natural aspect of the (not actually) empty land, free to be cleared as if they were trees or stones in a farm field. Hunter argues that among other artifacts, “Dighton Rock has been a mirror that reflects the prejudices and ignorance of everyone who has preferred not to see what is actually here,” and he quite fairly claims that pre-Columbian transoceanic contact enthusiasts promote a “multifaceted colonizing culture… [that has] employed the rock in a never-ending act of cultural ventriloquism.” Hunter contends that pseudo-history does violence to indigenous culture through a process of erasure, a process which is the very engine of colonialism.

Hunter is correct that this rhetoric is often explicitly racist, even in the seemingly more innocuous condescension that claims the Aztecs received their knowledge of pyramids from Egyptians, or that Zuni culture’s unique qualities were imported from Japan. Of course the vast majority of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories are bunk. People wish for varied reasons that there were Phoenicians in Massachusetts, Vikings in Wisconsin, Welshman in Alabama, or Hebrews in New Mexico chiseling the Decalogue into stone. Much of this enthusiasm is attributable to ideologies of white supremacy, from Thomas Jefferson and contemporaries conjecturing that the monumental mounds of the Mississippian peoples were made by ancient Jews, to Stiles preaching that Native Americans were both physically and spiritually the descendants of the Canaanites (and could thus be dealt with accordingly).

So, perhaps you’re asking: Can there be anything useful in the antecolumbian imaginary? And should we even try to find it?

An argument could be made that a version of the myth might serve to imagine the counter-factual potential of alternate history where our national original sins didn’t have to be colonialism and genocide. In these models, the antecolumbian imaginary is used for dreaming about an American dream that never occurred, but that acknowledges something redemptive or even utopian in the myth of a New World. Yet the painful and undeniable truth is that colonialism and genocide are what marked the “discovery” of America, and so dreaming of a world where history didn’t occur in the bloody way that it did must by definition be fraught, its promise undeniably problematic.

Which is not to say that the tension between what is promising and problematic about the antecolumbian imaginary can’t be explored within examples of the mode. One denomination, in particular, has more fully done this than any other, even while we must acknowledge that particular group’s own troubled racial history. In Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon (which members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints claim was uncovered in upstate New York by the prophet Smith in the early nineteenth-century), the faithful read in King James-inflected early modern English about groups like the Jaredites, the Lamanites, and the Nephites, all descendants of the ancient Hebrews, who gathered in the Americas building the great Mesoamerican cities, warring amongst themselves, and being visited by Christ before the ascension.

Bigotry still surrounds discussion of Mormonism, with their belief in Indian Hebraism only serving to confirm suspicions for many people. Yet Smith should rightly be viewed as a genius who used canonical scripture and the actual land of America to produce something new, the first fully theological encapsulation of the antecolumbian imaginary. Religion scholar Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp explains how the authors of apocryphal gospels saw them “not simply as vessels of divine revelation but as occasions for devotional creativity.” The Book of Mormon was an opportunity to “improvise and engage with religious texts.”

To judge Christianity or Judaism by the standard of allegory while assuming Mormonism to simply be unsubstantiated literalism is a hypocrisy, and when divorced from any historical claims the Book of Mormon can be read as it should be – the first scripture to exemplify the antecolumbian imaginary. We need not read the Book of Mormon through the lens of logos, but should rather content ourselves to interpret it with the Urim and Thummim of mythos. Smith appropriated the sense of sacred spatiality which defined the Abrahamic faiths and interpolated it upon the American continent, so that when in I Nephi 2:20 it’s said that “Ye shall prosper and be led to a land of promise” we see the complete merging of sacred history with profane, of America reconceived as a chosen land.

Because the covenantal nationhood exemplified by the antecolumbian imaginary at its least exclusionary can remind us that the concept of a “chosen land” need not be circumscribed by constructions of ethnicity. Indeed the Hebraic concept of covenant (or the Mormon concept for that matter) is such that adherence to a creed, what sociologist Robert Bellah called “American civil religion,” is what defines one as an “American.” There are risks with such an approach of course, not least of which in giving due respect to those original inhabitants of this land and their descendants, for whom even the most charitable models of covenantal nationhood threaten erasure. As a political project, partisans of covenantal nationhood will ultimately need to contend with that reality. But while models of covenantal nationality can certainly be exclusionary, they’re still worth defending at our current moment, when a poisonous Blut und Boden ideology threatens to infect the body politic once again. That explicitly fascistic model of citizenship based on fictions of blood and soil has always threatened to spill real blood and steal actual soil. At its most dangerous, the antecolumbian imaginary has affirmed such models, seeing the physical land of America as promised to some specific (normally white) people.

But I wonder, with perhaps a bit of hope, if a kernel of redemption for the antecolumbian imaginary can be reconciled with covenantal nationhood? To do such requires us, separate from the actual historical work of reconstructing the past, to admit the fictionality of Welsh Indians and Phoenicians in New England, while allowing for all such legends to be “mythically true.” But this only works if we affirm that all of those legends are mythically true, while reveling in the paradox. In that way the mad scramble to claim this or that group as the continent’s discoverer is eliminated, while acknowledging that “America” as a mythic concept is one which every group can lay claim to be in an ongoing process of discovery. By making everyone the “discoverer” of America we remind ourselves that the land was never really discovered at all, while simultaneously elevating every person to the grandeur of pilgrim. It requires us to affirm several contradictory things at once, but the great power of fiction is that it allows us to do precisely that. In the process, what’s uncovered is a type of scripture all encompassing enough to posit all peoples as founding citizens of that utopian republic, which although it is imaginary, can have ramifications more emancipatory than the equally invented, but toxic myths of blood and soil.

Always an imagined land, with as much of Atlantis about it as anything else, the antecolumbian imaginary elevates America fully to the mythic, with legend separate from history, identifying meanings as readily as facts. In examining that crisscross of lines upon Dighton Rock, women and men have seen evidence of those who were here before, or rather half-remembered glimpses of what could have been, in another reality. A palimpsest, whose very surface (carved and recarved so as to “highlight detail,” as such artifacts often are) records those invented histories. At its most noble there is the possibility of redemption in such narratives, constructing a fictitious space that allows everyone citizenship in our utopian, imagined republic. More often, such artifacts serve to obscure or erase that which is actually there, an imagined republic imposed upon the actual lives of those who were here first. For the Dighton Rock, like all such relics, is an artifact more significant than it is authentic; an artifact from a country that never existed, but in which innumerable people have yearned to plant their standard.

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[1] And if wrong about that, he was ultimately proven correct about a Viking presence in Newfoundland.

[2] With appropriate irony, the psychologist who saw Latin inscriptions and Portuguese heraldry on an ancient New England stone was also an innovator in ink-blot therapy.

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Ed Simon is a senior editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.