The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Phantom Time Hypothesis
Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast! In this episode, we're setting back the clock almost 300 years (and still showing up 15 minutes late) for The Phantom Time Hypothesis. From Hairy Bears to 2,000-year-old mollusks, from Charles the Great to Pope Gregory the Shady. From Pet Rock to the Catholic Church. The only thing wider than the Aachen Chapel's vaults are our gaps in knowledge. We're going straight from the Fall of the Roman Empire into the Italian Renaissance with no pit-stops in between!
Please subscribe where ever you get your podcasts. If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid.
Extra special thanks to Unpaid Intern Raymond for once again lending his vocal styling.
Music used in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music.
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: Hey, Sister!
CCK: Hey, Sister.
ARK: Hey, Listeners! Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast. My name is Amanda and I love the smell of frozen cardboard.
CCK: I’m Christine and I “am consistently 15 minutes late to everything”…but it's not my fault, it might be caused by a cognitive defect called TBPM, Time-Based Prospective Memory. When people are given a task in a lab setting with a time constraint and are given a clock to allow them to monitor their progress, people with bad TBPM forget to check the clock. Or maybe it's because I'm a laid-back Type B personality. In studies of Type A versus Type B personalities, when asked to guess when a minute has passed, type b personalities on average had a 77 second minute! Or maybe I'm just bad at multitasking and therefore unable to block out distractions and get to where I'm going on time. Or maybe I'm just a time-wasting jerkface. Only science knows for sure. …Please make sure you follow us on Twitter @style_paranoid and feel free to DM us with any questions, comments or topic suggestions!
ARK: Christine, do you know what the date is today?
CCK: September ##...
ARK: Do you know what year it is?
CCK: 2021?
ARK: What would you say if I told you that it may actually only be the year 1724?
CCK: I'd say "I know nothing about Phantom Time Hypothesis, so I have nothing to tell you."
ARK: But, that's how we begin all the episodes… with me telling you to tell me…
CCK: Oh, alright. Go ahead.
ARK: Sister, tell me what you know about Phantom Time Hypothesis.
CCK: Are you happy now?
ARK: Very.
CCK: The Phantom Time Hypothesis is the brainchild of a Bavarian historian and author named Heribert Illig. Illig started working on his theory sometime in the late 1980’s or maybe it was the late 1690’s… either way, Illig proposed that the time period between roughly the years AD 614 through 911, never actually happened.
ARK: Oh! You know plenty. This span of years, falls in the early part of what is known as the Middle Ages, AKA the Medieval era, AKA Late Antiquity, AKA the Dark Ages. And it is traditionally thought to sit right smack dab in between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the start of the Italian Renaissance AKA the Age of Discovery.
CCK: The Middle Ages lasted approximately 1000 years, and specifically, the early middle ages was referred to as the Dark Ages because of the darkness that seemed to cover Europe at the time, mostly relating to an economic decline, and the sudden lack of emphasis put on education or culture. It was as if all the skills and values of the past died with Rome. The idea of a Dark Age was first put forth in the 1330’s by a Tuscan scholar named Francesco Petrarca, commonly referred to as simply Petrarch. Petrarch believed that history could be easily separated into two periods: a classic period of the Greeks and Romans, which saw advancements in philosophy, literature and art, and the dark age, which was a steaming pile of plague-ridden crap with a healthy dose of the Catholic church.
ARK: Pet Rock knew of what he spoke. It’s bleak enough if it’s true that people just stopped reading and writing, but somehow the only thing that makes it worse is the Catholic church’s systematic destruction of history in the form of book burning. There were some texts that were saved and hidden away in monasteries where dedicated monks copied them by hand over and over for centuries in order to preserve them. And others perhaps ended up as part of the Vatican’s secret library, never to be seen by non-papal eyes again. It is traditionally believed that this was a move by the Catholic church to rid the world of heretical thought.
CCK: Or was it.
ARK: OR WAS IT?! Was this the Middle Ages equivalent of shredding secret documents to cover one’s tracks?
CCK: Ok, wait. Pump the crazy person brakes. Before we get into the possible cover-up, let’s dissect the alleged crime…
ARK: Time crime!
CCK: If we must… let’s dissect the alleged time crime itself. Why would the Catholic church be wrapped up in a conspiracy to create this phantom time and skip ahead almost 3oo years? Back to our man Heibert Illig, and a paper he wrote in 1994 called “Das erfundene Mittelalter: Die grösste Zeitfälschung der Geschichte” or“The Invented Middle Ages: The Greatest Forgery in History.”. In this paper, Illig proposes that one hypothesis is there was a secret meeting, sometime in the 700’s AD, between the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, and the Catholic Pope Sylvester II, in which they decided that there was a certain renown for being the person in charge at the turn of the very first millennium. Since it was believed that there would be more importance placed on the person reigning at the time that marked 1000 years since the death of Jesus Christ, it was done, poof! We are now claiming it’s the year 1000 AD. But suddenly that meant that there would be this almost 300 years gap in history, so chroniclers were brought in to fill up the empty time, as it were.
ARK: Which actually would have provided yet another great opportunity to usher in future events by re-inventing the past. Sylvester and Otto gave themselves an opening to set-up kings and dynasties. And part of this theory is the idea that Charlemagne, AKA Charles the Great, not be confused with Charles the Fat or Charles the Bald, was not a real ruler, and was more of a King Arthur-type legend and a model for the kind of emperor that Otto aspired to be. And if this is just a legend concocted in part by the Pope Sylvester, it makes sense to add the little tid-bit about Charlemagne being coronated on Christmas Day while kneeling to pray at the alter of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome by then Pope Leo III. By crowning Charlemagne, the church claimed the power to appoint the Emperor of the Romans.
***Making History Trailer***
CCK: Ok, now we can start shredding. This opportunity to make up history as you go would be directly threatened by anyone who has or is recording it as it actually happened. So, you round up what books you can, if there is nothing redeeming about the texts in the eyes of the Catholic church, onto the bonfire they go. But, surely, there would be books that would be vital to maintain, at least in parts. For example, we do not have any of the original writings of Plutarch, but we do have copies of his writing. One of the earliest copies of Plutarch’s work can be traced back to Joseph Justus Scaliger, who was responsible for making many edits to these works under the auspice of translating dates.
ARK: And what the Catholics couldn’t mold to fit their agenda, they straight up invented. Enter Pseudo-Isidore, which is now my new drag name.
CCK: Please welcome to the stage, Pseudo-Isidore.
ARK: Pseudo-Isidore was the name given to an author or authors behind several influential forgeries. Its main objective was to create false records of legal protections that could be used by diocese to shield them from trial and conviction, and to secure the validity of church property.
CCK: Speaking of property… books and texts are relatively easy to destroy, or manipulate, but there would have been other more substantial indicators that this time crime had occurred, like buildings. Proponents of the phantom time hypothesis often point out that there appears to be very few surviving examples of medieval architecture from between the years of AD 610 and AD 850 there is a large gap in Byzantine architecture. Others point out that in the Occident, or Western World, practically nothing was built between 850 and 950, with maybe the exceptions of castles and fortified walls.
ARK: The lack of examples of buildings from that time period is suspect.
CCK: Yes, but even more suspicious is perhaps the buildings that we do have to point to as examples of Middle Ages architecture. The most often cited example being the Aachen Palatine Chapel or as it’s known today, the Aachen Cathedral.
ARK: The Catholics! Again! And a church constructed on the order of Emperor Charlemagne, wink wink.
CCK: Yes. The Aachen Cathedral is a German Roman Catholic church located in Aachen, Germany, and is considered one of the oldest cathedrals in Europe. Charlemagne began the construction of the Palatine Chapel around 792, in addition to a palace that was built around the chapel. The chapel was consecrated by Pope Leo III in 805 in honor of the Virgin Mary. The palace surrounding the original Palatine chapel was lost to time, but the chapel itself has been preserved and now forms the central part of the Aachen Cathedral.
ARK: There are some reports that Charlemagne was not just the patron of this construction, but also possibly the architect and the building supervisor. According to Heibert Illig, he has found more than 24 building details that he believes are anachronistic to the time when this chapel was allegedly built. The biggest example of an architectural feature that would have had no predecessor in 800 AD is the central octagonal dome. The dome is over 30 M or almost 100 feet tall and 15 M, almost 50 feet in diameter. The chapel is comprised of hewn stone, at its weakest point, the stone is about 83cm or just under 33 inches thick, and that is all that holding up a ton of stone, and yet it was achieved so perfectly, that this chapel survived World War II. So, who taught these builders how to do this?
CCK: The earliest architecture of the Frankish people was primarily done in wood and timber, with few examples still standing. The Romans were certainly building domes and vaults at this time; however, they primarily were working with cast concrete, a mix of cement, water and gravel or sand. The most famous example of an early Roman dome is the Pantheon, and to account for the weight of the dome, the higher levels are comprised of less dense aggregate stones, such as small pots or pieces of pumice.
ARK: In Byzantium, you see a similar technique used where domes were made from tiles and clay. Basically, the lightest elements possible, the most famous example being the domes of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. There are no true predecessors to the particular masterpiece that is the Aachen Palatine Chapel.
CCK: And seemingly, no successors either. The next domed buildings in the Western world would not be built until about 970 AD, and even then, they would be built with spans of only about 3.5 meters or about 11 ½ feet. Let’s look at another example. This time in the town of Speyer in Germany sitting on the River Rhine is the Speyer Cathedral. Construction began in approximately 1030 and by about 1050, vaults had been constructed over the aisle of the cathedral. Those vaults were about 7.5 meters or approximately 25 feet and were the largest vaults of their time. Then you started to see large Romaneque domes popping up at Toulouse, Cluny, Santiago de Compostela and in Speyer. By 1100, the cathedral was given a central nave and a transept with vaults. Like in Aachen, Speyer’s transept is an octagonal dome with a diameter of about 15 meters or 50 feet. But, unlike Aachen, what we see in Speyer conforms to a logical progression. There were precursor buildings, there was building evolution over hundreds of years, and then there are successor buildings. But in Aachen…
ARK: No precursor, no successor, and totally inconsistent with the Carolingian age, of which it is normally categorized. There is one Art History professor, Jan van der Meulen that believes that despite what history had told us so far, the Aachen dome is not Carolingian. Van der Meulen rather thinks it is possibly Ottonian, which would place its construction anywhere from 918 AD to 1024 AD. But it was not just literature and construction. It seems like everything just totally stopped. There were gaps in the doctrine of faith, there was an almost 500-year gap in which mosaic art was made, 300 years for new farming techniques to be implemented. There’s a 450-year gap right in the middle of the history of building in Constantinople. And there is the fact that it just seems like nothing much happened during this time period.
CCK: There was… um… Charlamagne… if he was even real.
ARK: Exactly. There were two dark ages in the West, one that started in 600 and lasted until about 750, and the second began in 814 into the 10th Centurty. And right in the middle of those two spans of not-really-muchiness?
CCK: Charlamagne.
ARK: Charlamagne ruled from 768 until 814. He is credited with starting what is now referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance, but as soon as his reign ends, everyone just slips back into darkness? Ferdinand Gregorovius wrote of Charlamagne in his work, "History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages,", as follows:
Gregorovius: "The figure of the Great Charles can be compared to a flash of lightning who came out of the night, illuminated the earth for a while, and then left night behind him."
ARK: Illig’s interpretation of Charlamagne’s achievements is that he would have required the lives of three or four quote, unquote “normal men”. Stating that in 44 of Charlamagne’s 46 years of his reign, he was at war. He traveled the equivalent of two or three times around the globe, and yet still had time to formulate more than a hundred law decrees and introduced the jury system. He was a founder of schools and libraries and universities, although, if this were true it was still hundred of years before these types of institutions are ever mentioned in Europe. He was his own minister of agriculture, he was an architect, astronomer, and folklorist. He spoke both German and Latin and possibly a little Greek. Despite all this striving for knowledge and setting up institutions for his people, as soon as he was gone, the world was plunged into darkness again.
CCK: It is very odd how little literature, construction, art, or anything there was during this time, but, I mean, that is why its known as the Dark Ages. So, let’s say it was just man, as in mankind, packing up their inspiration, throwing on their tunics made of sweatpants material, and giving ye ol’ middle finger to trying to write or create anything of significance. But there is someone that never stops doing what she does… Mother Nature.
ARK: Life… uh, finds a way!
CCK: Dendrochronology.
ARK: Ah, yes, of course… the study… of dendrochrones…
CCK: So close… it’s tree ring dating. From the ancient Greek, dendron meaning trees and khronos meaning time. This scientific method can look at the horizontal cross-section of the trunk of a tree and based on the number of rings can determine the tree’s age, as each ring is formed annually. In addition to determining the age of a tree, the rings can also indicate what kind of climate or atmospheric conditions the tree experienced in any given year. Although, the earliest known example of someone noticing that trees had rings that could be related to a passing year was put forth in 322 BC, it was Leonardo da Vinci that first theorized that the rings not only indicated a year, but could also show how dry or wet that year had been… which is just a fun fact!
ARK: It’s thrilling. But how does this help to determine when certain events happened, exactly?
CCK: Well, something constructed from wood, like a building, could be dated by archaeologists as to when it was felled and that can help narrow down when a building may have been erected. The wood of a ship can give hints about not only when it was built, but possibly where if you know how to read the rings for clues about what climate it grew in. And there are panel paintings, literally paintings done on a flat, panel of wood. Dendrochronology has helped support or dispute panel paintings attributed to certain artists based on if the wood would have been around at the time the painting was allegedly done. And dendrochronology can also map out a tree’s… um… family tree, as it were. Basically, the idea is that there are typical sequences of tree rings for each time period, and as you overlap these sequences, it is possible to find a standard sequence for a given region that can go back centuries.
ARK: But… just like snowflakes and eyebrows, each tree is unique. While tree species like oak are considered very reliable for tree rings, alders and pines are notorious for sometimes missing a year. Birch and willow trees are never used at all due to their erratic growth cycles. Also, in times of draught, a tree may develop multiple rings in a single year, and it has been confirmed that removal of sap or heartwood after felling a tree, which was a common practice prior to more modern wood treatments were developed, can affect the reliability of using wood for dating. And there is the case of Ernst Hollstein, one of the most famous and trusted dendrochronologists in Germany. In the 1970’s, Hollstein proposed doing an oak-chronology study to try and bridge the gap in available data between antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Since at the time the samples of wood were very small, only about 3 confirmed samples from 380 AD and for the period about 720 AD only 4 suitable samples of wood. Hollstein worked for about eight years on this study and then proclaimed that he had finally had great success with this work and as a result, he would now be able to date samples back to Roman times. There was just one problem; Hollstein had to switch his method half-way through his study. He didn’t use oak for his oak-chronology study, he used copper beech wood. About ten years later, he finally found fitting oak wood to re-do his study with the proper samples and with the most reliable wood for tree rings; however, since his original findings had already been published a decade earlier, they would not be changed.
CCK: And what about carbon dating? How are you going to yuck my yum on the radiocarbon method, the most reliable method for dating ancient artefacts?
ARK: Wow! Sister, I had no idea you were such a C-14er…
CCK: Have you not seen my tattoo?
ARK: Anyway, don’t worry… there is a reason this is still the most reliable form of dating ancient artefacts, it’s just like in all things there are margins for error. For instance, they did C-14 testing on a castle that was known to have been built about 738 years prior. The results of the test determined that this castle was 7,370 years old. Or there’s the study done on live mollusks that resulted in age results ranging from 40, 125, 300, all the way up to 1890 years old. But, there is a much bigger issue with the way that carbon dating is used.
CCK: Bigger than an almost 2000 year old mollusk?!
ARK: Much bigger and way more fishy… eh? Eh?
CCK: I’ll allow it.
ARK: The issue was one first raised by Anatoly Fomenko and his New Chronology theory. Fomenko, like Illig, also believes that certain events that have been attributed to the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and/or Ancient Egypt may have actually occurred in the Middle Ages. Fomenko’s theory is that the conspirators, The Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, worked together to obscure true history by folding all ancient history onto the Middle Ages, sometime around AD 800. One thing I find very interesting about Fomenko’s theories is that unlike Illig that needs to fill in his gaps with stories just being straight up false, like that Charlamagne was not a real person, Fomenko rather theorizes that the stories were already there, why not just do a retelling. For instance, as Fomenko sees it, Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun were the same person. The black death that happened in the 1300’s, was the same Justinian plague that ravaged the Mediterranean, Europe and the Near East about seven centuries earlier. And Charlemagne’s and Flavius Odoacer’s lives parallel each other’s so closely that they could be the same person with a name change.
CCK: I feel like there is a cliché that speaks to this seemingly paralleled history… Something something repeats its something?
ARK: History repeats itself?
CCK: That’s the one! Besides, what does this have to do with dendrochronology and carbon dating?
ARK: Well, if Fomenko is to be given any sort of credence, he believes the errors in our systems can easily be traced back to Joseph Justus Scaliger, who largely manufactured this false chronology based on the alleged date of birth of a magical baby.
CCK: Ivy Blue Carter?!
ARK: Umm… close, but no. It’s actually a little guy I like to call Jesus Christo.
CCK: Oooh! That magic baby!
ARK: Scaliger is credited as being a pioneer in using the Julian period in calendrical calculations to provide a framework for dating the whole Bible historically. And it was during these calculations that Scaliger created 1000 years of phantom Christian history known as the Medieval period or the dark ages. And since all these methods of testing rely on a chronology which is established, then they are at the mercy of the accuracies of said chronology. If dates of the chronology are moved, the scale of these tests will move. Although, I’m not sure if I understand any of this anyway… cause it’s not as if you can just move the collection of time around. Or can you?!
CCK: You can!
ARK: Wait. What? I was just trying to do one of my super dramatic rhetorical questions.
CCK: That question is rhetorical no more because of the switch-over from the Julian calendar, proposed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, to the calendar that we still use today, the Gregorian calendar. After nearly 1600 years using the Julian calendar, Pope Gregory XIII introduced some changes in October 1582. Gregory reduced the average year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 days and adjusted for the drift in the 'solar' year that the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar had caused during the intervening centuries. Gregory also threw in some leap years to keep his math in check. Per the United States Naval Observatory:
USNO: Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the years 1600 and 2000 are.
ARK: I am so confused… What day is it?!
CCK: It’s ok, Sister… hang in there for just another couple of minutes…
ARK: Are those Julian minutes or Gregorian minutes divisible by 4?!
CCK: Basically, the Julian calendar no longer seemed to match the astronomical situation. So, Pope Gregory did some calculations and decided that for every year that the Julian calendar was in use the year was off by about 11 minutes. The Julian calendar had been in use for 1,537 years, which adds up to a discrepancy of about 10 days. Pope Gregory ordered those ten days be dropped…
ARK: Genius.
CCK: From October.
ARK: Bastard!
CCK: In order to get things back in alinement with the actual tropical or solar year.
ARK: It’s so simple Oscar Wilde could bring us some trout!
CCK: You mean “a child could figure it out”?
ARK: I don’t know. How do we get to phantom time from here?
CCK: Well, Illig and Fomenko propose that Pope Gregory’s astronomers were wrong. And that the discrepancy between the calendars should have been closer to 13 days, not 10.
ARK: A clerical error? Eh? Eh?
CCK: Or was it done on purpose, and the reason for this discrepancy was that the Pope was trying to hide the fact that there about 300 centuries that had not actually happened.
ARK: Illig was half right. Technically, the math should’ve been 13 days… Approximately 11 minutes a year for 1600 years would be closer to 13 days than 10, except Pope Gregory was not trying to correct the calendar all the way back to year one. He was trying to get it squared away with The First Council of Nicaea. It was the first ecumenical council of the church when a bunch of bishops got together to discuss Christian doctrine. In addition to hashing out all that God is the father and the son and sorta Jesus and the holy ghost… And then came Maude. But, their other order of business was to decide when Easter should be celebrated. And it was determined that Easter would be on the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or soonest after 21 March, the Spring Equinox and if that doesn’t sound like some Wicca, Witchy, WooWOo shit to you, I don’t know what is…
CCK: A topic for another time. But you are right, it is believed that Pope Gregory was not trying to correct the Julian calendar from its inception in 45 BC, but just back to 325 AD, when the first council of Nicaea occurred. Without accounting for the Council this does seem like it would be a very quick and tidy way to get rid of almost 400 years from the timeline. Although the math still is a little suspect, in my opinion.
ARK: I’m suspicious of all math.
CCK: I’m not sure how much credence any calendar should be given anyway. In Islamic culture they traditionally use a lunar calendar, not a solar one. Hindu and Buddhist calendars are actually based on a lunisolar cycle that adds an extra month as needed to realign the months with the seasons. The Hebrew calendar uses a 19-year cycle.
ARK: The North Koreans implemented their own calendar beginning with the date of their independence. And quite frankly, we should all probably be using the Mayan calendar, as it is considered to be probably one of the most advanced and accurate systems in human history. Ok, so history can’t be trusted, time can’t be trusted, and don’t even get me started on shadiness that is math.
CCK: Take heart, Sister, If you’re still looking for answers, you can always look to the East… cause this whole hypothesis is very western world centric. Because while the Occident may have been wallowing in plague and cultural stagnation at this time, the Islamic culture as well as Tang Dynasty culture, experienced enormous advancements in culture, mathematics, and technology. Although, to play a little bit of my own devil’s advocate here, in China, it was a pretty common practice that the incoming dynasty would attempt to erase and rewrite the history of the previous dynasty.
ARK: Well, you can look to the stars. There are several records of observations in ancient astronomy that would not allow for the phantom time theory to be true without distortion. Two of the most precise records are of solar eclipses recorded by Pliny the Elder in 59 AD and Photius in 418 AD; we know these dates to have confirmed eclipses. There were also observations of Halley’s Comet that remain consistent with current astronomy with no accounting for any phantom time.
CCK: So, phantom time is probably not true…
ARK: Probably not. Why do you look so sad?
CCK: I was just thinking how sweet it would be if all my deadline due dates were pushed back 300 years.
ARK: You’d probably still be fifteen minutes late!