Cotton Mather: Found proof of giants in America. And witches, too, of course.
Slacktivist Fred Clark recounts the story of Puritan Cotton Mather’s interpretation of a mastodon tooth discovered in 1705 as belonging to a giant from the legend of the Nephilim (Genesis 6.1-4), which Mather declared a ”wonderful confirmation of Mosaic history”. Fred links this to a recent report on the pictures sent back from the Hubble telescope.
Have a read of Fred’s full post, here.
Fred also refers to an interesting recent book by W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Baylor UP, 15 October 2011).
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I’ve got Cotton Mather’s book Wonders of an Invisible World 1693 – the oldest in my ‘old’ collection. And yikes. That particular book I didn’t pick up on my second hand book scavangings or auction and estate hunts – mum found it in the attic of a house we moved into when I was 14. Creepy vile book.