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Confucius Say: Test Your DNA
There’s an “Oddly Enough” news item from Reuters about how a Chinese company is offering a DNA test for 1,000 yuan ($125) which will prove that you’re related to the great Chinese social philosopher and statesman, Confucius.
“We would like to help these unconfirmed claimants to test their DNA and to establish a Confucius-DNA database,” it quoted Deng Yajun, a DNA expert from Beijing Institute of Genomics at the Chinese Academy of Science, as saying.
How the scientists had obtained a sample of Confucius’s DNA was not explained.
Evidently, “Kong” was the surname of Confucius, according to this article. The reason this jumped out at me so is because I have been hotly anticipating the same business model springing up in either the US or Europe because of the Da Vinci Code. Now that people are really starting to buy into this idea that Jesus sired a royal line of heirs, it’s literally only a matter of time until somebody starts offering a Jesus DNA test. Maybe it’s already happened, I don’t know. I know for a fact that Nicholas De Vere was, at least for a while, offering a blood test for people who thought they might be part of the elven/vampire/dragon/grail bloodline. But I’m not sure if that operation has folded, or what. I know it certainly never got to be very widespread.
Let’s say you really were a descendent of Jesus or of these holy ancient races. What would that mean? De Vere believes it means that you have a right to rule over the rest of humanity. But how many millions of people today would potentially have this DNA in them after 2,000 some-odd years? The number could simply be so large as to be meaningless.
I just found an interesting answer to this whole issue of bloodlines on a site about the “Sangreal”, mentioning a lecture by Rudolf Steiner
Rudolph Steiner (himself a Jew) believed that the idea of a hereditary bloodline was outdated. He replaced this old form of Divinity by Atlantean and Hebraic bloodlines, with the concept of the ‘etherisation of the blood.’ Here the blood becomes Spiritualised through Divine Grace rather than through racial purity.
The whole idea of bloodlines is all well and good for purposes of personal and cultural identity. It just sorta freaks me out when people try to link it to religion and politics (which, arguably, are central components of cultural identity, but oh well). What it comes down to, I think, is that people just want to feel special. They want to feel set apart and important and they want that feeling to just be handed to them by rights, rather than needing to do a lot of hard work on themselves to get it. Chances are, of course, that if they did actually do the hard personal work to acquire that feeling of specialness and separateness, they would realize just how unnecessary that all really is in the end.
- Test Your Jesus DNA
- Kathleen McGowan: Da Vinci Descendent
- DNA SCHMEE-NA
- DNA samples for some, Miniature American flags for others!
- Royal Bloodlines Abound!
- Prev: Drinking In the News
- Next: Chinese Death Van
June 17th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Yeah the whole divine bloodline thing encouraged by the DVC also has me a little wigged out. Part of me thinks that the DVC is a memetic Trojan Horse: on the surface, it looks like a repudiation of meanstream Christianity; but hidden inside is this insidious idea of bloodlines, with which comes the idea of the divine right of kings. Very ugly.
On a different note, the Chinese are way ahead of the curve in bioinformatics. Doesn’t surprise me that they’d be ready to market this kind of thing. (But there are vanity genotyping services available here in the West, although to my knowledge nobody is proposing a genetic test for Merovingian lineage.)
June 17th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
There was something I read a week or two ago about a guy in Japan being related to Jesus. The story went something like this — Jesus put his brother on the cross instead of him, escaped to Japan and married a girl. In the town the priest was supposed to have recently discovered this in the records, and they put to the use of ash on babies foreheads and the star of david in kimonos as evidence. I thought that was interesting since the Da Vinci Code movie had just recently come out.
June 18th, 2006 at 8:52 am
So… Jesus put his brother on the cross so he wouldn’t have to face the hereafter, yet we’re supposed to think his bloodline is somehow special anyway?
June 18th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Well, I don’t think the only value of Jesus would be the fact that he got on the cross.
June 18th, 2006 at 10:28 am
True, in spite of what the Nicaean creed would have us believe. But I don’t think the descendant of a brilliant teacher deserves any special treatment 2000 years later. Especially if the brilliant teacher preaches the Golden Rule and brotherly love yet lets his own brother be tortured and killed.
I’m just saying, the narrative of this Japanese fellow is a little fucked up. Whether Jesus had valuable things to say is an entirely separate issue.
June 18th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Dang. I write a genetics blog and I totally missed this bit of very interesting news! Thanks for posting about it. I’ve highlighted your post at Genetics and Health’s Gene Talk #4.
June 18th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Iirc, almost everyone in the world ‘;descends’ from Confucius. (Just as everyone in the West is descended from Muhammed, Charlemagne, etc)
June 18th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Well good, then there is a lot of money to be made in this sort of thing!
June 19th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
“Especially if the brilliant teacher preaches the Golden Rule and brotherly love yet lets his own brother be tortured and killed.”
What if it was his brother’s choice?
July 12th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
[…] Just like we predicted, somebody is offering a test to see whether or not you are a descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene over at TheTrueJesus.org. (Thanks to JM for sending me this!) […]
July 16th, 2006 at 6:22 am
[…] The Pop Occulture Blog speculates on why people might be interested in proving their link to historical figures and celebrities: What it comes down to, I think, is that people just want to feel special. They want to feel set apart and important and they want that feeling to just be handed to them by rights, rather than needing to do a lot of hard work on themselves to get it. Chances are, of course, that if they did actually do the hard personal work to acquire that feeling of specialness and separateness, they would realize just how unnecessary that all really is in the end. […]