This year marks the eighty-fifth anniversary of the publication of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in Weird Tales, in the February 1928 issue. (Lovecraft wrote the story two years earlier.) Although the anniversary was a few weeks ago, I bring it up because the New York Public Library posted a web page celebrating the publication yesterday, and they included my Cult of Alien Gods as recommended reading. Lovecraft’s story, of course, accidentally gave new life to Victorian pseudoscience when Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, under its influence, wrote The Morning of the Magicians and sparked the ancient astronaut theory, which in turn bequeathed to us the Maya apocalypse, Ancient Aliens, and America Unearthed.
But in the spirit of celebration, I’d like to take a day off from thinking about all that. Lovecraft wrote “Cthulhu” as part of a project to modernize the Gothic, to bring horror fiction into the twentieth century and to marry it to the great scientific discoveries of the age. From the Gothic, Lovecraft retained the Romantic notion that the past dictates the future, and that secrets long buried will not stay hidden forever. This Gothic inheritance continues in more recent attempts to modernize the traditional trappings of horror.
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As we approach the end of the first season of America Unearthed, I’ve started work on compiling my reviews of the program into an eBook and paperback book, which I’ll release as we get closer to season two. (Before readers start screaming about how I’m singling out America Unearthed, please note that I did the same thing last year with my Ancient Aliens reviews.) In doing so, I’ve started revising and rewriting my early reviews. It was quite a shock to see how short my review of episode one was, and how much information I left out. At the time, I didn’t know what the program would turn into, so I was apparently overly generous in letting smaller, silly claims simply go by without comment.
This past week eSkeptic published an interesting interview with Napoleon Chagnon, an American anthropologist who became world famous for his intensive study of the Yanomamö, an Amazonian tribe. His findings were published in a series of books, beginning with Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968) and several widely-seen documentary films done in conjunction with Tim Asch. His 1968 book is the bestselling anthropological text of all time and is a standard text in many classrooms.
As with last week, a historical review is necessary to understand where America Unearthed went so terribly wrong. If you know the history of the Newport Tower, you can skip to the episode review, but I recommend reading since there are some interesting tidbits below that even I didn’t know until I started researching the Tower.
This week CNN took a step into the alternative history waters in its monthly sailing show MainSail, which airs on the international feed of CNN (not available in most U.S. homes). According to an article posted on the show’s website, Philip Beale, late of the Royal Navy, plans to sail a replica of a Phoenician boat across the mid-Atlantic to prove that it was possible for Phoenicians to have reached America. He previously sailed the boat around Africa in 2010 in an effort to prove that the Phoenicians could have pulled off the feat in the first millennium BCE.
A few weeks ago on America Unearthed, Scott Wolter claimed that the “precursors” to the Knights Templar came to Arizona because “some Muslim group” had forced them out of Europe in the eighth century. At the time, I thought this was simply an incongruous reference to the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries CE. But in researching Vinland for more background on the Viking occupation of Newfoundland, I came across an interesting reference in Sir Daniel Wilson’s 1892 essay “The Vinland of the Northmen” that I think sheds some important light on this throwaway line and the thought process behind it. The results are surprising and somewhat disturbing.
Scott Wolter and the producers of America Unearthed, Andy and Maria Awes, owners of Committee Films, have been interested in the Templar connection to ancient America for a very long time, and each of their History/H2 projects pushes the exact same ideas in slightly different packages. Today, I’d like to look at Scott Wolter’s appearance on The Holy Grail in America, a program produced by Committee Films in 2009 for the History Channel.
On America Unearthed Scott Wolter discussed his belief that the Holy Grail was the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The authors of the earlier book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) identified this fictional bloodline as giving rise to the Merovingian kings of France and thus to the ruling houses of Europe. Last week, New Page Books published The Secret History of the Repitlians from Scott Alan Roberts, which looks at this same fictive bloodline and sees in it evidence of a legacy of reptilian serpent-human hybrid aliens who ruled the ancient world. Roberts, who previously wrote a book about the secret influence of the Nephilim, explores the question of serpent worship around the world and decides there is a hidden pattern.
America Unearthed and Ancient Aliens run on H2, a network owned by History, itself part of A+E Networks, the parent of A&E and the Lifetime family of channels. A+E Networks told Ad Age magazine recently that it is positioning History and H2 as male-oriented channels designed as a masculine counterpart to the female-oriented Lifetime brand. According to A+E, History has become a “male mega-brand,” and adding H2 as a branded extension of History has been key to providing content for a wide variety of men.
The scholar of Indo-European myth Bruce Lincoln wrote an informative book in 1992 called Discourse and the Structure of Society in which he argued that myths “can be, and have been, employed as effective instruments not only for the replication of established social forms … but more broadly for the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of society itself.” For Lincoln, myth can serve as the vehicle whereby societies experiencing crisis can justify the practical changes needed to overcome crisis or to provide the sanction of history and the divine to maintain existing social hierarchies in the face of crisis.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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