GIANTS AND THE LOST LANDS OF THE GODS Peter Kolosimo with Nick Redfern | Conspiracy Journal Books | no ISBN | $21.95 For reasons that will become clear, I cannot assign a star rating. Peter Kolosimo was the pen name of Pier Colosimo, an Italian communist, journalist, and mystery-monger. He attended school at the University of Leipzig in Germany, where he adopted his radical political views. Despite this, the editor of the strange hybrid posthumous partial collaboration Giants and the Lost Lands of the Gods (2017), written with Nick Redfern, expresses utter bafflement as to why Pier Colosimo would choose a German spelling of his own name as a pen name: “no one that I know has been able to surmise why he selected the nom de plume that he did,” writes Timothy Green Beckley, a longtime writer on UFO topics going back to the golden age of ufology. It’s a very small point, but a telling one, that in this book the logical inference is the one to be avoided at all costs. It is equally telling that Beckley acknowledges Kolosimo’s politics but declares them irrelevant to understanding his radical revision of human history, which included heavy reliance on Soviet propaganda and a revision of religious stories and myths to strip out the supernatural and to conform to dialectical materialism. Sure. It’s totally unrelated.
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When I spoke with Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli last week about the elongated skulls of Paracas, he assured me that his team anthropologist, Rick Woodward, who holds a master’s in anthropology and geography and who is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Biblical archaeology, was an expert in skulls and would be able to answer some basic questions about the supposedly anomalous osteology of the Paracas elongated skulls. I am always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, and yesterday Marzulli posted to YouTube an interview he did with Woodward on Wednesday about the supposed skeletal anomalies. I was left a bit confused about Woodward’s approach and findings, which seemed to imply a lack of familiarity with the scholarly literature on the subject.
When I reviewed a book on the egregores of occult belief yesterday, I noted that the concept originated from Éliphas Lévi, an occultist and ceremonial magician of the nineteenth century. He first applied the myth of the Watchers to supernatural entities that watch over human activity in 1868, in his book The Great Secret, though this book was not published until 1898. I will confess to not having read Lévi's book, but I was intrigued enough by the references to the Watchers, Giants, and Nephilim to read the chapter about them. This, in turn, surprised me greatly when I saw how Lovecraftian the material was, anticipating by seven decades the idea of titanic supernatural entities beyond time and space and beyond human comprehension, whose random movements affect human actions but which are utterly indifferent to us, as we care nothing for ants and mites. It is no wonder, therefore, that ceremonial magicians suspected that Lovecraft had channeled the same magical powers as Lévi. The similarities are uncanny, but not inexplicable. Lovecraft knew of Lévi's writing from an English translation of some of his work, published in 1896 and 1897, though this book did not include The Great Secret. Drawing on similar source material, both authors had struck upon similar ideas, with Lovecraft bending toward Lévi both because of his reading of him and his reading of secondary sources that discussed his ideas. While The Great Secret was translated into English in 2000, the text is under copyright, so I have translated the relevant chapter for my Library. It is well worth the read, both because of its relevance to understanding the occult version of the Watchers myth and for its anticipation of Lovecraft. My translation can be found here.
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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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