_ One of the key claims of the ancient astronaut theory is that many prehistoric buildings are constructed of stones so massive that no human could have built them. For example, in Chariots of the Gods, Erich von Däniken writes that “Our imagination is unable to conceive what technical resources our forefathers used to extract a monolithic rock of more than 100 tons from a quarry, and then transport it and work it in a distant spot.” (p. 22) For von Däniken and his followers, this is evidence that extraterrestrial beings were responsible for such achievements. But this line of reasoning—I don’t understand it, so it must be super-human—is quite ancient. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Greek travel writer Pausanias (fl. 2nd c. CE) reported the widespread belief that the ruins left behind by the Mycenaean people nearly 2,000 years before Pausanias wrote were so monumental that only the offspring of the gods could have built them: It was jealousy which caused the Argives to destroy Mycenae. […] There still remain, however, parts of the city wall, including the gate, upon which stand lions. These, too, are said to be the work of the Cyclopes, who made for Proetus the wall at Tiryns. (Description of Greece, 2.16.5) Going on from here and turning to the right, you come to the ruins of Tiryns. […] The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining, is a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree. Long ago small stones were so inserted that each of them binds the large blocks firmly together. (2.25.8) Just as von Däniken argued that humans could not move the blocks of Sachsayhuaman, so too did Pausanias precede him in arguing that the godlike quality of the workmanship was marked by the inability of modern humans to lift such blocks. _
Of course, we know very well who built Mycenae and Tiryns (hint: the people are called Mycenaeans for a reason), and even Erich von Däniken does not pretend their architecture was superhuman in scale. Instead, he claimed in Odyssey of the Gods that the cities were built out of extraterrestrial concrete blocks! (Aliens apparently poured irregular blocks, necessitating a different mold for each, simply to confuse later archaeologists.) So, if we can admit that human knowledge advances over time to provide increasingly accurate explanations of how seemingly-miraculous sites were constructed, why should we attribute other ancient cities to aliens? In other words, why believe von Däniken or Giorgio Tsoukalos on the impossibility of architecture if we readily dismiss Pausanias’ attribution of Mycenaean architecture to the offspring of the gods? Interestingly, such “cyclopean” architecture has long been (wrongly) assumed to link various ancient cultures. In the nineteenth century, antiquarians imagined a link between the cyclopean Lion Gate at Mycenae and the trilithons of Stonehenge, attributing both the Celts: “That the Cyclopes were Celts is certain; and it appears that the postern gate of Mycenae is in the form of one of the Trilithons of Stonehenge…” (The Treasury of Knowledge, 1850, “Ancient Buildings,” p. 227). Ignatius Donnelly linked Mycenaean cyclopean structures to those of Mexico, and others took the link still further, attributing the Pacific Island architecture of the Polynesians to this same culture, sometimes said to be Atlantis. Never mind, of course, that such buildings date from wildly different periods (Mycenaeans before 1600 BCE; Mexico before 1000 CE; Polynesia anytime from 500 CE to 1650 CE) and really don’t look anything alike. They all have one thing in common: Alternative theorists don’t understand them (or don’t want to understand them), and since these theorists take themselves for the measure of all things, their ignorance confirms that only a superhuman intelligence from Atlantis or aliens could be responsible for the miracle of stacking stones one atop the other.
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The influence of Theosophy on Lovecraft is quite clear and quite direct. Lovecraft was heavily influenced by the Theosophical tract The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, a compilation of W. Scott-Elliot’s two brief works on Atlantis and Lemuria. Scott-Elliot, in turn, was explicating the work of H. P. Blavatsky. Thus, we can trace one strange little idea from Theosophy straight through to “The Call of Cthulhu.”
Here is Blavatsky’s Stanza XI of the second set of (her completely fake) Stanzas of Dzyan: They built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built, and out of the fires vomited, out of the white stone of the mountains and of the black stone, they cut their own images in their size and likeness, and worshipped them. Blavatsky, as her explication later in the Secret Doctrine (1888) shows, was thinking of Easter Island in writing this. W. Scott-Elliott picks up on this in his The Lost Lemuria (1904): During the later part of the sixth, and the seventh sub-race they learnt to build great cities. These appear to have been of cyclopean architecture, corresponding with the gigantic bodies of the race. The first cities were built on that extended mountainous region of the continent which included, as will be seen in the first map, the present Island of Madagascar. Another great city is described in the "Secret Doctrine" as having been entirely built of blocks of lava. It lay some 30 miles west of the present Easter Island, and it was subsequently destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The gigantic statues of Easter Island--measuring as most of them do about 27 feet in height by 8 feet across the shoulders--were probably intended to be representative not only of the features, but of the height of those who carved them, or it may be of their ancestors, for it was probably in the later ages of the Lemuro-Atlanteans that the statues were erected. Now, here is Lovecraft in the “Call of Cthulhu”: Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. Even the very word “cyclopean” derives from Theosophy, where Madame Blavatsky applied it generously to the Pacific islands, adopting and adapting the use from Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis, where that author had thoughtfully restricted it only to Greece and Mexico. Scott-Elliot picked it up in describing the lost city 30 miles west of Easter Island, and then Lovecraft adopted the same. Note, too, the interesting fact that the lost city of Theosophy’s ancient races is located in the empty part of the South Pacific; Lovecraft placed R’lyeh 20 degrees further west and 20 degrees further south, but retained the idea. In both cases, the cities were removed from the earth’s surface by geologic processes—volcanoes for Scott-Elliot, an unnamed sinking of the ocean floor for Lovecraft. (With Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu all destroyed by volcanoes, I’m guessing Lovecraft found them a bit cliché.) One recurring bit of pseudoscience is the assertion that Easter Island is something more than an outgrowth of Polynesian society. Robert Brown in his nineteenth-century Countries of the World (vol. 4, p. 43), for example, describes Easter Island as an outpost of the Inca:
But who made the great stone images (p. 44, &c.) which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors no one knows. It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants arrived, and it is a belief of various ethnographers that probably the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America. When the island was first discovered, the islanders possessed neither the means nor the knowledge to construct anything similar to these monuments, the workmanship of which is of a high order. Even at the date of Cook's visit, some of the statues, measuring twenty-seven feet in length, and eigbt feet across the shoulders, were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of nearly thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen feet broad, being from three to twelve feet long, all built of hewn stones in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco [i.e. Tiwanaku] in Peru… H. P. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine refers to this passage repeatedly (vol. 2, pp. 317, 337, etc.) but goes beyond Brown to suggest that the builders of Easter Island were not Peruvian (pace, Thor Heyerdahl) but rather the buildings of both Peru and the Pacific Islands were the work of Lemurians and Atlanteans, under the tutelage of aliens from Venus! (See specifically W. Scott-Elliott’s Lost Lemuria.) But Blavatsky goes still further… not content merely to push a pseudoscientific doctrine (one derived from Donnely’s Atlantis)based on mere fact, Blavatsky, on the same page (317) went on to claim that the authors of speculative fiction were actually reporting the truth about Venusians and Lemurians in ancient history through psychic dreams that they turned into their books! Our best modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams: witness Mr. Louis Stephenson and his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist, Mr. Rider Haggard, also had a prophetic or rather a retrospective clairvoyant dream before he wrote "She "? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead, whose surviving living men sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems to step out in its general outlines from the imperishable pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests " that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians "; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in "Esoteric Buddhism." For, she says, "Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This (the nation of Kor) is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in. Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. But the barbarians. . . came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones. . ." (pp. 180, 181.) Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. The Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity as descendants of Homo primigenius, the ape-man, of which " No Fossil Remains Are As Yet Known To us," but (which) "were Probably akin to the gorilla and orang of the present day" (Haeckel). In answer to whose "probably," occultists point to another and a greater probability--the one given in our text. It is the singular genius of H. P. Lovecraft that he turned Blavatsky’s appropriation of speculative fiction as a proof of the occult on its head and instead made Blavatsky’s fraudulent mysteries “proof” of the Cthulhu Mythos, temporarily dragging Theosophy back across the divide between nonfiction and fiction. Those cyclopean stones of the Pacific, for example, now served Cthulhu in R’lyeh rather than Lemurians and Venus. The problem, of course, is that Lovecraft did his job too well, and as a result new generations became exposed to Blavatsky’s interplanetary nonsense through the much more convincing versions Lovecraft produced as fiction. As a result, later writers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier would take inspiration from Lovecraft, dig up the old Theosophical sources and begin creating the midcentury mystery-mongering movement, contributing exactly nothing that the Theosophists and Atlantis theorists of the Victorian era, and Lovecraft in the twentieth century, had not already invented. This material was reused a third time in the 1990s “alternative archaeology” craze. Now, of course, more time has passed and new mystery-mongers on cable TV are digging up the old work and presenting it anew, repeating it for the fourth time as part of the new ancient astronaut fad. And all of it came about because Victorian occultists tried to be “scientific” and ended up calcifying wrongheaded theories proposed by nineteenth century science to explain phenomena for which they did not have enough evidence to accurately judge. The Victorian scientists did their best, but they could not have known about continental drift (sorry, Lemuria) or the age of Easter Island (sorry, ancient alien theorists—late medieval times isn’t pre-human) or the ability for life to live on Venus (sorry, Theosophical Adepts). But these wrong theories became articles of faith for “alternative” historians because they were once proposed by scientists and so maintain a shadowy credibility long after the evidence left them behind. They’re in a book (no matter how old), so they have to be true. Right? Last night I watched National Geographic Channel's Diving into Noah's Flood, a program in which archaeologist Jeff Rose explored underwater sites in the Persian Gulf to see whether rising sea levels contributed to Near Eastern flood myths, including the Sumerian flood story from Gilgamesh and, of course, its derivative, Noah's flood.
I'm not sure what to think of the show. On the one hand, it had some interesting information about underwater archaeology in the Middle East, an area whose archaeology is not widely known in the U.S. On the other hand, the discussion of the myth and history of the Sumerians was rather superficial, and the program spent much more time on beefcake shots of a shirtless Rose than it did on the Sumerian flood myth he was attempting to elucidate. Rose also seemed unnervingly amazed that computers could be used to draw pictures of prehistoric landscapes. Overall, my verdict is that Diving into Noah's Flood was a solid half-hour documentary stretched into a somewhat lazy hour, saved mostly by gorgeous HD photography of the sandy scenery. I can't in good conscience give a bad review to any show that has the courage to admit that Noah's flood isn't the literal truth and that it is dependent on the earlier Babylonian and Sumerian flood myths. After all, we live in a world where Joel Klenck proclaims his discovery of Noah's Ark every three days, and creationists insist they've found geologic "evidence" of Noah's Flood in Washington State, all blissfully unaware or uncaring that Noah's flood was a mythic plagiarism of a flood story told a two thousand years or more before the Hebrew version was written. Happy New Year! As we begin 2012, it's time to brace ourselves for a full year of hooey about how the ancient Maya supposedly predicted the end of the world for Dec. 21 of this year. As faithful readers will recall, prior to the 1980s, this alleged date was given as December 24, 2011, the day ancient astronaut theorist Alan Landsburg predicted the ancient astronauts planned to return to earth to check on their colony of alien hybrid clones in Uxmal, the Mayan city in the Yucatan. As conspiracy theorists and ancient astronaut believers prepare for the aliens' revised return, it's fairly likely that you will see the following artifact used to illustrate the Maya calendar: While this is a calendar, and it is from Latin America, it is not the Maya calendar. This is the similar but much younger Aztec calendar. An important difference is the presence of the hungry sun god in the center of the calendar. This sun god was an important part of Aztec cosmology since, unlike the Maya, the Aztec actually believed that the world would soon end if they did not supply the sun god with a constant supply of fresh blood through grotesque human sacrifice.
More importantly, the Aztec calendar did not contain the "long count" of the Maya, which is the cycle that produced the supposed doomsday date. Instead, the Aztec calendar used 52-year cycle of interlocking short 260-day years and solar 365-day years, a feature shared by most Mesoamerican calendars, including the Mayan. The point, more or less, is that anyone using this stone to illustrate the Maya calendar does not know enough about the Maya to have credibility in claiming that the world is about to end. Two British geologists have located the spot in Wales where the rocks used for the original circle of Stonehenge originated. The site is more than 150 miles from Salisbury Plain, where the megalithic monument now stands. The stones were part of a now-destroyed circle believed to have stood on the Stonehenge site prior to the construction of the current monument some 5,000 years ago. This announcement reignited speculation into how the stones were moved from Wales to Salisbury, including predictable reactions about the "impossibility" of carrying stones so far and th necessity of extraterrestrial or Atlantean intervention. For me, however, the question of "how" the stones were moved is much less interesting than the question of "why" the stones were moved so far. What ideological or economic motive compelled ancient people to carry heavy stones from what must have then been close to the edge of the world? Surely, this discovery tells us something about ancient social networks and possibly something about the ideology of the early residents of the area. It also calls to mind the corrupt medieval legend preserved in Geoffrey of Monmouth, which probably derives from an older story, that Merlin carried Stonehenge to Salisbury from Ireland: _ _“If you are desirous,” said Merlin, “to honour the burying-place of these men with an everlasting monument, send for the Giant's Dance, which is in Killaraus, a mountain in Ireland. For there is a structure of stones there, which none of this age could raise, without a profound knowledge of the mechanical arts. They are stones of a vast magnitude and wonderful quality; and if they can be placed here, as they are there, round this spot of ground, they will stand for ever.” At these words of Merlin, Aurelius burst into laughter, and said, “How is it possible to remove such vast stones from so distant a country, as if Britain was not furnished with stones fit for the work?” Merlin replied: “I entreat your majesty to forbear vain laughter; for what I say is without vanity. They are mystical stones, and of a medicinal virtue. The giants of old brought them from the farthest coasts of Africa, and placed them in Ireland, while they inhabited that country. Their design in this was to make baths in them, when they should be taken with any illness. For their method was to wash the stones, and put their sick into the water, which infallibly cured them. With the like success they cured wounds also, adding only the application of some herbs. There is not a stone there which has not some healing virtue.” Source: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae 8.10-11, translated in The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth , trans. A. Thompson and J. A. Giles (London: James Bohn, 1842). Corrupt and confused as this legend is, it does correctly preserve a memory that Stonehenge's stones came not from England but from the Celtic fringe beyond the control of Anglo-Saxon monarchs. Though I'm pretty sure Stonehenge was never used as a spa.
I had to laugh when I read the latest press release from Joel Klenck, a biblical archaeologist who has made a specialty of promoting the literal truth of the book of Genesis. According to Klenck, religious fundamentalists and secular archaeologists are both biased against him and doing everything in their combined power to discredit his alleged discovery of Noah's Ark on Turkey's Mt. Ararat. According to the press release:
“Several groups of ark enthusiasts are also trying to disparage the sites,” Klenck states, “because they assumed that Noah’s ark would have dinosaur bones, Early Stone Age tools, Neanderthals, be completely fossilized or had other expectations. That the large wood structure on Mount Ararat exhibits an assemblage that appears mostly from the Late Epipaleolithic Period (13,100-9,600 B.C.) is troubling to some since the data contradicts their views and beliefs.” Further, he states some professional archaeologists have followed the critiques of ark enthusiasts and have ignored the Ararat discoveries. Klenck notes, “Professional archaeologists do not realize that the biggest critics of the Ararat sites either object to the scientific discipline of archaeology, acquire monies from meritless ark expeditions, or both.” I suppose we can give Klenck credit for expanding the Biblical timeline back beyond the Paleolithic instead of the standard 6,000 years; however, even Klenck must see that there is no evidence whatsoever of a flood capable of raising enough water to deposit a ship high up on a mountain. Where, pray tell, did all that water go? But more to the point is the fact that Noah's Ark is not an original story; it has been well-known since the nineteenth century that the tale, composed probably in the first millennium BCE, depends directly on the earlier Mesopotamian flood myths, dating back to the Sumerian flood tale of the earliest Gilgamesh stories, two or three thousand years earlier. A quick read of tablet XI of the standard Gilgamesh epic shows clearly the relationship between the earlier Mesopotamian text, with its Flood hero Utnapishtim, and the later Hebrew version. So, even if Klenck found something on Ararat, it should by rights be Utnapishtim's boat, not Noah's. But that ark landed on Mt. Nishir (today's Pir Magrun in Iraq), not Ararat. (Funny, isn't it, that no one goes looking for Utnapishtim's ark?) Ah, well... when conducting pseudoscience logic doesn't really matter. [Note: This post was edited to clarify that Klenck's timeline extends beyond the Paleolthic.] Scholars have argued for more than a century that the contemporary figure of Santa Claus derives at least some of his attributes from the old Norse/Germanic god Odin/Wotan, especially the long white beard, the midnight flight across the winter sky, etc. One of the more interesting sidelights into the Santa/Odin parallels is the case of the respective supernatural beings' steeds.
Santa, as everyone knows, drives a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. Interestingly, Odin rode a horse that had eight legs named Sleipnir. In old Germanic traditions, on the night of the Wild Hunt, when Odin rode Sleipnir across the winter sky to lead the souls of the dead to the underworld, children were said to leave out sugar and hay for Sleipnir in boots by the chimney, for which "Odin" would leave small gifts. In turn, this tradition derived from the folk practice of leaving a few stalks of wheat standing in the field at harvest time as an offering for Sleipnir. Eventually such traditions became the stockings in which Santa leaves presents in exchange for the cookies and milk left for him (and sometimes a carrot for the reindeer). (There was, of course, a great deal of Christian influence when St. Nicholas began to substitute for Odin.) _John W. Hoopes of the University of Kansas passed along the exciting news of a new edited anthology (in which he has an article) covering the alleged 2012 Mayan apocalypse from an academic perspective. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Here's the press release: 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse, edited by Joseph Gelfer, is the first book on the subject to be written for a primarily academic audience. It is available in both hardcover and paperback and is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses in several different disciplines. Description December 21, 2012 is believed to mark the end of the thirteenth B'ak'tun cycle in the Long Count of the Mayan calendar. A growing number of people believe this date to mark the end of the world or, at the very least, the end of the world as we know it: a shift to a new form of global consciousness.2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse brings together for the first time a range of scholarly analyses on the 2012 phenomena grounded in various disciplines including religious studies, anthropology, Mayan studies, cultural studies and the social sciences. 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse will show readers how much of the 2012 phenomenon is based on the historical record, and how much is contemporary fiction. It will reveal to readers the landscape of the modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity. This collection brings much-needed academic rigour and documentation to a subject of rapidly increasing interest to diverse religious and other communities in these crucial closing years before we experience what will be either a profound leap in the human story or, less dramatically, just another mark in time. Contents Preface - Michael D. Coe, Yale University
You can get your copy in Amazon.
One of the tenets of the ancient astronaut theory is that the extraterrestrials gave ancient humans detailed knowledge about outer space. According to most ancient astronaut theorists (AATs) this is evident in the Book of Enoch, where Enoch is taken up into the sky and instructed on the geography and movements of the heavens (1 Enoch 72-82), which they interpret as an actual trip to outer space. Additionally, in The Sirius Mystery (1976, rev. ed. 1998), Robert Temple argued that the aliens provided the Sumerians with detailed knowledge of the Sirius star system, including its binary (or even triune) nature, and the planet in that system from which the extraterrestrials had ventured to earth. This knowledge, he said (building on a reference in Appendix 1 of Santillana and von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill), was retained by the African Dogon tribe down to the present day.
Therefore, in examining ancient Near East mythology, we should expect to see an understanding of outer space from the extensive knowledge the aliens supposedly gave the Sumerians and others. At the most basic level, this should mean that the ancients understood that space was a vast empty territory beyond the earth which could be reached by traveling high enough into the sky, with no barriers between the earth, the planets, the stars, and the galaxies beyond. So what do the Sumerians say about the sky? |
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