I wasn’t sure what to make of The Lost Worlds of Ancient America when the new anthology from New Page Books showed up on my doorstep yesterday. The volume claims to be a selection of articles detailing “compelling evidence” of prehistoric European visitors to America, lost technology, and other currently unsupported suggestions about ancient America. In reality, it is a collection of articles from Ancient American magazine, the publication edited (until 2007), like this anthology, by “Frank Joseph,” the pen name of 68-year-old Frank Collin, a former neo-Nazi convicted in 1980 of sexually molesting underage boys. (For details, see here.)
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I usually look forward to getting the Skeptical Inquirer every other month, but I’m starting to think that they need (a) a better copy editor and (b) someone to fact-check their articles. For a publication devoted to truth, there was quite a bit of questionable material in the May/June 2012 edition. I’ll confine my critique to material directly related to ancient history.
At the Pic de Bugarach, a mountain in the Pyrenees of southern France, New Age believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse are gathering. They believe that within this oddly-shaped French mountain sits an extraterrestrial spacecraft that will spirit away the more than 100,000 believers expected to gather on the mountain December 21 in anticipation of the end of the world.
According to believers, the mountain is a “chakra” point where earth energy and alien technology combine to protect inhabitants from the upcoming cataclysm. Believers also say that the late French president François Mitterand, the Nazis, and Israel’s security service explored and excavated on the mountain. Local officials, by contrast, fear that the New Age believers plan a mass suicide like the Heaven’s Gate cult, who killed themselves when they thought a UFO arriving behind the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet would take their souls to an alien base on Pluto. What interests me is the way in southern France the 2012 apocalypse is repeating a widespread bit of European folklore that dates back thousands of years. Earlier today, ancient astronaut theorist and Ancient Aliens talking head Giorgio Tsoukalos answered a question from a Twitter correspondent about when earth would join a galactic federation resembling the “Star Wars Era,” referencing the movies, not the Reagan-era defense program.
I suppose this is the difference between the ancient astronaut theory and Scientology: Scientologists believe the federation already came and went. Tsoukalos’ remarks may appear to be so much science-fiction-inspired hot air, but they point to an interesting set of connections at the intersection of pseudoscience and speculative fiction. Notice that the alien societies beyond earth are described as “Star Wars-esque,” using the George Lucas films as a touchstone for understanding how a multi-system federation would operate (despite the physical impossibility of such a construct—just try running a galactic empire when it takes light years for taxes to reach the capital and imperial decrees to reach the colonies). It is patently obvious that in imagining the aliens’ civilization, ancient astronaut theorists are explicitly drawing on twentieth century science fiction, further blurring the line between their supposedly scientific theory and the science fiction it grew out of. Tsoukalos is also explicitly adopting the Star Wars/Star Trek idea of, essentially, human civilization projected into the stars. By contrast, H. P. Lovecraft imagined alien civilizations that humans could barely understand. But this is far less emotionally comforting. When George Lucas created the Star Wars universe, he drew explicitly on ancient myth, the so-called hero’s journey as outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which itself drew upon the psychoanalytical mysticism of Carl Jung. Jung was deeply interested in the occult (and even wrote a book on UFOs), seeing in the occult manifestations of the unconscious—the same unconscious that Jung’s estranged friend Sigmund Freud had viewed as erupting in science fiction and horror literature in his classic essay on “The Uncanny” (1919). Later science fiction and horror would, in turn, drawn explicitly on Freud, Jung, and Campbell in creating psychologically potent alternative worlds. The upshot is that speculative fiction and the nonfiction understanding of myth suffered extensive cross-pollination, each informing the other, becoming, in essence, the ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail. This symbol, of course, was used in the seal of Theosophy, whose own attempts to transform pseudoscience and early science fiction, including the vril of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, into mystic fact eventually informed H. P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu Mythos accidentally touched off the ancient astronaut theory by preserving nineteenth century extraterrestrial mysticism in an especially potent and widely accessible form.
So, it’s no surprise that ancient astronaut theorists reach for science fiction metaphors to explain their vision of the heavens. That’s all it ever was, science fiction, “always and always, back to no first beginning.” The intellectual paucity of the ancient astronaut theory is laid bare when we consider what ancient astronaut theorists (AATs) do not discuss—pretty much anything that isn’t readily available at your average Barnes & Noble or an online search. This means that vast reams of information are unavailable to the intellectually incurious AATs, who rarely go beyond the obvious in constructing their “theories.” (Even the supposedly academically rigorous Sirius Mystery of Robert Temple relied mostly on secondary, popular works like Robert Graves’ handbook of Greek mythology and obsolete nineteenth century studies like Godfrey Higgins’ Anacalypsis.)
Here’s a case in point. In Greco-Roman times, major texts received commentary from later writers who would place additional information, excerpts, and other notes in the margins of manuscripts of major poems. These notes have the name “scholia,” and they are a major source of information about innumerable authors and subjects that survive nowhere else in ancient literature. I’m the last person to argue that one needs a Ph.D. to be able to write intelligently about ancient history. I certainly don’t have one, and I like to think that my work is worth reading. But a passing familiarity with the methodology of archaeology and historiography would certainly seem an important prerequisite for claiming startling new interpretations of prehistory that would overturn centuries of carefully scholarly work.
So, I took a look at the talking heads on Ancient Aliens to see how their background prepared them to critically evaluate the past two centuries’ worth of archaeological research, including changing theoretical frameworks and methodology. Ancient astronaut theorists (AATs) are constantly telling us that by reading mythology, they can intuit hidden truths about ancient history, namely that aliens came to visit. I thought it would be instructive to look at this process in action in the ancient astronaut theory and also in an actual scholarly theory that revolutionized mythological studies 80 years ago this year.
I don't usually highlight the nasty, ugly comments and email I regularly receive from defenders of alternative theories, but today I'm making an exception because my faithful correspondent makes important points that I would like to discuss. In my review of Ancient Aliens S04E02, I noted that talking head Sean-David Morton was listed as a PhD, and on his website he claimed to hold that degree from a Canadian school whose name matches no institution in Canada. After doing some research, I discovered that the school he most likely attended, the International Institute of Integral Human Sciences, is not accredited in Canada to award doctorates. Therefore, I invited Mr. Morton to provide documentation of his degree, which, should it be real, is a relatively simple task.
Instead, I received a stream of invective from either Morton or his defenders, which, sadly enough, seems to be a regular occurrence when writing about Mr. Morton, the criminal fraud charges pending against him, and the failed lawsuit he launched against another of his critics. Let's take a look at some of the comments. Warning: GRAPHIC language. In the 1970s Hugh Harleston Jr. mapped Teotihuacan and declared that after identifying a standard unit of measurement equal to 1.059 m, he had found that selected monuments at Teotihuacan formed a precise scale model of the universe, including Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. (Pluto, of course, is no longer considered a planet, and other micro-planets have since been discovered that are larger than Pluto.) The key, though, was the “selected” set of monuments, selected to conform to a predetermined framework and which later work mapping the site has discredited. I wonder if he would have still noted the “Pluto” mound if he started his research after Pluto was no longer a planet. This is how our mental frameworks shape our ideas.
The screen grab below from Ancient Aliens illustrates how alternative theorists view the correlation. As faithful readers of this blog know, alternative historians and ancient astronaut theorists insist that "ancient texts" should be used as a primary source because their claims, no matter how outrageous, must be closer to the truth than modern, blinkered interpretations allow. But what happens when the "ancient texts" tell us that the modern interpretation is right?
Nothing fascinates alternative theorists more than Egypt, and the process of mummification has been attributed to a range of bizarre ideas, including but not limited to imitating cryogenic freezing and preserving DNA samples for the aliens to use in their experiments. But the "ancient texts" make plain that the mummification issue was well-understood in Antiquity. Maurus Servius Honoratus, a fourth century grammarian, in his commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid at 3.67 writes: “[T]he wise Egyptians took care to embalm their bodies, and deposit them in catacombs, in order that the soul might be preserved for a long time in connection with the body, and might not soon be alienated; while the Romans, with an opposite design, committed the remains of their dead to the funeral pile, intending that the vital spark might immediately be restored to the general element, or return to its pristine nature” (trans. James Crowles Prichard). So, there you have it: The "ancient texts" so beloved of ancient astronaut theorists tell us that the standard explanation for mummies is in fact correct. Don't look for this ancient text on your favorite ancient astronaut/alternative history website anytime soon. |
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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