I know many of you are waiting for Cthulhu in World Mythology, and I know the publisher said it would be out today. No, I do not know why it is not yet available. I asked the publisher for information, but as of this writing I have not yet heard back. I will let you know as soon as I have more information.
Since it’s Halloween today, I thought I’d share a few links to some articles in my Library about horror and the supernatural.
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Before we begin today, I’d like to ask for your help. Last year I put out an edition of Cory’s Ancient Fragments, which has sold poorly because the printer I used was much more expensive than my current one. Also, in the last year I’ve learned a lot about bookmaking. So, I’m reformatting it for a paperback (and possibly) eBook release at a much lower price. In doing this, it got me thinking about Karl Müller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum and its descendants, Felix Jacoby’s still-incomplete Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker and Robert Fowler’s Early Greek Mythography. These books have become such standard references for fragments of ancient texts that most scholars no longer cite the original texts from which the fragments are drawn—which is a pain the neck if you don’t happen to live near a library that stocks Fowler’s or Jacoby’s really expensive books.
Review of Ancient Aliens S06E05 "The Satan Conspiracy," in Which TV Tells Us to Worship Satan10/29/2013 So that happened. I think my TV just told me to fall down and worship Satan. So, um, hail Satan?
Just two weeks after Ancient Aliens devoted an hour to telling us that the rebel angels who fell from heaven during Satan’s insurrection were evil aliens who corrupted the human genome and nefariously plot to control the world, this episode tells us that their traditional leader, Satan, is a pretty cool dude who just wants us to be happy and really cares about us. That’s right, Ancient Aliens has done a full Aleister Crowley and is embracing Satan as humanity’s true hero! Tonight Ancient Aliens is going in search of “The Satan Conspiracy” and will attempt to argue that Satanists have it right, that Satan is misunderstood, and that he was a heroic alien freedom fighter trying to help humanity against the evil Yahweh-Elohim-Anunnaki. This will be quite a trick to pull off since Satan traditionally leads the Fallen Angels, whom the show christened evil gods just two weeks ago. But at least it goes toward proving my point that the ancient astronaut theory is intimately tied to religion.
This, in turn, brings me to today’s topic: A bizarre religious documentary about ancient aliens and how they are really fallen angels who are hiding in our DNA. The Spooksville book series covered everything from monsters to Atlantis and Lemuria to extraterrestrial invasions across its 24 volumes. Since no one else apparently wrote anything about The Hub network’s new TV adaptation of Spooksville, based on the children’s book series by Christopher Pike (unread by me), which premiered last night, I thought I’d give a brief notice to this modern, more Gothic Eerie, Indiana. The latter show was one of my favorites when I was ten years old (so much so that I still remember it two decades later), so it would be nice for kids today to have something similar. If Spooksville isn’t quite as instantly memorable as Eerie, Indiana, it is a cut above some of its competitors in the teen-oriented horror series landscape.
Atlantis S01E05 “White Lies” is what we might term a “bridge” episode. Nothing really happens, and it exists primarily to move from the plot of episodes 1-4 to whatever comes next in episode 6. To that end, it was less a story than a chunk of exposition grafted on to a halfhearted attempt to make the vacuous and vacant Ariadne into an actual presence and an effort to set up more royal intrigues in that age-old British storytelling obsession: who will inherit the throne? Power politics make for good drama, I suppose, but the stakes are so low on Atlantis that it becomes hard to care who sits atop the Minoan throne since the king doesn’t seem to do very much other than pass judgment on peasants.
I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me talk about the connection between ancient astronauts and religious belief. However, I think it says something that many of the people who have been writing about ancient astronauts recently (as in the last day or two) are seeing the same things that I am, even if they don’t quite conceptualize it the same way that I do.
TV Guide’s Matt Roush called NBC’s Dracula “the worst Dracula ever,” which is something of a stretch for anyone who has ever seen the 2006 BBC TV-movie in which the vampire becomes a symbol for syphilis and only religious puritanism can stop the sexually-transmitted scourge. However, the new series (a co-production with Britain’s Sky Living) certainly ranks among the most oddball interpretations of Dracula I’ve yet seen—and I’ve seen Dracula 2000 (2001) in which the count is “really” Judas Iscariot.
Creationist Begs Ancient Astronaut Theorists to Embrace God, Not Demons Pretending to be Aliens10/25/2013 I hesitate to even bring up an open letter religious conservative Sam Weaver published on Wednesday in the conservative website Renew America, which bills itself as committed to the Founding Fathers’ (alleged) biblical principles, since many readers dislike even a hint of political ideology or meaning in the context of alternative history theories, as though interpretations of the past can be divorced from the context in which they are proposed and in which they function. However, Weaver’s discussion provides another perspective on the rivalry and similarity between ancient astronaut theories and the biblical creationism (and/or intelligent design) movement.
New Book Claims Kensington Rune Stone Is Part of an Elaborate Freemason Numerological Code and Hoax10/24/2013 Paul G. Stewart has released a new book, the first in a series, in which he attempts to solve the mystery of the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS) by proposing that it and several other disputed artifacts, including the Bat Creek Stone, and even accepted artifacts like the Phaistos Disk, are all the work of a Freemason hoaxer he dubs “The Enigmatist.” Stewart claims that he was able to deduce the handiwork of this hoaxer through numerology, discovering a set of rules drawn from Masonic writings that unlock a hidden code across all of these artifacts.
Stewart provided me with a copy of the complete multi-volume book in August, but I have waited to write about it until Stewart officially released the first volume this week. |
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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