Remember the myth of the lost white race of Mound Builders? It’s currently en vogue thanks the resurgence of white supremacist and white nationalist thinking among racists emboldened by the coarsening public discourse encouraged by the Trump campaign. Never one to miss a cultural moment, on Columbus Day here in America—a day Native Americans protest as honoring the destruction of their culture—Graham Hancock announced on his blog yesterday that he plans to overcome the relatively disappointing sales of last year’s Magicians of the Gods by exploring whether North America’s Native American mounds were actually the work of his lost ancient civilization, the one that he identified in both Magicians and its predecessor, Fingerprints of the Gods, as “white.”
36 Comments
As the Trump campaign reeled from the videotape of Trump appearing to brag about being able to commit sexual assault without consequence, Wikileaks attempted to staunch the bleeding by releasing emails from Clinton advisor John Podesta, which U.S. officials believe were hacked on orders from the Russian government as part of an effort to influence the American election. Included in those emails (whose authenticity is likely but not yet confirmed as of this writing) is one from last year in which onetime Apollo astronaut and Ancient Aliens pundit Edgar Mitchell warned Podesta, a UFO enthusiast, about what the space aliens, or Extraterrestrial Intelligences, as he called them, plan to do:
Erich von Däniken has always been an opportunist. When authors across Europe and North America started writing about prehistoric UFO sightings in the 1950s and 1960s, he repackaged their work as Chariots of the Gods. When Christian conservatism came into flower in the years around 1980, he proposed to prove religion true with Miracles of the Gods. When “alternative archaeologists” like Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock revived Atlantis and pyramid mysteries in the 1990s, EVD latched on with The Eyes of the Sphinx. Last year, EVD caught the odor of Freemason conspiracy wafting up from the corpse of America Unearthed and the rantings of writers like Jim Marrs, and he produced The End of the Silence, a book I wasn’t aware of until this week but which (falsely) suggests in its book description and opening lines that it will reveal the unknown truths of the world’s secret societies, the organizations that run the world on behalf of space aliens. From the book description:
Alternative Historians Unite to Claim Wadi-al-Jarf Papyri Do Not Prove Khufu Built the Great Pyramid10/8/2016 Last week, marijuana enthusiast Preston Peet, formerly of High Times magazine and the editor of the Disinformation Guide to Ancient Aliens, etc., published an article on Graham Hancock’s website attempting to discredit the recent announcement that a cache of texts found in Egypt documented construction work on the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. Peet sits in an uncomfortable position where he wishes to discredit archaeological evidence in favor of medieval Arabic pyramid myths—but only the portions of which that support Graham Hancock’s lost civilization hypothesis.
I am constantly amazed at the way Zecharia Sitchin’s ideas have so seeped into fringe culture that they appear in unexpected places. Today’s case in point is this bizarre rendering of a legend associated with Mt. Shasta in California from Dustin Naef, the author of two forthcoming books about the mountain and a one-time guest on a Travel Channel “mysteries” show. Here is how Naef presents the story in a recent Ancient Origins piece:
New Book Claims Carl Sagan Was an Ancient Astronaut Theorist Badgered by Government into Silence10/6/2016 Yesterday a man named Donald L. Zygutis contacted me to try to interest me in his upcoming book The Sagan Conspiracy from New Page Books. The title, to be published in November, argues that Carl Sagan was secretly a believer in the ancient astronaut theory and that the Pentagon and NASA conspired to suppress Sagan’s ancient astronaut research and use him as an anti-ancient-astronaut propagandist. Here is part of the book description:
Jacques de Mahieu's Daughter-in-Law Is Mad at Me for Reporting Facts about Jacques de Mahieu10/5/2016 Yesterday, an Argentine reflexologist named Marcela Baez Mansilla, who also goes by the names Marcela de de Mahieu or Marcela Baez Mansilla de de Mahieu, took issue with my reporting that the Franco-Argentinian scientific racist anthropologist Jacques de Mahieu had been associated with Nazism, and she took to Twitter to share her upset with Scott Wolter, the former television personality who used de Mahieu’s research in his book From Akhenaten to the Founding Fathers (2013). I guess it’s as good a time as any to discuss why Jacques de Mahieu is not an unbiased source of information about Aryan conquest of the ancient Americas.
Are McMansions the New Haunted Houses? Evaluating a Flawed Argument about Why Some Houses Are Scary10/4/2016 Yesterday I read a very interesting but flawed argument in Slate magazine about the origin of haunted houses. Timed to the upcoming Halloween festivities, the article is an excerpt from the new book Ghostland by Colin Dickey, and I disagree with his evaluation of where haunted houses come from, pretty much wholesale. And as somebody who literally wrote the book on the horror genre, I have more than a little experience with the sources from which Dickey draws his argument.
OK, it’s time to give up and go home. I know that Iraq is a third world country and that the Coalition Provisional Authority left its new government woefully unprepared to face the challenges of a post-occupation economic, political, and cultural recovery. Indeed, Iraq is full of problems, from the rise of the Islamic State to the influence of Iran and the desire of groups within the country to break away. But what on Earth possessed the country’s transportation minister to endorse the ancient astronaut theory?
I could have swornI talked before about French scholar Julien d’Huy’s claim that a computer program can prove that world mythology can be traced back to a single set of Paleolithic myths. But it turns out that I was mistaken. I actually covered the incredibly similar work of Jamie Tehrani of Durham University and Sara Graca Da Silva of Lisbon’s New University, who applied a computer program to try to use a linguistic analysis to determine the origins of myths and legends. D’Huy, who has followed a similar research program since 2012 and who proudly uses the same methodology, has a new article in Scientific American alleging that he can trace world mythology back to the Stone Age.
|
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
Enter your email below to subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my latest projects, blog posts, and activities, and subscribe to Culture & Curiosities, my Substack newsletter.
Categories
All
Terms & ConditionsPlease read all applicable terms and conditions before posting a comment on this blog. Posting a comment constitutes your agreement to abide by the terms and conditions linked herein.
Archives
April 2024
|