John Anthony West: Public "Exults" When Academics Don't Have the Answers to Ancient Mysteries

The Disinformation Company, a publisher of conspiracy theories, has recently released a new edition of its Disinformation Guide to Ancient Aliens, Lost Civilizations, Astonishing Archaeology, and Hidden History. The first edition was published in 2005 and was unread by me, coming as it did just after I had finished writing The Cult of Alien Gods and four years before the rise of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. The book collects a series of essays by luminaries in the field of alternative history, including Michael Cremo, John Anthony West, Erich von Däniken, Robert Schoch, and many more.

Not that this is particularly relevant, but in the interest of disclosure, Disinformation rejected a book proposal from me several years ago (before I was known for debunking) for a book that would have been a journalistic (i.e. not necessarily skeptical) account of the alternative history movement. I believe just about every publisher has rejected at least one of my proposals, so it’s not particularly shocking or anything I hold against them personally.

The volume begins with Michael Cremo expressing his anger at the academic establishment for proposing and defending a Darwinist “paradigm” that refuses to allow for his Krishna-inspired concept that humanity “devolved” (with its reverse-teleological assumptions) from pure Krishna-consciousness to base matter. Summarizing his earlier work, the article concludes by suggesting that prayer and meditation can free our “pure” consciousness from matter, and that this is the purpose of life. Cremo thus reveals that his Forbidden Archaeology is not about science but faith, that he needs reality to conform to his spiritual vision so he can join Krishna in the sky.

The tone of anger with academia continues in the second essay, by John Anthony West, who has become ever-more-strident in his hatred of the ivory tower. Consider the very first words of his essay, which was written for the 2005 edition: “Academics abhor a mystery the way nature abhors a vacuum, yet in nature there are no vacuums, while in academia there are many mysteries. In no field of science or scholarship are there more (or more glaring) mysteries than in Egyptology. Yet, at the same time, there is no field in which mysteries are more systematically denied.”

Again, full disclosure: When I tried asking questions of West a decade ago, he immediately accused me of working “to trash whoever and whatever does not correspond to your foregone conclusions” and refused to speak with me forever after.

In his essay, West next complains that Egyptologists agree on “everything except the most insignificant details,” especially their insistence that the pyramids of Giza and Dashur were tombs built in historic times. That other pyramids were tombs he does not dispute, but these are different because… I guess because he likes them best. But the mysticism is secondary to West’s real problem: people with degrees who act like studying something professionally means they might know something more than he does. Worse, they’re probably nasty atheists anyway:

No doubts ruffle the calm, smooth surface of Lake Consensus, that bottomless pool where the Church of Progress’ (un)faithful go for solace, baptism and to pledge undying allegiance to the Great God Status Quo. (This act of intellectual servitude is called, in the quaint terminology particular to their Church, “critical thinking,” and sometimes even “reason.”)

There are plenty of disputes in Egyptology. Taking a look at the academic literature that West so forcefully disdains, I found disputes over whether ancient Egypt had private ownership of land, the degree to which modern economic theory applies to Egyptian economics, the exact chronology of Egyptian history (which would be a pretty big deal), the degree of influence of ancient Egypt outside the Nile valley, etc. But these are mere “details” about how untold thousands of people lived and worked in the past, not the “bigger” picture of what one specific building and one statue were used for. It is almost as though he does not care at all about the people who live among the stones...

He goes on for several more paragraphs about his anger about academics and his joy that a “vast public” is ready to reject academia, and, “indeed, exults in their discomfiture when unwelcome facts breach the walls of their fortified ivory towers.” He praises the media for presenting “heretical” ideas but bemoans “organized debunkers” for pressuring the media through an “intellectual inquisition,” offering thanks that today we no longer allow churches to torture people for their beliefs. Otherwise, he implies, he would not be spared the rack. Hilariously, he further complains that the “loony” theories of Erich von Däniken (whose essay sits in this book with his own) get more media attention than “serious” heresies because the public he just praised are too dim to appreciate West’s favorite alternative ideas, preferring aliens and other ideas that require no “rigorous scholarship.” The irony is spackled on rather thick.

West, however, seems trapped in a weird paradigm of his own, where the scholarship of Victorian social Darwinists is taken at face value. The Victorians assumed that human cultures moved from savagery through barbarism to full-on civilization in a linear way. This hasn’t been the accepted model of social evolution for more than a century, and yet West tilts at windmills, complaining that scholars insist on viewing Egypt as one long decline from the Old Kingdom to the Roman era instead of a series of peak and troughs. (No, he does not see a contradiction there because scholars also allegedly ignore the miraculous popping into existence of Egypt in mere “centuries”—the nerve!)  Has he read a modern history of ancient Egypt? That’s exactly how Egypt is described in the rather standard Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. West also accuses Egyptologists (who, remember, are supposedly insular dogmatists) of viewing Egyptian history as a “dry run for Greece” and thus through step-by-step progress to our incrementally improving World of Tomorrow. He believes scholars view human history as linear and heading in one direction—up.

Aside from being meaningless (what of the Bronze Age collapse, the Middle Ages, or any consideration of non-Western cultures?), it implies a teleological worldview incompatible with modern scholarship on the interactions between civilizations. It also suggests that dogmatic academics worship “progress” as an inevitable force, one West wants to replace with regression, an endless spiritual decline from Atlantis on down to sinful, miserable us. But what is “progress”? West wants us to reject social, political, and technological complexity as proxies for this nebulous “progress” but he won’t say what we should use instead. The implication—unstated—is that we should be looking at morality and spirituality as proxy for progress. In the past, of course, when humans sacrificed each other in unspeakable ways and institutionalized rape as pleasing to the gods, we were all much more moral and spiritually in tune with the universe. “Progress” and “regression” are not inherent qualities of civilization, nor does every aspect of a culture rise and fall at the same time or the same rate. Rome made great progress (from our perspective) on citizenship and rights during its gradual political and military decline.

As if to contradict himself and confirm my last point, in this essay West refers to the “advances” of science in our time and improved attitudes toward torture in the Western world since early modern times.

West next expresses bafflement that “Microsoft Word’s in-PC thesaurus” gives legend and falsehood as synonyms for myth but does not offer falsehood or legend as synonyms for one another. He apparently is not particularly aware that words can have more than one meaning, and “myth” has the older meaning of legend (well, it’s more complex, but let’s just go with that) and a newer meaning of falsehood. Just as a sole can be part of a shoe or a fish, the two meanings need not be identifiable with one another. Also: Microsoft Word thesaurus? Sigh.

West complains that “Victorians” made myths into lies through skepticism (though this grossly oversimplifies things) and that the succeeding Cambridge School ratified this (which even more grossly falsifies the myth-and-ritual hypothesis), but today (again with that unexpected progress!) scholars recognize the “profound” meaning in myths. He claims, without evidence, that myths encode not just astronomy and history but also genetics. No, I have no idea how.

Following this, West lies about Plato, claiming that he (a) proposed a series of five ages of man (gold down to iron) and (b) assigned these to a period of exactly 25,920 years. First, Plato proposed no such thing but rather referenced Hesiod’s ages of man in discussing the three types of souls (gold, silver, and bronze) in the Republic. Plato said nothing about 25,920 years, nor did anyone in the Platonic school. The number does not derive, as West says, from mystically significant multiples of six and twelve but rather from the (not-quite-true) approximation of the precession of the equinoxes as taking 72 years to travel one degree of arc, making 25,920 years for a full 360 degree circle of the sky. Sadly, the real number is closer to 71.6, which gives us the much less mystical 25,776 years. (Astronomers use 25,774 because 71.6 is also an approximation.) These are modern numbers. The closest approximation prior to Newton was a medieval Arabic text, the Zij-i Ilkhani, which gave 51 arc seconds per year, totaling 25,411 years for the full cycle. No known text prior to this gives anything close. West is confusing the Platonic “perfect year” from the Timaeus with the precession of the equinoxes, even though the Platonic “perfect year” referred to the time needed for sun, moon, and stars (in daily rotation, not revolution over eons) to all return to where they were at a given point. Ah, but that is that whole “rigorous scholarship” problem again...

West concludes by taking swipes at George W. Bush (which even in 2005 must have seemed bitter and mean enough to turn off whatever chunk of this book’s audience are not also political liberals), claiming Bush’s alleged mental failings were evidence that we have entered the End Times, the Kali Yuga of Hindu myth. Further evidence comes in the allegedly unprecedented violence recorded in newspapers of the day, which—honestly—is nothing compared to, say, the era between 1914 and 1945, or the period of the Thirty Years’ War. But since all alternative history has become a substitute spirituality, he offers tips on how to reverse the Kali Yuga and restart civilization, beginning with channeling “creative” energy (rather than negative academic study) to change things “in a hurry,” which contradicts everything the ancient texts said about the inevitability of cyclical time and instead tells us again that alternative history is not about ancient facts but about modern feelings, and a longing for a lost spiritual component of life that somehow the Enlightenment, Darwin, and “academics” have destroyed. Stop thinking and start feeling the truth!

It’s truly amazing the nasty language and utter vitriol alternative types spew when they think no one but their loyal fans are reading or listening. I don’t know if I can bring myself to read more of these essays. They make my head hurt.