Midweek Roundup: Lovecraft, Nephilim, Racism, & More!

H. P. Lovecraft is coming to television. The Hollywood Reporter says that Romark Entertainment and Markerstone Pictures have purchased the rights to the comic book Herald, which follows the adventures of Nikola Tesla and Lovecraft as they travel through time to battle Mythos monsters. No network or air date has yet been announced. I guess it makes sense, in a way, since Tesla famously thought that he was in communication with space aliens when he heard odd beeping in a radio signal. 

Meanwhile, Jennifer Raff has published a blog post calling on the publishers of American Antiquity to release their special section of reviews on pseudo-archaeology to the public as open access content. As she notes, it completely defeats the purpose of creating a section devoted to public engagement if the public can’t access the material due to it being locked in print format, locked behind an online paywall, or on a 2-3 year delay before hitting JSTOR. “Opening up these reviews is a critical part of the outreach efforts by the authors, which will otherwise be largely wasted.” While part of the purpose of those reviews was to reach archaeologists who might be unaware of popular perceptions, as editor Donald Holly wrote in his introduction to the reviews, he had intended them to give “the silent and curious majority” of interested laymen access to professional perspectives on pseudo-archaeology claims, something that can’t happen if interested people don’t know the material is in the journal, or can’t access it. As it stands, the reviews will be most influential in about three years, when college students searching for pseudo-history titles in JSTOR finally see them.

This kind of material certainly needs to be available to the public where they can find it. This afternoon, the Rev. Dante Fortson, a Nephilim theorist whom you will remember from my piece about him last year, informed me that he has created a presentation on “101 Facts That Prove Nephilim Giants Existed” and posted it online this morning. Most of the “evidence” is old newspaper stories of giant bones and examples of ancient art done in hieratic scale, where more important people are drawn larger than less important ones. Fortson takes this as proof of literal giants, and he told me that the page has received more than 1,000 hits per hour since it went online this morning. Try getting 1,000 people per day or even week to read American Antiquity.

Finally today, BoingBoing.com published an article by Robert Balkovich tracing the white supremacist ideology behind various facets of the New Age movement, particularly the Theosophical material that fed into the ancient astronaut theory. “From Blavatsky to Ancient Aliens, there’s is a long history of new age belief opening the door to racist ideology. This is a problem not just with individual practitioners, but with philosophies at the core of the movement.” I would differ from Balkovich only in noting that as Ancient Aliens tries to find enough material to fill out eight seasons they have added more involvement between aliens and white people, though even then it is more often in the realm of collaboration than tutelage as it is with non-white people.

Much of this will be familiar to readers of this blog, but he offers an interesting examination of the way Victorian scientific racism, particularly the imperialist-colonialist ideology of a natural hierarchy of races, became inseparable from the pseudo-history and pseudoscience it influenced. Thus, we read of Madame Blavatsky setting the Aryan race atop the pyramid of races, the most developed and intelligent, and her offshoot, Alice Bailey, decrying African people as animalistic and childlike as late as 1942 in her Treatise on the Seven Rays (Esoteric Psychology vol. 2): “These are child souls, and though the mental equipment is there and some of them can be trained to use it, the preponderance of the life emphasis is entirely upon physical activity as it is motivated by the desire for satisfaction of some kind…” As opposed to white people, who are only happy when they are dissatisfied? You know, white people problems.

Bailey, writing in 1942, also decried the Jews and the “Jewish problem,” even as Hitler was planning a Final Solution. In her discussion of the Jewish Problem, Bailey makes recourse to the Pillars of Wisdom from the Watchers myth (cited in the same passages as the “fall of the angels”), in its late recension in Masonic lore where she seems to have confused or conflated them with the two pillars of Solomon’s Temple. She wrote that “the clue to the problem is to be found back in the very night of time and, literally, when the sun was in the constellation Gemini.  At that time the two pillars were set up which, as all Masons know, are two great landmarks in Masonry.  Hence the Jewish colouring of all the Masonic work, though it is not Jewish in the sense that that word conveys today.” She accused the Jews of being under the influence of the “third ray” in her astrological system, which governs ego: “Because of this third ray influence, you have the tendency of the Jew to manipulate forces and energies, and to ‘pull strings’ in order to bring about desired ends. As a race, they are natural law makers, and hence their tendency to dominate and govern, because their egoic ray is the first.”

She goes on to say that the Jews are an accidental offshoot of the original Atlantean race, which is the original founding race of Freemasonry, but she praises the Jews for producing “our greatest men” and for being so perniciously segregationist that they alone have preserved their racial purity from the intermarriage of the other branches of the Atlantean race. Her solution to the “Jewish problem” is different than Hitler’s: She wants to assimilate them out of existence by promoting intermarriage to restore the unity of the original race of Atlantis!