Last night H2 ran an America Unearthed marathon. This is not news, but what is interesting is that I could tell (a) when it aired and (b) what episodes they showed from the comments that immediately started springing up on my blog. This deep level of interest fascinates me because the network shows Ancient Aliens much more yet I almost never receive an uptick in blog comments corresponding to repeat showings of Ancient Aliens. For some reason, people watching America Unearthed are much more interested in seeking out others’ opinions about the show and sharing their own outrage at its abuses or love of its attempt to create an alternative to mainstream history. While the comments were the usual mixture of rationalists looking to see if someone had called out the show’s lies and believers accusing me of close-minded dogmatism and a vendetta against Scott Wolter (whom, I remind you, I have never met), I was thoroughly disheartened by this comment, in response to the “Chamber Hunting” episode: I am sorry to say that I wasted time reading the first several paragraphs of this article. When was there some unwritten rule passed that anything you see on tv needs to be real. This is for entertainment, not a college thesis. Nothing you see on television is real, down to the crowds at award shows or tv specials. I’m not sure I can add anything helpful here. The combination of fashionable cynicism and anti-elitism would be shocking were it not so common. The cynic argues that TV is not just capable of lies but composed primarily of them, and apparently should be, for “entertainment” is by definition the opposite of “information.” Worse, “entertainment” is what we give to the public, while facts are reserved for academics. But what gets my goat is the unstated assumption that the viewer does not deserve facts or truth, and that the viewer not only expects but requires lies. At least, then, the defender of America Unearthed recognizes it isn’t true.
It is precisely this uneasy blending of fact and fiction—along with the assumption that the masses can neither tell the difference nor care to—that underlies Theo Paijmans’s new article in the current edition of the Fortean Times, in which he plugs his new book Behind the Vril Society (Kroll, Aug. 2013), which I take to be a repudiation of his 2008 book The Vril Society, published by David Childress’s Adventures Unlimited. The 2008 book—unread by me—claimed in its book description to expose the inner workings of the Vril Society, an alleged order of occultists who pulled the strings in Nazi Germany. While I can find the older book listed on various databases, I can’t find anyone who has actually read it, which suggests to me that it was never actually published, perhaps due to Paijman’s new discoveries. [Note: In the comments below Paijmans cites a 2003 French-language article, also unread by me, in which he says he first discussed the material from his current article. I do not know how that fits in with the 2008 book, unless, as I suspected before, the book description is a lie. Note, too, that in the paragraph below, Paijmans felt that I implied he plagiarized his article, while I was trying to be helpful by giving readers a link to where they could get the same information if they don't subscribe to Fortean Times.] As Paijmans now claims in his Fortean Times article (whose information duplicates, nearly point for point, Wikipedia’s “Vril” article for those of you who don’t get the Fortean Times), this group never existed and was a product of the postwar imagination, invented by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in Morning of the Magicians (1960), and from whose non-historical speculation all later claims emerge. Nevertheless, esoteric Neo-Nazis and alternative historians continue to promulgate the belief that vril was real. As I have discussed more than once before, vril was invented by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in The Coming Race (1871) and then picked up by Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophists, from whom it is transferred to Bergier and Pauwels. As I discussed before, Blavatsky’s role in this mess is extremely interesting—in ways Paijmans shortchanges in the Fortean Times article—because she essentially tried to subsume all of science fiction into Theosophy by claiming that science fiction writers connected, though only partially, to the esoteric forces she communicated with more fully (through fictional Ascended Masters and non-existent ancient texts). As she wrote in the Secret Doctrine: “Our best modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams […] [T]he clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity.” (L. Ron Hubbard would later claim the same powers, and also claim science fiction writers had a partial and faulty race memory of ancient wonders.) In this, Blavatsky began to destabilize the distinction between science and science fiction, between history and mythology—something also seen in the contemporary claims for the reality of Atlantis—and thus, a century early, inaugurated what would become postmodernism’s attack on the authority of science. Theosophy may have presented itself as the only authoritative combination of science and metaphysics, but at its core, it was a magical worldview that undermined science while acting in its name, dissolving the barriers between fact and fiction, truth and lies, and setting the stage for the 1960s revival of the same in the name of the New Age. Morning of the Magicians, as a resurrection and amplification of the Secret Doctrine by way of paranoid fantasy, is thus the most influential book of its era (giving rise to Chariots of the Gods, among others) as well as the single book more responsible than any other for creating the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical, conspiracy-mindset that passes today for popular history.
21 Comments
CFC
6/27/2013 09:19:44 am
It's a relief to know that curious viewers can find the mass of evidence you've put together on Wolter’s methods at this site.
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Dave Lewis
6/27/2013 06:44:25 pm
I read The Coming Race years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it even though it didn't start with "It was a dark and stormy night...."
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6/28/2013 08:14:41 am
I do not understand the statement on Atlantis. It is too easy to say that Atlantis is just fiction. Taking Plato *literally* leads to fiction (as well as with many serious historians ...). The key question is: Did Plato himself mean it as a fiction - or is it a distorted historical tradition and he really believed it as he pretends? This is not so easy to answer. Therefore, Atlantis is a bad example when it comes to science fiction and novels.
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Varika
6/28/2013 11:41:52 am
Your reply is a perfect example, in my opinion, of what Jason means about the lines blurring. Atlantis only shows up in two PLAYS written by Plato, originally. Even if he was drawing on an older oral tradition--and there is no evidence of that--the plays are fiction. No one quotes Shakespeare as a reliable source for historic events, even when he wrote plays about events we KNOW took place, like the assassination of Julius Caesar. Even when there were real people who existed, both writers put whatever words they wanted in the mouths of those people on paper.
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6/28/2013 01:52:40 pm
Try asking why the same people who want to read Atlantis as real somehow don't think much of Panchaea, an equally fictitious lost continent that Euhemerus also presented as a historical reality. The answers can be quite instructive. 6/29/2013 01:52:08 am
@Varika & Jason Colavito: 6/29/2013 01:52:23 am
@Varika & Jason Colavito: 6/29/2013 01:53:10 am
@Varika & Jason Colavito:
Varika
6/29/2013 06:08:26 pm
Thorwald, I don't dispute Plato as an amazing source for philosophy. However, the frameworks he used were still not a reliable historical source in any sense of the word. And yes, I still maintain that you have no way of knowing if anything stated by the characters in the dialogues came out of the mouths of real people or out of Plato's mind--if anything, that he was trying to convey a personal philosophical viewpoint makes it MORE likely, not less, that some or all of what was put on paper was his own words for his own ideas. 6/30/2013 03:24:29 am
@Varika: 6/30/2013 03:28:18 am
Thorwald, I can't agree with you that Plato's Timaeus and Critias fail to work if Atlantis were fictional; nor can I agree that political theory cannot be illustrated with fiction. Immediately Utopia comes to mind. By your logic, it sounds like you'd also be asking us to believe Utopia was a real place. 6/30/2013 03:40:38 am
@JasonColavito:
Paul Cargile
6/30/2013 05:47:22 am
If Atlantis was a real place and as magnificent as Plato asserts, it is reasonable to believe there would have been other historical references to it by those that lived near it doing trade, those that attempted to invade it, and or those that were invaded and conquered by it.
RLewis
6/28/2013 01:50:38 pm
...just my 2-cents worth for why you receive many more posts for AU vs AA.
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Paul Cargile
6/29/2013 03:18:11 am
What is interesting is the absurd claim that because something on television is deemed entertainment, its content cannot be refuted or rebutted. It most certainly can and should.
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Theo Paijmans
7/2/2013 08:23:30 am
Jason,
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7/2/2013 11:41:33 pm
Theo, my apologies on the publisher name. I will fix that, of course. That was an oversight on my part.
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6/29/2016 05:52:29 pm
Bulwer-Lytton did not "invent" Vril. The term was first used by Jacolliot, as noted in "The Morning of the Magicians," by Willey Ley, when interviewed by the authors, who also did not get it "passed down" from Blavatsky. Your timeline is full of incorrect assumptions about several books you have never read. It's most likely you have not read Paijman's book for the same reasons I have not - it was never published, he claims it will be this year, but still has not seen a bookshelf, despite having been issued an ISBN and cover art over 8 years ago. In fact, should it ever be published, the tag-line "over two decades of research" will have to be replaced with "over three..." As far as the existence of the group, I'll leave you to ponder the notion that no such group has ever gone by one name alone, as "a rose by any other name..." You apparently haven't ever researched anything other than the word "Vril" and only read the Wiki and related shallow summaries. If I'm wrong in that assumption, my apologies, but that is the result of the impression this article leaves me with.
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Peter
6/30/2016 01:21:06 am
Sounds like you should write a book or article concerning Vril etc. That would be interesting.
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6/30/2016 11:30:14 pm
Same here Peter, regarding Paijmans - I even called his publisher, who claimed no knowledge as to why the book was never published 8 years ago...I did write about it, a bit, in my first book, "Sound's Good! The Spiritual Science of Sound & Vibration," which I published in 2014. "Those who know don't say, and those who say don't know," the saying goes, and so I don't say much. I will say that I do own and have read Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine," also "The Morning of the Magicians," and "The Coming Race" and other Bulwer-Lytton works. As well as much more, including Paijman's "John Worrel Keely - Free Energy Pioneer," which I highly recommend. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that he would finally publish the "Vril Society" book, in June 2016, but June is pretty much over and no sign of it yet. He also says that the startling truth is that they DON'T exist, which is not at all surprising that he would say that. Perhaps the book fell into the same hole as Jonathan Winters' "non-existent" video disclosing the location of the base in South America. After that History Channel episode Paijman's did, with that alleged "historian" Michael something - I mean ugh...anyway...As an author, Paijmans has already taken a similar career turn as Winters, so, again, not surprising, albeit disappointing. Understandable though, as I too have been advised to NOT publish a book on the subject, and though it's already written, I won't be publishing it, at least until I'm certain that the timing is right. Since apparently no one here has read it, in "The Secret Doctrine," Blavatsky stated that "The world is not yet ready for Keely's Vril." I asked Dale Pond, who continues his work, if now, 100 years later, is the world ready? "I don't know," he solemnly replied, but I knew he meant, "Not most of it." So we'll just keep it to ourselves, for now. Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
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