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Many Americans believe that so-called ancient astronauts (visitors from outer space) were responsible for historical wonders like the pyramids. This entertaining and informative book traces the origins of such beliefs to the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The author takes the reader through fifty years of pop culture and pseudoscience highlighting such influential figures and developments as Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods), Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods), Zecharia Sitchin (Twelfth Planet), and the Raelian Revolution. The astounding and improbable connections among these various characters are revealed, along with the disturbing consequences of Lovecraft’s little joke for modern science and public knowledge. The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture
A solid look at the ancient astronaut theory that tries to demonstrate that this was directly inspired by the stories of HP Lovecraft. It provides a summary of Lovecraft's influences and his writing career and the post-mortem trajectory of his body of work, from post pulp obscurity to it seeping into the mainstream. This is followed by a survey of the main currents in the ancient astronaut/alternative archeology field. This provides a handy critique of the main theories and lack of evidence thereof (and in Erich Von Daniken's case, outright fraud). The problem really comes trying to tie the two together- the main piece of evidence he uses is that the first popular work that pushed the idea of ancient astronauts was Louis Pauwles & Jacques Bergier's Morning Of The Magicians, two Frenchmen who had previously published a science fiction magazine that had published French translations of Lovecraft's work. He presents this as a smoking gun as proof that the whole idea of aliens visiting earth in the past as being inspired directly by Lovecraft.
However, he doesn't explore other ideas, such as the substitution of aliens into our folklore in general- they fulfill the same roles that fairies and demons did in the past- numerous people have pointed out the parallels with folklore (most notably in Jacques Vallee's Passport To Magonia), so it was inevitable that aliens would eventually be subsituted into creation myths. Also, he over looks other early influences that can't be linked to Lovecraft, such as Morris K. Jessop, who was one of the first proponents of the idea in the English language. He also overlooks the Shaver Mystery, which would have been an interesting parallel as a pulp story which people claimed were fact.
Another issue for me is that the ideas of the likes of Von Daniken, Stitchen et al just aren't very, well, Lovecratian- rather than the hideous cosmic indifference of Lovecraft's creations, most of the ancient astronaut theories postulate Jesus-like cosmic brothers that owe more to the 50s contactee movement.
So, all in, a good history of Lovecraft and his works and also the ancient astronaut movement, let down by some tenuous linkage and reasoning as circular as the authors he critiques in the book. A minor irritation is his contention that the popularity of books like Chariots Of The Gods represents the death of reason and is a symptom of the decline of civilisation, which is overstating things a bit, I feel. Weirdly, this again parallels the idea of a mythical golden age now past of the alternative archaeology lot- I'm not entirely sure when people were all reading proper archaeology and science books rather than entertaining whatever notions they found interesting. Still,despite it's flaws, it's very worth reading. Jason Colavito This book proposes the hypothesis that H P Lovecraft is the unwitting and accidental progenitor of the ancient astronaut theory. The author starts with a thorough review of Lovecraft, his creation of what it today called the Cthulhu Mythos, and his literary influences. He then proceeds to show how writers influenced by Lovecraft ended up influencing those who manufactured the ancient alien myth of modern pseudo-archeology.
I find the hypothesis plausible, especially as the author specifies it is not a direct causal link and that the ancient alien myth makers are largely unaware of Lovecraft’s influence. Lovecraft may be the first to identify aliens and ancient gods. If he isn’t, he is certainly the first who was widely read and influential.
Whether or not you find this argument credible, this book is - if nothing else - an excellent history of the ancient alien hypothesis. I’m not aware of another this good. It is written by someone who was a true believer at one point and has become convinced that the ancient alien hypothesis is so much bunk. Jason Colavito I've been to parties with this guy.
Well, not _this, guy, but this _guy_. They weren't pleasant. Heck, I think there are times when I might have been this guy. I try not to think of those times.
Jason Colavito has it all figured out. And, as it happens, it is the exact obverse of what he used to think. Except that it's all a conspiracy, all part of a seamless whole. It's just that the bad guys have changed. And instead of being on the brink of a new world, were on the edge of the Kali Yuga.
Colavito admits at the beginning of the book that he used to be an aficionado of the so-called ancient-astronaut theory. This is the idea that human evolution was spurred--if not started--by alien interventions. For fictional examples think of 2001 or the recent movie Prometheus. He watched all the pseudo-documentaries on the pseudo-learning cable channels. He read the books. He researched the subject on-line. And then he ran into one niggling inconsistency--at least this is how he explains it in the introduction--and decided based on that one exposure to overthrow his theory of life and embrace its opposite. The ancient-astronaut theory and alternative archeologies are all bunk; science is correct, the one and only path to truth. He want to college and studied anthropology (as well as journalism) to prove this fact to himself. He also came to embrace Jacques Barzun's book, from Dawn to Decadence, as his new vade mecum. He decided that the proliferation of alternative archeologies--and the efflorescence of other so-called pseudo-sciences--betokened not a new knowledge, but the collapse of the Enlightenment project. We are the New Rome, and this is the end of the cycle, a return to Romanticism. He says this process has repeated itself again and again throughout history, but never fleshes this out.
Which is about par for the course, with this book. Colavito is fond of making sweeping claims, not so much with making detailed or nuanced arguments.
His thesis here is that the ancient-astronaut theory is entirely attributable to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, who penned some famous weird stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Colavito is obsessive in tracking any link between later advocates of alternative archeology and Lovecraft, but does not ever bother to weight the importance of those links, Lots of people read Lovecraft, especially people interested in the outré: that doesn't mean they absorbed and expanded on his ideas. What Colavito actually discovered is that Lovecraft was a node in the translation of Theosophical--and, more generally, esoteric Christian--ideas into a more scientific vocabulary that often involved aliens and flying saucers.
Except that this isn't a discovery. It's a point that's been made repeatedly. And here Colavito makes his argument ad nauseum. Poor Lovecraft is left in October 1926, pen in hand, ready to write The Call of Cthulu for three chapters! Colavito goes on to describe various permutations of the alien genesis theory, taking time to point out all their foibles. But he doesn't do so as well as other books that cover the same ground, such as Curtis Peebles Watch the Sky! And he does not do so carefully, incessantly ignoring his sources insistence that Lovecraft was not their source, and thta other Theosophical-inflected traditions were more important. If you haven't been exposed to the argument that UFOlogy repackages a lot of nineteenth century religious revivalism in America, then perhaps the book will be interesting, Otherwise, it's a rehash, and not a very good one.
Colavito further argues that tis religious tradition is the new religion, replacing the Christianity that has been discredited, and heralding the return to a more Romantic, or religious, epoch. To make this claim, though, requires him over-emphasizing the importance of the flying saucer beliefs on actual practice, and completely ignoring the continued flourishing of Christianity, especially fundamentalist Christianity.
But that is only one of his many sins as a historian. In two pages he claims first that a French book had no influence because it was never translated--and, of course, all history is American--and then admitting that the ideas in the book were taken up by later authors. He assumes that there is some transcendental division between science and pseudo-science that has been extant since the birth of the Enlightenment, and that anyone who embraced, say, spiritualism, at any time, was necessarily anti-science. He reifies _everything_. Hence the 1980s were no0nonsense, and so there was no interest in flying saucers or alternative sciences. (Poor Ronald and Nancy Reagan, consulting their astrologer, get no respect.) The 1990s were New Age.
One gets the sense that most of Colavito's historical arguments are based on either brief forays into the literature (France's sense of identity was completely destroyed in World War II and had to be rebuilt from the ground up--by borrowing earlier elements?) or his own sense of things. Thus, Ithaca College would rank high on the list of most liberal cities in America (because that's where he went to college). Thus, political correctness corrupts educational institutions (because he resents his own schooling). Thus, the 1990s were New Age-y (because that's when he was interested in New Age subjects).
It is worth noting that the book is put out by Prometheus, a publisher associated with the skeptical movement of the 1970s. Such books, which read more like extended grad-school essays, do the publisher and the movement no service. The book could have been edited more tightly. The prose, though, is generally good--it's an easy read with especially large print. The citations and bibliography are limited. Jason Colavito Colavito's theory that the ancient aliens craze of the 20th century is all due to H P Lovecraft's fictional ideas is interesting and certainly possible, although it's impossible to prove something directly, as none of the true believers he contacts admit to it and there's no smoking gun. The similarities between Lovecraft's stories and some ancient aliens/lost civilization pseudohistorical theories is certainly startling. But the reader may occasionally suspect that Colavito is guilty of the same sin as folks like von Daniken: seeing connections where there is only loose correlation.
It's an interesting book and I enjoyed it until the last chapter. This is when Colavito diverges from his original thesis to lament the downfall of Western civilization. He sounds a lot like Lovecraft, when you come right down to it. Not as overtly racist and misogynist, but he still is crying over some mythical past where everyone was rational and accepted science and didn't believe kooky things. He is disturbed by the fact that there 192 sovereign governments by the end of the twentieth century, up from 55 in 1914. The fact is that this is the vastly the result of colonized countries gaining their independence from their colonizers, which seems like a weird thing to be upset about, unless you are really invested in colonialism and empire. Which, given his references to the end of the Roman empire, he seems to be.
He goes on to talk about western civilization entering a phase of terminal decadence per Barzun, and compares our society to the primitive fourteenth century as depicted in Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Society is violent, impulsive, childish. I can't argue with that; however, I do think it's a mistake to think it wasn't like this at other points in time. Complaining that the Victorian statesmen wouldn't have appeared unkempt just makes the author look peevish and disgruntled. The Victorians were hardly the pinnacle of society that we should try to emulate. One wonders if Colavito ever noticed that he's guilty of the same thing as so many of the people he writes about, looking back to an imaginary past that's so much better than the present.
Two quotes from the final chapter sum up my issues. The first: Every group was now entitled to its own history: black history, women's history, and gay history. There was no longer human history. Now this statement just reeks of entitled white boyitude. There is nary a spark of recognition that rise of things like black history came about because human history generally only focused on the accomplishments of the wealthy, the powerful, the generally white and male. Colavito comes pretty darn close to putting history that focuses on marginalized communities in the same bucket as Lemuria and Atlantis, and that did not sit well with me at all.
The second quote: [Lovecraft] considered his stories to be his art; to see Great Cthulhu, his embodiment of cosmic indifference, turned into a cuddly children's toy would likely have broken his heart. To which my knee jerk response was, boo fucking hoo. The fact that humanity has defanged said embodiment of cosmic indifference says a lot about our survival traits.
So, on the whole, I'd say it's a worthwhile read, if you are interested in conspiracy theories, weird religions, debunking assholes like von Daniken, and the like. But maybe skip the last chapter if you don't agree that women and brown people are leading to the decline of the West. Jason Colavito When naming the most influential American author of the 20th Century, many will mention Hemingway, Faulkner, Roth, Bellow, but few would mention H.P. Lovecraft, which however is a bit of a mistake as his influence on writers as diverse as King and Matheson to Borges and Eco is undeniable. The author of this book would go further and argue that Lovecraft and his ideas not only influenced the world of fiction but additionally gave rise to the surge of post-Second World War pseudoscience that today sees nearly half of Americans believing in the existence of extraterrestrials.
Colavito does a nice job of showing how Lovecraft (and those in the Lovecraft Circle that developed around his Cthulhu Mythos (and is still expanding even to this day)) borrowed from early Science Fiction (Verne and Wells) and mysticism (particularly Theosophy’s Madame Blavatsky) to create his extraterrestrial horror stories, which through post-WWII popularization, may have influenced the belief in “hidden history” or “ancient astronauts”. Colavito’s social history traces the fifty years of pop culture and pseudoscience highlighting such influential figures and developments as Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods (ancient astronauts)), Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods (lost civilizations and/or ancient astronauts), Zecharia Sitchin (Twelfth Planet (ancient astronauts with genetic tampering of proto-humans), David Hatcher Childress (ancient atomic wars as well as Tesla conspiracy theories), and the Raelian Revolution (of recent cloning scandal). The line he traces from Lovecraft to these figures seems clear in his presentation, though it would be much stronger with more work. The book reads like the beginning of thesis to book conversion. It also could do with better citations than it has. Nonetheless the book does serve as a tremendous resource for teachers who have to struggle against the extraterrestrial face of what essentially a racial Social Darwinist Creationism with the divine spark coming from spacemen rather than an always intervening God. Accordingly, it is recommended to those who teach ancient history, Anthropology, or Psychology.
Note: The reading of the sadly-OOP Peter Washington’s Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru is recommended before the reading of this book as it complements this book quite nicely.
Jason Colavito
Highly cathartic reading for someone who was quite taken with the Raëlian Revolution and its pseudoscience as a retort to Catholic Confirmation at the age of 14. Jason Colavito This is a fascinating look at the rise of the Ancient Aliens/Lost Civilization movement in the latter half of the 20th century, rooting back to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Jason Colavito gets into Lovecraft's influences and fiction, then traces his thoughts as they outlive him, build in Europe, and erupt during a time of social and cultural upheaval. His comparison of these various conspiracy theories to similarly dogmatic and anti-science strains of America Christianity is interesting, too. This is absolutely a must read. Though I don't share Colavito's pessimistic outlook on contemporary society, I don't argue with his points. But if you've spent any time on cable television in the last 25 years, or you've talked to people coming out of our contemporary educational system, you know that there's a distinct lack of critical thinking and understanding of logic in the general population (teaching the young what to think, not how to think). And that always breeds anti-science.
Anyway, for Lovecraft fans, this is one to read. And if you're interested in conspiracy theories, how they grow, and how to sniff 'em out, check this out. Jason Colavito This book is excellent on many levels. The author's knowledge of the history of horror literature is wonderful. While reading this book I had a renewed interest in all the classics: Lovecraft, Poe, etc. I had never realized the great extent to which the classics are still honored in modern horror. I also had not realized to what extent the classics are the basis for today's pseudo history and belief that aliens have visited us (or are still visiting us, in some cases).
I learned something new in every chapter and added a number of authors to my fiction Want to Read lists.
Jason Colavito Aliens have gripped the public consciousness since that day Kenneth Arnold saw the first sightings of the modern age in 1947. Along with the idea that man is not alone in the universe, the idea that these alien visitors are directly concerned with the wellbeing (whether for good or bad) of humanity has been a common theme as well. The idea that in ages past, earlier cultures were visited by extra-terrestrials who gave the earthlings culture and advanced technological and spiritual secrets has been promoted since the 1960s after the popular alternative archaeology book Chariot of the Gods? by Erik von Däniken and has been the subject of books and television programmes ever since.
With this background in the alternative archaeological theories of the late twentieth-century, Jason Colavito proposes that the ultimate genesis of the theory that extra-terrestrials visited earth long ago is in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. From the stories Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness and The Haunter of the Dark, Colavito traces the cult of alien gods throughout the twentieth century to the Sirius and Orion mysteries, the twelfth planet of Nibiru, and ultimately to the Raëlian Movement. The author provides an excellent overview of the trends in alternative archaeology and extra-terrestrial genesis yet is often rather dismissive (yet this can be accounted for first, by the sheer outlandishness and anti-science tenants the theorists espouse, and second, by the author's own admission that he was once a firm believer yet realised the patent absurdity of the movement.)
Throughout the book, Colavito links the major players in the alternative archaeology movement back to Lovecraft's fictions (even if the former often do not acknowledge their debts). Sometimes the links are tenuous but nevertheless, the author still provides an excellent summation of the UFO history and alternative archaeology movements. Jason Colavito An entertaining and readable take-down of the ancient astronaut alternative histories. The central thesis, that they all were inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos is, is not very strong, but the book shows how Lovecraft's imagination at the very least was what introduced the ancient aliens into our culture. Jason Colavito