Ancient Astronaut Zero?

[robotnik2004]

So I recently read this book: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito. Colavito is an alternative archaeology debunker - he writes articles and runs a website dedicated to discrediting/debunking von Daniken style theories of ancient astronauts and UFO cults and the like. More power to him--didn't I make von Daniken a baddie in my retro-pulp game?--though I'm not convinced that a few nutbars appearing on In Search Of in 1976 constitute "the demise of the Western rationalist idea itself."

Anyway, the argument of his book is this: that our man Lovecraft was the originator of the ancient astronauts meme. Not that H.P. believed in alien astronauts, just that Lovecraft's fiction is where the idea came from: that nobody else before him had floated the idea, in fiction or non, that alien astronauts visited Earth in the distant past and spawned myths of ancient gods. My first instinct was to call bullshit. Surely somebody, some Blavatsky-style Theosophist or Donnelly-style catastrophist or Moonbat-style hoaxer cooked this idea up before the 1920s? But I realized I don't actually know of any. Maybe he's right? If only I had some friends who knew a thing or two about Lovecraft, or old pulps and fantastic fiction, or just general weirdness... Any thoughts, folks?

Whether or not you buy that central argument, the book's a breezy enough history of ancient astronaut hokum. The main part that was unfamiliar to me was the French connection: Colavito pinpoints two French writer-fans, Louis Pauwles and Jacques Bergier, as the missing link between Lovecraft in the 1920s and the von Daniken types in the 1960s and 1970s, and also the point where the ancient astronaut meme jumped the rails from fiction to alleged non. I can't say it didn't make me want to run a game about French New Wave-style filmmakers in Paris 1959 delving into Les Choses Qu'On N'est Pas Censé Pour Savoir. Kind of a Jean-Luc Godard meets Jacques Cousteau thing: The Life Eldritch with Steve Zissou?

Comments

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

(You can answer even if I didn't link to your LiveJournal. I know I have more friends who know lots of esoteric crazy shit than just the three polymaths I linked to.)

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

http://jeregenest.livejournal.com/205802.html

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Ha! Great minds, etc. etc. I obviously wasn't keeping up with LJ in Feb. 2006.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Never heard of Pauwles and Bergier, but of course I immediately thought of Jacques Vallée who inspired the character in Close Encounters played by... Francois Truffaut. So there's your tortured connection between UFOnauts and New Wave. :)

I still need to find a copy of Passport to Magonia. Very difficult to find, apparently.

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not turning anything up, but I think that the general idea of the alien astronaut meme was more or less present by 1900, if not twenty years earlier.

But I think HPL should probably be credited as the one who popularized it; the Victorian alien visitor stories were for the most part obscure and not widely read even at the time.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I think you pegged it earlier in one of your posts -- Sun Koh is all tangledy-up in ancient astronauts, and is way closer to von Däniken than Bergier and Pauwels are. Plus, nothing whatsoever that B. et P. say about their own personal history vis-a-vis HPL, or his reception in France, can be trusted.

I found Colavito's book to be depressingly under-argued.

[chrislehrich.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting idea, really. I would not expect to find the "ancient astronauts" thing much before 1900. The various main occultist threads running in the West--and in that period occultism is very much a thing of the West--are generally backward-oriented in a kind of revivalist, reconstructionist way. The classic claim was a sort of oral transmission, and sometimes a philological one: I know this because I am a descendant of the lineage of Blardyblar, and my master Hardyhar told me...; I know this because I read the ancient manuscripts of Yaddyah and I broke the code nobody else understands, and so I know.... Blavatsky has her secret masters, linked up to vague misunderstandings of Vedic ideas and then to Atlantis, but putting this stuff into space? I don't know.

If HPL had predecessors in this, I don't know of them, and even if he didn't invent it I do think he was probably the fons et origo for most western cryptogeography that claims aliens. But I also think it's very hard to prove influence like this. Probably there is something in some other old pulp, but would any one story have had real influence? And on the other hand, did HPL really have all that much influence in Switzerland of the 1950s (where von Daniken was a hotelier and embezzler)?

As to Pauwels and Bergier, Le matin des magiciens is annoying and tedious but quite influential. I don't know that Colavito is right about this connection, but it's certainly plausible, especially when it comes to somebody like von Daniken, because as I understand it (and now we're drifting well outside my specialty) P & B were taken up pretty strongly within right-wing speculation of the kind that originally prompted things like Wicca (which really only went hard-left after it crossed the Atlantic in the 1960s).

That's all simplistic, but there you are.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

You're right - it's very hard to prove influence, and the fact that random pulp story #11,734b might have contained some ancient alien astronauts doesn't prove that HPL -> Pauwels & Bergier -> von Daniken is not the vector. Interesting to think about, hence my post.

That's also interesting about the right-wing left-wing politics of Wicca. I suspected there was something right-wing wonky about some of those European occultists. Which now puts me in mind of Michel Houellebecq's Lovecraft bio.

Great to hear from you and see you surfacing back on LJ etc, btw. I also replied to your comments on my paper grading post over yonder. When you talk about grading papers, I listen.

[chrislehrich.livejournal.com]

For the politics of Wicca, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon. Hutton is a distinguished social-cultural historian who wrote the best book on the history of witchcraft as a religious movement in the latter West. It's a mite hard-history, as it were, but you for example will breeze through it: compared with the things you read in history, this is funsies. Good beach reading for wacko historians with freakish hobbies like you and me.