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Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots
of the Gods?, Miracles of the Gods, and several other books of like
nature, may be guilty of the worst case of pseudoscientific overkill in the
twentieth century. To him, virtually any ancient relic is proof that beings from
outer space once visited the Earth and inspired all the myths of gods and
heroes. Any well-made bits of architecture, from the Egyptian and Aztec
pyramids, to the Inca walls, to the buildings in Machu Picchu, were built with
the help of benevolent men from Mars. Any old sculptures, from the winged men of
Assyria and Babylonia, to the ancient stone heads in Mexico, to the Easter
Island statues, were inspired by some odd looking alien. Von Daniken refuses to
acknowledge human ingenuity or imagination, or even local artistic styles, in
his crusade to prove man a mental quadriplegic who rode to civilization on the
backs of more advanced races. The ironic thing is that H. P. Lovecraft expounded
the same theories in his Cthulhu Mythos stories back in the nineteen thirties.
Cthulhu Drives a Flying Saucer
There are some remarkable parallels in Von
Daniken's and Lovecraft's work. In Lovecraft's first major Cthulhu
Mythos story "The Call of Cthulhu", a researcher discovers the cult of
the Old Ones, a star-spanning race that once ruled the world, and now sleeps in
sunken cities and underground caverns. They will recover "When the stars
are right", according to their worshipers, a cult which has existed since
prehistory and is now scattered about the world. These groups are found as far
apart as China, Arabia, Siberia, and the South Seas. Later Mythos tales
("The Dunwich Horror", "The Whisperer inDarkness", "The
Curse of Yig", "The Mound", "Medusa's Coil", and
"Out of the Eons") spread the cult all over America, particularly New
England, the Southwest, and the Deep South. Cthulhu and similar Old Ones are
supposed to have influenced other religions, coming to be mentioned in Hindu
myths under different names, and becoming the devils in various books of magic
like the Necronomicon. Also widespread are idols and bas-reliefs of
Cthulhu, portrayed as a giant man with an octopus for a head, scales like a
dragon, huge claws, and vestigal wings.
According to Von Daniken, similar figures
of a great bulky faceless man (= a person in a space suit) and a being with his
or her head enclosed in a globe or halo of some sort are also to be found around
the world. Von Daniken provides many pictures to prove it. The similarity
between some is striking; in others it is slight, but it's usually there.
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Von Daniken makes much of the recurrent
theme of a powerful god who uses a lightning bolt as a weapon and begets demi-gods
on mortal women. He believes the being was a more human-looking spaceman who was
somehow reproductively compatible (perhaps because of some artifice) with Earth
women. He must have been trying to improve the human race by begetting superior
hybrids, as mythical demi-gods are usually depicted as incredibly strong, smart,
magical, and given to discovering fire, founding cities, developing the art of
weaving and similar useful things. (Personally, considering the behavior of Zeus
and the rest, we'd be more inclined to suspect a spaceman on shore leave after
being cooped up in that flying saucer for two or three years. The demi-gods were
just a side effect. The lightning bolt would have been the ray gun he used to
fight off enraged fathers and jealous husbands.)
Lovecraft also believed the alien races
could be reproductively compatible with humanity. Hybrid offspring of this
nature appear in "The Shadow over Innsmouth", "The Dunwich
Horror", and "Medusa's Coil". The creatures in the first story
are the spawn of Dagon and the Deep Ones, semihuman fishmen who worship Cthulhu.
The second and third tales present the children of the Old Ones Yog-Sothoth and
Cthulhu. They are always portrayed as beings of either ugly or odd appearance,
with some supernatural ability, both of which are inherited from the inhuman
branch of the family.
Admittedly, in his earlier stories, HPL
treated the Old Ones as demons or evil gods. "The Call of Cthulhu" and
"The Dunwich Horror" are both more supernatural than scientific. In
the later tales ("The Horror in the Museum", "The Whisperer in
Darkness", "The Shadow Out of Time", and At the Mountains of
Madness) Lovecraft reveals more about the Old Ones. Cthulhu and his kin are
one of many races from many planets. At the Mountains of Madness
mentions the wars between the CthuIhu-spawn and the Mi-go (winged lobster-like
critters who appeared first in "The Whisperer in Darkness") plus yet a
third race of aliens, the star-headed Old Ones. Von Daniken also allows for
different species of extraterrestrials, who fought over exactly how much control
and what sort to exert over the humans. This was the inspiration of the legends
of battling gods: Olympians vs. Titans, the Aesir fighting the Giants, etc. It
also explains such characters as Satan and Prometheus, passing on knowledge the
other gods don't want passed on.
In Search of Ancient Evil
As intimated above, the foundation of Von
Daniken's thesis is the existence of various archaeological oddities which he
claims are best explained as relics of the spacemen. Some of these require no
such explanation, e.g., the Nazca carvings in Peru or the ancient Indian iron
pillar which does not rust. (Von Daniken himself has since admitted the mundane
origin of the latter.) Others, if authentic, are genuine stumpers, e.g., the
enigmatic "Crystal Skull". Perhaps the best example would be the
"prehistoric storage batteries" found in the Middle East. Doubt has
been cast on whether these ceramic cylinders could really store electricity, but
if they could we would indeed have some pretty convincing evidence of technology
far too advanced for ancient man. (Of course, we'd still have to wonder just
what the devil aliens who had mastered faster-than-light speed would be doing
with Eveready batteries!)
Lovecraft makes extensive use of such
discoveries. The horrifying disclosure of extraterrestrial intelligences
predating man is the centerpiece of several of his stories (see "Jung and
Lovecraft on Prehuman Artifacts" elsewhere in this issue). It is the
discovery of paleologean cities that reveals the existence of the star-headed
Old Ones and the Great Race of Yith.
Von Daniken and other proponents of the
"ancient astronauts" hypothesis do not rest their case exclusively on
archaeology. They are quick to seize upon fortuitous passages in the Bible and
other ancient texts. For instance, it's not too hard to see spaceships in
Ezekiel's flying wheel or in the flaming chariot that carried Elijah off. Von
Daniken also makes the lost ark of the covenant into a radio set. In pretty much
the same way, Zecharia Sitchin plays fast and loose with ancient Babylonian,
Akkadian, and Sumerian texts in his erudite but futile book The Twelfth
Planet. The idea in all such fanciful exegesis is that the ancient writers
had no way of describing the wonders of extraterrestrial technology except to
make it all miraculous and supernatural.
Surprisingly, Lovecraft did the same thing
with the Necronomicon. In earlier stories, he had made that blasphemous
book describe real supernatural horrors. But in the later tales, he implies that
Abdul Alhazred did not know accurately whereof he spoke. What he made into gods
and demons were simply aliens from space. The star-headed extraterrestrials in At the Mountains of Madness
"were above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which
things like the Pnakotic
Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about."
Friends of Yuggoth
In his stories, Lovecraft made the
survival of Cthulhu-idols denote that there were still groups of people secretly
worshiping the aliens. Von Daniken does not suggest this, except for occasional
instances where this or that backward tribe needs an emergency visit by an alien
to help get things moving. For example, he mentions one Amazonian tribe who
worshipped a great bulky image representing a god who had visited them only
sixty years before. But on the whole Von Daniken is content with indicating the
remote origins of modern religions in our ancestors' dealings with aliens.
However, on the contemporary scene we do
find something very similar to Lovecraft's continuing but clandestine sects.
Readers of pop works like Brad Steiger's The Aquarian Revelations and UFO
Missionaries, or more serious monographs like Batch and Taylor's
"Seekers and Saucers" or Festinger, et al., When Prophecy
Fails, know that there are indeed legions of folks who not only worship Von
Daniken's aliens, but believe themselves to be in constant communication with
them. The fanciful Aetherius Society is the most famous of these groups. Such
UFO cults are caricatured (but not by much) in the form of Exidor's
"Friends of Venus" sect on Mork and Mindy.
There is, of course, more than a passing
similarity between these cults and Lovecraft's "Starry Wisdom Church"
in "The Haunter of the Dark". Like George King of the Aetherius
Society and Exidor of the Friends of Venus, Rev. Enoch Bowen claimed to be in
contact with alien beings. Such "space brothers" in today's UFOcults
bear names like "Ox-Ho", "Goo Ling", or "Mars Sector
Six"; Bowen's contact was named "Nyarlathotep". Indeed the
parallel between Lovecraft's Starry Wisdom cult and today's flying saucer
religions is startlingly close. As a matter of fact, the similarities we
have noted between Lovecraft's work and that of UFO-speculators like Von Daniken
and Sitchin force us to raise the question of who influenced whom. Von Daniken
was once actually asked if Lovecraft had been the source of any of his ideas. He
not only denied it, but seemed never to have heard of HPL. Well then, might the
influence run in the other direction? Could Lovecraft have had a "close
encounter" with extraterrestrial intelligences, which inspired his
writings? Don't bet on it.
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