Jason Colavito

I like Jason Colavito. Sometimes. His blog and his gruntwork in countering the pseudohistory and pseudoscience that inhabits the "History" channel and its cohorts are commendable and, lamentably, necessary. He rightly and often takes Ancient Aliens and so forth to task for their shoddy, terrible work, theses, and evidences.

But, he has, of late, taken to this idea that all such pseudohistory and pseudoscience, like ancient aliens, pyramidology, Atlantis, Knights Templars, Masons, Illuminati, etc., is the work of disgruntled, racist white guys wearing MAGA hats who vote conservative and go to church. Frankly, Colavito, probably a good liberal/progressive Democrat, has drunk the kool-aid on that score. Ancient Aliens can trot out literal Democrats like Dennis Kucinich, Shirley MacLaine, and John Podesta (the latter an advisor to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton) and still trumpet his thesis that right-wingers are the purveyors of the pseudohistory and pseudoscience he bemoans.

I'd be willing to bet most pseudohistory and pseudoscience types are a little on the Democratic side. I'd be willing to bet that most people who believe in aliens, ancient astronauts, crystals, magick, occult societies, etc., are on the left side of the spectrum. Believing in kooky conspiracy theories about science and history is a human frailty, not a rightwing one. The left and right have their kooks. But Colavito has now decided to link all of this to the right. Which is grating. And incoherent. And wrong.

Which is why I found it odd that, in this book, he bewails the typically leftist pursuits of postmodernism and relativism (see his "Conclusion") and, several times (e.g. p. 330) the stagnation of Western culture. This is usually a conservative complaint, the "calcification and stagnation [that] had hit Western culture, halting in its tracks the centuries-long parade of Western innovation" (p. 330). He sounds like a writer for National Review or the Claremont Review!

But, to the main thesis of the book, not his attempt at a philosophical conclusion. Colavito claims that the idea of ancient alien visitations to earth in the remote past that seeded human civilization (and/or homo sapiens DNA itself), the central thesis of Ancient Aliens and its ilk, was really birthed by H. P. Lovecraft's fiction and the cultural and fictional milieu he created. Lovecraft birthed the idea of ancient aliens.

It's an interesting thesis. Colavito engagingly and deftly lays out part of his case, explaining Lovecraft's time, his stories, his ideas, and the very definite links between the pulps and early ancient astronaut theorists, especially The Morning of the Magicians by the Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. The Morning of the Magicians engendered a whole host on imitators, like Erich von Däniken, et al.

Here Colavito is on definitely interesting ground.

But, then he takes a step too far, trying to tie in writers like Graham Hancock and alternative thinkers like him. Hancock (pp. 256-258) can straight up tell Colavito his ideas received no inspiration from Von Däniken ("I still don't think we need aliens/ETs to explain the mysteries of our past"), The Morning of the Magicians ("To repeat, I have never read the Pauwels and Bergier book"), or Lovecraft ("The fictional work of Lovecraft has not been an inspiration of any kind for me"), and Colavito maintains this extension of his thesis.

Colavito has fallen for the same logical fallacy that the writers he chastises often fall for. Just because pyramids were built in Egypt and pyramids were built in Mexico doesn't mean you need aliens or Atlantis to connect the two. And just because one writer talks of ancient aliens and another writer talks of ancient aliens (or an ancient advanced civilization) doesn't mean you need Lovecraft to connect the two. That's the failing of this book. He goes for a bridge too far.

But Colavito's secondary point, aside from Lovecraftian origins, is that his youthful enchantment for "alternative archaeology" or "fringe history" was dashed by the inherent errors, logical fallacies, and inadequate evidence of the field. Here, again, Colavito is on better ground again. There are problems with Hancock, Bauval, Sitchin, Von Däniken, and so on and so on. They make mistakes. (Though I will continue to insist lumping Hancock's more reasoned and reasonable ideas with the forgeries of Von Däniken or the inane translations of Sitchin is a bit disingenuous.)

I am only a year or two or three older than Colavito. I inhabited the same library aisles as Colavito growing up. Right next to the books I read on the Bible, like Keller's The Bible as History, or archaeology like Ceram's Gods, Graves, and Scholars, were books by the likes of Von Däniken (or his copycat First, Man. Then, Adam! A Scientific Interpretation of the Book of Genesis by Irwin Ginsburgh), and Robert Temple, and Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln. I, like Colavito, devoured Hancock's The Sign and the Seal. I, like Colavito, bought Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods at a brick-and-mortar bookstore. I bought the cheap Avon paperbacks by Sitchin with my leftover lunch money (I started with Genesis Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching Up With Ancient Knowledge?). But, I never bought any of the theories whole hog. I do think that such authors bring up interesting ideas and conundrums. So, I sympathize with Colavito's travel through the world of "alternative" non-fiction. I didn't read any Lovecraft till I neared forty, and only heard of him in my twenties.

Meanwhile, I earned my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history, and teach history to college freshmen. I sometimes get a question about aliens, or Illuminati, or somesuch. I agree with Colavito that much of the outgrowth of this "alternative archaeology" is dross and dreck. I have several times sent a student to his blog. His thesis here, that Lovecraft is the intellectual godfather of Ancient Aliens is compelling, but incomplete. His lumping in of all alternative archaeologies is a step too far. His current bugaboo that all pseudohistory and pseudoscience is the work of white supremacists is ludicrous and incomplete.

Read the book, if you can find it. I had to shell out about $60 for a physical copy. But, it is well worth it. And read Colavito's blog, but take it with a spoonful of salt.

(My used copy of the book had some pasted in artwork on the half-title page of, inexplicably, images and hieroglyphics of the Egyptian goddess Nut. Who knows?!)… (mer)

Colavito is at his best tracing out the influence H.P. Lovecraft has had on "alternative archaeology," from becoming an influence at the French science fiction magazine "Planete" in the 1960s, which led to the "Chariots of the Gods" craze of the 1970s, to a further breakout of writers who further elaborated anti-science epistles on the cosmic origins of Human civilization. However, the portions where Colavito traces how Lovecraft's vision of aliens from out of time and their impact on Human culture only represents about a third of this book; the rest is devoted to criticizing cosmic pseudoscience, the fading of the Enlightenment in Western civilization or the author's own musings on how he fell for a lot of this nonsense as a young man. Colavito's Spenglarian bombast can be amusing for awhile, but then it just becomes wearing; it's a big part of why I mark down this work a bit.… (mer)

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.… (mer)

Well, who knew? Jason Colavito has unearthed some late-19th-century accounts of cults involving an actual octopus god in the South Pacific. The sources are proto-anthropologists and scholar-missionaries, whose accounts often acquire the tone of a travelogue, and come close to the narrative tone used by some of Lovecraft's scholarly protagonists. There is nothing here to contradict "The Call of Cthulhu," and the notion of a sleeping-not-slain cephalopod deity is practically confirmed by these pages.

Of particular note is the Samoan temple ruin referenced in the title of the volume. The "House of the Octopus" (O le Fale o le Fe'e) was evidently distinctive for its stone vertical supports, a design otherwise absent in the island environment where plenty of trees were to hand for building pillars. Although the cuttlefish god continued to be reverenced, this site was already in long disuse by the 19th century, and the writers represented here had the opportunity of discovering it as a "lost" site (with the aid of knowledgeable locals).

Colavito has provided a rather minimal editorial service here, pulling the five source essays together into a single, brief volume that he has issued through lulu.com. His foreword provides little more than a reassurance that the materials are in factual earnest. He seems sure that Lovecraft didn't know about the Samoan cuttlefish cult, but I have to wonder. See, for example, the reference to the Australian Buddai in "The Shadow Out of Time" for evidence of HPL's study in this sort of material.

At some point, optical character recognition (OCR) was used to gather these texts, and they have suffered for it. Insufficient care was taken to eliminate artifacts like "rougli" for "rough," and "cither" for "either" (both on p. 5, with many more to come). The cover design is attractive and appropriate, featuring a detail from an Enoch Arden engraving of 1869, and the book is a slim, convenient digest for the use of latter-day Miskatonic University students.… (mer)