Roman Facebook, HP Lovecraft, and the Ancient Astronauts

From Gizmodo today: "Overwhelming proof that the Romans were addicted to Facebook"

While strolling through the Getty Villa in Malibu—a museum dedicated to the study the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria—Adam Pash discovered something curious: Evidence that even the Romans couldn't resist Facebook.

Either that, or he discovered evidence that we can't help but imagine familiar technologies in the most ancient of art pieces. [Adam Pash]

Look at it! It definitely proves the Romans had computers! I like this post because it illustrates exactly the thought process behind all those crappy websites about ancient astronauts: if I get stoned and stare at some archaeological stuff for a while, I start to see aliens!

Classic case: K'inich Janaab' Pakal, the Maya 'Astronaut'. Ruler of Palenque in the Late Classic period. His tomb lid looks like this:


Look, he's an astronaut! In a spaceship! You don't see it? Obviously you've been brainwashed by the archaeologists, who are trying to keep the truth from us. Check out this helpful video for an explanation.


(from Palaeoanimation, a very trippy site)

The Pakal tomb was made famous by Erich von Däniken, a cheerful lunatic whose 'Chariots of the Gods?' is an excellent guide on how to see whatever you want to see in the archaeological record. Millions of people take his stuff seriously - Mayanists, new agers who really believe 2012 will be the apocalypse, esoteric Christians, UFO enthusiasts. Not to mention all those misanthropes who think ancient people were too stupid to do anything worthwhile. Just because you sit on the couch and scratch your butt all day doesn't mean that people couldn't have built the pyramids.


(Lolthulhu, an excellent website)

The funny thing about Erich von Däniken is that he got a lot of his ideas from... H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was among the first to come up with the idea of gods as ancient space travelers in his fiction. Jason Colavito in a 2004 number of Skeptic makes a persuasive case that a lot of Von Däniken's ideas came directly from Le Matin des Magiciens ('the morning of the magicians'), whose authors were editors of the French science fiction magazine Planète.

Planète served as an important part of the French second science fiction period, a time when American pulp fiction became extremely popular in France following World War II. French magazines both imitated and reprinted in translation the classic pulp stories of the American 1930s and 40s pulp magazines. Planète's editors held Lovecraft as their prophet, and their reprints of his stories helped to popularize him and the Cthulhu Mythos in the French imagination. Lovecraft's longer fiction was published in French in a series of books.

Lovecraft's work had also inspired the editors of Planète to write a book, Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) a few years earlier, in 1960. The book, by Louis Pawles and Jacques Bergier, first introduced Lovecraft's concept of alien gods as a nonfiction hypothesis. The authors claimed that their study of religions around the world had led them to higher consciousnesses and to new revelations about the lost worlds of the past. Especially relevant to this is Part One: Vanished Civilizations, where they heap up evidence backing up Lovecraft's fictional claims about alien super-civilizations of the past.

Unfortunately now long out of print, the book Morning of the Magicians laid the foundation for all the lost civilizations books to follow, including Chariots of the Gods. As R.T. Gault comments, "It's all here, from the Piri Reis map to pyramidology. The authors are frankly fascinated by the idea that ancient peoples may have been more advanced in some of their technologies than we generally believe."

Von Daniken is known to have exploited this book as his major source. The bibliography of Chariots lists the book in its 1962 German translation: Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend.

So seeing ancient astronauts on Maya tombs is just as reasonable as seeing a laptop on a Roman stela. It looks that way to me, so it must be true!

On the other hand, what if everything Lovecraft wrote was true?

Nibiru Palace: New Math Proves Apollo = Satan?

OK, here’s the scoop. This video shows how the ancient Greek god Apollo = Apollyon, the beast from the pit in Revelations. And it proves that his satanic presence is EVERYWHERE. The dollar bill, the pyramids, the Maya Calendar, the Olympic rings, the coat of arms of the Vatican, the Freemasons, the chess board, the Nazis, everywhere. Basically, if you unscramble ΑΠΟΛΛΟΝ you get 666 in Roman numerals. But don’t just take my word for it.



Your host for this romp is Chris Constantine, the curator of the amazingly named 'Nibirupedia'. Despite his obvious enthusiasm and skill with video editing, his theory gets a big NOT. Constantine makes a rookie mistake and assumes that ancient Greeks used Roman numerals. They actually used a system where letters stood for numbers, like so¹:


So all those bits of Roman numerals flying off the dollar bill and out of the pope's behind and whatnot and forming the Name of the Beast are just bunk. It’s a shame that he doesn’t know shit about ancient mathematics, because the ancient Greeks LOVED paranoid ravings about numerology, from Pythagoras on down to the Byzantines. They would have understood EXACTLY where he was coming from. If you want to know more about the real practice of Greek numerology, this guy Joel Kalvesmaki did his dissertation on the topic. His website has a bunch of good resources to get you started. It's weird and interesting.

I like conspiracy theories, but I have some quality control standards these days. It’s pretty lame if you don’t back up your ravings with decent data. Holy Blood, Holy Grail had a ton of historical fact in it², so when Dan Brown ripped it off it came off as a plausible ancient mystery. I do like Chris Constantine’s website, though, because he uses so many archaeological bits to illustrate the presence of ancient astronauts and their connection to the grand battle between Jesus and the Freemasons. He’s got the secret planet Nibiru hypothesis of Zechariah Sitchin, who learned about ancient UFO visitations via Sumerian tablets, plus lots of stuff on pyramids:

the Mayan Calendar is also a cryptic 3D depiction of a UFO, swirling thrust and a Pyramid just like those at Giza. The Satanic Cult of Freemasons (illuminati) use Mayan symbols as well as Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, Roman etc.

Be careful, archaeologists, your research is leading you into un-biblical territory.



I'll let Chris have the parting word.

I have encountered immense opposition in researching the matters relating to:
1. Jesus Christ 2. UFOs 3. Nephilim 4. Reptilians 5. Masonic Logos 6. Nibiru ( Planet X ). Organised internet hate groups have made it impossible for people to debate these matters on a large scale.

True dat.

¹ There were a couple other Greek letter systems (the ‘Herodian’ and the ‘Acrophonic’) which were kinda like Roman numerals except with Greek letters. But since they’re totally different letters, Chris’ theory doesn’t work the same way. Go here if you want the details.
² Despite apparently being a surrealist prank? By Jean Cocteau? But if it was a surrealist prank, then it could be all true, right? You can now download the whole book from disinfo and decide for yourself.

Monday Not-Quite-News Roundup

2012 Shocker
This just in from the LA Times: apocalyptic disaster movie 2012 might not be based in sound archaeological evidence!

Canadian archaeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor... says the translation of the text essentially says that something will occur on Dec. 21, 2012 and that it will be similar to something that occurred on another date in the past. "At no point do any of the Maya texts actually prophesize the end of the world," she said.

But what's this picture about then?




Shelby rules, but facts are like, so hard!
There’s a new exhibition of Neolithic artifacts at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, sponsored by the famous/infamous Shelby White. The Baltimore Sun is on the scene with a reporter who fawns over White (just ‘Shelby’ to her friends), who with her late husband Leon Levy came to be known as much for their naked enthusiasm for stolen antiquities as much as for their philanthropy. The author also freely insults one of her sources as “long-winded” and “pontificating” because her descriptions of the exhibit actually include some information about its historical context. Moral of the article: old stuff is pretty, but facts are hard and boring!

The White Man's burden
While we’re the in comedy section, let’s check out the latest defense of James Cuno’s proposal to bring back partage, from John Tierney in the New York Times.

Tierney starts out complaining about Zahi Hawass’ belief that the Rosetta Stone is Egyptian (!?), and recycles the old orientalist argument that the Egyptians don’t really deserve to own it because they weren’t sufficiently interested in antiquity back in 1799. He derides governments like Turkey, Egypt, or Italy as and incompetent and ‘protectionist’, and veers headlong into the old stereotypes of the ignorant, grasping, swarthy Oriental, who doesn’t know how to appreciate the past like the White Man does.

Can I get a ride home? (Victor Koen/NYT)

As usual, all the fuss about ‘openness’ is really the collector and curator's veiled resentment about having to ask nicely to borrow the treasures of the ancient world, instead of being able just to take what they want, whenever they want it. If Tierney or Cuno really cared about the free exchange of ideas, they’d get behind efforts to expand artifact loans, as Italy has done recently. I wish these guys would just focus on bringing back the fun parts of colonialist archaeology, like gin tonics, pith helmets, and khaki shorts with spats.

A kinder, gentler Orientalism (villagehatshop.com).