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?

Archaeology in Fiction: H.P. Lovecraft, “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs”

"Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it - across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties - lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs that were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.

‘Imprisoned With the Pharaohs’ is a Egyptological horror yarn starring Harry Houdini, and loosely based on one of his tall tales from his tour of Egypt. Ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft, it was first published under Houdini’s byline in the summer 1924 number of Weird Tales.

In the story (Lovecraft's only one with an archaeological setting) Houdini gets the sense that archaeologists might be hiding something about the Giza plateau:

Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them.

Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night...

Houdini hires a dragoman, Abdul, as his guide to Giza, and duly makes the rounds of the monuments. But atop the great pyramid, the escape artist is set upon:

Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as securly as I was ever bound in the course of my life, either on stage or off...

Setting me down on a surface which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough handling. For apparent eons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.

Houdini, of course, escapes from his bonds. But I’m not going to ruin the story by telling you all the creepiness that happens next. (Read the story here online, or pick up the paperback for cheap.)

'Imprisoned With the Pharaohs' is a mix of sound 1920s-vintage archaeological data and pure fantasy. Lovecraft never went to Egypt; the story is wholly based on books from the public library, visits to New England museums, and Houdini’s own yarn-spinning. The story trades in antiquated stereotypes - the untrustworthy Arab, the fantastic origin of the Sphinx, Egypt as degenerate from its Pharaonic golden age - yet has a surprisingly modern air, since all of these stereotypes are still quite current in popular culture. (At times, it seems like you're reading an early script for The Mummy.)

Lovecraft... Smiling? (h/t Accelerating Future)

Lovecraft’s fiction is all about the past and its secrets. Though he was a deep lover of antiquity, he was also afraid of it: in his stories, aberrant things lurk in dark attics and ancient texts. Looking too closely into the past leads to terror, madness, and death.

The man himself is still a towering figure in horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was the epitomy of the crusty Yankee: cynical, reserved, and suspicious. He detested foreigners, technology, and modernity - and famously dated his letters 200 years in the past. At the same time, he was a starry romantic, a crafter of science fiction, and a mentor and friend to dozens of pulp fiction writers including Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. An avowed anti-Semite, he was nonetheless a big fan of Houdini (the son of a rabbi), and married a Ukranian Jew, Sonia Greene (thereby incurring the deep displeasure of his aristocratic maiden aunts). I have a great affection for the man: his bizarre and contradictory personality is totally all-American, and his hallucinatory evocations of the cosmic horrors lurking behind the veils of history have shaped me as a writer and a reader more than I care to contemplate. This site has much more about him.