While both writers actively worked to create a new mythology, they did so in very different ways. Lovecraft’s artificial mythology was self-consciously fake, created for fun, and intended to create a deep background that presumably stood behind early fertility cults and shamanic faiths. Nor was the materialist, atheist Lovecraft shy about declaiming the falsity of his fake gods:
Regarding the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred—I must confess that both the evil volume & the accursed author are fictitious creatures of my own—as are the malign entities of Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, &c. Tsathoggua & the Book of Eibon are inventions of Clark Ashton Smith, while Friedrich von Junzt & his monstrous Unaussprechlichen Kulten originated in the fertile brain of Robert E. Howard. For the fun of building up a convincing cycle of synthetic folklore, all of our gang frequently allude to the pet daemons of the others—thus Smith uses my Yog-Sothoth, while I use his Tsathoggua. Also, I sometimes insert a devil or two of my own in the tales I revise or ghost-write for professional clients. Thus our black pantheon acquires an extensive publicity & pseudo-authoritativeness it would not otherwise get. We never, however, try to put it across as an actual hoax; but always carefully explain to enquirers that it is 100% fiction.[62]
Hubbard, by contrast, meant his artificial mythology to be taken as truth. Like Lovecraft’s black pantheon lurking behind classical mythology, Hubbard would claim that Christianity emerged when a “madman” discovered Xenu’s 75 million-year-old “R6” implant within his soul around 600 BCE.[63] This implant apparently included images of God and the Devil, high technology, and crucifixions, inspiring the Christian faith six centuries later and leaving humans predisposed to accepting a (false) Christian message. In both cases, therefore, the aliens are the originators or manipulators of religious thought, with humans mistakenly worshipping entities that did not have their best interests in mind.
It would go far beyond the evidence to suggest Hubbard borrowed his cosmology from Lovecraft, but the core concepts of ancient aliens, buried civilizations, and mental transfer across time are all ideas that Lovecraft wrote about in stories that Hubbard almost certainly would have read years or decades before developing OT-III. Nevertheless, the reported revelations of OT-III are much more similar to Golden Age SF space opera projected into the past than anything Lovecraft would have written. (Hubbard even called the Xenu story “very space opera” in his handwritten OT-III notes.) It is, quite frankly, impossible to imagine Cthulhu engaging in palace politics the way Xenu’s lieutenants are said to have conspired against him. The closest parallel in Lovecraft is the war between the Old Ones of Antarctica and the spawn of Cthulhu in At the Mountains of Madness, but this takes much more of the form of a Darwinian survival of the fittest than a palace coup or even a Greek Titanomachy. It would seem that Hubbard’s ancient aliens are the direct result of needing the aliens to exist in the past to provide a creation story for Scientology rather than any actual interest in saying something profound about ancient history, while Lovecraft’s aliens have a immense prehistory because the enormity of time and the transience of humanity were two of Lovecraft’s major themes.
I previously established in The Cult of Alien Gods (Prometheus, 2005) and in Chapter 2 of this book that Lovecraft was the primary force marrying Theosophy’s idea of planets inhabited by ascended masters and human souls waiting to be born (itself derived from medieval notions of planets as the seats of various ranks of angels) to science fiction’s non-spiritual extraterrestrials in order to create the modern myth of ancient astronauts. In this limited sense, later works like Scientology’s OT-III (taken again as a literary text) can be thought of as influenced by the ancient astronaut myth Lovecraft developed in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the more accurate thing to say is that both Lovecraft and Hubbard drew on the heritage of nineteenth century scientific romances and occult speculation, creating similar end products from the same source material. (Both, for example, were influenced by occultism—Lovecraft through the works of Arthur Machen and thus the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, while Hubbard was involved with the Rosicrucians and Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, either to infiltrate the orders as Scientology claims or to practice magic as Russell Miller argued.[64]) That Lovecraft created his alien gods decades before Hubbard gives him priority in imagination.
It would be interesting to think that in some parallel world, a less scrupulous Lovecraft, had he lived past 1937, might have turned his artificial mythology into a profitable religion, leaving Hubbard’s Xenu and friends to eke out an existence solely the pages of pulp fiction. Of course, in that world we would have dramatic exposés of the real origins of Cthulhu, and that would take all of the fun out of the Cthulhu Mythos.
5. Was Cthulhu a King of Atlantis?
My Cult of Alien Gods and its supporting materials—including chapter two of this book—take a materialist view of the Cthulhu Mythos, assuming (correctly, by all rational laws of nature), that the Cthulhu Mythos is the invention of H. P. Lovecraft and has no basis in fact whatsoever beyond the building blocks from Theosophy, the Arabian Nights, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Lovecraft used to develop it.
But have you wondered what would have happened if The Cult of Alien Gods or chapter two of this book had been written by an “alternative” theorist? Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder. It really happened. By a weird coincidence, at the same time I was writing The Cult of Alien Gods in 2004, occultist Tracy R. Twyman wrote her own funhouse-mirror version of my Lovecraft connection theory called “Dead but Dreaming: The Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian Legend Reinterpreted as Atlantean Kings.”[65]
Whereas I looked at the connections between Lovecraft and ancient astronaut authors through the lens of the influence of (artificial) ideas, Twyman instead suggested that Lovecraft was carrying forward an esoteric tradition drawn from the Book of Enoch and the lost continent of Atlantis by way of Sumerian mythology. (This last point is obviously derived from the Sumerian-influenced hoax Necronomicon of Simon, which she acknowledges later.) She suggests that the “fall” of Cthulhu (i.e., his imprisonment in R’lyeh) descends from the Book of Enoch and the “universal” tale of Atlantis. Cthulhu, she claims, bears a striking resemblance to Oannes, the fish-man wrongly identified in Lovecraft’s day with Dagon and later with ancient astronaut flying space frogs (see Chapter 25). I don’t see it, personally. Cthulhu is an octopus-headed dragon, while Oannes is a man in a fish suit. Cthulhu has wings and claws; Oannes doesn’t. The descent of R’lyeh into the abyss, she says “parallel[s] precisely the tales of the Nephilim, the Titans, and the war in Heaven between God and Lucifer, as well as the fall of the Atlantean empire,” with the promised return of Cthulhu a cipher for the Apocalypse of Revelation.
At no time does Twyman seem to understand that she has the order of events backward. The prophesied return of Cthulhu resembles Revelation (and Ragnorak) because Lovecraft was Biblically literate and used the Biblical narrative as a base in order to subvert it. The imagined “fall” of Cthulhu, however, bears only a superficial resemblance to Atlantis, and even that was intentional. Lovecraft tried to create a (fictional) analogue to Plato’s Atlantis narrative as an answer to the Theosophists and their silly claims about Venusians running occult schools on Lemuria. Plato’s Atlantis sinks because of the Atlanteans’ sins; the Nephilim fall because they are evil. Cthulhu and R’lyeh sink beneath the waves—just because. Geology happens. There is no moral good or evil implied. It just happened. This is decidedly not parallel but rather a subversion of the traditional Classical and Biblical narratives Lovecraft knew very well.
But Twyman is so blinded by ideology that she cannot fathom that Lovecraft was conscious of his own material; she truly believes that R’lyeh is a secret Atlantis and that it sank because of—seriously—Noah’s Flood. She thinks the Old Ones’ reign was “glorious” like that of Atlantis, Lemuria, or Thule because she cannot parse Lovecraft’s complex narrative and takes his intentionally Bib
lical words at face value. The Old Ones’ reign was one of violence, blood, and death; it is considered glorious by a delusional cult.
That same literal-mindedness leads her to read deep secrets into the Esoteric Order of Dagon practicing in an old Masonic Hall. Unable to believe that Lovecraft knew enough of the Freemasons (and Masonic conspiracy theories) to purposely use them to lend weight to the fictive Dagon cult, she instead reads this as proof that the real-life ancient cult of Dagon (whom she views as Satan) is in league with the flesh-and-blood Masons!
This is not enough, of course. She takes the hoax Necronomicon of Simon as a genuine representation of Sumerian myth, and based on its forced and false parallels between Lovecraft’s deities and Sumer’s (which exist only because Lovecraft used Classical, Biblical, and Arabian myths as inspiration, and these share an uneasy heritage with Mesopotamia) she suggests that the Sumerian (actually Babylonian) practice of identifying gods with planets (like the Romans did—Jupiter, anyone?) meant that the “gods” were from outer space or another dimension, like Cthulhu!
Her article shades into Lovecraftian Magick, the weird practice of taking Lovecraft as a conduit of truths from another sphere and then trying to summon his monsters. The late Kenneth L. Grant actually argued that Lovecraft unconsciously channeled the Necronomicon from another dimension and that therefore one could summon Cthulhu using appropriate spells. Since we are all still alive, this is obviously untrue. It was, however, a survival of Theosophy’s unique insight that it could claim science fiction as prophecies of Theosophy by declaring that sci-fi writers merely received their ideas from the plane of ether, where Theosophy’s extraterrestrial gods spend their time when not cruising earth’s skies in flying chariots.
Twyman’s article reads like a parody of my own work. Instead of seeking out the facts as they exist here on the earth, among real people, she dances across the clouds making “connections” at random, ignorant of the human motives behind them and unwilling to acknowledge that even a single piece of writing is the result of conscious decisions rather than the passive receipt of inspiration from the level beyond human.
Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” acknowledges and subverts Atlantis and Armageddon—and this was intentional. Similarly, Lovecraft’s “Dunwich Horror” purposely acknowledges and subverts the life of Christ. By failing to recognize intentionality and the role of the author as creator of his own narrative, Twyman can propose a global, universal, self-reproducing set of myths and legends. But this is a chimera. Hmm. I better watch myself. She might take that literally and think I’m channeling hybrid monsters from the plane of ether!
6. How Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Gave Us Ancient Aliens
It might be a bit heretical, but I enjoyed the Night Gallery more than Serling’s more famous series, The Twilight Zone. It’s probably that my aesthetic sensibility runs more Gothic than sci-fi, and I preferred monsters to aliens, castles and mansions to rockets and asteroids. That said, Night Gallery is a difficult show to love unconditionally. Like any anthology, its segments vary in quality, and few anthologies varied as wildly as Night Gallery, largely due to the tension between the putative star of the series, Rod Serling, and the producer, Jack Laird.
At the time of Night Gallery’s inception, Serling had no interest in resuming the day-to-day running of a TV series, largely due to his bad experiences with CBS during the Twilight Zone years. He later realized it was a mistake to give control to Laird and the NBC network. Laird, to put it as gently as possible, was a populist in the worst sense of the term and pushed the show toward a campy, sensationalist tone that stood in tension with Serling’s more restrained take on the macabre. The result was a series that could reach dizzying heights (for 1970s TV, anyway) and fall to such painful lows as short one-joke comedy segments in which vampires visit blood banks, vampires need to hire a babysitter, or a cannibal tries to hire a maid. Needless to say, Laird was behind the misbegotten comedy bits, which severely undercut the stronger segments by their sheer campy awfulness. But even Laird was a bulwark of quality against interference from NBC and Universal Studios, who demanded lower quality, more action, more gore, and more shock. By the third season, Serling was little more than a paid host for a program that was churning out some of the worst genre television committed to film. (Just try watching the segments “Fright Night” or “Hatred unto Death.”)
But at its best, Night Gallery offered dark, moving portraits of fear and the macabre, usually in the Gothic mode, many drawn from classic pulp magazine stories that Serling loved as a young man. Adaptations of Weird Tales authors Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and H. P. Lovecraft gave a pulp-literary cast to the show’s greatest efforts. To the best of my knowledge, in 1971 Night Gallery became the first TV show to produce straight adaptations of Lovecraft stories: “Pickman’s Model” and “Cool Air.” (The Dunwich Horror, a straightforward adaptation of Lovecraft’s tale, had bowed in movie theaters the previous year.) Such segments as “A Death in the Family,” “Class of ’99,” “Green Fingers,” and “Miracle at Camafeo” are both dramatically satisfying and as memorable as the best of The Twilight Zone. Even the critically-despised third season had a few hits, like the Smith adaptation, “The Return of the Sorcerer.”
By late 1972, the writing was on the wall for Night Gallery. The network had cut the program from an hour to half an hour, and both NBC and the production company, Universal, ordered the show to feature more monsters, more mayhem, and more “promotable” stories; in other words, nothing too challenging for audiences. The new direction was failure, and the miserable run of duds for the final season ground to an ignominious end in May 1973 (production had ended some months earlier), when the final episode groaned its way to a sclerotic conclusion.
Serling had become disenchanted with the program, referring to the third season as “shit,” and he publicly disavowed any responsibility for the show that bore his name (its official title was Rod Serling’s Night Gallery). He had written twenty scripts for the second season, but contributed just four in the third. As the last episodes aired, the studio began repackaging the show for syndication, chopping up and butchering episodes to fit into half-hour slots. When that failed to produce enough episodes for syndication, they added 25 truncated episodes of the 1972 psychic-investigator drama Sixth Sense to the package, but to make them fit with Gallery, they paid Serling handsomely to film new introductions for these episodes. Serling essentially blackmailed them for cash, knowing they couldn’t syndicate without his intros. With that he washed his hands of the Gallery, and network series.
This meant that in late 1972, he was ending his series commitment and open to suggestions for his next project. His longtime producer, Alan Landsburg, came to him with some excitement, babbling about ancient aliens to a skeptical Serling. Landsburg convinced Serling that ancient astronauts were real, and he proposed a project to bring the story to the masses.[66] In his 1974 book, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, Landsburg presents his conversion to ancient astronautics as his own sui generis brainstorm, but in fact Landsburg had seen an Oscar-nominated 1970 German documentary about Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, probably in the English dubbing made in Britain. Landsburg’s proposal wasn’t so much to rewrite history as to make good money reediting the documentary for American audiences with Serling as the narrator. He called the new version In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and it aired on NBC on January 5, 1973, two days after a new Night Gallery episode. Two sequels followed in 1975: In Search of Ancient Mysteries and The Outer Space Connection.
Serling was no stranger to ancient astronauts. He knew about them from fiction, especially the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which he had read and loved years earlier and which were also a major influence on Night Gallery, thanks to both his and Gallery producer Jack Laird’s fandom. Therefore Serling was primed to accept the message that aliens had once visited the ancient earth. Even so, he initially thought the idea suitable only for fiction (not unlike, say, his rever
se-ancient astronaut script for Planet of the Apes) until Landsburg provided “evidence” in the form of the Nazca lines to convince him.
With Serling’s familiar voice lending the awe any mystery of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery to ancient astronauts, In Search of Ancient Astronauts and its successors were ratings successes. The programs propelled sales of von Däniken’s books and helped make him a 1970s celebrity. With no actors to pay, documentaries made for cheap programming. Therefore, Landsburg made plans to turn his documentaries into a television series, and he wanted Serling to continue as narrator. Serling, however, died in June 1975, and Leonard Nimoy, who had acted in and directed for Night Gallery, stepped into the role. The series, called In Search of…, ran from 1976 to 1982 in syndication.
The NBC documentaries and the In Search of… series drove public interest in ancient astronauts and prehistoric mysteries. More people watched the NBC specials than would ever read ancient astronaut books (there were only three networks and PBS for most TV viewers in those days), and the TV shows gave credibility to von Däniken’s ideas, despite PBS’s Nova making a valiant effort to discredit the idea by adapting a BBC Horizon episode.
Without the failure of Night Gallery in its third season, Serling likely wouldn’t have had the time or inclination for In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Without the participation of one of the network’s stars, NBC would have been much less likely to air the documentary, or for audiences to watch it. Without the documentary, von Däniken’s book sales would have been much less robust, his star much dimmer. Without a celebrity author and TV credibility, the ancient astronaut theory might have faded into just another weird idea on the lunatic fringe.
Instead, von Däniken’s residual fame led to a Chariots of the Gods documentary special on ABC in 1996 (to compete with NBC’s successful documentaries advocating Atlantis and creationism), a spate of cable TV documentaries in early 2000s, and the History Channel’s 2009 Ancient Aliens documentary, which in turn served as the pilot for Ancient Aliens: The Series. In an ever-more-fractured television landscape, appeals to the fond memories of popular old ideas were a shortcut to ratings. If only NBC and Universal had left Night Gallery to its devices, we might have had more quality classic horror and no Ancient Aliens.
Faking History Page 5