H.P. Lovecraft and 'extraterrestrial genesis'

The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture. By Jason Colavito. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2005. ISBN 1-59102-352-1. 380 pp. Paperback, $19.

The ostensible thesis of Jason Colavito's The Cult of Alien Gods is that modern pseudoscientific notions of "extraterrestrial genesis" and "ancient astronauts" have grown out of the fiction of Rhode Island weird-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The book's wider point is more ambitious: "[This book] is also the chronicle of a unique moment in the cultural decline of the West. It is nothing less than an account of how the five-hundred-year advance of science and progress faltered and failed, and with this epic failure came the demise of the Western rationalist idea itself."

Fortunately, these jeremiads are window dressing, and can be safely ignored. Most of the book is an entertaining survey of the last thirty-odd years of pop-extraterrestrial highlights. Colavito covers the development of the ancient-astronaut, alternative-archaeology, and extraterrestrial-genesis pseudosciences, discussing Erich von Daniken, Robert Temple, Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Zecharia Sitchin, etc.--up to the Heaven's Gate cult and the Raelians. This is all fascinating stuff, not least because some of the major figures in the field (Temple and Hancock specifically) were once respected scholars, before they started writing books about amphibian space gods and ancient Martian civilizations.

The Lovecraft connection itself is pretty thin. The primary point of contact seems to be a book called Les matin des magiciens (Morning of the Magicians) (1963) by French authors Louis Pauwles and Jacques Bergier. Colavito describes the book in such a way as to make it seem like a po-faced precursor to the Illuminatus! trilogy, which perhaps it is: "From Lovecraft, Bergier and Pauwles borrowed the one thought that would be of more importance than any other in their book. As we have seen, Morning of the Magicians speculates that extraterrestrial beings may be responsible for the rise of the human race and the development of its culture, a theme Lovecraft invented."

This overstates the case. Nowhere in Lovecraft's fiction does he explore the idea that extraterrestrials developed human culture. This would be a surprising thing to find in Lovecraft, in fact, since the alien entities in his stories are supremely indifferent to humanity as a whole, if not actually malign.

The Mi-Go, in "The Whisperer in Darkness," though highly intelligent, are essentially parasitical, stripping metals from the earth and occasionally stealing the brains of humans. The extratemporal Great Race of Yith ("The Shadow Out of Time") study human culture, as they do pre- and post-human cultures, but by no means assist in its creation. And the story in which Colavito grounds his primary thesis, "The Call of Cthulhu," outlines a conspiratorial cult that worships the prehistoric alien Cthulhu, "high priest of the Great Old Ones," an extraterrestrial race so far removed from humanity that the very sight of one can drive men mad.

Colavito does supply two excellent, concise chapters detailing Lovecraft's life and the (largely posthumous) spread of his "mythos," though some elements of biographical detail receive unusual emphases, such as the following passages: "H.P. Lovecraft was often poor and throughout his life had to scrimp to manage the lifestyle he thought a gentleman of his social class deserved." (Lovecraft did exhibit a routine, shabby snobbery, but k was appalling poverty that forced him to "scrimp," not aristocratic pride.) "After a brief period of dressing up like an Arab and claiming to be a Mohammedan named Abdul Alhazred, he gave up his quest for a religious life." (Nowhere does Colavito mention that Lovecraft was five years old when he did this, and the reader is left with a somewhat freakish impression of the man.)

But these are quibbles. Lovecraft has been routinely misunderstood and mis-characterized, and Colavito performs a valuable service here by disambiguating the subtle mixture of cosmic pessimism and conservative Romantic nostalgia that form the twin axes of Lovecrafr's thought and work. It's encouraging that Lovecraft receives such a dear-headed analysis here.

Colavito himself is a self-acknowledged alternative-archaeology apostate, and the tone of this book is an endearing mix of stridency and affection:

   Thus [Gods of the New Millennium
   author Alan] Alford plays numbers
   games and makes many other arguments
   derived from "creation science"
   literature, but at this point we see how
   his thinking goes. It should not surprise
   us then that he finishes his essay by
   claiming, "Clearly everything is not
   'hunky dory' with Darwinism."

   But I do not mean to be overly
   harsh toward Alan Alford, no matter
   how vociferously I disagree with his
   ideas. He has made significant progress
   in distancing himself from Zecharia
   Sitchin's theories, and he continues to
   evolve and adapt his thinking. I am
   confident that over time he will move
   still closer to the mainstream.