Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  - The two authors both knew of and thought highly of Lovecraft prior to writing Morning of the Magicians.

  - The two authors considered Lovecraft to have embodied real theories (“greatest...champion of theory”) in his fiction.

  From Lovecraft, the authors explored Lovecraft’s own sources, including Charles Fort, and from those sources and Lovecraft therefore developed their own version of the earlier authors’ ancient astronaut theories. Had they come to Fort unmediated, there would be no reason to acknowledge the connection to Lovecraft, which they again make when discussing Arthur Machen, another author whose work the two French writers encountered via mentions in the work of Lovecraft.

  This should establish the connection between Pauwels and Bergier beyond doubt. The French writers did not rely on Lovecraft as a primary source in Morning of the Magicians because they were (or believed they were) writing non-fiction and recognized that Lovecraft’s work was fictional. They did, however, acknowledge his inspiration for leading them back to the sources he drew upon, including Fort and Theosophy, which the French writers used as Lovecraft had to develop their own work. Unlike Lovecraft, they thought they were creating fact, not fiction.

  Bergier well understood that there was an obvious parallel between the Cthulhu Mythos and the ancient astronaut theory, one striking enough that he came to feel that he had to address the question in Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present (1970; English trans. 1973), a deeply weird book, perhaps the strangest ancient astronaut book I’ve ever read. The unnamed translator of the book, whoever he or she was, clearly had no real understanding of the material being translated, making an already obscure text that much more bizarre. Thus, in the first excerpted passages below, the name of Lovecraft’s Old Ones is a bit butchered.

  Perhaps the [alien] Intelligences will be forced to wipe out our species […] In any case, the Intelligences seem far removed from H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Men, who created life on the earth by mistake or as a joke.”[44] (referencing At the Mountains of Madness)

  “[A lost] civilization could have been in […] the extreme south: Antarctica. The ghosts of H. P. Lovecraft and Erle Cox [...] will rejoice when the traces of an advanced civilization in the Antarctic are discovered. It will be one more case of clairvoyance by inspired writers.”[45] (referencing At the Mountains of Madness and Erle Cox’s 1919 novel Out of the Silence, about the buried remains of a lost civilization)

  “…there once existed a city in the desert, El Yafri, built of enormous cyclopean blocks […] and the city should not be confused with Irem, H. P. Lovecraft’s doomed city…”[46] (referencing “The Nameless City,” but unaware that Irem, or Iram, is from the Qur’an 89:6-14)

  “This book is as much a factual accounting as possible. However, among its readers there will certainly be some science-fiction fans who would like to know what the connection is between the mysteries we have described in this chapter and the myths created by H. P. Lovecraft [...] Much of [Lovecraft’s work] relates so directly to the mysteries we have just described that there are still people who go to the Biblioteque Nationale or to the British Museum and ask for the Necronomicon! [...] It is not impossible that at least a part of Lovecraft’s myth may be verified when the Empty Quarter is opened to exploration.”[47] (referencing “The Nameless City”)

  Throughout, Bergier makes plain his debt to science fiction in general and H. P. Lovecraft in particular for inspiring his investigations into prehistory; even where unnecessary, Bergier emphasizes parallels between Lovecraft and the ancient mysteries he relates.

  Extraterrestrial Visitations is a deeply European book, beginning with the author’s insistence that he held an “exclusively rationalist position” even as he then proceeds to pile speculation upon speculation, often without any factual support, in the name of inductive reasoning. He assumes the reader is already familiar with the mysteries he discusses, leaving out conventional references, background information, and anything more than allusions to Victorian newspaper clippings and Fortean speculation. As a result, the text is frequently obscure, understandable only with a deep familiarity with the ancient mystery genre—and with Lovecraft.

  Bergier devotes a chapter to the infamous case of Dr. Gurlt’s cube, which he describes as being a 60 million year old perfect cube made of iron, with two opposite faces slightly curved. It had been found in a mine in Austria in 1885, and Bergier made three false claims about it: first, that it is perfect in form; second, it is an extraterrestrial recording device meant to transmit information about earth to outer space; and third, that a conspiracy is responsible for having made the object “disappear” from the Salzburg Museum so scholars like Bergier could never confirm its extraterrestrial origins.

  Weirdly for someone writing in 1970, Bergier was completely unaware the object was analyzed in Vienna in 1967 when he wrote of how badly he wanted modern science to examine it. It is in all probability, as Dr. Gurlt suggested in 1886, a lump of meteoric iron. The rock itself is not a cube in any recognizable sense, much less a device of perfect machine manufacture, what he called “data collectors of the same type as magnetic bands, but much more highly perfected.” It is instead a small, pockmarked stone of very roughly square shape when viewed from one angle, but appearing round when viewed in profile, with a deep ridge impressed around its circumference.

  Furthermore, the ancient astronaut writer Peter Kolosimo argued that it could not have disappeared from the Salzburg Museum in Austria because it’s actually in the Salisbury Museum, in Britain. (After consulting his original Italian text, I’m not so sure this isn’t Kolosimo’s translation error for Salzburg—not least because the name of the British museum is the “Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum,” though it does have a fine collection of geological specimens. I also don’t see how the cube would have traveled from Britain to Vienna and back in 1967 without any record.)

  Anyway, I don’t want to waste too much time on the facts, since they speak for themselves. What interests me is the way Bergier’s discussion of Dr. Gurlt’s cube echoes Lovecraft. The “cube” Bergier persists—against evidence—as viewing as an extraterrestrial device of perfect geometry, which he claims must have been a recording device meant to take note of “everything that has taken place on our planet in the past ten million years.”

  Their owners can no doubt retrieve them at great distance by means of a magnetometer; for the objects, when they receive a certain signal, must be able to indicate their exact position through an answering signal transmitted by magnetic resonance. […] What is to be hoped is that the next angled object discovered will be carefully examined, especially with a mind to extracting its signals.[48]

  This weird theory—unique to Bergier, so far as I know—is, to me, quite closely modeled on Lovecraft’s Shining Trapezohedron from “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935). The Trapezohedron is, like Bergier’s imaginary version of Gurlt’s cube, a “crazily angled stone” of extraterrestrial manufacture that sends and receives signals to other intelligences across the cosmos, “a window on all time and space.” It is also a relic of prehuman times (Triassic, though, rather than Paleogene):

  It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man’s notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? [...] Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from ni
ghted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records.[49]

  Based on these close similarities, I would suggest that Bergier’s alternative explanation for Gurlt’s cube is dependent upon Lovecraft’s Trapezohedron. The most telling point is the last sentence of Bergier’s that I quoted above. Despite spending his chapter discussing objects shaped like cubes, spheres, and cylinders, he refers to them collectively as “angled object[s].” This tells me that he had as his model the “crazily angled” Trapezohedron, and not the regular geometric forms of the “real” alien communication devices he purports to discuss.

  As Bergier’s 1970 book demonstrates, he clearly saw a connection between ancient mysteries and the “myths created by H. P. Lovecraft,” and saw Lovecraft as having led him to the ancient mysteries he wrote about.

  4. Cthulhu vs. Xenu: The Case of H. P. Lovecraft and Scientology’s Cosmology

  In the first months of 2011, two stories in the news turned attention toward the Church of Scientology, the faith founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 and long rumored to involve secret teachings about space aliens who came to earth 75 million years ago. The first was a major article in the New Yorker’s February 14 edition detailing alleged abuse and poor working conditions at the hands of the church and its leaders.[50] The second was the rumor that film director Guillermo del Toro wanted the most famous Scientologist of all, Tom Cruise, to star in a big screen adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 story of the discovery of an ancient extraterrestrial civilization, At the Mountains of Madness. While the Mountains of Madness movie project fell apart, interest in Scientology did not.

  As some noted at the time of the Tom Cruise rumors, Scientology and Lovecraft share eerie parallels. Lovecraft’s (fictional) extraterrestrials came to earth in the distant past and had a profound and largely dark influence on early humanity (see chapter two), and this idea bears a resemblance to Operating Thetan Level III (OT-III), the (supposedly nonfictional) cosmological doctrine L. Ron Hubbard created circa 1967 for Scientology. Lovecraft’s version, to my mind, is the more subtle and convincing of the two.

  It is a fact that Hubbard was a science fiction writer active in the same years that Lovecraft’s stories were first published (the late 1930s—some Lovecraft tales were published after his 1937 death) and writing for the same types of pulp magazines in which Lovecraft’s stories appeared. However, the two authors’ outlets overlapped only at Astounding Stories (known after 1938 as Astounding Science-Fiction), the magazine that published At the Mountains of Madness in 1936. This story, however, includes the same type of cosmic sweep as Hubbard’s cosmology, though both approach the concept in very different ways. Hubbard developed Dianetics (the precursor of Scientology) for Astounding Science Fiction in 1950, and science fiction luminaries such as L. Sprague de Camp and Astounding editor John W. Campbell were friends of Hubbard and also well-versed in Lovecraftian fiction.

  I admit that in the past I have shied away from exploring the possible connections between Lovecraft and Scientology, both because of the church’s infamous litigiousness and also because I had not studied the Scientology materials needed to make judgments. I should note here that I have no special knowledge of the secret doctrines of Scientology, and I do not know what the group teaches its followers beyond the publicly available information that has been widely reported since its disclosure during legal proceedings in the 1980s and 1990s. The 2011 New Yorker article reported what the court document and news accounts of the 1980s and 1990s had made public: that Hubbard claimed an ancient astronaut named Xenu (or Xemu), onetime president of a galactic confederation of overpopulated planets, came to earth 75 million years ago and buried a billion or more aliens beneath volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Their souls (or thetans) are said to now infest human hosts, causing many problems—problems that only Scientology’s “technology” can solve. According to testimony from Warren McShane, the president of the Scientology subsidiary, the Religious Technology Center, in the case of Religious Technology Center v. F.A.C.T.Net, Inc., et al. (1995), this information, “the discussion of the—of the volcanoes, the explosions, the Galactic confederation 75 million years ago, and a gentleman by the name Xemu there. Those are not trade secrets.”[51] Since this material is in the court records, it would seem to be fair game for analysis and criticism.

  There are some superficial similarities between Lovecraft’s and Hubbard’s visions of our alien past. Both wrote that extraterrestrials came to earth tens of millions of years ago, and both wrote that earth had been a part of a galactic system of inhabited worlds before a cataclysm caused the aliens to retreat. Hubbard’s Galactic Confederation was something like a cosmic United Nations, while Lovecraft had a messier conception of a multiplicity of alien races treating earth as one planet among many to conquer and on which to spawn. Both authors also wrote about buried evidence of alien civilizations: in Hubbard’s case, alien implant or reporting stations at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, a Martian station in the Pyrenees, and Xenu’s prison[52]; for Lovecraft, sunken or buried cities such as Cthulhu’s R’lyeh, the Old Ones’ Antarctic city, or the Great Race’s Australian metropolis. Hubbard’s Xenu is said to be “in an electronic mountain trap where he still is.” Of the other aliens, “‘They’ are gone,” Hubbard wrote.[53] Similarly, Cthulhu lives on, trapped in his undersea city of R’lyeh. Of the other aliens in Cthulhu’s retinue, “Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea.”[54] The differences are also telling. Cthulhu is trapped (in the original version) by purely natural forces (later August Derleth would make Cthulhu the victim of cosmic punishment), while Xenu is imprisoned by his rebellious lieutenants, like Kronos placed in the Greek Tartarus at the hands of Zeus.

  Additionally, both wrote about the ability of minds to travel millions or billions of years across time and millions or billions of miles across space for encounters with the aliens. For Lovecraft, this took several forms. In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” human brains were removed from their bodies and placed in metal canisters for interstellar travel. In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Randolph Carter’s mind travelled from body to body across the planets and the eons, while in The Shadow Out of Time, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had his own mind traded with that of a member of the Great Race of Yith from 250 million years ago. The Great Race, of course, had learned to migrate from age to age by projecting their minds into other species’ bodies, rendering the Grace Race close to immortal. For Hubbard, the initiate into Scientology’s highest secrets is able to project his mind into the stars. According to David G. Bromley and Mitchell L. Bracey, Jr., the official Scientology doctrine is that the dead Hubbard lives on in bodiless form, researching spirituality on another planet,[55] just as Randolph Carter’s mind visits the cosmic oneness that is Yog-Sothoth and studies magic in the body of a wizard on the planet Yaddith. Similarly, the Scientology “thetans” are also disembodied spirits who persist from age to age, like the roving minds of the Great Race. In both Lovecraft’s and Hubbard’s conceptions, this idea derives from nineteenth-century occult ideas of astral projection, which Lovecraft encountered in such sources as Walter De Le Mare’s The Return (1910). Hubbard was also familiar with astral projection, having written about the practice early in his career in the science fiction story “The Dangerous Dimension” (1938), which he described as an updated, science-fiction form of astral projection.[56]

  Both writers even had similar ideas about madness-inducing literary secrets. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s narrator describes the way madness results should anyone put together the pieces of the true history of aliens on earth, including hints from the Necronomicon and other written texts:

  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.[57]

  In parallel, Hubbard claimed to Forrest J. Ackerman that his book Excalibur was so dangerous that those who had read it had committed suicide or had gone insane.[58] Hubbard himself said that he had written the book after receiving a message from the stars when he “died” for eight minutes during a dental examination,[59] and the Church of Scientology claimed that four people who read the book went insane.[60] Scientology would also declare that anyone who learned of Xenu without proper preparation would catch pneumonia and die.[61] Such claims are unique neither to Lovecraft nor Hubbard, though. In 1895, for example, Robert W. Chambers wrote of the fictitious play The King in Yellow, which he said would cause madness should anyone read its final act.

  However, Hubbard’s cosmic vision is very different in detail and in tone from that of Lovecraft. Lovecraft imagined a grand cosmos of a multiplicity of diverse aliens and incorporeal entities that were utterly inhuman and incomprehensible, that treat humans as elephants might treat earthworms. By contrast, Hubbard’s aliens are essentially human in all but name, possessed of human vices and motivations. Lovecraft’s cosmos is also much less dependent than Hubbard’s on the tropes of space opera and Golden Age science fiction (presuming, of course, you take Hubbard’s cosmology as a literary text rather than revelation).