The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestial Pop Culture [Paperback]

Jason Colavito (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2005

Nearly half of all Americans believe in existence of extraterrestrials, and many are also convinced that aliens have visited Earth at some point in history. Included in such popular beliefs is the notion that so-called ancient astronauts (visitors from outer space) were responsible for wonders like the Pyramids. Shocking new evidence proves that the entire genre is based on fictional horror stories, whose author once wrote that they never wished to mislead anyone. In this entertaining and informative book, the author traces the origins of a belief in these visitors to the work of H P Lovecraft (1890-1937). This amazing tale takes the reader through 50 years of pop culture and pseudoscience highlighting a number of influential figures and developments. Beyond documenting Lovecraft's influence on ancient astronaut theories and Raelian cloning efforts, Colavito also argues that the appeal of such myths is a troubling sign on an age when science is having its greatest success. He suggests that at the dawn of the 21st century Western society is witnessing a deep-seated erosion of Enlightenment values that are the basis of a modern world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Combining literary theory, cultural criticism and muckraking, Colavito aims to debunk alternative history-believing, for instance, that aliens genetically engineered human life-but gets swept up in the frenzy of his own arguments and ends up positing "the western world is now adrift amidst its own decadence and decline." Colavito, a former believer in alternative history, traces the various beliefs' roots to H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. He does a fair job of presenting his case, using a great deal of textual analysis, but believers will dismiss it as yet another attempt to suppress the "truth," while those who haven't been immersed in the literature are likely to be bewildered or indifferent. Colavito tries to address this concern with broad theories about why such ideas have taken hold and what it shows about the state of humanity, a line of exposition that grows more prevalent and less persuasive as the book progresses; Colavito resorts to sweeping generalizations the reader must buy into for the rest to follow-an especially difficult proposition given Colavito's credentials (he is a freelance writer, not a historian or sociologist). Though the writing is engaging and the topic intriguing, readers will be frustrated by Colavito's frequent forays to the soapbox.
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About the Author

Jason Colavito (Albany, NY) is a freelance writer and editor who has written for Skeptic magazine, among other publications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 398 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (November 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591023521
• ISBN-13: 978-1591023524
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #805,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Large sections, but not all, are very enlightening, June 3, 2006

By 

Stefan Isaksson "www.stefanisaksson.se" (Malmoe, Sweden) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestial Pop Culture (Paperback)

The Cult of Alien Gods is really two books in one. First of all it's an introduction to master writer H.P. Lovecraft and especially the mythos about the sinister extraterrestrial known as Cthulhu, but it's also a study of the rise of the ancient astronaut movement along with the ideas about lost civilizations, where authors such as Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock, and Zecharia Sitchin became the most famous representatives.

According to Colavito, it's Lovecraft - the somewhat still mysterious gentleman from Providence - and his stories about extraterrestrials visiting Earth aeons ago that the entire genre later known as ancient astronauts is based upon. Proponents of this genre claimed that sometime way back in ancient history, Earth was visited by extraterrestrials who were mistaken for gods and among other things helped build the amazing Egyptian pyramids. For people who don't know anything about Lovecraft Colavito - himself a fan of Lovecraft - offers a nice introduction to the mysterious man and his ground-breaking penmanship, details where he picked up his influences, how his literary masterpieces were received by his peers, and much, much more.

Now this introduction is perfectly fine, and Colavito definitely deserves some praise for his tribute to Lovecraft. But, the main thesis behind the book is not quite as convincing. Colavito insists that Lovecraft and his fiction is indeed what von Däniken and the rest based their respective works upon, and even though he on several occasions shows how something that Lovecraft had written decades earlier were later taken as genuine facts, he still never manages to actually prove that without Lovecraft there would have been no ancient astronauts.

But that doesn't really matter, since large sections of the book aren't about Lovecraft anyway. Instead Colavito focuses on debunking what he himself once upon a time believed wholeheartedly in. However, over the years he became more and more skeptical to the amazing claims that von Däniken and his allies put forth, and thus the book contains numerous exposures of how the "evidence" that millions of people all over the world chose to believe in, and still believe in, is by and large erroneous. Sometimes they are even straight out lies and hoaxes. This exposure is, though, to be completely honest, not that great of an accomplishment, since the proponents of the ancient astronauts have been debunked time and again by a multitude of professional scholars. Still, Colavito is apparently on a vendetta against the ones who mislead him, and the passion behind his words makes the well worth reading..

The criticism never really digs deep and only chosen parts of the authors' books are criticised, but the purpose of this exposé is to show how the theories behind the ancient astronauts collapse as soon as they are thoroughly investigated, and this Colavito does with a vengeance. At the end of the book Raël - or His Holiness as he prefers to be addressed as these days - and his Raëlian Revolution makes an appearance, and again Colavito is highly successful in his debunking.

The Cult of Alien Gods failed to convince me that Lovecraft is the founding father of the ancient astronaut theory. Fortunately, however, the book contained a whole lot more than that, and when it was all over I had truly enjoyed reading the book.

I therefore have no other choice but to congratulate Colavito for a debunking-job well done.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but uneven, June 11, 2006

By 

Timothy Evans - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestial Pop Culture (Paperback)

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is well written and thoughtful, but sometimes the reasoning is a bit strained. Like many of the "ancient astronaut" folks that he is debunking, Colavito seems to think that showing a possible connection (i.e., between Lovecraft and ancient astronaut theory) is proof of a connection.
As the previous reviewer said, this book is almost like two books, one about Lovecraft and one about the "ancient astronaut" theorists. The author has an obvious passion for Lovecraft, and he does a good job showing how Lovecraft drew on the pseudo-scientific pop culture of his day (Blavatsky, Charles Fort, etc.) as a source for his fiction. In other respects, what he has to say about Lovecraft is not new or original.

His debunking of "extraterrestrial pop culture" is convincing and well researched, but the connections he draws with Lovecraft are a bit strained.

The strength of this book is its description of the broader cultural milieau from which both Lovecraft and the "ancient astronaut" theorists drew - a blend of pseudo-science, science fiction, alternative religion and popular culture which has influenced everything from the X Files to UFO cults to supermarket tabloids to movies such as "Stargate." The book's weakness is that its central thesis, that Lovecraft is the main source of all this, is way oversimplified. But in spite of its flaws, Colavito's book is worth reading.

19 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars That is not dead which can eternal lie . . ., December 2, 2005

By 

Found Highways (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestial Pop Culture (Paperback)

. . . And with strange aeons even death may die.

In this interesting book Jason Colavito answers a question I've wondered about ever since I first read H.P. Lovecraft. (Question: What's the golden age of science fiction? Answer: Thirteen. But that's not the question I'm talking about.)

What I wondered was, why did I like Lovecraft's own stories but rarely enjoy any of the fiction of "the Lovecraft circle" - - people who corresponded with Lovecraft and wrote stories in his Cthulhu mythos. (The only collection of "Lovecraftian" stories I've ever really liked is the anthology Cthulhu 2000.) Why are storytellers and literary scholars like Joyce Carol Oates (she edited an anthology of Lovecraft recently) still moved by Lovecraft's stories? Why did the Library of America (who've published Mark Twain and Philip Roth) just publish a volume of Lovecraft?

Colavito describes Lovecraft's loose conception of "the Old Ones" or "the Elder Gods" (alien creatures of immense power, not as strictly defined or set in a hierarchy as they later became), as opposed to the alien creatures in the stories of Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, and others. (These later stories always struck me as mostly comic-book horror.)

Unfortunately now Lovecraft's work is now mostly a source of humorous or insider references like "Arkham Asylum" in Batman comics and movies. (I have to admit I'm juvenile enough to have laughed the first time I saw a Campus Crusade for Cthulhu ad.)

Colavito brings out a connection to Lovecraft that never occurred to me. Normally Lovecraft is categorized with Edgar Allan Poe and other nineteenth-century horror writers. But he may also have influenced high-tech Cold War science fiction, like John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?" and the movie Howard Hawks made from it, The Thing from Another World.

Campbell published Lovecraft in the magazine he edited, Astounding Stories, and "Who Goes There?" is similar to one of Lovecraft's best stories, "At the Mountains of Madness." Both are set in the Antarctic. In "At the Mountains of Madness" a man finds remnants of an alien civilization, and in "Who Goes There?" scientists and military types uncover a flying saucer and the thing from another world that it brought to Earth tens of thousands of years before.

You can make another interesting connection - - from Lovecraft to Campbell to Howard Hawks to John Carpenter. Carpenter has always been fascinated by The Thing from Another World (it's the movie Laurie Strode and the children she's baby-sitting watch on TV in Carpenter's slasher classic, Halloween). And Carpenter himself remade the Howard Hawks film as The Thing, one of Carpenter's best films. But Carpenter's The Thing had the bad luck to be released at the same time as Steven Spielberg's E.T. And in the early eighties Americans wanted cuddly salvation-bringing aliens that could be cross-merchandised with fast-food chains and candy companies, not shape-changing flesh-eaters whose message was that our technology might not save us.

The British director Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit) and Howard Hawks are two of Carpenter's biggest influences. (Carpenter has remade Hawks's Rio Bravo every possible way EXCEPT as a western - - see Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., and Ghosts of Mars).

But Lovecraft is another of Carpenter's influences: Carpenter's film Prince of Darkness shows a realm of evil that intrudes on our universe, and In the Mouth of Madness nearly steals Lovecraft's title and definitely appropriates his mood (with a touch of Stephen King).

The Cult of Ancient Gods is even more interesting as social history than as literary history. Colavito shows how he thinks Lovecraft's ideas influenced people like Erich von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods) and Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods), who saw evidence of "ancient astronauts" all over the world. Colavito sees a connection between Lovecraft and the Heaven's Gate cultists who committed suicide in 1998 when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared, and another connection to the Raelians (another UFO religion) that claimed to have cloned a human baby a few years ago.

Personally, I think Lovecraft influenced fiction more than he did "alternative scientists" like Graham Hancock, but ideas in (often bad) science fiction were there to be appropriated by fantasy writers and conmen both. The Heaven's Gate cult died in uniforms meant to look a little like Star Trek costumes. The original Battlestar Galactica TV show in the late seventies took images and ideas from Erich von Daniken.

There was one thing about Colavito's perspective I disagreed with - - a criticism of what he calls "the Age of Relativity," where "[e]verything was open to interpretation" and "[e]very group was now entitled to its own history: black history, women's history, and gay history. There was no longer human history." It's sounds as though Harold Bloom had been reading Weird Tales instead of the Western Canon.


Again quoting Colavito: ". . . Indeed as the education system gradually broke down in the twentieth century, ever-larger numbers of people were leaving school ignorant of methodology and indoctrinated only in diversity and political correctness. They lacked the tools to understand or to think, and they resented the educated elite who told them what was right or true. . . ."

I think the current fad for criticizing "political correctness" is often an excuse to return to old kinds of racist or sexist discrimination. (Colavito is not a racist or sexist. He makes that clear in his book.)

But two points on the above. (1) This is the end of a paragraph where Colavito describes how "ancient-astronaut" theory popularizers like Graham Hancock can bamboozle people without any scientific education. And when you see how many people believe in so-called "intelligent design" - - to the point where school boards are willing to sabotage the education of their own children - - you can't argue.

But (2) being "indoctrinated . . . in diversity" means that we teach our children that other cultures ARE just as valuable as the Europeans who founded the United States on the genocide of the indigenous people and slavery of black Africans. And "political correctness" means IT IS NOT acceptable to demean women, minorities, gays, or anyone else who's different from you because you're in the majority. Blacks, women, and gays do have histories of their own. The Trent Lotts of the world really do think things would have been better if the Voting Rights Act hadn't been passed and if blacks had been kept out of colleges and if women were kept in their place.

I almost put the book down after reading Colavito's first, biographical, chapter, describing how Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence influenced him, and showed him how the "rot had set in shortly after" the revolutions of the eighteenth century. But I'm glad I kept reading. The history is fascinating and the writing style is very entertaining.

Just as the rationalist H.P. Lovecraft didn't mean for people to take his "Yog-Sothothery" seriously, maybe Colavito is throwing out ideas for us to chew on. (Remember: "Cthulhu saves - - in case he gets hungry later.")