In the 1970s Lovecraft’s burgeoning reputation must surely have both benefited from and fed into the ‘ancient astronauts’ fad. Jason Covalito had a book-length survey of that nexus of influence, which arose mostly from the Morning of the Magicians (1960) and then fed forward, in his The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture (2006, and I see that this is now available as an ebook).
An exemplar of this 1970s sub-genre, which reached even those not likely to read text-heavy and expensive UFO-ology paperbacks, was the fine $1 comic-magazine Marvel Preview #1, “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars” (1975). I remember having a copy of this as a youth, a copy now long gone.
Marvel Preview was an oversize magazine-style b&w comics title, intended to test ideas for titles that would reach more mature audiences outside the censorship of the loosening Comics Code. Notable later in the run were two Sherlock Holmes (#5-6, 1976) and a fine John Buscema take on Merlin the wizard (#22, 1980).
Preview is now mostly known for launching the Star-Lord character (#4), but this first standalone “Man-Gods” issue riffed on the ancient astronauts theme with a long Doug Moench tale from a basic Roy Thomas concept/plot, beautifully illustrated by Alex Nino. The excellent letterer doesn’t appear to be credited, and so may have been Nino himself.
Page 2 had a full-page Lovecraft poster-quote from “The Call of Cthulhu”, against Easter Island statues. As well as the lead comic there was also a profile and timeline for the best-selling ‘ancient astronauts’ author von Daniken, and capsule reviews of all the key books for and against the ‘ancient astronauts’ theory (which in the 1960s and early 70s could still be deemed ‘undecided’ by many, including Carl Sagan, rather than ‘crackpot’). At the back there was a nicely-done modern monster-heavy tribute to the old EC-style ‘planet explorer’ tales.
Apparently the same issue was re-printed for Australia in 1981. There are evidently a lot of copies about on eBay in paper, but they appear to be priced at silly ‘ooh gosh, Neal Adams cover art’ prices. Anyway, if you squint the following set of page scans are just about readable, and have the whole of the issue’s central story…
Not much Lovecrafting here, other than the general theme and some archaeological interludes, and it’s more of an exemplary short science-fiction mash-up of space-gods and ‘sabre-tooth-tiger’ prehistory. Jack Kirby, also at Marvel, would explore similar ideas in his The Eternals (first issue July 1976).
One of the Amazon reviews for The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture (2006) is a cursory one but points out that Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898) proto-pulp Edisonade got there first with such ideas…
“Edison’s “Conquest of Mars” has the Martians coming to Earth in the distant past, abducting humans, and then hanging around to build the pyramids of Egypt”.
That Lovecraft read Serviss’s book as a boy is highly likely (see my chapter on Lovecraft and Serviss, a favourite author in his youth and ‘the Carl Sagan of his day’, in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #4). And there was a book reprint of Edison’s Conquest of Mars in a 1,500-copy limited edition in 1947, which was advertised for several years in the likes of Weird Tales. Its reprint edition would have been about the right time to hit France in the mid 1950s, if only as book reviews (Morning of the Magicians was written c. 1955-59 and published 1960 in French). But Covalito’s book convincingly shows that the Morning of the Magicians authors were strongly influenced by Lovecraft.
In theory then the route(s) of influence to von Daniken could be many:
Serviss [1947] -> Morning of the Magicians [mid 1950s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [1960s].
Serviss [1898] -> Lovecraft [1920s] -> Morning of the Magicians [mid 1950s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [1960s].
The most likely is, cumulatively:
Serviss [1898] -> Theosophy [1920s] -> Lovecraft [1920s] -> + more Theosophy and other 1930s historico-mystic currents [1930s and 40s] -> Morning of the Magicians in English [1963] -> other French copycats of Magicians [mid 1960s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [later 1960s].
But quite whether the bulk of the 1970s UFO-logists bothered to look any further back than von Daniken after his 1971 American paperback and cinema movie, who knows? There was also an American documentary of the increasingly popular book, the TV programme In Search of Ancient Astronauts (NBC, 1973).
Though we do know that Terrence McKenna was influenced early by Lovecraft (see the memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss), and many of the more literate hippies must have at least tried to read Lovecraft once he was in affordable paperback form. Some key Lovecraft ideas had also filtered through into Arthur C. Clarke’s trans-cosmicism — which had its own ‘ancient contact’ symbolism such as 2001‘s monolith among the primitive man-apes — so there may be more wormholes of influence to be considered there. Carl Sagan’s famously lyrical Cosmos TV series probably also had an influence (see Cosmos: Podcast Edition – Carl Sagan for a good audio-only version), with Sagan highly sceptical of post-1940s UFO contacts but not of alien civilisations per se.
Nor should we underestimate the power of oral transmission, in terms of the influences swirling through the tight but far-travelling counter-culture of the UFO-logists. I guess there must be good histories of ‘serious’ UFO-ology by now, which might tell us more about that swirl. But I expect that research on the now-unfashionable ‘ancient astronauts’ wing and the influence of Lovecraft is likely greatly hampered by big gaps in memory, caused by: i) the inevitable natural memory loss and distortion caused by age; ii) the natural ephemerality of the counter-culture’s diaries and suchlike; iii) the psychedelic drugs of the time (summed up in the saying “if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there”); and iv) the later 1970s heroin epidemic which burned through so many urban hippies.
Apparently this half-baked stuff is still popular, mainly through a rather shallow American TV ‘documentary’ series called Ancient Aliens. I’ve never seen that series, and didn’t even know it existed until today. It’s said that even ‘serious’ UFO-ologists shun the ‘ancient astronauts’ believers as a ‘fringe of a fringe’, but I guess it has some passing entertainment value as “what if?” TV pseudo-archaeology for the masses. Although, as Lovecraft suggested several times in his letters, such wild real-world historical-conspiracy theory is really best confined to speculative fiction which is its proper home.
It’s possible that such ideas won’t just be confined to junk TV and swivel-eyed YouTube channels in the near future. On the 50th anniversary of von Daniken’s book, Hollywood is obviously currently sniffing around the sub-genre, with Prometheus already leading the way and a proposed movie-trilogy based on Kirby’s Eternals comics being mooted.
Pingback: UFO Connection | Tentaclii