1. I have a few thoughts on Atlantis and other "lost" civilizations, ancient mound builders, Abraham Lincoln, Ezra Pound, the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, West African art and space aliens. Maybe also Jack Kirby.
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8. With his search for Atlantis in Africa (which inspired Nazi expeditions), Frobenius seems like a character out of pulp fiction: H. Rider Haggard, Lovecraft or the Indiana Jones movies. But of course, those fictions drew on figures like Frobenius.
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8. I think it's the Lovecraftian tradition that wedded the idea of ancient advanced civilizations with the science fiction conceit of alien visitations (from either other planets or dimensions). The up-lifting advanced white civilization became the advanced alien civilization
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9. I think with the creation of Black Panther in 1966, Jack Kirby was trying to see if this rather dismal tradition could be repurposed to anti-racist ends, with the role of the advanced hidden civilization being taken by Wakanda, a black nation.
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10. As a science fiction or pulp conceit, the idea of ancient astronauts is fun. But I do think people who palm it off as an actual theory (i.e von Däniken) are doing a lot of harm: poisoning our ability to appreciate these ancient cultures on their own terms.
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11. At bottom, these theories always show a fundamental failure of imagination: an inability to believe that there existed human communities outside the western tradition who created strange, wonderful, complex artifacts, sometimes beyond our skills.
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Unlike UofC’s Mircea Eliade, who was a Nazi
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I believe this was the premise of Robert E.Howard's Hyborian Age, as well.
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Sortof. Robert E. Howard took inspiration from Theosophical writings that the "root races" of modern humans emerged from Atlantis and Lemuria; he developed this in his own fashion for the pseudo-historical background he developed to bridge his Kull and Conan stories.
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