Occult Origins of ‘Ancient Aliens’
By Derek Gilbert
By the fourth quarter of the 19th century, the Spiritualist movement was joined on the spiritual scene by the new Theosophist movement, a blend of Eastern and Western mystical traditions that found fertile ground among urban elites. Following the lead of their founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Theosophists saw Spiritualism as unsophisticated and provincial. For their part, “Spiritualists rejected Theosophy as unscientific occultism,” wrote David J. Hess in his book, Science in the New Age.
Blavatsky is an enigmatic character, partly because it’s difficult to confirm a lot of what she said and wrote about herself. According to official histories, she was the daughter of a Russian-German nobleman who traveled widely across Europe and Asia in the 1850s and 1860s. By cobbling together traditions cribbed from Eastern sources, Blavatsky was guided by her “ascended masters” to lay the foundation for the modern UFO phenomenon and ET disclosure movement.
Entire books have been devoted to the life and claims of Madame Blavatsky, and we don’t have time or space here to dig deeply into the material. Briefly, Blavatsky acknowledged the existence of Spiritualist phenomena, but denied that mediums were contacting spirits of the dead. She taught instead that God is a “Universal Divine Principle, the root of All, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being,” according to her book, The Key to Theosophy.
That’s a very Eastern worldview. Madame Blavatsky wove Hindu and Buddhist concepts into her philosophy, and it’s claimed that she and Henry Steel Olcott, with whom she founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875, were the first Western converts to Buddhism. The success of Theosophy in the United States and United Kingdom did much to spread Eastern mysticism in the West. The New Age movement owes a huge debt to Helena Blavatsky.
Blavatsky, New Age Movement and Atlantis
Through her most famous books, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, and her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, Blavatsky attracted international attention to her society and its goal of uniting the world in brotherhood by blending the philosophies of East and West through the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science, Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote in his book, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom.
In The Secret Doctrine, which Blavatsky claimed was channeled from a prehistoric work called The Book of Dzyan (which critics accused her of plagiarizing without credit from a number of sources, including the Sanskrit Rigveda), she wrote that “Lemuria was the homeland of humanity, the place of the first creation. Further, there were to be seven Root Races ruling the Earth in succession, of which humanity today was only the fifth. The fourth of these races were the Atlanteans, who were destroyed by black magic. Lemuria would rise and fall to spawn new races until the Seventh Root Race, perfect in every way, would take its rightful place as master of the world,” Jason Colavito wrote in his book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture.
Who, you ask, were the Atlanteans, and what is Lemuria? In the 19th century, this odd marriage of Spiritualism and Modernism gave rise to competing claims that the human race was either evolving or devolving. Spiritualists more or less accepted Darwinian evolution because it supported their belief in the continued development of the spirit after death. Blavatsky and her followers, on the other hand, believed that humanity had left behind a golden age that collapsed when Atlantis fell beneath the waves, similar to the belief of ancient Greeks in a long-ago golden age when Kronos ruled in heaven.
Lemuria, like Atlantis, was another lost continent believed to be submerged somewhere in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. It got its name in 1864 when zoologist Philip Sclater noticed that certain primate fossils existed in Madagascar and India, but not in Africa or the Middle East. To solve the puzzle, Sclater theorized that a lost continent that once connected Madagascar and India accounted for the similar lemur fossils—hence Lemuria.
No kidding.
While belief in the existence of Lemuria was abandoned by mainstream scientists when plate tectonics and continental drift caught on, the lost continent was kept alive by the imagination and teachings of pseudo-scientists and spiritual deceivers like Helena Blavatsky.
The Secret Doctrine, Masters and ‘Astral Clairvoyance’
Mysterious symbols, tragic history, and memories of a glorious, golden past transmitted to Blavatsky by disembodied Masters via “astral clairvoyance” apparently stirred something in the hearts of those who read The Secret Doctrine. Through the force of her powerful will, Madame Helena Blavatsky convinced thousands that the history they’d been taught was a lie, and that humanity’s future was to return to the golden age that was lost when Atlantis slipped beneath the waves.
To put it simply, Blavatsky’s occult system Theosophy is a religious faith with human evolution as an integral part of cosmic evolution. The ultimate goal was perfection and conscious participation in the evolutionary process. This process was overseen by the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, a hierarchy of spiritual beings who’d been guiding humanity’s development for millennia.
From a Christian perspective, it’s easy to recognize the deception embodied by the doctrines of Theosophy. While Blavatsky’s critics believed she invented her faith out of whole cloth, a discerning follower of Jesus Christ sees through the lies. Humanity is not the product of random evolutionary chance; the “golden age” was the pre-Flood era during which the “mighty men who were of old” spread their terror throughout the earth; and there is no spiritual discipline that will enable us to become one with God and the cosmos.
The appeal of the old lie, “Ye shall be as gods,” is why the Infernal Council keeps rolling it out. It deceived Adam and Eve, the kings of the Amorites, and even Manasseh and Amon, the son and grandson of King Hezekiah of Judah, who, like the pagan Amorites, aspired to join the “assembly of the Rephaim” or the “council of the Ditanu” (i.e., the Titans) after death.
And now these messages from beyond the grave have been rebranded as communications from beyond the stars—thanks to the wickedest man in the world and an atheist author of horror fiction.
H.P. Lovecraft and Messages from Beyond the Stars
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the giants of 20th century literature, although he wasn’t recognized as such until after his death. And because he wrote horror fiction, he wasn’t the kind of writer who got invited to fancy society parties. Lovecraft and his friends, most of whom he knew through volumes of letters that some believe were more influential than his published work, wrote to entertain, usually by crafting terrifying tales and conjuring monstrous images of overpowering, inhuman evil.
H. P. Lovecraft was a sickly child who missed so much school in his youth that he was basically self-educated. He never completed high school, giving up on his dream of becoming an astronomer, because of what he later called a “nervous breakdown.” It’s possible that whatever intellectual gift Lovecraft was given came at the expense of social skills. It’s also possible that he was tormented by the same demons—psychological or spiritual—that drove both of his parents to spend the last years of their lives in an asylum. Lovecraft lived as isolated an existence as he could manage most of his life, and he admitted “most people only make me nervous—that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn’t,” according to Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters.
As a child, Lovecraft was tormented by night terrors. From the age of six, young Howard was visited by what he called night-gaunts—faceless humanoids with black, rubbery skin, bat-like wings, and barbed tails, who carried off their victims to Dreamland. The nocturnal visitors were so terrifying that Howard remembered trying desperately to stay awake every night during this period of his life. These dreams, which haunted him for more than a year, apparently had a powerful influence on his fiction.
From a Christian perspective, it’s a shame that Lovecraft’s mother, who raised Howard from age three with his aunts after his father was committed to a psychiatric hospital, failed to recognize the phenomenon for what it was—demonic oppression of her only child. But by the late 19th century, the Western world didn’t have room in its scientific worldview for such things. In fact, despite his personal experience with what many would call the spirit realm, Lovecraft claimed to be an atheist throughout his life.
In spite of his disbelief, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft has been adapted and adopted by occultists around the world. The man who died a pauper not only found an audience over the last eighty years, Lovecraft has inspired an army of authors who have preserved and expanded the nightmarish universe that sprang from his tortured dreams.
Although Lovecraft claimed he didn’t believe in the supernatural, he was more than happy to use the spirit realm as grist for his writing mill. Lovecraft apparently saw potential in the doctrines of 19th century occultist Blavatsky for stories that would sell. And they did, but mostly after his death. During his lifetime, Lovecraft was barely known outside the readership of pulp magazines.
From Blavatsky to Lovecraft to Ancient Aliens
While Lovecraft may have rejected the idea of lost continents like Atlantis or Lemuria as the forgotten motherland of humanity, a popular pseudo-scientific theory in the late 19th century, the concept served him well as an author. The notion that certain humans gifted (or cursed) with the ability to see beyond the veil were communicating with evil intelligences vastly greater than our own also made for compelling horror. Lovecraft viewed the universe as a cold, unfeeling place, so in his fiction those entities, unlike the kindly “ascended masters” of Blavatsky’s Theosophical teachings, had no use for humanity—except as slaves or sacrifices.
The horror of discovering that one is at the mercy of immense, ancient beings incapable of mercy is a common theme in Lovecraft’s tales, and he gave those ideas flesh and bone with carefully crafted prose that infused them with a sense of dread not often distilled onto the printed page.
And next time we’ll show you how Lovecraft’s fiction, inspired by the occult teachings of Madame Blavatsky and another influential occultist, Aleister Crowley, was repackaged by a Swiss hotel manager in 1969 into what’s become received wisdom for the teachers of the gospel of “ancient aliens.”
Derek Gilbert hosts SkyWatchTV, a weekly Christian television program, and co-hosts SciFriday, a weekly television program that looks at science news with his wife, author and analyst Sharon K. Gilbert. His broadcast career spans nearly four decades, with stops in Little Rock, Saint Louis, and Philadelphia, and he’s been interviewing guests for his podcast, A View from the Bunker, since 2009. Derek is author of the groundbreaking books The Great Inception and Last Clash of the Titans. He’s also the co-author with Josh Peck of The Day the Earth Stands Still, which exposes the occult origins of the modern UFO phenomenon. Bad Moon Rising: Islam, Armageddon, and the Most Diabolical Double-Cross in History was released in the summer of 2019. Derek and Sharon just released their newest book, Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon, about ancient death cults and the Bible. Derek is a popular conference speaker, a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs, prefers glasses to contacts, and has been known to sing the high part in barbershop and gospel quartets. Find out more: www.derekpgilbert.com, www.gilberthouse.org, www.vftb.net, and www.SkyWatchTV.com. —
