Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (36 page)

A Brief History of Pseudo-Scholars

The first grand wizard of the Universal Order of Mass Pseudo-Scholarship may have been the psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky, whose “study” of the mythologies of China, India, Mesopotamia, and ancient Greece, as well as the Bible, led him to argue that the planet Venus had originated only 3,500 years ago. In the form of a huge comet, it had come close to earth, setting off a series of events that were recorded as catastrophes by the then inhabitants of the planet, including the Hebrews in Egypt, who experienced them as the various Mosaic plagues in the Book of Exodus. In 1950, Velikovsky had his theory (“about which I no longer have any doubt”) published by Macmillan under the title of
Worlds in Collision
.

Velikovsky’s technique was similar to that of the
Holy Blood
authors. He deployed evidence that favored his hypothesis, ignored anything that didn’t, and accounted for the lack of specific records of the Venus comet by arguing that mankind had suffered from some kind of planetary repressed-memory syndrome. So, in a tone now familiar, he set down the nature of his task, which was “not unlike that faced by a psychoanalyst who, out of disassociated memories and dreams, reconstructs a forgotten traumatic experience in the early life of an individual.”
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By correctly reading the unconscious clues, he alone had found the truth.

Scientists hated
Worlds in Collision
, loathing its reduction of the achievements of astronomy to the half-baked interpreted neuroses of ancient Assyrians. What made things worse was that Velikovsky was lionized by the scientifically illiterate literary elite, who, according to the popular scientist Carl Sagan, placed the questing shrink on the same level as Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud. Apparently, some scientists who published their works with Macmillan’s textbook division threatened to take their books elsewhere, not wanting to be associated with Velikovsky’s theories. As a result, Macmillan dropped the book and it was taken up by Doubleday, where it continued to sell remarkably well.

Velikovsky’s successor—who was fifteen at the time of the publication of
Worlds in Collision—
was the Swiss hotelier and convicted fraudster Erich von Däniken. Living on money in most cases honestly earned by working in hotels and bars across Switzerland, the young von Däniken financed an interest in archaeology and visits to ancient sites. At Palenque, a site in the Chiapas province of Mexico inhabited by the Mayans between the fifth and ninth centuries A.D., von Däniken came across the tomb of King Pacal, inside the Temple of Inscriptions. First discovered in 1952, the tomb displays an unusual carving on the five-ton stone coffin lid. In the middle of it, wrote von Däniken,

a being is sitting and leaning forward (like an astronaut in his command module). This strange being wears a helmet from which twin tubes run backward. In front of his nose is an oxygen apparatus. The figure is manipulating some kind of controls with both hands. The fingers of the upper hand are arranged as if the being was making a delicate adjustment to a knob in front of him. We can see four fingers of the lower hand which has its back to us. The little finger is crooked. Doesn’t it look as if the being was working a control such as the hand-throttle of a motorbike? The heel of the left foot rests on a pedal with several steps.
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And if that’s what it looked like, reasoned von Däniken, then that’s what it was. This then was evidence for what he called “paleo-contact”: aliens had landed on Earth thousands of years ago, amazed men with their extraordinary technology, and simultaneously given rise to the great civilizations of the world. Other traces of the extraterrestrials were to be discerned at Stonehenge, on Easter Island, and in a ship-borne navigation aid found off the coast of Greece.

Von Däniken’s odd manuscript did not attract publishers, and he received twenty-two rejections, with one describing his work as “emotional ramblings.” Only when the book was rewritten with the (very terrestrial) help of a sci-fi author and promoted as archaeology did
Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past
find a publisher. And a lucky publisher at that. Brought out in 1967, it was a phenomenal success. Even an awkward interruption of three years in prison for tax fraud and embezzlement did the author’s sales no harm. In his Landsberg, von Däniken completed a second book,
Return of the Gods
, and by the time he emerged from jail in 1971 (his conviction was subsequently overturned), he had sold 2.5 million copies of both books in at least twenty languages. Today, enjoying the sobriquet “the most successful nonfiction writer in history,” von Däniken has published a Trollopian twenty-six books on paleo-contact, been translated into thirty-two languages, and sold sixty-three million copies.

Inevitably, his theory was disputed from the first day of its appearance. Von Däniken reacted to criticism in the usual way: the Establishment was out to get him, but he wouldn’t be got. “Even if a reactionary army tries to dam up this new intellectual flood,” he told readers, “a new world must be conquered in the teeth of all the unteachable in the name of truth and reality.” And then he commended both himself and his fans: “It took courage to write this book,” he said, “and it will take courage to read it.”
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It isn’t clear whether more or less bravery was required to watch von Däniken’s theories on television—as tens of millions have, especially in America and in Germany. As recently as 1996, the network RTL showed a film made by ABC in America, which was seen by nearly eight million viewers.

But extraterrestrialism was yesterday’s thrill by the mid-1980s. The moon landings were becoming a memory, space was no longer quite so glamorous, a decade of UFOlogy had led to the Roswell autopsy hoax, and Steven Spielberg had moved on to other things. Even with von Däniken still alive, his seal and sepulcher passed into the hands of British writer Graham Hancock.

Hancock, who became the archetypal practitioner of the book-TVBOOK-DVD cycle, is a sociologist by training. He worked as a journalist on several mainstream British newspapers and was something of a specialist on Africa and poverty, writing several books on international aid from rich countries to poor. And then in 1987, according to him, he had a revelation in Chartres Cathedral, which eventually led him to write his own
Holy Blood
-style work of pseudo-history. “Following obscure clues found within ancient stories and biblical tales,” explains his publisher, “through the occult knowledge gleaned from the coded Grail epic of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the obscure and secretive workings of the enigmatic Knights Templar, [he] traces the Ark from its source in ancient Egypt, to Jerusalem, and from there to its final resting place in Africa.”
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Two uses of “obscure” in one sentence should be a bad sign, but when
The Sign and the Seal
appeared in 1992, unlike his earlier works on Africa, it was a bestseller.

Hancock’s big triumph was yet to come. By 1995, he had evolved a theory that was rather larger than anything about Templars, however enigmatic. He had decided that his observations of ancient cultures pointed in one direction: 10,500 years ago there was a supercivilization of superterrestrials who built the Sphinx and passed on their knowledge to the Egyptians, who came along some 6,000 years later. “If I’m right,” said Hancock, “and our whole conception of prehistory is wrong, then the foundations upon which we have built our idea of what our society is are crumbling.”
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Three million copies of the resulting book,
Fingerprints of the Gods
, have been bought worldwide.

Hancock has variously theorized that Atlantis was actually Antarctica, inhabited before the ice covered it, and that there are formations on Mars that also suggest the activities of ancient civilizations. In a more recent book,
Supernatural
, he promises to answer such questions as “Why did Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick keep concealed until his death the astonishing circumstances under which he first ‘saw’ the double-helix structure of DNA? And why did he become convinced that the DNA molecule did not evolve naturally upon this planet but was sent here in bacteria by an alien civilization?”
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I don’t know. Drugs, perhaps? But skepticism has not been universal. Hancock’s books have been described as “persuasive and scholarly” by the
Observer
, as containing “an elegant theory that reads like a detective story” by the
Daily Mail
, and as representing “a discovery about the pyramids that could change our whole view of human history” by the London
Evening Standard
. Hancock’s work has been expensively filmed and given prime-time airing on the BBC and Channel 4 in Britain, and his lecture tours of America have been hugely successful. Millions have watched, millions have read, millions have bought.

A quick look through Hancock’s Amazon reviews shows how few purchasers seem inclined to doubt Hancock’s “research,” but those few who do track down his claims discover basic errors in archaeology and astronomy. One American, writing about attending a Hancock illustrated lecture in the mid-1990s, comments on the author’s claim that the Gateway of the Sun at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia contains a carving of an elephant. Hancock’s point was that the gateway dated from around the sixth century A.D., while elephants had been extinct in Bolivia since the eleventh century B.C. The American gentleman points out, perhaps with British humor, “This is a carving of a parrot . . . Of course, someone could respond: ‘Well, you think it looks like a parrot because that’s what you want to see.’ Fair enough. But what’s more likely, that it’s an incongruous, extinct elephant carving from 10,000 years ago or a more recent carving of an existing, common indigenous species?”
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At the end of 1999, two BBC
Horizon
programs demolished Hancock comprehensively. They showed that the best archaeological evidence was that civilizations had developed incrementally and individually and did not derive from a common source. They also showed that Hancock’s claims about the astronomical positioning of the Pyramids to reflect the night sky in 10,500 B.C. could also be applied to twentieth-century Manhattan, so was he saying that the super-ancients were somehow influencing the architects and planners of the modern era?

The BBC giveth ground to the pseudo-historians, and sometime later taketh it away.

And a Byway: Schonfield and the Bible

When it comes to Bible studies, an area where facts are even harder to ascertain, the door is wide open for far-out theories. One strand was begun in 1965 by Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield, a British academic and Bible scholar.
The Passover Plot
consists of the extended hypothesis that Jesus engineered his own arrest and crucifixion in order to fulfill the Jewish prophecy about the Messiah, but that he had an elaborate plan for survival, which would be sold as a resurrection. “These things had to come about,” wrote Schonfield, “in the manner predicted by the Scriptures and after preliminaries entailing the most careful scheming and plotting to produce them . . . A conspiracy had to be organized of which the victim was himself the deliberate secret instigator. It was . . . the outcome of the frightening logic of a sick mind, or of a genius.”
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Almost all went to plan: Jesus set Judas up to betray him, and events took their intended course. Jesus knew that crucifixion was a slow death and swallowed a special potion to make it look as though he had expired more quickly than usual, so that he would be cut down still alive. He and others had arranged a tomb “conveniently placed” on Joseph of Arimathea’s land, to which he would be taken off and revived, making it clear to all that he was indeed the Chosen One. Unfortunately, a Roman soldier, in an uncharacteristic and unlucky moment of compassion, decided to speed Jesus’ end by thrusting a spear in the suffering man’s side. After that the disciples spirited the body away and made the rest up as though nothing had gone wrong. Ironically, Christianity survived; Christ didn’t. Schonfield’s book (a bestseller, need I say) reminded people how disputed much of New Testament history really was. A whole variety of speculations and theories on the story of Jesus followed. Was he black? Was he gay? Was he a she? Did he really die? And so on.

With sections of the established Church still professing to believe in saints, miracles, and manifestations, in the liquefying of sacred blood and the transubstantiation of comestible items, such theories seemed no more far-fetched. But while Schonfield genuinely was a scholar, some of those who came later have made their lesser learning go much further. Particularly threatening was the promise, made as this chapter was being researched, that the British duo of Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince were finishing a book called
The Masks of Christ
, for which the advance publicity read, “As the phenomenal sales of
The Da Vinci Code
continue to fuel a growing global appetite for questioning the old certainties and assumptions about Christianity and what it says about its founder, never has there been a more perfect time to launch
The Masks of Christ
.”

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have enjoyed several perfect times. Their slightly disturbing hair has graced just about every documentary made on the subjects of the secret Leonardo, the mysterious Templars, and the hidden wife of Christ in the last decade, and they have an impressive publishing record. Between them, they have managed
The Templar Revelation, The Sion Revelation, The Stargate Conspiracy, Mary Magdalene: Christianity’s Hidden Goddess,
and
Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History
. Published in 2006,
The Sion Revelation
is a particularly adept bit of sophistry, succeeding as it does in turning the proof of Plantard’s hoax on its head
.
True, say P & P, the Sion skeptics “do undoubtedly have the weight of evidence on their side,” but it isn’t as simple as that, because the hoax was “as intricate a hoax as any in history” and therefore presumably beyond the resources of a group of French con men. So we should be careful before we decide to consign the story to the big Book of Swindles, and wary lest “the evidence that the Priory has lied, ever, on any subject—automatically means that it can be dismissed out of hand.”
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