Can it be stars are right time now?

[old book]

March 2012 Fortean Times, "The Hidden History of 2012" by John W. Hoopes, excerpt from page 42:

"As Jason Colavito has pointed out in The Cult of the Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (2005), Erich von Daniken's 'ancient astronaut' theory can be traced to Lovecraft's 'Old Ones'. It was filtered through the work of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, whose The Dawn of Magic (1960) [Morning of the Magicians???] conjoined ufology with occult and conspiracy theory. Lovecraft's play on Helena Blavatsky's kalpas and root races fuelled a new mythology. The Lovecraftian tone of Coe's words provoked in others an association with extraterrestrials. The success of Chariots of the Gods? (1969) and its German film version inspired John Landsburg to produce In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), In Search of Ancient Mysteries (1975), and The Outer Space Connection (1975), which suggested the ancient Maya had been in contact with extraterrestrials who had started a colony in the Yucatan, undertaken cloning experiments, and would return to Earth on Coe's date: 24 December 2011. A modern myth was born, melding 19th-century Theosophy with ETs through Lovecraft and Coe."

[Genus Unknown]

Huh. I've read Cult of Alien Gods, and recommend it, but I never thought to draw a connection to the 2012 doomsday stuff.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Well, to play Asathon's advocate here, just about everything is circling around the 2012 Doomsday fad right now. People are drawing parallels between doomsday and every nut-case out there and I'm having a really hard time taking any of it for anything else but utter lunacy. For instance, when I was a child, there was a program on TV about Nostradamus and his prophecies. According the grim voice of Orson Wells, Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 1985. This scared the hell out of me and gave me all kinds of anxiety when I was a kid. When I started high school (in 1987) someone brought Nostradamus up in conversation and I realized that I had already lived through the "apocalypse" he had predicted. Now, people are saying that they have decoded more of his quatrains and that the world is REALLY going to end in 2012. What complete nonsense.

At this point, while I still find the connection to Lovecraft very interesting, I just get annoyed about the entire 2012 end of the world garbage.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

My theory is that the 2012 Doomsday Phenomenon is a vast cultural misconception of the same type as the mythical Jersey Shore audience. Allow me to explain.

Jersey Shore rose to infamy as a "reality" show that follows the most ridiculous, obnoxious group of douchebags ever yet shown on national television. It's a show that nobody admits to watching, but clearly somebody is, or was. Everyone knows it, everyone can name at least two cast members, and if it ever comes up in conversation, someone, without exception, will voice some opinion along the lines of "who actually admires these people?!" You'll hear people lamenting the sad state of the country when the likes of Snooki and The Situation are held up as role models, people that vast legions of idiots and teenagers are supposedly looking up to. This despite the fact that such people are about as easy to find as Bigfoot. I have never met a person who wants to be like the cast of Jersey Shore. I have never heard of such a person. I daresay you haven't either. I have met people, 20-something "party girls" who would seem to be the most likely candidates, who watch the show. But they don't watch because the cast members are a bunch of really cool people. No, the pitch is always, without exception, "oh man, you have to watch this show, it's so fucking ridiculous!"

The trick is that people think "well, it's on TV and getting good ratings, and these people are appearing on other shows and starting clothing lines (or whatever), so clearly someone is trying to emulate them." But I don't think so. Of the millions of people who watch or watched Jersey Shore, maybe a tiny fringe group actually relates to the cast members, but that's pure speculation. I've never seen any evidence that these people actually exist. I think 99-to-100% of the audience of Jersey Shore is laughing at the cast members' expense. Same with the Kardashians and every other "who the hell are these idiots" reality show. Something stupid gets a surprisingly large audience, and the scoffers watch, all the while bemoaning the idiocy of the people who watch, not realizing that everyone else in the audience is thinking the exact same thing.

What does this have to do with 2012? Well, I think it's the exact same phenomenon.

The History Channel runs a couple of moronic specials on this theory, and for a short while, maybe it actually catches on among the lunatic fringe. But if anyone ever seriously bought into it, I haven't heard from them lately.  Sure, TV specials were produced (and watched), and books were written (and bought, maybe even read). Roland Emmerich made a long special-effects clip about it starring John Cusack. But somewhere between that John Cusack movie and today, it fell out of fashion. The crazies turned their attention to other crazy topics. Now, 99% of the conversation about the 2012 Doomsday Prophecy of Doom revolves around how ridiculous it is. It has passed from the hands of the weirdo fringe into the hands of the skeptics, who are having as much fun debunking it as the "superior" Jersey Shore viewer has bashing the rest of the Jersey Shore audience.

In other words, nobody looks up to the Jersey Shore cast, and nobody really believes the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 just because the ancient Mayans had a weird calendar system... but everyone likes to think such people are out there in significant numbers, thus granting us an excuse to feel superior.

That's my theory, anyway.

[old book]

That's a very astute point you've made there, Genus. I would go a bit further, because there are Maya/2012 "experts" debunking "the nonsense" as well now, meaning that they are educated, learned etc and know the real poop, while all the riff-raff rabble rage outrageously on and on about the false media-inspired 2012 "hype." So there's something for just about everyone here, and it does make me laugh.

I have not actually seen Jersey Shore or Kardashians ever. I have heard the name Jersey Shore (on MTV right?) and "Snooki" pops up now and again, but until now I never knew of the connection. I always pictured "Jersey Shore" as an extension of the 4chan "meme" that goes something like, "Hi, my name is John, and I hate every one of you." Pure speculation unguided by evidence on my part.

That issue of Fortean Times has several lengthy quotes from Lovecraft peppered throughout, and recent issues of FT have also had a fair bit of Lovecraft included for whatever reason. I find this trend interesting.

Without getting too into the 2012 thing, I note two things:

1) Terrence McKenna came up with the date, if it wasn't Jose "Harmonic Convergence" Arguelles, and no one has really come up with the definitive date in our calendar for when the Mayan cycle/Aeon ends. Terrence McKenna came up with the date on his old skool Mac by playing around with hexagrams from the I Ching and correlating them to the Maya cycles. His program never really worked for anyone else, it wasn't an app you could send around for people to check out for themselves, and it always needed tweaking just to run. Without going too much into computer models and expectations and scientific method, it was really McKenna's baby, and he thought the singularity of "novelty"--or was it "levity" or both?--on December 21 might mean that's when people discover how to time travel. He couldn't imagine it could mean anything else. One of his friends is on the current episode of the new-agey radio show Revelations talking about it, free Mp3 here:

http://www.strieber.com/streaming/030712.mp3

2) History Channel is still rolling out the same old BS about how the Maya supposedly went extinct in the 13th century. They're still there. They still speak Maya. Mayan glyphs were only finally deciphered by comparing them with living Mayan speech. The star-gazing peaceful astronomer race of Maya never existed as such, it as invented by self-proclaimed academic Mayan experts in a fit of romanticism and rejection of the living Indians, which has happened over and over again around the world. While it is true that the Maya probably got some of their calendrical and astronomical notions from the earler Olmec cultures immediately to their north in what is now Mexico, the Mayan groups did not go extinct in the 13th century. And the Olmecs must have been much earlier than that, so calling them "the ancient Maya" doesn't really work, if you ask me. (as a parenthesis, there is some mania appearing among the Maya in Guatemala concerning 2012, according to a lady married to a Guatemalan Indian I heard on the radio.)

Real progress in deciphering Maya was made by a Soviet and Russian amateur who literally picked the codices from the rubble in Germany at the end of the war, when he was a soldier. He completely bucked the academic establishment that had coagulated around the "dead but great ancient Maya" in the US and the West in general. His work was rejected because he disagreed with them and he was Soviet. Later people in Western academia came around to his views on the script and much progress was made. It turns out the Maya were much more interested in mundane matters such as kings and conquests than had been previously thought. Whether that island off Chile really is the outpost of a Mayan ruler, or merely has some Mayan-looking stone work, I do not know. Given that we know there was Chinese contact with the Americas, and that there are some real parallels between Chinese and Mexican/Central American Indian art in stone, I don't think it's fantastic to think the Chilean island was visited by either a Mayan group or a Chinese group, or both. In the time just before AD 1000 I know of at least three great expansions: the Norse to Iceland and then Greenland and North America, the Polynesians across the Pacific and the Yupik/Inuit across the North American Arctic, so I'm guessing there could've been other expansions coming out of Central America. It seems like AD 1000 was also given as a proximate date for the Salish expansion from the Albertan Plateau into Western Washington in some book I looked at. Getting a few Maya to an island off Chile doesn't seem all that fantastic, but I'd be skpetical of the claims being made for that island.

As a final side note, speaking of stars being right, it's a full moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter are all visible and Venus and Jupiter are right next to each other, and there was the largest solar storm ever recorded a few days ago, just now hitting Earth. I expect at least a good earthquake off Fiji, if not Cthulhu rising up out of Davey's Locker. Devi's Locher? Leviathan, whatever.

[Lambda]

Real progress in deciphering Maya was made by a Soviet and Russian amateur who literally picked the codices from the rubble in Germany at the end of the war, when he was a soldier. He completely bucked the academic establishment that had coagulated around the "dead but great ancient Maya" in the US and the West in general. His work was rejected because he disagreed with them and he was Soviet. Later people in Western academia came around to his views on the script and much progress was made.

While you have the history right, I must correct you here. The main reason Knorozov was disregarded by western scientists was not the fact that he was Soviet, but that Thompson (the Maya authority during that time) was a complete <insert expletive here> who would not accept any theory not matching his personal interpretation of the Maya. He actually believed that most of the glyphs weren't supposed to make sense at all, that they were just mystical decorations and that the Maya (who we nowadays know to be quite a warlike people) were devoted to stargazing, corn planting and spreading peace and love, man.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Peace and love are easy to spread when all your enemies have their hearts torn out and sacrificed to your gods.

Bob

[old book]

Real progress in deciphering Maya was made by a Soviet and Russian amateur who literally picked the codices from the rubble in Germany at the end of the war, when he was a soldier. He completely bucked the academic establishment that had coagulated around the "dead but great ancient Maya" in the US and the West in general. His work was rejected because he disagreed with them and he was Soviet. Later people in Western academia came around to his views on the script and much progress was made.

While you have the history right, I must correct you here. The main reason Knorozov was disregarded by western scientists was not the fact that he was Soviet, but that Thompson (the Maya authority during that time) was a complete <insert expletive here> who would not accept any theory not matching his personal interpretation of the Maya. He actually believed that most of the glyphs weren't supposed to make sense at all, that they were just mystical decorations and that the Maya (who we nowadays know to be quite a warlike people) were devoted to stargazing, corn planting and spreading peace and love, man.

Thank you, Lambda. I got the impression from reading on the internet the Soviets used him to promote some kind of "Marxist archaeology," and Thompson used that Soviet propaganda to dismiss his work. I'm sure you're right that it wasn't the main reason, just a sort of argument/appeal to non-authority kind of thing.

[T. Kelly Lee]

Bit odd a guy writing for Fortean Times blaming HPL for ancient astronaut theory - surly it was from Fort's Book of the Damned that HPL got the idea.  We know from his writings that he studied Fort heavily. 

I've always wondered what "When the Stars Are Right" means.  HPL would have had now knowledge of the Mayan calendar, so since that seems interesting he couldn't have influenced his work.  But he was also a serious amateur astronomer, so clearly he had something in mind.  He seemed to like the idea of intelligences in other star systems only being able to communicate with entities on earth at a time when celestial system had "come round" in a complete orbit.  Polaris, of course, gives us this idea.  My guess is that something of this nature is what he was referring to. 

[Genus Unknown]

The Mayan calendar has nothing to do with anything. If we must look for a real-life (or "real-life," as the case may be) influence for the lines about "the stars [being] right," I think good old astrology would be the more obvious and likely source. If I had to guess, I'd say it was probably done to emphasize the link between his otherworldly creatures and the vast cosmic cycles of the universe, as well as to provide a convenient excuse as to why they aren't overrunning the world now, and to drive home the point that there's nothing mankind can do against them -- any more than we can alter the courses of the stars themselves.

As for HPL "studying Fort heavily," has that been established? The impression I got was that HPL didn't much care for Fort, mining his books for nuggets of story ideas (like "The Colour," which some theorize was inspired by Fort's accounts of "thunder stones"), but regarding the man himself as nothing more than a mildly amusing crackpot.

I'd also be interested in learning when he read Fort. The Book of the Damned came out in 1919, at which point HPL had not yet written anything about ancient aliens, but if he didn't read it until after "The Call of Cthulhu," then it wouldn't count as an influence.

[old book]

"Polaris" makes reference to the precession of the equinoxes (equinoces?), not directly, but to the physical "coming round" of the Pole Star. I think Lovecraft was enchanted by conceptions of cosmic time, and therefore felt some respect for the "ong calendars" of other cultures, although he seems to seize upon the "Hindoo" system more than any other in that regard.

Apparenly Fort and Lovecraft visited the same New York Public Library rather often. Not sure if they bumped into one another, probably not.

[T. Kelly Lee]

Through HPL's letters he makes it clear that he read Fort heavily, but also disagreed with the bulk of his theories.  Sort of like how a skeptic (like me) still enjoys watchin Ancient Aliens or Ghost Hunters just to revel in the bollocks - it's like eating frosting and no cake!  I can remember one instance in which HPL heavily dresses down Fritz Leiber for taking Fort too seriously.  It's clear that HPL had thorough knowledge of Fort in rebutting his arguments.  We know that HPL read Book of the Damned before writing COC because he references borrowing it from Herman Koenig while in New York.

HPL references Fort of course in a number of stories and many times in his letters - but he also makes it clear he didn't care for the conclusions of the research.  In fact, HPL was such a skeptic he actually had plans to write a kind of "debunkers handbook" with Houdini. 

[Bob Lovecraft]

I have always believed that the reference to "the stars being right" has nothing to do with the typical view we have of cosmic convergences, that is, certain planets lining up in their orbits relative to our vantage point on Earth. I've always though of it more as a mas conglomeration of semi-chaotic patterns. After all, Lovecraft is constantly talking abut how the universe a completely chaotic, formless void of uncaring outer entity. So, to me at least, it follows that the stars being right would be some weird random-looking blob that none of us humans would really have any idea actually was a pattern. That's why people seem to need books like the Necronomicon in order to figure these things out.

Anyway, that's always been my take on the concept.

Bob

[Jape]

Yeah Bob, we are talking HPL here - the idea humanity would even be able to comprehend the coming of their doom is a no-no. An overlapping chaotic 'forces' that could happen tomorrow or in a billion years seems to fit the bill.