The Stargate Simulacrum: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Aliens, forgotten civilization that was the real originator of the pyramids and the Sphinx

The film Stargate (1994, directed by Roland Emmerich) forms the basis of a successful science-fiction franchise spanning four television series with 380 episodes and two direct-to-DVD films. Its premise is an incredible archaeological discovery in Egypt: In 1928, a mysterious artifact is unearthed near the pyramids of Giza - a giant ring, fifteen feet in diameter, inscribed with strange characters, and made of a metal which does not occur naturally on Earth - the eponymous ‘Stargate,’ so-called by accompanying hieroglyphic inscriptions. For more than sixty years, no one is able to decipher the unknown symbols that presumably hold the key to its function, until the arrival of wunderkind Egyptologist Dr. Daniel Jackson, recruited because the artifact’s apparent non- terrestrial origin and immense age lend credence to his unorthodox theories. When we first encounter him, Jackson is giving a passionate lecture arguing for a much greater antiquity of the pyramids and the Sphinx than conventional Egyptology will allow. Stubborn, elitist professors in the audience pillory him without mercy, asking whether he thought men from Atlantis built the pyramids - “or Martians perhaps!” Not Martians, but close. Jackson divines the purpose of the giant ring by recognizing the strange symbols as stylized star constellations: as the name implies, the Stargate is a threshold to the universe. If one enters the correct ‘address’ of seven of the thirty-nine symbols engraved on its surface, the gate opens a conduit between itself and an identical counterpart on another planet, much as one telephone dials another. Once Jackson and a team of soldiers step through this artificial ‘wormhole,’2 they are hurled across the universe within seconds and, emerging from the Stargate on the other side, find
1 I wish to thank Dylan M. Burns for helping this Egyptologist navigate the religionswissenschaftliche literature that has been essential for the story told on the following pages. I am furthermore very grateful to Ingbert Jüdt, Uwe Neuhold, and Jonas Richter for generously providing me with digital copies of some of their works cited here.
2 The popular term for a so-called ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge,’ a sort of shortcut through space-time that has been hypothesized by astrophysicists. themselves on the desert planet Abydos, inside an Egyptian temple near a virtual duplicate of the Great Pyramid of Giza - total vindication of Jackson’s theories. The American explorers soon discover that the planet Abydos is inhabited by the descendants of Ancient Egyptians who were enslaved millennia ago by an alien tyrant who, having chanced upon Earth and primitive humans, created Egyptian civilization, assumed the persona of the sun god Ra, and took thousands of slaves through the Stargate to Abydos to work in the planet’s mines, harvesting the precious metal from which the Stargates are made and which serves as the foundation of Ra’s technological might. With impeccable timing, Ra himself soon appears in his ominous pyramid-shaped spaceship and lands on the pyramid near the gate. The Americans take up the fight against the god-king and his legions of warriors, who wield high-tech laser weapons and conceal their faces behind frightful helmets resembling the head of a falcon - the ‘Horus guards’ - while their captain Anubis wears the likeness of a jackal’s head. After the Americans are able to convince the Abydonians to rebel, Ra is eventually vanquished after a fierce battle at the pyramid, the symbol of his despotism. In the television series Stargate SG-1, the ‘Stargate Command’ battles many more (usually Egyptian or otherwise ‘Oriental’) false gods like Ra and liberates planet after planet from their despotic grasp.
From a critical standpoint, Stargate gives the initial impression of a very confused pop-cultural salad, randomly tossed together out of the vegetable bins of sci-fi, American military triumphalism, and a lot of Orientalizing Egyptomania. Yet the film was a lasting hit that developed into a franchise, complete with television spinoffs (four serials, from 1997 to 2011), merchandising, and even Stargate- inspired conspiracy-theories. Meanwhile, other films such as Mission to Mars (2000), Alien vs. Predator (2004), or Prometheus (2012) also proved commercially successful ventures in exploring the theme of extraterrestrial races interfering in Earth’s past, as have ‘non-fiction’ series such as Ancient Aliens (eleven seasons and counting). What is the cultural resonance of a story like that of Stargate, and where does such a story come from?
The present contribution seeks to address these questions by way of a multi- faceted analysis addressing questions of reception of antiquity and Egypt, as well as sociology of religion. Following general methodological remarks about reception-theory which are indebted primarily to the literary theory of reception aesthetics as well as a mnemohistorical approach in the vein of Jan Assmann, I proceed to identify the traditional images of Egypt that the film harnesses, and how they are embedded in the appropriation of contemporary discourses. One of these is the focus of my essay - the so-called Ancient Astronaut discourse (henceforth: AAD or just AA for other attributive instances of ‘Ancient Astronaut’), or Preastronautics, popularized above all by Erich von Däniken, who claimed that ancient mythologies commemorate extraterrestrial visits in Earth’s distant past. I proceed to examine the centrality of Ancient Egypt in the AAD, starting with narratives about ancient Oriental and Egyptian wisdom that have been contested since late antiquity until they were discredited around the eighteenth century and pushed to the cultural fringe, thus becoming open to appropriation by new religious currents. I illustrate how esoteric currents, particularly Theosophy, as well as popular culture and an increasing belief in extraterrestrials, all paved the way for the birth of today’s AAD.
I will then focus on the ‘Egyptian front’ of this discourse, showing that Stargate responds above all to the theories of Zecharia Sitchin and Robert Bauval. A close look at key works of the genre creates a strong impression that (the) Stargate was in a way ‘prepared’ by an increasingly technological language applied to the Great Pyramid as a literal ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Post-1994, the AAD exhibits a stunning development as the fictional origins of the Stargate device are silently dropped or explained away by conspiracy theories. I try to account for this phenomenon by adapting, in the vein of recent studies of fiction-based religions, Jean Braudillard’s theory of postmodernity. I argue that we are dealing with a ‘simulacrum,’ something that has become ‘hyper-real,’ supporting Carole Cusack’s assertion that “it is necessary to posit a definition of ‘religion’ that can harmonize with fiction and invention.”3 The AAD, we will observe, resembles in several facets a religious discourse to be located within the fringe realm of ‘occulture’ as defined by Christopher Partridge, particularly in its deep entanglement with popular culture. It serves as a neo-mythology able to re- enchant the world, to present an attractive anti-authoritarian option for identity formation and yet functionally equivalent to religion (according to traditional modern definitions) in its creationist tenets. In summary, the aims of this contribution are essentially twofold: One, to showcase the emergence of the AAD out of religious discourse as well as its continued religious functions despite all differences and pretensions to the contrary, and second, to sketch a concise literary history of this emergence itself, as well as the continuous mutual influence between the AAD and popular culture, exemplified via the rather spectacular case of Stargate. Throughout these observations, we will encounter an imaginary Egypt as providing both the primary building blocks and the general backdrop of ancient mystery from and upon which the AAD’s flying pyramids are built.
2. Reception Theory, Cultural Memory, and the Mnemohistorical Approach
In the late 1960s, German literary theorists, beginning with Hans-Robert Jauß, developed the reception theory of reader-response criticism, or Rezeptionsästhetik.4 Its defining characteristic is the focus on the reader not as a passive recipient of preexisting authorial meaning, but as the active producer of meaning that may or may not conform to the meaning originally intended by the author.5 When the Ancient Egyptians gave expression to their worldview through their art, literature, architecture, etc., they too were encoding ‘authorial meaning’ which Egyptologists attempt to recover through reconstruction of the original cultural context of Egyptian texts and artefacts. In Gunter Grimm’s terms, these are “interpretations [...] assessed in terms of their adequacy (Adäquanz) in reflecting authorial intentions”6 - something that only became possible in 1822 with the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script and the birth of Egyptology. Preceding this paradigm shift, and since then accompanying and fighting it, lies a long history of Ägyptenrezeption - a web of passionate constructions of Egypt whose primary threads go back to ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. These cultures incorporated ideas of Egypt into founding narratives that were of central importance for what I call, following Jan and Aleida Assmann, their respective ‘cultural memory’ - the memory (as opposed to Egyptology’s domain: factual knowledge) of Egypt in the West.7 The basic theory, laid out extensively by J. Assmann in 1992’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (published in English only in 2011), sets out to accomplish what Assmann’s most important predecessor, Maurice Halbwachs, had not considered: “expanding his theory of memory into the realm of a theory of culture.”8 His most brilliant case studies (most notably 1997’s Moses the Egyptian) emerged where Assmann qui Egyptologist applied to his main area of expertise (i.e., pharaonic Egypt) the notion that culture is, for all intents and purposes, the sum of its ‘memories’ (i.e., cultural constructions imagined as such, be they true or not) of founding myths that are shared by and thus consolidate a community of people. Important groundwork for this endeavor was laid in the concluding chapter of 1996’s Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, where Assmann turns from the ancient Egyptians’ conceptions of self and world to the outside perspective - the history of the memory of Egypt that survives to this day, “enshrined in the cultural memory of western civilization.”9 Assmann emphasizes that identity-forming discourses of both Greco-Roman culture as well as Judeo-Christian religiosity - the two main ‘pillars’ on which Western cultural identity rests - look back to Ancient Egypt as their mythical place of origin. With respect to the overarching theme of this volume, these are the two most basic ‘master narratives’ of Western conceptions of Egypt: For the Greeks, it served as the glorified vault of mysteries and arcane wisdom from which civilization and knowledge of the gods itself reached Hellas; for Judaism (and then Christianity), it served as the abhorred prototype of false religion and the house of slavery - something to be resisted and overcome, instead of admired.10 As we will see, both images inform the representation of Egypt in Stargate. In adopting the premises of reception aesthetics and mnemohistory, I will consequently focus not on the veracity, but on the history and cultural relevance of the ideas that we will encounter.
3. Stargate as an Ancient Astronaut narrative
Stargate feels a bit like two movies shoehorned into one. The approximate first third covers the mythical story of Daniel Jackson’s vindication: An orphan, outcast, and misunderstood genius finds new meaning in life as he cracks an ancient mystery and is finally led to a portal to another world, where he finds himself before a giant pyramid and says blissfully, “I knew it.” At this point, his journey of (self-)discovery is essentially over, and Stargate switches gears as the American soldiers take it upon themselves to liberate the helpless and clueless ‘orientals’ from their evil God-king - a demonizing, biblical vision of Egypt as a ‘house of slavery’ that fuels a neocolonialist narrative negotiating legitimizing strategies about American military intervention in the Middle East shortly after the First Gulf War.11 Jackson’s solving of the Stargate mystery, however, is bound up with the so-called Ancient Astronaut theory (also called ‘Pre- astronautics,’ and, increasingly ‘Paleo-SETI’ [Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence]) which constitutes a popular discourse in Western industrialized societies and particularly the German-speaking countries.12 Its (in)famous founding father is, of course, Erich von Däniken, whose 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods? is the prototypical incarnation of the entire genre, as both his specific points and rhetorical tactics are retreaded to this day. As the ‘Bible’ of this discourse was written in German, its organized adherents are found predominantly in the germanophone sphere, and most in-depth scholarship on the subject is written in German as well (a significant exception being the work of Jason Colavito).13
In Chariots, von Däniken famously professed the idea that the gods of ancient mythology were really extraterrestrial visitors who were mistaken for deities by primitive humans, and that ancient writings and various (alleged) anomalies inthe archaeological record attest to the visits and the technology of these visitors. Von Däniken’s theory has been described by Andreas Grünschloß as a ‘ufological’ or ‘pre-astronautic Euhemerism,’ as it resembles a belief held by the philosopher Euhemerus (fl. 300 CE) that the gods were really great kings of yore who had over time been deified due to their remarkable innovations and achievements.14 As will be shown, the AAD was at the peak of its popularity in the mid-1990s when it was used as the premise for Stargate. Although it may seem that its popularity has diminished somewhat since then, the AAD is still very much alive and influential - in fact, I suspect that it is less conspicuous today because it has become normalized as an element of popular culture and lost some of its original shock value. The ‘gods’ are here to stay, and they continue to inspire ‘worship’.
4. The Road to von Däniken: Ancient Wisdom through the Ages
We have seen above that the mystification of Egypt originates with the ancient Greeks. One may specifically point to the transformation of Middle- and Neoplatonic philosophical speculation into religious narratives (such as the various incarnations of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, etc.) in late antiquity, sharing as a common legitimizing strategy the reference to a primordial wisdom possessed by the ‘barbarians’ of the Orient, including the Jews, Brahmans, Magi, and, of course, the Egyptians, usually represented by the god of wisdom Thoth, known to the Hellenistic world as Hermes Trismegistus. It was debated whether Platonic wisdom was really wisdom derived from the ancient Orient, hence the moniker ‘Platonic Orientalism.’15 In these narratives, Egypt was one of the key players: “(N)ot only was Greek philosophy seen as derived from oriental sources, but the Egyptians in particular could even claim to be the true founders of philosophy as such.”16 This controversy of how Greeks (and later, Christians) should evaluate the ‘wisdom of the pagans’ was picked up again when the sources became known in Europe during the Renaissance. While the verdict of the church fathers was overwhelmingly negative,17 the Renaissance witnessed a new apologism for ‘Oriental pagan wisdom,’ whose Egyptian chapter was largely defined by a platonizing misunderstanding of the hieroglyphic script that long obstructed its actual decipherment and that remains influential to this day.18 A crucial early figure in this resurgence of Platonic Orientalism is Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who “stands at the origin of a non-institutional current of religious speculation, the development of which can be traced in European culture through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, and where ‘Plato’ stands as a generic label for a much wider complex of practices and speculations largely inherited, as we know today, from the Hellenistic culture of late antiquity.”19 This label went on to assimilate over time all those “traditional bodies of spiritual, theurgical, magical, arithmological, astrological, and alchemical lore” attributed to ancient sages such as Hermes Trismegistus, thus accumulating the collective ‘referential corpus’ sometimes referred to today as ‘Western esotericism,’ which in this essay is to be understood as a typological umbrella term for such currents.20 This spectrum was eventually exiled into the ‘occultural’ fringe where we find it today, in large part due to new methods of philological criticism that began to view the narrative of ancient wisdom “as an inherently a-historical approach to historical questions.”21 The emerging historiographical disciplines - such as Egyptology - distanced themselves sharply from what was perceived as embarrassing and unscientific fantasy. This ‘other’ history was appropriated by new religious movements like Theosophy, founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831– 1891). She and other influential esotericists “absorbed diverse culturally available elements, interpreted this material through a hermeneutic framework of their own and presented the result as a coherent doctrine.”22 For our purposes, this means that conceptions of Egypt were embedded in a larger narrative that strings together various ‘wisdom-bearing’ cultures.23
Another important feature of many esoteric traditions that survives into the AAD is the minor significance or absence of a supreme deity.24 Instead, the focus is on contact with intermediary beings such as angels that populate the heavens, sometimes understood to be extraterrestrials.25 Blavatsky focuses on intermediary figures in a particular, salvific-historical framework crucial to the development of AAD.26 According to Blavatsky, human development had arrived at a crucial turning point: she and other theosophical leaders were in spiritual contact (via ‘channeling’) with benevolent ascended masters, “living persons who had fully evolved through many reincarnations, had acquired and become the custodians of ‘ancient wisdom,’ and now sought to impart that wisdom to humanity in order to lead it into a new age of peace, spirituality, and global community.”27
While Blavatsky’s first major work Isis Unveiled (1877) - with its “plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom- Religion”28 - carried strong Egyptian connotations, her Theosophical Society soon shifted its focus permanently towards India, where Blavatsky claimed to have been initiated.29 Among the second generation of Theosophists, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) can be said in many ways to bridge the gap between the tradition of Theosophy and the beginning of the New Age movement of the 60s and 70s;30 furthermore, the messages he claimed to receive have had a lasting impact on ‘alternative Egypts.’31 Cayce believed, as did many Theosophists, that ancient Egypt had preserved the primordial wisdom of the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis. He claimed to have experienced past lives in Ancient Egypt, around 10,500 BCE - long before Egyptian civilization even existed, according to orthodox Egyptology - and he prophesized that, beneath the Sphinx, the fabled ‘Hall of Thoth’ would be discovered. We will reencounter this dating and this prophecy as cornerstones of ‘alternative Egyptology’ and the AAD.32 While Cayce (who identified firmly as Christian) was very influential in the United States, Alice Bailey (1880–1949), who channeled messages from extraterrestrials, was the more prominent figurehead of second generation Theosophy and the ‘New Age’ in the United Kingdom and Europe.33
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the father of Anthroposophy, also integrated Egypt into a diffusionist sequence of civilizations, beginning with Atlantis. Steiner approached the ancient texts with a strong literalist tendency, interpreting, e.g., the god Osiris as an extraterrestrial visitor, and his headdress as a spiritual sense organ.34 This way of reading the ancient sources as literally true and declaring the gods extraterrestrials marks an important step towards AA rhetoric. Literalist readings became more widespread in the New Age movement,35 and messages received through channeling increasingly stem from extraterrestrials. Already in Neo-Theosophy, represented among others by Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847–1934), extraterrestrial explanations had begun to displace spiritual ones - Sanskrit, for Blavatsky the language of the gods, was declared by Leadbeater to be an extraterrestrial language, and Nirvana a sort of space station.36 While Blavatsky and other early Theosophists still considered the intermediaries angelic beings who lived on an ‘etheric plane,’ later authors like A. E. Powell already show them steering physical spaceships toward Earth.37
The ‘60s and ‘70s saw a veritable explosion of counter-culture,38 leading to the pop-cultural entanglement of the AAD, analogous to the interdependency that informs the development of UFO religions.39 Since 1947, when an alien spacecraft is alleged to have crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, UFOs have remained something of a national obsession in the United States. This phenomenon lent further immediacy to the increased Theosophical emphasis on extraterrestrials outlined above, rooted it deeply in popular culture, and it did much to further what Christopher Partridge has called “the sacralization of the extraterrestrial.”40 Following in the tradition of the Theosophists’ ‘channeling’ of messages from ascended masters, the teachers were now extraterrestrial beings - Theosophical mythology thus began to merge with the UFO phenomenon, a synthesis that Mikael Rothstein dubs “a case of mythological modernization or updating, and...an example of Theosophical adaptability.”41 Already in 1934, Guy Ballard, who founded the I AM Activity, had claimed to be in contact with Venusian masters.42 Like in the New Age movement, UFO religions feature prominently a millennialist expectation that a new age and a transformation of humanity are upon us.43 The extraterrestrials wish to help us through this crisis, often specifically connected to the threat posed by the atomic bomb.44 Indeed, UFO religions and the AAD alike share a desire to establish a unified worldview where science and religion are no longer separate - a ‘re-enchanted’ world.45 Important early UFO contactees such as George Adamski (1891–1965) described the Venusian masters of Blavatskian myth as extraterrestrial visitors who brought civilization to earth and were remembered as gods - preparing the central belief of the later AAD.46 Recalling the extreme literalism brought to Ancient Egyptian texts by Rudolf Steiner, we encounter across the spectrum of UFO religions “the physical interpretation of scriptures and ancient mythologies” that is the basis of AA theorists’ interpretations. Those, notes Partridge, are in turn “sacralised and replicated” in religious movements: “this physicalism is explicit in the writings of all the principle [sic] individuals and groups, from Adamski to von Däniken and from the Raëlian Church to Heaven’s Gate.”47 The AAD therefore serves as an integral origin myth in various religious movements.
A crucial transformation was achieved by the veritable ‘godfather’ of AA theories, Charles Fort (1874–1932), who, with a righteous gesture of unveiling uncomfortable secrets that had been guarded jealously by conspirational orthodox historians, offered as the answer to all kinds of perceived ancient anomalies the intervention of extraterrestrial visitors in Earth’s distant past.48 Instead of spiritual enlightenment, Fort’s project was that of an alternative historiography, an agenda that was popularized in France by Louis Pauwles and Jaques Bergier, whose major work, Le matin des magiciens (1960), “is little remembered now, but it has the distinction of launching a revival of interest in the occult in the 1960s and 1970s that would culminate in the ancient-astronaut craze of the 1970s.”49 Pauwles and Bergier were both influenced by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937),50 whose most famous cosmic horror stories comprising the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ are based around monstrous extraterrestrial beings that were worshiped by primitive humans. While Colavito’s The Cult of Alien Gods certainly overstates Lovecraft’s influence on the AAD as a whole, it is nevertheless significant to note that these stories impacted the authors of Le matin des magiciens. Much of its content, as well as the works of another representative of this largely forgotten French chapter of the history of Preastronautics, Robert Charroux, were later borrowed - mostly without credit51 - by Erich von Däniken when he wrote the ‘Bible’ of the AAD, Chariots of the Gods?
5. The Egyptian Front: From Chariots to Stargates
While sidelined in the Theosophical ancient wisdom narrative, Egypt rules supreme in the AAD. Chapter seven of Chariots deals with the pyramids of Giza as “Space Travel Centers,” and several of von Däniken’s claims here would become ever-repeated tropes: First, he asserts that “ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilization. Great cities and enormous temples, colossal statues...splendid streets...perfect drainage systems, luxurious tombs...pyramids of overwhelming size - these and many other wonderful things shot out of the ground, so to speak. Genuine miracles in a country that is suddenly capable of such achievements without recognizable prehistory!”52 As the prehistorian Herbert Kühn noted, “nothing is more false than this. The prehistory of Egypt is known particularly well, and a great number of books documents it. Däniken knows nothing of them.”53 The notion that Egyptian civilization simply “shot out of the ground” as von Däniken puts it, or rather, “fell from the sky,” is repeated to this day, and it is representative of the anti-evolutionist overtones of AA narratives. Further important claims are the implication that the barque of the sun god Ra is actually a spaceship,54 as well as the notion that the extraterrestrials had some part in the building of the pyramids55 - both points are of course present in Stargate.
Two further aspects are particularly significant for the AAD’s quasi-religious properties. First, von Däniken suggests that it may be humanity’s destiny to follow in the footsteps of the ‘gods,’ and that we too may one day be greeted as gods by the primitive inhabitants of other worlds (which happens repeatedly in Stargate and the television series Stargate SG-1).56 Second, von Däniken assures the reader that “(d)rawings and sagas actually indicated that the ‘gods’ promised to return from the stars.”57 This vague reference to “certain legends” that allegedly tell of the gods coming from the stars to earth and leaving again with a promise to return, is one of the most typical clichés of AA narratives. Which specific legend that is, and on which temple wall or papyrus one may read it, is never stated - which in the case of Egypt may be explained by the fact that no such myth exists.
Von Däniken’s influence hit America in the early 1970s, mainly to the credit of Rod Serling and Alan Landsburg, respectively the host and producer of the popular science-fiction series The Twilight Zone (who, like von Däniken’s forgotten French precursors, were also fans of H. P. Lovecraft whose stories influenced several episodes of their show). Inspired by Chariots, they cooperated on a television documentary titled In Search of Ancient Astronauts that aired on NBC in 1973, presenting von Däniken’s main claims with impressive images. The program was a huge hit, and in its wake, Chariots became a massive success in the US as well, spawning many sequels, imitators, and further television events.58
The second most influential figure in the AAD after von Däniken is Zecharia Sitchin (1920–2010). Between 1976 and 2007, Sitchin published the seven books comprising The Earth Chronicles, beginning with The Twelfth Planet (1976), where he explains that Sumerian culture, like von Däniken’s Egypt, mysteriously appeared out of nowhere. “A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and civilization.”59 We learn that Sumerian civilization and the human race itself were created by extraterrestrials from Nibiru, another planet in our solar system. Those aliens, the Annunaki, were considered gods by the Sumerians, and Sitchin insists that the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia (of which all others are deemed derivative) preserves actual historical records of their activities. Sitchin’s most significant contribution to the Egyptian ‘front’ of the AAD is the second volume, The Stairway to Heaven (1980). Here we are told that, according to the usual unspecified “Egyptian traditions,” “in times immemorial ‘Gods of Heaven’ came to Earth from the Celestial Disk”60 - the latter is illustrated by the symbol of the winged sun disk (which is actually a form of the god Horus, not a dwelling- place for the gods). This misinterpretation of the ‘winged disk’ as either the planet or the spaceship of the aliens is repeated in Preastronautic literature to this day.61
Furthermore, Stitchin’s entire book is framed by a narrative concerning humanity’s eternal quest for immortality, a prevalent theme in Stargate as well: Ra takes a human body as a host “to cheat death,” and he possesses a machine in the shape of a sarcophagus in which he perpetually recharges his life forces and is potentially immortal - reminiscent of Sitchin’s assertion that “Ra...managed to live forever because he kept rejuvenating himself.”62 While Stargate’s Ra found and enslaved humanity and Sitchin’s aliens genetically engineered humans, both do so for the specific purpose of mining a precious metal: The Annunaki made Homo Sapiens as a slave race that could mine the Earth’s gold resources.63 In Stargate, Ra takes thousands of slaves through the Stargate to Abydos in order to mine the alien metal that is the basis of his technology. The entire part, the aliens as oppressors who enslave humans and abuse their status as ‘gods’ for evil, is rather atypical of the AAD, making it all the more likely that Emmerich was inspired by Sitchin.
Meanwhile, Stargate’s Daniel Jackson argues in his lecture at the beginning of the film that the only inscription inside the pyramid that gives the name of king Khufu - the main basis for Egyptologists’ ascribing the pyramid to this Pharaoh - is a forgery, at which point the room begins to empty, accompanied by laughter and jokes about Martians and Atlantis. Jackson’s argument here is that the discovery of the hieroglyphs made by Col. Richard Vyse, “was a fraud.” Sitchin was the first to make this accusation,64 and argued that, as Jackson concludes, “the Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty did not build the great pyramids.” For Sitchin, the pyramids of Giza were built by the Annunaki as guiding beacons for their starships during landing on Earth, and all other Egyptian pyramids are just inferior imitations.65 In Stargate, Ra’s starship is seen landing on top of a pyramid as a kind of alien airport (cf. Sitchin: “the Celestial Boat of Ra was depicted as sitting atop a mountain”),66 and even the fact that Ra’s ship is itself pyramid- shaped seems lifted from Stairway, for Sitchin explains that an Egyptian funerary pyramidion, showing the deceased in adoration of the sun god (this is literally what the accompanying hieroglyphs say), actually represents the sun god who “landed on Earth” in his “Celestial Chamber.”67 According to Sitchin, just as the Pharaohs could only build inferior imitations of the great “mountains” built by the “gods,” so the journey of the deceased described in Egyptian funerary literature constitutes an emulation of actual journeys to the stars actually undertaken by the “gods” long ago. This section of his book is dominated by imagery of “doors,” “portals,” and “gates” - due to the fact that, for instance, the Book of the Dead is full of portals that the deceased needs to pass through.68 The Egyptian gods “open for the king a path and a gateway,”69 and Sitchin states that “the gods assume more technical aspects.”70 In light of all the other close correspondences, it seems very likely that this technologized ‘gate’-language inspired Emmerich to give a concrete form to one such “gate of the star gods.” Another of Emmerich’s inspirations may have been the work of Peter Krassa and Reinhard Habeck who popularized certain depictions in the temple of Dendera which supposedly (not really)71 show lightbulbs. After earlier treatments, it was in their Das Licht der Pharaonen (1992) where the “Dendera lightbulbs” are embedded in a larger Preastronautic narrative. Krassa and Habeck were in turn von Däniken’s source when he presented the same case.72 Since then, the Dendera lightbulbs have become recurring stars.73 Much emphasis is furthermore put in Das Licht der Pharaonen on the wars, weaponry, and starships used by the Egyptian “gods” - obviously inspired by Sitchin’s Mesopotamian scenarios - Krassa and Habeck even reprint (their fig. 17), and they are not the last to do so,74 Sitchin’s absurd illustration implying that Egyptian funerary pyramidia represent starships. So here we have pyramid- shaped starships, Egyptian gods as aliens with horrifying weapons, and as the formidable pilot of the “winged sun-disk” spaceship we meet the falcon-headed god Horus.75 And just two years later, Ra’s soldiers in Stargate wear falcon helmets and fly fighter jets with stylized wings. The name of Emmerich’s Egyptian planet, Abydos, may be derived from early 90s AA literature as well. In 1990, a group from the AA Society took pictures of some hieroglyphs in the funerary temple of Seti I. in Abydos that appear to depict technological contraptions, including what looks deceptively like a helicopter. First published in 1991, the (long debunked) Abydos “technoglyphs” have joined the ranks of Aegyptiaca technologica in the ever-repeated canon of Preastronautic literature.76 In 1976, the same year that saw Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet, Robert Temple claimed in The Sirius Mystery that the tribe of the Dogon in Mali possessed astronomical knowledge that they could only have inherited from the ancient Egyptians, who had it from extraterrestrials.77 This book in turn inspired Robert Bauval to construct a complex archaeoastronomical theory, published first in two articles in Discussions in Egyptology in 1989 and 1990, and most famously and comprehensively together with Adrian Gilbert in The Orion Mystery (1994), holding that the three great pyramids of Giza were all planned in advance and aligned with the three stars of the ‘belt’ of Orion, representing the god of the dead Osiris. While this alone was not outside the realm of what most Egyptologists would consider possible, the notion that the foundations for this entire monumental landscape were laid around 10,500 BCE certainly was (Cayce’s year again). The so-called ‘Orion Correlation Theory’ was popular in the 1990s, coinciding with exciting new explorations of the great pyramid of Khufu in 1993, as the UPUAUT 2 robot crawled along narrow shafts and ran into a sealed door, quickly prompting wild speculations and conspiracy theories about hidden chambers. It is this media hype around the pyramids of Giza - supposedly linked to the stars and thousands of years older than orthodox Egyptology would allow - which clearly forms the most immediate ‘occultural’ context for Stargate, released in the same year as Bauval’s and Gilbert’s Orion Mystery,78 although the simultaneous release means that Stargate could hardly have been inspired by the book, but rather by the previous popularization of its main theory. At any rate, it is surely no coincidence that it is specifically the constellation of Orion that leads Daniel Jackson to realize what the Stargate really is. Remembering Sitchin’s very technical ‘gate’ terminology that seems to have inspired (the) Stargate, it is noteworthy how Bauval and Gilbert opine with a similar tone “that the Grand Gallery looks like part of a machine, whose function is beyond us.”79 They refer to shafts in the King’s Chamber as “channels to the stars”80 and to the whole Giza complex as “the great star-clock of the epochs.”81 In 1995, one year after Stargate and The Orion Mystery, Graham Hancock made the case for a forgotten civilization that was the real originator of the pyramids and the Sphinx (Fingerprints of the Gods).82 Then, with Robert Bauval, he fused this lost civilization theory with the ‘Orion Correlation Theory’ in 1996’s Keeper of Genesis (in the US: Message of the Sphinx). Together, they aimed “to align the pyramids with Orion circa 10,500 BCE, which they claim was the date of the lost civilization’s entry into Egypt,” during the astrological Age of Leo, represented by the Sphinx. Their calculations were also meant to demonstrate the existence of a secret chamber beneath the Sphinx - thus proving Cayce’s prophecy.83 Bauval and Hancock adopt Sitchin’s conspiracy theory discrediting the inscriptions with Khufu’s name,84 and their terminology is once more striking: The shaft containing the newly discovered door is literally called a “Stargate,”85 and the pyramid is interpreted as a kind of salvific machine to which New Age millenarian hopes are attached “that the sages of Heliopolis, working at the dawn of history, could somehow have created an archetypal ‘device’, a device designed to trigger off messianic events across the ‘Ages’ – the Pyramid Age...and perhaps even a ‘New Age’ in Aquarius?”86 While these theories did not involve extraterrestrials explicitly, their 1996 articles in the London Daily Mail postulated that the ancient cultures of Earth were actually influenced by an advanced civilization from Mars, due to a renewed interest in NASA images of the red planet, where believers wanted to see the infamous ‘Mars face’ as well as various pyramids. Bauval and Hancock teamed up again, assisted by John Grigsby, to write The Mars Mystery in 1998, where they announced more carefully that aliens may or may not be the originators of the “Martian monuments.”87
A particularly interesting entry is Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy (1999), because it is unusually critical and self-aware. The authors take several ‘celebrities,’ such as Temple, Bauval, and Hancock to court, expose flaws in their theories and conclude that there is an agenda to construct a new alternative orthodoxy about the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Mars face, and to arrive at all costs at the year 10,500 BCE, prophesized by Cayce. As far as this goes, most orthodox historians and Egyptologists would probably applaud the authors for having seen the light. However, this project of debunking is only the beginning. Picknett and Prince identify as the source of this artificial mythology a shadowy group preparing for a sinister new world order ushered in by the return of the Egyptian gods (or possibly, in the vein of Stargate, evil imposters). These gods are specifically “the Nine,” i.e., the Great Ennead of Heliopolis, the most significant genealogy in the Egyptian pantheon who have been the alleged source of messages received through ‘channeling’ since 1952.88 Picknett and Prince chronicle the activities of various organizations at Giza and relate rumors “that the US government is searching for a physical artefact or ancient device, perhaps even of extraterrestrial origin,” prompting the authors to speculate that “(i)f the Americans are involved with ancient stargate technology, then it would be the most top secret project in history, and the number of people ‘needing to know’ about it would be minimal.”89

The Stargate Simulacrum: Ancient Egypt, ...

Heidelberger OJS-Journals
journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.

Taken on: August 4, 2024

Tags:

enigma

puzzle

mystery

riddle

problem

poser

question

stumper

brainteaser

why

twister

teaser

difficulty

stickler

abstruseness

crux

puzzler

mindboggler

charade

braintwister

cryptogram

perplexity

rune

cliffhanger

inscrutability

subtlety

rebus

secrecy

oracle

chiller

whodunit

occult

thriller

grabber

inscrutableness

closed

book

sixty-four-thousand-dollar

tough

nut

crack

challenge

puzzlement

mystification

complexity

complication

intricacy

snarl

paradox

dilemma

obscurity

involvement

fix

inextricability

obfuscation

knotty

how-do-you-do

can

worms

secret

maze

convolution

head-scratcher

complicacy

unsolved

sixty-four

dollar

entanglement

quandary

bewilderment

mind-twister « less

Sets appears in: • "Urlicht" or original light

Groups appears in: • Art and Artists. • UFOs more » • Travel Photography • Sepia Lovers • Sphynx Lovers • Fractal Mystic • ART / REAL • Students of Religious Studies • ! ART & PHOTOGRAPHY ! All artistic works welcome • Surreal Dimension • You Think this is Art • Seven Wonders of the Ancient World • Royal Group - Have a Good Light ! • ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆ • Photoshop vandalized photos • Sphinx around the world • digital is the devil • The End of Faith • Specialistz™ « less

Camera: Panasonic DC-GX9, f/22.0, 1/250 sec, 108mm (=216mm), ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Panasonic DC-GX9
Lens:	LUMIX G VARIO 100-300/F4.0-5.6II
Aperture:	f/22.0
Exposure Time:	0.004 sec (1/250)
Focal Length:	108mm (35mm equivalent: 216mm)
ISO:	400
Exposure Bias:	-0.33 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Manual
Light Source:	Tungsten (Incandescent)
Gain Control:	High gain up
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Ver.1.5
Show full info

Stats: 1,817 views / 3 comments