Room 207 Press Webinars #1: The Scam From Atlantis

Madame Blavatsky will never not be judging you.

The Scam from Atlantis, Monday 1st June 8pm BST and 8pm EDT

So I've gotta eat. And more specifically, I've been asked a bunch of times if I'll be doing more talks, because talks are a thing I do. Hi, by the way. If you've not come here before, I'm Howard David Ingham, and I've written professionally about occult history, religion and, most recently, movies for twenty years, and a couple of years ago I wrote a book called We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror (obligatory Amazon UK link) which got nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, which is nice.

I'm starting on 1st June with The Scam from Atlantis: the occult roots of fake archaeology, which deals with an abiding lifelong obsession of mine: Atlantis.

This is personal to me, has been since I was a kid, and my dad used to keep his books on the occult on a high shelf and one day I balanced on a stack of wobbly chairs and got them down, and there was this one about Atlantis, only I'm not talking about your Plato Atlantis or your Robert E Howard Atlantis, your Graham Hancock Atlantis or even your Doug McClure Atlantis, I'm talking about the dream Atlantis of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, William Scott-Elliot and Charles Leadbeater. The Hyperborean age of the Lhas. The Lost Lemuria.

This was a world invented by and for psychics. Mystics. Dreamers. Not filtered through any lens of pulp fantasy, either. I wouldn't read the American writers who riffed on this stuff until well into adulthood, and that was probably a good thing.

I was about eleven, and I'd discovered Dungeons and Dragons about the same time (I still have the box, purple sides, Erol Otus dragon, acquired second hand from some older lads down the road who couldn't make head or tail of it, at a time when everyone else had the Elmore dragon), and in my lonely head the blurry second-hand fragments of theosophical imaginations turned into lost ancient worlds full of psychic three-eyed beastmen who domesticated dinosaurs (and when you are eleven nothing catches your imagination like a giant with a dinosaur on a lead. Nothing), and tribes of sad blue giants who walked through lands scoured by the depredations of airship fleets commanded by crazed tyrant witch-kings. This was in the books. This was all there, I swear to God, with Chris Foss paintings of Sky-Chariots and diagrams of the concentric islands of Poseidonis and discussions of cosmic memory and theosophical root races. All there.

From my Dad's Atlantis book.

But the problem is, the more you read about it, the more you see the problems with it. As time went on, the magical Atlantis of my childhood began to exist in tension with horrific undercurrents. When you realise that the root races of man corresponded with the late 19th/early 20th century orthodoxy that humans had subspecies, and that the Lemurians were Black, and the Atlanteans were Asian, and they were replaced by the fifth race, and the fifth race are the Aryans... and that the history of Atlantis was tied up with this, it gets a little concerning.

Click to see the big version of this. It's from a family encyclopedia, dated 1927.

The Atlantis that mystics like Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce invented came from Ignatius Donnelly, and he had this whole “pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in South America – what are the chances?” thing going on, a basic error of misapplied imagination that has inspired a whole history of wannabe archaeologists – Graham Hancock, Erich von Däniken, and the others – who all work on the assumption that the Black and Brown people who yet live in the places where these awe inspiring monuments were built couldn't possibly be the descendants of the ones who built them, and that they must have been built by people from Somewhere Else.

This seminar ran on 1st June 2020. 
 
You can buy tickets for all the seminars in the series on the main seminar page.

I Blame Society #8: Enter the Dragon (1973)

(I'd warn you about spoilers, but hey, you've probably seen this already. You may already know that there's a lot in this film that's, eh, the sort of stuff you see in 70s exploitation films. Make of that what you will.)

I Blame Society #7: Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

When I was a kid, there was a certain sort of movie that would be shown in the mornings during school holidays, and often these movies would be oddly affecting, and would haunt me for years. one of the morning screenings of the 80s dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Tenkū no Shiro Laputa, 1986) would haunt me for a decade or more until I realised what I had seen; likewise, René Laloux's existentially bleak Moebius-designed and Moebius-strip-plot space opera Time Masters (Les Maîtres du Temps, 1982) absolutely traumatised me, as well it might. And then there's Watership Down (1979). I don't need to tell you about Watership Down.

Some movies seemed to be on every holiday. I don't know if this is really the case. In the words of 80s Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner, “The memory cheats.” I mean, all it probably took for me to recall a movie being on “all the time” was two screenings, the one being burned on my memory and the second reinforcing that. I know for sure, for example, that I saw Jim Dale-starring “science makes a cuddly mutt colossal” comedy Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World (1973) at least twice. But it feels like more. The same goes for insanely harrowing and inexplicably U-rated kid-against-the-wilderness thriller Lost in the Desert (actually Dirkie, 1969), and it most definitely goes for Battle Beyond the Stars.

Cult Cinema #27: The Ninth Rule

Fight Club (1999)

The single easiest and laziest thing in the world right now would be to start an essay about this movie with a gag about the First Rule of Fight Club, and the Second Rule of Fight Club, and the juxtaposition of the two and whether they're amusingly the same or amusingly not the same.

The second easiest and laziest thing in the world right now would be to make some point about how it would be the easiest and laziest thing in the world right now to joke about the First Rule of Fight Club. Which is to say, I'm beaten before I start whatever I do because this movie has, in the more than twenty (twenty!) years since its release, sewn up all the discourse. Everyone knows what the first two rules of Fight Club are, even the people who have never seen it. And the film is firmly in that peculiar category of movie which is undeniably great but shouldn't ever be anyone's favourite movie.

Obviously there are spoilers, but the likelihood is that if you get any distance into this, you've probably seen it (or read Chuck Palahniuk's book, or both, but let's face it, it's more likely you've seen the movie) so there we are.

Sects Education #4: Straight is Great

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

(Given that this is about gay conversion therapy movies, it's going to deal with some bad stuff. Discretion is as usual advised. Spoilers abound, as ever.

On a less serious note, as this is the last of my Sects Education pieces, I only think it's appropriate to mention that the Sects Education title came from my pal Jon Dear, who rode in as the Dad Joke Cavalry and saved me when I was looking for something sectsually explicit for a title. Ta, Jon.

This post is Cult Cinema #26.)

The sort of evangelicalism that gave us the genesis of apologetics ministry grew out of a feeling of somehow losing control, that since the end of the 19th century, the world was no longer in the shape of the white Christian. If a certain category of Christian – a technocratic, economically and socially privileged category of Christian – did not feel that control was lost, it would not be so desperate to assert control. Apologetics ministry exists because science and history, the external realms of facts, are not doing what the evangelicals want them to, and must be domesticated.

On a Thousand Walls #28: Orrore Popolare, Part 4

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh) (1971)
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero) (1974)

(More Italian cinema. Spoilers. Discussion of misogyny, with all you might imagine that entails. You know.)

The easiest thing to do when you're looking at the portrayal of women in classic horror from any country is generally to shrug and say, well, those were different times, and to an extent that's true, in that the way we did discourse forty or fifty years ago was different, and the terms in which we framed our expectations of gender roles were informed by societal mores, and the law, and what mum and dad were told by their mums and dads. But what that ignores is empathy.

Cult Cinema #25: Sects Education, Part Three

Don Verdean (2015)

(Today, I'm looking at Jared Hess's interesting, misunderstood and antisemitic 2015 comedy Don Verdean. There are spoilers, but it's not like you're going to watch this movie, so don't sweat it.) 

Could it be fair to call the most vocal and temporally powerful branch of English-speaking Christianity a sect? It's easy to point out all the ways in which American evangelicalism decades ago departed from historical Christian orthodoxy. It has its own media, its own ways of speaking. It has peculiar obsessions and fears that it has superimposed over actual traditional belief – abortions, sexuality and gender, evolutionary science – and doctrines that are in most traditional readings literally prohibited by Scripture, but which somehow have become normative, like the Rapture, and Prosperity Teaching. And it is partisan in its politics, for since the 1980s, the fortunes of American evangelicalism have been tied tightly to those of the Republican Party, and so we've seen this particular take on the faith metastasise into something hard-edged, and warlike, and, to outsiders frightening and fascist.