Egyptians and Astronauts

One of the blessings of living in San Francisco is the presumption of literacy, but the literacy which some possess is not what others would consider "respectable". My habit of studying Ancient Egyptian in public has highlighted this local characteristic. It would be presumptuous to expect that many citizens would display much archaeological acumen, but the sight of hieroglyphs seems to draw the "ancient astronaut" crowd.

My quarrel with this sort is not that extrahuman life exists, but that aliens must have helped the ancient civilizations, which afterwards deified them. The deification of illustrious or notorious humans as their deeds become increasingly remote from the present of the incipient worshipper has happened (the technical term is 'euhemerism'), most notably in Egypt, where the Pharaoh already possessed divine characteristics. The suggestion, however, that the Sumerians and the Egyptians received extraterrestrial aid denigrates the ingenuity of the men and women who lived at the dawn of civilization. The requirement of external help is a remnant of racial attitudes which are no longer acceptable,; since it would be impossible for non-white tribes to accomplish such mighty deeds unaided, but white aid is chronologically impossible, aliens must have helped the savages of yore.

Presentation of the aliens as a "more rational" explanation for the deeds of gods in whom no-one (including yours truly) believes is really a re-mythologizing and displacing in time those very gods. The shift from numinous or divine forces to extraterrestrial ones occurred in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century, the very era when technological progress was replacing (and in some cases threatening) the theological establishment. The fundamental characteristics, however, of contemporary systems of human thought do not change instantly, and just as the sixteenth century reformers replaced a Papal absolutism with a Biblical one, so too the congregants of technology replaced the unknown, watching God of Heaven Above with new watchers who had superior technology rather than supernatural potency. The aliens may not demand incense and burnt sacrifice, but belief in them is no dfferent than belief in elves and brownies, and the aid the (allegedly) gave no more than a modern version of the myth of Prometheus, with the added satisfaction of confirming the superiority of modern man.