Lair of the Twisted Kitten back (for real this time)

My comics/art/writing website, Lair of the Twisted Kitten, is really back online this time.  I checked it and everything.  And I promise never to leave it offline for so long again… too much hassle fixing it.  Hope you enjoy!

Books

I went to Gould’s, a monster of a second-hand bookshop near where I live in Sydney today to get my hands on two specific books- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard’s book I thought I should read to find out if the theories expounded in my previous post were on the money; Lem’s because, after a bit of research into the 2002 film starring George Clooney, I discovered that Solaris was a much more interesting topic than I had realised, so I wanted to read the novel, and watch the 1972 Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky, before coming to any final conclusions.

The literary gods were not on my side however, and finding specific books among the endless piles of gold and dross in Gould’s is near impossible at the best of times. It’s not necessarily a bad thing though; the English edition of Solaris is a translation of a bad French translation from the original Polish , which Lem has attacked for its poor quality, so maybe it’s better that I rely on internet reviews and synopses for my knowledge of it.

I did however have a dig in the science-fiction and religion/New Age/self-help/Paranormal sections, and in amongst endless copies of Shirley MacLaine’s “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain” and The Celestine Prophecy I found a few gems. I decided to stay away from any more Von Däniken (and his countless imitators), having found him pretty repetitive and uninspiring (see my previous post).

What I did buy though were…

Light Years by Gary Kinder, a fairly uncritical account of the antics of Eduard “Billy” Meier, somewhat uncritically described on the cover as “The Best Documented, Most Credible UFO Case Ever”. I was planning to devote a later post to Meier and his visitors from the Pleiades, and this seemed like exactly the sort of detailed introduction to him that would be hard to find on the net.

Communion is a fairly iconic book about a man’s reconstructed memories of an alien abduction that looks to be pretty relevant (and also a bit creepy…)

Finally, I also found Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, classic sci-fi by an author I’ve been interested in for a while. Stapleton sounds a lot like me philosophically, an agnostic leaning towards atheism but interested in religion. C. S. Lewis, of Narnia fame, hated him, but found inspiration from Stapledon in his own Space Trilogy, even going so far as to put his philosophy into the mouth of the satanic villain. Since both authors have something to say about space and gods, I thought it would be interesting to have do a post looking at their similarities and disagreements.

All that for only AU$19!

Psychology 101- Scientology vs Materialism

This week was quite cinematic for me: I worked my way through Manhattan, No Country for Old Men, The Passion of the Christ, Step Up (probably shouldn’t admit to that one), Solaris and Battlefield Earth. The best one by a long way was No Country for Old Men, and if you’re interested in tense, bloody and beautiful modern westerns you should go and see it. This post isn’t about Old Men though; it’s about Battlefield Earth, the child of two old men, one of them dead: L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology and author of the novel, and John Travolta, an actor of some note who you may have seen dancing in a dress and fatsuit in Hairspray. I’ll talk about Solaris in a future post.

Battlefield Earth gets 3% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes, which means, at a simple calculation, that it’s 7 times more awful than Step Up, and about 32 times worse than No Country For Old Men. No words can really do it justice, but it’s basically a sci-fi film, in which a group of post-apocalyptic cavemen rise up against the evil aliens who have ruled them for a thousand years. I watched it with a bunch of friends with whom I’ve formed a sort of awful-movie appreciation club, so we went in fully prepared for its mindnumbing crapness (although around the one-hour-ten mark I was considering sparing them further torture). I thought that watching it might give me some insight into the mind of the man who created one of the world’s biggest (or at least noisiest) sci-fi religions. Unfortunately, on the surface at least, no insights were forthcoming. It’s just a really shitty science-fiction movie.

The villains are the Psychlos, a race of 9-foot tall giants, who inexplicably all have dreadlocks and enormous codpieces. I was interested to see how they’d handle the giant size of the aliens visually; rather than doing something clever like trick-perspective or CGI, however, the solution is to put all the actors on stilts, which they lazily disguise with knee-high fuck-me boots and ubiquitous trench-coats; unfortunately the actors don’t seem to have practiced stilt-walking much, and never seem to manage anything beyond an awkward amble, even when the script calls for them to run.

About half the film is in painful slow-mo, and the lines and scenes are replayed to us two or three times to beat the point home. The cinematography is also incredibly hard on the eyes; aside from a few women (more on them later), the characters and scenes are all deliberately and spectacularly ugly; every shot is over tinted, and, by the director’s proud admission, there is not a single shot which is not tilted to some neck-straining degree; he wanted it to look like a comic, apparently. A crap one. (Yes, ugliness is not necessarily a bad thing in a film, but taken together as a package, this is one long painful assault on your senses).

So what did I learn about L. Ron Hubbard? Well, more than I first thought. I have to actually buy and read Battlefield Earth, and see if the sins of the film started with its parent; but I suspect they did. The story is a fairly good illustration of the misanthropy and arrogance many people attribute to Hubbard; as Punch noted, the plot shows to good effect his “excellent understanding of evil impulses, particularly deviousness, which helps with the plot, and [he] is well-enough aware of his weaknesses not to dwell upon frailties like love, generosity, compassion.” [1]

I don’t want to talk too much about Hubbard or Scientology since I’m saving that for later, but there are a few fun things I came across while trying to better understand Battlefield Earth. The book was prefaced, for example, with an introduction in which Hubbard, or possibly one of his ghostwriters[2] fussily tries to define science fiction, name-drops some famous writers (“Bob Heinlein”) and then places Hubbard firmly in the pantheon of those who “helped start man to the stars”.[3] Take this example, illustrating his ability to use a Latin dictionary:

How do you look at this word “fiction”? It is a sort of homograph. In this case it means two different things. A professor of literature knows it means “a literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact; the category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels, short stories, and plays.” It is derived from the Latin fictio, a making, a fashioning, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to touch, form, mold

He moves on to sniffily define fantasy:

Actually they don’t mix well: science fiction, to be credible, has to be based on some degree of plausibility; fantasy gives you no limits at all. Writing science fiction demands care on the part of the author; writing fantasy is as easy as strolling in the park. (In fantasy, a guy has no sword in his hand; bang, there’s a magic sword in his hand.) This doesn’t say one is better than the other. They are simply very different genres from a professional viewpoint.

I like how Hubbard is at pains to emphasise his authority on the subject, as a “professional”. A much better definition of fantasy, however, can be found in his “biography”. Here are some choice samples:

Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc[o] at age three and became the blood brother of a Blackfoot Indian medicine man by the time he was six.

He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.

He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics.

Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Carribean Motion Picture Expedition, sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico.[4]

 

Viewed alongside an illustration (right) from the original publishing, we can start to see an outline of the man who created Scientology; a product of the pulp era. His biography is that of Indiana Jones, of Doc Savage; his characters are leering giant monsters, bronzed he-men and blank-faced damsels.

There are only two female speaking parts in Battlefield Earth; one is the main character’s beautiful plot device of a girlfriend, absent for most of the film, doting, needing to be rescued. In a concession to noughties sensibility, she can be glimpsed with a machine gun at the end, but it’s a shallow concession when she has no personality to speak of.

 

The other female character is an alien uber-slut, acted, charmingly enough, by John Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston. A cone-headed secretary who performs sexual favours for her boss with her foot-long tongue, she is doing it all for a “a big house on Psychlo”. Did someone say binary? My Gender Studies tutor would have a field day.

 

Apart from the chauvinism, there’s also the same scientific positivism that filled early sci-fi, a faith that technology is The Answer. The cave-man hero, filled with knowledge by the Psychlo’s “learning machine” goes about rediscovering the lost history and science of earth; he reads the Declaration of Independence, and a Harrier Jump-Jet manual; the latter comes in handy when he teaches his cave-man followers to pilot some suspiciously well-preserved examples, and engage and destroy the alien-space craft in a battle eerily reminiscent of the Death Star run.

 

Speaking of the Death Star, there’s a kind of Atomic Age miracle at the end, when the god guys teleport a nucular (sic) bomb to Planet Psychlo, and thanks to the reactive gas that makes up its atmosphere, utterly annihilates it. The morality of this sort of muscular vengeance isn’t really considered; does the entire planet deserve to die? I mean, the Belgians did some terrible things in the Congo, but it’s hard to argue that if Congolese had wiped Belgium off the map that would have made it right. Is it unrealistic to point out moral flaws in fiction? Maybe, but Hubbard was the one extolling the power of sci-fi to prepare our minds for the future.

Other bits of Hubbard’s nastiness show through at other times; when our hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, is strapped to the learning machine, he is addressed by a diminutive alien from a dead race, whose short speech is so full of “ridiculous bowing and scraping”- honourable-this and humble-that, that it put me in mind of those awful parodies of Chinese and Japanese speech you that regularly appeared in pre-PC literature, where everyday politeness is translated in a way which makes them like the biggest suck-ups ever. The alien is called a “Clinko” in the film; in the book it was “Chinko”.[5]

But the most important point of the film is easy to miss: the villains are Psychlos. They are run by a cult called the Catrists, who “implant… metallic capsules in Psychlo babies’ skulls so they grow up to become sadists“.[6] L. Ron Hubbard hated – really, really, truly hated – psychiatrists.

Understanding why is pretty important, and not only because Scientology’s current campaign, spearheaded by Tom Cruise, against Psychiatry could have some pretty serious consequences at some point if anyone takes it seriously. I think that the roots of this irrational hatred are tied into the appeal of Scientology.

Scientologists have some fairly serious accusations against their psychlo foes. Hubbard claimed they were responsible for the holocaust; more recently Scientologists have assigned to them responsibility for September 11^th. Their evil stretches back a lot further though; the spirit of Psychiatry was alive in those countless evil aliens who conditioned our spirits with irrational impulses over their billions of years of existence (including the famous Xenu), resulting in everything from psychological disorders to physical diseases. In one bizarre aside, he describes one of their most effective techniques:

take a sheet of glass and put it in front of the preclear — clear, very clear glass — which is supercooled, preferably about a -100 centigrade. You got that? Supercooled, you know? And then put the preclear right in front of this supercooled sheet of glass and suddenly shove his face into the glass. Now, that’s pretty good. I mean, that was developed about five billion years ago by a whole-track psychiatrist.[7]

“Preclear” here means someone who has yet to experience a Scientological enlightenment. Elsewhere he describes the astonishing license given to psychiatrists:

A psychiatrist today has the power to (1) take a fancy to a woman (2) lead her to take wild treatment as a joke (3) drug and shock her to temporary insanity (4) incarnate her (5) use her sexually (6) sterilise her to prevent conception (7) kill her by a brain operation to prevent disclosure. And all with no fear of reprisal. Yet it is rape and murder.[8]

Astonishing stuff. Rather than just dismiss it, though, I should say that psychology, and psychiatry, have not always been as benevolent as they are today. The early history of these sciences reads like a horror story: routine ice pick lobotomies, electro convulsive therapies, conditioning babies to fear fluffy objects and a long list of dubious experiments and treatments. Our present knowledge about the brain was bought at a high cost, but modern day research and practice are miles and miles from their classical ghoulishness.

Even if Hubbard was inspired, in part, of these types of abuses, I don’t think it explains the pathological hatred of the Psychiatric profession that has formed in Scientology. There’s a couple of fuller explanations I’ve seen suggested.

Explanation 1
Hubbard wasn’t always opposed to Psychiatry. In 1947, suffering from an inability to find equilibriuim in cicil life, he wrote to the Veteran’s Administration asking to be seen by a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.[9] Indeed, he originally saw his technique of “Dianetics” as a tool for Psychiatrists.

“With the techniques presented in this handbook the psychiatrist, psycho-analyst and intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psycho-somatic ills and inorganic aberrations.”[10]

Given that Dianetics is not based on any research, or indeed reality, it would never be accepted by a profession that for all its faults is founded on the scientific method. Did Scientology turn on Psychiatry when they saw their techniques laughed at, or worse, ignored, by mental health professionals?

Explanation 2
Psychiatry was, and still is, controversial in many quarters. Rightly or wrongly, people have never liked the idea of treating mental problems with physical medication. In choosing Psychiatry as an enemy around whom they could rally their supporters, Hubbard created the real-life equivalent of Big Brother’s 2-Minute Hate.

The truth is, it’s probably a combination of the two; but a more interesting point is raised by the literature produced by Hubbard denouncing Psychiatry. Let’s go back to his introduction to Battlefield Earth, where he told us that “fictus” is the past perticiple of “fingere”.

I do notice that every time modern science thinks it is down to the nitty-gritty of it all, it runs into (and sometimes adopts) such things as the Egyptian myths that man came from mud, or something like that.

Hubbard wrote that earlier letter to his superiors asking for psychological help at a low point in his life. He was suffering from “long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations”.[12] In the process that followed, in which he created Dianetics, and ultimately Scientology, he was creating something which denied the soulless, pagan materialism of modern science, and re-exalted Man; a mythology in which we are fallen gods with infinite potential. By contrast:

The psychiatric idea of man is a Godless, soulless piece of meat. They demand their rights to butcher at will. They mock every Christian sentiment. According to them, everyone is helplessly mad and anyone who opposes them is especially so. Yet where are their cures? They only have victims. They torture and kill out of sight in their institutions.

This is the core theme of Battlefield Earth: “the indomitable spirit of man prevailing over those who mistakenly regard him as an animal.”[12] At its core this is what Scientology believes: that this universe is the playground of gods, but that some chose to use their powers to blind others, until we forgot ourselves and thought we were human. It’s an idea that goes back to Orphism and Gnosticism, and which eventually finds expression in almost every religious tradition. Hubbard cast it in the language he knew, the language of science-fiction, of weird devices and electrical resistance, of space opera and acronyms and futuristic abbreviations. If we can only audit our way from pre-clear to clear, avoid the brain-washing center on Venus and use our E-Meters religiously, we can escape this mortal coil, and this MEST (matter-energy-space-time) universe will no longer hold us prisoner.[13]

[1]Punch, April 4, 1984, cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_Earth_%28novel%29#Critical_response

[2]http://www.lermanet.com/cos/MissionEarth.htm

[3]This and all other quotes taken from an online copy of the introduction hosted at http://www.battlefieldearth.com/author/the_intro.html

[4]http://www.battlefieldearth.com/author/author.html

[5]http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Battlefield_Earth_2000.aspx?Page=5

[6]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/06/AR2005070601403_3.html?nav=rss_metro/religion

[7]Hubbard taped lecture of 13 Nov 1956, “Aberration and The Sixth Dynamic”, catalog #5611C13 15ACC-22 cited at http://psychassualt.org/

[8]Sec ED, Office of LRH, Confidential, “Project Psychiatry”, 22 Feb 1966 cited at http://psychassualt.org/

[9]http://www.lisamcpherson.org/cchr.htm

[10]Synopsis of Dianetics, 1950 6th printing, page ix cited at http://www.lisamcpherson.org/cchr.htm

[11]http://www.lisamcpherson.org/cchr.htm

[12]http://writer.lronhubbard.org/page90.htm

[13]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta ; The source within Scientology seems to be the “Factors”: http://www.bonafidescientology.org/Append/01/page03.htm

Homo Novis Tetropsis

But thou shalt find another, from the Lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it.
Say, ‘I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.’
Plate from Petelia, South Italy, fourth-third century B.C.

Lair of the Twisted Kitten back…

My website over at www.lairofthetwistedkitten.co.uk is back in action… in theory at least.  I’ve paid off my webhosting, but it’ll probably take about 24 hours to show up again.  So while you impatiently wait, you have the first completed work of Return of the Space Gods to look forward to… it’s sitting in my drawing pad, just waiting to be scanned.  Better do it now.

It all started with Erich von Däniken…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but I thought I’d start with by talking about John Frum. According to the Tanna Tribe of Vanuatu, he is a god who visited the island in the 1930s, coming in a flying metal chariot, bringing alien treasures of coca-cola, radios and canned meat. His worship survives to this day, and as you’ve probably guessed it preserves the memory of the American GIs who visited the island during the Second World War, conflated apparently with ideas about John the Baptist, Santa Claus and Uncle Sam. To ready themselves for the return of their god the islanders clear landing strips in the forests, and sit in wooden air-traffic control towers wearing carved headsets. [1]

Erich von Däniken is a Swiss writer who believes that most religions, from ancient paganism to Hinduism and Christianity, have a similar source, except rather than worshipping troopers from the US of A, we are worshipping alien voyagers, who made us in their image, and may one day return to set us back on the right path.

Däniken’s books peaked in popularity in the 70s, before I was born, but my school library had quite a large collection of them for some reason, and they captured my teenage imagination. Even then, I was not entirely convinced, but my opinion at the time was that even if his conclusions stretched probability, his anecdotes raised dizzying questions. Who built the vast, seemingly-useless, ancient monuments in Egypt and Stonehenge? Who set a rustproof iron pillar outside Delhi 4000 years ago? Why did the Nazca Indians carve drawings into the earth which could only be seen from space? How could an ancient map show the coastline of Antarctica, buried beneath the ice since before recorded history began?

The ideas have stuck around in my head for a long time, so when I started thinking about this project, Däniken’s first book, “Chariots of the Gods?” seemed a good place to start.

Revisiting your childhood memories is always a dangerous business, and coming back to Däniken’s prose I was… underwhelmed. His arguments are sloppy, his evidence leap-frogs from point to point without time for examination, and forget about footnotes or references. At one point he discussing the Ark of the covenant, he comes out with a surpising admission “without actually consulting Exodus, I seem to remember that the Ark was often surrounded by flashing sparks and that Moses made use of this ‘transmitter’ whenever he needed help and advice”. Okaaay.. When an author can’t be bothered to even look up a page in the world’s most readily-available book, it’s time to worry. [2]

So, somewhat disappointed, I turned to “The Space Gods Revealed”, a slim volume by Ronald Story, which I serendipitously found in a second-hand bookshop last week. This book is a counter-argument to Däniken, and in meticulous (footnoted) detail Story debunks his opponent’s evidence.

It turns out that most of Erich von Däniken’s ideas were not original to him- many were… inspired by a series of French writers who preceded him, including Jacques Bergier, who wrote “Morning of the Magicians” in 1960, and Robert Charroux, who documented “One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History” shortly later.[3] Däniken’s book, published first in 1968, was just in the right place at the right time, and he became the star, the father of the alien astronaut movement.

All this aside, I’m not interested in “Chariots of the Gods?” for its scientific value, but for its worth as a story, and while Däniken may not be its originator, or most compelling teller, the tale is still an intriguing one. About 40,000 years ago, according to our Swiss friend, visitors from another, distant world came to earth. Whether they were just travellers, refugees from a distant war, or even ourselves from a time-travelling future, we cannot know; but they interacted with our distant, simian ancestors, making us into the conscious, intelligent creatures we are today. Thus, in essence, we are part-monkey, part-space god. Again, our guide is inconsistent as to how they achieved this alchemical union of natures; sometimes he thinks that they physically impregnated hominid women (Ronald Story, in his critique, hints at the engineering problems of giant aliens making sweet love to diminutive she-apes). More plausibly, perhaps they simply practised some form of genetic engineering.

They then departed, only to return thousands of years later to find that their creations had not lived up to their promise, they’d reverted to sub-human wickedness; they unleashed atomic weapons, described in the Mahabharata and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing off the failed experiments, so that they could then teach the rudiments of civilisation to the more promising specimens.

As evidence, we have anomalous artefacts from all over the world, whispering of a higher culture that created them, if only we know how to listen. There’s the map of the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis, based on older maps, which showed out the landmass of Antarctica and the Americas, prepared in 1513, surely copied from a photo taken from orbit. Then there’s the rustproof Iron pillar of Meharauli near Delhi, which has stood for 4000 years. Exciting? Yes, but unfortunately these were two bits of evidence that Däniken himself had to disown, as he did in a Playboy interview; the technology used in making the pillar was impressive, but documented in pre-modern times, and the supposedly accurate map bore no relation to the Antarctic coastline; the admiral had guessed that South America was connected to the Southern tip of Africa, and had drawn the map accordingly. [4]

Then there are the eyewitness accounts of the visits of the gods, take this one in Ezekiel for instance:

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went. As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.

Däniken takes this to be a painstaking account of a spaceship, and in fact Josef Blumrich, an Austrian Engineer who worked for NASA at the time, found this idea so convincing that he left his job to spend more time researching “extraterrestrial visitors in ancient times”. He reconstructs the alien ship thusly:

I’ll leave it to you to decide how plausible that one is.

 

 

Some of Von Däniken’s most interesting ideas are also his wackiest. He believes that the Egyptians practised mummification so that they could preserve their bodies until their gods returned, and used their technologies to return life to their run-down bodies. Hopefully they could also reconstruct their brains, which would have been pulled out through their noses with hooked implements.

Like most of his successors in the Space God movement, Däniken invokes our alien ancestors to support modern ethical concerns- they want to warn us about the dangers of nuclear war, and they herald an age when we can rise above the divisive ideas of separate nation states.[5] Ronald Story offers a cogent analysis of the appeal of the ancient astronauts theory, which I want to mention here because it forms one of the central ideas of this project.

 

Modern humans want to believe in the gods, but we fear that science is killing the magic that once filled the world. So we recast our myths in a superficially scientific form, breathing the wonder back into the material world, and plausibility back into religion. For all their references to the Mahabharata and Ancient Greece, Däniken and his crowd are most interested in interpreting the Bible, the central religious text of their culture.[6]

 

They are people desperate in quest of that noblest and rarest of human boons, an experience of wonder, and when the U.F.O.s bestow it, they cannot but believe the Ultimate must lie encapsulated in them… These books maybe pitiful stumbling efforts in the morasses of technical and historical scholarship… But as religion they are worthy of respect as picture-language wrestling with the deep matters all persons face – or evade – in the stillness of the heart. On this level their scientific and historical failings may not matter so much. In what pertains to the ultimate beyond the circles of science and history, all language is picture-language only shadowing what is beyond words. It is, in the old Zen phrase, the finger pointing at the moon.[7]

[1] http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=788
[2] Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods?, Northumberland Press Limited, 1972; Page 57
[3] Ronald Story, The Space Gods Revealed, New English Library Limited, 1978; Page 20
[4] Ibid 49-52; 98
[5] Däniken, op cit. 25
[6] Story, op cit 130
[7] Ibid GR 136-137

Hello world!

Welcome to Return of the Space Gods! Of course, you’re probably wondering what that rather clunky title actually means, so here’s the quick lowdown…

This blog was created by Korshi, an art student/artist (it’s not really clear which) based in Sydney, Australia. The title refers to my major project for this semester, a fairly ambitious idea which I intend to document in this online forum. What is the project about? It’s really the product of my love of sci-fi and the paranormal, a look at sci-fi religions and their relationship to science and religion. The story is that sometime in the distant past, Alien Gods from outer space visited us, and will return again to save us from ourselves at the end of this Mayan Cycle (2012 I think…). The final project will consist of paintings, drawings, digital paintings, photos… whatever I decide to include.

Why (I hope) this blog will be interesting, is that I will try to post more-or-less daily either images or thoughts relating to my research. You can look forward to my thoughts on subjects from Scientology to Erik von Daniken, Jack Kirby, Raëlism, Billy Meier, H.P. Lovecraft and Battlefield Earth… and if you have your own take on any of these I’d love to hear it.

I have a website at www.lairofthetwistedkitten.co.uk (which will probably be down for a few more days), with a load of comics, drawing and a few short stories. I haven’t been updating this as often as I’d like, mainly due to my uni comittments, so hopefully this blog will do something about that.