Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls:

A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

The original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, had concerned the descent of a solar hero — hence, his antipathy to snakes, for snakes are usually lunar — into the underworld of Egyptian civilization in order to retrieve from the sunken depths of our perceptual field the Ark of the Covenant, the central fetish around which the Hebraic tradition had revolved. The significance of the retrieval was precisely that it was a religious object that had to be restored and brought into the field of focus of our modern, secular society, since the religious object becomes pars pro toto for the religious experience as a whole. It is precisely a sense of communion with the divine which we moderns have lost, and it was the goal of the first film to retrieve this lost experience as a way of bringing it to our attention and making the point that contact with a spirit world is indeed what we have lost in the building of modernity.

In the new film, the central religious object is a crystal skull with an elongated head that is meant to represent an extraterrestrial founder of human civilization, for in the worldview of Spielberg and Lucas, aliens stand in for the gods as the founders of civilization and the teachers of human beings of such arts as agriculture, temple building and metallurgy. In ancient myths and epics, such as the Persian Shahnameh, for example, such arts were taught to mankind by the first kings, each of whom introduced a new technology, such as animal husbandry or irrigation or the weaving of clothing.

The practice, likewise, of elongating the head through applying a headboard to an infant originated in the Neolithic Near East as a custom for singling out certain revered members of the village who were thought to be either the reincarnation of ancient Ancestors or else in special communication with them. Spielberg and Lucas’s extraterrestials, then, are in reality metaphoric of the ancient cult of the Ancestors, those primordial beings who were regarded by ancient societies as having shaped and created the contours of the world as we know it for all time.

Whenever these ancestral beings are depicted in art, such as the Wondjina of the Australian aborigines, for example, they bear a striking resemblance to extraterrestrials, for they have large eyes and either small knife-thin slits for mouths or else no mouths at all. For according to the aborigines, the Wondjina created everything in the world by pronouncing the name of each thing, for the magically resonant properties of the name was thought to bring a thing into being. The Ancestors, furthermore, were thought to have closed their mouths for all time once the world was created, and it has never changed since. Hence, the Wondjina are depicted without mouths because they represent the mythological past when creativity and innovation was held to be the exclusive property of the Ancestors. In the present time, the Ancestors have no mouths because there is nothing new to create. Hence, in most traditional societies, technological innovation is frowned upon because it is generally forbidden by the Ancestors or else the tribal Elders who are thought to be the living embodiment of their ancient wishes. (It is significant in light of this that extraterrestrials are typically depicted with small inconspicuous mouths).

Thus, contrary to Jared Diamond’s materialistic thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel that the West became so technologically saavy because of its direct access to goods and services such as domesticable wheat and animals, the real reason why other societies have lagged behind the West technologically is because of the strong presence of the cult of the Ancestors in those societies which has remained in effect, especially in Asia, to the present day. The West, early on, got rid of its cult of Ancestors at the dawn of civilization in ancient Sumer, where there occurred the transformation of the forbidding Ancestors into gods who become patrons of new technologies. Enki, for instance, became the patron of irrigation; Inanna of astronomy; Nanna-Sin of boat building, and so on. Each of the Sumerian deities was thought to have brought into being one or another form of technology, and so it is evident that the Mesopotamians were the first to get rid of the ancient Ancestors — and along with it, the skull cult, which is universally associated with Ancestor worship — by transforming them into the world’s first pantheon of technologically minded deities. That is the reason why the West has triumphed technologically, and not because of its access to a vast Neolithic supermarket. Diamond’s view is that of a white, middle-class American consumer who thinks that all of history is determined by who gets to the supermarket first.

Although it sounds like I’ve forgotten Spielberg’s film here, I haven’t, since all of this is part of the background for what I believe the film to be (subliminally) communicating to us: namely, that it is perhaps time for the technologically conservative cult of the Ancestors to be given a second glance, for we could use a little more of their skepticism and a little less of jumping up and down everytime someone invents a new gadget. Our reckless love of technologizing has created the fastest civilization in history and as a result, the one most prone to mass catastrophes. From the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 on down to September 11, 2001, our civilization has begun to mass produce catastrophes at an alarming rate, and in most cases, directly as the result of a sudden and massive increase in speed or power. We have a heedless disregard for the value of human life in our society. Perhaps we need an intervention on the part of the ancient Ancestors, with their cult of skull worship, in order to put a check on our out of control development. We don’t seem to recognize that with every new gadget that comes along, a way of life is undone and goes into a state of disintegration. To take a random example, iTunes is currently destroying the record industry, while the Internet as a whole has caused bookstores to begin closing down everywhere.

Spielberg and Lucas’s film shows us the side effects of the Nuclear Age, for at one point in the movie early on the tiny, silhouetted figure of Indiana Jones is dwarfed by the detonation of a mushroom cloud which renders him insignificant. One cannot help but feel that this image is the film’s statement of the problem, and that its climactic vision of a group of extraterrestrials leaving the planet in a flying saucer is somehow meant to be the antidote. If the cult of the Ancestors had still been around in the 1950s, Spielberg and Lucas seem to be saying, then perhaps the atrocity of the atom bomb would never have been allowed to come into being.

After all, the Ancestors took special care, when they set up civilization in the beginning, to keep its mighty powers out of the reach of mere human beings, and this is why we find that as Mesopotamian civilization declines, we begin to see more and more myths appear in which human beings are depicted as stealing technological powers from the gods: Etana, for example, becomes the first man to appropriate the power of the gods to fly by building copper wings and affixing them to an eagle whose wings had been previously destroyed; Adapa is the first human being who seeks to steal immortality from the gods (but succeeds only in bringing plagues and disease into the world) and later Gilgamesh will try to imitate him in this endeavor. These are all characters who come in at the end of Mesopotamian civilization when it is entering a state of confusion and turmoil due to its willingness to experiment with new forms of technology.

We too are currently involved in a number of endeavors at trying to steal powers traditionally ascribed to the gods, such as the power to make life through genetic engineering, or to fly to other worlds, or to look down on the planet from above in the form of omnipresent satellites. We are engaged in a massive and morally questionable undertaking, and the nervous outcome of our current experiments remains to be seen. Whether the gods will sit back and allow us to destroy the planet or not — unless, like the ancient Flood Myth of the Atrahasis, they decide to intervene and wipe us out with a mass catastrophe — is the question that stands waiting for its answer.