I saw this movie last week and was very disappointed. I actually thought it was bad, but not as bad as War of the Worlds. In my opinion, Spielberg’s good days are behind him. After watching it, however, I did find myself thinking again of the old and fairly common tradition of elongating skulls, such as was done in Egypt, the Middle East, and in the Americas, etc. I actually have not studied the origins of this particular tradition in these places with the exception of Central America, where I remember reading that this shape was supposed to resemble a head of corn/maize among the Maya royals, which makes sense. Apparently, this Maya tradition is well documented, but I do not know if it was the exclusive privilege of royal males, although I would assume so. Since the corn/maize plant was one of the models for their World Tree, this caused me to wonder whether the elongated skull in these other places might be connected to the World Tree/Mountain as well. I think this is not unlikely.

You know, just for the record, I have never attributed, in my mind/imagination, the discovery and development of the mythical “arts of civilization” to aliens, like Spielberg has so consistently done. This seems like a very Hebraic thing to do. Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think, would have attributed these same developments to our own ancestors, as I do.

Ken

Well, I think you forgot the movie in your excursus on technology. Fact is, the movie trivializes politics, caricatures the Russkies who were then creating the space age with sputnik, and makes a roadrunner cartoon out of myth. Given all you know about myth, don’t you think you have the cart before the horse? The extraterrestrial gods come first, bringing the arts of civilization to primitives; then a more organized society creates the cult of the ancestors because they are in the Dreamtime of origin closer to the time of contact with the extraterrestrial gods. The new conservatism helps to keep the new priest class in power. Who says we should revere the ancestors? The priests, of course, who are threatened by innovation. Remember when Xeng Hu in the Ming dynasty sailed around the Indian Ocean in 1433 in huge ships and challenged the ancestor worship and Confucian conservatism of the Eunuch bureaucrats at court, the Eunuchs responded by burning his maps and records and moving the Ming capital inland from coastal Nanking. China was then the world’s most advanced civilization, but when it withdrew from world projection, the rapacious Portuguese and Spanish jumped in, with tragic consequences. Ancestor worship and the distrust of innovation is no great thing.

Interestingly enough in the pop Roswell Myth, the ETs are said to have warned our leaders of the danger of atomic weapons wiping out all life on earth–hence the fact that neither we nor the Russkies have used them in war–and in compensation the ETs are supposed to have given us all the new things that have lead to the rapid acceleration of postindustrial civilization since 1948. So the myth of the ETs as culture heroes bringing the arts of civilization and “cargo” (chez Diamond) to primitives still continues. The fact that the movie is about gods and not ancestors is also revealed when the NKVD colonel demands to see all knowledge and disintegrates in the process, as this is literal quote of the myth of Dionysos and Semele.

I think you need to add on a couple more paragraphs to your review to critique the movie. The decay of the 1970s mythic movie into a Hanna Barbera cartoon is also part of the decadence you are tracking.

Yours,

William Irwin Thompson