Introduction

Numen 59 (2012) 119–124 brill.nl/nu

Introduction

James R. Lewisa) and Pia Anderssonb) a) University of Tromsø, IHR/HSL, Breiviklia, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway [email protected] b) Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden [email protected]

The 2005 Baylor Religion Survey contained a series of nine items on the paranormal, from questions about belief in telekinesis and astrology to UFOs and Bigfoot. Drawing on findings from the Baylor survey as well as from their own extensive fieldwork, the authors ofParanormal America concluded that

Believing in something paranormal has become the norm in our society. . . . In a strictly numerical sense, people who do not believe in anything paranormal are now the “odd men out” in American society. (Bader, Mencken, and Baker 2010:129)

One of the nine questions in the survey addressed the existence of Atlantis, a major topic in contemporary alternative archaeology. In response to the question, “Ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed,” 43% answered Agree or Strongly Agree. Another 30% were Undecided, whereas only 27% Disagreed or Strongly Dis- agreed (Bader, Mencken, and Baker 2010:51). With the exceptions of belief in ghosts and belief in the efficacy of alternative medicine, a larger percentage of the sample expressed belief in Atlantis than in any of the other subjects. One should immediately note that the Atlantis of contemporary popular culture is different from Plato’s Atlantis. As mediated to the larger ‘cultic milieu’ (Campbell 1972) by the Theosophical Society,

Edgar Cayce, and others, Atlantis was portrayed as a high-tech world of advanced spirituality with links to extraterrestrial civilizations. Rather than Plato’s natural disaster, the Atlantis of popular culture perished as a consequence of the misuse of technology (Melton 1990:44–48). In this transformed guise, Atlantis — as well as Atlantis’s lesser known cousins, the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Mu — became standard items of belief within the alternative spiritual (‘New Age’) subculture. A related popular belief about the past — another form of alternative archaeology that can often be found side-by-side with ideas about Atlantis — is the belief that in the distant past ‘ancient astronauts’ vis- ited the Earth from alien worlds and were responsible for the great archaeological wonders of the ancient world, such as the pyramids of Egypt and the architectural feats of pre-Columbian America. Some ancient astronaut theories also advance the notion that aliens altered the genes of our distant ancestors to produce contemporary human beings. A distorted record of this event can, it is asserted, be found in a few enigmatic verses in the book of Genesis about the sons of God copulating with the daughters of men, producing an intermediate spe- cies that Genesis refers to as the “Nephilim.” Our space ‘fathers’ have subsequently been watching over us, and will, according to some New Age notions, return to mingle with their distant offspring during the imminent new age. Variants on these notions, which already straddle the line between religion and science, have been adopted by a variety of different new religious movements, particularly UFO religions such as the Raëlian Movement (Palmer 2004) and Heaven’s Gate (Chryssides 2011). In addition to appealing to the archaeological record, Raël and the founders of Heaven’s Gate also gave their respective movements ancient lineages by interpreting selected parts of the Bible as having preserved distorted records of extraterrestrial contact (Gallagher 2010; Zeller 2010). This blending of archaeology and biblical hermeneutics for religious purposes is not, however, unique to emergent religions. At its very ori- gins, it appears that biblical archaeology’s “purpose was to confirm the essential truth of scriptural accounts” (Levitt 2006:271). However, archaeology is not the only academic discipline that has been invoked in support of religious ideologies.