Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

Introduction

J. Douglas Kenyon

Just a few centuries after what the experts say was the first great laborsaving invention of the ancient world—the wheel—society crossed a major threshold and headed irreversibly toward the modern world. More than anything else, it was the wheel, we are told, that revolutionized primitive society and set the stage for the great achievements that were to follow. The prevailing assumption is that the rise of highly organized society was unprecedented; such is the conventional scenario for the dawn of civilization on Earth.

After all, it is argued, if there had been an earlier, advanced civilization we would have discovered unmistakable evidence of its existence. Presumably, we would have seen the remains of its highways, and bridges, and electrical wiring. We would have found its plastic bottles, its city dumps, and its CD-ROMs. Those are, after all, the things we will leave behind for future archeologists to puzzle over.

But could an ancient civilization have risen to heights similar to our own, yet have traveled a different road? What would we understand of a world that might have employed fundamentally different—though no less effective—techniques to harness the forces of nature? Would we, or could we, comprehend a world capable of, for example, creating and transmitting energy by means other than a power grid, traveling great distances without internal combustion engines, or making highly complex calculations involving earth science and astronomy without electronic computers?

Do we have the grace to recognize and respect achievements other than our own, or must we take the easy way out and resort to crude stereotyping of our mysterious primitive ancestors, dismissing out of hand anything we don’t immediately understand? Indeed there are some, including many contributors to this book, who would argue that the evidence of a great but forgotten fountainhead of civilization is overwhelming and needs, at last, to be given its proper due.

Forbidden History, a compilation of essays gathered over time from the magazine Atlantis Rising, aims to put forward such evidence, and to propose ideas and theories with regard to the origins of life and the human race itself that may very well be more in accordance with reality than currently prevailing orthodoxy. In proposing these ideas, we hope to pose some interesting and provocative questions.

For example, could today’s reigning conception of the limits of prehistoric society be but another in the long line of self-serving conceits to which our ruling elite, if not our flesh, is heir? Take, for instance, the Darwinian/Uniformitarian view of history, which argues that our world is a very slowly changing place; wherein everything has developed spontaneously, albeit quite gradually, over millions of years, without the help of any external forces—no, God forbid, God!—to interfere in the process. According to this predominant school of thought, the way the world works now is the way it has always worked.

On the other side, some have tried to argue (without the benefit of much public exposure) that our world today is the product of a series of catastrophes. These “catastrophists” tell us that the story of mankind is one of a never-ending cycle of ascents followed by cataclysmic falls. For more than a century, the uniformitarians have dominated the debate, but this is a circumstance that may be changing.

Probably no one in the past half-century is more directly linked, in the public mind, with the concept of catastrophism than the late Russian-American scientist Immanuel Velikovsky. When Velikovsky’s book Worlds in Collision was published in 1950, it caused a sensation. His subsequent works, Earth in Upheaval and Ages in Chaos, further elaborated his theories and expanded the ongoing controversy. Here was a scientist of considerable authority suggesting, among other things, that Earth and Venus might once have collided, leaving behind a vast and puzzling chaotic aftermath that, if we could just decipher its resultant clues correctly, could do much to explain our peculiar history.

For such arguments, Velikovsky was roundly and routinely ridiculed. Nonetheless, many of his predictions have now been verified, and many who initially disagreed with him on many subjects, including the late Carl Sagan, have been forced to concede that, after all and in some ways, Velikovsky may have been on to something.

Very few realize that Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst by profession, an associate of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. His insights into the psycho/sociological impacts of cataclysmic events, in my view, were his greatest contribution to a proper understanding of our ancient experience. Sometime in the mid-1980s, I ran across his book Mankind in Amnesia, and my own thinking about the condition of humanity on Earth has never been the same. According to Velikovsky, the psychological condition and case history of planet Earth is one of amnesia: We find the planet today in a near-psychotic state, left so by traumatic events of an almost unimaginable magnitude that, thanks to a collective psychological defense mechanism, we cannot bear to remember.

Today, psychiatrists have applied the term post-traumatic stress syndrome to a group of mental disorders that have been known to follow the witnessing of life-threatening events (e.g., military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, and violent personal assaults such as rape). Symptoms of the disorder include depression, anxiety, nightmares, and amnesia.

The question that must be asked is whether or not such a diagnosis could be applied to the culture of an entire planet? And could a collective unwillingness to explore and define our mysterious past—unconsciously dreading that to do so would open ancient wounds—eventually harden into a systematic repression of the truth? Could it become tyranny? Certainly our reluctance to honestly explore the past has led to many such evils. Over time, this reluctance to consider the truth of our origins has often become codified and institutionalized, culminating in nightmares like the inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the book burnings of Nazi Germany. How often we have watched as a brutal elite, supposedly acting in our name, enforced the collective subconscious wish to keep such threatening—and thus forbidden—knowledge safely out of sight? The answer, Velikovsky believed, was, ‘all too frequently.’

In many ways, his views were supported by Carl Jung’s notion of an innate collective unconscious undergirding all of human awareness. From this vast and mysterious well of shared experience, Jung argued, emerge many of our greatest aspirations and many of our deepest fears. Its influence is recorded in our dreams and in our myths. In the subtext of such narratives, Velikovsky read the tale of a monumental, albeit forgotten, ancient tragedy.

As I reflected on Velikovsky’s theories, my own thinking came into sharper focus, for it seemed apparent to me that collectively we have indeed been persuaded to close our eyes to certain realities—to dissociate from them—and that, perversely, compounding the error, we have justified this willful blindness and endowed it with a certain authority, even nobility. The strange effect of this has been to turn many moral issues upside down—to make right wrong and wrong right, if you will.

Recall the Church fathers of the Middle Ages and their refusal, because of what they considered to be Galileo’s incorrect conclusions, to look through his telescope for themselves. Galileo’s notion that the Sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system was deemed heresy, no matter what the evidence might show to the contrary. In other words, the minds of the authorities had already been made up, and they had no intention of being confused by such minor annoyances as facts.

Does such blindness persist today? Some of us think so. The ruling elite of today may subscribe to a similarly intolerant “religion”—what John Anthony West has sardonically called “the Church of Progress.” As Graham Hancock affirmed to Atlantis Rising in a recent interview, “The reason we are so screwed up at the beginning of a new century is that we are victims of a planetary amnesia. We have forgotten who we are.”

Sadly, the establishments of government and industry and the academic world—along with those who categorically and systematically debunk any and all alternate theories which might undermine the ruling paradigm—today remain determined to thwart any reawakening from the ongoing amnesia.

Often, when it proves difficult to find an adequate rationale to support the misguided choices of our leaders, it is tempting to think in terms of dark conspiracy theories and treacherous hidden agendas. For Velikovsky, though, the explanation for behavior that some might describe as evil and others would view as, at the very least, self-destructive and unenlightened, lies in the classic mechanism of a mind seeking to regain its equilibrium in the aftermath of a near mortal blow.

In the case of amnesia, it’s not enough to simply say that a hole has been blown in our memory. The victim of a near fatal trauma is driven, it would appear, by fear—both conscious and unconscious—to exorcise, by whatever means possible, the demons of such a dreadful experience lest he or she be overwhelmed. How else can we get on with our lives, put the past behind us, think about the future? To rid ourselves entirely of the memory of such an episode, however, is not such an easy task. Much more than the record of the trauma itself may be lost in the process. The human identity—what some would call the very soul itself—is often the first casualty. Moreover, what is true on an individual level Velikovsky felt was also true on the collective level.

This process might move more slowly and allow for personal exceptions, but the institutions of society would in time come to reflect and then enforce a deep collective subconscious wish that, for the good of all, certain doors stay closed and certain inconvenient facts stay forgotten—that such history remain a forbidden zone. And in the meantime, the risk of reenacting the ancient drama grows, as does our need for reliable guidance.

It is a premise of this book that the map we must follow in order to find our way out of the current dilemma is one that may be drawn from our myths, our legends, and our dreams—from the universal, collective unconscious that Jung talked about. The real story of our planet’s tragic history, we suspect, can be deduced from these mysterious records.

Read between the lines and Plato’s account of Atlantis in the Timaeus and the Critias is corroborated by the Bible, by the Indian legends of Central America, and by a thousand other ancient myths from every part of the world. Giorgio de Santillana, a professor at M.I.T. and an authority on the history of science, and his co-author, professor of science Hertha von Dechend, hypothesized in their monumental work, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth, that an advanced scientific knowledge had been encoded into ancient myth and star lore.

Indeed, the mythology of many ancient societies is filled with stories of cataclysmic destruction of Earth and its inhabitants. We agree with Graham Hancock when he says, “Once one accepts that mythology may have originated in the waking minds of highly advanced people, then one must start listening to what the myths are saying.”

What they are saying, we believe, is that great catastrophes have struck Earth and destroyed advanced civilizations (not unlike our own) and, moreover, that such cataclysmic destruction is a recurrent feature in the life of Earth and may very well happen again. Many ancient sources (again, including the Bible), warn of possible cataclysm in a future end time—perhaps in our lifetime. If it’s true that those who cannot learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them, these enigmatic messages from our past could very well prove to be something that we can ignore only at our peril.

As Hancock points out, we’ve received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from our ancestors, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we must recapture that heritage and learn from it what we can, because it contains vitally important guidance. To prevail in the challenges before us now, we must recover our lost identity. We must remember who we are and where we came from.

We must, at last, be awake.