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(More customer reviews)The Cult of Alien Gods is really two books in one. First of all it's an introduction to master writer H.P. Lovecraft and especially the mythos about the sinister extraterrestrial known as Cthulhu, but it's also a study of the rise of the ancient astronaut movement along with the ideas about lost civilizations, where authors such as Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock, and Zecharia Sitchin became the most famous representatives.
According to Colavito, it's Lovecraft - the somewhat still mysterious gentleman from Providence - and his stories about extraterrestrials visiting Earth aeons ago that the entire genre later known as ancient astronauts is based upon. Proponents of this genre claimed that sometime way back in ancient history, Earth was visited by extraterrestrials who were mistaken for gods and among other things helped build the amazing Egyptian pyramids. For people who don't know anything about Lovecraft Colavito - himself a fan of Lovecraft - offers a nice introduction to the mysterious man and his ground-breaking penmanship, details where he picked up his influences, how his literary masterpieces were received by his peers, and much, much more.
Now this introduction is perfectly fine, and Colavito definitely deserves some praise for his tribute to Lovecraft. But, the main thesis behind the book is not quite as convincing. Colavito insists that Lovecraft and his fiction is indeed what von Däniken and the rest based their respective works upon, and even though he on several occasions shows how something that Lovecraft had written decades earlier were later taken as genuine facts, he still never manages to actually prove that without Lovecraft there would have been no ancient astronauts.
But that doesn't really matter, since large sections of the book aren't about Lovecraft anyway. Instead Colavito focuses on debunking what he himself once upon a time believed wholeheartedly in. However, over the years he became more and more skeptical to the amazing claims that von Däniken and his allies put forth, and thus the book contains numerous exposures of how the "evidence" that millions of people all over the world chose to believe in, and still believe in, is by and large erroneous. Sometimes they are even straight out lies and hoaxes. This exposure is, though, to be completely honest, not that great of an accomplishment, since the proponents of the ancient astronauts have been debunked time and again by a multitude of professional scholars. Still, Colavito is apparently on a vendetta against the ones who mislead him, and the passion behind his words makes the well worth reading..
The criticism never really digs deep and only chosen parts of the authors' books are criticised, but the purpose of this exposé is to show how the theories behind the ancient astronauts collapse as soon as they are thoroughly investigated, and this Colavito does with a vengeance. At the end of the book Raël - or His Holiness as he prefers to be addressed as these days - and his Raëlian Revolution makes an appearance, and again Colavito is highly successful in his debunking.
The Cult of Alien Gods failed to convince me that Lovecraft is the founding father of the ancient astronaut theory. Fortunately, however, the book contained a whole lot more than that, and when it was all over I had truly enjoyed reading the book.
I therefore have no other choice but to congratulate Colavito for a debunking-job well done.
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