Reviewing Ancient Egypt in Popular Culture
I recently watched the DVD’s series called Magical Egypt by John Anthony West explains but before talking about that lets recap what popular culture in the West knows about Ancient Egypt.
Ancient Egypt has long held a fascination with people in the West and has provided Hollywood with lots of material for horror movies typically featuring 3000 year old mummies fulfilling curses upon anyone that dares to disturb their internal slumber. For most of us Ancient Egypt was about the Pyramids, the Sphinx, strange symbols (hieroglyphics), strange clothes, and very strange ideas about an after-life with the general perception conveyed to us of a primitive and oppressive civilization.
This changed in the early 70s when Erich von Daniken’s book and film Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past became popular and introduced into the mass conscious of humanity the idea of there being extraterrestrial origins to many of the amazing creations of Ancient civilizations around the world.
Up until then most of us had accepted without question the artist impression in our history books of thousands of slaves hauling the huge stones to build the amazing structures like the pyramids. There may have been foot notes in some books about what an amazing technological feat it was and how it even puzzled modern day engineers but few of us had given it much thought until then.
The next big “Egyptian” thing to surface in popular culture was Pyramid Power with pseudoscientific theories regarding the power pyramids preserve food, sharpen razor blades, improve health, mental ability and enhance sex. While this caught the imagination of many it was relatively short lived as none of the claims could be substantiated under scientific conditions. Pyramid Power polarized views on Ancient Egypt with those already sceptical now convinced it was just silly New Age hocus-pocus.
The extraterrestrial origins of Ancient Egypt were again thrust into popular culture with the release of the Stargate movie in 1994 and ongoing TV series. The basic ideas is that an Alien1 which are devices that enable personal teleportation through wormholes to other locations cosmic distances away.
The New Age movement have also become increasingly interested in Ancient Egypt connecting it to all their theories about the origins of humanity. In addition to some of the wild New Age theories that usually tie everything back to the lost city of Atlantas there has been some scholarly work that if nothing else shows that the Mystery of Ancient Egypt remains totally unsolved and the explanations by mainstream Egyptologists are totally unsatisfactory.
John Anthony West is a maverick Egyptologist challenging mainstream findings and illuminating Ancient Egypt as being far more advanced than ever before believed.
In his 8 video series Magical Egypt he explores a mysteries aspect of Ancient Egypt and suggests some alternative theories. Each DVD runs for about an hour and is too much to cover in one post so I will review each episode separately identifying what I remember to be the key points.
- the Goa’uld) race visited the earth creating the Egyptian religion and culture and installed Stargates ((to transport human slaves [↩]