JESUS CHRIST, HEIR TO THE ASTRONAUTS by Gerhard R. Steinhäuser

I was staying at the Marriott

With Jesus and John Wayne

I was waiting for a chariot

They were waiting for a train

My ride's here ... though it's more of a metaphysical passage, more Morning of the Magicians than Chariots of the Gods?, and even though Steinhäuser's book postdates von Daniken, he's much more in tune with the esoteric authors like Pauwels, Bergier, and others that Erich was ripping off. In fact, reading through this volume, one is reminded of just how shabby, how lazy, how slapdash von Daniken's work was in comparison to his predecessors. For better of for worse, writers like Steinhäuser make you work for it!

Steinhäuser starts off with the basic question, was God an astronaut? We get the usual ancient art and architecture, the electric Ark of the Covenant, the "white" god Quetzalcoatl, and so on. But he goes a step further ... could it be that all of our major religions are outright massive cons, not simply garbled interpretations of gods from outer space but deliberate frauds perpetuated by priestly PR men simply borrowing aspects of the true alien visitors? Was Jesus simply a dime-a-dozen would-be prophet with the good (posthumous) luck of Peter and Paul shoring up his legacy with borrowed themes? 

It's the idea behind Christian/pagan/esoteric syncretism, but cast out further: Von Daniken used his science fiction gloss to try to shore up the Bible, while Steinhäuser aims to shred it to bits - though his introduction denies antagonism, saying the Churches are doing a good enough job of discrediting themselves!

Churches and temples are our own feeble attempt to replicate the wormhole gates that enabled the gods to travel across the universe without even needing spaceships - ritual doorways and gateways and arches are the key here, in Steinhäuser's view.

Steinhäuser tracks other potential alien influence through the ages and around the globe, asserting on page 123 that "the nearer the subsequent religious centres (e.g. in Egypt, Asia Minor, China and South America) were to the former "residences" of the gods, the clearer and more distinct is their tradition; the further away they were, and the less frequently they had contact with the gods (e.g. in northern Europe and North America) the more obscure and unintelligible are their traditions." 

One might also wonder if he simply has better access to sources to mine for those areas "closer" to the gods ...

Part of Steinhäuser's bibliography

Steinhäuser (1920-1989) wrote a handful of Ancient Astronaut texts, though this appears to be the only one ever translated into English.

Hardcover edition

I was staying at the Westin

I was playing to a draw

When in walked Charlton Heston

With the Tablets of the Law

He said "It's still the greatest story,"

I said, "Man, I'd like to stay

But I'm bound for glory,

I'm on my way."

My ride's here ... This title was translated into English by Susanne Flatauer and is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Coronet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1973)

THE AMERICAN INDIAN AND THE OCCULT by Christopher Dane

This purported guide to Amerindian occultism merely collects 35 quick hit chapters with no real analysis or through-line, making this another big pile of slop from bad, bad Brad Steiger working under his Christopher Dane pseudonym. Popular Library gave us a beautiful cover but slacks on the interior: we have typos here and there including chapter titles, and they even accidentally left Brad's true name on the inside cover!

What did readers make of this slip-up back then?

Steiger kicks things off with the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944. One Robert Segee confessed to arson in the case, and Steiger writes of vengeful Indian spirits compelling him to set the fire that killed 167 people and injured over 700. Segee would later recant his confession, but Steiger is content to finger him as the culprit and not get too involved in details about whether the fire was even really arson at all ...

Segee was supposedly of Native descent, by the way, which merits his inclusion here.

Moving on, there's no real structure as Steiger darts from outdated mystery mongering over sites like the Big Medicine Wheel in Wyoming and the Palenque ruins in Mexico, from peoples as varied as the Incas, Aztecs, Apache, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), with no attempts at delineation across two continents, countless cultures, and thousands of years of history.

Chapter 23, "The Sailors Who Came Before Columbus," discusses the Metcalf Stone of Georgia which purportedly illustrates pre-Columbian contact between Greece and the New World, while Chapter 29, "The Moon of Flowers," touches on Ancient Astronaut ideas around the Maya, in line with the Umlands' Mystery of the Ancients. Chapter 23 also mentions those famous Olmec heads and the Piri Reis Map - not by name though! Steiger is strangely subdued with his usual Fortean name checking.

Besides this de rigueur pseudoarchaeological mystery mongering, Steiger pads out his pages with the spectral threat of werewolf cults, vengeful ghosts, visions, killings and so on. These are in the classic Fortean maybe-fiction style of C.B. Colby and Frank Edwards, with nothing in the way of authentication or sourcing but plenty of invented dialogue and cheeseball scene setting:

Chapter 8 deals with the chindi or chʼįį́dii spirit, a malevolent force from Diné (Navajo) culture, of which Brad would later write a whole horror novel.

Two covers for this undoubtedly authentic chiller

Another real life horror is uncovered in Chapter 19, "The Manitou Grand Cavern Mummy," as miscreant Tom O'Neel (or "Jackknife Tom") is killed in a fight and then experimentally preserved by one Dr. Isaac A. Davis. Eventually Tom's corpse goes on the road as an "Indian mummy" ... yech!

Various just-so stories of uncertain provenance and bits of garbled history fill out the rest: Chapter 9 is an abbreviated account of Running Eagle, a warrior woman of the Blackfeet Tribe, here referred to as Weasel Woman. Steiger's version features dialogue like "Hooo, Ah," from rival Flathead fighters, go figure. Other chapters cover leaders like Wovoka, Handsome Lake, and Wabokieshiek. Sourcing is always thin regardless the subject.

Running Eagle, aka Pi'tamaka, aka Brown Weasel Woman

In style and content this volume straddles the classic "Dead Indian" era of frontier tales that was fading out by C.B Colby's time and the emerging New Age fascination with subjects like Hopi prophecy and general indigenous mysticism. Steiger was no stranger to this, whether here in the Americas, in "the Orient," or with the fraudulent Kahuna magic of Max Freedom Long. Nowadays we just have to seek out one of a thousand online "creepypasta" stories to find Amerindian concepts like skin-walker witches and the wendigo appropriated, sometimes mangled beyond recognition - reinterpreted from distinct cultural forms to generic oogy-boogy monsters.

True to form for Steiger's meatloaf volumes released as "Dane," the chapters are very uneven. Some are wisps that barely merit inclusion, some go on far too long for basic stories, some are obvious piffle and some are interesting enough. Chapter 32, "Many Scalps Has Laughing Wolf," surprises with a very measured history of scalping among Amerindians and settlers, analyzing the spread of the practice through bounties offered by settlers, and the difference between these bounty scalps, tit-for-tat atrocity scalping, and ritualistic scalping as practiced by a small number of tribes. Steiger was capable of decent writing when he put the effort in, and it's disappointing that the rest of this volume doesn't measure up.

Per usual, Popular Library doesn't bother with a table of contents or index.

Table of contents:

1.  Spirit Councils in the Forest of Fiery Death (5)

2.  Massau's Great Star: The Hopi Book of Genesis (11)

3.  A Wheel Older Than Memory (17)

4.  The Pyramid at Palenque (23)

5.  Where Are the Sheepeaters Now? (29)

6.  The Knife of the Arikaras (35)

7.  Death to the Apache Witch (41)

8.  Run From the Devil (47)

9.  Death Comes to the Woman Warrior of Two Medicine Lodge (55)

10. To Walk Among Rattlesnakes (63)

11. Roaring Thunder Returns From the Dead (69)

12. In Quest of the Medicine Arrows (75)

13. The Invincible One (83)

14. The Werewolf of Eagle Creek (91)

15. An Apache Head in Search of a Body (97)

16. Who Will Dance for Wovoka? (103)

17. Lake for Sale: Inquire of the Devil (109)

18. The Sign of Ubabeneli (115)

19. The Manitou Grand Cavern Mummy (121)

20. The Aztec God Demand's a Woman (127)

21. Tell Two Bears I Am Coming (135)

22. The Mysterious Hand of Gray Robe (141)

23. The Sailors Who Came Before Columbus (147)

24. The Rain Gods of Mesa Ecantantada (153)

25. The Secret of the Soul Eaters (159)

26. The Strange Dreams of Prince Viracocha (167)

27. Makers of Great Medicine (175)

28. The Amazing Empire of the Sun (181)

29. The Moon of Flowers (189)

30. The Good Gentle Words of Handsome Lake (195)

31. A Prophet of Another Sort (199)

32. Many Scalps Has Laughing Wolf (205)

33. The Search for Fons Juventutis (209)

34. Wabokieshiek Knows the Future (215)

35. To See the Spirit Home (219)

The American Indian and the Occult is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Popular Library, 1973

ANCIENT ASTROLOGICAL SECRETS OF THE JEWS REVEALED by Reuven Shomroni

Before the fall, when they wrote it on the wall 
And there wasn't even any Hollywood 
They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall 
For you and me, we understood

By now we've seen plenty of midcentury pop astrology guides, offering love, prosperity, and understanding for those bold enough to grasp them. But now comes "the eminent Hebrew authority," one Reuven Shomroni, with the ancient system to beat all ancient secrets, Chinese or otherwise: ANCIENT ASTROLOGICAL SECRETS OF THE JEWS REVEALED!

Shomroni leads with an uncomfortable philosemitic argument which takes Exodus as read for historical fact and writes off non-Kabalistic astrology as built on the blundering failures of dirt eating medieval Christians:

The cultural gloss may be unique, but Shomroni's attitude is par for the course for any vintage astrology text: simply disclaim your competition as a bunch of morons! Unlike those other useless, simpering astrologists, Shomroni claims that Hebrew astrology is a rock solid science of unseen influences and forces, a truly intellectual tradition that offers amazingly accurate insight into our modern lives!

And just how does Hebrew astrology reach these dizzying heights of accuracy? Simple, according to Shomroni: it starts with an adherence to the older five planet system of astrology, which our author tells us is superior to the modernized eight planet system. Furthermore, each traditional sign is granted a "governing intelligence" named for one of Jacob's twelve sons, and each planet is granted a "guiding intelligence" or sephiroth, named after archangels and bestowing additional qualities! Finally, every sign is given a Kabalistic number. Thus, a sign's profile would look as such:

As we've seen already, and in common with other pop astrology writers, Shomroni makes a lot of hay out of the failings of rival systems, and in his chapter on Scorpio he claims that other astrologists almost never deal with Scorpio's darker side. We know this just isn't true - Scorpio's dark side is half the fun! Sexy and scary, passionate and obsessed Scorpio is, for me, the highlight of any pop astrology guide, and Shomroni's "ancient" Hebrew style sounds identical to every other midcentury guide (no matter how "elevated" the authors claim to be) in warning, ever so titillatingly, of the dangers of mixing it up with these powerful personalities.

The text could have benefited from some Kabalistic charts or ancient illustrations, but the good folks at Lancer are too cheap for that.

The backpage ads feature a plug for the psychic self help text How to Use ESP by Dorothy Spence Lauer and Brad Steiger.

A wooly man without a face, and a beast without a name! This vintage title goes for far too much money online, so in the interest of information, Reuven Shomroni's guide is available to read and download at archive dot org, absolutely free of charge!

Lancer Books, 1970

CRASH GO THE CHARIOTS by Clifford Wilson, M.A., B.D., Ph.D.

Zip, bang, boom, and CRASH GO THE CHARIOTS! Lancer Books releases another anti-Chariots reader the same year as Popular Library's anthology Some Trust in Chariots, and like that volume you'd be hard pressed to guess the critical content given the packaging which promises more and greater revelations in the wake of von Daniken's ancient astronauts. But author Clifford Wilson isn't going to take any of von Daniken's nonsense lying down, and he's got mainstream and Biblical archaeology on his side - Wilson was a young earth creationist and proponent of Biblical truth who takes extreme issue with von Daniken's warping of basic historical facts as well as Biblical interpretations.

Wilson is especially incensed at von Daniken's slurring of archaeologists as a bunch of close minded, hidebound "experts" and describes his own experiences in the field working alongside both secular and religious minded researchers who were all professional enough to go where the facts lead ... Wilson just happens to thinks they lead to an inerrant Biblical truth and a geologically young earth!

Author Clifford Wilson (1923-2012)

These old school creationists can be quite logical in their own way, and Wilson's background allows him to neatly filet von Daniken's crimes against the Bible, including old standbys like Ezekiel's wheel, the atomic destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the electrified, positized, nuclearized Ark of the Covenant.

During his fact checking episodes Wilson also lays out how von Daniken structures his own shaky arguments: railing at those nasty "experts," leaving out established answers to his many "mysteries," and always ending things with a giant question mark - meaning that von Daniken never has to stand behind any of his arguments and can always retreat to claiming to be "just asking questions."

I've already remarked how Lancer packaged their anti-Chariots books without any critical clues on the covers, as if they were worried readers wouldn't seek out a skeptical perspective. It seems like nowadays we don't even really have this soft pedaled "mainstream" counter to von Daniken, as the various Ancient Aliens shows churn on for year after year and alternate perspectives are limited to specific "skeptic" outfits like CSI (formerly CSICOP) and authors like Jason Colavito. Even Wilson's evenhanded religiosity is a thing of the past, as Creationism has long since been subsumed into the larger partisan right wing evangelical culture. This work is a snapshot of a time gone by, just as it describes ancient history and dusty archives.

Brad Steiger pops up in the backpage ads with his book on Paul Twitchell and Eckankar, alongside Twitchell's own work, Aleister Crowley, and some other occult and astrology guides that Wilson surely wouldn't approve. Some big name science fiction and a couple of Exorcist cash-ins fill out the ads.

If footmen tire you, what will horses do? Crash Go the Chariots is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Lancer Books, 1972