What I Am Reading: "Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes" by Donna Kossy
I ordered this book during a sort of library lull in mid-December. The author, Donna Kossy, was mentioned on a list of "wiki holes" on the only subreddit I peruse, r/UnresolvedMysteries. I was intrigued by the fact that she came up through the punk / zine world; Amazon reviews of her books noting that they were good except for being "too serious" and "liberal propaganda" sealed the deal.
Kossy is famous for writing a book called Kooks about holders of fringe beliefs. In a similar vein, this book drills down on fringe ideas of human origins, referred to as “aberrant anthropologies” and described, in a through-line that I wish received more attention, as third ways between Evolution and Creationism that often try to reclaim humanity’s centrality in the cosmos while retaining scientific advances. It separates into chapters on Extraterrestrial Origins, De-Evolution, Race, Eugenics, Creationism, The Aquatic Ape Theory, and what I think of as Other on the Urantia book, Heaven's Gate, and Stanislav Szukalski.
The book is in fact very straight-faced and semi-scholarly, with endnotes for each chapter (though, frustratingly, no index). The book is essentially an extensive literature review on each of its topics, and dutifully goes over the basics of weird racist theories about how god did or did not create various races of people and how some evolved, or did not evolve, or de-evolved from their higher state. I decided not to take detailed notes on the theories, but suffice to say that each chapter does a thorough job, and the big names in the respective fields such as Helena Blavatsky and Lothrop Stoddard make their appearances. There is certainly enough crackpot 19th Century race "science" and pseudo-anthropology for one to get lost in it, and the book occasionally gets bogged down in too much detail. That, plus the putsch in Washington on Wednesday, slowed down my completion.
De-Evolution offers the most interesting stand-out in my mind: the notes on Oscar Kiss Maerth. First, a disclaimer: as a crackpot pseudo-anthropologist in the '70s, Maerth naturally has lots of racist ideas and likes to compare different races to monkeys. Anyway, the chapter on De-Evolution is one where Kossy drops the formality and gets more personal, and talks about falling in love with Devo and their sound after Three-Mile Island. Devo, attempting to spearhead an artistic movement centered around humanity's decline, degradation, and "de-evolution," found an idol in Maerth. His theory, published in his book The Beginning Was The End, is that, in short, the anthropological reason for humanity's large brains, aggression, and other adaptations is that they descend from a group of primates who started cannibalizing each others' brains as an aphrodisiac. Maerth, a Hungarian, was a shadowy figure, and his studies apparently / allegedly came not from formal bio-anthropological study, but from interviewing remaining tribes of cannibals.
I think that this macabre theory is something right out of a (certain type of) Lovecraftian horror story. Imagine: you are a racist scholar whose research uncovers essentially the most gruesome (de-) evolutionary backstory possible, pertaining to the entire human race and remembered, theorized, or suspected by none other than yourself. What can you possibly do other than publish? The discovery must have driven him mad, if he actually believed it.
Another segment where Kossy got personal was toward the end, when discussing Heaven's Gate, because she (in her pursuit of kooks) attended one of their meetings and found them interesting until they started incorporating Christian elements into their lecture. She followed them through their website, however, when they appeared in their final incarnation before their mass suicide. I recently read another piece by the wonderful Kate Wagner about the Heaven's Gate website: it was entwined with their post-suicide public image in the '90s when the internet was scary for old people and not because of old people.
Again, though occasionally a slog, the book seems to have done its homework, and gives a good background (a bit out-of-date now, since it was published in 2001) on the abovementioned eugenics, de-evolution, racial theories, and eugenics. The familiar Creationists appear, and feminist proponents of the Aquatic Ape Theory (a theory, with which I had not previously been familiar, that mankind evolved from other primates because of inhabiting and nursing babies in shallow waters) get their shout-out as well. I guess I'd recommend it if you are in to this kind of thing, but if you are in to this kind of thing then you are probably familiar with a fair amount of the ground covered already. This is Kossy's latest book; I might check out Kooks if I have a copy fall into my lap, and I wonder what she's written in the intervening decades?