This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Red Shoe: Does someone have a reference for the claim about Stargate SG-1? I never got any impression but that the Goa'uld had invented those mythologies.
Inyssius: Me neither.
Scifantasy: Me neither; in fact, I have to assume they did invent them, because the show often uses the mythologies to properly understand the Goa'uld. If they adopted the convenient mythology, the myths wouldn't be so accurate, I have to believe.
some discussion from an entry that did not quite work out, the proposal being that this trope represents racial profiling of a sort, with the Ancients being Aryan-analogues ...
Gus: From the Ancient Astronauts entry...
- Stargate SG-1 takes this to its logical extreme. Virtually every culture's gods or mythic figures (right up to King Arthur) have, in the course of the show, been revealed to be or be inspired by aliens of one form or another. Mostly, they were the Goa'uld, which began as the Egyptian gods and spread from there, though the benevolent Asgard were the Norse gods, and Merlin was a Sufficiently Advanced Alien.
Tulling: Regarding this Stargate thing, has there been aliens that are said to have posed as Jesus Christ or somesuch figure that is still fashionable to believe in? I am guessing "no", since they would probably get many complaints.
Kendra Kirai: Well, the Goa'uld were kicked off the planet around 2000 BC, which was rather before Jesus Christ...and for the most part, the Goa'uld seemed to much prefer the pantheon type of religion, of which relatively few remain. Though there have been Goa'uld doing Greek and Roman gods, the Asgard had the norse, Seth had his little cults, there was Lord Yu (He who's name had every joke made about it) who was a big figure in chinese mythology or something (It's been ages)...
Anyhow, I rather find this entry rather insulting. I'm not calling for it to be taken down or anything, but what is it for? I mean..look at history. These african and south american and so forth cultures had a civilization FAR more advanced than the eastern european level (Which at the times involved, was somewhere around the level of trying to figure out how to not get eaten by wolves while they slept. The Ancient Astronauts theory gives a possible reason for this (Ignoring the fact that the human race began in the southern areas and migrated to the northern climes), and gives a possible reason for the fact these great cultures seemingly collapsed or simply vanished, or simply ceased to advance and got overtaken and swallowed up by neighboring cultures that were still advancing.
[[Pepinson]]: Well, that's exactly my point—it's a bit silly to claim that people who were so much more advanced than we were at the time needed help from aliens to build their various and assorted monoliths. In a sense, it's just an updated version of the belief held in the Dark Ages that the giant structures built by the Romans were made by a vanished race of giants—we can't figure out how they were made because we still haven't made some of the advancements they had. It's taken us a thousand years and an industrial revolution to provide us with running water and central heating, but the Romans did the same thing without electricity, steam power, or even a solid understanding of metallurgy—and yet, we remain convinced that they did it by perfectly explainable, mundane methods.
Kendra Kirai: That's partly because records and working examples still exist of how they did it..and for the most part, they were relatively mundane. Ingenious, but mundane. And lets not forget Stonehenge. Nobody knows what the hell that is for, and nobody knows how they built it.
Really, is it so..and I hesitate to use this word..racist, to think that these ancient cultures that just suddenly...stoped advancing, or simply vanished, had to have had some sort of advanced technological help which for some reason or other dried up? If it's true, clearly these beings, whatever or whoever they were, had some reason to contact these ancient cultures. And if it isn't true..well, that just means those ancient cultures were so advanced that even now we have no idea just how they did stuff, and we should be in awe.
Ununnilium: Like I said on the other discussion page, this entry doesn't really make sense to me, either - Ancient Astronauts aren't universally portrayed as white at all.
Gus: Hmm. This discussion didn't carry over to the renamed page. Let me try to extract the thesis:
It is insulting that some cultures are not given credit for their accomplishments. The credit has been arbitrarily assigned to Chariot Gods.
That it? We're calling "Chariot Gods" Ancient Astronauts. I think addition of the idea in the thesis to the Ancient Astronauts entry would cover it pretty well.
Robert: I agree with Gus. Doctor Who also has examples of aliens responsible for European achievements, and Stonehenge has been attributed to both aliens and lost civilisations. The generalisation on this page is too sweeping.
The Ancient Astronauts trope is probably rooted in prejudice, but not racism. It rests on a different type of prejudice, against the 'less' civilised of all colours, including early, white, Europeans. In fact, even stone age technologies are more capable than is popularly understood. Stonehenge and the Pyramids are not mysteries to the professionals, merely tributes to human ingenuity.
Looney Toons: Spaceman's Burden.
scionofgrace: Could Narnia count as an example, just seen from the other side? Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are all from a very different and advanced society when they become kings and queens in Narnia, and eventually myths. Likewise, a lot of Narnian culture must be based on the English traditions and knowledge that King Frank and Queen Helen brought when they arrived. I'm just thinking here of Edmund's electric torch being left in Narnia, or Eustace explaining trains to King Tirian.
Does Helen's Mother from the Narbonic Steampunk Sunday Serial count as an inversion? It turns out that was her visiting Mars that is the reason all the Martians look like Helen.
Fnord23 I'm perhaps over-sensitive to this but: I dislike the use of the term "certain people"; it smacks of the "I'm so NAUGHTY...!" school of anti-Semitism which I see around the net*, even when it's not indtended in that way at all. Better, I think, to just say, in this case, "religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims" since those are the people who would be offended.
~*~Poster acts like he'd better step very lightly because They're Watching, so he won't write the word "Jew" after managing to disgorge large sections of the "Protocols" without it; poster assumes he's important enough to merit the sort of attention of which he's claiming to be afraid. Not only anti-Semitic, but CUTE.
Fnord23 Currently-worshipped (or at least -acknowledged) gods and goddesses in the Goua'uld pantheon: Nirrti, Ameterasu,...now if they'd only had had Mammon, perhaps as a late-nigh TV pitchman or the founder of Amway....
Mike Rosoft: Removed - doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything, and especially with my entry about the Salamanca Cathedral it was posted in response to (perhaps accidentally put in the wrong page?):
