TV and ET

Cylons and the New Age

Human interaction with ETs has been a stock premise on television for decades, sometimes played for drama and sometimes for laughs. And the mix of space travel and religion has never been off-screen for long. The original Star Trek reimagined the gods of Greece and Rome as powerful aliens when they encountered Apollo in the second season episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Other entries in the Star Trek franchise likewise explored religious themes. The pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced Picard’s godlike nemesis, Q, who eventually appeared in a dozen episodes of The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and Star Trek: Voyager.

The 1994 film Stargate kicked off a long-running science fiction franchise that centered on the return of the old gods to Earth. In the Stargate universe, the deities of the ancient Near East were parasitic, technologically advanced ETs called the Goa’Uld who ruled the earth thousands of years ago as gods. The movie follows a team of explorers who travel through a stargate to discover a world controlled by a brutal entity posing as the Egyptian sun-god Ra, whose spaceship looks a lot like the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The television series Stargate SG-1 and its spinoffs continued that theme. The Norse pantheon was introduced in the series as the Asgard, whose appearance inspired stories of the alien Greys, and who, contrary to their reputation among ET contactees, side with humanity in the war against the Goa’Uld.

In other words, the Stargate franchise built an entire alternate history for the main religions of Earth: all of their gods are aliens. We don’t recall how they explained why the gods stopped visiting Earth for a couple thousand years, and of course they never touched the third rail of Hollywood, Jesus. But considering what the series did to the pagan gods, it’s just as well.

SG-1 ran from 1997 through 2007, surpassing The X-Files as the longest-running science fiction television series in North America until it was passed by Smallville in 2011, a series that featured another godlike ET, Superman.

Battlestar Galactica had two series runs, the first in 1978–79 and a second that ran for seventy-five episodes between 2003 and 2009. The original series was notable for being a thinly veiled dramatization of Mormon theology, including a council of twelve, marriage for “time and eternity,” and a planet named Kobol. Religion was a prominent theme in the reboot, too; the twelve “Lords of Kobol” were the Olympian gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, and the twelve occupied planets of humanity were named for the signs of the zodiac.

In the 2003 reboot, the Cylons, sentient robots who rebelled against their human masters, were depicted as monotheistic. Their religion looked like Christianity minus Christ, where the god worshiped by the AI-powered Cylons resembled an atheist’s stereotypical depiction of God in the Old Testament—all anger and smiting of unbelievers.

The reimagined Battlestar introduced a new element: Humanoid Cylons so lifelike they were indistinguishable from humans. As the series developed, it was revealed that there were only seven models, but many copies of each. Model number One, Cavil, deceived the other Cylons by hiding the identities of the remaining humanoid Cylon models, the “Final Five.” Finding the unknown Cylons was a major plot thread in the series, and their ultimate disclosure to the human fleet was the turning point that led humanity to salvation on a new Earth.

That Cylon plot twist draws from several Western occult traditions, especially as they’ve been syncretized into Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine that seven “rays” together form all energy and all forms produced by it—in other words, you, us, and everything around us. These “rays” are also intelligent beings called the Dhyan Chohans.

Since at least the early 1970s, however, some New Age leaders like Elizabeth Clare Prophet have been teaching that there are “five secret rays,” which “promote an action of detail, the final sculpturing of the mind and consciousness in the perfect image of the Christ.”^[1] We don’t know why the writers of the reimagined Battlestar added the Final Five plot line, but the parallel to current New Age thinking is unlikely to be a coincidence.

This is an excerpt from our 2024 book The Gates of Hell. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish it here at no charge. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

Comic books have also mined human theology for decades. Beyond the obvious, such as Marvel making a superhero out of the Norse storm-god Thor (who is a cognate for Jupiter, Zeus, and Baal—in other words, same god with different names), researcher and author Christopher Knowles makes a strong case in his book Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes for comic book heroes as a modern rebranding of ancient mythological archetypes.

This culture is far more influential (and insidious) than most realize. Most contemporary action movies take their visual language from comic books. The rhythm of constant hyper-violence of today’s action movies comes straight from Jack Kirby. Elvis Presley idolized Captain Marvel Jr., to the point of adopting his hairstyle. […]

Although most of us don’t realize it, there’s simply nothing new about devotion to superheroes. Their powers, their costumes, and sometimes even their names are plucked straight from the pre-Christian religions of antiquity. When you go back and look at these heroes in their original incarnations, you can’t help but be struck by how blatant their symbolism is and how strongly they reflect they belief systems of the pagan age. What even fewer people realize is that this didn’t occur by chance, but came directly out of the spiritual and mystical secret societies and cults of the late 19th century—groups like the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians, and the Golden Dawn.^[2]

Popular movies based on comics or graphic novels featuring the ET/religion theme include the Transformers franchise, X-Men Apocalypse, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. The common thread: ETs exist, they’re coming to Earth, and it’s either going to be awesome or apocalyptic when they get here.

And how has eighty years of pop culture pushing the ET meme shaped our ideas about contact? Seth Shostak, lead astronomer for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, hit the nail on the head:

I think we are ready for ET contact in some sense, because the public has been conditioned to the idea of life in space by movies and TV. And if you go into a classroom with a bunch of 11-year olds and ask them, “How many of you kids think there are aliens out there?” they all raise their hands! Why? Is it because their parents have been educating them about astrobiology? No. It’s because they’ve seen them on TV! […]

I think that Hollywood is by far the biggest term in the equation of the public’s reaction to confirmation of alien life.^[3]

It’s a concept that’s been drawn from nineteenth-century occult groups and filtered through pulp magazines, sci-fi novels, radio dramas, cartoons, comic books, graphic novels, movies, and television, packaged as popular entertainment and sold as a worldview to the last four generations. How long before an official announcement that the ETs—the old gods—are finally back?

One last thing: Isn’t it odd that the lead astronomer of the group searching for ETs is named for the chaos-god, Seth (Set)? And that the group’s acronym, SETI, is Egyptian for “man of Set?” Should we be concerned that Set-Typhon, the dark lord of chaos, is the one Aleister Crowley’s successor, Kenneth Grant, believed is the spirit of our age? And that it’s apparently reaching out to Earth from somewhere in the direction of Sirius?

In other words, is it possible that the gates of hell will open in the sky above us rather than emerging from below the earth?

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^[1] Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Seven Chohans - On the Path of the Ascension: The Opening of the Retreats of the Great White Brotherhood(Malibu: Summit University Press, 1973), p. 193.

^[2] Christopher Knowles and Joseph Michael Linsner, Our gods wear Spandex the secret history of comic book heroes (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2007), p. 18.

^[3] Robbie Graham, “SETI Astronomer says We’re Ready for Alien Contact… Thanks to Hollywood.” Mysterious Universe, July 19, 2017. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/07/seti-atronomer-says-were-ready-for-alien-contact-thanks-to-hollywood/, retrieved 8/6/17.