From Stonehenge to Rapa Nui: Donald Wandrei and the return of the Titans

Taking both hands from the "Weird" literature of HP Lovecraft e Arthur Machen and combining the proceeds with the hypotheses of Charles Fort and the theosophical and "Atlantean" doctrines, Wandrei's 1932 novel was able to anticipate if not actually shape most of the cultural currents ascribable to the so-called "alternative reality" of the second part of the twentieth century: from the "magic realism" of Jacques Bergier to the "paleo-astronautics", from the encounter with extraterrestrial civilizations up to some dystopian predictions that today, almost a century later, do not seem science fiction at all.


di Marco Maculotti

"The earth was linked to other worlds, within and without, and from their laboratories in the ultracosm, the Titans re-tied these bonds."

"They will claim for themselves all that lives, they who made us of dust and consuming fire."

β€”Β D. Wandrei, "The Web of Easter Island"

Since the discovery of European settlers in the XNUMXth century by the Dutchman Jakob Roggeveen, Rapa Nui Island (more commonly known as "Easter Island" because the first landing took place on Easter Sunday 1722), located in the South Pacific 3600 km from the coast of Chile, has always aroused the bewilderment of explorers, historians and anthropologists. Its megalithic walls and platforms and even more the enigmatic ones Moai extracted directly from the granite quarries in the center of the island and brought to the beaches with methods that are still not entirely clear have always triggered the most imaginative and "esoteric" hypotheses, from civilization in ancient times by Atlantean navigators to the most recent "fantasy" theories that they would like it to be colonized, and then suddenly abandoned, by some presumed one alien civilization.

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The Moai of Easter Island

Since the advent of "Magical realism" with the publication in 1960 de The morning of the wizards by Pauwels and Bergier onwards, there has even been a real media speculation inherent in the mysteries of Rapa Nui, identified by an ever-growing list of authors as one of the archaeological sites that would most bring water to their hypotheses. From the Swiss Erich von Daniken a Graham Hancock, the standard bearers of fanta-archeology have exploited all the most enigmatic sides of the island to their exhaustion, placing it in importance, within their hypotheses, at the level of the Pyramids of Giza, of the megalithic sites of pre-Columbian Peru and Stonehenge.

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Nonetheless, a few years before the release of the cult book of Bergier and Pauwels, the Norwegian explorer and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl published a book, Aku-Aku (1957), entirely dedicated to Rapa Nui and the folkloric tradition of its people, a work born from the numerous visits, explorations and interviews carried out on site in first person. The thesis put forward in Aku-Aku, already advanced in the previous works of the author including American Indians in the Pacific (1952), focused on similarities and on parallels existing, in the oral mythological tradition as in artistic representations, crafts and etymology, between Easter Island and other islands of the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti and the Polynesian archipelago.

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Heyerdahl believed that these civilizations were all founded by an ancient lineage of navigators and colonizers, remembered in the folklore of the Pacific islands as "cultural heroes", who would also build some of the most ancient and cyclopean sites of the PerΓΉ and Mexico, regions whose mythological traditions spoke of the ancient coming of so-called "White gods" like Viracocha e Quetzalcoatl, just to mention the two most famous. Not too dissimilar in substance from"Atlantean" hypothesis of the theosophical school, Heyerdahl's thesis was opposed by a large component of academic anthropology and archeology, who saw in his hypotheses a sort of continuation of those that founded the research work of the German Ahnenerbe. Nevertheless, Heyerdahl's "transoceanic" and "thalassocratic" theses have found more and more confirmation over time, even from the point of view of the most modern genetic analysis.

But even before Heyerdahl, and in a different context, it was Donald Wandrei, an American writer of the Lovecraftian mold (as well as a personal friend and correspondent of the same HPL) to concentrate his fantastic visions on Easter Island and his Moai in a novel now considered one of the best "continuations" of the work of Providence dreamer.Β The Web of Easter Island (written in 1932 but released only in 1948), published in Italy with the title The stone giants, is configured as a particularly precious work because, in addition to following in the footsteps of Lovecraft, it also knows how to fish with both hands from other first-rate authors within the Weird current, mixing everything with appreciable dexterity and balance, even managing - as we will see - adΒ largely anticipate the UFO trend of the second half of the century, from the theory of "Ancient Astronauts" to that of the Grays, as well as some elements dystopian of the contemporary world that the author sensed almost a century ago, with surprising clarity.

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It is the only novel by Wandrei, who had already continued Lovecraft's work with two short stories released in 1933 - The Fire Vampires e The Tree-Men of M'Bwa. Upon the death of his master, Wandrei founded together with August Derleth the publishing house Arkham House, with the express purpose of preserve and expand the Lovecraft universe, publishing anthological works, letters and stories of Lovecraftian inspiration that could give new life to the so-called "Myths of Cthulhu". In The Web of Easter Island the Lovecraftian influence particularly emerges, in particular theHPL more "aquatic", That of Dagon/The Call of Cthulhu/The Shadow over Innsmoth. In addition to the narrative device of "newspaper clippings", which slavishly follows the Lovecraftian example in the story that gives its name to the cycle of tales, there is also a mention of the Marsh family, central to the terrifying mythogony of The Innsmouth mask, while the final part, in which the island of Rapa Nui is transfigured following the awakening of the Ancients, reminds the reader of the exotic setting of Dagon.

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It's still, the underground descent into the mysterious tunnel dug for kilometers below the "cursed" cemetery of Isling, which leads the protagonist Carter E. Graham to a world of forgotten geological horrors, brings to mind other creations of the Providence Dreamer, such as The Nameless City, At the mountains of madness e Under the pyramids, written for illusionist and contortionist Harry Houdini:

β€œWalls of a gray-green, smooth, without the slightest crack, began to pass before their eyes. They appeared to be of the same substance as the stone that had covered the entrance to the vertical tunnel. Who knows who built it, and for what purpose! […] And above all he could not imagine where the material and the ability that had allowed the construction of such an architectural masterpiece to come from in an era that was lost in the mists of time. He had no doubts, in fact, that that unlikely work was older than the Vadia and the Devil's Cemetery. "

Donald Wandrei with HP Lovecraft

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Other choices by Wandrei recall Arthur Machen's horrific mythopoeia. It is impossible, starting to read the novel, not to feel the impression of reading an unpublished story by Arthur Machen: the narration begins in fact far from the Pacific Ocean and Easter Island, precisely a Isling, a town located a short distance from Stonehenge, where an ancient Roman road, the Vadia, leads the visitor to the "Devil's Cemetery", sinister place where, according to the popular rumor, during the occupation of the Roman legions "blasphemous rites and strange orgies were celebrated, and [...] even earlier, in the depths of oak woods, the Druids had [van] or performed the their monstrous sacrificial ceremonies ”- on the leitmotif of tales by the Welsh writer such as The Great God Pan e The Red Hand.

Other Machenian elements come to the eye of the attentive reader: from the central narrative element represented by the green color, which recurs on several occasions as a chromatic attribute of Evil coming from Elsewhere and from incalculable geological eras, up to some hints that have to do with the folkloric sphere of the gods fairies, such as the hawthorn, the fairy tree par excellence, which surrounds the Devil's Cemetery, as well as the aforementioned mixture of the most archaic and unspeakable ritual traditions and the most recent Roman occupation of the territory, which so often occurs in Machenian literature (but also in Lovecraft's famous β€œRoman dream”).

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Or, again, the "Protoplasmic regression" which strikes the victims designated by the Evil who sleeps below the cemetery, first of all the members of the Grant family, at the opening of the novel. The sinister affair, which evokes the supernatural horror of Montagu Rhodes James and anticipates the actual narrative to the reader, it occurs after a boy from a local family brings home the infamous green stone statuette, finally being literally sucked, similarly to the unfortunate victims of The Great God Pan, The Inmost Light e The Shining Pyramid, three of the most representative Machenian works:

'On the bed, a grotesque and phosphorescent shape, with moving and imprecise outlines, surrounded by a green halo, was all that remained of Willy. The black eyes, inhuman and shining, no longer had anything in common with those of the boy. Willy Grant no longer existed. "

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Donald Wandrei, HP Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long, 1931

This form of regression to the informal, which Machen attributed to the terrifying power of Pan, is related by Wandrei to the proverbial "non-Euclidean geometry" of Lovecraftian memory: it is the indicator of the action, in our world, of a power completelyΒ other which is in no way subjected or constrained by the physical laws that govern our dimensional plane. It follows that the laws governing objects coming from this unspecified Elsewhere are completely incomprehensible to the human mind:Β the slab that leads to the underworld, performed by an unknown hand with an unknown green substance - the same of which the statuette that performs the task of "Guardian of the Seal" - has the inexplicable characteristic of suddenly appearing and disappearing, and the inscriptions written on its surface "did not resemble any known sign [...] and between the two words stood out a jumble of geometric symbols that had nothing in common with the traditional ones of Euclid". It's still:

Was it the language of the Atlanteans? Was it the form of the first language that preceded all the others by millennia? […] Then there were the geometric signs, shorthand symbols of a mathematical and super-Einsteinian system, relating to a multiple time and to one multiple spaceΒ».

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The album of β€œAstounding Stories” which contains β€œRiders of the Universe” by Donald Wandrei

Completely detached from the laws of terrestrial physics, the alien substance shows in the aforementioned statuette other amazing powers, such as that of vibrating, materializing the air around it and constantly changing outlines and features:

"It looked like the image of a monster, but as soon as I was sure it was a monster, it took on the appearance of an ancient god, magnificent and terrible, suggesting the idea of ​​a gigantic titan reaching out to the stars ..."

Even the underground tunnel, entirely dug out of the mysterious gray-green pseudo-metal, possesses the same "non-Euclidean" properties the statuette and the slab used to prevent access:

Β«In that ageless corridor the sense of reality was lost to sink into the world of illusion and dreams where everything is stripped of its substance. […] The ceiling, the walls, the floor mingled in a kind of wild saraband. What had been upright a moment before became horizontal and then vertical again. […] The gigantic whirlpool finally dissolved in a radioactive cascade. In the chaos of matter the walls opened wide on a gigantic magnetic storm from which luminescences similar to the passage of meteors darted. "

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The central theme of the story is - as per usual as regards the stories attributable to "Cthulhu cycle" - from exquisitely theosophical flavor: the supposed existence on planet Earth, in incalculable geological eras according to the criteria of the history of human evolution, of alien entities that, although at the moment they are "trapped" in a separate plane of existence by an unfavorable astral conformation, wait for the stars to "return to their place" to regain possession of what belongs to him by right: that is to say β€œour” planet, obviously including ourselves, who so naively have always believed us to be the masters.

The presence inside the underground tunnel of countless remains of skeletons belonging to the most varied species homoon the contrary, it gives Graham as well as the reader a far more chilling vision of things, in line with the disenchanted vision of Charles Fort and with the paraphysical hypothesis of Keel and VallΓ©e:

Β«[…] To justify the presence of the other remains, the more ancient ones, the construction of the well had to go back to a date earlier than one million years. Before the birth of man, therefore. Or rather, and this second thought shocked Graham, before the dawn of life, as if the trap had an intentional, calculated, willed relationship with the existence of man on earth. "

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Thor Heyerdahl at a Moai in Rapa Nui, 1955-56

As in the tales of the master of Providence, here too it is clear that the Ancients are still worshiped, in isolated communities around the world, with the most obscure and degenerate rites. In this regard, Professor Alton, Graham's colleague, refers above all to the mythology contained in it The Call of Cthulhu when he mentions almost identical rites and invocations, dating back to the dawn of time, in the Indian subcontinent and in sub-Saharan Africa. Even the translation of the inscription on the slab of the Isling cemetery that he, at Graham's request, manages to translate precisely by comparing it with the Indian and African languages ​​he knows, is in full line with the atmosphere of looming horror and with the Blavatskian reminiscences who were the masters in Lovecraft's tale:

Β«Wake up! Distant Titans of Time, and Space, and Existence, creators of Life, creators of Death, creators of Energy. On the day destined by the stars, descend from your immense world, through the stars, to this little world that you have created. Take what's yours and go back to your universe. O Guardian of the Seal, take all that the Titans have given us and that belongs to them, for they themselves will take it back on the day that was fixed in the stars. We belong to you as well as to them. And, waiting for them, we pray you. Remote Titans wake up! "

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Guang Yang, "Under the Isle of the Dead", 2019, inspired by "The Call of Cthulhu" by HP Lovecraft

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The aforementioned newspaper articles that Graham collates, increasingly alarmed by the situation, are in all respects a quotation of those already in The Call of Cthulhu they suggested the sudden spread of madness, the return of the stars "to the right place" and, consequently, that of the Ancients themselves in our world. An epidemic of violence in black Africa with aberrant blood rituals contemplating human sacrifices and torture of all kinds; a civil war in Calcutta between members of the various religious factions, all equally convinced that their respective "ancestral gods" are about to return; the suicide of a young artist who, like the Lovecraftian Pickman, shapes the horrendous visions of him through his art, in order to exorcise them; a riot following a collective psychosis inside a mental asylum in Bavaria; and again the extreme gesture of a poet who left these verses as his only testament:

β€œIn the valleys and highlands
The Titans will wake up at last,
Four-dimensional abysses will open
They will arise out of nowhere
And they will take off from Easter Island.
They will come gliding from the gulfs of time
And space.
The prophets have announced the return of the Titans
When the stars have reached
The right position
And the sky will burn up. "

Stone Henge, Wiltshire, engraved by Robert Wallis 1829 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851
JMW Turner, "Stonehenge", from "Picturesque Views in England and Wales"

Graham has every reason to be alarmed, not least because, if the clues weren't clear enough, both the text of the ancient inscription and that of the poem above, as well as all the various mentions in the news stories supporting "return of the ancient gods "Fit in all respects with a sacred text, "written in an unknown language, probably prior to Sanskrit", which he had personally seen during a trip to Tibet, in the monastery of ParuSai, shown to him by a Sekhite monk:

β€œWhen the stars are in the prophesied position, then the Titans will awaken and return. The earth will open wide, and from crypts deeper than the clouds are, the Guardian of the Seal will cast his call to the Titans. The Guardian of the Seal will also become as large as a Titan and will stand on Crltul Thr. The waters will rise in a sky of flame. From their universe, beyond the stars, the Titans will descend. They will claim for themselves all that lives, they who made us of dust and consuming fire. "

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Decades and decades earlier (the novel, as mentioned, was written in 1932) by the various Pauwels and Bergier, von DΓ€niken and various epigones, before the extraterrestrial Anunnaki of Zacharia Sitchin, in the fictional narrative deΒ The stone giants by Donald Wandrei we already find all topoi more paradigmatic than "magical realism" and "paleo-astronautics": from the idea that ancient archaeological sites such as Stonehenge and Easter Island Moai are connected to each other, to the idea that these and many other mysterious places have been erected in illo tempore from a breed of "Alien supermen" landed on our planet even before the advent of humanity, to arrive even at the hypothesis of "In vitro creation", by these extraterrestrial colonizers, of the human race itself, by means of genetic engineering. In an excited passage of the novel, anticipating the times, Graham argues:

Β«The more I thought, the more I became convinced that human life was the work of this supercosmic power. But why was it created? Was it just a laboratory culture implanted to find a virus that served as an antidote to some disease that plagued those super-existences? At the end of those three weeks corresponding to one and a half million years of ours, would they have reaped the fruit of their experiment or restarted a new crop? One and a half million years! The universe known to us is perhaps only a molecule or cell of the most common species in the superuniverse of the colossal Titanics. There is a fly, the ephemeral, whose existence lasts only a day. But for her, the ephemeral, these twenty-four hours are perhaps worth a hundred years to us. So these million and a half years of sins, loves, grudges, deaths, inventions and slow progress towards the conquest of civilization represent perhaps only a few weeks in the time of our masters.Β»

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A "Gray" alien depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's "Communion" book, centered around a series of alleged "abductions"

But that's not all. Even more surprisingly, Wandrei went much further. In the final part of the novel the protagonist is sucked into an alternate reality one and a half million years away in the future and witnesses, bewildered, the mutation undergone by humanity. The description he makes of the man who gets off a flying saucer to get to know him is reminiscent in all respects the contemporary iconography of the so-called "Grays", an alien species that some alternative reality enthusiasts would believe to be visitors from a distant future, after the planet and humanity itself have suffered terrible catastrophes and cataclysms:

β€œThe man who got out of the plane descended into the air as if following the path of an invisible ladder. He looked grotesque: the head too big above the tiny and frail body, the limbs long and thin like the legs of a spider, and immense deep eyes. [...] The sweet and fluid speech reminded the chatter of a bird, and did not resemble any known language. "

The descriptions with which Wandrei anticipated the entire mythology of the gods by decades flying saucers and of the Gray aliens, Berger's visions imbued with "magical realism" and the hypothesis of the "ancient astronauts" are too evident to be ignored. With these premises it can be ruled without fear of denial that he represented one of the most influential American writers of the last century as regards the development of the numerous currents ascribable to "alternative reality", together with the aforementioned - and equally undeservedly misunderstood to the general public - Charles Fort.

But, in conclusion, it is imperative to underline the fact that ne The stone giantsΒ there are also some, equally noteworthy, predictions on the future of humanity, darkened by an attitude of criticism towards the path it has taken in the twentieth century. So - following the example of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which in The Coming Race (1871) had intended to satire against the "irritating democratic claims", the "patriotic fanaticism" of many Americans, "accustomed from childhood to the daily use of the revolver" and the nascent feminism - Wandrei equally wished to include as a subtext of his only novel a bitter prediction of the future that, in the eyes of a twenty-four-year-old American of the thirties, would be inherited by his descendants.

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Donald Wandrei (1908 - 1997)

This final part of the novel is configured as highly significant, both for the clear difference of tone compared to the rest of the work and for the stylistic distance with his masters Lovecraft and Machen, and above all because of the sinister predictions that go hand in hand with those of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (curiously also, as The Web of Easter Island, written in 1932!). Forecasts that, read today, almost ninety years after their writing, make us reflect and worry at the same time, and which allegorically denounce the suicide of a humanity that, annihilated by the excessive power of the Titans and now devoid of any soul conscience, has resigned itself to the total abjuration of its own humanity:

"Now one race inhabited the world. He was a hybrid of all the races that Graham had known […]. They talked one language, that bird chatter […]. All were organized under one government. […] Births were no longer something that interested spouses and families. The same family institution had disappeared for a thousand years. It was the World Council who was interested in these events: every year the number of births was established, mothers were selected and proceeded to artificial fertilization. The children were raised and educated under the direction of the Council. There suppression of breastfeeding it had caused female organs to atrophy, so women had flat chests like males. […] The Council had provided each community with a place where those who felt tired of living could voluntarily put an end to their existence with the simple gesture of swallowing a pill of exquisite flavor. Thus they left the world, carried on the waves of an ineffable ecstasy. […] He saw many people entering it and no one leaving. On the faces of those men and women, young, old, or old, he always saw the same expression, calm and serene, without the slightest trace of emotion.. […] All over the world, the number of those who resorted to the Departure Tower had increased sharply. "


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