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1. I have a few thoughts on Atlantis and other "lost" civilizations, ancient mound builders, Abraham Lincoln, Ezra Pound, the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, West African art and space aliens. Maybe also Jack Kirby.
2. I was re-reading Ezra Pound lately and reminded that he was very taken with the ideas of the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, a curious figure who played a pivotal role in recovering the cultural history of West Africa but also had some very whacky, racist ideas.
3. First, the good news: Frobenius was one of the first European scholars to study ancient West African art for its aesthetic value and demonstrate that it emerged from complex societies that interacted with the ancient world.
4. But, Frobenius also believed that he had discovered inside Africa the lost civilization of Atlantis, a super-sophisticated white society that had taught the black Africans and gave them their complex civilization. Here's the New York Times report from 1911. 
5. Frobenius might seem like a crack-pot, but he's followed a well-trodden path in Western history, where encounters with evidence of cultural achievement in non-white peoples is quickly accredited to some other external force (because natives have no innate ability)
6. A classic example of this tendency are the many theories about the mound builders of North America (. Were they vikings? The lost tribe of Jews? Abraham Lincoln in 1848 thought they were "species of extinct giants" pre-dating Adam and Eve.
7. Now, Frobenius was not a Nazi (and in fact his positive view of African history was an inspiration for anti-imperial revolt). But of course some Nazis used his ideas to argue that Atlantis was the Aryan homeland.
8. With his search for Atlantis in Africa (which inspired Nazi expeditions), Frobenius seems like a character out of pulp fiction: H. Rider Haggard, Lovecraft or the Indiana Jones movies. But of course, those fictions drew on figures like Frobenius.
8. I think it's the Lovecraftian tradition that wedded the idea of ancient advanced civilizations with the science fiction conceit of alien visitations (from either other planets or dimensions). The up-lifting advanced white civilization became the advanced alien civilization
9. I think with the creation of Black Panther in 1966, Jack Kirby was trying to see if this rather dismal tradition could be repurposed to anti-racist ends, with the role of the advanced hidden civilization being taken by Wakanda, a black nation.
10. As a science fiction or pulp conceit, the idea of ancient astronauts is fun. But I do think people who palm it off as an actual theory (i.e von Däniken) are doing a lot of harm: poisoning our ability to appreciate these ancient cultures on their own terms.
11. At bottom, these theories always show a fundamental failure of imagination: an inability to believe that there existed human communities outside the western tradition who created strange, wonderful, complex artifacts, sometimes beyond our skills.
12. In sum, as always, there is a meme:
