Summer Harvest

Check out this great overview of the “shapeshifting reptiles” conspiracy theory, quite possibly one of the strangest theories ever believed by a great number of people:

The concept of reptilian beings on Earth is a surprisingly widespread conspiracy theory, in which the US government and major public companies are complicit in a vast worldwide network of underground bases housing a large population of humanoid reptilian creatures called Reptoids. They speak English and are involved in every major government and corporate decision. They are variously said to either disguise themselves or actually shape-shift into humans, where they have public lives in positions of national importance. Some say the Reptoids are of extraterrestrial origin, and some say they are native to Earth, having developed intelligence before the primates, and have been secretly running things all along.

Although the article does a good job tracing the influence of the shape-shifting lizard theory to a newspaper story from the 30’s (and reports of a Hopi legend that are spurious at best), it is worth noting that the idea of half-men/half-reptiles as a theme throughout the history of indigenous cultures is losing ground in most serious scholastic circles. For instance, one of the most common tropes found in defenders of the Reptoid theory (see this collection of speculative serpentia, for example) is that the Mayans of Central America worshipped a half-man/half-iguana deity named “Itzamna,” or “Iguana House.” This is another one the Icke likes to pull out on occasion. As it turns out, however, Itzamna means no such thing. Instead, it means “Sorcery House” :

Perhaps more telling are the house images on the west building—they combine the itsam head with the image of a house to form the iconic representation of the name Itsam Na, “Sorcery House.”4 The famous god of Yucatan was not a crocodile or iguana house as Thompson (1970) proposed, but it was a house for sorcery. The north building had its own way of making this identity. Its house images have vision serpents emerging from their summit. Like the west building, it was a place where the lords of Uxmal traveled to the otherworld and called forth creatures and ancestors from that world.

I only mention this example to show that trying to analyze the mythology of ancient cultures to somehow “prove” that there are half-man/half-lizards or aliens from Planet X or any other such zaniness is a fool’s game from the get-go. We simply don’t know enough about these particular ancient cultures to interpret their myths with such certainty, and new information is being discovered about them every single day. There’s a reason that experts are… er… experts.

For every culture in which half-human half-reptiles appears in the myth cycle, you’ll also find half-human half-birds, half-human half-wolves, half-human half-flower, etc. etc. etc. But hey, Ovid’s Metamorphses feature humans turning into oh, let’s say spiders, and we don’t go around accusing the Romans of turning into black wigglies and spinning silk webs. Let’s have a little dignity here, people.

Now, I’d even be willing to entertain the Julian-Jaynesian possibility that the reptilian brain has the capacity for taking over and making us do crazy stuff. As a rule, however, I think this whole lizard theory is esentially completely absurd. It is, however, interesting, and the idea is certainly a fun “what if.” This doesn’t mean that I don’t think odd things are out there and weird creatures and intelligences are walking around on our planet or in those sideways places between hither and yon, just that we must always exercise caution in our analyses of them.

However, it would certainly explain a few things were it true (*cough*dickcheney*cough*).

P.S. Doesn’t “reptoid” sound like something you’d find causing a subdermal rash? “Dammit, my reptoids have flared up again!