Eighteen
Autistic interests, spirituality and the unorthodox, Graham Hancock.
This week I went down one of my rabbit holes, this one about unorthodox theories of human development, joking to myself that I would have to change my PhD thesis, five months from the hand-in deadline, to ‘YouTube videos of our ancient alien ancestors.’
This has been in the anglophone cultural chatter recently, in reaction to Graham Hancock’s Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse, all eight episodes of which I gobbled down in one sitting.
I first learned of Hancock a year or so ago, among the Facebook posts of an old friend who abandoned her high-flying career in the civil service and now exclusively posts about her new beliefs. The posts include videos of people in their bedrooms telepathically channelling messages from benevolent extra-terrestrials, and self-portraits of herself worshiping at sacred pagan sites. Although we used to be close, briefly having a relationship, we haven’t communicated much in almost a decade, so I don’t know the catalyst for her sudden change. Despite having everything an ordinary person is expected to aspire to—prestigious education, career, money, property, partners, physical beauty, a brief relationship with me—she was always dissatisfied and searching for something consistently meaningful and fulfilling. Her abrupt withdrawal from society isn’t entirely unexpected, although her esoteric beliefs and the culture around them had been—pun intended—alien to me.
In one post, she mentioned Hancock’s work as one of the foundations for her scepticism of orthodox history and science, and this sentiment also appears in Tao Lin’s novel Leave Society, which I posted about last week. I became interested at the level of a Wikipedia skim. Then a few weeks ago I noticed Hancock’s splash on Netflix, which distracted me from my true path. The Society for American Archaeology, which represents academics, wrote an open letter to Netflix imploring the company to reclassify Hancock’s show from documentary to science-fiction, at which point I put the kettle on and downloaded every episode.
For readers who are unaware, Hancock describes himself as an investigative journalist. He began his career writing about international development for mainstream publications like The Economist, before becoming a best-selling author of many nonfiction books that explore ancient archaeological sites and speculate about pre-history.
The Netflix series polemically distils and illustrates the unorthodox thesis of these books, which supposes: A technologically advanced civilisation was wiped out by a cataclysmic climate event around the Younger Dryas period, 12 thousand years ago. Its survivors travelled the earth, propagating its technologies amongst surviving hunter-gatherers, which accounts for the mythological, architectural and cosmological similarities of ancient buildings and artefacts on different continents. It is a kind of analogue of modern international development and humanitarian aid. It also continues the tradition of looking for evidence of mythical civilisations like Atlantis and Lemuria.
Although repetitive and tendentious, the series introduced me to some unfamiliar, mysterious ancient buildings that inspire wonder and awe, reminding me of the scale of history and human achievement. Hancock attracts opprobrium, but I’m less interested in evaluating his claims than reflecting on why his theories interest me and other autistic people, like Tao Lin, or my friend, who I strongly suspect is also autistic.
‘Special interests’ as they are politely (or infantilisingly) referred to are a hallmark of autism; in the clinical criteria they are called repetitive or restricted interests; it is also called or is related to the concept of monotropism.
My improved understanding of this feature was one of the keys to finally realising with confidence that I am autistic. I have always had to be deeply, actively interested in something otherwise I feel like my life is rapidly draining out of me. There’s an agitated distress and then a rapid enervation, as though I’m being enveloped in liquid concrete. For much of my life, most of my obligations and opportunities have not interested me, and I have endured them by creating daydreams that did and then retreating to solitude as soon as possible so that I can pursue my interests or plan an escape.
An autistic person’s interests can be in anything, and their variety can be found in our autobiographical writings and conversations—recently autistic people listed their diverse interests in a twitter thread. In the people I’ve mentioned in the course of this Substack series there have been autistic people interested in music, football, politics, science, painting, animals, computer games… and I have referenced a talk given by Ben Mitchell about autism, heterodoxy and the occult. I keep returning to this talk because it furnished ideas to one of the questions I had wondered about since realising I’m autistic, i.e. autism’s relationship to spirituality, whether in a traditional religious sense or in the sense of modern eclecticism and its ancient inspirations.
Since realising I’m autistic it has become more possible for me to imagine a non-horrific future for myself in society, but among the many things I have been able to remember more clearly about myself is my attunement to the mysterious and the spiritual, which ostensibly contradicts that temptation to be better assimilated into society.
As a teenager, I was totally engrossed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings et al. Although too frightened and isolated to really try it, for a period I was very excited by Wicca. For as long as I can remember, I’d been having vivid, distressing nightmares that involved occult themes and imagery, which influenced my daydreams.
These sensibilities were progressively suffocated in my twenties, being socialised into academic and political materialism, which felt like drilling deeper into the strata of depression using a drill of neurotic thoughts fuelled by the news and social media. The language of autism, which finally explains this process and offers the opportunity to change course, is scientific(ish), but becoming more healthily autistic has rehabilitated these sensibilities, which so far evade contemporary scientific explanations, and infuriate some of its adherents. I’m still figuring it out.
“When you realize how much you’ve lost, you have to go looking again for those moments when your spirit first came alive.” — in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry