The children in The Midwich Cuckoos novel reminds me of the creepy oft-quoted passage about the birth of Noah (of Ark fame).
From the Book of Enoch or Book of Noah, depending on which source you read (I find it all a bit confusing):
Baby Noah is described as having skin as white as snow and as red as a rose. His hair is white and like wool and his eyes glow like the sun.
His disturbed father Lamech says, “I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us and his eyes are as the rays of the sun…And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels…”
Lamech ponders whether his wife Bathenosh has been “lying with the angels”.
Some people interpret these angels as being aliens.
Other people are merely perplexed that angels are being perceived by Lamech as beings of flesh and blood with the ability to have intercourse with humans.
And some people think the passage means that the suspicious (but modest) Lamech is just shocked that he has sired a beautiful child.
As with all things, it all depends on how you look at it.
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Friday, 16 May 2008
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Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Village of the Damned
In the recent episode of Doctor Who, the eponymous friendly alien begat a warrior daughter with two hearts just like himself, but who looked like your usual blonde gun-toting earthling heroine.
The concept of the humanoid alien or of genetic hybridisation between humans and aliens seems to hold a deeply rooted fascination (or fear) in the collective psyche or imagination.
The idea of aliens as cuckoos who leave their eggs in human nests is vividly brought to life in the movie(s) Village of the Damned based on the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham.
Upon awakening, twelve women of child-bearing age eventually discover that they are now carrying a little visitor - all of them are pregnant, including a perplexed virgin.
They all give birth to white haired spooky eyed children who keep to their own elite clique, harbouring a disdain for everybody else. As this reviewer writes, "the Ghastly Progeny turn out to be...straight out of a Nazi eugenicist’s wet dream."
Similar blonde-haired pale-faced children are reproduced at the same time by women in other places on Earth including an indigenous community in Canada and in the Soviet Union.
The Midwich children look human but they grow and learn at an accelerated rate, they read minds, control people’s behaviour, their eyes glow and they appear to be without conscience and to have global domination in their sights.
Dodgy wigs aside, the ‘… of the Damned’ movies are creepy old films.
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Monday, 12 May 2008
Doctor Who and the Breath of Life
Continuing the look at creation myths and stories, here's one from last Saturday's episode of Doctor Who entitled The Doctor's Daughter.
"In the Beginning, the Great One breathed life into the universe. And then She looked at what She'd done and She sighed...That Sigh [was called]... the Beginning of Time and was kept as the Source...Whoever holds the Source controls the destiny of this planet."
The Source was mystically known as the Breath of Life. But the Doctor (in a scientific rant) labelled it a Bubble of Gases.
The episode was set on a planet where the inhabitants had "mythologised their entire history" and where a war, which they said had been waging for generations, had only been waging for seven days.
"Your whole history is just Chinese whispers getting more and more distorted as it is passed on," said the Doctor - before releasing the Breath of Life and creating a Whole New World, in his usual breezy manner.
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