In the 1950 Cocteau film Orphée, Orphee (Orpheus from Greek Mythologic reborn in mid-century Paris) receives his poetry from a mysterious radio in the car of Death. We don’t have ideas—ideas have us.
We are just antennae for thoughts.
HAM
I recently became a licensed Amateur Radio Technician.
I spent a weekend in a training room with half a dozen other folx learning about antenna design, propagation, resistance—the arcane lexicon of wireless technology.
Somewhere between a discussion of the ionosphere and atmospheric ducting, I had a strange realization: the Earth isn’t a planet, it’s a battery—an electric organism. The Earth co-evolved with electricity.
Immediately, I was reminded of my favorite fringe metaphysical and cosmological theories—modern myths for a technological age.
Before I publish my follow-up to Mamdani’s Human Design, I feel compelled to share a small constellation of them.
1. Aquatic Ape Hypothesis — Or, Humans Evolved from Dolphins
I first came across this theory in the work of Buckminster Fuller, but it was introduced by Elaine Morgan in her 1982 book The Aquatic Ape.
How do we explain that humans differ so dramatically from other terrestrial apes? We can swim. We have subcutaneous fat. We can hold our breath. Infants have an automatic swim reflex (think: water birth). Clearly humans evolved from dolphins.
2. The Electric Universe Theory
According to mainstream physics, gravity—slow, weak, inevitable—is the force that structures spacetime. It pulls matter into stars, stars into systems, systems into galaxies.
Electric Universe theorists disagree. They argue that electricity and plasma currents sculpt the cosmos, and that stars are powered externally by electric currents rather than internal nuclear fusion. This is why, they claim, the solar corona is hotter than the sun’s surface. And if you adopt this worldview, many physics “anomalies”—like dark matter—simply vanish. (Dark matter being the matter that should be there according to gravity.)
3. Velikovsky’s Catastrophism
Immanuel Velikovsky is the granddaddy of fringe cosmology. In his 1950 book Worlds in Collision, he proposes that Venus was ejected from Jupiter, causing global catastrophes remembered in myth. In this view, Venus was originally a comet, only later settling into its present orbit.
The Electric Universe community often cites Velikovsky approvingly, pairing his claims with the idea of Jupiter as an electrically active planet giving birth to another.
4. RH-Negative Alien Bloodline Theory
I include this one because my partner is RH-negative—so perhaps she is an alien.
RH stands for Rhesus Factor, a protein on the surface of red blood cells. Roughly 85% of the population is RH-positive. All primates are RH-positive. So where did RH-negative come from? Aliens? Fallen angels? Nephilim?
Believers claim RH-negative people tend to have heightened intuition, blue eyes, lighter hair, tall stature, and even an extra vertebra.
5. Tartaria / Mudflood Civilization
How did so many large, ornate buildings appear in the 1800s when the technology supposedly didn’t exist? Easy, according to the theory: they were already there. A lost global civilization—Tartaria—was buried in a cataclysmic mud flood that covered its architecture. We merely “discovered” what remained.
Why we need this theory is still unclear.
6. Phantom Time Hypothesis
I include this because I’m currently deep in a philosophy-of-history rabbit hole. The claim: 300 years of history were fabricated to justify political power, and the Middle Ages didn’t exist.
Chronology as conspiracy. Time as a forgery. I mean the Calendar is a construct afterall!
7. Saturn–Sun Cosmology (The Saturn Myth)
This was the first one that came to me during my radio-school reverie.
In The Saturn Myth (1980), David N. Talbott argues that Saturn was once the Sun, presiding over a Golden Age when Saturn—mythic ruler of the gods—literally illuminated the Earth. Saturn is really a comet and the planets are not in orbit around the sun but in the tail of this comet, so it is part of the electric universe school of thought.
It’s an inversion of both mythology and astrophysics, and an oddly moving one.
Fringe as Myth
These theories are, to me, the new mythologies—ways of explaining origin and destiny when science feels too cold and religion feels too literal.
It does feel like the Earth was made for electricity, but perhaps that is just the meaning making/ego centric capacity of humans to make everything about themselves.