The Ancients were a legendary race whose members were said to have completely mastered the science of telepathy. They were often referenced in books about magic and mind reading that were out-of-print by the early twentieth century. Those references contained information could be used to make calculations that revealed that the Ancients had once dwelt in a cavern deep within a mountain just off the coast of Antarctica.[1]
Although the Atlanteans knew of the long-vanished Ancients, who they were and when they lived had been forgotten.[2] Similarly, the precise nature and origins of the Ancients were unknown to surface-dwelling humans, with Paul Destine believing them to have been a "telepathic elder race."[3]
Decades later, Namor the Sub-Mariner came to believe that the Ancients had been the Pre-Cataclymic Atlanteans who (he believed) had created the Serpent Crown.[4]
In contrast, the people of undersea Lemuria knew of them, not as the Ancients, but only as the rebels who had stolen the Serpent Crown from Naga.[5]
History
The beings later known as the Ancients were originally a group of Lemurians who possessed telepathic abilities. The first of these telepaths were born in the undersea kingdom of Lemuria several centuries after the insane king Naga acquired the Serpent Crown which granted him both immortality and great mystical powers. Determined to overthrow the despotic Naga and end his reign of terror, the telepaths banded together into a group of rebels who were led by the brothers Psycatos and Bekkit. However, knowing that their numbers were too few to stand against Naga's army, let alone the power of the Serpent Crown, the rebels concentrated on growing their numbers while avoiding detection.[6] At some point, they used self-hypnosis to protect themselves from the Serpent Crown's demonic influence.[5][6]
Eventually, Aurwel, the brother of Psycatos and Bekkit, was captured by Naga's soldiers and tortured for information about his fellow rebels. After surviving the Chamber of Tortures without revealing anything about the rebellion, Aurwel was brought before Naga but still refused to reveal any of his secrets. When he dared Naga to do his worst and praised the rebellion, an enraged Naga sought to tear his mind to bloody ribbons but found that Aurwel's mind resisted his mental probe. Realizing that this meant that Aurwel was a telepath and that all these rebels were telepaths, Naga used his powers to kill Aurwel by incinerating his head. Naga then had Aurwel's carcass displayed in the public square as a warning to his fellow rebels. Hours later, realizing that Naga had learned of their circle's existence, the telepaths decided that their only hope lay in fleeing to the land where Naga and his army could not follow them, but Psycatos was unwilling to allow Naga to continue to use the Serpent Crown.[6]
That night, the two brothers used their mental powers to cast Naga's guards into a deep sleep and then entered the palace royal and stole the Serpent Crown from the chamber in which Naga slept. All of the rebels then fled from Naga's city with the crown, and swam southward to the continent of Antarctica.[5][6]
Once in Antarctica, the rebels used a potion that Jhandark had created that transformed them from water-breathers with hard and scaly green skin into air-breathers with soft pink skin who were outwardly identical to Caucasian humans. Now able to live on land, they found a cave near the coast that contained a massive dynamo and other equipment that had been left there millennia ago by people from Pre-Cataclysmic Atlantis. The rebels used the machines to provide heat and light for the town they built within the cavern.[6] While there, Bekkit[6] used the technology to encase the Serpent Crown within an unknown substance that reduced its power to ensnare people's minds and changed its appearance.[5]
Pyscatos and Bekkit jointly governed their community for many years. Eventually, Bekkit married Jhandark and the couple had (at least) two children. Later, when their children were still young, Bekkit and Jhandark took their children with them when they left in a submarine on a voyage to establish contact between the rebels and the human race. During the decades that they were away, Bekkit traveled widely and came to know many of the greatest human scientists and statemen of the nineteenth century. It was because of these contacts that the community of long-lived telepaths came to be known in scholarly writings of the time as the Ancients.[6]
Meanwhile, back in Antarctica, Psycatos had become old and infirm, and, after nearly perishing from a strange illness that had instilled within him a fear of death, he succumbed to the influence of the Serpent Crown. By the time Bekkit and his family finally returned to the colony, Psycatos and everyone else there had been transformed into Serpent Men, with Psycatos himself now strongly resembling Naga, and all were thralls of the ancient god Set. When Psycatos invited his brother to join him in serving Set, Bekkit cursed him for betraying everything for which they had spent their lives struggling and refused to join him, so Psycatos used the power of the Serpent Crown to slay him. However, looking down at his brother's corpse caused Psycatos to remember his past as a fiery young rebel in Lemuria. Inspired to resist Set's will but knowing that he would be unable to do so for long, Pyscatos sent Jhandark and her children back out to sea in their submarine, and then, that night, he went alone to the dynamo. After a fierce mental battle, Pyscatos managed to remove the helmet and then programmed the dynamo for one last task. After shouting his defiance to Set as he felt the demon trying to take hold of his mind once again, Psycatos fatally stabbed himself in his chest. As he blacked out, he punched one last control that caused the dynamo to overload, resulting in an explosion that set off a titanic avalanche that buried the settlement of the rebels, killing everyone there and leaving the Serpent Crown with no living minds to ensnare.[6]
In the early twentieth century, a young man with telepathic abilities, Paul Destine, sought to learn more about his abilities so that he could gain power over humanity whom he regarded as lesser beings. After coming across some out-of-print books that referenced the legendary Ancients who had mastered the science of telepathy, Destine was able to calculate where their civilization had existed and then, after using his mind-reading skills to convince Captain Leonard McKenzie that there might be something to his claims about the Ancients having lived in Antarctica, he was allowed to join the crew of the ice-breaker Oracle on its expedition to that continent.[1] Soon after blasting some ice floes with dynamite, the crew of the Oracle discovered a blue-skinned woman, later identified as Fen, who had come aboard from out of the water. Although unable to understand her language, Destine believed that she was one of the Ancients and that her presence proved that their elder city must have been somewhere in the vicinity.[3] Destine was later able to convince Captain McKenzie to lead a small party to where he had calculated the Ancient city must be. Later, after persuading the captain that the two of them should proceed alone, Destine and McKenzie found a half-hidden cave that led into a cavern where they eventually found a dynamo frozen inside ice. When McKenzie left to get the men from outside to help free the dynamo, Destine tried to free it himself so that he could add its power to his own. However, activating the dynamo triggered an avalanche that sealed him in the cavern but also released the disguised Serpent Crown from the ice, enabling Destine to reach it and use its power to keep himself alive.[1][7]Notes
- As far as is known, these Lemurians telepaths never actually called themselves the Ancients. That was only the name by which human scholars of the nineteenth century knew them.
- In their first appearance in Sub-Mariner (Vol. 2) #10, the Lemurian rebels were depicted as having skin that, although scaly, was as blue as the skin of modern-day Lemurians and Atlanteans. However, as part of the expansion of their backstory that occurred during the Saga of the Serpent Crown, the Lemurians were retconned into having had pale green skin six centuries ago and much darker green skin centuries later, when the rebels stole the Serpent Crown. No explanation for this inconsistency has ever been provided.
- Sea Leopard once implied that he was one of the Ancients,[8] but his claim has never been confirmed.
- No explanation for why these Lemurians possessed telepathic abilities has ever been revealed. One possibility is that they were mutant members of the Lemurian species who somehow all developed the same power. Another possibility is that, just as exposure to the Serpent Crown transformed the skin of the Lemurians from soft and blue to scaly and green, some other mystical artifact may have given telepathic powers to a select group.
- The backstory of the Ancients has changed over time:
- Archie Goodwin and Gene Colan created Destiny, his Helmet of Power and a long-abandoned city in Antarctica that were all first seen in Tales to Astonish #101.
- Goodwin also wrote Iron Man and Sub-Mariner #1 in which the Ancients were first mentioned but not depicted in-story.
- Roy Thomas and Gene Colan transformed the "Helmet of the Ancients" into the Serpent Crown in Sub-Mariner (Vol. 2) #9 and it was their origin for the Serpent Crown in Sub-Mariner (Vol. 2) #10 that revealed that it had been created in undersea Lemuria before being stolen by Lemurian rebels who had taken it to Antarctica where they had encased it in a shield that greatly changed its appearance.
- Oddly, although it established the connection between the rebels and the Helmet of Power, that story didn't mention that the rebels had telepathic abilities or explicitly state that they were the so-called Ancients.
- Decades later, Thomas wrote Saga of the Sub-Mariner #1 in which he had Namor write that the precise nature and origins of the so-called Ancients had never been discovered, seemingly contradicting his own story which had established them as being Lemurian rebels.
- The following year, Peter Sanderson wrote Chapter Seven of the Saga of the Serpent Crown for Daredevil Annual #4B in which the Watcher revealed how those Lemurian rebels had become known as the Ancients.
- Marvel Team-Up Annual #5 stated that the Serpent Crown had been found and given to Naga when one tribe of Atlanteans had migrated to the Pacific Ocean to become the Lemurians, an event that was later dated to five hundred years after the time of Kamuu who had founded undersea Atlantis about eight thousand years ago.[3] This implied that Naga had acquired the Serpent Crown circa 5,500 B.C. However, Chapter Six of the Saga of the Serpent Crown in Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #9 established that, although the Lemurians had long known of and shunned the Serpent Crown, it had only been about six hundred years ago that Naga had become the first person in almost twenty thousand years to touch it and not immediately die. This moved the beginning of Naga's reign of terror forward to about 1400 A.D. and drastically reduced the duration of his reign.
See Also
- 2 appearance(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)
- 1 minor appearance(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)
- 7 mention(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)
- 2 mention(s) in handbook(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)
- 1 image(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)
- 5 member(s) of Ancients (Lemurians) (Earth-616)