Eric Von Daniken, Chariots Of The Gods? : Unsolved Mysteries Of The Past, Berkley Books, New York, 1970/1999.
This is the classic but still controversial work that launched a revolution in how human pre-history is perceived, at least by some. Chariots of the Gods and its several successors made Von Daniken a top best-selling author and celebrity. In 1970, he was among the first to explore the possibility that many of the “gods” encountered in myths and legends of cultures from around the world may have actually been beings who made use of highly advanced technologies that led them to appear as super-human to far less developed peoples. According to Von Daniken, many surviving monuments of the earliest civilizations show clear evidence of being created using highly sophisticated, and far from primitive, techniques.
In the half-century since Chariots of the Gods appeared, an abundance of other authors have further developed this hypothesis. Even now, however, Von Daniken’s engaging first work is still well worth reading. His primary focus are the bounty of ancient tales about long-ago peoples being visited by highly advanced beings who steered powerful, fire-spewing flying vehicles across the sky and conveyed crucial knowledge from which the first civilizations developed. He supports his conclusions with a mountain of evidence, noting, for example, all the mentions in the Old Testament of the inter-breeding of the “Sons of God” with the “Daughters of Men” and assertion in Genesis that there were “giants on the earth in those days.”
The destruction of hopelessly de-based Sodom and Gomorrah by an enormous fiery explosion, blinding or killing those close to it, is also, Von Daniken believes, a revealing passage. So too is the elaborate description of the strange miraculous flying machines in which the prophet Ezekiel is carried off into space. A close reading of Exodus appears to reveal that the Ark of the Covenant may have been a highly electrically-charged communication device. There is the question of why, if, “God” had a face, humans were rigorously forbidden from viewing it.
Of all the world’s venerable religious scriptures, the Ramayana, from India, describes miraculous flying machines, called “Vimanas”, and all their astonishing capabilities in the greatest detail. In one of several such passages cited by Von Daniken, “At Rama’s behest the magnificent chariot rose up to a mountain of cloud with a tremendous din.” Von Daniken observes that, “We cannot help noticing that not only is a flying object mentioned again but also the chronicler talks of a tremendous din.” The Mahabharata records that, “Bhima flew with his Vimana on an enormous ray which was as brilliant as the sun and made a noise like the thunder of a storm.”
An even more vividly dramatic passage from the Mahabharata depicts a:
“…weapon that could kill all warriors who wore metal on their bodies. If the warriors learned about the effect of the weapon in time they tore off all the metal equipment they were wearing, jumped into a river, and washed themselves and everything they had come into contact with very thoroughly. Not without reason, as the author explains, for the weapon made the hair and nails fall out. Everything living, the writer recorded, became pale and weak.”
It is noteworthy that the above description comes from a translation of the Mahabarata from 1889, long before modern atomic weapons existed. In ancient Egypt, images of winged-suns, soaring falcons, and “eyes of Horus” gazing down on earth from the sky are frequently encountered in depictions of their most important gods. The temple island of Elephantine in the Nile, Von Daniken notes, can only be seen to have the shape of an elephant if viewed from high over it looking down.
A tremendous number of these kinds of ancient mythologies, Von Daniken observes, have survived. A large number of other records of humanity’s distant past, he also reminds us, been lost, sealed away, or destroyed. As a result, he believes, much of our human story continues to lie behind an opaque curtain that may never be fully parted. If viewed with open eyes, however, what does remain presents us with mystery after mystery. The Piri Reiss map, for example, discovered in the Imperial Palace Library in Istanbul in 1929 (and discussed far more fully in Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) sets out almost perfectly the coastline of Antarctica as it was before being covered over with ice. Another is the terrace built of shockingly enormous finished stone blocks at Baalbeck in Lebanon, some more than 65 feet long and weighing nearly 2,000 tons.
The tunnels into the tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings have perfectly smoothed-out walls with elaborate engravings, but no indication of what lighting source may have been used in their creation. In Delhi in India a 4,000 year old column in a temple courtyard is comprised of a now-unknown rust-proof iron alloy. Current speculations regarding the huge number of massive stone heads, topped with equally imposing stone “hats”, on Easter Island a large number of islanders engaged in their creation and movement. Easter Island has however, Von Daniken points out, always been only sparsely inhabited.
According to the Maya, Von Daniken writes, the god Quetzelcoatal:
“…came from an unknown country of the rising sun in a white robe, and he wore a beard. He taught the people all the sciences, arts, and customs, and left very wise laws. It was said that under his direction corncobs grew as big as a man and that cotton grew already colored. When Quetzalcoatal had fulfilled his mission, he returned to the sea, preaching his teaching en route, and boarded a ship there which took him to the morning star.”
Von Daniken’s greatest achievement is in joining these accounts together into a unified fabric, an entirely different kind of framework from which to perceive the distant past. As a result of his influence, many began to see our shared heritage from a whole new perspective. As Von Daniken wrote:
“If we want to set out on the arduous search for the truth, we must all summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything we have previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical? What would happen if we dared to take off our blinders and look at the old things with fresh eyes?”
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