Odyssey of the Gods: The History of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient Greece

2012·3.94 MB·english

by  Von Daniken

ODYSSEY OF THE GODS
The History of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient Greece
By Erich von Däniken
Translated by Matthew Barton and Christian von Arnim
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Adventures of the Starship Enterprise in Long-Gone
Millennia
Chapter 2: In the Name of Zeus
Chapter 3: The Network of the Gods
Chapter 4: The Trojan Tangle
Chapter 5: Atlantis: The Millennia-Old Whodunnit
Chapter 6: Help For Plato
A Final Word on Atlantis
A Note to the Reader
Notes
Index
About the Author
Preface
Do you know what an orgy is? Encyclopedias give its original
definition as the celebration of religious rites in ancient Greece.1
Nowadays the word refers to a much less restrained kind of caper, in
which sex plays its fair share.
But in fact this is also what the word meant in ancient Greece. At
that time, men used to meet together in the afternoon for
philosophical debate, followed a few hours later by a “symposium” or
drinking party—which often ended in an orgy. Wives were not
present, but boys and youths were. Greece was taboo-free in this
respect; people thought and felt differently in ancient Hellas.
Everyone knows what a science-fiction story is. But you probably
don’t know that there were science-fiction stories circulating in
ancient Greece too, though much more fantastic ones than ours. The
difference between them is that the Greeks didn’t regard their
science-fiction as utopian fantasies; they believed that the stories
related events which had really taken place. And there was another
difference. Our science-fiction stories—such as the adventures of
“Starship Enterprise”—take place in the future, while the ancient
Greeks looked back to a dim, distant past, to a time millennia before
their own.
Just imagine that the island of Crete is continually circled by a
metal guardian, which has the phenomenal ability to monitor all
ships heading toward the island and to blow them out of the water.
No foreigner has a chance of landing there against the wishes of the
island’s rulers. If a boat does manage to slip through, the metal
monster can direct a fierce heat at it and burn up the invader.
However, this guardian robot does have a weak point: if a certain bolt
on its metallic body is undone, its thick blood flows out so that it is
immobilized. Naturally, only those who constructed it, and their
successors, know the precise location of this vital spot.
This story was already in existence around 2,500 years ago, and
the Greeks were convinced that it told the truth about events long
before their time. The robot which patrolled Crete was called Talos,
and the engineers who knew the precise position of the place where
the hydraulic fluid had to be drained, so as to inactivate the monster,
were called “gods.”
This ancient Greece is positively awash with incredible stories. In
the Argonautica, a tale thousands of years old whose origin lies buried
in the mists of time, so-called “centaurs” occur. What are they
supposed to be? The “centaur” is a hybrid with a male torso and a
human head—but the body of a horse. Basically an absurdity which
should be a figment of the imagination. But hybrids existed elsewhere
in antiquity as well. The historian and Church Father Eusebius (died
AD 339), who also entered ecclesiastical history as the Bishop of
Caesarea and an early Christian chronicler, wrote about it in Volume
5 of his works. “The Gods.” Eusebius reports, “had created various
hybrid creatures”:
And they begat human beings, with two wings; and then others
with four wings and two faces and one body and two heads…still
others with horses’ hooves, and others in the shape of a horse at
the rear and a human shape at the front…they also made bulls
with human heads and horses with dogs’ heads as well as other
monsters with horses heads and human bodies…then all kinds of
dragon-like monstrous beings…of many kinds and different from
one another, whose images they kept in the Temple of Belus
depicted one next to the other…. 2
“Human beings with two wings” are said to have existed?
Nonsense? Why, then, do their reliefs stare out at us from steles and
sculptures in all major museums? The only difference is that they are
not called “human beings with two wings” because our modern
archeology refers to them as “winged genii.” “Human beings with
horses’ hooves”—centaurs—half man half horse, are immortalized in
images from antiquity. And they are said to have created “bulls with
human heads.” The Cretan monster, the Minotaur, was one such
monstrosity. A bull with a human head for which the Cretans had the
famous Labyrinth built.
Could it be, then, that the ancient stories in the Argonautica are
not fairy tales at all? Are they accounts of real events? And when in
the endless river of time is all this supposed to have happened?
No one knows. But there is a temple in Malta which has been
dated by specialists to 12,000 BC on the basis of its astronomical
orientation. And there are underwater sites both in the Atlantic and
the Pacific. In the Mediterranean, not far from Marseilles, divers
discovered an underwater tunnel at a depth of 35 meters with an
upward incline. The tunnel led into a 40-meter-long corridor and
ended in a lake. At the surface of the lake, the torches illuminated a
picture gallery: C-14 samples from the colors produced an age of
about 18,000 years.
There appears to be something not quite right with our dating.
Are the Greek tales much older than the research is prepared to
admit? Could it be that they—or at least some of them—are not
inventions at all, classical “science fiction,” but that they represent a
reality of the past?
This is not a (hi)story book of ancient Greece, but a book about
its stories. The Greece of ancient times is chockablock with
extraordinary tales. Did the wanderings of Odysseus ever happen?
What was going on in Delphi? Was there really a doom-and-gloom
prophetess there who foresaw all major political events? Are the
powerful descriptions of Troy based on truth? And what about
Atlantis? All the information we have about Atlantis, to which all
authors on the subject refer, has come from Greece. And who were
the Argonauts who set out to steal the “Golden Fleece”?
Greece is worth exploring. I invite you to join me on a special
kind of adventure.
Chapter 1
Adventures of the Starship
Enterprise in Long-Gone Millennia
Impure means lead to an impure end.
—Mahatma Gandhi, 1869–1948
A long, long time ago there lived a distant descendant of the
gods. No one knows his original name, but the Greeks called him
Jason. I’ll have to make do with this name since I don’t know any
other. Now Jason was no ordinary man, for blue blood ran in his
veins. His father was King Aison of Iolchos in Thessalia. But, as so
often in mythology, Jason had a wicked stepbrother who deprived
him of the throne when he was still an infant. Jason’s father arranged
for his small offspring to be brought up by a centaur. Others say that
it was his mother who took him to the centaur, but that is not the
important thing here.1, 2 The centaurs were a curious cross-breed,
with a man’s head and upper torso and arms, but the body of a horse.
A truly astonishing phenomenon. And Jason must have had a rather
unusual kind of upbringing!
Jason is connected with an oracle, for anyone who was anything
in ancient Greece had something to do with an oracle. The prophecy
in this case warned of a man with just one sandal. As the disreputable
king, Jason’s stepbrother was one day holding a celebratory buffet on
the beach, when a tall, beautiful young man came striding along. This
was Jason, and he was wearing only one sandal because he had lost
the other in the mud of a river. Jason was clothed in a leopard’s skin
and a leather tunic. The king did not recognize the stranger and asked
irritably who he was. Jason, smiling, answered that his foster-father
the centaur called him Jason, but that his real name was Diomedes,
and he was the son of King Aison.
Jason soon realized with whom he was talking, and quickly
demanded the throne back, which was rightfully his. Surprisingly the
king agreed, but on one condition—which, he assumed, could not be
fulfilled. He said that Jason must free his kingdom from a curse,
which had been laid both on him and on the whole country. He must
fetch the Golden Fleece that was guarded by a dragon in a faraway
place. This dragon never slept. Only when this deed had been
accomplished would the king relinquish his kingdom.
Jason agreed, and thus began the most incredible science-fiction
story. First, Jason went in search of an extraordinary shipbuilder, who
would construct the most amazing ship of all time. This man was
called Argos, and scholars disagree about where he came from. What
is certain is that Argos must have been an outstanding engineer, for
he built Jason a ship unlike any that had ever been seen before.
Naturally, Argos had unusual connections, for none other than Athene
herself gave him advice, and under her direction a vessel was built
from a kind of wood which “never rots.”3Not content with that,
Athene personally contributed an unusual sort of beam and built this
in to the ship’s bows. It must have been an astonishing piece of wood,
for it could speak. Even as the ship left the harbor, the beam shouted
out in gladness because the journey was starting, and later it warned
the ship’s company of many dangers. Argos, the shipbuilder,
christened the mighty ship Argo, which in ancient Greek means
roughly “fast” or “fleet-footed.”4 The ship’s company were thus called