Chariots of the Gods (10 page)

In the legendary and saga-like world of intangible cultures which as yet offer to us no fixed points of reference, we are on shakier ground still and things become even more confusing.

Naturally the Icelandic and Old Norwegian traditions also mention 'gods' who travel in the sky. The goddess Frigg has a maid-servant called Gna. The goddess sends her handmaid to different worlds on a steed which rises in the air above land and sea. The steed is called 'Hoof thrower' and once, says the Saga, Gna met some strange creatures high in the air. In the Alwislied different names are given to the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the Universe depending on whether they are seen from the point of view of men, 'gods', giants or dwarfs. How on earth could people in the dim past arrive at different perceptions of one and the same thing, when the horizon was very limited?

Although the scholar Sturluson did not write down the Nordic and Old Germanic legends, sagas and songs until about A.D. 1200, they are known to be some thousands of years old. In these writings the symbol of the world is often described as a disc or a ball—remarkably enough—and Thor, the leader of the gods, is always shown with a hammer, the destroyer. Professor Kuhn supports the view that the word 'hammer' means 'stone', dates from the Stone Age and was only transferred to bronze and iron hammers later. Consequently Thor and his hammer symbol must have been very ancient and probably do go back to the Stone Age. Moreover, the word 'Thor' in the Indian (Sancrit) legends is 'Tanayitnu'; this could be more or less rendered as The Thunderer'. The Nordic Thor, god of gods, is the lord of the Germanic Wanen, who make the skies unsafe.

When arguing about the entirely new aspects that I introduce into investigation of the past, the objection might be made that it is not possible to compile everything in the ancient traditions that points to heavenly apparitions into a sequence of proofs of prehistoric space travel. But that is not what I am doing. I am simply referring to passages in very ancient texts that have no place in the working hypothesis in use up to the present. I am drilling away at those admittedly awkward spots, where neither scribes, translators nor copyists could have had any idea of the sciences and their products. I too should be quite prepared to consider the translations wrong and the copies not accurate enough if these same false, fancifully embellished traditions were not accepted in their entirety as soon as they can be fitted into the framework of some religion or other. It is unworthy of a scientific investigator to deny something when it upsets his working hypothesis and accept it when it supports his theory. Imagine the shape my theory would take and the strength it would gain if new translations made with a 'space outlook' existed!

To help us patiently forge the chain of our thesis a little further, scrolls with fragments of apocalyptic and liturgical texts were recently found near the Dead Sea. Once again, in the Apocryphal Books of Abraham and Moses, we hear about a heavenly chariot with wheels, which spits fire, whereas similar references are lacking in the Ethiopian and Slavic Book of Enoch.

'Behind the being I saw a chariot which had wheels of fire, and every wheel was full of eyes all round, and on the wheels was a throne and this was covered with fire that flowed around it.' (Apocryphal Book of Abraham 18:11-12.)

According to Professor Sholem's explanation, the throne and chariot symbolism of the Jewish mystics corresponded roughly to that of the Hellenistic and early Christian mystics when they talk about pleroma ( = abundance of light). That is a respectable explanation, but can it be accepted as scientifically proved? May we simply ask what would be the case if some people had really seen the fiery-chariot that is described over and over again? A secret script was used very frequently in the Qumran scrolls; among the documents in the fourth cave different kinds of characters alternate in one and the same astrological work. An astronomical observation bears the title: 'Words of the judicious one which he has addressed to all sons of the dawn.'

But what is the crushing and convincing objection to the possibility that real fiery chariots were described in the ancient texts? Surely not the vague and stupid assertion that fiery chariots cannot have existed in antiquity! Such an answer would be unworthy of the men I am trying to force to face new alternatives with my questions. Lastly it is by no means so long ago that reputable scholars said that no stones (= meteors) could fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky. Even nineteenth-century mathematicians came to the conclusion—convincing in their day— that a railway train would not be able to travel faster than 21 miles an hour because if it did the air would be forced out of it and the passengers would suffocate. Less than a hundred years ago it was 'proved' that an object heavier than air would never be able to fly.

A review in a reputable newspaper classed Walter Sullivan's book Signals from the Universe as science fiction and said that even in the more distant future it would be quite impossible to reach say Epsilon-Eridani or Tau-Ceti; even the effect of a shift in time or deep-freezing the astronauts could never overcome the barriers of the inconceivable distances.

It is a good thing that there were always enough bold visionaries oblivious to contemporary criticism in the past. Without them there would be no world-wide railway network today, with trains travelling at 124 miles an hour and over. (N.B. Passengers die at more than 21 m.p.h.!) Without them there would be no jet aircraft today, because they would certainly fall to the ground. (N.B. Things that are heavier than air cannot fly!) And lastly there would be no moon rockets (because man cannot leave his own planet!). There are so many, many things that would not exist but for the visionaries!

A number of scholars would like to stick to the so-called realities. In so doing they are too ready and willing to forget that what is reality today may have been the Utopian dream of a visionary yesterday. We owe a considerable number of all the epoch-making discoveries that our age thinks of as realities to lucky chances, not to steady systematic research. And some of them stand to the credit of the 'serious visionaries' who overcame restricting prejudice with their bold speculations. For example, Heinrich Schliemann accepted Homer's Odyssey as more than stories and fables and discovered Troy as a result.

We still know too little about our past to be able to make a definitive judgment about it. New finds may solve unprecedented mysteries; the reading of ancient narratives is capable of turning whole worlds of realities upside down. Incidentally, it is obvious to me that more old books were destroyed than are preserved. There is supposed to have been a book in South America that contained all the wisdom of antiquity; it is reputed to have been destroyed by the 63rd Inca ruler Pachacuti IV. In the library of Alexandria 500,000 volumes belonging to the learned Ptolemy Soter contained all the traditions of mankind; the library was partly destroyed by the Romans, the rest was burnt on the orders of Caliph Omar centuries later. An incredible thought that invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts were used to heat the public baths of Alexandria!

What became of the library of the Temple at Jerusalem? What became of the library of Pergamon, which is supposed to have housed 200,000 works? When the Chinese Emperor Chi-Huang ordered the destruction of a mass of historical, astronomical and philosophical books for political reasons in 214 B.C., what treasures and secrets went with them? How many texts did the converted Paul have destroyed at Ephesus? And we cannot even imagine the enormous wealth of literature about all branches of knowledge that has been lost to us owing to religious fanaticism. How many thousands of irretrievable writings did monks and missionaries burn in South America in their blind religious zeal?

That happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. Has mankind learnt anything as a result? Only a few decades ago Hitler had books burnt in the public squares and as recently as 1966 the same thing happened in China during Mao's kindergarten revolution. Thank heavens that today books do not exist in single copies, as in the past.

The texts and fragments still available transmit a great deal of knowledge from the remote past. In all ages the sages of a nation knew that the future would always bring wars and revolutions, blood and fire. Did this knowledge perhaps lead these sages to hide secrets and traditions from the mob in the colossal buildings of their period or to preserve them from possible destruction in a safe place? Have they 'hidden' information or accounts in pyramids, temples or statues, or bequeathed them in the form of ciphers so that they would withstand the ravages of time? We certainly ought to test the idea, for far-seeing contemporaries of our own day have acted in this way—for the future.

In 1965 the Americans buried two time capsules in the soil of New York so constituted that they could withstand the very worst that this earth can offer in the way of calamities for 5,000 years. These time capsules contained news that we want to transmit to posterity, so that some day those who strive to illuminate the darkness surrounding the past of their forefathers will know how we lived. The capsules are made of a metal that is harder than steel; they can even survive an atomic explosion. Apart from 'daily news' the capsules also contain photographs of cities, ships, automobiles, aircraft and rockets; they house samples of metals and plastics, of fabrics, threads and cloths; they hand down to posterity objects in everyday use such as coins, tools and toilet articles; books about mathematics, medicine, physics, biology and astronautics are preserved on microfilm. In order to complete this service for some remote and unknown future race, the capsules also contain a 'key', a book with the help of which all the written material can be translated into the languages of the future.

A group of engineers from Westinghouse Electric had the idea of presenting the time capsules to posterity. John Harrington invented the ingenious decoding system for generations yet unknown. Lunatics? Visionaries? I find the realisation of this project beneficial and reassuring. It's nice to know that there are men today who think 5,000 years ahead! The archaeologists of some remote future age will not find things any easier than we did. For after an atomic conflagration none of the world's libraries will be of any use and all the achievements that make us so proud will not be worth twopence, because they have disappeared, because they have been destroyed, because they have been atomised. It does not even need an atomic conflagration to ravage the earth to justify the New Yorkers' imaginative action. A shifting of the earth's axis by a few degrees would cause inundations on an unprecedented and irresistible scale—in any case they would swallow up every single written word. Who is arrogant enough to assert that the sages of old could not have conceived the same sort of idea as the far-sighted New Yorkers?

Undoubtedly the strategists of an A- and H-bomb war will not direct their weapons against Zulu villages and harmless Eskimos. The will use them against the centres of civilisation. In other words the radioactive chaos will fall on the advanced, most highly developed peoples. Savages and primitive peoples far away from the centres of civilisation will be left. They will not be able to transmit our culture or even give an account of it, because they have never taken part in it. Even intelligent men and visionaries who had tried to preserve an underground library will not have been able to help the future much. 'Normal' libraries will be destroyed in any case and the surviving primitive peoples will know nothing of the hidden secret libraries. Whole regions of the globe will become burning deserts, because radiation lasting for centuries will not allow any plants to grow. The survivors will presumably be mutated and after 2,000 years nothing will be left of the annihilated cities. The unbridled power of nature will eat its way through the ruins; iron and steel will rust and crumble into dust.

And everything would begin again! Man may embark on his adventure a second or even a third time. Perhaps once again he would take so long to re-emerge as a civilised being that the secrets of old traditions and texts would be closed to him. Five thousand years after the catastrophe, archaeologists could claim that twentieth-century man was not yet familiar with iron, because, understandably enough, they would not find any, no matter how hard they dug. Along the Russian frontiers they would find miles of concrete tank traps and they would explain that such finds undoubtedly indicated astronomical lines. If they were to find cassettes with tapes, they would not know what to do with them; they would not even be able to distinguish between played and unplayed tapes. And perhaps those tapes might hold the solution to many, many puzzles! Texts which spoke of gigantic cities with houses several hundred feet high would be pooh-poohed, because such cities could not have existed. Scholars would take the London Tube tunnels for a geometrical curiosity or an astonishingly well-conceived drainage system. And they might keep on coming across reports which described how men flew from continent to continent with giant birds and referred to extraordinary fire-spitting ships which disappeared into the sky. That would also be dismissed as mythology, because such great birds and fire-spitting ships could not have existed.

Things would be made very difficult for the translators in anno 7000. The facts about a world war in the twentieth century that they would discover from fragmentary texts would sound quite incredible. But when the speeches of Marx and Lenin fell into their hands, they would at last be able to make two high priests of this incomprehensible age the centre of a religion. What a piece of luck!

People would be able to explain a great deal, provided sufficient clues were still in existence. Five thousand years is a long time. It is a pure caprice on nature's part that she allows dressed blocks of stone to survive for 5,000 years. She does not deal so carefully with the thickest iron girders.

In the courtyard of a temple in Delhi there exists, as I have already mentioned, a column made of welded iron parts that has been exposed to weathering for more than 4,000 years without showing a trace of rust for it contains neither sulphur nor phosphorus. Here we have an unknown alloy from antiquity staring us in the face. Perhaps the column was cast by a group of far-sighted engineers who did not have the resources for colossal building, but wanted to bequeath to posterity a visible, time-defying monument to their culture?