ODYSSEY OF THE GODS
The History of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient Greece
By Erich von Däniken
Translated by Matthew Barton and Christian von Arnim
Copyright © 2012 by Erich von Däniken
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ODYSSEY OF THE GODS
EDITED AND TYPESET BY DIANA GHAZZAWI
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All photos by Erich von Däniken.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Däniken, Erich von, 1935-
[Im Namen von Zeus. English]
Odyssey of the gods : the history of extraterrestrial contact in ancient Greece / by Erich von Däniken ; translated by Matthew Barton and Christian von Arnim.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60163-192-3 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-634-8 (ebook) 1. Civilization,
Ancient--Extraterrestrial influences. 2. Greece--Antiquities. I. Title.
CB156.D332513 2012
938--dc23
2011027033
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 explorin
g. 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 “Argonauts,” and the whole story is called the Argonautica. (Our astronauts and cosmonauts take their name indirectly from the Greek Argonauts.)
The Argo had room for 50 men, who must all have been specialists in various fields. That is why Jason had sent messages to every royal house in his search for a team of volunteers with particular abilities. And they came, all heroes and offspring of the gods. The list of the original crew is only partially preserved, and scholars say that other names were added by later authors.5, 6, 7 The crew must have been quite phenomenal, and it included the following people: Melampus, a son of Poseidon; Ancaeus of Tegeg, also a Poseidon offspring; Amphiarus the seer; Lynceus the look-out; Castor of Sparta, a wrestler; lphitus, the brother of the king of Mycenae; Augeias, the son of the king of Phorbas; Echion the herald, a son of Hermes; Euphemus of Tainaron, the swimmer; Heracles of Tiryns, the strongest man; Hylas, the beloved of Heracles; Idmon the Argive, a son of Apollo; Acastus, a son of King Pelias; Calais, the winged son of the Boreas; Nauplius, the sailor; Polydeuces, the prizefighter from Sparta; Phalerus, the archer; Phanus, the Cretan son of Dionysus; Argos, the builder of the Argo; and Jason himself, the leader of the enterprise.8, 9
The various authors who described the journey of the Argo more than 2,000 years ago added other names. At different points in Greek history, writers or historians concerned with the Argonauts assumed that this or that famous character must also have been there. The oldest list is in the Pythian Poem IV, recorded by a writer called Pindar (roughly 520–446 BC). This contains only ten names: Heracles, Castor, Polydeuces, Euphemnus, Periclymenus, Orpheus, Echion, and Eurytus (both sons of Hermes, the messenger of the gods), as well as Calais and Zetes. 10, 11 Pindar continually emphasizes that all these heroes were of divine descent.
The best and also most detailed description both of the whole journey and the heroes taking part in it, comes from Apollonius of Rhodes. He lived at some point between the 3rd and 4th centuries BC. Now Apollonius was certainly not the originator of the Argonautica. Various scholars assume that he must have drawn the basic story from much older sources.12, 13 Apollonius writes in his “First Song” that poets before him had told how Argos, guided by Pallas (Athene), had built the ship. Fragments of the Argonautica can be traced back as far as the 7th century BC. Scholars do not exclude the possibility that the story actually originated in ancient Egypt.
The Argonautica by Apollonius was translated into German in 1779. In quoting from the story, I will mainly draw upon this translation, now over 200 years old. The 1779 translation is not yet imbued with our modernist attitudes, and reflects Apollonius’ original flowery style. An excerpt from the list of names, written down roughly 2,400 years ago, goes as follows:
Polyphemus, the Elatid, came from Larissa. Long ago he had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Lapiths, fighting in battle against the wild centaurs…
Mopsus came too, the Titaresian, who had learned from Apollo to interpret the flight of birds…
Iphitus and Clytias were also of his party, the sons of wild Eurytus, to whom the god who shoots far had given the bow…
Alcon had sent his son, although no son now remained in his house…
Of the heroes who left Argos14 Idmon was the last. He learned from the god [Apollo] the art of watching the flight of birds, of prophecy and of reading the meaning of the fiery meteors…
Lynceus came also…his eyes were unbelievably sharp. If the rumor is true, he could see deep into the earth…
Afterwards came Euphemus from the walls of Tenaros, the most fleet of foot… two other sons of Neptune came too….15
Whichever list of names is closest to the original, the Argonauts were, at any rate, a hand-picked company of gods’ sons, each with his own astonishing gifts and special expertise. This extraordinary group gathered in the harbor of Pagasai on the Magnesia peninsula, to set off with Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece.
Before the journey began, they held a feast in honor of Zeus, the father of the gods,16 and then the whole team marched on board, through a crowd of thousands of inquisitive observers. Apollonius describes it as follows:
Thus did the heroes pass through the town and make their way down to the ship…. With them and around them ran a great, foolish mob. The heroes shone like stars in the sky between the clouds…17
The people hailed the brave seafarers and wished them success in all their undertakings and a safe homecoming, while anxious mothers pressed their children to their breasts. The whole town was in uproar until the Argo finally sailed over the horizon and vanished from sight.
And why all this effort? Because of the Golden Fleece. But what is this slightly bizarre object of desire? Most encyclopedias I consulted describe the Golden Fleece as the “fleece of a golden ram.”18, 19, 20, 21 So this whole Argonaut crew is supposed to have set sail because of a fleece? The greatest ship of
the time is supposed to have been built, and sons of gods and kings to have freely offered their services, in the quest of a ridiculous bit of fur? And a curse—one that needed such effort to combat—was supposed to hang over the country because of this? And a dragon, who “never sleeps,” was meant to guard this lousy fleece day and night. Surely not!
No, definitely not, for the Golden Fleece was a very particular skin with astonishing properties. It could fly!
The legend tells that Prixos, a son of King Athamas, had suffered a great deal because of his wicked stepmother, until his real mother snatched him and his sister away. She placed the children on the back of a winged golden ram, which the god Hermes had once given her, and on this miraculous beast the two flew through the air over land and sea, finally landing in Aia, the capital of Colchis. This was a kingdom at the farthest end of the Black Sea. The king of Colchis is described as a violent tyrant who easily broke his word when it suited him, and who wanted to hang on to this “flying ram.” The Golden Fleece was thus nailed firmly to a tree. In addition, the services of a fire-spitting dragon which never slept were enlisted to guard it.
So the Golden Fleece was some kind of flying machine that had once belonged to the god Hermes. It must on no account remain in the hands of a tyrant, who might have misused it for his foul purposes—hence the top-class crew with their various expertise, and the help of the gods’ descendants. They all wanted to regain what had been the property of the Olympians.
Hardly had they embarked when the Argonauts elected a leader in democratic manner. Heracles, the strongest of all men, was chosen, but he turned down the job. He declared that this honor belonged to Jason alone, the initiator of the whole expedition. The ship passed swiftly out of Pagasai harbor and rounded the peninsula of Magnesia.
After a few harmless adventures, the crew reached the Capidagi peninsula, which is connected to the mainland by a strip of land. There lived the Dolion people, whose young king Cyzicus asked the Argonauts to tie up in the harbor in the bay of Chytos—somehow forgetting to warn them about the giants with six arms who also lived there. The unsuspecting Argonauts climbed a nearby mountain to get their bearings.
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