The Ten Commandments are so clear and definite because
they weren’t decided by conference.
The region which we call Olympia was already inhabited in the 3rd millennium BC. The first holy place in that part of western Peloponnesia was dedicated to the goddess Ge. Much later, Olympia developed into the temple city of Zeus. In the year 776 BC, the first competitions were held at Olympia, and we have a written record of the name of the victor— “Coroibos from Elis.” Athletic competitions took place here every four years, over a total span of 1,168 years, from 776 BC to AD 393. Strict rules were drawn up, both for the competitors and the audience. The athletes had to have trained for at least 10 months; they also had to be free Greeks, who had not committed a murder nor behaved indecently in a holy place. Thirty days before the games began, the athletes gathered in the training camp at Elis, 35 miles (57km) from Olympia, where they lived together in simple dwellings, all receiving the same food.
The Olympic Games were only for the men; women and slaves were not even allowed to watch, and there was a law which actually said that any woman caught watching the games would be thrown off Mount Typaion. Why were they so against women? All participants had to compete naked, and later on the organizers made them train without clothes on as well. Why, for heavens sake? Both the competition judges and the public had to be quite sure that participating athletes were normal human beings, that there was no cheating, and that everyone had the same chance. The word “athlete” actually comes from the Greek word athlos, and means prize or honor. And what has all of this to do with the story of the Argonautica? Bear with me a little longer.
Up until the 13th Olympic Games in 728 BC, only one single competition took place: the sprint over a stade, a distance of about 200m. Not until 720 BC was a longer run added, over a distance of two stades, about 400m. The first Olympic winner of this race was Acanthos from Sparta. From one Olympic Games to the next after that, new sports were allowed. The history of the games has been researched in detail by various historians. Herodotus, the “father of historians” (490–426 BC), read in person from his works at Olympia, which is how he first became known to his countrymen. The Greek historian Diodorus (about 100 BC), who was the author of 40 volumes of history books, visited the 180th Olympic Games.
Image 3: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
Image 4: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
Image 5: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
It is easy for me to use the history of the Olympic Games to demonstrate that no monsters, giants, Titans, “mixed beings,” or other freaks took part. The competitors were naked, and no cross-breed or hermaphrodite would even have been allowed to watch. No robots à la Talos were set to protect the Olympian temples, of which there were a good number, containing gold and silver. No fire-spitting dragons guarded valuable offerings to the gods with tireless eyes, and no “divine” offspring corrupted the games. At least we can be sure of this as far back as 776 BC. Competitions were held in Olympia prior to that, but these were not included in any historical records.
The oldest known reference to the Argonautica comes from the IVth poem by Pindar, who scribbled the story down about 500 BC. There were certainly no giants, Titans, or other descendants of the gods around in his day, or they would have been mentioned in the historical records of Olympia. Nor were there any a quarter of a millennium before that, at the first Olympic Games. Nevertheless, the story mentions gods, robots, the Golden Fleece, and an unsleeping dragon. Therefore the first people who told the Argonautica story must either have made up their monsters or taken them from far older sources. I can see no alternative.
The fairy-tale invention of a “speaking beam” or a “metal man” does not fit easily in the time of Pindar or even Apollonius. Nor does the unsleeping dragon which has no physical needs, spits fire, and does not die. If such figures were dreamed up in the fairy-tales of the times, we would know about it. In ancient Greece, after all, there was no end of poets and dreamers. Countless numbers of their stories have lasted the millennia, but no single one of them casts scorn on the invented lies of the others. So, surely, these stories must be older than the first Olympic Games.
The deeper we delve into the mists of human history, the more improbable becomes the technical gadgetry, such as that mentioned in the Argonautica. Our evolutionary model would lead us to conclude that the further back we go the simpler human thinking would be. Or is there anyone who seriously wants to put forward the view that the fairy-tale tellers reached for their clay tablets the moment that the first writing was invented?
Come with me on a voyage of the mind, which takes us back 4,000 years. We are in the town of Assur, which existed about 2,000 years BC. The development of writing is in full flow, and people are already trying to scratch into clay tablets some laws laid down by their clever ruler. The ruler demands that every one of his subordinates should implement the laws immediately, rather than judge things according to the whim of the moment. Making these “law tablets” is very hard work. First of all, the right mixture of clay must be pressed into square wooden frames, kneaded, and smoothed. Then the scribe draws fine lines in the clay with a sharpened stone. The whole process has been tested for weeks already, by inscribing the soft medium again and again with the wedge-shaped signs. Sometimes the stone tool scratches too deep and the wedge is then too broad at the top, at other times too much pressure is applied. Or the scribe’s hand trembles. Often the soft clay sinks just at the wrong place, hiding an important stroke which made one word into its opposite—such as “unjust” out of “just.” At last the wooden frames are laid out to dry in the sun. After a few hours one can see that the writing no longer looks right because the heat warps the frame. And many of the tablets break as they are removed from their frames.
You can see, therefore, that writing was both an exhausting process and a grave responsibility 2,000 years BC. Only a few mastered this new art. And now imagine that a dreamer turns up who only has one thing in mind: he demands 5,000 clay tablets in order to inscribe them with a made-up story, a dream, say—or, as one would call it millennia later, a fairy tale! The priests, the tribe, the ruler will only allow such a thing if they regard it as extremely important. And what sort of story would be important enough to spend years engraving it in clay?
Only one, certainly, which tells of an ancient, powerful, and, of course, true series of events, which must be retained for posterity. Lies and inventions are not inscribed in clay—and definitely not dreams.
And this is what happened. After mankind had finally invented writing, or rather had learned it from the gods, what was written down were commercial agreements and later royal decrees or reports of wars and battles. The few, hand-picked experts who were capable of writing did not use this power to record rubbish. The clay tablets were not there to immortalize any dreamer’s fantasy. The only things written down were those which were of truly outstanding importance—including tales about the gods, their superhuman weapons and supernatural power. Such tales already existed and were not suddenly invented. There was no place for trivial or escapist literature in the holy texts. Not only the rulers but also the priests would have absolutely refused to countenance that.
So why are descriptions of a mysterious technology of the gods to be found amongst the oldest written records? What made these things so important that they were written down at all? The Epic of Gilgamesh was written thousands of years BC, as were the stories of the first Chinese emperors and their heavenly dragons. And in the most ancient version of the Gilgamesh story, written on clay tablets 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, we find the robot Chumbaba, the “tower of the gods,” the “door that speaks like a person” and the lightning-rapid missiles of the gods. We also hear of a space journey of course, for Gilgamesh is carried up away from the earth, and describes the view from a great height.
I’d better stop there; I have already explored these tales in other books, to which those who would like to look further can refer.1, 2
The historian Dr. Ernst Curtius wrote 190 years ago: “History does not know about the infancy of any race.”3 This is true, for each people only enters historical record after it has formed a community about which something can be written. Herodotus was certainly not the first historian on the planet, history was written down centuries and millennia before him. Herodotus was a scholarly person. He did a thorough job in the libraries of his time, for he was always curious and interested in knowing more, and wanted to find out the real truth about his Greek gods.
Through his diligent research he discovered the origin of the Greek gods in Egypt. He found out that the Egyptians were the first people to keep precise records about their gods and kings, and that they knew of very ancient festivals which “have only recently begun to be celebrated in Greece.”4
Herodotus discovers his Greek gods, together with all the rites dedicated to them, in ancient Egypt, and he has no compunction in being open about it, although his devout compatriots could easily take offense. Isis, Herodotus declares quite matter-of-factly, is none other than the Egyptian name for Demeter. The goddess Athene and the gods Helios, Ares, and many others all have their origin in Egypt. In the second book of his Histories, from Chapter 60 onward, Herodotus describes diverse festivals honoring these gods, and how they took place in Egypt. He always retains a critical perspective, distinguishing between personal experiences and things which have only been told him at second hand. He also meticulously notes things he does not wish to write about, either because they are sexually offensive, or because he does not believe what he has been told. Herodotus even pursues the question as to why these superhuman beings are called “gods” at all. The answer he comes up with leaves no room for doubt: because they were the original teachers of mankind, and also because “they ordered everything and shared out everything amongst themselves.”5
Herodotus also derives from his Egyptian sources year-counts which can make us blink in surprise. In Chapter 43 of his second book, he writes that Heracles was known to the Egyptians as a very ancient god. From Heracles to the reign of Amasis, he says, 17,000 years passed. And then he gives two numbers which make the heads of our scholars spin. To the travelling Herodotus—and all this of course happened about 450 BC—the Theban priests read out the names of 341 generations of rulers, which they had carefully recorded. These 341 generations correspond, according to Herodotus, to 11,340 years, and since then there have been “no further gods in human form” in Egypt. Herodotus was not just chatting with simple stonemasons or gossiping traders. The people he was talking to were educated priests; and when, astonished, he asked them if this was true, this elite of priests confirmed that the 341 kings had been people “quite different from the gods,” and that before them gods had ruled in Egypt, and lived among human beings. (Whoever wants to check this out can read book 2, Chapters 142 to 145 of Herodotus’ Histories.) And once more Herodotus assures us that the Egyptians knew “for certain, because they continually reckon the years and record them.”6 The same priests also read to Herodotus from a book the names of all 330 kings, together with the dates of their reign, which followed the reign of Pharaoh Menes.
Our sharp-witted exegetes, philologists, archaeologists, and religious historians of the present day cannot begin to come to terms with these enormous periods of time. Before written history begins, they know only the great black hole of the Stone Age, during which the human beings who had descended from apes slowly and surely expanded their knowledge. They learned to use stone tools and gradually developed a language. They formed closed tribes for safety, invented the arrowhead, the spear, and finally the bow, and at some point found out how to win iron from rock. At the same time, they put up gigantic megalithic constructions. And when they eventually invented writing, they immediately used stone styluses to imprint clay tablets with fairy tales that had a technological slant!
And our experts, who straitjacket their brains in endless conferences and discussions, and who quote from each other’s works all the time so as to “remain scientific,” cannot come up with any better explanation than the psychological one. They write sentences such as: “To place the chronology of the oldest dynasties before the middle of the 4th millennium is ridiculous and clearly invented.”7 Or: “Complete nonsense,” or: “We can happily leave this passage out, for it contains nothing but fantastic nonsense.” This kind of viewpoint is absolutely sure that “the history of ancient Egypt only really began around 3000 BC.”8 Any other version of mankind’s history is unthinkable, even if the chroniclers of the most varied peoples provide concrete dates. The holy dogma of evolution allows no other alternative.
In order to explain all the inconsistencies, people invent “moon years,” accuse the historians and chroniclers of making mistakes with their figures or exaggerating the grandiose nature of their kings, or think up types of calendar which actually never existed—such as the Sothis or Sirius calendar for the Pharaoh kingdoms. And what becomes of our much-praised “scientific approach” if we simply ignore all the dates which so many scribes and chroniclers so carefully recorded? Herodotus is far from being the only one to include dates and periods in his stories. In my last book9 I showed comparative figures from all over the place. The conclusion to be drawn is not that the ancients had a problem counting, but that we simply don’t want to acknowledge the reality of those times.
The Greek philosophers Plato (427–347 BC) and Socrates (470–399 BC) are still regarded, even by our highly advanced culture, as outstanding, sharp-witted thinkers. Their treatises and dialogues fill thousands of pages, and they were always at pains to get at the truth. Whoever reads Plato’s Dialogues will find out the real meaning of philosophy and dialectics. In his dialogue entitled The Laws, Plato enters into conversation with a guest of his from Athens, with Cleinas from Crete and with the Lacedernonian Megillos. These men also discuss past ages, and the Athenian says:
If we look closer we will find that the paintings and sculptures created 10,000 years ago—and I mean this amount of time precisely, not in the usual vague sense of the term—are neither more beautiful nor uglier.10
Why does the Greek emphasize the fact that he means a precise period of “10,000 years”? Because the Greeks regarded all numbers above 10,000 as anything from “big” to “infinite.” In Book 3 of the same Dialogue, the men speak quite openly about the downfall of earlier cultures. It is clear that knowledge of these extinct civilizations was self-evident in those days—and not just of small nations decimated at some point or other by war or natural disaster. No, people knew about a global catastrophe caused by a great flood. In Plato, one can read in detail about the eradication of whole countries and cities, and that only small groups survived in mountainous regions. These survivors, he says, had preserved the art of pottery, had lived by hunting, and could make blankets and simple weapons, for they could do this without iron. The use of metals, on the other hand, he says, was taught them by the gods, “so that the human race, in the midst of the travail in which it found itself, would regain fresh impetus and strength to develop.”11
One can read how the cities of the plains and by the sea were destroyed and all the metal mines were submerged so that it was no longer possible to get new ore. All tools were lost as well, and much knowledge, including the “art of politics.” Subsequent generations, says Plato, soon forgot how many millennia had passed. Many people interpret this Dialogue as a kind of assumption, as if Plato were saying “Let’s assume this happened, that the world went under and people had to start again from the beginning, how would it be.” But this view doesn’t have much mileage, for the mention of extinct cultures in Plato is not confined to The Laws. And the Athenian expressly says that he is talking of a precise figure of “10,000 years.”
But why should such a catastrophe have occurred? In Plato’s Politics one reads with astonishment about: “The miracle of reversal of the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies. Where they now rise, there they once set, and rose on the other side.”12 That sounds quite absurd, but in our time gains another dimension. Just imagine a globe and give it a spin around its own axis to get our days and nights. Now tilt the axis over and let the globe continue the same rotation as before—not, in other words, stopping its spin and reversing it. What happens? To the inhabitants of the earth it seems that the sun has changed its path. Of course it hasn’t really, but turning the earth’s axis in another direction makes it seem so. And a change in the earth’s axis will also inevitably lead to terrible floods. Ever since we have known that the magnetic field of our planet shifts, a change in the angle of the earth’s axis has been within the bounds of possibility.
Centuries before Plato, the poet Hesiod lived in Greece. Several epics, poems, and fragments of his have survived the millennia. The best known work is his Theogony, which was written between 650 and 750 BC.13 In it he mentions frightful beings who once inhabited the earth. The gods themselves had created them: dreadful figures “with 50 heads, and from their shoulders hung down enormous limbs.”14 The fire-spitting dragon is also already part of Hesiod’s menagerie. Apollonius, living 300 years later, cannot therefore have been the inventor of the dragon in the Argonautica.
From the shoulders of the gruesome, snaking dragon grew a hundred heads, its dark tongues flickering and licking about in all directions. From each pair of eyes of the hundred heads light flashes and bums…when he looks his gaze burns like fire. And each of the appalling heads has its own reverberating voice, a wondrous multiplicity of sound.15
One can also read in Hesiod’s Theogony how the goddess Chimaera, from whom we get the word “chimaera” or “mixed being,” gave birth to a fire-snorting monster. The monster possessed three heads, that of a lion, a goat and a dragon. The dragon head “snorted the terrible ardour of a fiercely glowing fire.”16
Once again it is not clear where Hesiod got his information. It is assumed that he too used original Egyptian sources. His accounts are too colorful, too precise and too technologically slanted to have arisen in his own time. In his book Works and Days, he writes that the gods created four races before they created the human race: “First the gods, they who dwell on the heights of Olympus, brought forth a golden race of much-discoursing men.”17
The above quote is translated from a German version of 1817. Professor Voss translated the Greek to read “they who dwell on the heights of Olympus”. In newer versions of the same passage, we find a slightly different slant: “[gods] dwelling in heavenly houses.”18
Let me put these two translations, separated by only 150 years, alongside each other so that you can compare them and draw your conclusions:
1817 |
1970 |
“First the gods, they who dwell on the heights of Olympus, brought forth a golden race of much-discoursing men. These were ruled by Chronos, at that time reigning in heaven. And they lived like the gods, their souls continually cared for…” |
“Deathless gods dwelling in heavenly houses first created the golden race of frail human beings. That was at the time of Chronos, when he was still king in the heavens. And they lived like gods, having no worry in their hearts…” |
The ancient Greek some of us may have toiled over at school is not sufficient to judge which version is more accurate. Although the general drift of both translations is broadly the same, there is a fundamental difference between “heights of Olympus” and “heavenly houses,” and between “ruled by Chronos” and “at the time of Chronos.” What will the translation sound like in the year 2100? And what was the original sense and meaning in Hesiod’s time? After the “golden race” the gods created a second, lesser race, a “silver race.” This race was still created by the same gods, those who “dwell in the heights of Olympus,” or, perhaps, “dwell in heavenly houses.” This “silver race” was of a lower order than the golden race, both in form and outlook, and was made up of “softies,” whose mothers pampered them.
After this came “a third race of noisy people.” These were of “great strength and force,” and “from their shoulders grew huge limbs.”19 This race is supposed to have been obdurate and obstinate, and its agricultural tools were made of metal. But this race too was a disappointment apparently, and so Chronos created a fourth as well: that of the heroes or half-gods.
We modern people, according to Hesiod, belong to the fifth race, the iron race. We are a mixture of “good and evil,” and experience joy and pain. But when things degenerate to such an extent that children no longer resemble their fathers, hosts no longer welcome their guests, and brothers no longer love one another, then our race too will be destroyed in the name of Zeus.
Hesiod gives a vivid, detailed description, including all the finer points of the weapons involved, of the battle between the gods and the Titans. Although the latter had been created by the gods themselves, they had to vanish from the face of the earth. A terrible struggle broke out, in which even father god Zeus got involved, hurling from the skies great exploding bolts of lightning, missiles which made the seas boil, burned whole regions, and brought the earth to its trembling knees. Hesiod uses many pages to describe the slaughter, but I will quote only a short excerpt from the 1817 translation:
Up above too, the Titans consolidated their squadrons…loudly did the earth quake, and the dome of heaven boomed…and straight from heaven and from Olympus rushed in the Thunderer, with a flash of lightning. Blow fell upon blow, with rumbling and flashing of fire…holy flames intertwined…the fertile sprouting earth flamed up and the great forests collapsed in the fury of fire…then the holy winds caught fire too, so that the eyes of even the strongest were blinded…as if the domed heaven descended close to the earth, the loudest, most thunderous noise vented itself…the gods stormed in to the fray, the winds blew wildly and whirled up dust and destruction…then Zeus sent his sublime missile…and awful clamour arose…20
Such a battle was not waged with earthly means. Something very similar, but with even more dreadful weapons, is described in the Indian epic The Mahabharata. There, too, different races of gods do battle with each other:
The unknown weapon is radiant lightning, a frightful messenger of death, which turns to ashes all who belong to the Vrishni and the Andhaka. The bodies consumed by fire were unrecognizable. Those who escaped with their lives lost their hair and their nails. Clay pots broke without cause, the birds turned white. In a short while food became poisonous. The lightning fell to earth and became fine dust.21
And what did Gilgamesh say when his friend Enkidu died in great pain after encountering the divine monster Chumbaba? “Was it perhaps the poisonous breath of the heavenly beast which struck you?”22
The Mahabharata versions available in German are all edited and shortened. Because I can’t read Sanskrit, I have to refer mainly to the many volume versions in English. The similarities with Hesiod are too compelling to be simply overlooked.
It was as if the elements had been set free. The sun turned in circles, and burning from the weapon’s heat, the world staggered in flames. Elephants were singed by fire and ran wildly to and fro…the water grew hot, the beasts died…the thundering of the flames made the trees crash one after the other as in a forest fire…. Horses and chariots burst into flames…thousands of chariots were destroyed, then a deep silence fell…a terrible sight met the gaze. The corpses of the fallen were disfigured by the awful heat…never before have we seen such a dreadful weapon, never before have we heard of such a weapon.23
This is also the place to mention another cross-reference to Gilgamesh: “The heavens cried out, the earth screamed out in reply. Lightning lit up, a fire flamed upwards, death rained down. The brightness vanished, the fire was extinguished. All that had been struck by the lightning turned to ashes.”24
All these weapons of mass destruction—whether described by Hesiod, or in The Mahabharata, or the Epic of Gilgamesh—were used in times before written history began. If these battles of the gods had occurred in an “historical epoch,” we would have precise accounts with dates. Since this is clearly not the case, they must either have taken place in prehistoric times—or in the imagination. I do understand the point of view of scholars who made their commentaries on these ancient writings before 1945. But since the end of the Second World War, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we ought to be a bit wiser. We now know what “gods” are capable of.
The 24,000 couplets of The Ramayana are also a treasure trove for the gods’ prehistoric activities and technological capabilities. Although the written version of The Ramayana dates back to the 4th or 3rd century BC, the content comes from unknown sources. The hero of the story is the king’s son Rama, whose wife Sita is stolen away by the demonic giant Ravana and taken to the island of Lanka—reminiscent of the cause of the Trojan War. With the help of the king of the monkeys (and much technological back-up), Rama succeeds in winning back his wife.25
A marvelous vehicle which rises into the air is described in full detail. It resembled a flying pyramid and took off vertically. It was as tall as a three-story building and flew from Lanka (Sri Lanka or Ceylon) to India. The flying machine therefore covered more than 2,000 miles (3,200km). Inside this flying pyramid there was room for several passengers, and also some secret chambers. As it rose up from the ground carrying Rama and Sita, there was a terrible noise. There is a description of how the machine makes the mountains quiver and shake, and heads off upward with the sound of thunder, but also sets fire to buildings, fields, and forests. Decades before Hiroshima, in 1893, Professor Hermann Jacobi commented: “There is no doubt whatsoever that this must refer simply to a tropical storm.”26
As I said before, after Hiroshima we should be a little wiser. But the commentaries which experts still make about these ancient texts make me feel as though we’re stuck in the wrong age. To me, it is clear that much of what the ancient chroniclers recorded did not stem from their macabre imagination, but was once reality—even if such gruesome events did not take place at the time the poets and historians were writing about them. If they had witnessed such events at close hand, they wouldn’t have been able to write about them anyway, for they would all have been dead. The chroniclers were not eye-witnesses; they wrote down things which others had seen, or heard of, from far away, and then told their offspring, perhaps after visiting the burned lands and cities afflicted by the devastation. Or perhaps after survivors from the outermost fringes of the battle had recounted their appalling experiences to others who had not been involved.
Information of that kind, passed on Chinese-whisper fashion, can never be exact. And even less so given the fact that neither the eyewitnesses nor the later chroniclers had the faintest clue about modern weapons systems. What else could they do but ascribe what they did not understand to supernatural deities? In their eyes they were, after all, “gods”—for what else could they be? There is also a quite clear distinction throughout ancient literature between natural phenomena and the weapons of the gods.
In his Theogony, Hesiod also turns his attention to the Cyclops. These were supposed to have been huge figures similar to the gods, who had only one eye in the middle of their foreheads, which gave them their name of “round-eye”: “Their single eye was round as a circle and set in the midst of their face.”27
One might think that Cyclops must really be the products of imagination, since there have never ever been one-eyed creatures, but I’m not so sure. Since the 17th century, there have been documented cases of occasional miscarried fetuses with one eye. And modem genetics has ascertained that only a single gene is responsible for our two eyes. At the earliest fetal stage of vertebrates, to which we belong, there first develops a kind of strip of light-sensitive cells. If the function of the “Pax-6” gene did not kick in, this light-sensitive conglomeration would fail to divide into two separate areas, and we would all be Cyclops. Heaven knows what genetic experiments the gods dreamed up—and where the chroniclers got their idea of the Cyclops from.
The Greek Hesiod also mentions flying chariots in several passages, such as Fragment 30, where Zeus descends with thunder and lightning from the firmament. And the former ruler of Lydia is said to have had access to fairly mind-boggling technology. He was called Gyges and was originally a shepherd. Herodotus writes that Gyges had come, while still young, to Candaules’ palace, and had made friends with this ruler. One day Candaules had urged Gyges to hide himself in his bedroom so as to admire the beauty of his wife as she undressed. This happened, but the ruler’s wife noticed the voyeur and the next day demanded that he murder her husband, for otherwise she would reveal to all and sundry what had happened, and Gyges would lose his life. If he did murder Candaules she would make him king of Lydia—which is what happened. Now Gyges is said to have possessed a machine which rendered him invisible. Plato writes about this in his dialogue The State. When Gyges was still a shepherd, a great storm and earthquake had one day erupted, and the earth had gaped open. Astonished, the young Gyges had stared into a great hole in the ground that appeared before him. He climbed into it and:
Saw, besides other wonderful things, also a hollow iron horse with windows. Gyges looked in and also saw a corpse within, seemingly bigger than human size. It had nothing on other than a golden ring on one hand, which Gyges drew off and then climbed out again.28
The ring could move, and Gyges turned it. When he met his fellow shepherds again, he suddenly noticed that they did not see him. Depending on which way he turned the ring, he either became visible or invisible, but even when invisible he could still hear and see everything going on around him. This amazing ring must have made it very tempting to go and inspect his queen’s sleeping quarters. But he must have made some slip for she would not have noticed him otherwise. And for someone who could make himself invisible at will it could not have been too hard to become Lydia’s ruler.
The Gyges tale is the oldest known story about a voyeur. It might be pure fantasy, for who wouldn’t occasionally like to have a way of becoming invisible? But why all the business with an underground chamber containing the skeleton of a giant, and a metal horse with windows? Somehow this story reminds one of Aladdin, who only had to rub his wonderful lamp, in order to get his heart’s desire.
Fairy tales are fairy tales because fictional things take place in them. The accounts of appalling weapons used in prehistoric times do not resemble them in the least, for one thing because they describe a technology which we only now recognize; secondly because fairy-tales would not have been engraved on clay tablets millennia ago, for reasons I have already given; and thirdly because these gods’ weapons do not appear in the accounts of only one people or nation.
There is still a further reason why the substance of the Argonautica story did not first arise in Greece: constellations. East of the Great Dog constellation—easy to find in the night sky because bright Sirius belongs to it—we also find the Argo cluster. The Argo or “heaven’s ship” is relatively difficult to make out, because it lies quite low in the south and in spring vanishes again in the evening. The Argo is said to have been affixed to the firmament by the goddess Athene, who also made the Argonauts’ vessel unsinkable, and equipped it with the speaking beam. But this constellation was already known as “heaven’s ship” by the ancient Babylonians.29 The same is true of Aries. The Greeks derived the Aries constellation from the Golden Fleece. They believed that Phrixus and his sister Helle had once flown upon the Golden Fleece from Europe to Asia. Helle fell from the Golden Fleece down into the sea, which is why the channel there is called the Hellespont. The ram (Aries) however, had freed himself from his golden skin and had flown up to the firmament, where he became a constellation. Yet Aries had likewise long been known by the Babylonians.
According to legend, Pegasus, the flying Greek horse, bore upon his back the demonic Chimaera, which had the heads of a lion, goat, and dragon. But this constellation, too, existed millennia before Apollonius. The same is true of the Taurus constellation and the Pleiades. It is easy to show that the Greek poets took their constellations from older peoples, and only later invested them with their own heroes. We can be sure of this simply because some things which the Greeks adopted were no longer applicable even in their own time. For example, in Hesiod’s book Works and Days, he warns of the 40 days in which the Pleiades are not visible as being a time to avoid travelling by ship. He says that the period of their disappearance is always accompanied in the Mediterranean region by wild storms at sea (the so-called equinox storms). But from an astronomical point of view this was no longer correct in Hesiod’s time.
In reality it “applied in 4000 to 2000 BC, at a time when the heliacal setting of the Pleiades fell roughly in the weeks following the spring equinox.”30 So Hesiod must have been drawing on older sources.
The heroes of the Argonautica sail down the Eridanos River, which modem scholars try to place in northern Italy. But the Greek texts continually connect this Eridanos with the constellations of Aquarius and Orion. The star-gazers of ancient Babylon saw it in just the same way, which is proved by an astronomical table that was discovered in the clay tablet library of Assurpanibal. And where does the dragon come from that was also admired in the firmament long before the Greek poets arrived on the scene? It appears in Sumerian clay tablets. Some god or other is said to have shown a priest star constellations and even to have drawn them on a tablet. Among these was the heavenly dragon with his many heads. This immediately reminds me of the so-called “heavenly journeys” which the antediluvian prophet Enoch undertook. There too, it was an “angel” who mapped out the firmament for him: “I saw the stars of heaven, and I saw how he called them all by name. I saw how they were weighed in a just scale, according to the strength of their light, after the fashion of their breadth and the day of their appearance.”31
The world of Greek legend was always related to the fixed stars, but the starry constellations, together with the enigmatic stories and ideas associated with them, existed millennia before then. Prometheus was said to have taught mankind to observe the rising and setting of the stars. He also taught them writing and various branches of knowledge and science. I have already described the sea creature Oannes, who did exactly the same thing. Diodorus of Sicily recounts something very similar in his first book, namely that the first human beings learned their language, writing, and knowledge from the gods.32 One finds just the same thing amongst the ancient Egyptians,33 the Japanese,34 the Tibetans,35 the Mayans, the Incas….
Only our culture is uninterested in these ancient traditions and accounts. Of course, we know better!
There is not the slightest doubt that the Greek poets and historians took ancient stories and related their versions of them to their own land to “make them their own,” investing them with Greek gods and Greek landscapes. But the substance of these stories, whether in the Argonautica, or in Hesiod’s accounts of the battle between gods and Titans, does not refer to Greece at all. Nevertheless I believe that the descendants of the gods did leave their traces behind in the geographical region of ancient Greece. Let us now see what these traces might be.
