“Every myth, every legend reflects, as shown by science, a state or a real event.... And so to our great surprise, we find knowledge embedded in myths, albeit enciphered but not to be doubted, which early humans could not have acquired...”1
This quote comes from the ethnologist Karl Kohlenberg, who as long as 50 years ago was conducting comparative research into myths and reached the baffling conclusion: something is not quite right here. Why do Stone Age cultures that lived thousands of kilometers distant from one another and had no contact report related stories? Where do the conspicuous common elements originate? The very influential French classicist and ancient historian Professor Pierre Grimal (1912–1996) defined myth as “chronologically disordered history.”2 At their core, the original events had been preserved but frequently not in the correct causal context and, furthermore, in a wrong time.
Somewhere out there in indefinable space, “chaos” ruled. The world had not yet been created. Many of the oldest traditions start with this idea. Our ancestors could not imagine the origin of the universe. Are we better informed today? Someone created order in this chaos. Who? Where does this someone come from? The Greek poet Homer has Gaia arise and she in turn gives birth to Uranus—the starry heavens.3 The Old Testament places chaos at the beginning. Then God enters stage right and creates order. He creates light, then water, land, vegetation, then the creatures of the sea, birds, and finally “cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth” (Genesis 1:24), and on the sixth day, as the crowning glory of Creation, the human being.
How, actually, did the scribes of thousands of years ago know about the obligatory course of biological evolution? Human beings were not simply placed there as finished creatures. Before them there had to live other creatures, before them in turn sea creatures. That was only possible if land and water were first separated and an energy source—the sun—shone in the sky. The sequence is correct.
In Greek mythology, things are more confusing. The starry heavens—Uranus—produce the 12 Titans, male and female giants with immense strength. Their names are Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Cronus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, und Tethys. They begat children and those in turn children. Thus were created Helios, the Sun god, and Selene, the Moon goddess. Cronus begat Poseidon and Zeus. There was war in the universe and on Earth. Zeus fought against the dragon-like monster Typhon. Zeus finished the beast off with a lightning bolt. How else?
This Zeus (Latin for “Jupiter”) is described by Homer as the father of all gods and humans. He gives earthly kings their power. Zeus is also the designer of a robot called Talos. This Talos circled the island of Crete several times a day and shot down anything that had no business on the island.4 Zeus is also the father of Apollo, and he, in turn, is the teacher of young humanity. Apollo’s main place of residence on Earth was Delphi, the location of the schools of wisdom and the Oracle. Delphi lies at the center of an incredible geometrical network that already existed in antiquity and was set up by gods of some kind.5 Apollo, of course, possessed a heavenly chariot. He used it to fly each year to the “Land of the Hyperboreans which lay behind the north wind,” but also over the ship Argo with its crew the “Argonauts.”6
All human fantasy? Fire-breathing dragons? Fights in space? Flying machines? Robots?
Another of Zeus’s sons was called Ares (Latin for “Mars”). He was a war-like being who was always in the company of Phobos and Deimos (fear and terror). Phobos and Deimos are still the current names of the two moons of Mars with their impossible orbits. They are definitively the strangest moons in our solar system. They orbit Mars in almost circular trajectories over the equator and they do so faster than Mars below them is rotating. Our astronomers say the two bodies are fragments from space that were once captured by Mars. This view has some snags. Both moons of Mars rotate in almost the same plane over the equator of Mars. One fragment might do that by chance, two is stretching things. In our time, several satellites have approached the moons of Mars and provided some quite good pictures. They are potato-like fragments with various craters from strikes. At a distance of 165 miles, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also photographed a strange, monolith-like object with a clear, rectangular shadow. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, said, “There`s a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato-shaped object that goes around Mars once every seven hours.” Next to the craters, parallel stripes have also been photographed on the surface. That is why the attempt was made to fly past Phobos and Deimos at a lower level. But no satellite from Earth reached its target. Our earthly probes went “blind” before they could transmit their images to Earth. Now we have two “potatoes with craters” but we know as little about the inner life of these small celestial bodies as we do about their orbit. In the autumn of 1972, the then-most famous Soviet astronomer, Iosif Shklovsky, at the Sternberg Institute in Moscow, told me, “I suspect that the two moons of Mars are hollow. Their orbits are not natural.” Furthermore, the craters raise additional questions. It is generally known that debris from space strikes planets that do not have a protective atmosphere in which at least the smaller lumps would burn up. But why on such midgets like Phobos and Deimos? God knows the two don’t possess the gravity of planets or larger moons. It is difficult to avoid the impression that at one time an incredible barrage of rocks flew through our solar system. From where? What was the cause? Star wars like the one fought by Zeus (and others!)? And was Ares, the son of Zeus, who created the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, not a god of war?
Aphrodite (Latin for “Venus”) and Hermes (Latin for “Mercury”) were children of Zeus. People ascribed fantastical stories to them, yet the origin of all these myths remains shrouded in obscurity. The root of the Greek word myein (myth) contains the meaning of “mysterious.” What Homer wrote about the gods was, in his time, already the result of a very long development. The gods were superhuman in the eyes of people, and yet they were similar to human beings. They lived in a kind of non-earthly state. They did not eat human food but ambrosia, the heavenly food, and drank nectar, the heavenly drink.
The gods were imagined to be omniscient and omnipotent and yet there are things they don’t know about what is happening in their immediate surroundings. They were also similar to humans in their form, just more beautiful and of more noble appearance.... They either reveal themselves to humans in their true shape or they transform themselves into human beings....7
So far the gods possess exceptional characteristics:
And where do humans come from? In almost all the traditions, they were created by heavenly beings. Greek myth reports that Prometheus, a son of the Titan Iapetus, had descended from heaven to Earth. The word Prometheus means “forethinker.” This Prometheus possessed the knowledge of the gods and he also knew how the seed of heaven could be transplanted to Earth. So he took clay on Earth, wet it, and created a form out of it in the image of the gods.”8 Prometheus took the good characteristics of the animals and enclosed them in the human breast.
Animal characteristics are said to have been transferred to humans? Does there not resonate a primordial memory of an artificial mutation? Changes to the base sequence in the DNA molecule?
The first humans, so Greek mythology tells us, did not understand anything about their surroundings. They walked about like phantoms; they knew neither art nor technology. “Then Prometheus attended to these creatures: he taught them to observe the rising and setting of the celestial bodies, invented the art of counting for them, writing...but also shipbuilding...and taught human beings with regard to all other circumstances of life...”9 Prometheus also instructed human beings in astronomy, metallurgy, and all kinds of sciences.
Other authors, some of them unknown, reported the same about that incomprehensible period. Diodorus of Sicily (Diodorus Siculus), for example, the historian from the first century before Christ, traveled the world for 30 years and visited all the libraries of antiquity. His historical work comprises 40 volumes. In the second volume, he writes that the first humans had literally learned everything from the gods, be it astronomy, metallurgy, road or house building, the art of writing, the healing arts, and whatever else. All of this must have happened in a very early time because it was the gods who taught human beings “not to eat one another.”10 When were our ancestors still cannibals?
Prometheus is also the one who brought fire to human beings. To do so he took a long stalk of giant fennel, held it against the passing chariot of the Sun, and in this way set the fennel alight. And soon the first fires were burning brightly on Earth. The supreme god, Zeus, saw this as treachery. He had poor Prometheus chained to a cliff of Mount Caucasus. In Christian/Jewish mythology, Lucifer starts a fight “in heaven” and resists the command of God with his armies. Lucifer is cast out of heaven and brings fire to Earth. “Lux fare” is Latin for “making fire.”
Are all of them just silly stories? Myths? A hundred and forty years ago, the highly respected philologist Professor A. Wollheim, who had studied the ancient traditions that had been handed down, wrote, “Anyone who sees myths as just nonsensical tales and nice allegories has no idea of their importance. The myth is something quite different: it is the most sublime expression of the most sublime truths. Furthermore, it is also the primordial history of humanity.11 (Author’s italics)
Polynesia lies a long, long way from Greece. We understand it to mean the approximately 50 million square kilometers of Oceania from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the southeast. All of it is Polynesia—dreamily called the “South Seas” in popular parlance. This island world is awash with ancient traditions which—how could it be any other way—basically communicate the same content as in Greece. The creation story of the Maori in New Zealand tells about the creator god: “Io breathed in infinite space. The universe was in darkness. There was no glimmer from ‘below,’ of clarity, of light...”12
Like everywhere else, Io began to make light, create water and earth, then animals, and finally the first pair of humans. They were images of the cosmological primeval gods, created in their image. The inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands do not know anything different. They lie south of the equator, 1,600 kilometers northeast of Tahiti. (Politically, the Marquesas Islands belong to French Polynesia.)
“In the beginning the cosmos was in high heaven. Tanaoa lived in heaven...there was no voice, there was no music. Nothing living moved. There was no day, there was no night. There was only blackness, black darkness...”13
On the island of Samoa, the primeval god, who of course came from the cosmos, was called Tagaloa. Like everywhere else in Polynesia, the emptiness of the universe is first described. There is only ‘chaos,’ no light, no earth, no land, no sea, nothing on which something could grow. He had come from the infinitude of space, the great ‘Tagaloa.’ He had set lights over the earth, one for the day, another for the night. He had created land and water. Then he sowed the seed and created fish as well as animals on land. There are, so the tradition of the native inhabitants of Samoa says, nine different heavens and all of them are inhabited. Tagaloa appointed rulers over the different heavens, but also messengers between the heavens:
Then Tagaloa, the creator, spoke to Tagaloa-le-fuli, “come here, I appoint you chief of the heavens.” Then Tagaloa, the creator, spoke to Tagalossavali, the messenger: “Come here, you shall be messenger between all the heavens. Starting with the eighth heaven to the first heaven. They shall all gather in the ninth heaven where Tagaloa-lefuli rules.”14
We learn that many stars are inhabited, but that is also what it says in many other original traditions. (I will come back to that.)
In the creation story of Hawaii, there are even three creator gods: Kane, Ku, and Lono. Each has different characteristics, but without exception they all came from space.
And the wandering stars and the inhospitable stars, and the wandering stars of Kane, innumerable are the stars, the large stars, the small stars, the red stars of Kane. Oh infinite cosmos. The large moon of Kane, the large sun of Kane, turning, moving in the immensity of the cosmos...and they created the human being in the image of Kane.15
Not one of these myths reached Polynesia through the white conquerors. It was not the Christian priests who taught the native inhabitants their knowledge. All traditions existed before. Jesus or other figures of Christian belief do not exist in the wide space of the Polynesian creation myth. Neither do any figures from the Old Testament such as Abraham or Moses. The ancient stories were told for x generations before there was contact with whites. And everywhere the stories begin with the endless cosmos. A god or some gods move in the blackness of the universe. There was neither above nor below, neither light nor shadow. The gods spent a very long time in this blackness until they were finally touched by the light of a sun. The path of the gods to Earth is described in more detail in the traditions of Kiribati. Kiribati is the collective name for a group of islands that stretch north and south of the equator. The islands belong both to Micronesia and Polynesia. Thirty-five years ago, I spent several days in the astonishingly well stocked library of “Bairiki,” a village on the main island of Kiribati. There I studied the legends literally on site.
At the beginning, a long, long time ago, there was the god Nareau. No one knows from whence he came, who his parents were, because Nareau flew alone and sleeping through space. In sleep, he heard his name being called three times, but the caller was “nobody.” Nareau awoke and looked around. There was nothing but emptiness, but when he looked down he saw a large object. It was Te Bomatemaki—meaning “Earth and Sky together.” Nareau’s curiosity led him to descend and carefully set foot on Te Bomatemaki. There were no living creatures there, no animals, no humans. Just him, the creator. Four times he circumnavigated the world he had found from north to south, east to west, and he was alone. Finally Nareau dug a hole in Te Bomatemaki, filled it with water and sand, mixed both into rock and ordered the rock to give birth to Nareau Tekikiteia. Thus on instruction of the Creator, Nareau Tekikiteia was created, meaning “Nareau the Wise.”
Nareau the Creator now ruled over Te-Bomatemaki, while Nareau the Wise was in the earth. Then Nareau the Wise created the first beings endowed with reason.
“And when the work was done, Nareau the Creator said, ‘Enough! It is done! I go never to return!’ And no one knows where he has been since then.”16, 17
This ancient body of thought can be reasonably reinterpreted from today’s perspective. Someone is flying alone and sleeping through space until he is woken by a voice who was “nobody.” An astronaut lies in deep sleep. An on-board monitoring system registers a solar system with planets. The astronaut is woken by the computer, a “nobody.” Below him, namely where there is the gravity of a celestial body, he notices a large object. The Earth. Once again in full command of his faculties, the pilot decides to land on the alien planet. (“Nareau stretched his limbs, he wanted to know what kind of object it was...he descended and carefully set foot on it.”) Next the astronaut flies around the new planet from east to west and from north to south. He finds no sign of life and decides to plant the seeds of life. (“At that time there were not yet any spirits nor any human beings but only mighty Nareau. He went four times around the world...and determined that there was no life.”)
The myth cannot tell by what means Nareau made life flourish. Perhaps the processes were too confusing to be understood. (“Nareau dug a hole in the earth and filled it with sand and water. Mixed both into rock...commanded the earth to give birth. Thus Nareau the Wise was created.”)
The characterization “the Wise” could stand for “spirit,” “being ensouled,” or “living.” Where previously there was emptiness life now begins to sprout. Now two elements of creation are at work: Nareau the Creator of all existence and Nareau the Wise for the start of terrestrial development. (“Nareau the Creator was now above Te-Bomatemaki, while Nareau the Wise was in the earth.”)
I have noticed a small difference between the principal god of Kiribati and the other super goods. Nareau went, “never to return.” Other divinities—Osiris (Egypt), Quetzalcoatl (Mexico), Gesar (Tibet), Nommo (Mali), and so on—expressly promised to return.
One island chain in the South Pacific is the New Hebrides. The native inhabitants of Malekula (one of the islands) tell that a long time ago, Barakulkul had come from heaven with five of his brothers. They did so in a coconut which opened by itself.18 This accords with the story from the Fiji Islands, for there the first humans emerged from a shiny egg which the cloud serpent “Degei” had thrown to earth.19 For the Micronesians, heaven and earth were connected by ropes a long time ago. On one occasion, the brothers Tawaki and Karihi wanted to visit heaven. So they went to the place where the ropes were hanging down from heaven. One of the brothers managed by this means to reach the heavenly realms. And one of the Hawaiian gods, Lono by name, left Earth in a cloud ship. He did so with the express promise to return in the far distant future. The same applies to the youths Punifanga and Tafalin, both from Samoa, who “were borne up in the smoke of a might fire.”20 This immediately reminds us of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan, the feathered serpent of Central America. Be it the Maya, the Aztecs, or still earlier the Olmecs, all of them were familiar with the feathered/winged serpent that came from heaven and from which the original teachers emerged.
Professor Johannes Andersen, probably the foremost authority on all myths of Polynesia, author of a 500-page work on them, notes, “There are innumerable cosmological variants on the origin of the ancestral parents.... The expanses of space are mentioned multiple times and the infinitude of the universe.”21
Not actually a surprise, one might think, for the South Sea Islands are tiny specks in the expanses of the Pacific Ocean. The native peoples stared upward each night, observed the course of the stars, and were lost in their reveries. But why did they think up the same or, at least, similar creation stories to the people in Egypt, Sumer, America, Australia, or China?
Psychologists such as C.G. Jung developed the idea of a common archetypal consciousness. Even if such an archetypal consciousness existed, where did it start? After all, even this archetypal consciousness had to start in a brain. Through which inspiration, influences, experiences?
I keep having to point out in my lectures and books that these archetypal memories cannot be events from nature. Why not? Stone Age people experienced natural disasters of all kinds: earthquakes, eclipses of the sun, volcanic eruptions, thunder, and lightning. They gave rise to the first nature religions. But the gods who came from the stars are not comparable because they supplied information. They acted as teachers. They instructed human beings in many fields of the sciences and technology. This is told by all historians of antiquity. No force of nature takes humans “up to heaven”—into the spaceship—and instructs them as follows: “Son of human beings, look outside. Do you see that small light out there? You humans call it the moon, but the moon does not have light of its own. It draws its light from the sun.”22 Then the person is told about the phases of the moon and about the course of the stars and the Earth around the sun, including leap hours. It can be read up in the Book of Enoch, chapters 72–75 and so on. And all this happened in the Stone Age because Enoch was the seventh patriarch before the Flood.
No nature religion will help us further, no lightning, no thunderstorm, and no earthquake. Scientific facts were communicated.
Often variants of the same myths were handed down by the same peoples, which should not come as a surprise. These traditions were handed down before there was writing. Stories were probably told through an endless relay from tribe to tribe, family to family, until it finally became possible to set them down in writing. The core nevertheless remained the same.
One of the Samoan legends tells about the god Tagaloa: “God Tagaloa lived in the universe. He created everything. He was alone, there was no heaven and no land. There was no water, no rock, neither sea nor earth. His original name was ‘Tagaloa-fa-atuputupu-nu-u’, which means ‘Origin of Growth.’”23
As elsewhere, this primordial god creates the sun, then land, water, fishes, land animals and, as the pinnacle, human beings in the right sequence. This is described in the following way:
Then Tagaloa spoke to the rock, and “Lua`o,” a boy, came out. Then Tagaloa spoke again to the rock, and “Luavai,” a girl, stepped out. Tagaloa brought both of them together...then Tagaloa made the spirit, the heart, the will, and the thinking.... Then said Tagaloa, may the spirit, the heart [feelings?], the will, and the thinking come together in human beings. And they combined and human beings were intelligent.24
The gods were always involved in the creation of human beings. Yet as far as I am aware, not a single one of the creation myths reports that human beings had descended from the apes or that some heavenly being had formed the human being out of the chimpanzee. Oh yes—there is often talk of liaisons between gods and humans, but not between humans and apes.
Often the people of Polynesia linked their ancient stories with specific geographical locations. Thus the ancient temple of Te-Mahara on the island of Raivavae (French Polynesia) is today still deemed to be the location where the god “Maui” landed after his space flight.25 The native inhabitants of Ati Ona, one of the islands of the Marquesas group, say the same. The small mountain Kei Ani is considered to be a sacred place although there is no structure there. The mountain was originally called Mouna-tuatini-etua, which literally means “Mountain on which the gods landed.”26 And of course (why should it be any different!) the South Sea islanders erected temples in honor of their heavenly teachers. These rectangular structures are called marae and they can be seen on many Polynesian islands.
The Marae Tooarai on Tahiti is a regular nine-stepped pyramid, the one in Raiatea (French Polynesia) a rectangle made of monoliths. And even on the small island of Borabora, which has a circumference of merely 14 kilometers, there are several, although smaller maraea. Nowhere did I find sculptures chiseled into the stone. No depiction of the gods, such as, for example, on the Maya pyramids in Mexico. Just simple terraces or platforms in memory of and as waiting rooms for the gods.
The Marae of Arahurahu on Tahiti consists of several terraces.
Photo credit: Erich von Daniken, Beatenberg/Schweiz
The Marae of Raiatea in French Polynesia, a former landing site of the gods.
Photo credit: Erich von Daniken, Beatenberg/Schweiz
Reinhard Habeck, a thoroughly honest researcher and author of many books on the subject of extraterrestrials refers to a “cowshed of god” in an article for the magazine Ancient Skies (currently Sagenhafte Zeiten).27 This is a circular wooden building constructed by a Dinka tribe in Upper Sudan. Despite having a large diameter of 12 meters, the round house is empty. It serves as a sacred site in honor of a god called Mayual, who is said to have ascended to heaven from this site.
Many peoples honored their gods in places that later became sacred sites. This is what happened to a majority of the gigantic temples of antiquity. They arose everywhere where the gods were once active. The oldest Maya city of Tikal is located in what is Guatemala today. But it was only founded because the “ruler of the heavenly family” had once descended here. This is what is inscribed on a small Mayan plate, the so-called “Leyden Plate,” which is today kept in the Museum of Leyden in the Netherlands. Another of these ancient locations, 20 kilometers east of the Euphrates (south of Baghdad, Iraq) was called Uruk. (Biblical Erech, Greek Orchoi, Roman Orchoe.) Today it is Warka. Uruk existed as long ago as the fourth century before Christ and is the location where the oldest writings were found, including the Sumerian text “Bilgamesh and Akka.” (Not Gilgamesh.) The cuneiform script tells about a temple built in honor of “An, who has descended from heaven.” The structure was erected “where a cloud spread over the earth...where a start was made from earth...where the magnificence of An started from the earth....”28
The god Enlil and the heavenly goddess Inana originally resided in Uruk. They maintained “the bond between heaven and earth.”29 The geographical space in which the incomprehensible occurred is a glob on the globe. Mesopotamia, the home territory of the earlier Chaldeans, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians, is only an hour by plane from Egypt. That is why a brief link with my book Evidence of the Gods is appropriate here:
In the Pyramid Texts of Unas from the Third Dynasty, researchers keep encountering verses (so-called “Utterances”) in which the Pharaoh literally flies in a heavenly barque:
(Utt. 267) “A stairway to heaven has been set up for me so that I can ascend to heaven... and I climbed up on the smoke of the large vessel. I fly high as a bird and light as a beetle on the empty throne of your barque, oh Re. And I am permitted to sit on your seat and thunder across heaven, oh Re. I am permitted to lift off the land in your barque...”
(Utt. 434) “You have helped every god who possesses an own barque so that they set themselves up in the starry heavens...”
(Utt. 584): “The doors of the (?)...which are in the firmament were opened for me, the metal doors which are in starry heaven lie open for me...”30
There are many of these verses but our confused zeitgeist turns them into wishful thinking. The priests had imagined journeys of the pharaohs after death. This is nothing but scientifically misunderstood nonsense. Our busy Egyptologists are not aware of the links with ancient India. There, too, the leaders of humanity are ferried about in flying vehicles, so-called “vimanas.” The following extracts are a few examples:
“‘Faster Matali!’ spoke Indra. ‘Be quick with my heavenly chariot...’ Matali steered the chariot which gleamed like a sunbeam to the place where Rama encountered his enemies. Take this heavenly chariot, Matali called out to Rama...dressed in heavenly materials, Rama mounted the chariot and threw himself into battle such as human eyes had never seen before....”31
“While Kalki is still speaking, two chariots descend from heaven, gleaming like the sun, made of gems of all kinds, moving by themselves, protected by incandescent weapons.”32
“So the king sat down...in the heavenly chariot. They reached the expanse of the firmament.... The heavenly chariot flew around the earth over the oceans towards the city of Avantis where a festival was just being held.... After a short stopover, the king started again under the eyes of innumerable onlookers who marveled at the heavenly chariot.”33
And these gods were never squeamish. The terrestrial rulers supplied the “heavenly” beings with gold and diamonds. In return, they were protected.
Thereupon Hor-Hut flew up into the firmament in the form of a large sun disc with wings attached... when he saw the enemies from the heavenly heights, he charged upon them with such might that they neither saw nor heard him. Within a short period of time, no living head existed any longer. Hor-Hut, shining in many different colors, returned to the ship of Ra-Harmachis in his shape as a large, winged sun disc.34
There is no shortage of stories about flying vehicles in antiquity. The busy critics have no idea about this. King Solomon gave his lover, the Queen of Sheba, a flying chariot: “He gave her all the splendors she could wish for...and vehicles with which to drive on land, and a chariot which flew through the air which he had made in accordance with the wisdom given him by God.”35 (Author’s italics) We even know about the speed of Solomon’s flying chariot: “The king and all under his command, they flew on the wagon without sickness and suffering, without hunger and thirst, without sweat and exhaustion, covering a distance of three months in one day.”36 (Author’s italics)
These were facts recorded thousands of years ago. That our busy Egyptologists and Sumerologists turned this into legend is understandable. The zeitgeist was not yet ready for the logical consequences. But meanwhile the links can be shown; exegesis—the interpretation—is no longer isolated to a geographical region. Myths are “the most sublime expression of the most sublime truths and much more. They are the primordial history of humanity,” according to Professor A. Wollheim 140 years ago.37
If we accept as a factor in even just one example that gods equal extraterrestrials, all the creation myths abruptly make sense from Greece through Polynesia to the jealous God of the Old Testament. And this simple insight also throws a light on certain construction technologies in ancient history. Once accepted, illumination passes around the world.
Even the soil of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was the landing site of the god Perun thousands of years ago. Starokyivska Hill lies in the center of Kiev. Until the ninth century it had a religious building in honor of Perun, who long ago “descended from heaven in a pillar of fire” in precisely this place.38 Like Zeus in Greece or Odin in Germania, Perun was deemed to be the “god of lightning” who drove around the earth in his heavenly chariot. Originally the sacred site for this flying god comprised an area of 10,000 m2. This has been shown by archeological investigations in Kiev.39 Most of these ancient sacred sites were destroyed with the advent of Christianity. This happened (almost) worldwide.
We are quite well informed about the heavenly beings who came from the cosmos in silver and golden eggs in the pre-Inca period. Both in South and Central America, priests traveled to the newly discovered lands soon after the first conquerors. Their job was to bring Christianity to the native peoples. But the bearded and not very pleasantly smelling ecclesiastics also noted what the indigenous inhabitants were telling them about their gods, written down more than four centuries ago when flying was not yet occupying our minds. There were reports about “golden and silver eggs out of which came the teachers, the heavenly nobles.”40, 41
The Spanish chronicler Pedro Simon writes that a priest from the Chibcha tribe had told him the following about the beginning of all things: “It was night. There was still something of the world. The light was locked up in a large ‘something hut’ and emerged from it. This ‘something hut’ is Chiminigagua and it contained the light within itself so that it would come out. Then things began to be.”42
The Chibcha are a tribe in the highlands and the valleys of the eastern Colombian cordillera. Logically they had no understanding of extraterrestrial technology. So the spaceship became a “something hut.” No different than distant Easter Island. The primordial gods were venerated as “masters of the universe.” They include Makemake, the inhabitant of the air. His symbol is the egg.43 And the same thing exists thousands of kilometers away in the highlands of Tibet. The so-called “Books of Kandshur and Tandshur” tell clearly about “pearls in the heavens” as well as of “shining glass spheres” from which the gods emerged.44 “Kandshur and Tandshur” are not actual books but folios in which the sacred texts of Lamaism are recorded. The term Tandshur means “translated teaching” and is a commentary on the “Kandshur.” No one knows their original age.
The similarities in the content of sacred books is always intriguing although their authors could not know anything about one another. So the Inuit say that their great-, great-, grandfathers once came to present-day Alaska in “flying houses.”45 And the Tungus, a tribe in Siberia, claim their first divine couple had descended from heaven “in a silver gondola.” That is precisely how it was recorded by the famous polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen in his book The First Crossing of Greenland.46 The work was published in 1891, once again a time when aircraft were unknown.
It is the same across the world. In ancient Egypt, Nun was seen as the endless ocean of stars from which the primal god Osiris had once arrived in a “golden ship.”47 Just like the gods, his spouse Isis descended in a silver barque from Sirius to human beings. Osiris and Isis, the heavenly couple from Orion and Sirius. It was no different in Nippur, the millennia-old Sumerian city. The place is called Nuffar today and lies about 180 kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It once had step pyramids in honor of Enlil and Ninlil. Like in Uruk, tablets made of lapis lazuli (lapis is a blue shiny mineral) were also found in Nippur, which praised the two gods “because they maintain the bond between heaven and earth.”48 Why, then, is there something similar in the Finnish national epic Kalevala? God knows the far north has nothing to do with Baghdad in the south. The Finns refer to a “flame bird,” which brought wisdom from heaven and was also involved in fighting in the firmament.49
We can leap around the globe. Cultures that have never met, never heard of one another, report about similar events which, without exception, took place in a dark age when there was not yet any writing. Just being surprised about that is not enough. We have to draw the conclusions. Human beings experienced the arrival of their primal gods from the cosmos. Once there was writing, their memories migrated to clay tablets, palm leaves, and wooden boards. Later they turned into stone sculptures. The experiences of the venerable ancestors were to remain unforgotten forever. Thus, they grew to become an element of the cultural heritage, the religions, and were celebrated in folk dances or priestly song. The powerful impact of the past, the mystery of the heavenly teachers, was never to fade from memory. After all, those gods had promised to return one day. Nothing surprises me any longer. The gods were visitors from alien solar systems. What else? In Exodus the descent of God is described in the following words: “And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.” (Exodus 19:18)
What did we turn that into? Religion. Those who don’t want to know go on about how it was only a tropical storm or volcanic eruption—and ignore that the tropical storm or volcanic eruption gave precise instructions. There was a flow of information. God has spoken. The faithful, in turn, see the true and only God behind it. As if the being of God, the sublime figure of Creation, would care about a small ethnic group on a ridiculous world called Earth among trillions of planets. Even more insane, as if he would go racing about on this insignificant planet with a vehicle that descends on a mountain in “smoke and fire” and makes it glow. Whereby the same “God” still issued the instruction before his landing to erect a fence around the mountain to avoid the people being harmed. All previous attempts at an explanation, no matter how clever and profound the intention, are on a hiding to nothing. The facts should determine our insight—not religious or psychological wishful thinking.
What facts? Those of the temples across the world in honor of the gods. Teotihuacan in Mexico, the place “at which the gods conferred,” the place also “at which the gods are buried.”50 “During the period of night, when the sun did not yet shine, when there was not yet day, the gods assembled at the place called Teotihuacan.”51 And this Teotihuacan is not some one-horse town where a few temples are located. All the buildings on the main street, the “Avenida de los muertes,” form a model of our solar system, including Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto about which the Stone Age planners could not know anything—other than through the gods, the teachers.52 Uruk, one of five cities in Mesopotamia founded by the gods, was modeled on a heavenly city on another star.53 “In China, Hangzhou, Marco Polo’s Ling-gan or King-se, was called the ‘heavenly city.’ They believed their city was an image of the cities of the gods in the heavens,” writes the ethnologist Karl F. Kohlenberg.54 And in Beijing, in the middle of the capital of the Chinese empire, there stands the Palace of Heavenly Emperors. Just like that? So that atheistic China remembers a “heavenly emperor”?
How divorced from the world does theology and comparative religion have to be to avoid bringing the facts in the ancient texts, the sculptures, the rituals, and the “heavenly cities” under one umbrella? An umbrella, by the way, which covers a multitude of things and provides a meaningful explanation for everything.
Rome, the Holy City. Why is it located where it is? The god of war, Mars, once made a king’s daughter pregnant. What else? She gave birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. The children were set adrift on the river Tiber in a willow basket (remember Moses in the basket on the Nile) and were ultimately nursed by a female wolf. Decades later, Romulus had long become king, and the god Jupiter kidnapped Romulus and took him to heaven. From that time on, his divine name was “Quirinus.” And the location of these incomprehensible events was called Rome.55
Among the Germanic peoples, the supreme god was called Odin (also Wotan, the angry one). Of course his parents Bos and Bestla came from heaven. In the land of the gods, in Asgard, he sat on a throne and could oversee both the world of the gods and the world of humans. His war horse had eight legs and was the fastest means of transport in the firmament. On his shoulders sat the holy ravens Huginn and Muninn, who on their wings could see everything that was happening on Earth. What was that in Egypt? Nothing on Earth escaped the falcon Horus, a son of Osiris and Isis. The eye of Horus is keeping watch.
Thor (Donar the thunderer) was a son of Odin and—as so often—a mixture between heaven and earth. Thor’s mother was accordingly the human Jord. Thor’s tool was a gigantic hammer that hung on a magic belt. The innumerable enemies that Thor slaughtered also included the architect Thyrm. Why did Thor kill Thyrm? Because the latter was meant to build the fortress of the gods Asgard, but something went wrong. In the end, many descendants of the gods landed in Valhalla.56 And this, in turn, is not located in some arbitrary spot on Earth. Take a map of Germany and draw a line through the present-day cities of Aachen, Frankfurt, Würzburg, Nuremberg, and Donaustauf. All these points have their origin in the Stone Age and can be connected with a dead straight line. After about 300 kilometers as the crow flies, the stretch ends at a hill behind Donaustauf. That is where the temple complex of Valhalla is located.
Nowadays tourists drive up to the impressive columned hall by car. The temple in honor of great Germans was built by King Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786–1868), but according to legend, the original Valhalla, the funerary temple of the god Odin, was in the region.
Communities, cultures, and peoples are all connected by myth. In the view of the East African Massai, who are located mostly in the south of Kenya, there once lived upon earth a young man by the name of Kintu and he fell in love with the daughter of a heavenly being that had visited Earth. The father permitted Kintu to go to heaven for a time to learn. But when the pair remained in love also in the heavenly realms, the father sent both of them back to Earth to instruct humans in all matters.57 This is very similar to the myth of the Bantu peoples in today’s South Africa. There the heavenly god Nzame had descended to Earth to investigate the planet. Here he fell in love with the extremely beautiful human woman Mboja. The pair begat a son and called him Bingo. The supreme god was angry about this cross between a celestial and terrestrial being and the two of them were not allowed to return to heaven. The pair instructed humans in all matters and now we know the origin of the popular expression “Bingo.” Bingo! The Shilluk tribes in southern Sudan say that the first human being, Omara, had originally come from heaven. At that time, humans still lived like wild animals and killed one another. But Omara weaned them away from the animals and taught them everything they needed to know. Omara had also founded the first kingdom on Earth.58
Valhalla near Donaustauf in Bavaria, Germany.
Photo credit: Tourismus Donaustauf/Deutschland
Always the same: The original teachers always came from the stars. The Nuba tribe lives primarily in the middle of Sudan and forms the largest non-Arab group. They are a group of more than a million people, which nevertheless speak different languages. All of them have the creation myth in common according to which the heavenly god Nuba ordered his divine messenger Su to bring grain to humans. To this end, he was to lower the grain kernels “from heaven to earth on a long bamboo pole. As soon as the kernels had arrived on earth, the messenger of the gods was to beat a drum.”59 (According to other versions, he lowers it on a long hemp rope.) As soon as the heavenly god heard the sound of the drum, he intended to pull the bamboo pole up again so that humans could not use it to climb up to heaven. But the divine messenger was driven by curiosity and he opened the sack of grain before he reached Earth. Now some of the kernels fell down directly on to the drum. The heavenly god heard the faint drum beats and thought his messenger had reached Earth. So he quickly pulled the bamboo pole up again. The messenger fell to Earth and with him the sack full of grain, which broke open on the ground. So the divine messenger showed humans the grain and taught them how to make fields and grow cereals.
Here the question arises as to the origin of certain foods. Both the Central and South American tribes hold the view that maize was brought to Earth by the gods and originally in four colors: yellow, white, red, and black. The same applies to bananas. There is no knowledge of an “original banana.” Rice too is supposed to be a gift from heaven, the brilliant Indologist Armin Risi reports.60
I wrote extensively about the Dogon tribe in the Republic of Mali, in my last book.61 Their heavenly teacher was called Nomo and came from the constellation of Sirius. This Nomo also told the Dogon about the Sirius system. He explained to them that Sirius was a dual star (currently Sirius A + B) and that there were still additional celestial bodies in the system (which are still unknown to our astronomers).
South American peoples, including the Inca and Warao tribes, even say that originally humans had lived in heaven and had descended from time to time to hunt here. It was only later that they settled here. But they had sporadically been visited again and taught by their heavenly ancestors. Reports of the same kind can be found among the Kogi Indians in Colombia. They live in the mountains on the Caribbean side of Colombia. Their original heavenly teachers created the first humans, instructed them in all matters, and continue to visit them even today. It was the same teachers who warned human beings thousands of years ago about a flood which would be intentionally caused and ordered them to build ships. “And the priests, the older brothers, all descended from heaven....”62, 63
That is astonishing for a lateral thinker like myself, for the same story was told worlds and oceans away from Colombia. The Sumerian King List <WB444>, currently in the British Museum in London, says, “After the flood had passed, the kingdom descended from heaven once more.” And the same is told in the Gilgamesh epic, which also originates from Sumer. After the flood, the gods descended from the heavens.
Who would have the sorry courage to ignore this worldwide accumulation of statements? In what age are we living? In the 17th century or the age of global communications? The Tootoosh native peoples on the northwest coast of California not only report about a Thunderbird, which descended from the heavens and instructed their ancestors, but they also still represent this Thunderbird on their totem poles today. The Hopi in Arizona—this is something my loyal readers are familiar with—know about the heavenly teachers and naturally venerate these teachers in the form of dolls. “The first world was Tokpela, the endless universe. But right at the beginning, so our elders tell us, there was only the creator Taiowa. Around him was infinite space. There was neither a beginning nor an end, neither time nor form. Just immeasurable emptiness....”64 That is how it has been handed down in the Book of the Hopi, the collection of myths of this Native American tribe that today lives in Arizona. And White Bear, the oldest Hopi, described to the NASA designer Josef Blumrich what originally happened:
This is the story of my ancestors and the clans who came to this part of the world. The continent on which my people lived for a long time sank into the sea and the people had to leave it.... In the first world the deity Taiowa created human beings.... He gave them reason, he gave them knowledge, he gave them all the things they need for their life. And he gave them the law and the duties they had to fulfill in this part of the world.65
And as a cross-connection for new readers: Naturally the Kayapo on the upper Amazon, 8,000 kilometers distant from the Hopi, know the same thing and celebrate it in their dances even today. These, then, are not just obscure tales handed down but verifiable evidence: totem poles, kachina dolls, Kayapo dances, gods who have descended chiseled in stone worldwide, sacred places where the gods were once at work, and so on. We call all of this illustrative material. Bingo!
And how do we act? We continue to live in the dulled, sticky mess of the psychology of religion, which has answers to everything, none of which are true. Two years ago, I spoke at the theological faculty of a Swiss university in the department of comparative religions—a quite ordinary lecture in a quite ordinary lecture hall with 30 quite ordinary students. I spoke about flying vehicles in the ancient Indian writings, the so-called “vimanas.” When I had finished, the dean of the faculty explained to his students how these texts were to be understood. “When a young man today drives through the landscape in his open top car, his hair flutters in the wind. He has the feeling that he is flying. That is what happened thousands of years ago. At that time the offspring of the prosperous rulers drove into the arena in richly decorated chariots, often with pearls, and drawn by four horses. Their long hair fluttered in the wind. They thought they were flying....”
And I thought I was dreaming. In the ancient Indian texts there is clear differentiation between chariots with wheels that roll on the ground, and those without wheels that fly over and above the Earth and even to the moon. But in the theological faculties, even those teaching comparative religion, people still live in the Middle Ages. Nothing new is added. The same applies with regard to the most sacred book of Christianity: the Bible. Theologians persist in proclaiming that the Bible contains the Word of God. The famous Jesuit and professor of theology, Karl Rahner, the mentor of whole hosts of young priests, asserts that the story of the Old Testament “came from the God who ultimately revealed himself in Jesus Christ.” The scripture of the Old and New Testament had the same originator. The Old Testament was from the beginning “an open progression towards final salvation steered by God.”66 And the theology professor Jacques Guillet teaches that the stories in the Bible were “without exception reports about the fulfillment of a Word of God. This schema applies in all cases.”67 Aha! In fact, and every theologian should know this, the Old Testament is a work full of contradictions, written by innumerable authors at various times. And often texts from outside sources were inserted. (For example, the story of the Flood that comes from much older Sumerian writings, or the stirring story of the little boy Moses who floated down the Nile in a little basket. The same is already reported about the Babylonian ruler Sargon I, a thousand years before Moses.) The Old Testament glorifies a pseudo god who descends to humans in smoke, fire, noise, and heat. In this context even the vehicle of this “God” is described in detail in the book of Ezekiel. And since my first work, Chariots of the Gods, a copy of that “heavenly vehicle” has been drawn by a NASA rocket engineer.68, 69 We know today what Ezekiel was describing. A similar thing applies to biblical manna or the Ark of the Covenant. Modern knowledge exposes the Ark of the Covenant as a life-threatening technical device which, furthermore, “is not of this earth.”70
The explanations of our time are without exception sensible, logical, and scientifically comprehensible. But that is of no interest to any theologian. Professor Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), the “father of space travel,” told me some years ago, “There are scholars who behave like stuffed geese. They no longer take in new knowledge.”
The book of the Old Testament prophet Job describes a “leviathan” as follows (Chapter 40):
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron...Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.... When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings, they purify themselves. The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.
What is being described here? Jacques Guillet says, “Without exception reports about the fulfillment of a Word of God. This schema applies in all cases.”
There are in our time increasing numbers of books by authors who can read the “Book of Books” in various languages and who correctly analyze the nonsense that has been interpreted into the Old Testament. Thus Walter Jörg Langbein, theologian and comrade-in-arms from the beginning, picks apart “Holy Scripture” and uncovers the various original sources that were raided to make the Bible.71 His analyses appear to have provoked as little interest as the work of Mauro Biglino, who fluently reads Hebrew and knows all the links to the Aramaic and Semitic roots.72 In Mauro Biglino it becomes clear that angels were nothing other than extraterrestrials and that there is a crucial difference between angels and cherubim: “While angels are persons, cherubim are machines!”73 Every Bible reader is left with the belief that a single great God has been at work in the Old Testament. Nothing of the kind is true. The reference is always to the “Elohim,” the gods in plural. Accordingly the translation regarding the creation of the human being is not “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” but “...we want to make man in our image...“74
A fairy tale? No. It is the concordant primal memory of human beings and the same is reflected in the tales worldwide.
“Long ago there was a time in which all people lived up in heaven...”75 So starts one of the creation myths of the Inuit. “Moon spirits” and “heavenly beings” created the first humans and later there was also sexual contact between the “moon spirits” and Inuit women.
The Japanese tribe of the Yamasachi tells of a time “when there were still demigods on Earth who commuted between heaven and Earth as they wished.”76 Like elsewhere, here too it came to sexual intercourse between the “offspring of a heavenly deity” and humans. The product was—what else?—half gods, half humans. The Japanese Amewakahiko kings founded their ruling house directly together with heaven: “The origin of our ruling house extends back into the age of the gods. With Jimmu Tennô, the sequence of terrestrial rulers begins.... Now because this land is a land of the gods, it happens from time to time that gods live as humans among us and unite with humans...”77 Something similar can be heard in the world of Egyptian tales. All rulers of the Old Kingdom descended directly from some god or other.78 And those gods expressly wanted humans who were similar to them.
Kings as sons of the gods? Tibet, China, Greece, and many more say hello. Flying chariots in ancient India, with Solomon, in the Bible? Already heard the one about the flying carpets in the Arabian and Persian tales?79 The knowledge of visits by gods and the creation of humans is global. Not to recognize this is thoroughly unscientific. And the psychological variations that keep being wheeled out in explanation of this fantastical reality are no more than grumpy vanity.
The Baltic Latvian people may be more closely related to us than remote King Solomon. Their principal god was called Dievs. (For the Romans, “gods” = “die.” In French today, still “god” = “dieux.”) Dievs lived in heaven and ruled there over vast riches. He rode around the heavenly mountain on his flying horse and, at the time of the terrestrial harvest, descended from heaven to earth.80 Chinese mythology is familiar with nine heavens, whereby the supreme heavenly god resided in the constellation of the Great Bear.81 The original emperors reached the earth with fire-breathing dragons. In the Tibetan highlands, it is not just the first ruler, Gesar, who came from space but also many other gods.82 And how? “Heaven resounded, the earth shook, there was the roaring of dragons.” The quote could come from the Old Testament. But it doesn’t. It comes from Tibetan mythology. Other heavenly beings of Tibet “used a rope or ladder to descend.... Many sons of gods descend from the heaven of the gods to the earth of humans. They then become the rulers and kings of human beings.”83
Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America, is poles apart from Tibet. Like everywhere else, the primal human being, Kenos, came to Earth to bring order to it. “Then he flew back to heaven; he now lives among the stars.”84 It is no different among the Pawnee people in what is Nebraska today. According to their teaching, humans were created by stellar beings and the heavenly ones had come down to us repeatedly “with fire and smoke.”85 (Food for thought: There are 11,000 kilometers as the crow flies between Tierra del Fuego in South America and the great plains of the USA.)
We lack perspective. Every scientist, however hard working, has to specialize. There is no alternative. Knowledge has become too extensive. The paradox here? Specialization is precisely the reason why the connections fail to be seen. It is impossible for an Egyptologist to know the Indian writings of the Mahabharata. All the texts from the field of ancient India are not even known to the specialists in Indology. There are simply too many. If even the Indologists don’t have a complete overview, how, then, is the Egyptologist supposed to learn about the gigantic body of Indian literature alongside his own specialism? Of course! Super computers could show the links—to the extent that the texts were previously scanned in and the right program existed. Personally I need six months to battle my way even superficially through the Mahabharata and specifically the “Drona Parva” (part of the Mahabharata).86 Scholars who make this effort just once in their lives know for all eternity that the ancient gods can only be a reference to space travelers from distant worlds. Among those knowledgeable about the ancient Indian texts, any discussion about alien space travelers thousands of years ago only provokes a weary smile. Of course they were here. Anyone who still disputes this does not know the comprehensive textual material. The “Drona Parva” describes space ships in the firmament, then terrible “heavenly” weapons in comparison to which every tropical storm, every earthquake, every volcanic eruption is a mere hiccup. There was clear differentiation between “cities in the firmament”—we would describe them as “generational spaceships” today—and smaller space shuttles. Whereby, and this is worth noting, the men who translated these texts from Sanskrit into English lived in the last century, except one.87 Therefore they couldn’t have the faintest idea about mother spaceships, aircraft, space shuttles, etc. The translation of verse 50 in the “Drona Parva” says specifically, “The three cities came together in the firmament.” It was translated in 1888!88 Weapons systems are described that burn everything through “concentrated heat rays,” others are activated through the eyes of the pilot. Then there are hypnotic weapons or weapons that produce illusions in the firmament. Weapons that can make mountain chains explode and others that could tear open the whole planet if they were deployed. The “Drona Parva” describes aerial battles between different armed flying machines, which can change their position in the firmament at lightning speed. This is where we need a short quote from my book Habe Ich Mich Geirrt?
Scorched by the heat of the weapons, the world staggered in heat. Elephants were burned and stumbled about...The water boiled, all the fishes died...The trees fell by the dozen...Horses and war chariots burned up...It was a nightmarish sight. The dead bodies were mutilated from the terrible heat; they no longer looked human. Never before has there been such a gruesome weapon, never before have we heard of such a weapon....89
The hair of the warriors and their fingernails and toenails fell out from the effect of this weapon. All life paled because it was overlaid with the “deadly breath” of the god. And far from where the weapon was deployed, even the unborn children died in their mother’s wombs.
We Westerners have no idea. We bask in the feeling of being the greatest, indeed, the pinnacle of evolution. We don’t care about the ancient traditions of cultures. And the weapons systems in the thousand-year-old texts of the “Drona Parva” have long been adequately explained. They were “tropical storms.”90 Since when do tropical storms cause the effects described? And since when are tropical storms also responsible for deadly radiation that kills unborn children in their mother’s wombs? And in any case, how did people thousands of years ago know anything at all about deadly radiation? We are resting on the completely false laurels of our self-aggrandizement. The flying chariots of thousands of years ago? Nothing but “meaningless chatter” and “foolish fantasies,” so said Professor Hermann Jacobi 160 years ago.91
One hundred and sixty years in the past! Yet the views of yesteryear, at the time probably carefully considered by highly intelligent professors with great integrity, have at no time since then been questioned, at least not by the relevant scientists. There is no “new school.” The old knowledge is gumming up the brains. And books like the present one or those of my outstanding colleagues don’t count. Why? I said so in the Introduction: Because its hypotheses and evidence do not fit into the laboriously constructed mosaic of established conventional wisdom, scholars will put it on the list of those utopian books which it is advisable not to talk about.
What to do? Provide enlightenment and let the zeitgeist do its work.
The Bantu tribe in Cameroon tells of its oldest patriarch that he flew down to their tribal homeland in a large hollowed-out tree. “Everything we can see was made by Mubei. First he made the earth...then the grass steppes... then put the animals on them.... Nyoenduma made a great rock rain. Whereupon it opened with great thunder and brought forth the first two humans.”92
Humans created by some “heavenly beings”? This is also told by the small tribe of the Abasi in West Africa. Abasi brought the people living in heaven directly to Earth. “He created all things. All things above, all things below. He created the water and the forest and the rivers and the springs and the animals. He created all the things that are there in the whole world, but he did not create the human beings...because they lived aloft with Abasi in his heavenly city.”93
A “heavenly city” was also inhabited by the King of Salem, a priest of the supreme God of the Jews.94 Or the Tibetan son of heaven, Gesar. He originally lived in a flying city that shone in the firmament and “possessed roofs of heavenly iron which resisted every lightning bolt.”95 Or the Arab historian Nashwan Ibn Said, who died around 1195, and who told about “a city of metal,” which had in the past appeared out of nothingness. The whole town had stood on “silver, gleaming pillars” and water had been guided through the facilities in metal channels.96 Or Hadhad, father of Bilqis (Queen of Sheba). His residence was “a flying palace made of metal and towers.”97 Or, as already mentioned, the “three cities in the firmament” in the ancient Indian “Drona Parva.”98 Or “cities in the heavens which gleamed like crystals,” described in the Book of Enoch.99 Or...or...there are many such examples. Heavenly cities are simply a part of the traditions of peoples. Be it the most forgotten tribe somewhere in Africa, be it in the highlands of Tibet, or be it in the profound books of the ancient Jews.
Humans had to be able to speak before they learned to write. The first language was dictated by the gods. That is what several historians of antiquity say.100, 101, 102 “Human beings are only human through language; but in order to invent language they already had to be human.”103 The quote comes from the statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1787–1835). A bush is a bush and not a moon. The sun is an illuminated sphere in the firmament and not a water course. Human beings are human beings and neither crocodile nor bird. In order to understand one another, the first humans had to mean the same thing. Only then does writing become possible. Moses was given the tablets of the law—if we believe the Old Testament—from his “God” on Mount Sinai. The Sumerians were given writing by the god An.104 It is no different in Tibet, India, or China. “We recall the fact that originally all letters and pictograms and characters were deemed without exception to be sacred by all peoples and were only comprehensible to the priests. According to that view, writing also came from the stars,”105 as Karl Kohlenberg, with his thorough knowledge of myths, confirms. Then, in about 1,600 BC this Hammurabi (1728–1686) appears, who—how could it be otherwise—was born in heaven. His mother was made pregnant by the sun god. Naturally, Hammurabi became the King of Babylon and as such he left a splendid body of law: the Code of Hammurabi. The text had been chiseled into an over two-meter high stone pillar, which was excavated at the start of the 20th century in Susa, what today is Shush in Iraq. In his laws, Hammurabi explicitly refers to “divine revelation.”106 We should be able to assume that the legislator will not start his imposing work with a whopping lie. But a lot is possible among politicians. In 280 paragraphs, the people now know about the law, but also about the financial system, the rules of inheritance, or of marriage. The Code of Hammurabi deals with several categories of people. There were those who were free, semi-free, and slaves. But within this class system, all people were equal. The free people had to adhere to the rules between one another, as did the semi-free people and slaves. Some examples:
If a man breaks into a house, he shall be buried, after he has been killed, in front of the site of the break-in.... If a robber is not caught, the city and the Elder shall replace for the person robbed everything they have lost.... If a man steels the underage son of another, he shall be killed.... If someone takes a wife but does not conclude a contract with her, then this woman is not his spouse.... If a man hires an ox for threshing, payment shall be one measure of grain. If a donkey is hired for threshing, payment shall be a half measure of grain....
Hardly a detail that Hammurabi has forgotten. His code regulates divorce, illness, property, inheritance law, the payment of day laborers, and much more, indeed, even the taking of hostages. At the end of his work, Hammurabi had the words chiseled into the pillar: “...In the days to come and for all time, let the king who rules this land observe the words of justice I have written on my monument.”
Many legislators from other cultures did indeed use Hammurabi’s code as a model in the course of human history. Today, his original stone pillar is kept in Paris in the Louvre.
It seems that those gods, the heavenly ones from another solar system, have repeatedly involved themselves in human development. And today? Where do we stand? Clearly they are involving themselves again. What future will that produce?