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 ki
nd, 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 c
ourse, 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.
Chapter 3
The Network of the Gods
There is no such thing as indisputable truth—
and if there was it would be boring.
—Theodor Fontane, 1819–1898
Egyptology tells us that the Egyptians were the first people to build pyramids. The oldest of all types of pyramid is said to be the step pyramid of Sakkara, built for the Pharaoh Djoser (2609–2590 BC). But is that right?
Pausanius was a Greek travel writer who lived about 1,800 years ago. He travelled about his homeland and wrote vivid, often flowery descriptions of the Greece of his time. One day he was on his way to Epidaurus from Argos, a town not far from the Bay of Nauplia, when he saw a small pyramid to the right of the road (the old road from Argos to Tegea). A little further, no more than half a mile west of the present village of Ligurio, right at the foot of the Arachneus mountain, stood a second pyramid. Pausanius examined the exterior of these pyramids. They were built of hefty blocks of stone, roughly 5 feet (1.5m) long. A few larger chunks lay about on the ground, and Pausanius thought that these must have been grave pyramids.1
Not until 1936 and 1937 did archaeologists follow Pausanius’ trail and find the pyramids, which today are called the “pyramids of Argolis.” Not far from them a megalithic structure was also discovered, which is referred to rather dismissively as a “block house.” This is a square structure, built of dressed stone beams. Parts of its construction are reminiscent of the gigantic walls one can find in faraway Peru. At both places, the stonework is not composed of monoliths cut at a right angle, but of blocks interjoined in a complicated fashion, with many corners—secure against earthquakes.
Odyssey of the Gods Page 6