A Short History of the Pyramidology (Part 4)
By Kevin Jackson
Extra-Terrestrials
With the 1960s came something a little more space age. In 1969 - not so coincidentally, the year of the Apollo 11 mission that first put men on the moon - there appeared the first English-language version of the book Chariots of the Gods? The author of this curiously written and much publicised work was a Swiss hotelier, Erich von Daniken, and its theme passed into popular consciousness, borne along by serialisation in tabloid newspapers.
‘…the earth had long ago been visited by superior beings from other worlds…’
Briefly, von Daniken contended that the earth had long ago been visited by superior beings from other worlds, whose technology appeared to our distant ancestors as a form of magic; that our most ancient monuments, including the Great Pyramid (von Daniken maintains that its construction by existing earthly methods would have taken at least 664 years, although the evidence he gives for this is not clear), are the material evidence of that visit; and that the world’s religions and mythologies reflect garbled memories of the culture shock it engendered.
‘…the Pyramid was a sort of freezing chamber…’
Although it is sometimes hard to penetrate von Daniken’s prose, he also appears to contend that the Pyramid was a sort of freezing chamber, in which the significant dead could be preserved until such time as the sun god Ra (an astronaut, naturally) returned to revive them. Despite widespread derision, the refutations of scientists, and the promptings of plain old common sense, von Daniken’s writings remain in print to this day, and help perpetuate one of the leading folk myths of our time.
Continued…