While in his cell [whilst incarcerated for embezzlement, fraud and forgery], he claims, he experienced an intense vision.
Von Daniken won’t discuss the nature of the vision…
Erich Von Daniken, ancient astronaut alien fame (or, infamy)—was interviewed by Timothy Ferris; an interview you can find scanned from the original magazine here and yet, one that no one seems to have transcribed as of yet which is why we will provide much of the text within this series.
Von Daniken claims that the Indian Mahabarata (oldest preserved parts are not much older than around 400 BC, may have originated 8th-9th centuries BC) and in the Epic of Gilgamesh (the Old Babylonian version dates to the 18th century BC, the Standard Babylonian version dates from the 13th to the 10th centuries BC) some, such as Gilgamesh’s Engidu, die do to a “hot wind” which he takes to be some sort of nuclear weapon.
But it is hot wind from ancient nuclear weapons or merely hot air from Erich Von Daniken?
An example of that to which ancient nuclear weapon usage believers hold is elucidated by Jason
Colavito (in his book Ancient Atom Bombs – Fact, Fraud, and the Myth of Prehistoric Nuclear Warfare):
[ancient astronaut / ancient alien] Believers maintain that in the distant past either extraterrestrials or a lost civilization like Atlantis detonated nuclear weapons, producing terrible devastation. This disaster was recorded, they say, in the Bible, Hindu scriptures, and world mythologies. Sodom and Gomorrah felt the sting of nuclear weapons when “the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens.” (Genesis 19:24-25, New International Version)…
As you will see, there is a short distance from Genesis 19’s fanciful misinterpretation to Von Daniken:
…the Soviet mathematician and ethnologist Matest M. Agrest, who argued in 1959 that Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by nuclear bombs from alien spaceships…This claim was brought to the attention of the other side of the Iron Curtain through The Morning of the Magicians
(1960), a French work by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier which outlined one of the earliest complete (nonfiction) versions of the modern ancient astronaut theory…
It was von Daniken who introduced mainstream audiences to the idea (borrowed from the French writer Robert Charroux, as well as Pauwels and Bergier) that the “aliens” had blown up Sodom and Gomorrah with atom bombs. Pauwels and Bergier quote what they say is a description from the Dead Sea Scrolls about the nuclear effects of the Sodom bomb
But the aliens were quite busy back in the day and were blowing up all sorts of sites:
From the very beginning of the ancient astronaut movement, Hindu mythology, exotic to Western eyes, has been a mainstay of ancient astronaut theories. Ancient Vedic epics, running into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of words each were perfect for out of context quoting since ancient astronaut writers could be fairly certain no one would be able to find and check their accuracy.
One ubiquitous quotation in this regards was a simple, and frightening, statement:
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, used a line from ancient Indian epic the Bhagavad Gita to reflect on the enormous power of the Bomb: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He spoke these words not at the time of the detonation in July 1945, but twenty years later, on a television documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb.
From specific sites of Sodom and Gomorrah we move to more exotic sites:
….believers hold that deposits of 28-million-year-old glass found buried in the deserts of Libya are the result of ancient atomic bombs that melted the desert sand. In fact, according to geologist Evelyn Mervine, the glass (while still not completely understood) is likely the result of either a meteorite impact or volcanic action.
Also David W. Davenport and Ettore Vincenti clamied that “an archaeological site they investigated in India, the famous city of Mohenjo Daro, was destroyed in ancient times due to a nuclear blast” within their 1979 AD book, 2000 A.C. Distruzione atomica /Atomic Destruction in 2000 BC.
Back to the Ancient Vedic epics’ millions of words, Colavito notes that one such quotation:
…is translated into English from an 1889 German translation of the Sanskrit original, with no indication of where in the 1.8 million words of the epic the quotation came, or in what context this amazing weapon worked. In Book 7, I found what I believe to be the same passage in a standard translation:
The very elements seemed to be perturbed. The Sun seemed to turn round. The universe, scorched with heat, seemed to be in a fever. The elephants and other creatures of the land, scorched by the energy of that weapon, ran in fright, breathing heavily and desirous of protection against that terrible force. The very waters being heated, the creatures residing in that element, O Bharata, became exceedingly uneasy and seemed to burn. From all the points of the compass, cardinal and subsidiary, from the firmament and the very Earth, showers of sharp and fierce arrows fell and issued, with the impetuosity of Garuda or the wind. Struck and burnt by those shafts of Acwatthaman that were all endued with the impetuosity of the thunder, the hostile warriors fell down like trees burnt down by a raging fire. Huge elephants, burnt by that weapon, fell down on the Earth all around, uttering fierce cries loud as those of the clouds.
Other huge elephants, scorched by that fire, ran hither and thither, and roared aloud in fear, as if in the midst of a forest conflagration. The steeds, O king, and the cars also, burnt by the energy of that weapon, looked, O sire, like the tops of trees burnt in a forest fire. […] Burnt by the energy of Acwatthaman’s weapon, the forms of the slain could not be distinguished. (Ganguili Vol. 7, 678-679)
In Morning, two passages from the Mahabharata are cited as proof of ancient atomic warfare. In later works, like those of David Hatcher Childress, these two passages are interpolated into a single block of (out of context, mixed together) text. Here is the passage as it is frequently given online and in the works of Childress, somewhat different than in Morning:
Gurkha, flying a swift and powerful vimana, hurled a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose in all its splendor. It was an unknown weapon, and iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.
The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out. Pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white.…After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected…to escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and all their equipment. ([David Hatcher] Childress Lost 72-73)
This passage does not appear in the 1.8 million words of the Mahabharata. Instead, it appears to be carefully and purposefully rewritten from genuine passages, combining texts at will to create a misleading paragraph that seems to indicate anomalous knowledge of nuclear bombs. Childress did not do the rewriting; it seems that Pauwels and Bergier were the first to record the variant version, though few seem to seek out the actual Vedic original, relying instead on Pauwels and Bergier or Childress rather than primary sources. When we look at the source texts, we can see how this material has been altered dramatically:
Gratified with him, the holy one then showed Utanka that eternal Vaishnava form which Dhananjaya of great intelligence had seen. Utanka beheld the high-souled Vasudeva of universal form, endued with mighty-arms. The effulgence of that form was like that of a blazing fire or a thousand suns. It stood before him filling all space. It had faces on every side. Beholding that high and wonderful Vaishnava form of Vishnu, in fact, seeing the Supreme Lord (in that guise), the Brahmana Utanka became filled with wonder.
Acwamedha Parva, Section LV (Ganguili Vol. 16)
As it turns out, the context bares out that this description pertained to an appearance of Vishnu. Here is some more:
When the next day came, Camva actually brought forth an iron bolt through which all the individuals in the race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas became consumed into ashes. Indeed, for the destruction of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas, Camva brought forth, through that curse, a fierce iron bolt that looked like a gigantic messenger of death. The fact was duly reported to the king. In great distress of mind, the king (Ugrasena) caused that iron bolt to be reduced into fine powder.
Mausala Parva, Section 1. (Ganguili Vol. 16)
Here it is clear that the iron bolt, known also as the rod of chastisement, is not envisioned as a bomb but as a type of scepter. But more importantly, this passage does not describe events that happened, but rather a prophecy of events to come. The king destroyed the bolt before it could be used. The actual destruction of the Vrishnis came three decades later when they became drunk and killed one another with pots and pans.
Day by day strong winds blew, and many were the evil omens that arose, awful and foreboding the destruction of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. The streets swarmed with rats and mice. Earthen pots showed cracks or broken from no apparent cause. At night, the rats and mice ate away the hair and nails of slumbering men. […] That chastiser of foes commanded the Vrishnis to make a pilgrimage to some sacred water. The messengers forthwith proclaimed at the command of Kecava that the Vrishnis should make a journey to the sea-coast for bathing in the sacred waters of the ocean.
Mausala Parva, Section 2 (Ganguili Vol. 16)
It is also noted that Childress:
…uses material from the Lemurian Fellowship lesson manual to tell how the Ramas and the Atlanteans fought a great war which resulted in nuclear holocaust. Never mind that Lemuria was a failed 19th century scientific theory designed to explain the appearance of lemurs in both India and Madagascar in the years before plate tectonics showed that the animals walked from one to the other when both were linked.
The self-professed possessed professor, Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, p. 52—see my review of the book here) elucidates the part that an imaginary continent played:
Through clairvoyant, telepathic, and other occult channels (a stock staple of human-alien communication in the later UFO accounts), Theosophy claimed further to offer an account of “the ascent of man” that was really more of a “descent of man,” that is. A descent or emanation from the Divine Mind. In this vision, we are all avatars, literally “descents” of the divine. And Lemuria played a key role here. It, after all, was the land of the first civilization, which the Lemurians developed with the help of some divine teachers from the planet Venus, the Lords of the Flame who arrived in the chariot of the Sons of the Fire in order to breed the next Root Race, the Atlanteans, from the stock of the Lemurians.
The notion of alien intervention in human evolution was in fact a staple of the theosophical imagination, and it worked on many levels. As Theosophist Alfred P. Sinnett—one of the first to popularize the terms “occultism” and “occult” for the English-speaking world-put it: “The evolution of man is not a process carried out on this planet alone. It is a result to which many worlds in different positions of material and spiritual development have contributed.”
This notion of a Venusian-Earth hybrid civilization would come to play a major role in science fiction, pulp fiction, and the UFO contactee cults of the 1950s and ’60s, as would Theosophy’s central assertions around some “occult dimensions to human evolution of which material sciences were barely cognizant.” In short, before there was science fiction, there was Theosophy.
But David Hatcher Childress add more confusion to the mix as he:
…cites L. Sprague DeCamp’s assessment of ancient oil-based weapons like Greek Fire to bolster the claim of sophisticated stone-age weapons. DeCamp, it should be noted, was one of the disciples of the American horror author H.P. Lovecraft, whose mythos of Great Cthulhu helped spawn the ancient astronaut theory when Pauwels and Bergier used him as inspiration for Morning of the Magicians (see my eBook, The Origins of the Space Gods and my Cult of Alien Gods). Childress then brings in another ancient astronaut supporter, Robin Collyns, to testify that on the authority of another Indian epic, the Vymaanika-Shaastra, ancient peoples had plasma guns powered by electrified mercury.
Though the Atlantis legend has its origins in an unfinished work by Plato written more than 2,500 years ago, the modern version of the Atlantis legend begins with Ignatius Donnelly, an American politician who wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882 to prove that the lost continent was very real and was the origin of all European, Asian, and Native American civilizations. Donnelly was the first to equate Atlantis with the destructive power of advanced weaponry.
Yet, beyond all of this; even the descriptions of alleged ancient atomic/nuclear weapons do not match reality:
When atomic bombs go off, the majority of their destructive power derives from the blast wave—a wall of wind that knocks down all around it. No mention of this blast wave—the most prominent effect of a nuclear blast—shows up in Genesis. Theoretically, with Lot so close to the site of the destruction, he should have felt the blast. While nuclear weapons can set off fires, this is entirely dependent on the amount of flammable material and the distance from the blast site; whereas in the biblical description the dominant motifs are first, a rain of burning sulfur and second, heavy smoke and fire lasting into the next day….
Unlike an actual nuclear weapon, which produces a mushroom cloud, vaporizes the area beneath it, and then dissipates, this weapon is specifically said to be like a “smokeless fire.” It causes the sky to fill with clouds that rain blood, but instead of vaporizing those it hits, instead, it causes the air to boil, setting alight all around it. In an actual nuclear explosion, the blast force is the force that kills once one passes the hypocenter. And anyone who survived to describe the blast would by definition have been in the region where the blast wave overtook any flame.
Outside the small area where the actual explosion occurs, the thermal radiation from a nuclear blast is intense, but brief, lasting perhaps one or two seconds. It can cause severe skin burns (but not light a person aflame). Thermal blasts can ignite highly flammable materials, though these do not include elephants or trees; nor would it boil the rivers and seas.
Within the show Ancient Aliens it was stated:
After those blasts, people who survive started to lose their hair and nails started to fall out. I mean, right there, we have a concise reference to radiation poisoning; nuclear fallout – and those texts are thousands of years old.
However, note that which the actual text actually states—Mahabharata, Mausala Parva,
2:
The streets swarmed with rats and mice; earthen pots showed cracks or broken from no apparent cause. At night, the rats and mice ate away the hair and nails of slumbering men.
Rats and mice and not nuclear fallout.
In the next segment we will touch upon the related topic of ancient alien UFOs; the Vimanas.
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