Denying the reality of the gods (including God) by attributing to them only mythological (fictional) status is easy. Much harder is to try to accept their reality while stripping them of their supernatural (deity) status. That’s what I try to do here. If that however can’t be done, well the fairy tales involving the ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek, etc. gods or the Biblical God still make for interesting bedtime stories.
Introduction:
The concept that once-upon-a-time, a time long, long ago, an extraterrestrial civilization’s beings held sway and had influence over humanity has gained stature. We call those ancient beings the ‘gods’, even ‘God’. Collectively, they are now known by the popular phrase ‘ancient astronauts’. While that concept has just about zero credibility with scholars (vested interests perhaps), the general populace has had a far more open mind on the issue, at least judging from the popularity of books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc. that discuss the issue.
Let’s start off with some basic assumptions. Mythology is not purely an invention of the human imagination out of whole cloth. There are grains of truth or reality within the tales. Humans are intelligent enough to separate basic facts from basic fictions, even if the facts are often embellished to make a good tale better, or misinterpreted. The mythological gods (including God) really existed. However, they weren’t really supernatural beings or deities. That’s the misinterpretation part. Tales of the gods have, I’m sure, been embellished as well.
That’s because oral traditions (language) has existed vastly longer than the written record. Thus, there’s a long oral tradition of the ancient astronaut ‘gods’ and their relationships with humans and with each other before it all started to be written down, since language proper first came to the fore less than 100,000 years ago (probably less – more like 50,000 years ago with the development of full behavioural modernity) but writing can only be traced back to roughly 6000 BC. That’s a lot of in-between time for a lot of the details to have been embellished or lost and lost too in the retellings over some 2000 generations!
When it comes to the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ mythology when coupled with astrobiology, well that combination forms a greater dynamic duo, a more profitable source of material, explaining all relative to that of pure archaeology and related artefacts. Thusly, in dot-point form, here are some central facets to the mythology behind ‘ancient astronauts’.
Astrobiology:
*A few Type-II advanced technological civilizations exist within our Milky Way galaxy. A Type-II civilisation is one that can harness the energy output of an entire star.
*They have subluminal interstellar spaceflight capacity.
*Subluminal interstellar spaceflight violates no laws of physics.
*The time it takes to cross from one edge of the Milky Way galaxy to another is a small fraction of the age of the galaxy even via subluminal velocities.
*It is likely, even highly probable that Planet Earth was discovered by one or more such Type-II civilizations many, many millennia ago. You can’t hide or cloak a star, solar system and planet.
*These Type-II civilized interstellar travelling beings arrived on Earth in one or more spaceships way before humans existed.
Mythology:
*Our advanced extraterrestrials set up shop on Planet Earth as an R&R home-away-from-home, sort of taking dominion over this paradise / nature reserve / national park, perhaps with a view towards eventual long-term colonization.
*In much the same way as British colonizers of Australia brought with them reminders of home, from plants and crops to cattle and sheep, not to mention rabbits, cats and dogs, so to did the ‘god’s bring with them their menagerie, like say the hydra, chimera, unicorns, Pegasus, and of course dragons.
*This would certainly explain why nearly every pre-Christian human culture independently had dragons as part of that culture. Dragons could be good (The East), or bad (The West) but regardless ‘here be dragons’. So, I suspect that at one time, thanks to the ‘gods’, dragons were anything but mythical.
*There are many other common themes that cut across several cultural mythologies involving the gods. One is that you can be turned to stone (or in the Biblical sense, a pillar of salt perhaps?). ‘Global’ floods are common in the mythological literature, not just in the Bible. Nearly all cultures have trickster ‘gods’. And in creation myths involving the cosmos, there’s nearly always a subdivision between attic (the sky or heaven, etc.); the basement (the underworld); and ground level (Planet Earth). That trilogy is probably not too surprising however since wherever we are there’s always an up, a down, and a sideways. However, the importance of near universal mythological themes between cultures with no contact between them is relatively obvious in an ‘ancient astronaut’ context.
*Such extraterrestrial beings became known collective as the gods or as deities to humans as soon as humans evolved sufficiently to develop (or were given a) language and a reasonable level of intellect. The gods are really an advanced race(s), representing a Type-II civilization(s), but to more simplistic humans, such advanced extraterrestrials were interpreted as deities.
*These advanced extraterrestrial beings will be hereafter referred to as the ‘gods’, because that’s they way humanity perceived them.
*There are numerous creation myths surrounding the ‘gods’. The ‘gods’ created heaven and Earth; living things; other ‘gods’ – you name it, they probably created it.
*’Gods’ are of course usually responsible for creating the human race and beings.
*Humans may have evolved from ‘lesser’ primates, but the ‘gods’ did some artificial selection to assist the process so as to provide the ‘gods’ ultimately with a labour force. This is how the ‘gods’ ‘created’ humanity. That the ‘gods’ created humans is one very common creation tale among many differing cultures. ‘Genesis’ has no monopoly on how the ‘gods’ breathed life into man and woman.
*This is akin to humans establishing a horse farm say, stocking same with say wild horses and then artificially breeding them for the trait(s) you want.
*The ‘gods’ created humans to do the hard yakka (one good reason why humans, not aliens, built the pyramids and other monumental stoneworks such as cities, as temples, as buildings, as massive statues, etc).
*If that’s the case, it would give further credence to the comments made many, many decades ago by the late Charles Fort (of Fortean or anomalies fame) that “I think we’re property”.
*The ‘gods’ brought culture, arts and crafts, trades, fire, agriculture and all the other civilized products (i.e. science, writing, language) to early human societies. That might be one reason why the transition from primitive hunter-gatherers to sophisticated settlements and ‘civilization’ was apparently reasonably quick in many, but not all parts of the world. Some African and Pacific cultures (i.e. the Australian aborigines) remained nomadic, but their ‘gods’ and mythologies are also hard to mesh with the European, the subcontinent and Asian cultures. This might be another case of division of labour – this lot of ‘gods’ took sole responsibility for this geographical area; this other lot of ‘gods’ looked after another geographical area. The styles of these differing collections of ‘gods’ might have differed enough to account for why some parts of the world developed ‘civilization’ and some didn’t, even though all parts had ‘gods’.
*As a possible example of advanced knowledge given humans, reinterpreted by mankind in the only way possible given their limited understanding of modern cosmology, we have creation myths involving the ‘cosmic egg’. The basic story generally goes roughly like this: in the beginning there’s this dark void, or an endless dark and still ocean; in this darkness there was an egg, often a golden egg. For reasons unexplained, the egg breaks open and hatches, often associated with an outpouring of light. There’s usually a deity or deities in the egg who then go on to create the rest of, well, creation, including the heavens, the Earth, the underworld, and of course life. Now variations on this basic story will be found in at least ancient Egypt , Greece , India , China , Africa (the Dogon and Mande peoples), Japan , Finland , Tibet , Borneo and Oceania . In the 20th Century, early cosmologists postulated the Ylem or the primeval atom as the ‘cosmic egg’ equivalent. Today, the ‘cosmic egg’ we’d now call ‘before the big bang’; the hatching would be the big bang; the associated deity or deities would be the natural process of physical, chemical and ultimately biological evolution that created, well, the rest of creation.
*Now humans, not knowing any better when subjected to various natural disasters like local, but intense, floods, were prone to blame the gods for being pissed off at humanity – maybe they were!
To be continued…
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