Pop Theology: Those Gods from Outer Space

Although spaceflights have detected no life on the moon or Mars, they have nonetheless increased speculation both theological and secular—about whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Some of the religious pondering has been a serious effort to prepare for that possibility (TIME, Jan. 24), but much of it—like the subject itself has been rather far out. The two most recent examples come from Europe. In Germany, a Swiss hotelman has published a bestselling book claiming that highly intelligent space travelers visited earth during man’s early history and became the prototypes for the “gods” of various ancient mythologies. And in Russia a scientist has proposed that Christ was a cosmonaut.

In his book, which will be published in English under the title Chariots of the Gods?, Hotelman Erich von Daniken builds his thesis with the zeal—and sometimes the evidence—of a flying-saucer enthusiast. Thus, chapters 1 and 3 of Ezekiel (the prophet’s famous fiery-wheel vision) are cited as Biblical descriptions of flying saucers, and Genesis 6, in which the “sons of God” mate with the “daughters of Men,” is presumed to describe the spacemen’s couplings with earthlings. Even the Ark of the Covenant becomes an intercom system through which the prophets received the word from space.

Däniken finds evidence for his extraterrestrial visitors in many ancient cultures. Only a highly advanced civilization, he says, could have taught the Sumerians how to handle mathematical calculations running up to 14 digits.

From whom else could pre-mechamcal civilizations have learned to move the stones for the pyramids or the Mayan cities or the great carved heads of Easter Island? After all, asks Däniken, are not the legends of many lands filled with stories of godlike visitors from the sky, riding in fiery chariots or on iron wings, arriving like “birds of thunder”? Indeed, the book’s only illustration is drawing of an ancient stone carving found in Mexico in 1935. It looks remarkably like a figure bent over an instrument panel in a space capsule.

The publishers of Däniken’s book deleted his references to the extraterrestrial origins of Christianity, but a Soviet scholar has attacked the subject head-on According to an angry Izvestia editorial, Philologist Vyacheslav Zaitsev of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences has not only proposed the theory that Christ was a cosmonaut but also that the star of Bethlehem was his rocket A being from a higher civilization (“My Kingdom is not of this world”), Christ came to bring advanced social ideas of love, charity and democracy to a slave-society world. He was immune to the human death of crucifixion, and “ascended into heaven” after promising to come back. The idea of Christ as a cosmonaut did not bother Izvestia, but Christ as a democrat did.

Science-fiction writers have long enjoyed developing similar themes. Nelson Bond, in a short story called The Cunning of the Beast, published in 1942 told about a weak-bodied, high-minded scientist named the Yawa Eloem who tried to create intelligent animals to serve his fellow academicians on the distant planet that was their home. But the servants rebelled, got into the Yawa Eloem’s private laboratory, and learned how to do evil. His colleagues decided to punish Dr. Eloem by sending him off in a spaceship to a far corner of the universe, accompanied by his creations—Adam and Eve. The late author and Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis used space to expound traditional Christian theology in his trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. His Perelandrans, for instance, were creatures who had not fallen from primordial grace.

Blue Fire. Other stories examine what might happen when it is man’s turn to explore other worlds, possibly to encounter life forms both inferior and superior to his own. One chilling short novel published in 1954, Lester del Rey’s For I Am a Jealous People, told of a future in which mankind comes up against an ambitious race of conquerors with whom God has made a new Covenant—against earth men. Ray Bradbury’s story of “The Fire Balloons” in The Illustrated Man tells of a gentler encounter, when two Episcopal missionaries on Mars discover spheres of blue fire that are intelligent beings—free spirits, as it turns out, long liberated from the pains, and the sins, of the body. And in a recent, surprisingly touching Star Trek TV script, the crew of the spaceship Enterprise stumble upon the Greek God Apollo on a distant planet, only to tell him that they can no longer worship him, as they did when he and his race of supermen lived on earth.

Encounters with more primitive civilizations might produce unintended results not unlike those that Erich von Däniken says once occurred on earth.

In a 1961 story called Prometheus by Philip José Farmer, the hero, an intergalactic missionary named Father John Carmody, visits a planet where the inhabitants are only dimly aware that they have souls at all. He then prcceeds to instruct them, in one breathtaking passage, in the basic principles of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and the ritual of the Last Supper. As Carmody’s spaceship moves away from the planet, the agnostic ship commander chides him. What the priest has done in his effort to instruct, says the captain, is to lay the foundations for a mythology in which the missionary himself may well become a god—or the son of one.