Erich von Däniken Receives Award for "Integrity," Gives Keynote Speech Based on Decades-Old Mistakes and False Claims

​This weekend Erich von Däniken was in California to give the keynote address to the Conscious Life Expo. At the event, he received the “Integrity Award” for his lifetime of investigation into the ancient astronaut theory. The layers of irony are thick, particularly since von Däniken’s “integrity” involves being convicted of embezzling money to fund his writing of Chariots of the Gods, admitting to fabricating his exploration of a cave full of “alien” artifacts, wholesale reusing of material from book to book while charging readers for “new” content, and the usual laundry list of false and misleading statements that demonstrate his lack of scholarly rigor or even a basic critical understanding of his own material. 

Das Neueste aus den USA: In Kalifornien wurde ich mit dem Conscious Life Award geehrt. (Siehe Bild) pic.twitter.com/zMjvVemcpm

— Erich von Däniken (@vonDaeniken) February 25, 2019

​There is an irony in giving an award “for telling the truth” to a man who claims not to make claims but to be “just asking questions.”
 
During his keynote address, von Däniken (henceforth EVD) touched on the truly important issues in life: “Did extra-terrestrials have sex with humans?” It probably says something that this question came first in the description of his address, but I am more interested in the fact that EVD is still repeating a demonstrably false claim about the Great Pyramid of Giza:

Cheops and the Great Pyramid
Was Cheops, the Pharaoh of the IV Dynasty, the father of the great pyramid? Where does the name “Cheops” come from? Some old documents suggest the true builder of the great pyramid was a king with the name of Saurid, whom the Hebrews call "Enoch." He was the 7th patriarch before the great flood and was in very close contact with extra-terrestrials, which he called "guardians of the sky.” Enoch is the main witness of the past. He even quotes the names of his extra-terrestrial teachers. Will we find the missing books of Enoch somewhere in the great pyramid? Erich von Däniken shows the newest discoveries inside and under the pyramid. With incredible computer animations, the audience will be transported into a world thousands of years in the past.

​As regular readers know, I am currently writing a book about exactly this issue—the persistence of bizarre medieval myths about the pyramids down to the present. What astounds me, though, is that EVD happily repeats material—which he first published more than fifty years ago!—that is, by turns, false and misleading. Let’s take his points one by one.

1. “Cheops” is a Greek transliteration of Khufu’s throne-name, ḫw.f-wj. The Greeks were terrible at transliteration, so “Cheops” is Herodotus’ approximation of “Khufu.” Other notable attempts include Manetho’s rendering as Suphis, the Kh sound having softened to an s over the course of Egyptian history, at least according to the few people who have ever tried to explain it.
2. The “old documents” that claim Surid (older transliteration: Saurid) to be the builder of the Great Pyramid are the Akhbar al-zaman, composed around 1000 CE, and all the later Arabic histories that copied from it. (Technically, the Akhbar is probably a reworked copy of a lost original, not much older.) These “old documents” are from the Middle Ages, some about 3,500 years after the Great Pyramid had been constructed. While there is some Late Antique material in the medieval stories, there is little to no actual ancient Egyptian history in them except for the tiny bit that diffused from Manetho through the Greeks to the Arabs.
3. The “Hebrews” did not call Surid by the name of Enoch. EVD has confused two opposed traditions. The story that Surid built the pyramid before Noah’s Flood is a later reworking of an earlier parallel story that Hermes Trismegistus built the pyramid before the Flood. Hermes was identified with Enoch and his Islamic counterpart Idris in Muslim historiography. Jews only occasionally concurred (such as the possibly fake Abenephius) while Christians tended to view them as separate figures, with Hermes sometimes seen as an evil pagan and other times as a forerunner of Christianity.
4. Enoch did not contact extraterrestrials or call them “Guardians of the Sky.” EVD is referring to the apocryphal Book of Enoch, written thousands of years after Enoch allegedly lived. As should be obvious, Enoch did not actually write the book passing under his name. In the text, he has contact with God’s angels. “Guardians of the Sky” is EVD’s bad English translation of a faulty German translation of the Ge’ez translation of the original phrase from the Book of Enoch, referring to the Egregors, or Watchers. EVD has been using variations of this incorrect translation since at least 1996.
5. Finally, EVD’s reference to the “missing” books of Enoch refers to a tradition that Enoch and/or Hermes wrote hundreds or even thousands of books of heavenly wisdom. These books never existed and were generally seen as symbolic. By the Middle Ages such books served to represent the concept that the story of all that was, is, and will be was written in the stars and astrologers, in reading the stars, could write the complete history of creation. The idea that the pyramids contain books of secret wisdom is another Arabic legend, one deriving from the Late Antique belief that hieroglyphic inscriptions (which people by then could no longer read) were occult secrets imbued with magical powers. The Arabs spent centuries camping out in abandoned Egyptian temples trying to pry the secrets of alchemy and magic from the hieroglyphs.

 
It’s not a secret that the material EVD has based his claim upon is medieval in origin. He first learned about it from Col. Vyse’s Operations, written in 1840, which very clearly explains that the stories are medieval in origin and therefore unreliable. I’ve pointed out in this space and elsewhere many times how this story grew and developed from a stew of Enochian mysticism, Hermeticism, alchemy, astrology and Abrahamic religious fervor. I’m glad I’m writing a book about the subject since it is a bad claim that just won’t die.