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Review of "Astronaut Gods of the Maya" by Erich von Däniken

2/23/2017

22 Comments

 
​Good news, everyone! Erich von Däniken has another new book out! It’s called Astronaut Gods of the Maya: Extraterrestrial Technologies in the Temples and Sculptures (Bear & Company, 2017), and it was translated by Aida Selfic Williams. The title should probably give you a good indication of what to expect in the book.  The original German version was published in 2011, but it is now appearing in English for the first time. You might not expect the elements of casual racism, such as describing the Aztec as “coffee-brown, stark-naked natives,” but you probably expect the claims that various artifacts look to our author like pieces of modern technology.
​Even old von Däniken seems to be getting tired of the routine. In his authorial preface, he tells readers that he will “explain for the umpteenth time” material about cargo cults that he first explored half a century ago. Consequently, the first chapter of the book reviews material about cargo cults that is familiar to anyone who has read his work. Specifically, he discusses the way that some groups in Asia and Australasia treated American World War II pilots as messengers of heaven and built mock-ups of landing strips and airplanes in the hopes of coaxing more cargo from the heavens.  He compares this to the Maya and suggests that their pyramids and other buildings were built in imitation of aliens.
 
I don’t really know what more to say about the book. He goes through a number of pieces of Mesoamerican art, and in each case he interprets stylized animals, bones, plants, and other material as pieces of technology because they have been rendered in geometric form. He also follows the currently fashionable trend in seeing Asian influences in Mesoamerica, opining that seated Mayans look like they are doing yoga, and their headdresses look “Asian.” He parallels Graham Hancock in comparing Mayan art to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a site built many centuries later, and he compares Mexican pyramids to those of India, which share only superficial similarities.
 
He brings in claims both old and new, some taken from other mystery writers. He speculates that the ancients were fascinated by mercury not because a liquid metal is really cool (and can substitute for water in sculpture without evaporating) but rather because it was the fuel for alien aircraft. He cites “ancient Indian texts” to this effect, without admitting that they are the fake “channeled” texts written in the twentieth century. He recycles his greatest hits about how “heaven” is really outer space, and the Old Testament God and the angels are really space aliens. He devotes an entire chapter to the sarcophagus lid of Pakal, which he first suggested was a depiction of a rocket back in the 1960s.
 
He ventures into the waters of Velikovskyism, apparently in keeping with what was then the “new” rage for claims about comets and rogue planets in the run-up to the 2012 “apocalypse.” He made much hay of Plato’s claim in the Timaeus that the myth of Phaethon represents “a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals” (tans. Jowett). Though he leaves out the geocentrism to wrongly suggest that Plato knew about planetary orbits and their changing nature over time.
 
Von Däniken complains at points about how “politically correct” academics want to protect “the pride of the Maya” by refusing to accept that space aliens are responsible for Maya culture. “This is obviously joined by the blessed doctrine of evolution,” he adds, nonsensically. He defends himself against charges of racism by saying that the Berlin symphony is not devalued by playing American music, so Maya people are not degraded when he says they merely enacted plans created by aliens.
 
Primarily, this is a photo book, with hundreds of nice (if not particularly well-shot) photographs of Mesoamerican art, many dating back to the author’s early trips to Mexico and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. The text is light and secondary to the images. The translation is amateurish and borders on the incompetent. At one point, the translator renders the intended word “restorers” as “restaurateurs,” the latter being an obscure term for a restaurant owner. It seems that the translator translated many of the texts von Däniken quotes from his German translations of them, which creates some issues of translating translations. So, for example, the famous description of Teotihuacan transforms oddly. The original is from Bernardino de Sahagun’s General History of the Things of New Spain, which I translate this way: “They say that before there was day in the world, the gods had gathered themselves in that place which is called Teotihuacan…” (7.2). After being run through several translations, the lines from Sahagun appear in our book as: “During the nighttime, as the sun does not shine, it is said that the gods gathered and advised them at this place, which was named Teotihuacan.”
 
All in all, the book is more of the same, with about the same quality control you would expect.
22 Comments
Clete
2/23/2017 12:23:06 pm

I have some other things to do today, but I am relieved that I will not have to journey to Barnes and Noble to pick up the latest piece of shit from Erich Von Daniken.

Reply
Kathleen
2/23/2017 01:47:57 pm

Since there are folk who compare Angkor Wat and Mayan art, does anyone suggest that the Maya colonized Southeast Asia?

Reply
Shane Sullivan
2/23/2017 02:12:50 pm

Now you're getting into Augustus le Plongeon territory!

Reply
Kathleen
2/23/2017 03:23:53 pm

My brief look at Wikipedia said that le Plongeon had the Maya establishing Ancient Egypt. Still, he sounds like a very interesting guy. His photography must be a wonder.

Shane Sullivan
2/25/2017 01:20:44 am

He was the only hyperdiffusionist I'm aware of who thought that the Maya colonized the old world rather than the other way around, although James Churchward had colonists and refugees from Mu peopling both Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia.

Kathleen
2/25/2017 08:56:09 am

Thanks, I see what you mean.

E.P. Grondine
2/25/2017 12:38:29 pm

For Auguatus Le Plongeon, see -

http://www.danieljglenn.com/the_podcasts/Stelle/Documentation/He%20Walked%20Among%20Us%20Part%201.pdf

Kathleen
2/25/2017 02:11:44 pm

I'll check it out

Kal
2/23/2017 02:31:57 pm

Yeah funny that 2012 BS, and how all of those trolls disappeared post December 2012, when all of that blew over. Funny how nobody is interviewing the ones that were so into it now and asking them anything? Some of them retracted though and pretend that it's going to be later, which it isn't. The world was going to end five times in my lifetime. Ha.

Reply
JLH
2/28/2017 10:50:46 am

I was just thinking about this last week. There really needs to be an accounting of all those hucksters and discredited doomsayers.

Reply
Bob Jase
2/23/2017 03:59:29 pm

Poor Eric, sixty years of telling the same story with the same bullshit 'evidence'. Its worse than working for a living.

Reply
DPBROKAW
2/23/2017 05:51:15 pm

"Poor Eric" ain't so poor! Guys made himself rich by basically lying to anybody who'd pay to listen, then selling the books to whomever would pay to read them. How many times has this guy been caught laying? He knowingly lied about golden caves, and engraved stones. collaborated with the person(s) who actually created them, then admitted to having lied! And yet people still believe his nonsense.

Reply
Only Me
2/23/2017 04:30:36 pm

I swear it takes a very special person to deny reality as long as EvD has. Decades of lies and being proven a hack must be taking their toll.

Still, he's aware that there are people who will buy his latest offering, even if it is just another recycling of the same trash.

Reply
Americanegro
2/23/2017 06:05:58 pm

Everyone must bow before the might hooked X Talpiot sarcophabooboo! That said, why is Von Daniken even putting out new books? Shouldn't he be digging a big hole?

Reply
expat link
2/23/2017 07:16:52 pm

Oi Jason, there's nothing obscure about "restaurateur." We food fanatics use the word fluently.

On a less trivial note: The grunge-documentary film "Mondo Cane" (1962) showed a cargo cult near Port Moresby. It impressed me so much that I've remembered it all this time. It's on the Tube that is You, sequence at 01:42:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj5U8UbWqsk

Reply
DigDug
2/24/2017 03:19:25 am

Claiming mercury was used as fuel for alien spacecraft only reveals that he knows absolutely nothing about chemistry.

Reply
Jonathan E. Feinstein
2/24/2017 02:05:44 pm

Why should he. He has already proven he cannot tell a highly stylized ear of corn from a spaceship, I haven't seen this book yet, but I am sure he must include a drawing or photo of the lid of Pacal's sarcophagus as it is one of his favorite. Well... unless we are willing to believe a dead Mayan king could ride into space on a mercury-powered ear of corn.

Reply
Pacal
2/24/2017 06:05:31 pm

"He [von Daniken] devotes an entire chapter to the sarcophagus lid of Pakal, which he first suggested was a depiction of a rocket back in the 1960s."

I take it von Daniken ignores the fact we know that the man on the sarcophagus lid is the is Pacal called the great by Mayanologists, king of Palenque has shown by the decipherment of the glyphs. Further the iconography of the lid is now well known and it shows Pacal falling in death along the cosmic tree, (probably the milky way), into the gaping jaws of the earth monster at his death.

Von Daniken has per usual ignored the copious amounts of evidence about the classical Maya and simply regurgitates his stale old nostrums.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
2/25/2017 01:09:44 pm

Hi Pacal -

I may be mistaken here, but I think that the "tree of life" is viewed as the ceiba tree, a source of an MAO inhibitor, while the caiman was the Mayan symbol of the Milky Way.

Personally, I prefer the Mixtec to the Maya and the Aztec, but that is just my current preference.

Reply
Pacal
2/24/2017 06:14:50 pm

Another hilarious thing about von Daniken and the Maya is in his book Chariots of the Gods he spins a completely fanciful theory about the classic Maya collapse.

In his theory von Daniken theorizes that the Maya did all that building in preparation for the return of the space gods which was anticipated to happen on a given date. When the space gods didn't happen Mayan society collapsed into chaos out of disappointment.

Aside from the total lack of evidence that the Maya ever expected the gods to "return" this runs into the fact that the Mayan collapse took over a century to happen has indicated by the last dated monuments at the various Mayan sites.

That von Daniken thinks that the Mayans got just about all of their culture from space aliens just shows von Daniken knows next to nothing about the archeology done in the areas the Maya lived in.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
2/26/2017 11:17:38 am

Hi Pacal -

These guys do not want facts to interfere with a good story or the cash that flows from it.

The plain fact is that many people want to believe in ancient aliens;
the most important question is "Why?".

Reply
JLH
2/28/2017 10:46:35 am

"Primarily, this is a photo book, with hundreds of nice (if not particularly well-shot) photographs of Mesoamerican art"

This is one of my main reasons for watching fringe stuff on TV. They occasionally feature interesting works in the aggregation of obscure art and literature forming their connect-the-dots "theories."

Reply

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