Book summary “Odyssey of the gods”: summary

Introduction

You often read ancient Greek myths as charming fairy tales invented by primitive storytellers to explain natural phenomena. This traditional view leaves you with countless contradictions, as ancient texts describe flying machines, laser weapons, and precise anatomical knowledge that should not exist in antiquity. Erich von Daniken argues in Odyssey of the gods that these stories are actually factual reports of extraterrestrial visitors who interacted with humanity and left advanced technology behind.

You will explore this radical hypothesis across five detailed chapters that reexamine classical literature, archaeological sites, and historical records. The book investigates divine interventions in ancient Greece, hidden technological networks, historical realities behind Homeric epics, and the lost continent of Atlantis.

• Did ancient gods possess nuclear weapons and spacecraft?
• How did ancient sculptors achieve precise anatomical details?
• What physical evidence links Greek sanctuaries to a global grid?

1. Adventures of the Starship Enterprise in Long-Gone Millennia

Ancient Greek stories share similarities with modern science fiction. Yet you find a crucial difference when you look closer: the Greeks believed their fantastic tales described real events that actually happened in the remote past.

Ancient Greek legends describe real historical events and technological artifacts rather than mere utopian fantasy.

Modern science fiction looks to the future as a utopian fantasy. Ancient Greek myths looked back thousands of years and were regarded by the population as historical truth. You can examine these accounts as potentially factual records of historical events rather than fairy tales.

The story of Talos describes a metal guardian robot that patrolled the island of Crete, monitored ships, and could burn down intruders with heat unless a specific bolt was undone. The approximate existence of the story about Talos dates back 2,500 years.

Ancient Technology in Mythology

The Golden Fleece in the Argonautica was not a simple animal skin, but an advanced flying machine that originally belonged to the god Hermes. Building the greatest ship of the era and assembling a crew of demigods makes no sense if the goal was merely to retrieve a piece of fur. Instead, the Golden Fleece possessed the ability to fly, was kept by a tyrant in Colchis, and was guarded by a sleepless, fire-spitting mechanical dragon.

Prixos and his sister flew through the air over land and sea on the back of a winged golden ram given by Hermes, finally landing in Colchis.

The legendary ship Argo was constructed with superhuman engineering assistance and features a speaking technological component in its bow. Built by the engineer Argos under the direction of Athene, the ship incorporated a special beam from a wood that never rots. Athene personally contributed an unusual beam to the ship's bows that shouted out in gladness and warned the company of dangers.

Expeditions of the Ancients

The crew of the Argo consisted of fifty hand-picked specialists and demigods assembled for a high-tech expedition. Jason recruited heroes and offspring of the gods from various royal houses, each possessing unique expertise necessary to face extreme dangers. The room capacity and crew size of the Argo totaled 50 men. The oldest preserved crew list by Pindar names 10 heroes.

The crew included:

• Lynceus the look-out whose eyes could see deep into the earth;
• Euphemus the fleet-footed swimmer;
• Heracles the strongest man.

Mythological monsters such as the dragon guarding the Fleece and the bronze giant Talos functioned as automated security robots. Talos was a bronze giant created by Hephaestus who circled Crete three times a day, hurled accurate missile rocks, and radiated heat to melt attacking ships.

Monsters and Genetic Mutants

Ancient texts and historical chronicles report that gods created various monstrous hybrid creatures combining human and animal traits. Images of these creatures are also found in physical reliefs and museum artifacts. The early Christian chronicler Eusebius documented that gods created winged humans, multi-headed beings, creatures with horses' hooves, bulls with human heads, and other monsters.

The historian and Church Father Eusebius died in AD 339. Hybrid creatures are discussed in Volume 5 of Eusebius's works. Their images were kept in the Temple of Belus and are found today as winged genii and centaurs in museums.

Ancient literature and archaeological finds worldwide document the historical existence of giant human-like beings born from unions between gods and humans. Texts including the Bible, the Book of Enoch, the Kebra Negest, and indigenous traditions describe multiple races of giants.

According to the Apocrypha of Baruch, 4,090,000 giants were destroyed by the flood. Archaeologists dug up stone hand axes in Syria and Morocco that required human hands of massive proportions to wield.

• Giant hand axes were dug up 3.5 miles from Safita in Syria.
• Stone tools found in Ain Fritissa, East Morocco, measured 12.5 by 8.5 inches.
• Heavy stone tools weighed 9.5 pounds, indicating a user over 13 feet tall.

The myth of Phaethon driving his father's sun chariot describes a runaway spacecraft accident caused by inexperience. Phaethon's sun chariot raced out of control, growing hotter until his hair and skin caught fire, forcing him to leap out into the Eridanos River.

You can trace the author theory that extraterrestrials landed on Earth in antiquity, were mistaken for gods, intervened in human evolution, created genetic mutants through interbreeding, and left behind technological remnants. The author has spent 40 years chasing the trail of the gods and published 32 books on this theory since 1968.

2. In the Name of Zeus

Ancient texts, king lists, and epic battles preserve memories of pre-scientific technological warfare and global cataclysms. You can explore how early records describe events that defy conventional historical timelines. Scribes recorded these occurrences despite the immense labor involved in writing.

Ancient texts preserve memories of pre-scientific technological warfare.

Creating clay tablet inscriptions in cities like Assur around 2000 BC required precise clay mixtures, wooden frames, drying, and meticulous hand-scribing where mistakes could reverse word meanings. Scribes and rulers would never waste such exhausting labor on trivial or imaginary stories. In Assur around 2000 BC, scribes laboriously carved laws and important state decrees onto clay frames that frequently warped or broke.

Chronology and Writing

Egyptian priests informed Herodotus that before human kings ruled, gods lived among men in human form, recording vast chronological periods that modern scholars reject due to evolutionary dogma. The Theban priests read out the names of 341 generations of rulers to Herodotus, corresponding to 11,340 years, preceded by an era ruled directly by gods.

Athletes had to be free Greeks, train for ten months, and compete naked so that judges and the public could verify they were normal human beings, free of cross-breeds, hermaphrodites, or divine monsters. Coroibos from Elis won the first recorded competition in 776 BC, and women were strictly barred under penalty of being thrown off Mount Typaion.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Hesiod's Theogony describes five successive races—golden, silver, bronze/noisy, heroes, and iron—and details a violent war where Zeus hurled exploding lightning bolts and fiery missiles that melted landscapes. Hesiod describes the fierce battle between the gods and Titans where Zeus used supreme missiles and thunderous noises that blinded strong men and set forests on fire.

The Mahabharata depicts unknown weapons of mass destruction that turned bodies to ashes and poisoned environments.

The text describes an unknown radiant lightning that acts as a messenger of death, turning the Vrishni and Andhaka warriors to unrecognizable ash. King Rama's rescue of Sita involves a vehicle as tall as a three-story building that flew from Lanka to India, generating a roar that shook mountains and burned surrounding forests. Rama and Sita rose into the air inside a flying pyramid machine that traveled more than 2,000 miles from Lanka to India.

Celestial Anomalies

Plato discusses an exact period of 10,000 years regarding ancient artifacts and describes global floods that destroyed coastal and lowland civilizations, forcing survivors to live without metals until the gods reintroduced them. In Plato's dialogue The Laws, an Athenian speaker discusses with Cleinas and Megillos the precise dating of ancient sculptures and the destruction of civilizations by floods. Plato's Politics describes the miracle of the reversal of the rising and setting of the sun and other heavenly bodies.

Gyges entered a gaping chasm opened by an earthquake, discovered an iron horse with windows containing a giant corpse, and took its magic ring. Constellations like Argo, Aries, Pegasus, Taurus, and the Pleiades were known to ancient Mesopotamians millennia before classical Greek authors mapped them or applied local hero myths to them. Hesiod warned against sailing during the 40 days the Pleiades are invisible, a navigational rule that only astronomically applied between 4000 and 2000 BC.

3. The Network of the Gods

Anatomical precision, megalithic structures, and a geometrical grid of sanctuaries point to a sophisticated pre-historic infrastructure.

Megality and Oil Reserves

Travel writer Pausanius described seeing small pyramids built of hefty stone blocks near Argos and Ligurio around 1,800 years ago. While 1940s archaeologists dated the pyramids of Argolis to around 400 BC, thermoluminescence testing in 1997 by a Greek-British team revealed they are at least 4,700 years old, placing them before Sakkara. The exterior measurements of the pyramids at Ligurio span 46 feet north, 41 feet west, 39.5 feet south, and 42 feet east, reaching an approximate height of 33 feet using stone blocks about 5 feet long.

Massive storage jars found in the palace of Knossos on Crete were actually fuel-oil reserves used to power ancient flying machines. Because Crete lacked external defenses and relied on divine protection or the robot Talos, the massive storage capacity for oil was unnecessary for survival, suggesting a technical application similar to steam-engine fuel. Professor Dr. H. G. Wunderlich noted the impossibility of cleaning or emptying the giant Pithoi stone vessels without a communicating tube system.

The House of Minos at Knossos contained 1,400 rooms across several floors. The west wing held 420 storage containers, each averaging a monstrous capacity of 129 gallons, giving a total storage capacity of 54,180 gallons.

High Technology and the Geodetic Grid

Ancient Epidaurus functioned as a mass-healing center relying on auto-suggestion, group hypnosis, and ritualized mass psychology rather than modern medicine. Thousands made pilgrimages to the Abaton where they entered a healing sleep after participating in purification rites, listening to flutes, and inhaling scents, mirroring modern pilgrimage phenomena like Lourdes. Stone and marble tablets discovered in excavations list roughly 70 supernatural healings, including Ambrosia of Athens, who arrived one-eyed and left with two good eyes. The ancient theatre at Epidaurus seated 20,000 people, and the nearby inn featured 1,150 rooms.

The Anticythera mechanism represents an inexplicably advanced piece of high technology that violates standard historical timelines of ancient engineering. Retrieved from a shipwreck at a depth of 100 feet by sponge divers in 1900, the bronze device contains more than 30 interlinked cogwheels, differential wheels, and engraved astronomical inscriptions requiring precision up to a hundredth of a millimeter. Math professor Derek J. Solla Price spent years analyzing the device, stating it felt as anomalous as finding a can-opener among the treasures of Tutankhamun. A tiny cogwheel with a thickness of 2mm carried a maximum of 240 teeth on the device's cogs before a brush crumbled it.

Ancient texts from the Middle East describe sophisticated flying chariots operated by figures like King Solomon using primitive steam or oil-combustion systems. The Kebra Negest and Arabian histories describe Solomon traveling through the air to visit the Queen of Sheba, utilizing vehicles that required fire, water, and flammable oil. Prince Baina-lehkem successfully stole and flew the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia on a flying wagon, covering 3,600 kilometers in one day according to the chronicle while outdistancing Solomon's fast riders who chased him after the Queen of Ethiopia brought 797 camels to Jerusalem.

Ancient Greek holy sites are positioned in a precise mathematical and geometrical network based on the golden ratio, rather than random placement. Brigadier Dr. Theophanias Manias and the Association for Operational Research discovered over 200 equal geometrical relationships and golden ratio proportions connecting ancient sanctuaries across mountainous terrain. Air force pilots noticing recurring fuel consumption and distances across different flight routes prompted the military investigation into the precise geodesic alignment of the temples. Using 1:10,000 scale maps, researchers found:

• 35 three-temple lines in central Greece;
• 22 instances where distance between holy sites is identical in central Greece;
• 200 total equal geometrical relationships;
• 62 percent proportion representing the greater portion of the golden ratio distance between interconnected sites.

4. The Trojan Tangle

Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, emerged from a very ancient folktale tradition rooted in fantastic descriptions. They contain 28,000 verses in the Iliad and Odyssey combined. You encounter strange weapons and heroic battles alongside concrete references to places like Crete and Troy.

Homer's epics and Heinrich Schliemann's excavations reveal a complex intersection of folktale traditions, geographical routes, and real archaeological layers.

Homer describes Poseidon being transported across the water by invisible flying horses whose chariot axle does not even touch the waves. It took Odysseus 20 years to return to Ithaca.

Mapping Odysseus

More than 100 different opinions on Odysseus's journey existed alongside about 70 maps drawn to trace the route. German researchers Hans-Helmut and Armin Wolf successfully reconstructed a plausible Mediterranean sea route corresponding to the journey described in the Odyssey.

Unlike other sacred centers in Greece, Troy stood outside the geometrical network of ancient Greece. Historical accounts place the Trojan War between 1194 to 1184 BC. Agamemnon is buried in Mycenae, which is part of the geometrical network, while Troy remains outside it.

Unearthing Troy

Heinrich Schliemann was born on January 6, 1822. He started as an Amsterdam clerk on a 15 dollars annual salary before making a fortune and accumulating more than 10 million marks in capital by his later travels.

On October 11, 1871, he started excavations with 80 workers at the hill of Hissarlik, situated just over 2 miles (4 km) from the Dardanelles. On June 15, 1873, he announced the discovery of the treasure of Priam.

Schliemann hid a copper vessel filled with gold and silver objects in his wife's headscarf, placed a golden diadem on her head, and announced he had found the treasure.

Archaeologists dug through 48 layers and found 9 different Troys. Manfred Korfmann started international excavations in 1988, revealing an 8-foot (2.5m) thick defensive wall in Troy I and periods like Troy VI spanning from 1800 to 1250 BC.

Schliemann's identified palace of Priam turned out to be no larger than a pig-sty rather than a grand structure with 50 bedrooms.

Geo-archaeologist Eberhard Zangger proposed the provocative theory that Homer's Troy and Plato's Atlantis are actually one and the same place. Zangger argued that Atlantis was destroyed by the Trojan War around 1184 BC rather than sinking into the ocean cataclysmically 9,000 years before Plato as the traditional Atlantis timeline suggests. American archaeologist Curtiss Runnels noted that Zangger's book would have the same major impact on the academic world as Schliemann's discoveries a century prior.

5. Atlantis: The Millennia-Old Whodunnit

Plato's account of Atlantis details precise architecture, governance rituals, and advanced metallurgy that point to a lost continent beyond the Mediterranean.

Sources and Architecture

Plato sets the scene of the dialogue involving five men in 401 BC Athens: Plato himself, Socrates, the astronomer Timaeus, the politician Critias, and the commander Hermocrates. Critias relates a story passed down from his 90-year-old grandfather Critias, who heard it from the famous statesman Solon. Solon learned it from an Egyptian temple scribe in Sais.

Critias recounts how Solon traveled to Sais in Egypt in 571 BC and was told by an ancient priest that the Greeks were like children who lacked true ancient knowledge because of recurring natural catastrophes. Temple records stated that Sais was founded 8,000 years earlier, while the events and war involving ancient Athens and Atlantis occurred 9,000 years prior.

The island of Atlantis was created by Poseidon, who surrounded the central hill of his mortal lover Cleito with alternating rings of land and water. The capital featured massive canals, harbors, bridges, and a complex system of defensive walls coated in various metals including gold, tin, and orichalcum. Critias describes a canal dug 50 stadia long and 3 plethra wide leading from the sea into the outermost ring to allow large vessels to enter as into a harbor.

Orichalcum and Trans-Oceanic Awareness

The ten rulers gathered every five or six years to maintain joint governance and judge disputes across the 10 king regions. To swear their oaths, they hunted a free-roaming bull in Poseidon's sanctuary using only sticks and cords, slaughtered it atop the orichalcum pillar above the inscribed laws, and mixed its blood into a sacrificial bowl. The kings donned dark blue robes by nightfall after the sacrifice and inscribed their judgments upon a golden tablet at dawn.

Eberhard Zangger's attempt to equate Atlantis with Troy faces insurmountable contradictions regarding location, chronology, and physical scale. Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at the hill of Hissarlik revealed a modest settlement rather than the massive rings of water and earth and cyclopic walls attributed to Poseidon's domain. Seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon proposed Santorini based on volcanic destruction, while Professor John Luce argued for Minoan Crete due to the bull-cult traditions.

John Luce pointed to the bull-hunt on Atlantis and the sacrifice to Poseidon as evidence linking the legend to the Minoan labyrinth and bull-cults of Crete. However, these Mediterranean locations fail to match Plato's dates of 9,000 years ago or his explicit placement of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean.

Orichalcum, described as a gold-copper ore second only to gold in value, did not exist in ancient Greece or Troy. The author notes that the only known culture capable of creating such advanced layered metal alloys that mimic precious metals was found in ancient Peru and Ecuador. Pre-Incas in Peru mastered layering techniques with copper, silver, and gold that yield brighter or darker gold finishes resistant to standard acid tests.

Plato describes how travelers could cross from Atlantis to other islands and reach the entire mainland situated on the other side of the ocean. The Egyptian priests maintained 10,000 years of careful written records, which allowed them to preserve accurate descriptions of lands unknown to the younger Greek civilization.

10 Key Ideas

1. Ancient Greek myths should be examined as potentially factual records of historical extraterrestrial events and technological artifacts rather than mere fairy tales.
2. The Golden Fleece was not a simple animal skin, but an advanced flying machine that originally belonged to the god Hermes and was guarded by a mechanical dragon.
3. Ancient literature and archaeological finds worldwide document the historical existence of giant human-like beings born from unions between gods and humans, with stone hand axes discovered in Syria and Morocco requiring massive hands to wield.
4. Scribes and rulers would never waste the exhausting labor of creating clay tablet inscriptions around 2000 BC on trivial stories, instead preserving crucial records of historical events and laws.
5. The Mahabharata describes an unknown radiant lightning that acts as a messenger of death, turning the Vrishni and Andhaka warriors to unrecognizable ash using pre-scientific technological weapons of mass destruction.
6. The Anticythera mechanism represents an inexplicably advanced piece of high technology containing more than 30 interlinked cogwheels and differential wheels that violates standard historical timelines of ancient engineering.
7. Ancient Greek holy sites are positioned in a precise mathematical and geometrical network based on the golden ratio, as discovered by researchers studying equal geometrical relationships connecting ancient sanctuaries.
8. Heinrich Schliemann started excavations at the hill of Hissarlik in 1871 and discovered the treasure of Priam, revealing a complex intersection of folktale traditions, geographical routes, and real archaeological layers in Homer's epics.
9. Plato's account of Atlantis details precise architecture, governance rituals, and a capital featuring massive canals, harbors, bridges, and a complex system of defensive walls coated in various metals.
10. Orichalcum, described by Plato as a gold-copper ore second only to gold in value, matches advanced layered metal alloys mastered by pre-Incas in Peru and Ecuador who used copper, silver, and gold.