Alien Space Gods Of Ancient Greece and Rome (24 page)

The brother of Lycurgus was said to be Polydectes, King of the
island
of
Seriphos
, whither floated the massive chest containing the infant Perseus and his Mother, Danae, seduced by Zeus, metamorphosed into a shower of gold. Polydectes fell in love with Danae; when Perseus attained manhood the King got rid of him by sending the young hero off to slay the Gorgon. On his return to protect his Mother Perseus used Medusa's head to turn Polydecles and all his guests to stone, Perseus flew on winged sandals; he apparently possessed some death-ray weapon, the Egyptians worshipped him as a God and told Herodotus he visited them; he closely resembled Balor with the Flashing Eye in Irish mythology and the Aztec Tezcatlipoca with the malignant rays, possibly Spacemen.

Whether Lycurgus was concerned in this confusion is not clear; he may have lived contemporary with Homer or even Solomon, when Spacemen were active on Earth. The belief that Lycurgus was inspired by Celestials was strengthened by the tradition that after giving the Laws to
Sparta
he left to end his life in voluntary exile just as Laotse after teaching Taoism to the Chinese was last seen climbing a mountain towards the clouds. The Cretans claimed Lycurgus died in Pergamus, some say he died in Cirrha, others in
Elis
, no one really knows. Centuries later the Spartans believed that Lycurgus was not a man but a God and built a temple to him with yearly sacrifices and the highest honours. Like Quetzalcoatl, Law-Giver to Ancient Mexico, was Lycurgus translated to the skies?

About the sixth century BC lived the poet, Aethalides, a herald, the son of Mercury, to whom it was granted to be amongst the dead and the living at stated times; he was said to have travelled in Hades and above the Earth, reminiscent of Enoch. This ancient Adamski penned his revelations in a poem unfortunately lost. Pythagoras claimed to be a reincarnation of Aethalides suggesting the poet was an Initiate receptive to Spacemen. Only tantalising fragments remain of those exquisite lyrics of Sappho, that supreme, passionate poetess of Lesbos, lilting of love; Anacreon sang gaily of wine, Philoxenus, the great dithyrambic poet, wrote a Rabelaisian poem about the cloudship of Zeus more amusing than our stolid 'Saucer' books.

About 400 BC Philoxenus at the Court of Dionysius in Sicily, obliged to listen to the King's bad verse, suggested that the best way to correct it would be to draw a black line through the whole paper; the King somewhat aggrieved sent him to slave in the quarries. Later on release Dionysius recited his poem again to be interrupted by the anguished Philoxenus begging to be sent back to the quarries rather than be sentenced to listen to such rubbish. A stern example to our Television critics!

Pythagoras, the Sage of Samos, who flourished in the sixth century BC, was acclaimed by Diodorus Siculus as a God among men; he possessed not only great eloquence of speech but a temperate character of soul and a marvellous memory. He believed in the transmigration of souls and remembered having been the Trojan hero, Euphorbus, who was slain by Menclaus. Callisthenes said Pythagoras was the first to introduce geometry to
Greece
from
Egypt
. The Sage preached a simple life and taught his disciples to cat meat uncooked and to drink only water.

Pythagoras called his principles 'Philosophia' or 'Love of Wisdom'; he said because of human weakness no man is wise but all men could become 'Lovers of Wisdom' or 'Philosophers'. Ammianus Marcellinus reported that Pythagoras learned his knowledge from the Hyperborean Druid, Abaris, the Priest of Apollo, who took no earthly food and rode through the air on the 'Arrow of Apollo' suggesting a Spaceman. Suidas told of the presence of Apollo in
Athens
and
Sparta
, where he instructed people in the prevention of plagues.

The so-called Pythagorean doctrine, according to Suidas, was an adaptation of the ancient British philosophy. Caesar later wrote that the Druids wore renowned for their religious and astronomical knowledge, in their famous colleges students studied the Mysteries for twenty years, evidence of profound wisdom. Pythagoras also told of intercourse with the Gods, people believed the Sage to have been miraculously transported around the Earth, hinting at his friendship with Space Beings. When the populace of
Crotona
burned down the
Temple
where Pythagoras and his followers had taken refuge, the Celestials must have arrived too late for the Sage perished in the flames.

The mysterious disappearances of people in the present-day and in the past, arouses speculation as to abduction by Extraterrestrials. Legends in many countries tell of heroes transported to some
Land
of
Eternal Youth
, where they mingle with Immortals in wondrous realms beyond Space and Time, possibly another planet; sometimes they return to find their families and friends long dead and buried, suddenly they age centuries old and die themselves. Epimenides, the celebrated poet and prophet of Crete, when a boy in the early seventh century BC was sent out by his father in search of a sheep; seeking shelter from the heat of the midday sun, he went into a cave and there fell into a deep sleep, which lasted fifty-seven years. On his return he found to his amazement that his brother had grown an old man.

In 596 BC Solon invited Epimenidcs to purify
Athens
from the plague, there he worked many wonders. His God was the Cretan Zeus, tradition assigns to him a theogony, a Critica and various mysterious writings. The influence of Epimenides must have been most profound for six hundred years later
St. Paul
in his Epistle to Titus quoted him concerning the people of
Crete
saying, 'One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said ‘The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.’ Harsh words!

The Spartans took Epimenides prisoner in a war with Proconnesus and put him to death because he refused to prophesy favourably. The Cretans believed he lived for three hundred years and worshipped him as a God. Fantastic though it seems, Epimenides' sleep in a cave lasting fifty-seven years might have been his own explanation concealing translation to another planet, where he was taught wisdom to impart to the peoples of Earth: stories of him wandering outside his body ascribed to him powers of astral travelling practised by great Initiates but they could be meant to conceal possible trips in Spaceships. The extraordinarily long life of Epimenides evokes Count St. Germain, who claimed to have lived for several centuries.

Another astral-traveller was Aristeas of Proconnesus, a noted writer quoted by Longinus, who lived in the third century before Christ. He once vanished from Cyzicus, the wealthy city near the
Sea
of
Marmora
and reappeared at
Metapontum
near
Taranto
to spread the worship of Apollo. He was an authority on the inaccessible Hyperboreans. It is tempting to wonder whether his travels were made in Spaceships.

The scanty evidence would suggest that Lycurgus, Aethalidcs, Pythagoras, Epimenides and Aristeas, like their contemporaries, the Prophets of Israel, were inspired by Spacemen. The Philosophers spoke of the Gods somewhat vaguely; perhaps they hesitated to reveal the esoteric teachings of the Mysteries but generally they were much more interested in men Plato, Aristotle and their followers studied the relation of Man to the Universe, abstract problems of human conduct, love, justice, education and practical conceptions of the ideal State.

This was the age of Sophists like Socrates concerned with ethics and the nature of Reality, disputing with the irritated Athenians not speculating about Spacemen. When Socrates spoke of his 'daemon’ he usually meant the voice of conscience, his inner self. Plato, however, wrote in
'Laws'
713 AD, 'Daemons are defined as a race superior to men but inferior to Gods; they were created to watch human affairs', suggesting perhaps the existence of a celestial race or Spacemen.

In the '
Phaedra'
246 F, Plato describing the divine as beauty, goodness and the like, added:

‘Zeus, the mighty leader, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all and there follows the array of Gods and Demi-Gods, marshalled in eleven bands.’

This concept would suggest that Plato believed in Celestials speeding across the skies like the Gods in their golden cars so brilliantly described in the Sanskrit classics. Aristotle was never at a loss for ideas. Unfortunately they paralysed men's minds for nearly two thousand years. In his '
Meteorology'
he declared:

‘The cause of these shooting stars is sometimes the motion which ignites the exhalation. The flames passed wonderfully quickly and looks like a thing thrown or as if one thing after another caught fire. Sometimes it is like the flame from the lamp and sometimes bodies are projected by being squeezed out (like fruit-stones from one's fingers) and so are seen to fall into the sea and on dry land both by night and by day when the sky is clear.... These then must be taken to be the causes of shooting-stars and the phenomena of combustion and also of the other transient appearances of this kind.'

This diverting, if mistaken, opinion of the great Aristotle suggests that in his leisure moments, be, too, might have watched UFOs.

Anaxagoras, an intimate friend and teacher of Euripides and Pericles, taught that a Supreme Intelligence was the cause of all things. Pliny wrote in
'Historia Naturalis’
, Book II, LIX:

'The Greeks tell the story that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in the 2nd year of the 78th Olympiad (467 BC) was enabled by his knowledge of astronomical literature to prophesy that in a certain number of days a rock would fall from the sun, and that this occurred in the daytime in the Goat's River, a district of Thrace (the stone is still shown, it is of the size of a wagon-load and brown in colour.) - a comet, also blazing in the nights at the time - There is also one that is worshipped at Cassandra, the place that has been given the name of Potidaea, and where a colony was settled on account of this occurrence. I myself saw one that had recently come down in the territory of the Vocentii.'

In 1772 Lavoisier and other Members of the
French
Academy
reported that stones do not fall from the sky, a conclusion destined to cause scientists some embarrassment.

Darmiachus in his treatise on Religion wrote that in 468/7 BC an immense fiery body moved erratically in the heavens for seventy-five days then crashed in flames like shooting-stars.

Lysander, the distinguished Spartan General, in 405 BC brought the Peloponnesian War to a conclusion by defeating the Athenian fleet at
Aegospotami
near the
Dardanelles
. (Lampsacus, Propontis.) Plutaarch in his
'Life of Lysander'
declared:

'Lysander had wrought a work of the greatest magnitude with the least toil and effort and had brought to a close in a single hour a war which in length and the incredible variety of its incidents surpassed all its predecessors. Its struggles and issues had assumed ten thousand changing shapes and it bad cost
Hellas
more generals than all her previous wars together and yet it was brought to a close by the prudence and ability of one man. Therefore some actually thought the result due to divine intervention.      There were some who declared that the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) appeared as twin stars on either side of Lysander's ship just as he was sailing out against the enemy and shone out over the rudder-sweeps.'