Erich Von Daniken Miracles of the Gods
Foreword
This is a book I had to write from the heart. I've been carrying it around inside me for ten years, ever since my first visit to Lourdes, that vast caravanserai where hope, despair and commercialism thrive side by side. I was haunted by the images and dirges I had seen and heard there.
While I was following the trail of my astronaut gods through the five continents, I made a point of visiting every accessible visionary shrine. How alike they all were in essence! It became increasingly clear to me that the phenomenon of visions is something that concerns us all. I did not forget my space- travelling gods, but there are some books that ripen like autumn fruit.
What are the people who seem to be predisposed to have visions really like?
Are they psychologically unbalanced religious fanatics?
Are their 'miracles' simply an attempt to ingratiate them- selves with the Christian churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, that accept their wonders as 'genuine'?
Did the dogmas of the Catholic Church, which also play a vital role in visions, originate by divine inspiration?
Are we really supposed to believe that God's word, the last Court of Appeal when authoritative Christian judgments are-delivered, is inspired by the Holy Ghost?
Are the multifarious miracles which undoubtedly happen at places of pilgrimage delusions or selfdelusions?
Is there a broad basis of medical and scientific fact behind these miracles which makes them credible and explicable?
While mountains of documentary material were piling up, while I was making special journeys to places of pilgrimage while I was rummaging in many of the world's great libraries, a deluge of questions assailed me. As I am not by nature the sort of person who can believe, in the good oldfashioned way, but want to know what can be explained by our god-given reason without appealing to an anonymous and much-abused Holy Ghost, I set to work. I set to work as a curious labourer in God's vineyard, as someone who considers God too exalted an arbiter to be constantly invoking him in support of his arguments.
After studying visions for years, I think I can say fairly safely that this is the first compendium of its kind. Consequently some questions remain open to discussion, but I hope that in the future competent scholars and ecclesiastical courts, too, will accept my researches into the cause and effect of the vast and complicated field of miracles and visions to rectify frankly and honestly the false conceptions that are still in circulation.
I should like to thank Dr. Robert Kehl, Zurich, most sincerely for many suggestions and for his special help when he acted as guest author for one section. Dr. Kehl first studied theology, but later switched to law and political science. His legal commentaries are in daily use by Swiss lawyers and he has made a name for himself with important works on moral theology, among many others.
At the same time I should like to express my thanks to the thirty-two publishers who are going to arrange for the worldwide publication of this book.
Inside Cover Blurb
Visions are real, they do exist.
Visions arise in intelligent brains.
Every intelligent brain has the prerequisites for creating visions.
The impulse for producing visions is of extraterrestrial origin.
To establish my hypothesis of the visit of extraterrestrial beings to our globe I drew a great deal of information from mythology. This store of knowledge from the old chronicles is fascinating because it preserved for mankind Facts with implications whose meaning and significance the writer could not recognize in his time. As far as contacts between terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings are concerned, mythology is a treasure trove with more than a little importance.
Extraterrestrials visited this and other solar systems, and on the planets that seemed suitable, they left behind scions 'in their own image'. Certain groups of these descendants have an advantage over us: they tamed, developed, and trained the 'brain, the monster' better than we have done. These preferred students or overripe intelligences are sending energetic thought impulses to us, the brothers and sisters of the same heritage. These impulses are intended to stimulate and enlarge our consciousness.
A few 'chosen people' -I do not mean religious personalities - have always found access to the wonderful unconscious, from which they evoked visionary great discoveries.
Chapter One - Visions - Do They Exist?
Unfortunately I have never witnessed a vision. Not one of the 12,000 saints has ever said so much as
'Good day' to me, but since I was first at Lourdes ten years ago I have realized that the phenomenon of visions is something that concerns us all. I saw people in ecstasy, I heard their doleful plaints, and observed endless suffering. I was disgusted by the exploitation of credulous creatures. I saw no miracles. 125 years ago a fourteen-year-old girl saw visions at Lourdes: today five million pilgrims visit her shrine year after year. 'Lourdes' stands as an example for hundreds and thousands of places of pilgrimage where miracles are 'performed' under much the same conditions.
How can we explain this mystery, the 'perception of divine grace in man', to use the Catholic vocabulary?
It always begins with individuals or small groups of people having a vision of members of the Holy Family - in the Christian west mainly Mary, mother of Jesus, one of the archangels, or even Jesus Christ or God the Father in person. The apparitions seen in visions are not neutral. Those who appear do not come as mere observers, all smiles and blessings - they tell men what they may and what they must do and what they are strictly forbidden to do. All personified visions assert that they are envoys from heaven and divine messengers with the power to save, redeem and even to destroy mankind.
They interfere with religious and political affairs, they infiltrate and dominate the brains of mass assemblies.
I went on pursuing my astronaut gods, but I could not forget the deep impression Lourdes made on me.
I collected 'official' publications and pamphlets about visions of the sort offered for sale at the pilgrimage shrines which spring up where visions have been seen. In every case arid in every place individual visionaries or small groups of them unleash an unending sequence of processions, whether the Church has already recognized the 'miracle', forbidden it or merely tolerated it in silence. 'The Church gives its blessing to what it cannot prevent' (Kurt Tucholsky). The human longing to believe in miracles is always stronger than any prohibition.
A few years ago a representative public opinion poll was held in West Germany and Berlin. 53 per cent of the people questioned believed in miracles and visions, 36 per cent did not and 11 per cent did not know. I assume that those results were not solely representative of Western Germany and the inhabitants who were questioned. There are countries, especially Catholic ones, where the percentage of those who believe in miracles is much higher.
In what primitive soil does this belief flourish? What obviously timeless force makes it thrive?
Independently of space and time and culture? Untouched by the kind and quality of the different religions?
In order to understand the phenomenon at all, you have to get to know the 'visionaries', places and circumstances involved. So at the beginning of this account I am giving detailed sketches of some astonishing cases of visions which have all the essential characteristics of such miracles.