Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night

There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to consider the implications of these mysteries.

We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of mankind. Whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it, because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.

Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical Bible, the body of knowledge that we call 'History' is an edited cultural artifact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym for delusion.

Suppose it is not delusion?

Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this cataclysm 'to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what had happened in early times'. Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 of the Christian era?

It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of explosions that gave off a 'terrible glare of light' and 'immense heat'. Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a 'mythical' account something like this:

The flames of the Brahmastra-charged missiles mingled with each other and surrounded by fiery arrows they covered the earth, heaven and space between and increased the conflagration like the fire and the Sun at the end of the world ... All beings who were scorched by the Brahmastras, and saw the terrible fire of their missiles, felt that it was the fire of Pralaya [the cataclysm] that burns down the world.

And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era? Isn't it possible, probable even, that they might preserve traditions of 'celestial cars' and 'heavenly chariots' and 'spacious flying machines', and even of 'aerial cities'. If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:

• 'Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come to you - and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will look like a deity.'
• 'Visvakarma, the architect among the Gods, built aerial vehicles for the Gods.'
• 'Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that all-traversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced me with weapons.'
• 'He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.'
• 'The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33 divine beings.'

All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Puranu and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:

The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky ...

Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?

We will never know unless we try to find out. And so far we haven't tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions as 'unhistorical'. No doubt many are unhistorical, but at the end of the investigation that underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ...