By Vithal C Nadkarni

The celebrated American naturalist-cum-essayist Henry David Thoreau once confessed in his journals that he did ‘not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which i am acquainted.” Thoreau added candidly, though almost as an arguably subversive afterthought, that “mythology came nearest to it of any.”

The toss-up, therefore, was between mythologies of dreamy-eyed bards and prophets and hard-core science as practised by boffins in white lab-coats. In his viral bestsellers, the Swiss author Erich von Daniken who died at 90, artfully opted for mythologies of extraterrestrial origin to account for the seemingly extraordinary attainments of our ancient civilisations.

In the process, he earned a cult following among paranormal enthusiasts around the globe even while being subjected to spiffy scorn from the scientific community. He used, for instance, the Delhi Iron Pillar in the Qutb Complex at Mehrauli to support his hypothesis of “an unknown alloy from antiquity staring us in the face”. His contention of this being a shining example of ‘Alien Tech’ “resisting rust for 40 centuries” was treated as gospel by millions of his aficionados.

Predictably, there were howls of protest from metallurgists. They said the pillar was made only 16 centuries ago by hammering together 80 pounds of red-hot iron to weld them together into a single piece.

Experts also said ceremonial coatings of ghee in the first 500 years may have slowed down or even prevented corrosion considerably. But there were few buyers for such arguments possibly because the pillar was in a remarkably good condition. But the fact that the lower portion of the shaft was pitted by rust often got ignored or worse, dismissed outright as ‘scientific nitpicking’ against ‘the glory or wonder that was India’.

More serendipitous or surreptitious (depending on your side) is Daniken’s choice of the chariot as the lead or head metaphor for his bestseller. Known as Ratha Kalpana , the trope of horse-drawn chariot has been effectively used in Hindu scriptures to describe the relationship between the senses, mind, intellect and the Self.

The metaphor was first deployed in the Kathopanishad and is believed to have sparked similar narratives in Gita, Dhammapada and across the seas in Plato’s Phaedru s . Yama, the Lord of Death, for instance, tells the ever-inquisitive boy Nachiketas in the Kathopanishad, “He who has the discriminative understanding of the driver, vijnan-sarathi and controls reins of the mind, manages to reach the end of journey, the supreme abode of all-pervading Vishnu.”

The final verse of Gita is equally emphatic. “Wherever there is the CharioteerSupreme of Yog, Krishn, and his devotee, the ace archer Arjun, there is sri, prosperity, vijaya, victory, bhuti, glory, and dhruv niti, firm morality/righteousness.

However, can this be construed to mean that Daniken chose the chariot rather than the rocket for his heading due to Indic influences whether overtly or subliminally? The irony wouldn’t be lost on the Swiss banker once jailed for fraud: for to do so would upturn his main thesis that we had visitors from outer space and it is these visitors — not earthly bards such as Vyasa, Vaisampayana or Sauti — who altered our intelligence and imagination through artificial mutation.

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