Embedded Files
And those depictions of Akhenaten’s children really do look like aliens.
Every civilization writes its anxieties into its myths.
Sometimes they come wearing wings or halos, sometimes in silver suits or circuits.
The language changes, but the longing behind it—the need to explain what exceeds us—remains constant.
Whether gods, aliens, or algorithms, each age invents its own machinery of awe.
Erich von Däniken is one of the legends of our generation.
If we were to look for his counterpart today, we might imagine something like Leslie Kean meets Dan Brown—not one of those profiteering conspiracy hawkers, but a dreamer fascinated by the traces of the divine among the stars.
Chariots of the Gods was his masterpiece, and he went on to write some twenty-six books, nearly all of them echoing the same mythic refrain: The Gods’ Footprints, The Gods’ Miracles, The Gods’ Return…
In essence, he argued—supported by what he considered evidence—that humanity had once been visited by extraterrestrials who were mistaken for gods and worshipped as such.
Much of it was genuinely compelling, especially his writings on the pyramids, ancient Egypt, and the Mayan civilizations.
Years later, we encountered Galip Tekin’s comic stories built around the same notion:
Aliens abduct a village woman and, through artificial insemination in a laboratory, make her pregnant.
When she wakes up, she is carrying Jesus Christ.
Or another: Lot, fleeing with his wife from the people cursed by God, turns back—and sees the mushroom-shaped cloud of an atomic explosion.
All such stories in mythology or the history of religion deserve to be revisited through this lens.
And of course, Jung’s collective unconscious should remain close at hand—if not to resolve the confusion, then at least to deepen it.
When one encounters the story of the Golem in Prague, it’s impossible not to see how it parallels our classic robot tales.
True, most storytellers compare it to Frankenstein, but it belongs to the same lineage—only, given the technology of its time, the creature was sewn with thread instead of bolted with screws.
Its twentieth-century descendants are I, Robot, Artificial Intelligence: AI, and, though bodiless, HAL 9000 also belongs to the family.
The Golem was made of clay.
In Jewish mythology, even the first human is called a “golem”—meaning unfinished; the word can also signify fetus or embryo.
The Prague Golem was created by a rabbi to protect the city and its Jewish community from harm.
But it had no mind or will of its own.
The rabbi would write activating lines on a slip of paper, place it in the golem’s mouth, and thus bring it to life.
Removing the paper—or replacing it with another inscription—would deactivate it.
It’s the same as a robot story powered by a chip; one doesn’t need to be Däniken to see the resemblance.
Yet the Czechs’ affair with robots did not end there.
Czech writer Karel Čapek, from the Slavic word robota—meaning labor or, more precisely, forced labor—wrote a story featuring mechanical workers.
Thus the word “robot” became the property of all humankind.
The line from the rabbi’s parchment to Čapek’s factory floor runs straighter than we think.
Whether inscribed in clay, code, or scripture, our creations still mirror us—unfinished beings writing activation words into other unfinished beings.
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