Collection: Excerpts from The Dänikbharata
When I was a child, I asked my father whether he believed there really, truly was a good. His answer was to introduce me to ancient astronaut theory, by handing me a copy of Erich von Däniken’s Gods From Outer Space — I think mainly because Chariots of the Gods was tucked away in a box somewhere. Years later, reading HP Lovecraft’s fiction, I realized that some of it was, in some sense, a prescient literary exploration of the same ideas von Däniken was into. (Little did I know that von Däniken had simply ripped off someone who had, in turn, ripped off Lovecraft, but that’s another story.)
The Dänikbharata was on of the eventual manifestations of this strange moment: it was a series of poems I worked on in 2000-2001, in which the gods of various historical pantheons turned out, as von Däniken had suggested, to be aliens who had been stranded on Earth. The tale was to focus on the gods who ended up in India, and what they had gone on to do in their long wait for rescue; the epic was to mainly concern the war between the various gods and pantheons when a rescue ship arrived, but only limited seating was available. The project is currently incomplete.