Chariot of the Gods

There might have been a time when an insomniac caveman looked out of the entrance of his home and observed that the stars had moved.

Cavemen would be hunting, fishing and gathering all day so the nights would be for sleep and... er... making more cavemen. Stars were something he noticed on the way into the cave and, maybe, as he crawled out in the morning.

At first, he might have thought that his eyes, or mind, were deceiving him but checking on subsequent nights would reveal the truth.

The stars move.

A revelation.

It would be quite obvious to him that the earth that he stood on was static. There was no trace of movement there.

Thus the stars move.

Then somebody noticed that there were patterns to the stars and that one pattern pointed at a star that never moved or, if it did, it was very little.

The star that stayed where it was became a navigational beacon. People could use that to find their way about the World although, that said, the World then was extremely small. Possibly the World would be a radius of around sixteen miles.

But now, using that star, the World became bigger. People could wander off, bivouac for the night and then find their way home. This was something the sun, that blinding light in the sky that rose out of the ground in the mornings, passed overhead, and then buried itself in the ground on the other side of the World each night, could not do.

The star had been placed there by some kindly soul to help them. That tiny point of light, whose shape and outline could not be seen, had been placed there by a magician.

Then there was the lightning. A great flash in the sky. Sometimes spread everywhere like a great luminous blanket and, at other times, it could be seen as a spiteful, jagged streak. Always that visual extravaganza would be followed by its brother, the noise. Thunder rolling sometimes as a threatening rumble and other times as a deadly crack.

People knew to keep out of the way of both the lightning that could turn trees to ash and the thunder that would, surely, crush you under its great feet.

Magic. It was all magic.

We still suffer from it. To this day we like to explain things that we do not understand by believing in magic.

We say we are rational beings. We tell people that we know there is no such thing as magic and yet. And yet.

We yearn for the supernatural. We watch programmes dedicated to hunting ghosts when we know, all of us, in our hearts, that there is no such thing.

We want to believe. Oh, how we long to believe that ghosts exist. They would be the proof we need in an afterlife.

But they do not.

The magic of science fiction has us clamouring for more stories about aliens; we have a series that explains to us, in detail, that aliens have visited us.

Certainly there are people, like Erich von Däniken, who are intelligent and reasoning human beings that will proffer convincing and plausible stories that we have indeed been visited in years gone by.

They will show us mysteries that can only be explained by the technology of visiting aliens.

Those mysteries are fascinating, surely, and have yet to be explained by the scientific community.

But it is not aliens and it is not magic, of that you can be certain.

A million years ago we had no clue what a star was and now we yearn to go there and see them for ourselves.

What we need to get there is a chariot. A magical chariot. Perhaps, somewhere, there is a scroll that will tell us how to build it.