Evidence of the Gods (12 page)

Once again, even the cleverest mind under the sun does not know who painted or engraved the paintings on to the walls. Yet it quickly becomes clear that the prehistoric artists preferred the same motifs as their colleagues on the other side of the world: circles, wheels with spokes, suns, squares, hand prints, crosses, stars, and highlighted beings. Additionally there are a few paintings that do not occur anywhere else. (
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) There are red and yellow circles, which today would be assigned signal character, bright red rings arranged above one another, or a round structure with a rootlike outgrowth. In the round object, there is something like a small window. A UFO? Heaven help us! I cannot think of any reasonable explanations, the exception being my adored “gods.” They greet us from the walls also in Sete Cidades, like everywhere. (
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) And all we can come up with for such a worldwide concurrence is a psychological angle? Our Stone Age ancestors are hardly likely to have all visited the same painting school. So where does the initial spark for these depictions of the gods come from? The gods are the ones with the rays!

You might think that Sete Cidades, with its impossible motifs on the rock walls, was probably a singular aberration of the Stone Age artists. What do we know about the Stone Age anyway? Maybe there was some kind of painters’ convention every few years near the equator in Sete Cidades, and a few whiz-kids managed to get from California to Sete Cidades and back. Or perhaps they sent their latest creations around the world on some kind of hocus-pocus telepathic wave. I know that such a suggestion is ridiculous. That is why the question bothers me all the more as to why various rock paintings southeast of Santa Barbara, California, are similar to those in Sete Cidades. The art gallery of Santa Barbara is just as incomprehensible for us thinkers of the 21st century as the one in Sete Cidades. What else can one say except that in Santa Barbara, too, the large figures with the rays indicate the gods, no matter whether they are called “Great Manitou” or “Rongomai.”
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speak for themselves.