White gods

White gods is the pseudohistorical belief that ancient cultures around the world were visited by white races in ancient times, and that they were known as "white gods".

Some authors have claimed that white missionaries or "gods" visited the Americas before Christopher Columbus. Authors usually quote from mythology and legends which discuss ancient gods such as Quetzalcoatl to conclude that the legends were actually based on Caucasians visiting those areas, and that the Caucasians were really the gods.

This story was first reported in 1553 by Pedro Cieza de León, and later by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Similar accounts by Spanish chroniclers (such as Juan de Betanzos) describe Viracocha as a "white god", often with a beard.

The first Spanish chroniclers from the 16th century, however, made no mention of any identification with Viracocha. The first to do so was Pedro Cieza de León in 1553. Similar accounts by Spanish chroniclers (e.g. Juan de Betanzos) describe Viracocha as a "white god", often with a beard. However, the whiteness of Viracocha is not mentioned in the native authentic legends of the Incas. Most modern scholars, therefore, had considered the "white god" story to be a post-conquest Spanish invention.

Rupert Furneaux also linked "White gods" to the ancient city of Tiahuanaco.

Colonel A. Braghine in his 1940 book The Shadow of Atlantis claimed that the Carib people have reports and legends of a white bearded man whom they called Tamu or Zune who had come from the East, taught the people agriculture and later disappeared in an "easterly direction". Braghine also claimed Manco Cápac was a white bearded man. The Atlantis author Gerd von Hassler linked the "White gods" to the biblical flood.

20th-century Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, best known for his voyage across the Pacific in a reconstruction of an ancient vessel in an effort to prove that Polynesia was peopled by South American voyagers, believed that a white race inhabited South America.

The archaeologist Pierre Honoré in 1962 proposed the fringe theory that the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were due to "white men from the vicinity of Crete".