The Eternals: Everything you need to know about who – or what – they are

The Celestials

In order to better understand the Eternals, we first need to talk about the Celestials. And in order to talk about the Celestials, we also need to briefly talk about Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Published in 1968, this was nonfictional “secret history” book that presented a rather unorthodox argument: Ancient man didn’t build the Pyramids, Stonehenge, or the Easter Island monoliths; space aliens did. And these same aliens are also the basis behind every single god that was ever worshiped, along with angels, demons, and other monsters.

While Chariots of the Gods isn’t what you would call academically sound, it’s a gold mine for science fiction concepts influencing such films as Stargate and Prometheus, and also the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens. It also had a great influence on Jack Kirby.

While over at DC Comics, he wanted to expand upon his New Gods/Fourth World saga (which includes such characters as Darkseid, Mister Miracle, Big Barda, and Orion to name a few). Unfortunately, he left DC before he could implement these ideas. Undaunted, Kirby reworked his unpublished New Gods material for the Marvel Universe instead.

Thus Kirby created The Celestials, a race of gigantic, space-faring, enigmatic cosmic beings who came to Earth millions of years ago and decided to start tinkering around with human evolution. Not only did this result in the creation of modern-day homo sapiens, but also three other offshoots of humanity: The Celestials, the Deviants, and (get ready X-Men fans) the Mutants. They also, apparently, were the first wielders of the Infinity Stones.

They also conduct a series of trials over a period of centuries on a planet to determine whether or not a sentient form of life is worth saving, which they call “Hosts.” The First Host is when they arrived on Earth, and started messing around with the human race. During the Second Host, as a means of punishment to the Eternals for not doing a proper job safeguarding humanity, they destroyed the Deviants’ nation along with the continent of Atlantis, which also resulted in the Great Flood as accounted in the Bible.

The Third and Fourth Hosts became part of a Walt Simonson-penned story in the Thor comics, in which the Asgardian and Olympian Gods fought the Celestials to save Earth.

We’ve also seen glimpses of the Celestials in the movies already. That colossal robot looking thing  the Collector (Benicio del Toro) showed the Guardians of the Galaxy in the first movie that was destroying a planet? That’s a Celestial. Knowhere? That’s the head of a Celestial. And remember Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell), the father of Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt)? Well, as revealed in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Ego – at least in the Marvel Cinematic Universe –  is also a Celestial. And he wasn’t a very nice guy either, what with him giving Star-Lord’s mother cancer and trying take over the universe by having his “seeds” terraform various planets, including Earth. In short, Celestials can be massive jerks.