CHAPTER EIGHT

THE NATURE OF HISTORY

The quarrel between evolutionists and creationists, and between Western and other religious traditions, reduced to its most basic form, ­involves the interpretation of history. Two views, irreconcilable with each other, vie for our approval. Did the universe begin a short time ago through a divine act, or did it begin seventeen billion years ago with a ­sudden explosion of energy? Perhaps the universe simply fluctuates, contracting and expanding according to the new string-theory interpretation. Or, if the universe is really a gigantic complex thought, who is thinking it? The Christian fundamentalists believe the accounts of Genesis literally and seek to reconcile everything we know about the natural world with a very short biblical time span. Clearly, we are facing irreconcilable conflict over the history of the universe and all of its subsequent small processes.

The reigning elite of modern science insists that an endless amount of time can produce almost anything. Species are thought to develop through minuscule innovations in their physical structure via mutations in their genetic makeup—or disappear from the strata, quickly and radically evolve, and then return to the stage in later geological strata (punctuation). We arrange geological strata by identifying fossils. We move from simplicity to complexity, recklessly estimating the time that might have existed ­between compatible sets of strata. Once a scenario is devised that can ­withstand the critique of esteemed older scholars, a chronology is ­approved, and we come to believe that we have accurately described the history of our planet. These accepted scenarios, however, need as much faith as does the biblical story.

Insuperable barriers exist that call into question the reality of both ­versions of Earth history. The Bible tells us only about the historical ­adventures of a small group of desert tribes who briefly established a small kingdom amid the larger empires. It describes their political conflicts in the Middle East between approximately  b.c. and the beginning of the Christian era. This history is said to reveal a divine plan for all of creation, including humanity, devised prior to Genesis, that will be consummated in the future with the destruction of the physical world and its transformation into a new and strange world, in which the lion will lie down with the lamb, reconciling the prey-predator relationship that we find in the empirical world.

Missing in this biblical scenario is an acknowledgment of the importance of the histories of other peoples and whatever divine plans they ­believed their experiences had revealed. In secular scholarship this broader version of history is a major part of the human story. We are interested in tracing the history of the large early empires, beginning with the Sumerians and followed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and others, in proper archaeological sequence. We then focus on the Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and English, finally arriving at the Americans. There is no question that each empire believed it was particularly blessed by the acknowledged deity of the time as it reached its zenith. Yet the Hebrew version of early Earth history has become dominant thanks to the evangelism of the early Christians. They brought the Old Testament to the gentiles to provide a historical basis for belief in Jesus Christ, which led to the gentile world’s ­uncritical acceptance of the belief that the physical world had been created or formed only once and that cosmic time was linear. With the victory of Christianity over competing religions in the Roman world, Genesis became the official version of Earth history. Peoples of the succeeding European empires understood the Bible as revealing a divine plan of which they were always the contemporary beneficiaries. With the increase of secular knowledge and the separation of religion from science, the idea of linear time was uncritically accepted as the proper framework within which the physical world could be understood—because science was merely offering secular alternatives to sacred concepts. With the triumph of evolution, linear time has become the primary framework of science; we flee to the idea of endless eons of time when we are unable to explain anything in the findings of paleontology, geology, archaeology, or evolutionary biology.

While we do admit that ancient societies possessed calendars that originate much earlier than those of the Hebrews, we arbitrarily reject the value of their accounts, although we are unable to explain why they would devise calendars of great antiquity if they had no memories of remote times on the Earth. Sumerian stories, for example, go quite far back in calendar years, to a time when the “gods” lived on Earth alone.₂₇₄ We also have numerous stories of once-existent continents with flourishing civilizations in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that were destroyed by sudden cataclysms. We usually reject the accuracy of such accounts or seek to bring the legends forward by forcing them into an acceptable modern time frame even if, as in the case of Atlantis, we have to change the locations and dates.

Within the current acceptable scientific stories relating the history of our planet, we also have problems. A century and a half ago, when the ­biblical worldview was breaking down, the prevailing geological paradigm saw Earth history as catastrophic—although the catastrophe was limited to Noah’s flood, since it was described in Genesis and was later discovered to be present in the records of many other peoples. Working with the ­hypothesis that observable, present-day geological processes had always been the same, and that catastrophes had never occurred on any sizable scale, Earth history was understood by science to consist of billions of years during which minuscule changes had occurred. Comparing the annual ­accumulation of sediment in lakes and river deltas laid down according to uniformitarian processes, scholars began estimating how long it would have taken for certain strata to form. Thus, estimates of the age of some sandstone and limestone formations ran into the millions of years. There was no guarantee that climatic conditions had remained stable for those long stretches of geologic time, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone. Much of scientific dating is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s famous essay proving that someday the Mississippi would be many thousands of miles long, extending far into the Atlantic.

Eventually, so many strata were studied that larger classifications had to be devised to describe the various phases that geologists believed ­accounted for all the visible formations. Today the nomenclature is quite complex. Our basic unit is the eon. We have four eons: the Hadrean, the Archean, the Proterozoic, and the Phanerozoic. This classification sounds good until we examine it more closely. As it turns out, the Hadrean eon did not exist here on Earth. It is, according to Brian Skinner and Stephen Porter in their textbook The Dynamic Earth, “the earliest part of the Earth’s history, an interval for which no rock record is known. However, rocks of this age are present on other planets whose earliest crustal rocks have been little modified since they accumulated.”₂₇₅ (Emphasis added.) It seems strange that we could have an “eon” of geologic time with no data whatsoever. The hypothesis that other planets have these rocks is sheer speculative fantasy unless some geologist can prove he has been there and verified their existence. Support for the reality of the Hadrean raises severe questions about the empirical nature of geology.

Eons are subdivided into eras that are defined by the life forms found in the strata. We have the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. Eras are then broken down into periods that in turn are divided into epochs. These classifications are highly speculative since nowhere on Earth is there found a complete stratigraphic column, and in many areas critically important formations are missing, with no discontinuities that would explain their absence. Many geologists will simply admit that the stratigraphic column is a disaster. Nevertheless, the basic outline of geological timescales does have sufficient empirical data for it to serve as a framework around which a new concept of Earth history can be constructed.

The biggest barrier in constructing a new understanding of Earth history lies in our current view of things. We suffer immensely from the sin of modernism. That is to say, we have adopted the attitude that we know more about the ancients than we really do. We assume that the fragments of data that have come down to us represent the high points of the various ancient civilizations. We judge them while holding the attitude that they were unable to express the complex theories of today and so constructed their understanding of the world from superstition. We fail to realize that the vast majority of important, ancient scholarly works were lost and that we are basing our judgments on summaries or secondary sources. Our version of Aristotle’s philosophy is in fact the summary of notes taken by his disciples and, with one rare exception, not the writings of his own hand. Some of the ancient philosophies that we have pieced together are contained only in the writings of later thinkers who quoted them in order to refute them. Even where we have deciphered clay tablets and bi- and tri­lingual inscriptions, we are dealing with only a minuscule representation of what was actually known by ancient peoples.

We forget, to our detriment, that many ancient libraries were destroyed in wars and religious purges, so it is doubtful that we possess even a thousandth of the knowledge that was gathered together, analyzed and edited, subjected to additional commentaries, and regarded as reliable by ancient peoples. Richard Mooney, popular science writer, made up a short but ­important list of the destructions of the great libraries of the ancient world that should give us a bit of pause: “The library of Pergamus in Asia Minor … contained , books, all of which were destroyed. When the Romans razed Carthage in the Punic Wars in  b.c. they also burned to ashes a library said to contain half a million volumes. The Romans also ­destroyed under the leadership of Julius Caesar, the Druidic library at Autun, France, containing thousands of scrolls on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. In China the Emperor Tsin Shi Hwang-to ordered all the ancient books destroyed in  a.d. Leo Isaurus burned , books in Byzantium in the eighth century a.d.”₂₇₆

These books were not by any means the novels, “how-to” guides, and children’s books that make up the bulk of our modern libraries’ holdings. They must have represented hundreds if not thousands of years of careful thought, perhaps even some early scientific experiments, and certainly ­accurate observations by people as dedicated and reliable as the scholars of our own time. One of the great tragedies of our planet’s history, the ­destruction of the great library at Alexandria, deprived us of a library of , books in scroll form. “The Bruchion contained , books and the Serapeum ,,” Mooney noted. “The university [at Alexandria] also included facilities for the study of medicine, mathematics, astronomy, botany and zoology, and it could house , students.”₂₇₇ Can we imagine an ancient university with a student body large enough that it could perhaps qualify for one of our major athletic conferences or send a team to the NCAA basketball “Big Dance”? When we consider that ancient peoples devoted considerable time and resources to the accumulation of knowledge, and that education probably consumed a larger percentage of their social wealth than education in America does today, the contemporary Western pride in representing our modern knowledge as a substantial accomplishment begins to fade considerably.

What did these ancient people know? Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend describe the contents of some of the astronomical tablets of the ancients in Hamlet’s Mill: “Now that the documents of the earliest ages of writing are available, one is struck with a wholly unexpected feature. Those first predecessors of ours, instead of indulging their whims with childlike freedom, behave like worried and doubtful commentators: they always try an exegesis of a dimly understood tradition. They move among technical terms whose meaning is half lost to them, they deal with words which appear on their earliest horizon already ‘tottering with age’ as J. H. Breasted says, words soon to vanish from our ken. Long before poetry can begin, there were generations of strange scholiasts.”₂₇₈

They also describe noted Moslem scholar and mathematician ­
­­Al-Biruni’s visit to India a thousand years ago, when he found “that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated aspects and events by means of stars—and were not able to show him any one star that he asked for.” In other words, ancient scholars were struggling with astronomical knowledge so old they had even forgotten its empirical application. And they comment, “The Mayas and Aztecs in the unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes.”₂₇₉ Surely we are dealing here with long stretches of historical, not scientific, time. Much of the data testifies to complex civilizations so remote that they have become legendary tales and fables now unworthy of our respect or investigation.

Donald Patten points out in The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch that the Dravidians of India, a very early people, had “astronomical and astrological themes in their literature and religion. They were concerned about perishable versus imperishable worlds, about ages, catastrophes, cycles, and new ages, and they were concerned about mathematics, causes of natural phenomena, planets, orbits, and zodiacs.”₂₈₀ He then reminds us that the Chaldeans, Druids, Egyptians, Germans, Greeks, Incas, and Mayas all had complicated astronomies and astrologies. Zecharia Sitchin, contemporary advocate of the ancient astronaut thesis, mentions that Alfred Jeremias, in The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East, “concluded that the ­zodiac was devised in the Age of Gemini (the Twins)—that is, even before Sumerian civilization began. A Sumerian tablet in the Berlin Museum (VAT. ) begins the list of zodiacal constellations with that of Leo—­taking us back to circa , b.c., when Man had just begun to till the land.”₂₈₁ This evidence contrasts sharply with the image given us by cultural evolutionists of cavemen at that time hunting on the edge of glaciers and only dimly perceiving the nature of life and death.₂₈₂

The testimony from scholars about the knowledge of the ancients rarely reaches us in either textbooks or popular articles on the origins of mankind. Peter Tompkins, in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, moves the dates even farther back, suggesting cultures so ancient that we can hardly imagine their existence. “Like the Maya, and their possible predecessors the Olmecs,” he writes, “the Chaldeans had records of stars going back , years, while the Babylonians kept the nativity horoscopes of all children born for thousands of years, from which to calculate the effects on humans of various planets and constellations.”₂₈₃ These numbers are startling and raise questions that we should have faced honestly when this data was discovered. They are studiously avoided by historians studying ancient times and not taken seriously or simply not mentioned at all.

Why would ancient peoples want to know the configurations of the heavens over such a tremendous amount of time? Did they project backward mathematically to arrive at these numbers? Or do these records ­represent actual observations? The question affects evolutionists and ­creationists alike and demonstrates that both groups have been content to let data such as this fade into the background because it is disruptive to the stories they tell. The figure of , years contradicts the creationist estimate, which favors an absurd , years, but provides no support to ­cultural evolutionists and archaeologists, who debate the various “lithic” ages of , to , years during which our species supposedly cringed in caves, afraid of the darkness and stars, barely capable of sharpening one side of a flat rock. If both groups deny the possibility of human existence and ­intelligent observation of the heavens dating back as far as Tompkins’s records show, then our original accusation that science has in some ways ­appropriated the biblical worldview and is answering its questions holds firm.

In fact, the Western, Christian view of historical time stands out as an anomaly in comparison with other cultures, large and small. Almost universally, other people speak of a series of worlds prior to the present one, when things were entirely different on Earth, when other peoples and ­exotic animals were alive and prospering. In general, their memories are not fables, and contain some reasonably specific ideas that might be verified, given some openness. Depending on the tradition, people speak of “worlds” or “ages” when they are referring to the totality of the previous world, including its humanoid creatures and their social structures as well as the physical world. Other people speak of “suns” when the cosmology was different from what it is today. These memories should be included in a rendering of secular, human history of the planet.

The list of cultures that embraced the idea of past ages is astounding.
A preliminary survey reveals that the Chinese have ten previous ages; the Polynesians and Icelanders have nine; and the Etrurians, the Visuddhi Magga, the Bahman Yost, the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the Sybylline Books, the Mayas, and the ancient Hebrews all report seven previous worlds. Remembering four previous worlds are the Hesiod, the Bengals, the Tibetans, the Bhagavata Purana, the Mexicans, and many American Indian tribes. With more concentrated research, one could find considerably more cultures that believed in a multiplicity of worlds. We have no basis for rejecting their statements except to say, as many academics are prone to do, that we don’t believe them.

In view of the Western/Christian propensity to support the single world theory and pretend that we are unique, it is important to note briefly that the multiplicity of Hebrew worlds since Genesis must be understood within the context of early Hebrew beliefs. Louis Ginzberg, noted Hebraic scholar and historian, in The Legends of the Jews, says: “Nor is this world inhabited by man the first of things earthly created by God. He made several worlds before ours and he destroyed them all.”₂₈₄ In a variant Jewish tradition, according to Immanuel Velikovsky, “Several heavens were created, seven in fact. Also the seven earths were created; the most removed being the seventh Erez, followed by the sixth Adamah, the fifth Arka, the fourth Harabbah, the third Yabbashah, the Second Tebel and our own land called Heled, and like the others it is separated from the foregoing by abyss, chaos, and waters.”₂₈₅ Genesis describes only the beginnings of the present world, and it is a summary of Sumerian beliefs.

Much speculation about the accomplishments of ancient peoples centers on the Sumerians. They spoke a language that was unrelated to any other that we know. We can read their language primarily because of the multilingual inscriptions that have been found and the use of Sumerian words by later peoples. Scholars have waxed eloquently about the achievements of the Sumerians and have traditionally credited these people with the birth of civilization. Some scholars even contend that the Sumerians exerted great influence on the Egyptians, who rival them in longevity. Zecharia Sitchin summarized the praise of scholars for these people: “H. Frankfort (Tell Uqair) called it ‘astonishing.’ Pierre Amiet (Elam) termed it ‘extraordinary.’ A. Parrot (Sumer) described it as ‘a flame which blazed up so suddenly.’ Leo Oppenheim (Ancient Mesopotamia) stressed ‘the astonishing short period’ within which this civilization has arisen. Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God) summed it up in this way: ‘With stunning abruptness ... there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden ... the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world.”₂₈₆ These are high accolades indeed, but why?

Most scholars adopt the conclusions of the pioneering work of Samuel Noah Kramer, the reigning authority on Sumer for many years. They particularly cite his famous twenty-five “firsts” from his books From the Tablets of Sumer and History Begins at Sumer. Among the Sumerians’ ­accomplishments are the first wheels, kilns, bricks, high-rise buildings, commercial agriculture, metallurgy, medicine, irrigation, and city planning. More important, in the social/cultural realm, they devised the first schools, courts, temples, legislatures, priests, kings, administrators, librarians and library catalog systems, historians, literary debates, poetry, music, and art. Kramer became so enthusiastic about Sumerian achievements that he later revised History Begins at Sumer to include thirty-seven “firsts.”

Different scholars propose alternative inventors for some of these disciplines, and as we discover additional artifacts in the ruins of different societies, the emphasis shifts back and forth among contending perspectives. Agriculture, for example, could have originated in the Middle East highlands, somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, or in China. Metallurgy’s origin is attributed to a variety of locations, depending on how extensively scholars compare various digs and what their dating scheme is. Finding very ancient mines in South Africa dating perhaps to , b.c. may radically change our concept of how and when people began to work ores for metals.

All these different disciplines come together in Sumer as one interwoven cultural/social complex that raises questions of origin that cannot be ­answered by allocating the various “firsts” to other peoples. If this complex did arrive together, then we might give serious thought to the possibility that an extraterrestrial civilization brought it to the Sumerians, that the Sumerians inherited this knowledge from the survivors of a previous world, or that they themselves were a different people than we have imagined. When we broach the subject of ancient astronauts, many scholars ­automatically turn their backs and return to their fictional speculations about caveman paintings. Our intent here, however, is not to prove the ­existence of ancient astronauts but to examine the idea.

Generally, when the idea of ancient astronauts is brought up among its adherents, they suggest seemingly impossible engineering feats and point to the strange ruins at Baalbek, proclaiming that ancient astronauts left these megaliths as evidence of their sojourn on Earth. That conclusion can hardly follow, however, from an examination of large stones. Megaliths may get us interested in prehistory, but they cannot tell us very much, and we tend to fill in the enormous gaps in our knowledge with speculations. From the multitude of people who have made claims regarding ancient astronauts, I have chosen three scholars who seem to represent possible fruitful approaches to the question: Carl Sagan, C. A. O’Brien, and Zecharia Sitchin.

Sagan assumes that the Sumerians were already living as a sedentary people with some measure of civilization. He does not elaborate on the scope of their accomplishments or the origin of their knowledge and technology. He suggests that a strange aquatic creature with a vast scientific knowledge then arrived on their shores, and they become the first modern society through his teachings. Sagan quotes fragments of legends from Alexander Polyhistor, Abydenus, and Appollodorus, suggesting that these ancient writings “present an account of a remarkable sequence of events. Sumerian civilization is depicted by the descendants of the Sumerians themselves to be of non-human origins. A succession of strange creatures appears over the course of several generations. Their only apparent purpose is to instruct mankind. Each knows of the mission and accomplishments of his predecessors. When a great inundation threatens the survival of the newly introduced knowledge among men, steps are taken to insure its preservation.”₂₈₇

With Sumer apparently founded around  b.c., and Noah’s flood often dated around  b.c., that would mean a useful life of the Sumerian culture of only around , years. This would barely rival Egyptian longevity and would hardly account for the astronomical tables that purport to track stars for , years. Even more confusing is the fact that this creature came from the sea, which would suggest that we are dealing with some kind of amphibian, or that astronauts from other planets like to spend their quality time in our oceans. The idea of a superhero coming to people and teaching them the arts of civilization and/or simple crafts is pervasive in North America and is found in many other parts of the world, albeit without any of the fundamental changes such as occurred at Sumer. Pueblos and Navajos, for example, were much better fed after the visit of the Corn Mother, but they did not begin compiling astronomical charts and building temples. Unfortunately, Sagan did not follow up on his idea and demonstrate how the appearance of a being with superior knowledge changed the behavior of the Sumerian people. He was apparently content to simply suggest that an unidentified complex of institutions and technologies arrived and was adopted. Cultural evolutionists should tell us whether these changes were primarily social or technological in nature, and which came first.

Zecharia Sitchin provides such an extensive development of his idea that his thesis had to be presented in a series of books that sought to cover the period from the prehistoric cosmos to the landing of the ancient ­astronauts, their subsequent settlement, and their eventual disappearance. Sitchin does connect with the chronology of the Bible in his book The Wars of Gods and Men, in which Abraham appears as a character. Briefly, according to Sitchin, the Earth is invaded by an expedition of astronauts who come to Earth to mine gold. After working in the gold mines for hundreds of thousands of years, they rebel and demand that the elders of the expedition create a worker who can do the manual mining labor in their place. The leader of the expedition begins to experiment with genetic ­engineering, creates a bevy of strange animals later to appear in Middle Eastern mythology, and finally creates a hybrid from a local hominid by crossing his genetic structure with that of the astronauts.

Some hybrids work as slaves in the mines, and later some become ­servants in the cities established by the members of the expedition. The ­hybrids walk around naked since they are not believed to be fertile and ­apparently have no sexual urges. “Birth goddesses” who have hybrid eggs planted in their wombs give birth to new servants as they are needed. Sitchin cites some tablet scenes that feature naked humans with a clothed god or goddess and others that show goddesses lined up to give birth. If these tablets actually exist, why haven’t scholars made some reference to them during the last century? The problem with Sitchin’s theory is that we are never certain whether these tablets actually exist because he does not give accurate documentation and because they are so foreign to other tablets we have seen from the same civilization.

Although Sitchin doesn’t state it directly, it is plain that early institutional religion is a device invented to control humans. The astronauts create the concept of “gods” to distinguish themselves from us socially. Temples are built that are actually elaborate villas for the gods. Ziggurats and the multitude of ancient, public city buildings are constructed for the administration of the cities so that control can be maintained. The prettiest woman in the city has to spend the night in a room at the top of the ziggurat in case the astronaut who rules the city stops by for some fun₂₈₈ (much like what may happen in some fancy apartment buildings in Washington, D.C., I would suppose). Things get worse and the population of humans grows dramatically.

Then the astronauts become aware that a massive physical catastrophe will occur shortly. They hold a council, find a way to protect themselves, and decide not tell humans about its approach so they will be exterminated. One astronaut does tell a human (here insert the name of your ­favorite flood hero), however, and instructs him in how to build a boat so some humans can be saved. The catastrophe occurs, most humans and most animals are destroyed, and we are now well into the chronology of ancient history that leads to the biblical account of the rise of the Hebrews as a distinct people. From the picture Sitchin sketches, the Noah figure seeks to save only domestic animals and doesn’t scour the Earth for unicorns and so forth. He also takes a large number of people with him, ­according to extracanonical sources.

When we connect the ancient astronaut thesis with the biblical families, we must remember that Abraham and his people are really Chaldeans from Ur, a city that was apparently rebuilt after humans once again had a sufficient population to build cities. Being a shepherd, Abraham would probably have had just enough knowledge of the popular version of Sumerian prehistory to have passed down the stories that now compose Genesis. We are not told that he was one of the palace elite or even educated. So perhaps he could not have known of the complex histories recorded by the Sumerians regarding the flood or other past events. Considering that Genesis was written after the exodus, and perhaps even after the entrance into Canaan, by people who had heard the traditions as folklore, what we probably have in Genesis is a “Reader’s Digest condensed version” of Sumerian history.₂₈₉ An examination of Genesis shows that it is a sequence of personal family stories. We have no assurance that they follow each other in strict descent to provide a family genealogy. Creationists who read Genesis literally to compose their chronological timelines are ­seriously mistaken if they assume that it contains accurate historical facts about early man.

Different aspects of Sitchin’s scenario give me pause, but I have presented an expanded synopsis of his thinking because it has elements that can be used to critique some aspects of the beginnings of Judaism and Christianity and, by extension, the Western view of history. If we have goddesses giving birth without benefit of sexual intercourse, we have a way to understand the virgin-birth idea that was so popular in the Middle East and see that it was a mark of honor. If the astronauts were pretending to be “gods,” there was ample reason for them to be jealous and demand obedience from their humans. If they in fact brought some kinds of flying ­vehicles with them, stories about their fantastic flights may simply have been descriptions of what humans observed. Both the Hopis and the people of India have many stories about the flying machines of the ancients, so this thesis can become a foundation for further research.

C. A. O’Brien, English prehistorian, offers an alternative reading to the Sitchin scenario, placing his emphasis on the garden of Eden, the events that caused its destruction, and the eventual founding of cities in the ­region known as the Fertile Crescent. Sitchin understands these cities as earlier efforts to create a grid for landing spaceships in this area. O’Brien suggests that many of the terms we uncritically accept as descriptive of ­religious personalities were in fact offices or ranks in the ancient astronaut social structure. Thus the yhwh was an office filled by a succession of leaders rather than a name for a specific god. He strikes a chord here because the Old Testament has many admonitions against worshipping “other gods,” as if those deities were actual beings who could compete with the Hebraic deity.

We are accustomed to explaining religion in terms of “worshipping” our deities and attributing to them the most fantastic of powers. That would be the proper stance of a creature standing before someone of infinitely greater knowledge and technology. Carl Sagan writes, “The astronauts would probably be portrayed as having godlike characteristics and possessing supernatural powers. Special emphasis would be placed on their arrival from the sky, and their subsequent departure back into the sky.”₂₉₀ These themes are found in many peoples’ histories. Our idea of heaven must come from this experience. I am reminded here that the Osage Indian stories, which tell of a hybrid of “earth” and “sky” peoples, are perhaps an echo of that time.

Sitchin’s and O’Brien’s basic argument regarding the creation of man rests on linguistics. “The very terms by which the Sumerians and Akkadians called ‘man’ bespoke his status and purpose,” Sitchin writes. “He was a lulu (‘primitive’), a lulu amelu (‘primitive worker’), an awilun ­(‘laborer’). That man was created to be a servant of the gods did not strike the ancient peoples as a peculiar idea at all. In biblical times, the deity was ‘lord,’ ‘sovereign,’ ‘King,’ ‘Ruler,’ ‘Master.’ The term that is commonly translated as ‘worship’ was in fact avod (‘work’). Ancient and biblical Man did not ‘worship’ his god; he worked for him.”₂₉₁ This point is important ­because it is the firm contention of Christian apologists that the “sovereignty” of god is what distinguishes that religion from all others.

Ian Barbour says that “clearly the biblical story differs from other ancient creation stories in its assertion of the sovereignty and transcendence of God and the dignity of humanity.”₂₉₂ I am dubious about how much dignity for humanity is found in Genesis, but with the ancient astronaut thesis we can certainly see where the idea of the sovereignty of god originated. It was that of the master and slave relationship. Later on the same page, after asserting the dignity of man, Barbour admits, “In the Babylonian story, humanity was created to provide slaves for the gods,” forgetting perhaps that Genesis is a summary of a much more extensive Chaldean tradition and basically supports the ancient astronaut thesis. His admission that humans were created as slaves gives added credence to the ancient astronaut thesis.

When we examine Christian theology through the centuries, we find that it always uses political and judicial images. It is as if the trauma of life as slaves to superior beings could not be forgotten. (We know Protestant Christianity certainly never overcame the embarrassment of being naked.) Barbour discusses how Christianity has phrased its explanations by using judicial models, and here again we see the trauma of being on the bottom of the social pyramid in Sumer. Barbour says that the “penal substitute model uses the images of a law court. The satisfaction for justice requires a penalty for our offences; Christ as substitute bears our punishment and we are acquitted.”₂₉₃ But why would a society model its understanding of cosmic history after a human institution? Many societies modeled their ideas about the world after the family that could be seen in both animals and humans. Why would people define the purpose of history as a deity’s seeking to punish humans unless they had already experienced that setting while the gods were controlling them?

Barbour offers a second model used by Christian theologians: the “sacrificial victim model,” which “uses the images of the temple sacrifice. Christ as both priest and victim (as in the letter to Hebrews) provides expiation for man’s sin.”₂₉₄ Now, a point that Sitchin makes, although not too clearly, is the importance of these blood sacrifices of ancient times. The “temples” were apparently villas for the various gods, since they were always dedicated to a particular god. The sacrifices may well have been simply that the human priests had to cook meals for the temple god. O’Brien emphasizes that the meat had to be well cooked since the astronauts had experienced an illness from badly cooked food early in their occupation of the valley in which the garden of Eden was located. The old saying that gods loved the smell of the sacrifice could well have stemmed from a real memory that, at a good barbecue, the gods loved to smell meat cooking—somewhat akin to Lyndon Johnson savoring a Texas feed.

Other miscellaneous tidbits make sense when we consider the ancient astronaut thesis. Everyone familiar with ancient mythology must be shocked to find that in the Sumerian, Hindu, and Greek pantheons we find abundant evidence of completely dysfunctional groups. Adultery, incest, murder, betrayal, political coups, and feuds of great intensity occur as a matter of course. Grandfathers can hardly wait until their granddaughters are “of a desirable age,” as they say in the American South. Without exception, the human followers who “worshipped” these gods lived a less promiscuous life than did the deities. How could any of these “religions” have flourished in human society for any period of time if these deities represented the highest expression of moral and ethical behavior that we can conceive? Who would worship Zeus and others unless compelled to do so? The gods appear to have been feasting on Viagra rather than ambrosia. Their behavior as public figures was probably not duplicated by any society until our recent Congresses.

Christian theology has colored our interpretation of ancient texts so that we tend to think in exalted, abstract terms, believing that the peoples of the Middle East thought in the same manner as we do. We can look at other materials that will shed light on the ancient astronaut interpretation. “El” seems to have been a reasonably widespread word designating the highest god in the regional pantheon. Marvin Pope, noted Old Testament scholar, looked at the Ugaritic texts and attempted to discern what the original meaning of this term might be. He found that “there is hardly anything that could be called a creation story or any clear allusion to cosmic creativity in the Ugaritic texts.” But, he said, “The tradition of yhwh as a Creator God ... is a prominent feature of the Old Testament and yhwh was almost certainly identified with El. It is altogether probable that El was a Creator God, but the Ugaritic allusions to El’s creativity are in terms of generation and paternity. El is called ~~ [citations to Ugaritic texts omitted], ‘Father of Mankind’ and bny bnwt, ‘Creator of creatures.’ The translation of ‘Creator of creatures’ for bny bnwt is not quite satisfactory or adequate, but a woodenly literal rendering of ‘Builder of Built Ones’ or ‘Begetter of Begotten Ones’ would be rather awkward.”₂₉₅ Pope’s analysis gives comfort to the Sitchin and O’Brien thesis.

What does this mean in terms of the history and worldview of these people? They apparently knew or believed that El had had some intimate involvement in the creation of human beings and that the designation
“father” had a strong genetic flavor rather than a sociological/religious emphasis. Perhaps “El” was a donor of genetic material, and the “creation” of man involved him personally. This line of interpretation, which coordinates the general beliefs of the peoples of this area instead of isolating the Old Testament and pretending that the Hebrews were immune from cultural interchange with their neighbors, can lead to a radically different secular history for this part of the Earth.

Theologians, as we have mentioned, put much emphasis upon the “sovereignty” of god and tell us that all creation is subject to his powers. That belief may be a later interpretation by Hebrew thinkers. We remember from the mythology of Sumerian, Hindu, and Greek traditions that the head god, whatever his name, barely had control of the other gods and often faced quarrels and disagreements within their ranks. Pope paints the same picture from his reading of the Ugaritic texts: “The disrespectful ­behavior of Prince Sea’s messengers, El’s ready capitulation to their ­demands, his apparent helplessness in the altercation that breaks out in the divine assembly, his submission to ‘Anat’sr threats, is rather difficult to ­understand, if his authority and power are really commensurate with his nominal position. It is hard to see how the Ugratitians who composed and read and heard these ironical episodes recited could have had a firm belief in El’s supremacy.”₂₉₆

Most Western religious thinkers will reject out of hand the linkage of Sumerian and early Hebraic sources with their traditional interpretation of the Old Testament. It is nonsense to pretend, however, that all of the histories and references to other peoples must fade away into obscurity ­because we prefer to regard the Old Testament as historically accurate and to exclude other literature that originates in the same cultural complex. The ancient astronaut thesis opens a new area of historical research in that by synthesizing data rather than isolating it, one can construct a more realistic alternative history of mankind. We cannot, then, rely on the ­accounts of Genesis alone to give us accurate historical data. But taking them together with the Sumerian and other traditions, we can construct a new history of the region that has both internal and external consistency.

Let me be clear about the purpose of this chapter. With secular history, we seek to go back to modern man’s earliest appearance. Yet when we do, at least in some of the ancient ruins we have uncovered, there is already a complex civilization present, with both technology and institutions clearly similar to that which we possess. We need a history that will easily and comfortably explain these great cultural complexes. The basis of Western religions is their claim of the absolute primacy and sovereignty of god as the creator. What if this belief is not an exalted abstraction that has emerged from a religious tradition but a memory of a unique event in our planet’s history? Clearly, the ancient astronaut thesis spans the tremendous gulf between these two views. Western religion may simply be the historical remnants of an ancient cargo cult.

I do not believe the ancient astronaut thesis, contrary to what I’m sure many reviewers will insist. Following Occam’srazor, however, I am forced to admit that it ties up a lot of loose strings. I do believe that it has much to tell us and should be a topic for serious historical investigation rather than simply the concern of flying saucer groups.

Unfortunately, at the present time academics seem to be rewarded with advancement primarily when they keep the knowledge of the past grounded in narrowly focused specialty topics, thereby gaining an ­immense reputation by becoming an expert in a minuscule field defined exclusively by themselves and their colleagues. Synthesizers—those who try to paint the larger picture—do not do well in academia, and for that reason most of the truly creative work is being done outside the ivy-­covered walls. Other scenarios can be brought forward that view the data in entirely different ways than I have suggested. It is in the nature of real scholarship to propose new ways of interpreting data instead of simply ­defending outworn theses. In that sense, and because so much is being published for the general reader, sooner or later some serious consideration will have to be given to these ideas. The other religions, then, have much to contribute to our understanding of the universe and ourselves, but they must be taken as seriously as we take the Western traditions.