by Freddy Silva
A divine hierarchy of dragon lords is known to have been present within Chinese culture for at least 7000 years,21 although the association stretches into antediluvian times. According to legend, both Chinese primogenitors were closely related to lóng (dragons). At the end of his reign the first ruler was himself immortalized into a dragon and ascended to the sky; the next was born by his mother's telepathy with a dragon, and ever since, the ancient Chinese have self-identified as descendants of the dragon,22 suggesting the presence of a divine bloodline borne of the mating between gods and humans. This symbolic as well as probable genetic connection is enforced by the lineage of Chinese monarchs who took on the title Son of Heaven whenever they cemented a matrimonial bond. The phrase was interpreted literally in China and Japan, whose monarchs described themselves as half-human half-divine — just as in Iberia, India, Scythia, Egypt and Mesopotamia — or as the living image of gods,23 insinuating once again how they were offspring of the original People of the Serpent.
The Chinese antediluvian goddess Nü Kwa and her consort Fu Hsi are said to have molded humans from clay when they descended onto the sacred mountain Hua Shan after the flood. They taught them how to hunt, fish and cook their catch, the art of writing, and provided the laws necessary for the foundation of a civilized society, while knowledge of agriculture and medicine came from a Divine Farmer by the name of Shennong.
Nü Kua and Fu Hsi, founders of China’s dragon bloodline.
Nü Kwa is of central interest to our quest because she is credited with repairing the sky after Gonggong, a water god with red hair and a tail like a serpent, damaged the pillar supporting the heavens, essentially knocking the Earth's axis off kilter and causing the planet to tilt to the southeast and the sky to the northwest — a story often used to explain why the rivers of China generally flow to the southeast. The remote period when this cataclysmic event befell the Earth is described in the Huainanzi: “Going back to more ancient times, the four pillars were broken... Heaven did not completely cover [the Earth]; the Earth did not hold up [Heaven] all the way around [its circumference]. Fires blazed out of control and could not be extinguished; water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferocious animals ate blameless people; predatory birds snatched the elderly and the weak. Thereupon, Nü Kwa smelted together five-colored stones in order to patch up the azure sky, cut off the legs of the great turtle to set them up as the four pillars, killed the black dragon to provide relief... and piled up reeds and cinders to stop the surging waters. The azure sky was patched; the four pillars were set up; the surging waters were drained... blameless people [preserved their] lives."24
Written in enigmatic style, the book uses allegory to describe how a god with knowledge of earth magic balanced the elements of nature after the heavens fell out of alignment and the sky was punctured with holes, when deep fissures opened in the ground, and entire regions caught fire while others were flooded — a fair picture of a planet damaged by the impact of a disintegrated meteor. There's no mistaking the prehistoric setting, a time when oversize "predatory birds snatched the weak."
Nü Kwa and Fu Hsi also come from the same sister-brother wife-husband tradition, like Anu and Antu, Zeus and Hera, just to add new names to the ever-growing list. But there's another revealing aspect to this Chinese pair, they are portrayed as half-snake, half-human, thus shown to herald from the People of the Serpent, setting in motion the divine dynasty of Dragon Emperors in China, ending with the last emperor in 1912. In the Forbidden City it is still possible to see the Throne of Supreme Harmony featuring seven tier, each commemorating the original Seven Sages.
Just as the Seven Sages and the People of the Serpent are always associated in some form with the sea, so the dragon was associated in China and Japan with water. The famous Japanese Dragon King Ryo-Wo was revered as the god of the sea and was said to live in an underwater grand palace called Ryugu, from where he controlled the ocean. The association also appears in Korean legends, in which mortals and dragons are always connected to each other via an intermediary fish.25
Interestingly, while the serpent or dragon was associated with Emperors and water, the Empress was identified with the phoenix, the bird of resurrection, together painting a vivid symbolism of the rebirth of a divine lineage following the flood.
VENOM THAT PROLONGS LIFE
Earlier we looked at the unusual ability of antediluvian gods to live outrageously long lives. The same was true of the People of the Serpent, and this overlap may reveal how they achieved it. This surreal longevity appears to have been partly genetic, as though these people originated from an environment that differed significantly from the Earth's, much like a citizen of Mars adapting to a planet whose orbit around the Sun is shorter, making a day seem like an hour. The method was also partly induced. Somehow they found that snake venom is rendered harmless when mixing with a certain blood type, producing an elixir that boosts the body's immune system and retards the aging of cells, thus extending longevity while creating the illusion of immortality. As strange as this might seem, Chinese herbalists still use diluted snake venom to prolong the shelf life of food.
The relationship between longevity and serpent venom became central to the symbolism of the Greek god of medicine Asclepius who, legend has it, killed a snake, then watched another slither into the room with a herb in its mouth. With this herb Asclepius was able to resurrect the dead snake, putting his healing abilities on par with those of another group of serpents in the east called the Naga priests.
THE CULT OF NAGA
The long sovereignty of the People of the Serpent and their influence on human affairs covers the regions of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, India, and many Pacific islands, and in every case the sages belonging to this select group are referred to as Naga (serpent).
Fijians claim they originated in Central Asia, then migrated to Egypt, and continued south to Tanganika before sailing across the Indian and Pacific oceans to their present homeland. A secret initiation called Baki was once practiced in Fiji inside walled temple enclosures called naga, the name also given to a seafaring race whose ships resembled serpents. The Fijian civilizing god Degei arrived on such a canoe from his sunken abode after a ualuvu levu (great flood), landing on the Ra coast of Viti Levu where he built a village at Vuda (origin), and taught agriculture to local people. Degei also acts as the guardian of two caves on the island said to lead to the Otherworld, a job similarly ascribed to Osiris.
Naga in Indian temple. The seven serpent halos acknowledge the flood Rshis.
One Naga progenitor of the royal house of Japan is Izanagi, whose etymological connection to the Itzá makes his name a compound word meaning 'serpent magician'. According to Japan's prehistoric text Kujiki, he and his sister-wife Itzanami gave birth to the islands of Japan by raising the land out of the ocean, or to be geologically correct, when Japan separated from mainland Asia by rising seas at the end of the Younger Dryas to become an archipelago. The Kujiki itself is estimated to have been compiled before the flood, with one document, Takenouchi, describing two sunken landmasses in the Pacific called Miyoi and Tamiara, the result of dozens of tenpenchii (cataclysms) that afflicted the Earth due to an imbalance between humans and the divine source.26
Incidentally the Takenouchi states that the Five-Colored Peoples (humanity) coexisted for millions of years and only through growing degeneration in society have the Yuga cycles (world ages) generated a periodic wiping out of civilization.27
Naga tradition extends to Viet Nam, where the first person to unite the Cham people of the region and teach them agriculture and medicine was an Empress by the name Po Nagar. In Laos, the Naga kings were intertwined with water spirits, just as they were in Cambodia. In the legend of Nagi Soma, for example, a prince meets the daughter of the Naga lord of the land — who is half human, half snake — by the seashore, whereupon he marries her and founds a royal race.28 The Naga tradition was maintained for millennia at Angkor, where each year the ruling king united with a symbolic Na
gi to recall and revive the prehistoric origins of the cult.29 As indeed he should, because a study by John Grigsby of the orientation and position of Angkor's main temples suggests the site is far older than the official 12th century founding date. Just as the Giza pyramids model the belt of Orion in 10,400 BC, so the main temples of Angkor mirror the coils of the celestial serpent, the constellation Draco, as it appeared above Cambodia in the same era.30
The further you walk away from the heavily visited temples of Angkor and toward outlying sites such as Phnom Bakheng, the more the anomalies begin to appear pointing to a retrofitting and expansion of an earlier site. Walls damaged by earthquakes and strife reveal megalithic blocks taken from elsewhere to patch up holes. In several cases these blocks look no different to the high precision masonry prevalent in Puma Punku, they bear the same precision-drilled holes and a finish that looks as though the stone was poured like cement. What I find most interesting is how one wall near this site has partly collapsed, revealing refined and meticulously fitted megalithic core masonry. Contrary to common sense, this advanced masonry was subsequently encased by smaller, cruder, comparatively less precise stonework, the kind consistent with the 12th century, the era when the whole 15 square miles of Angkor was allegedly built from scratch. There is also the curious case of a solitary megalithic block that, stylistically, could have been taken from Puma Punku and dropped here. Or vice versa. It even features the double staircase design common to the Andes that forms the basis of the chakana or Andean Cross.
If you are inclined to walk around Angkor, mark down the number of steps, statues, platforms and carved serpents. You will discover the mathematical values common to the Earth's precessional cycle hard-wired into the fabric of the buildings. Like the Great Pyramid, it seems Angkor too has been rebuilt to maintain the ongoing tradition of knowledge first set down by the antediluvian sages.
One of the more unusual remarks concerning the Naga comes from the Mahabharata and Vedic Purana texts of India, in which it is said they assumed human form when a situation demanded it — such as a global cataclysm, or the necessity for mass social reform due to degeneracy in the human race. When describing the domain of the Naga, the Puranas are specific yet paradoxically vague, probably because they tried to conceal their precise whereabouts, compelled as they were to lead a separate existence. As always, the ocean theme is prevalent. The Naga would arrive on the seashore, typically in groups of seven led by an eighth: "Rishi Kashyapa begot the seven great serpents,"31 thereby revealing the People of the Serpent to be the same as the Seven Sages. Once their mission is accomplished they return to a land beyond the horizon, to Patalaloka (Nether Regions), somewhere amid the ocean. Hindu mythology describes their capital as a subterranean location called, appropriately enough, Bhogavati (peopled by snakes).32
And yet if their original homeland sank, to where were they returning? Were portions of their island still remaining after the flood? Are the allusions to underwater domains mere descriptions of former lands now inundated?
The irony is that, for all their efforts risking their lives to bring civilization to human shores, the Naga race was almost obliterated in India by Aryan king Kuru in a massacre at Takshashila, when his clan came to possess their land. Just as in Yucatan and the Andes we see the same pattern of groups of humans turning on the flood heroes or their offspring, even though the Indian account appears to have occurred well into historical times. The cliché 'power corrupts' is an apt observation here, for once humans had been raised from a state of barbarity, some figured out that the only thing better than imitating the gods is to usurp power and pretend to be a god.
Nevertheless, as with the Shining Ones in Egypt and the People of the Serpent in Guatemala, the Naga bloodline persevered for thousands of years after the flood and into historical times. Naga kings and queens in India ruled over a dozen cities throughout the subcontinent, including the northwest of India where they held court at Patalpuri, as well as at the aforementioned city of Takshashilla, once home to one of the world's oldest universities. Today, traces of these People of the Serpent can be seen in the symbolic rituals performed by the cult of Shiva and its practitioners, the Naga Sadhu,33 a comforting thought because the aim of these ascetics is to become "well disposed, kind, willing, effective or efficient, peaceful, secure, virtuous, honourable, righteous, noble,"34 in other words, "a good man or woman who chooses to live on the edge of society to focus on spiritual perfection"35 — not unlike the gods who set the example 11,000 years ago.
There's one further aspect about the People of the Serpent which will take us west of India and into Mesopotamia and its antediluvian gods. Ninlil, sister-wife of the god Enlil, bore the title Great Mother Serpent of Heaven, and was appropriately pictured with a serpent's tail.36 It's one of two times when the serpent title is raised in Mesopotamia, the other being a Watcher by the name Kâsdejâ, "who was son of the Serpent named Tabââ'êt."37 These magicians formed a reclusive enclave on a mountaintop somewhere in the Middle East, a settlement by the name Gar-sag,38 where they went by the collective name Anunaki.
Or as they were known throughout India, Annunagi.39
13. A MEETING WITH THE LORDS OF ANU
At this point it is worth recalling my conversation with Teokotai Andrew, the wisdom keeper of Tongareva, and how his tribe’s ancestors were the tall, bearded, red-haired Tupenake/Anunaki, "great sages, star navigators and intelligent human beings" who originated from an island called Te Pitaka, and how it sank somewhere in the region of what is now the Arabian Peninsula during the great flood.1
Inundation maps of this region prove his people's tradition to be generally correct. A dramatic rise in sea level 10,600 years ago breached the Straits of Hormuz and caused the fertile plain between Persia and Saudi Arabia to become what today is known as the Persian Gulf.2 That's the equivalent of flooding the British Isles.
The same situation prevailed along the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula, which became the Red Sea. Sumerian traditions identify this waterway as the general region from where the civilizing flood god Ua-annu once emerged with his seven sages.3 Given how its earliest name was Sea of Reeds4— Aaru to the Egyptians — it makes for a tantalizing hypothesis, because the K'iche' Maya and the Olmec refer to one of the points of origin of the antediluvian sages as Tolan, the Place of Reeds.
MANY GODS, ONE PEOPLE
By now it should be obvious that the Aku Shemsu Hor, the Followers of Horus, the Shining Ones, the Hayhuaypanti, the Urukehu, the Huari, the People of the Serpent, the Naga, the Kaanul, the Ofiússa, the Seven Rshi, the Apkallu, and the Anunaki are interchangeable. They are one and the same group of antediluvian gods — civilizing flood heroes and magicians sharing the same maritime symbolism, “fish-men... who worked many miracles” to quote the Popol Vuh,5 all interconnected by physical description, deeds and ideals, from Iberia to the Atlantic and Yucatan, from Japan and China to Cambodia, from Polynesia and Indonesia to India, and from Egypt to Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
The global link completes with the Dogon of Mali, an ancient people of the Sahara whose creation myth describes their culture as founded by a group of sea or water people called Nommos. The name means ‘Instructors, Monitors’ — Watchers by any other name. Created by the sky god Amma, the Nommos are described as inhabiting a world orbiting Sirius, from where they descended long ago in a vessel pouring thunder and fire; because they required a watery world in which to live they were subsequently dubbed Gods of Water, not unlike the People of the Serpent.6
The Dogon inherited a substantial amount of hermetic knowledge from the Egyptians, which might have included the understanding of Sirius and its lesser-known twin star, Sirius B, whose existence was only proved with the advent of advanced optics in the twentieth century.7 The Dogon ceremonial headdress, with its extended rays and oblong patterns, resembles the equally out-of-place katsina costumes of the Hopi, which we’ll discuss later; paintings depicting the Nommos with fish tails seem oddly similar to the Mesopotamian A
pkallu, who are themselves depicted with fish tails or as men wrapped in fish skins and wearing distinctive double-stranded beards indicative of their divine rank of office.
Fish symbolism and flood gods: Nommos and U-annu.
Just to clarify, Apkallu are not a people but a distinction, a title meaning ‘sage’. They are Anunaki (People of Anu), the descendents of Anu, a god of the sky. Let us now examine how they and Mesopotamia fit into the antediluvian picture.
THE MISSING LAND OF THE ANU