by Freddy Silva
As for the secret knowledge of the Anu and the Apkallu, it was promulgated for thousands of years by new groups of sages, among them the leading Essenes of the Qumran community, priests of the Enochian tradition who referred to themselves as Sons of Light,67 as did the Druid priests of northern Europe.68
As for the nephilim, not all were wiped out. According to Genesis, "Nephilim were on the Earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans, and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."69 They were still evident c.1300 BC when Israelite scouts entering Canaan reported "all the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there, the descendants of Anak... We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."70
Perhaps the living giants of the Solomon Islands and other remote places are a faint reminder of this distant and regrettable episode in human history.
The Shining Ones, Followers of Horus. Temple priests disfigured specific effigies deliberately to prevent outsiders from misusing their energy. The Egyptians believed everything in the temple was imbued with a life force since the time of the First Occasion.
14. THE MECHANICS OF A COMET
Disaster, from dis (negation of) astor (a star)
Donald Gault and Charles Sonnett, two scientists from the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, set out to demonstrate the impact of a large space rock in the ocean.1 They theorized that the first result would be the generation of a large plume of vaporized debris consisting of seawater, seabed rock, and matter from the meteorite itself. This plume would be sucked high into the atmosphere by the reduced barometric pressure created by the descending projectile.
Not surprisingly the release of such titanic energy would generate an equally powerful and wide circular wall of water, both upwards and outwards, which could travel very long distances without loss of energy. The vast amount of energy transferred from a high-speed meteoric impact to a body of water, both in terms of potential and kinetic energy, means the that resulting wave is both extremely tall and speedy.
The first wave forced out by the impact would travel at a speed of 397 miles per hour. But that's just the beginning. The original impact site is temporarily replaced with a three-mile tall circular wall of water with a base pressure of some 3.5 tons per square inch, and highly unstable at that, so when this high pressure water rushes back to fill the hole created by the impact, a second massive wave is generated, packing a punch with 60% of the energy of the first.
This sobering model is based on a sound understanding of water waves and the formulae which exist for calculating the speed, height and pressure of waves regardless of whether they are caused by a meteorite, a ship or a duck.2
In a nutshell, the height of the first tsunami from a meteorite impact at sea will match the depth of the water at the point of impact. Therefore if fragments from the disintegrating meteorite of 9700 BC hit deep parts of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, the tsunami generated could potentially have been as much as three miles high. And even though these projections are extrapolated from projectile velocity experiments carried out in a controlled environment, they nevertheless validate oral traditions of waves crossing the Rocky Mountains to penetrate North America or reaching the Himalaya as far as Tibet.
Seas rising to cover mountain ranges seems like an improbable proposition, fantastical even, yet there exist many bodies of water far from the ocean or at high elevation containing salty sea water, and virtually all of them are regions from where flood myths arise. Take the Ararat Massif in Armenia, for example, on whose slope rests the petrified hull of a massive ship, ostensibly Noah’s ark.3 Ararat has been a sacred mountain to Armenians since the dawn of their culture (the name derives from a Sanskrit word meaning 'holy ground'), and the earliest variant of the name c.3000 BC was Urashtu 4 — an echo of the Egyptian term Urshu (Watcher) perhaps? The mountain's adjacent lakes, Van and Urmia, are both salt water despite being 5400 feet and 4160 feet above sea level respectively. To the southwest lies another mountain range featuring sea-sand beaches — at 7000 feet. To the north there are two large landlocked bodies of water, the Aral and Caspian seas, both of which are salt water and still feature marine life that is more at home in the ocean, and yet the closest possible inlet is 500 miles away.
At 13,000 ft in the Andes, Titicaca is the world’s highest navigable lake and was once a vast inland salt-water sea, in fact, sea horses still live there. In southern Australia, Lake Eyre is a sea salt lake in a basin that is 300 miles from the ocean.
Are such bodies of water merely examples of coastlines stranded by millions of years of uplift, or did their water become contaminated by an incursion of the sea? Because the ability of a high-speed projectile transferring its kinetic power to water is such that it was once capable of generating a wave that took the bones of humans, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and marine animals and dumped them on the summit of a mountain deep inland in Vermont.
The Chinese kept meticulous records of comets (top), which they referred to as “vile stars.”
It is also worth bearing in mind that the peaks of tsunami are lower as the shockwaves travel through wide open sea, they are merely seen as giant rogue waves, much like the Urukehu experienced on their way to New Zealand when such waves capsized one of their waka. Had these navigators been closer to shallow water they would not have survived to tell the tale, because a tsunami regains its original height once it reaches shallow water.
Is this what motivated ancient people to build temple cities far inland and at high altitude? Cuzco, 11,000 feet above sea level; Pisac, 10,000 feet; Tiwanaku, 12,000 feet; Kura Tawhiti, 3000 feet; Arunachala, 2400 feet, Göbekli Tepe, 2500 feet.
In Arizona, the Anasazi place of emergence Tuuwanasavi, located at the three mesas, is 6300 feet above sea level, while the Sipapuni of the Hopi is in Canyonlands, whose average altitude is 6000 feet above sea level. It is characterized by a mineral dome along the Little Colorado River, below Black Mesa. The site is purely symbolic,5 representing as it does the moment in tribal tradition when the messenger god Masau’u assisted the Hopi at the end of the Third World. One of the lesser-known aspects of this myth is an instruction by Masau’u that the people ought not rest too long in the same location, that sixteen years is more than ample time to set down roots before becoming complacent. Thus Hopi settlements were impermanent. Historians still paint the nomadic movement of such tribes as due to creeping desertification over the past four thousand years, necessitating the need to live close to sources of water which, in the desert Southwest, rapidly diminished with climate change. This much is true, however, such an opinion is now contradicted by archaeological finds at Black Mesa that place human habitation there some ten thousand years ago, proving that migration by native tribes took place within sixteen hundred years of the flood.6
A CRASH COURSE IN COMETS
Outwardly the scientific world has doggedly resisted the overwhelming evidence that the Earth was nearly destroyed by the impact of a fragmenting meteor 11,000 years ago and with it whatever high civilization may have once existed. They are, however, starting to open up to the possibility that another event of equal magnitude took place barely one thousand years earlier and triggered the Younger Dryas. In 2007 a team of twenty-five prominent and accredited researchers met at the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco to cite several inquiries and present evidence that the Clovis culture — a subjective collective term describing early North American peoples — vanished suddenly from the historic record due to the impact of a wayward comet that entered the atmosphere c.10,800 BC, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs, the debris scattering across North America — Canada in particular — and Europe.7 It is estimated that while large fragments plunging into the two-mile thick Laurentide Ice Sheet destabilized it, those parts of North America not covered by ice were scorched by wildfires.8 The effects were a rise in sea level, extensive biomass burning, megaf
aunal extinctions, and a cooling of the atmosphere, creating the onset of the Younger Dryas.9
Additional research by sixty-three scientists from sixteen countries advocating a cometary impact theory has now displaced the glacial melt theory as the leading cause of the Younger Dryas. Dozens of peer reviewed scientific publications from the National Academy of Sciences provide supporting evidence, such as the presence of nanodiamonds and microscopic grains associated with impact events coinciding with the onset of the Younger Dryas c.10,800 BC.10 To compound their claim, studies of 129 core samples from lakes across the world demonstrate a clear spike in sediment charcoal levels, evidence that a mass burning was in effect on a worldwide scale which consumed around 10 per cent of the landmass. The dramatic rise of carbon released into the atmosphere further contributed to a sudden drop in temperature.11
Undaunted, humans rebuilt. Within three hundred years of the onset of the Younger Dryas cold snap, the Egyptians were celebrating Zep Tepi, a defining event when everything that was clean, good and wholesome began once more. It marked the foundation of temples along the Nile and the whole paraphernalia upon which civilization is erected, a point of view shared by the Mesopotamians and a number of similar cultures.12
All this effort would be undone within seven hundred years by a second impact that closed the Younger Dryas. Around 9645 BC a steep temperature rise of 14º F. took place over a fifty-year period, more disastrous than the most pessimistic doomsday global warming scenario today and experienced in one lifetime!13 Backed by Greenland ice core data, the mathematician Flavio Barbierro proposed a model to explain this sudden warming of the climate. Because the Earth behaves like a giant gyroscope, a strike from an asteroid of considerable size, at the right angle and in the same direction as the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon, could feasibly disturb the planet's torque and shift its spin axis, even if for a brief moment. Since the Earth is also a semi-fluid object — oceans on the surface and a liquid core inside a liquid lithosphere — a change in centrifugal rotation affects the behavior of its layers, deforming and displacing landmasses. There would also be a displacement of the poles, forcing the ocean’s water to shift towards the new equator with considerable force, buckling and reshaping the Earth's surface. A change in the mantle establishes the new rotation of the axis in a matter of days or minutes. The consequences would be devastating. Large parts of the crust would rise and fall, volcanic activity would increase, titanic earthquakes would be unleashed, accompanied by hurricane force winds, torrential rain, wildly fluctuating sea levels, and tidal waves hundreds of feet tall crossing entire continents.14
Barbierro's hypothesis neatly accounts for all the descriptions of what took place geologically and climatically around the world as recorded in nearly two hundred indigenous traditions.
Once again we must ask, could these two events, barely one thousand years apart, be another factor explaining the two separate yet complimentary megalithic building styles found consistently throughout the world?
The effect of a large meteor striking the Earth was researched by the French astronomer Pierre Laplante back in 1796, whereupon he reached similar conclusions: “The axes and rotational movement will be changed, the seas forsaking their age-old positions and rushing towards the new equator; most of the human race and the beasts of the field will be drowned in this universal deluge or destroyed by the violent shock imparted to the terrestrial globe, entire species annihilated, every monument to human endeavour overthrown.”15
Laplante’s observation was not taken seriously until 1994 when comet Shoemaker Levy arrived from outer space to be captured by Jupiter’s gravitational pull, the pressure of which split the rock into twenty-one fragments that pummelled the giant planet, causing a plume of debris thousands of miles high. This time it was Jupiter's turn, the same could have happened to Earth, in fact, David Levy, one of the two astronomers after whom the comet is named, went on to state as much, it is but a question of time.
ONE CATACLYSM IS NOT ENOUGH
From 22,000 BC to 9000 BC alone, the Earth experienced wild climate fluctuations. During that era the most stable habitable region was the territory between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, coincidentally the region where most of the oldest megalithic sites are located as well as the aforementioned homelands of the gods.
Known impact sites and debris fields from first Younger Dryas event.
Ancient writers alluded to recurring conflagrations and their words are now vindicated by geologists and climatologists. As the Egyptian priests once explained the capriciousness of life on Earth to Solon: "In mind you [Greeks] are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. "There have been and there will be many and diverse destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means... For in truth the story that is told in your country [Greece]... has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs over long intervals... Just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times."16
Compare the statement with the Mayan Popol Vuh: "Again there comes a humiliation, destruction and demolition. The [people of that time] were killed when the Heart of the Sky devised a flood for them. A great flood was made; it came down on the heads of the [people], they were killed, done in by a flood. There came a rain of resin from the sky... the earth was blacked because of this; the black rainstorms began, rain all day and rain all night."17
An Akkadian legend called the Erra Epic was authored by a writer of the period by the name Kabti-ilani-Marduk, yet he states that he was merely transcribing an old visionary dream recounted by Erra himself. Erra is a god who is roused from slumber by his advisor Išum and Seven Sages, sons of heaven and earth, "champions without peer," each of whom is assigned a destructive destiny by Anu. However, the narrative is then tainted with a political agenda: these Anunaki are made out to be terrorists whose services Erra hopes to employ in the destruction of the Babylonians. When the obvious propaganda is removed and the remaining text is read in its original context, an element of astronomy and warning rises to the surface. The narrative is placed in the mouth of another god, Marduk: “Once long ago indeed I grew angry, indeed I left my dwelling, and caused the deluge. When I left my dwelling, the regulation of heaven and earth disintegrated. The shaking of heaven meant the positions of the heavenly bodies changed, and I did not restore them. The quaking of netherworld meant the yield of the furrow diminished, being thereafter difficult to exploit. The regulation of heaven and earth disintegrating meant underground water diminished, high water receded.”18 As with other flood narratives, there is a description of the regular order of planets and stars being disrupted by an outside force. Marduk may have been an astral object, a comet that “left its dwelling” causing the "regulation of heaven and earth" to be disintegrated. It was not uncommon in the ancient world for astral bodies to be personified and awarded the status of gods because they were considered living entities in their own right. Where the above text diverges from others lies in its mention of the retreat of aquifers, along with the receding of high water, strongly suggesting the oceans suffered a serious drop in sea level as a result of this encounter, whereas comparative flood myths describe an overabundance of water. What the Erra Epic appears to be describing are conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum around 22,000 years ago, when the Earth experienced a steep drop in aquifers and sea level due to most of the water being trapped as ice. If so, this prehistoric event is compatible with the traditions of the S
umerians, who claimed their history had been maintained and preserved for “over 150,000 years.”19
ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
Those great students of the stars, the Chaldeans, were under no illusion that planetary orbits are in any way fixed, but undergo periodic change. Writing about their knowledge, Diodorus of Sicily said, "Each of the planets, according to them has its own particular course, and its velocities and periods of time are subject to change and variation."20
One such event took place not so long ago. In the Bamboo Books of China it is stated that in the tenth year of the reign of Emperor Kwei c.1578 BC, "the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The earth shook."21 And further along, "At this time the two suns were seen to battle in the sky. The five planets were agitated by unusual movements. A part of Mount T'ai Shan fell down."22
The Pawnee describe a time when the Earth's poles switched places, when the southern star and the north star swapped positions and that "when the time comes for the ending of the world, the stars will again fall to the earth,"23 an idea shared by Egyptians who once accepted south as up and north as down. Such drastic reversals were understood to occur periodically in relation to the Great Year — the Earth's processional cycle — and were accompanied by great conflagrations, leading learned people such as Philo of Alexandria and the Stoics to comment, "by reason of the constant and repeated destructions of water and fire, the later generations did not receive from the former the memory of the order and sequence of events."24