Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

  The relic is enshrined, folded inside a silver casket, in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista and is unrolled for display only on special occasions; the Holy Year 2000 was one of those rare times—and we went to see it during our day in Turin. Entering the dimly lit chapel and reaching the cathedral’s domed part, the casket could be seen resting on an imposing marble altar; above it, the shroud itself, framed and protected by sheets of glass, could be seen fully unrolled (plate 27). The image, in faded brownish-yellow color, was exactly as we had seen it in photographs, and it looked authentic. But whether it really was, turned out to be doubly doubtful: First because of the ongoing controversy, and second because, to our dismay, we heard later that what we saw displayed was a replica and not yet the original—the original would be exposed only later that year . . .

  So is the length of cloth two thousand years old? Is it a burial shroud? Is the image an imprint of a crucified man, or just a painting no matter how cleverly done? And if the answers are Yes, Yes, Yes—is it the burial shroud of Jesus? No one can say for sure. The Vatican has steadfastly neither endorsed the relic’s authenticity nor denied it. Pope John Paul II, who went to Turin (several months after us) as part of the Holy Year ceremonies and did get to see the original shroud, spoke of its spiritual meaning: An affirmation of Jesus as the Christ.

  To me, the Shroud of Turin was a step on the way to the mystery of the Last Supper.

  Before we left Milan we went to see Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece—The Last Supper.

  It is a mural painted by him in 1495–1498 for his patron, the Duke Ludovico Sforza, on a wall in the convent of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The church was damaged during World War II in an Allied air-raid on Milan in 1943; but the mural survived undamaged—a miracle that enhanced its fame and significance. The painting has undergone several restorations, starting as early as 1726; the latest restoration, intended to remove dirt and other pollution and to stabilize the painting against flaking and deterioration, used advanced scientific methods to ascertain elements of the original painting, and is therefore deemed by some to have resulted in the most authentic version—while other experts have been unhappy with the brighter and stronger colors, preferring the older version as having a more authentic feel. This slow restoration work lasted from 1978 to 1999; it was completed in time for the Holy Year 2000—and we were, as stated above, among the first to see the restored painting that year (fig. 79).

  Fifteen feet long, the painting (plate 28, after the restoration) portrays Jesus and his twelve disciples at his “last supper” before his arrest and crucifixion, as told in the New Testament. They are seated at a long table, on which food platters and round bread-cakes are seen. Jesus is in the center, flanked by his disciples in groups of three, six on each side of their Master. Each person depicted, starting with Jesus himself, is a masterful portrait painted by da Vinci to express personality, emotion, intent. The face, the gesture, the clothing, what each one holds or points to—create a lifelike and realistic scene as though it was a photograph; and indeed, from the beginning to the most recent notoriety of the painting, it has been treated as though it was such—a “photograph” if not in fact, then certainly in its Church-approved interpretation of that night’s events according to the New Testament.

  Figure 79

  Experts have identified the twelve disciples by their New Testament names, starting with Batholomew, James the lesser, and Andrew on Jesus’ extreme right, and Matthew, Jude, and Simon on his extreme left. Judas Iscariot, who has been accused of betraying Jesus (fourth from the left) is shown wearing green and blue, the colors of betrayal according to the experts.

  The photographic quality of da Vinci’s masterpiece appears to have captured the group at a moment of great excitement. Interpreters of the painting have suggested that it was the moment, reported in John chapter 13, when Jesus announced to his disciples that one of them would betray him; but that happened after the meal was over and Jesus, having taken his clothes off, washed the disciples’ feet. There was something else—during the meal—that agitated the group.

  One could not discuss these points in front of the painting, since the group’s allotted twenty minutes of viewing were up. Back at the hotel, at the last group briefing before leaving Milan, I pointed out that in two days we covered 5,000 years of history. But the discussion centered on the “Jesus exhibits”—the Shroud, the da Vinci painting. Members of the group voiced their reactions to what we had visited, what we had seen. The disciple to the right of Jesus seemed to evoke the greatest curiosity; someone recalled a book that suggested it was a female, Mary Magdalene. Others wondered what the disciples were agitated about.

  As far as I am concerned, I said, it is not so much what the painting shows, but rather what it does not show. To understand my puzzlement, I added, one must realize that the “Last Supper” that Jesus and his disciples were having was a traditional and ritually prescribed Jewish Seder—the Passover-eve meal, the holiday commemorating the Israelite Exodus from Egypt.

  A principal role in the Passover Seder meal is played by the Prophet Elijah, who was taken up in a whirlwind to be with God and who was to reappear, at Passover time, as the Herald of the Messiah. Custom required that a special cup, a goblet filled with wine, be set on the table for Elijah, and a hymn is sung calling upon him to appear, sip from his cup, and usher the messianic time. This custom, I said, was followed by Jesus, to whom the appearance of the Herald was vital; he held up the cup of wine and made the blessing, according to the New Testament; but in the painting there is no cup, no goblet where Jesus sits, I said; Why?

  Is this the mystery of the Holy Grail?

  Years later, as I was writing The End of Days, I realized that I have indeed found the answer in this painting of The Last Supper.

  9

  VATICAN ENCOUNTERS

  One can visit Italy, the destination of the 2000 Earth Chronicles Expedition, countless times without exhausting that country’s places of interest; the Vatican in Rome is just one of them. The customary Briefing Notes prepared by me for that Expedition began with a map of Italy on which I circled five destinations (fig. 80); with the exception of Bolzano and its Iceman, they all had to do—one way or another—with the Vatican, the heart and mind of the Catholic Church and its billion and a half followers around the world.

  There were specific reasons for our going to each one of the marked places; but underlying it all was the curiosity stemming from persistent rumors that “The Vatican”—as a depository of covert knowledge and secret artifacts accumulated over the millennia—knows more than it divulges about what was and what will be; that it even knows about “my” Anunnaki and their planet, Nibiru. And to find out as much as possible about that was an added personal purpose of the trip.

  Indeed, the very reason for going to Italy at that particular time was directly connected to the Vatican: To meet, and have a public dialogue, with one of its spokesmen on the subject of Extraterrestrials.

  It has been some two or three years by then that word had reached me that a certain member of the Vatican hierarchy—a Monsignor, no less—who has been speaking on the subject of UFOs and Extraterrestrials on Italian television and in press interviews, has mentioned my books.

  Figure 80

  That, the reader should be told, was not the first time that my writings were noticed by Christian clergymen. Already in 1978, two years after The 12th Planet was published, I shared an interview on a Christian radio program in Chicago with a Presbyterian Pastor, Rev. Jack Jennings, of the Christus Collegium in Montana, who had this to say about my book: “The possibility that Man is not the only intelligent life in the universe and that astronauts from outer space may have been involved in Man’s origins and development is supported by enough evidence to merit serious consideration.” Several years later, I found out that a Catholic priest, Father Charles Moore in California, was quoting from my boo
ks on his weekly radio program; we later appeared together on TV and he was a presenter at a Sitchin Studies Day in 1996 in Denver. Other clergymen attended and spoke up at my various seminars.

  But now the clergyman who spoke out was of a different caliber . . . His name was Corrado Balducci, and he was a respected theologian high in the Vatican hierarchy, a member of the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church, a Prelate of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and the Propagation of the Faith, a member of the Vatican’s Beatification Committee that approves sainthoods, the author of several books. He was actually designated by the Vatican to speak out on the UFO/Extraterrestrials subjects, I was told; and people in Italy wondered whether I had any plans to come to Italy and meet with him.

  At one point it was arranged for me to speak at a conference in Sardinia which he was also due to address; but he canceled his participation at the last minute, and our meeting did not take place. Then, early in 2000, the organizers of an international conference titled Il Mistero dell Esistenza Umana invited me to come to Italy in March, assuring me that the Monsignor will also be there and will be ready to have a dialogue with me—a public dialogue.

  And so it was that on Friday March 31, 2000, I and my wife and twenty of my American fans took the train in Bolzano and arrived in Rimini, a resort town on the Adriatic Sea, for the “Mystery of Human Existence” conference. The venue was a huge Centro Congressi Europeo in the adjoining town of Bellaria; I was scheduled to speak there the next day, the Monsignor on Sunday morning, and our dialogue was to take place Sunday afternoon. But by Saturday morning, Balducci was nowhere in sight . . .

  I left for the conference venue certain that the Monsignor had reneged again; but when I arrived there and was led to the speakers’ room, a befrocked tall Catholic priest welcomed me with open arms; he took both my hands in his, and said: I am Monsignor Corrado Balducci, and I have great esteem for your scholarship; I drove the whole night from Rome to hear you speak! It was Friendship At First Sight, commemorated by many photographs (plate 29).

  As I was led to the speaker’s rostrum, I was astounded by the size of the audience—there were more than a thousand people there. My talk, ably translated by my Italian editor Tuvia, included a slide presentation that added a pictorial dimension to the textual evidence from ancient times, supporting my conclusions about the planet Nibiru and the Anunnaki who had come from it to Earth and then used genetic engineering to bring about The Adam. That, I said, is the Sumerian explanation of the mystery of Humanity and its civilization; and in doing that these gods with a small “g” acted as emissaries of the Universal Creator—God with a capital “G.”

  “We have much to talk about,” Msgr. Balducci said to me as he came forward to congratulate me on my presentation. “Shall we do it at lunch?” I suggested. We all returned to the hotel, and the restaurant set aside a table for me, my wife, and Msgr. Balducci (fig. 81); the rest of my group sat at tables surrounding us in a semicircle. Several in my group, as on an unspoken command, triggered their tape recorders: It was not every day that a representative of the Vatican and a descendant of Abraham were about to discuss Extraterrestrials and the Creation of Man.

  Yet, in what surely was a historic first, our conclusions converged. Though different from each other in background, upbringing, religion, and methodology, we arrived at these common conclusions:

  Extraterrestrials can and do exist on other planets.

  They can be more advanced than us.

  Materially, Man could have been fashioned from a pre-existing sentient being.

  Figure 81

  In the hours-long session, Msgr. Balducci outlined the Church positions he was going to state in his talk the next day. From time to time he read from his prepared text, and then agreed to give me a copy, so that when his words are given here in quotation marks, they are actual quotes from his text or from the taped record.

  It was clear that while my approach was based on the available physical evidence from antiquity, his was a purely Roman Catholic theological-philosophical one. Based on the taped recording and his prepared text, these were the positions expressed by Msgr. Balducci:

  On UFOs: “There must be something to it.” The hundreds and thousands of eyewitness reports leave no room for denying that there is a measure of truth in them, even allowing for optical illusions, atmospheric phenomena, and so on. Such witnessing cannot be dismissed by a Catholic theologian: “Witnessing is one way of transmitting truth, and in the case of the Christian religion we are talking about a Divine Revelation in which witnessing is crucial to the credibility of our faith.”

  On life on other Planets: “That life may exist on other planets is certainly possible; the Bible does not rule out that possibility. On the basis of scripture and on the basis of our knowledge of God’s omnipotence, His wisdom being limitless, we must affirm that life on other planets is possible.”

  Moreover, this is not only possible, but also credible and even probable. “Cardinal Nicolo Cusano (1401–1464) wrote that there is not a single star in the sky about which we can rule out the existence of life, even if different from ours.”

  On intelligent Extraterrestrials: “When I talk about Extraterrestrials, we must think of beings who are like us—more probably, beings more advanced than us, in that their nature is an association of a material part and a spiritual part, a body and a soul, although in different proportions than human beings on Earth.” Angels are beings who are purely spiritual, devoid of bodies, while we are made up of spirit and matter and [are] still at a low level.”

  “It is entirely credible that in the enormous distance between Angels and humans, there could be found some middle stage, that is beings with a body like ours but more elevated spiritually. If such intelligent beings really exist on other planets, only science will be able to prove. In spite of what some people think, we would be in a position to reconcile their existence with the Redemption that Christ has brought us.”

  These were far-reaching statements, in which I saw the basis for his being “reconciled” with my conclusions; but his comments skipped over a major point: The Creation of Man . . .

  Well then, I asked Msgr. Balducci, does it mean that my presentation was no great revelation to you? We appear to agree that more advanced Extraterrestrials can exist, and I use science to evidence their coming to Earth; but then I quote the Sumerian texts that say that the Anunnaki (“Those who from Heaven to Earth came”) genetically improved an existing being on Earth to create the intelligent being that the Bible calls Adam. Do we have a conflict in that?

  The Monsignor must have been ready for the challenge. My conclusion regarding your overall presentation, he said, is that more than anything else your whole approach is based on physical evidence; it concerns itself with matter, not with spirit. This is an important distinction, “because if this distinction is made, I can bring up the view of the great theologian Professor Father Marakoff, who is still alive and who is greatly respected in the Church. He formulated the hypothesis that when God created Man and put the soul into him, perhaps what is meant is not that Man was created from mud or lime, but from something pre-existing, even from a sentient being capable of feeling and perception. So the idea of taking a pre-Man or hominid and creating someone who is aware of himself is something that Christianity is coming around to. The key is the distinction between the material body and the soul granted by God.”

  This, I realized, was important—but it circumvented the role of the Anunnaki. Yes, I responded to the Vatican theologian, in my writings I deal with physical evidence; but already in my first book, The 12th Planet, the last sentence of the last paragraph raises the question: If the Extraterrestrials, the Anunnaki, “created” us, who created them on their planet? From that my own thinking and the content of my subsequent books evolved toward the spiritual or “divine” aspects. I explained in the books that the Anunnaki were just emissaries, which is what the Hebrew word Malachim, translated “Angels,” means. They thought that
it was their decision to come here for selfish reasons and to fashion us because they needed workers, but in truth they only carried out the plans of an Almighty God.

  If such Extraterrestrials were so involved, Msgr. Balducci said, even by your own interpretation they had to do with Man’s physics, body and rationality; but God alone had to do with the soul!

  Well, I said, my second book which deals with Man’s aspirations to ascend the heavens is titled The Stairway to Heaven; it seems to me that you and I are ascending the same stairway to heaven, though by different steps: I pursue the physical evidence, you pursue the soul! “We can agree on such a division of labor,” the Mosignor answered.

  It was late in the afternoon; we agreed to continue next day, in front of the public audience. But next day the program turned chaotic, with speakers holding forth well beyond their allotted time, angry exchanges, and protests from the audience. The programmed dialogue was lost in the commotion.

  When the Msgr. and I said good-bye, we parted as friends, promising to stay in touch and continue. For a while we did, even considering the possibility of a joint book; but then the contacts petered out. As far as I know, Msgr. Balducci continued to speak out and state the Vatican’s position on Extraterrestrials: They can and do exist.