....Under the first guideline, an organism or any part of one in its natural living state is clearly unpatentable, since it does not originate with the inventor. But in 1972, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen won a patent on the process they had invented to manufacture human insulin by cloning its gene. That same year, microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarry applied for a patent on a microbe he had constructed that could degrade crude oil. The utility of his invention was obvious, as was its nonobviousness, and Chakrabarry had no problem writing down the recipe so that any other skilled biologist could produce the microbe. But the patent examiner disallowed the application, arguing that microorganisms are products of nature and therefore not original. Chakrabarry appealed the decision, and by 1980 the case had found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, the court ruled in his favor, on the ground that “anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man” is patentable subject matter, including the specialized life form he had engineered into being. Mother Nature may have supplied the ingredients, but Chakrabarry baked the cake.267
As will be discovered later in this chapter, these legal issues raise profound implications for the understanding and interpretation of some very old texts.
C. THE POTENTIALITIES OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
Chakrabarry’s genetically engineered microorganism reveals the full potentiality — both for good and ill — of genetic engineering and, moreover, the private “ownership” or use of such engineered creations. One may envision genetically engineered organisms that literally eat nuclear waste and discharge it as harmless waste,268 or genetically engineered drugs,269 free of the harmful effects of ordinary pharmaceuticals. But by the very same token, one may imagine a world of horrifying possibilities, of genetically tailored plagues, diseases, and viruses that target only races or people with specific genetic characteristics, or a world of horrible chimerical creatures, part human, part animal, engineered for a specific purpose, or devoid of normal human compunction and compassion, literal genetic “Manchurian Candidates” that, coupled with the technologies examined in chapter three, would be the perfect killing machines. Strangely, it is in the engineering of chimeras — of genetic hybrids — that we find the clearest link to ancient times and texts, and to some very disturbing potentialities and scenarios.
D. THE “MESOPOTAMIAN” GENOME WAR: THE O’BRIENS AGAIN
The Babylonian “creation epic” Enuma Elish — which I have elsewhere interpreted as a “war epic” and not a creation epic at all270 — contains the slightest hint of the possibility of genetic engineering of chimerical beings in ancient times, referring to “scorpion men” and “fish men.”271 Of course, these ambiguous references could mean almost anything, from metaphorical expressions to fully-fledged expressions of the role of a genetic technology in that war.
But the Enuma Elish is hardly the only ancient Mesopotamian text containing statements suggestive of an active technology of genetic engineering in play in paleoancient272 times. Indeed, in the Atra-Hasis epic, the creation of mankind himself is described both in grisly terms and in terms that strongly suggest that mankind is himself one such chimerical creature, a genetic mixture of “the gods” and of some pre-existing terrestrial hominid. Here is how the academic translation of Sumerologist Stephanie Dalley recounts the story:When the gods instead of man
Did the work, bore the loads,
The gods’ load was too great,
The work too hard, the trouble too much.
The great Anunnaki made the Igigi273
Carry the workload sevenfold.
Anu their father was king,
Their counselor warrior Ellil,
Their chamberlain was Ninurta,
Their canal-controller Ennugi,
They took the box [of lots]....,
Cast the lots; the gods made the division.
Anu went up to the sky,
[And Ellil(?)] took the earth for his people (?)...274 They were counting the years of loads.
For 3,600 years they bore the excess,
Hard work night and day.
They groaned and blamed each other,
Grumbled over the masses of excavated soil;
“Let us confront our [ ] the chamberlain,
And get him to relieve us of our hard work!
Come, let us carry [the Lord(?)].
The counselor of gods, the warrior, from his dwelling...”275
As I observed in my book The Cosmic War, these passages make it clear that the “gods” were very near “open revolt due to the exorbitant workload laid on them, and they demand to see the ‘chamberlain.’”276
A little later in the epic, the “strike” threatens to become an open revolt or civil war:“Every single one of us gods declared war!
We have put [a stop] to the digging.
The load is excessive, it is killing us!
Our work is too hard, the trouble too much!
So every single one of us gods
Has agreed to complain to Ellil.”277
Seeking some way to ease their burden, the “gods” decide to create an intelligent worker for the precise purpose of being a worker, a serf, a slave, a function that we shall say more about toward the end of this chapter:Ea278 made his voice heard
And spoke to the gods his brothers...
...
“There is [ ]
Belet-ili the womb goddess is present —
Let her create primeval man
So that he may bear the yoke [( )],
So that he may bear the yoke, [the work of Ellil],
Let man bear the load of the gods!”279
Then, further on in the text, the rather grisly methods of the creation of mankind are described in detail:Enki made his voice heard,
And spoke to the great gods,
“On the first, seventh, and fifteenth of the month
I shall make a purification by washing.
Then one god should be slaughtered.
And the gods can be purified by immersion.
Nintu shall mix clay
With his flesh and blood.
Then a god and a man
Will be mixed together in clay.
Let us hear the drumbeat forever after,
Let a ghost come into existence from the god’s flesh,
Let her proclaim it as his living sign,
And let the ghost exist so as not to forget (the slain god).”
They answered “yes!” in the assembly,
The great Anunnaki who assign the fates.280
After taking the decision to create mankind, a serf-worker, the Anunnaki “gods” “then proceed to the task of slaughtering one of their own and creating ‘primeval man.’”281 In the first, seventh, and fifteenth of the month
He made a purification by washing.
Ilawela who had intelligence,
They slaughtered in their assembly.
Nintu mixed clay
With his flesh and blood.
They heard the drumbeat forever after.282
As I observed in The Cosmic War, this account — amore or less standard type of academic translation of the text — gives a “crucial insight into the ‘morality’ of the Anunnaki, who are clearly not above murdering one of their own to lighten the workload of the rest” in order to create their worker-serf, man.283
Enter Christian and Barbara Joy O’Brien and their landmark book The Genius of the Few once again, for they maintain that such standard exercises of academic translation may be missing some significant clues. But in order to appreciate the case that they argue, it is necessary to understand it in the light of their wider methodological assumptions, for these in turn raise, once again, issues for religious apologetics.
The O’Briens state the theme and sources consulted in their book in the following fashion:The Genius of the Few is an account of the activities of a group of culturally and technically advanced people who settled in a mountain valley in the Near East around 8200 B.C. and, as their primary concern,
established an agricultural centre for the teaching and training of local tribesmen. Their secondary activities were even more dramatic if the accounts which we have from Akkadian sources, and our interpretations of them, are to be accepted.
The records of these Shining Ones, as we prefer to call them, are taken from three principal sources: (a) Sumerian tablets from the Library of Nippur on which they are referrred to as the (Anunnaki); (b) ancient documents from the Hebraic Books of Enoch where they are described as Angels; and (c) a critical interpretation of the biblical Book of Genesis which uses the Hebrew words ha elohim. 284
It is with the first of their sources — the Akkadian tablets from the Library of Nippur — and with their interpretation of them that we will be chiefly concerned here.
Additionally, the O’Briens believe that archaeology and, by implication, paleography itself, are in part to blame for what they believe is a massive misinterpretation — and, by implication, mistranslation — of these ancient stories:In this sphere, one small, undetected error in comparison can become self-perpetuating and mar the whole fabric of the interpretation. And even worse, one small, but attractive, error in interpretation can set up a chain reaction that can lead to whole histories being wrongly conceived.285
For the O’Briens, this background forms the basis for three significant methodological assumptions that they make, which informs the whole of their book. Christian O’Brien states these three assumptions with astonishing clarity:...(Archaeologists) certainly did not have the answer to the development of the Middle East — because behind each successive magnificent advance there had lain, undetected, the arcane stimulus of the genius of the few. Or had it been detected, and not recognized? I found that I needed fresh skills in the study of this arcane influence. I turned to languages — Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, and even Gaelic where it was required; I translated tablets from Nippur that had not been touched in almost a hundred years, and unearthed Hebrew books that, until a few years ago, had not been available for study for more than fifteen centuries. Gradually, the doubts crystallized — I was not sure that we were right — but I was certain as I was of my own existence that scholars, over five millenia [sic], had gone very wrong.
And, in taking the path that they had, they had established concepts that never should have been in the receptive minds of men. Fundamentally, early scholars had given too little weight to those deification processes to which the later Sumerians, and the Babylonians, were fanatically prone... making gods where none had existed... and hiding glories of erudition and altruistic activity behind the mask of the shrine. Moreover, later archaeologists, and anthropologists, too, followed in that same path which tends to confuse the secular with the religious; which turns palaces into temples, houses into shrines, customs into rites; and makes every buried statuette a religious relic.
Out of the earliest of these unfortunate mistakes, there grew a strange religious tradition that fed, avidly, upon itself, and grew stronger with every act of worship and ritual repetition. Shiningcountenanced Lords of Cultivation, as they were described in ancient writings, became blurred and distant memories... and were elevated to gods. And the leaders of those same Lords became Gods; and the supreme commander of them all — Great Anu to the Sumerians, and the Most High to the Hebrew — vicariously became GOD.
And all that time, the true God, the Spirit who is the ultimate arbiter of all Mankind, remained unknown to all but the mystics... as far above those resplendent creatures as we are about the worms in the field.286
Note carefully what the implications of Christian O’Brien’s statements really are for the methodology by which he proposes to interpret the texts he translates and examines:1) He presupposes the existence of a hidden elite that is not of the species Homo sapiens sapiens quietly guiding human civilization;
2) He presupposes that the fundamental error of academic examination of the artifacts and texts of the earliest period from this region is to interpret everything as being an example of the deification processes of the Sumerians and Akkadians themselves, whereas, he maintains, if examined from a wholly secular point of view, a radically different picture emerges of what those texts might actually be saying;
But what of the third methodological assumption? O’Brien notes that one primary feature of these ancient languages is paronomasia: Another source of ambiguity lies in the fact that early Middle Eastern languages leant heavily on paronomasia to give variety to simple phrases — a form of punning which allowed several different meanings to be given to a single set of symbols.287
Thus we have the third component:3) The paronomastic nature of ancient languages of the region permits one to translate such texts by a wholly different paradigm — the radically secular one — by noting the plain literal meaning of words, and allowing for the possibility that a primitive language is describing advanced technology in use. The error of academic translations is not, therefore, in mistranslation of individual words or phrases, for given the paranomastic nature of those languages, such interpretations are plausible. But, says O’Brien, they are not the only possible ones, and the implication of his remarks is that if there is an error in those translations, it is a paradigm error and not a philological one. Or, if one wishes to speculate a bit more, the paranomastic nature of these languages permits the true nature of the history being recounted to be hidden behind a religious patina, a “psychological operation” called religion, which only served to empower the same hidden elite. This, fundamentally, is the general methodological principle of the O’Briens, as is evident from their remarks cited above.288
This brings us to the central text in their “paradigm reinterpretation,” the so-called Kharsag Epic, or Kharsag Tablets, a set of tablets first published and translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918.289 While standard scholarship tends to view these tablets as more or less disjunct from each other, the O’Briens believe they form a more or less contiguous narrative.290
1. The Anunnaki and the Engineering of Man
What, then, emerges from these texts concerning the creation of mankind, if one adopts their “secular paradigm” of interpretation, and their assumption of the existence of a hidden elite? Here the crucial tablet is the 8th tablet. The O’Briens begin by noting that even in the book of Genesis there is a residue of the Sumerian idea that mankind was created to be a worker-serf for the gods, for he was created and placed in the Garden of Eden for the purpose of tilling and keeping it.291 This is an important point, for it implies that the account in Genesis chapter two is a heavily edited text, since it omits crucial details of the earlier cuneiform version, if indeed the cuneiform formed any sort of basis for the Genesis account.
The O’Briens then cite the relevant portion from the Kharsag tablets detailing the creation of mankind (and note the differences in translational style between them and Stephanie Dalley); Enki has the floor, and is addressing the other “gods”:“What are we accusing them of? Their work was very heavy, and caused them much distress [... ... ...] while Belet-ili, the creator of life, is present. Let her create a ‘lullu’ — a man, and let the man do the work, and carry the burden of the toil of the lordlings...
“While Belet-ili,292 the creator of life, is here, let her create offspring, and when they become men, let them bear the toil of their lordlings.”
They sent for Ma-mi, the creator of life, and told her: “You are the biological expert,293 the creatress of Mankind, we want you now to create a lullu so that he may undertake the tasks assigned by Enlil, and so relieve the toil of the lordlings.”
In reply, the Lady of Creation said to the (Anunnaki), “It is not possible, for me to make these things on my own; Enki has the skills I need. As he can purify everything [or everybody], let him prepare the material that I need.”
We now reach difficulties in the interpretation. The text continues by Enki proposing to make a purifying bath on three separate days, roughly a week apart in which he wishes all the lordlings to be dipped for cleansing. Then he requires that
one lordling be slaughtered, and that Nintu should mix “clay” from his flesh and blood. The verbatim text is as follows.Enki opened his mouth
And addressed the great gods
“On the first, seventh, and fifteenth day of the month
I will make a purifying bath.
Let one god be slaughtered
So that all the gods may be cleansed in a dipping.
From his flesh and blood
Let Nintu mix clay,
That god and man
May be thoroughly mixed in the clay
[... ... ... ...].294
Thus, even on a standard sort of “academic translation,” mankind emerges as two things:1. a creature deliberately created or invented for the specific function of being a laborer, a serf, for the “gods”; and,
2. a creature that is a chimera, a hybrid of two different creatures: (a) the gods, and (b) some presumably pre-existing terrestrial hominid.
Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Page 16