Interestingly, the rise of astronomy was often integral to religious ideas. In the Hindu Vedas, for example, we can find references to everything from the division of a year into 360 days of 12 equal parts, the actual creation of the Universe from a void or nothingness (pre–Big Bang!), and even the monthly calculations that would lay the groundwork for their astrological system, which varies from our own by one month and one sign. The ancient Vedic texts mention a spherical-shaped planet Earth (we thought this dang thing was flat long after the Hindu figured it out!). These calculations did not deny or defy their religious belief; they added credence to them.
Even the Old Testament hints at a scientific understanding of the Earth’s position in the heavens, and its fixed place there. Even the rising and setting of the sun is mentioned (Ecclesiastes 1:5) in the same places each day and night, as well as the importance of sound and vibration and light as fundamental creative forces (Genesis). Even Job knew that the Earth hung in the sky on “nothing” (Job 26:7)! Call it a crude description of our gravitational position in the solar system, but he nailed it. Yet we have ongoing arguments today over the huge discrepancies in how old the earth is, how humans evolved, and even which gender came from which—all because of the paths that science and religion took throughout the course of thousands of years.
Still, for every connection, there was a big misconnection, as in the belief in the Old Testament of a flat earth, of being able to stop the sun in the sky, and of exactly where woman came from, and it surely was not a rib. So how do we find the fact in the fiction? Especially when we are given tantalizing examples of both? Maybe, as Joseph Campbell suggested of myth, the stories of the Bible were actually meant to be taken metaphorically. Two of the earliest church fathers, Origin (185–254 AD) and Augustine (354–430 AD), rejected the literal interpretation in favor of a more metaphorical and even mythical model. Yet even as myth or metaphor, we still have to wonder where this breach occurred. If you continue to observe your surroundings and note those observances, and as science and technology either support or refute them, knowledge should be unified. And yet, through time, knowledge became split between what could be proved in an empirical sense, and what was supposed to be the realm of faith and divine intervention. This rift exists to this day, making it very difficult, if not downright impossible, to focus on the common themes and motifs that suggest that at one point in time, we agreed.
A Tale of Nephilim By Scotty Roberts
The phrase going viral is, of course, a modernism we use for the spread of information, be that information something of importance or just banal entertainment that has little to do with advancing humanity. In the case of the Nephilim, according to ancient Hebrew/Israelite mythology, that story had already run rampantly viral by the time we find any record of it in their religious documents. According to the accounts, the earth had been filled with the offspring of an intercoursive intermingling between the gods and humans, rendering the entirety of the human race “tainted” with non-human blood.
This story is mirrored in myriad accounts found throughout antiquity, from sprawling cultural mythologies to tribal legends. Nearly 600 different ancient versions of these mythological creatures exist, from the Hebrew Bible to the Tuatha de Danaan of the Celts; from the Chinese dragon to tales of Krishna and the Mayan’s Quedtzlcoatl—to name just a small handful. But just how these tales spread with any sort of precision from ancient culture to ancient culture is a mystery to be unraveled. But one thing is certain: No matter the cultural tale, when you burn off all the dross, you are left with one, seemingly indisputable common thread: The interruption of the bloodlines of the human race.
With the advance of civilization and its spread from pockets of established places of origin, humanity spread out and carried with them the ancient stories told and retold again and again, with new twists and variants added to build the newer version of the mythology in the rising, newer religions. But perspective alters the understanding of how these things transmitted: Archaeologists and anthropologists would call this the equaniminous evolution of civilized culture, whereas alternative theorists might simply interpret such similarities in cultural mythologies as humanity’s exposure to outside elements that influenced change.
There is, however, one ancient symbol that seems to piggyback the story of this “race interrupted,” and that is the symbol of the serpent, found in nearly every ancient culture. From the story of human origins found in the Hebrew religion’s Book of Genesis, we find the “serpent character” tempting the mother of all humanity. On a closer examination of the language, we learn that the eating of “forbidden fruit” is merely a cultural, encoded cover story for a much greater event of seduction and impregnation by a god who is later equated with a serpent character. When you examine the linguistics and etymology of the ancient story, it has it foundational moorings in the accounts of the Sumerian culture’s pantheon of gods, the Annunaki. Elil/Enlil, the chief god of the Annunaki, charges his brother god, Enki/Ea, with the creation of “primeval man” as a slave race to conduct the work of the gods. After time, the humans, seeking freedom, gain the aid of their creator, Enki/Ea, to lead them in rebellion against Elil/Enlil. Enki/Ea is associated with the “Serpent’s Marsh,” which became known as “Ea’s Den”—or “Ea-den/Eden” found in the adapted Hebrew text of the similar creation/rebellion event.
The story of the serpent character in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is adapted information from the much older Sumerian account. In the case of the Garden of Eden’s serpent character, the transfer of religious mythology from one ancient mooring to the next was carried out by Moses, the founder of Judaism. When he wrote his Book of Genesis, he had already been raised in the courts of 18th dynasty Egypt, and was thoroughly immured in ancient Egyptian mysticism and magical religious practice for the first 40 years of his life. The next 40 years he was married to the daughter of the pagan high priest of Midian and learning the Sinatic religions, along with the ancient Canaanite, Syrian, and Sumerian religious mythologies. Without a doubt, the transfer of ancient cultural and religious mythology to the foundational building blocks of Hebraic religion demonstrates just one culture’s perpetuation of a viral mythology. The Hebrew story of the Nephilim is built upon the more ancient tale of Enki/Ea rising from the Serpent’s Marsh (Ea’s Den). The hand of the gods in the creation, proliferation, and interruption of human bloodlines, as well as the delivery of the forbidden knowledge of the gods leading to rebellion against the chief god is a commonality in these ancient accounts.
One step further in this particular analysis: Elil of the Sumerians becomes El of the Hebrews, rendering as El, Elohim, El Shaddai, and ElElyon, whereas Enki/Ea becomes Yaweh, the Hebrew word for Jehovah.
The bottom line is that perspective and interpretation of these ancient mythologies are the keys to understanding how they spread from culture to culture. In my travels in Egypt with Dr. John Ward, what I saw throughout Egypt was the overwhelming proliferation of ancient symbolism in art, iconography, and language all having immense bearing on the hermetic and esoteric knowledge behind the spread and proliferation of the story of the Nephilim, beginning with the Egyptian tale of the descent of the Ogdod to the creation mound near Menindat Habu to the ancient Sumerian Annunaki who bred primeval humanity.
In and throughout all is the symbol of the serpent that appears as the constant element throughout human history to carry the message of a race created, enslaved, and interrupted. And this mythology—when you dig for its encoded underpinnings—reveals a story that spread through all of humanity’s ancient cultural myths and legends.
Scotty Roberts is the publisher of Intrepid Magazine and the founder of the Paradigm Symposium. He has authored three books with New Page Books: The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim, The Secret History of the Reptilians, and The Exodus Reality (coauthored with Dr. John Ward). He is also the author and illustrator of The Rollicking Adventures of Tam O’Hare. Scotty lives with his wife and children in rural Wisconsin.
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nbsp; Literal Truths?
Maybe it was scriptural literalism that tripped us up, or maybe it was a move away from the fantastical to the more down to earth as we began to understand that there wasn’t some guy up in the clouds tossing lightning bolts around, and that thunder and lightning and rain were natural events that were the result of some meteorological brew we were only beginning to get the right ingredients for. As belief moved away from observation and empirical experience to more inward reflection and personal subjectivity, we may have become divided between what we knew for fact and what we knew on faith, and the two got thrown together like chocolate and peanut butter, or maybe oil and water. They didn’t always mix or go well together.
Just as archeology seeks to understand our history through the recovery of remains of the past civilizations, biblical archeology seeks the same with focus on finding evidence for or against stories in the Old Testament and New Testament and the evolution of the Judeo-Christian cosmogony. It gives structure and fleshes out the stories with factual evidence of who these people were and how they lived. We look to the past to understand our present, and how we got here, while also seeking to discern factual knowledge from fictional inspiration. Herschel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archeology Review, writes in “What Brings You Here?” (July/August 2013): “Many people are interested in biblical archeology because it fleshes out the Biblical world for them. It makes the Bible come alive as a real world and not only a text grounded in faith.” This field, he continues, offers glimpses into the homes they lived in, the pots they cooked with, and how they lit their lamps in the dark—all of the big and small factors that allow us to peer through the window of time and “feel the sweep of humanity of which you are a part.”
The general study of symbol and myth offers us a window to the past, but a fragmented one, according to Laird Scranton, author of several books on symbolism, cosmology, and the African Dogon, who had a very sophisticated scientific understanding, and shared many traits and traditions with ancient Egyptians and even Hebrews. Scranton writes in Comparative Cosmology: The Dogon, Buddhism and Ancient Egypt, that the way we can overcome these fragments and gaps in evidence of the past is by looking at the “parallel nature of myth and symbol in different cultures.” Scranton comments that these similarities are striking and may have involved more unconventional means of transmission from one culture to another, possibly even involving the use of archetypes and “innate psychology as a credible way to explain their near-global appearance.” In an excerpt from his book The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol, Scranton also writes that “when we study the actual creation traditions of distant cultures, uniqueness of view is not what we typically find. Rather, what we see instead is an almost predictive commonality of theme, symbol and storyline, expressed in distinctly similar terms and organized according to a set of familiar states of creation.” Might these parallels reflect a “vision of ancient cosmology as a kind of instructed system of civilization, one that was typically associated with knowledgeable ancestor/teachers or beneficent ancestor/Gods?” We will explore this and other theories of how this knowledge was transmitted in a later chapter, as well as the idea of a “common parent cosmology,” as Scranton calls it, that may explain all these common elements, which then leads to the quest to discover what this parent cosmology is—and where it came from.
Myth, legend, religious stories, cosmogenesis stories, cultural narratives—all are ways and means of conveying the attempts of our ancestors to figure out who they were, how they got here, and what was going on around them when the skies shook and the ground shuddered and plants died and were born anew, and the sun and the moon rose and set and rose again, sometimes different, and the stars moved across the sky in patterns and shapes.
In his seminal work, Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock looks at myth, most notably end of the world or cataclysmic myth, as a valid means of information, and information we must listen to, no matter the form it comes in:
The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep, or cows, or pheasants, we have a past, which is separate from ourselves. We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors. Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us in the form of bona fide “historical records”? And is it arrogance or ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating “history” from “prehistory” at about 5000 years before the present—defining the records of “history” as valid testimony and the records of “prehistory” as primitive delusions? At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means unreasonable.
By looking at what Hancock calls the fingerprints of these ancient geniuses that composed such myths, and the amazing evidence they left behind in the form of the advanced calendric systems of the Mayans, or the complex edifices of the Pyramids, he cannot disregard what these “Newtons and Shakespears and Einsteins of the last Ice Age” where trying to tell us: “Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here.’ And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here. Of these things I have no doubt.” And whether their myths were of worlds ending, or worlds beginning, we owe it to ourselves to stop, look, and listen.
Our lives are told in the stories we tell. Sometimes those stories are personal to our tribe, or to us, and sometimes they are universal. All contain nuggets of truth that we will then pass down to our future generations, through the stories we tell ourselves today.
Chapter 4
Once Upon a Time: Story, Lore, and Legend
I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.
—Tim Schafer
If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.
—Diana Wynne Jones
What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.
—Terri Windling
We have always been story-tellers. From the dawn of humankind, we’ve been constructing ideas of who we are, how we got here, and what our purpose is, as well as attempting to describe, through creative and imaginative means, how the world around us just might work. Before science, there was story, and in a sense, science has always been embedded in stories throughout time, as well as knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
Once upon a time, we didn’t have the means to send a piece of information across the globe at lightning speed. We had to find other ways to convey what we were thinking. Around the fire perhaps we sat, speaking in whispered tones as we told tales and did our best to describe the world, as we knew it, even if we didn’t have a clue as to how to understand it. The reality around us was so vast, so bizarre, and so utterly incomprehensible, and we did not yet have the scientific savvy or acumen to understand any of it.
But we had words—and images. And we had stories.
Stories in Writing
Whether in the form of images on a wall of rock, or words to a breathless audience, or in writing, stories provided not just a form of entertainment to pass the time, but a way of expressing ideas and information via the vehicle of a three-act dramatic structure embellished with imaginative add-ons. The oldest stories may have been those out of ancient Mesopotamia, such as the epic tales of Gilgamesh etched into clay and carved onto stone pillars about 700 BC, changing from generation to generation and perhaps even becoming
a part of future stories. Gilgamesh, according to Dr. Michael Lockett in The Basics of Storytelling, contained elements such as a garden and a flood, which may have later morphed into the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis.
Lockett also tells us that story-telling in written form was utilized by ancient Egyptians, in the form of the Westcar Papyrus. Possibly the sons of Cheops, the builder of the great Pyramid that bears his name, entertained their father with such stories of magic and heroism. The tales of Aesop, a slave who told stories and fables that survive to this day, although claimed by the Greek as having originated with them, may have instead come to us from some part of North Africa, set in writing about 300 BC–250 BC. “Storytelling has helped adults pass on wisdom, knowledge, and culture through the generations before they were finally printed in written form,” Lockett writes, citing the great epics of the Greek Homer from 1200 BC, that were not written down until 700 BC and became the Odyssey and the Iliad we know of today.
We discussed in Chapter 1 the importance of oral tradition as a means of passing on generational stories of individuals, families, events, and even what life was like for those who came before us. Oral history and tradition were eventually recorded not just in audio form, but later, when writing systems developed and evolved, as written text, to assure its continued preservation.
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