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- They are the ultimate questions of our times: what is
the nature of God, what is Heaven, and who was Jesus Christ, the Son of
God? On Saturday, in the first part of our new series, Alan F. Alford suggested
that the first Jesus Christ was a primeval god who died at the beginning
of the world - in a physical and catastrophic event. Today, in part two,
Alford traces the roots of the Bible and Christianity to the oldest pagan
legends of the ancient Near East and explains how he eventually managed
to decode the secrets of 'the gods'.
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- WHEN I stood in front of the magnificent pyramids of
Giza as a fourteen-year-old boy in 1975, I had no idea that twenty-two
years later I would be back in Egypt making a radical breakthrough into
the meaning of the pyramids and ancient Egyptian religion - a breakthrough
which promises not only to revolutionise our understanding of ancient religions,
but also of modern religions - bringing us within a whisker of knowing
the scientific secrets of God, the gods and the Son of God.
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- THE ROAD to my religious enlightenment was most unconventional.
For many years, I had been sceptical about religion and its premise of
a supernatural God, and I had taken little interest in the matter. But
during my mid-twenties, my interest was piqued by the theories of the Swiss
author Erich von Daniken. According to von Daniken, the meaning of religion
lay not so much in God but in gods - human-like gods who had come down
to Earth as astronauts from another planet; hence the title of von Daniken's
first and most famous book: Chariots of The Gods? Eventually I would come
to reject von Daniken's theory. But not until I had first become one of
his most outspoken supporters.
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- In a ten-year spell from 1986-1996, I digested avidly
all that had been written by von Daniken and other popular authors and
I felt an increasing sense of excitement. Although the idea of alien astronauts
sounded like science fiction, von Daniken had drawn attention to numerous
anomalies in the human past which warranted explanation. And foremost among
these anomalies were the legends of the gods, which described human-like
beings coming down from Heaven to Earth. Surely von Daniken was right.
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- So captivating was this mystery of the gods that I gave
up my career as a chartered accountant in 1995 and in the following year
wrote a book, Gods of the New Millennium, which lent strong support to
von Daniken's theory. But within two years I was beginning to have grave
doubts about this hypothesis.
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- IN 1998, I wrote a second book, The Phoenix Solution,
which included a partial retraction of the ancient astronaut theory. And
now, after two more years of intensive research, I declare my volte-face
to be complete. [Note: this is a gross oversimplification for the purpose
of the newspapers - the actual situation is far more complex, hence the
detailed position statements on my website http://www.eridu.co.uk In a
word, I have not abandoned the ancient astronaut theory per se, only those
parts of it which relate to the legends of the gods who came down to Earth]
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- In place of the ancient astronaut theory, I am now able
to present a new explanation of 'the gods' which is far less controversial,
but which promises nevertheless to instigate a common sense revolution
in our understanding of both ancient and modern religions.
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- FOUR THOUSAND years ago, in the land of Sumer, a king
named Gudea experienced a remarkable dream-like vision. From out of the
void, there appeared to him a god 'whose height equalled the Sky, whose
weight equalled the Earth'. And alongside this fearsome god there appeared
a goddess who held in her hands a stylus of flaming metal and a tablet
of heavenly writing. The god and goddess spoke to the king, announcing
that he should build a new temple in which they might reside. Then the
two deities disappeared miraculously into thin air.
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- What was the meaning of this astonishing vision? King
Gudea immediately sought the advice of a dream-interpreter, who revealed
that the god had been Ningirsu - a Sky-god - whilst the goddess had been
Nisaba - the goddess of writing and science. Gudea would indeed build a
temple, said the interpreter, but first he should build for Ningirsu a
chariot 'adorned with shining metal and lapis lazuli'. The god would then
reappear and reveal the exact design of the temple which Gudea should build.
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- Gudea turned the divine prophecy into an earthly reality.
In the heart of his city, Lagash, he constructed a magnificent temple in
accordance with the plan which had been lowered from Heaven. The temple
was called E-ninnu-Imdugud-bar-bar, which meant 'Eninnu, Flashing Thunderbird'.
To Gudea, a man well versed in the legends of his day, the name of the
temple commemorated a dramatic battle of the gods which had occurred at
the beginning of the world.
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- ONCE UPON A TIME, according to Sumerian lore, in the
days before mankind had been created, a rogue demon known as Zu had stolen
the so-called 'tablets of destiny' from the Earth, causing the crucial
'bond' between Heaven and Earth to be broken. As Zu flew off to his heavenly
'mountain', the gods on the Earth were plunged into darkness. Who would
stand up to Zu and recover the magical tablets? The challenge was accepted
by a god named Ningirsu, who soared up into the Sky and launched a fierce
attack upon Zu, using seven mighty whirlwinds and fourteen storm-floods.
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- Zu was defeated. He was cast down to the Earth in the
form of a 'Sling-Stone', and his heavenly 'mountain' was smashed into pieces,
causing a huge flood of ice and rock to fall upon the Earth below. In triumph,
Ningirsu returned to the Earth flying the 'Imdugud-bird' - the celestial
vehicle of his defeated enemy Zu.
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- Thus it was that the Sumerian king Gudea came to build
the Eninnu temple - commemorating not only the capture of the Imdugud-bird,
but also the act of creation by Ningirsu, which fecundated the Earth and
turned it into a lush garden of paradise.
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- THE CIVILISATION of the ancient Sumerians is a mystery
wrapped inside an enigma. From the mid-4th millennium bc, this pioneering
people emerged from the cloak of prehistoric anonymity, and began to build
marvellous cities in the fertile plain between the mighty Tigris and Euphrates
rivers (a region roughly equivalent to modern-day Iraq). The entire region
was known as Sumer, or in later days by the Greek name Mesopotamia, meaning
'the land between the rivers'.
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- The Sumerians instigated a revolution in fields as diverse
as agriculture, commerce, maths, architecture and metallurgy, and they
developed remarkably sophisticated forms of government along with the earliest
known social institutions, such as schools and courts of law.
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- Most significantly, the Sumerians invented writing, initially
in a pictographic form, but later in a style known as cuneiform - a curious
system of wedge-shaped signs which were impressed into clay tablets. These
writings - discovered and decoded during the mid to late 19th century -
reveal a Sumerian society which was driven by religion to an obsessive
degree.
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- The temple to Ningirsu in Lagash and the legend of its
building exemplify a phenomenon which was repeated in every city throughout
Sumer. To cite but two examples, there was at Nippur a temple to the Sky-god
Enlil known as E.KUR - 'the Mountain-House' - whilst at Uruk there was
a temple to the Sky-goddess Inanna known as E.AN.NA - 'the House of Heaven
and Earth'. The latter was said to be a 'temple descended from Heaven'.
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- All of these temples were regarded as microcosms of the
bond which existed between Heaven and Earth, according to the ancient way
of thinking. They were the ultimate power places, where the visible world
met the invisible world, where the human world met the divine world, and
where all things present were linked to all things past. Each temple, pyramid
and ziggurat reconnected mankind to its origins, its genesis and its birthplace
- the gateway of the gods at the navel of the world.
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- THE CLAY TABLETS of the Sumerians relate an amazing story
- of gods who had created the heavens and the Earth and who had descended
to the Earth at the beginning of time, in order to lay the foundations
of the Sumerian cities. In those days, the gods alone had occupied the
land of Sumer, but soon they grew weary of their work and set about creating
mankind - in their own image - to release themselves from the burden of
their toil. The result was the Sumerian 'mankind', known by the enigmatic
title 'the black-headed ones'.
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- Who or what were the Sumerian gods? Why did they come
down from Heaven to Earth? And how did they create mankind in their own
image?
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- It would be fair to say that few of us have had the time
or inclination to study the Sumerian legends in depth. Instead, most of
us have relied on the opinions of 'experts', who have interpreted the ancient
texts and summarised their contents for us.
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- One such expert is Erich von Daniken, who has carried
out a wide-ranging study of ancient epic legends. To von Daniken, the human-like
nature of the ancient gods was to be taken literally, implying that they
were astronauts who came down from Heaven to Earth. Important, if true.
But is this what the ancient texts actually said?
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- It is a notable feature of the Sumerian legends that
the gods who came down to Earth did so amidst fiery rocks and floodwaters.
There was Enlil, for example - a Sky-god who split open the Earth's crust
with a 'pickaxe'. And there was Enki - supposedly Enlil's brother - who
descended to Earth amidst raging waters and stones. Even more curiously,
Enlil and Enki were said to have penetrated the surface of the Earth and
become hostages in the underworld. Strange activities for ancient astronauts.
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- AN IDEAL test-bed for von Daniken's theory of alien intervention
is a Sumerian legend entitled Creation of Man by the Mother-Goddess - a
tale of how mankind was created to bear the work of the gods. At first
glance, the mother-goddess Mami appears to be a human-like entity. She
speaks, mixes clay, directs her birth-giving assistants, and, at one point,
she has her 'feet' kissed by the grateful gods, whose burden was to be
borne by the newly created people. Mami's most important act was to pinch
off fourteen pieces of clay, and insert them into the wombs of fourteen
birth-goddesses, who in due course brought forth fourteen human beings
- seven male and seven female. To a 21st century audience, the story sounds
remarkably like one of genetic engineering.
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- But any notion that Mami was creating the world's first
test-tube babies is dispelled by a closer examination of the text. It then
becomes apparent that the fourteen birth-goddesses were fourteen 'wombs'
which were all contained within the single 'womb' of Mami herself. Various
clues in the text then lead us inexorably towards the conclusion that Mami
was a personification of the Earth, not too dissimilar from Gaea, the Mother
Earth goddess of Greek mythology. The 'womb' of Mami, it would seem, was
the interior of the Earth, in which the seeds of the human race had been
planted.
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- As for Enlil and Enki, other Sumerian legends describe
them being placed bodily inside the 'womb' of the Earth-goddess. So much,
then, for the idea of ancient astronauts.
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- WHO, then, were the gods who came down from Heaven to
Earth? Another group of experts - those of mainstream academia - are convinced
that gods such as Enlil and Enki were weather-gods, who used their thunder,
lightning, rainwater and hailstones to fertilise the womb of Mother Earth.
It is a mundane theory, and it produces a mundane explanation for the Heaven
whence the gods originated, namely the troposphere where the Earth's weather
is produced.
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- But unfortunately the theory of mainstream academics
also fails when we pay close attention to what the ancient Sumerians actually
said.
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- One of the central themes of the Sumerian creation legends
was the seeding of the Earth by fragments of a disintegrating heavenly
'mountain'. We encountered this theme earlier, in the legend of Zu, when
Zu's mountain was destroyed and cast down to the Earth in a torrent of
ice and rocks. The same theme is evident in the fertilisation of the Earth
by Enki, and it is evident again in the legends of Enlil, who impregnated
the Earth with the seeds of life in his name of 'Great Mountain'.
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- All of this mountain imagery - which is found also in
Greek mythology - suggests that we are dealing with something more than
a cloudburst and fall of hailstones. It suggests, on the contrary, that
the Sumerians were referring to the collapse of a celestial mountain, i.e.
a celestial body in the depths of space. And as for the rocks which were
unleashed by the disintegration of this celestial body, we should recognise
them instantly as meteorites.
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- THE WORSHIP of meteorites in ancient times is not a matter
for dispute, although archaeologically speaking it is a practice better
attested in ancient Egypt than in the land of the Sumerians.
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- At the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis, close to
the Giza pyramids, an enormous meteorite was erected atop a pillar, pointing
the stone up towards the heavens whence it had come. This meteorite was
known as the 'Benben Stone', and its name - derived from bnbn in ancient
Egyptian - meant 'The Stone which Flowed Out'. Ancient inscriptions attest
to a belief that this Stone had flowed out from God 'in the primeval ocean',
i.e. in the depths of space.
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- The meteorite cult of Heliopolis accords with the ancient
Egyptian belief in a Golden Age which had been lost when a tremendous catastrophe
occurred in the heavens. This disaster, which occurred at the beginning
of time, had prompted the gods to descend from Heaven to Earth. And foremost
among these gods was Osiris, whose cult was central to the Egyptian quest
for the afterlife.
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- As we might expect, the birth of Osiris was catastrophic
in nature. According to the Pyramid Texts (the prayers inscribed inside
certain pyramids from around 2300 bc), Osiris had been cast down from the
heavens, whereupon he 'split open' the Earth and came to reside in an 'Island
of Fire'. This Island of Fire was the underworld, where Osiris ruled over
the dead and mutilated gods who had followed in his train.
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- A similar legend was told two thousand years later to
the Greek writer Plutarch. Significantly, Plutarch described the dismemberment
of Osiris in a battle of the gods, the scattering of his body-parts and
their burial in the Earth - at numerous different locations.
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- THESE LEGENDS of Osiris point unmistakeably to a singular
and unique phenomenon - a meteorite storm. This explains why Osiris was
known as a god of 'iron members', for meteorites were a crucial source
of iron in ancient times. Similarly, it explains why a tool made of meteoric
iron translated the Egyptian kings to the afterlife, as well as the idea
that the resurrected king would rule the heavens upon a 'throne of iron'.
It is no coincidence that the Egyptians referred to meteorites as 'the
efflux of Osiris'.
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- Osiris, then, can be identified as a disintegrating celestial
body - in perfect accord with the Sumerian way of thinking. And just as
the Sumerians spoke of a disintegrating celestial mountain, so too did
the Egyptians. Heaven, they said, was a 'mountain' in the distant 'east',
whilst the Sky-goddess Nut - the mother of Osiris - was 'the Primeval Hill
of Land in the midst of the Sea'. The explosion of this hill or mountain
had unleashed the 'efflux of Osiris', which comprised both meteorites and
floodwaters - once again in line with Sumerian thinking.
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- ALL IN ALL, there can be no doubt that the gods who came
down from the Sky were not weather-gods from the troposphere, as scholars
so fondly presume, but rather meteorite and flood-gods, which came from
the disintegration of a celestial body in the depths of space.
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- WHY are these ancient legends of the gods so important?
The simple answer is that they represent the earliest written forms of
a religion which has survived into modern times - via the writings of the
Holy Bible. The ancient legends can thus teach us a great deal about the
meaning of modern Judaeo-Christian religion.
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- When we re-examine the stories of the Old Testament in
the light of the legends of ancient Egypt and Sumer, we find that we are,
in many ways, in familiar territory. We have a battle of the gods, a creation
of Earth and the heavens, a creation of mankind, a Great Deluge, and a
tradition of ten god-like humans with remarkable longevity. Clearly the
Hebrew writers of the Old Testament did not live in a theological and cultural
vacuum, and nor should we expect them to have done.
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- There are, however, some tell-tale signs that the Hebrew
priests carried out a major editing of the old pagan stories. In a vehement
rejection of pagan beliefs, the Hebrew priests denied the existence of
the afterlife in Heaven, and told the people that death was spent in the
dingy depths of the underworld (Sheol), in a state of nothingness and non-existence.
There, the life of every man would be snuffed out for all eternity.
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- Concerning the abode of God, which the pagans hoped to
visit, the Hebrew priests declared it off limits to man, and relocated
it to a distant point in the highest heights of the heavens.
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- Concerning God himself, who the pagans regarded as the
archetypal model for death and rebirth, the Hebrew priests occulted his
ex-physical nature, and thus concealed his death and resurrection. The
old mountain-god El Shaddai was given a 'make-over' to become the purely
spiritual God Yahweh-Elohim. And as for the pagan idea of God creating
the other gods by physical emanation from himself, this was occulted by
deleting the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet from the opening line
of Genesis, causing a profound alteration to its meaning.
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- In short, the Hebrew scriptures presented God and his
heavenly abode as unfathomable mysteries, which were beyond the ken of
mankind. And this is how most of us have regarded God and Heaven ever since.
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- TODAY one is almost forbidden from questioning the veracity
of the Bible, which supposedly contains 'the gospel truth', but when we
do question it, in the light of the ancient pagan beliefs, some remarkable
revelations emerge from its pages. The story of Adam and Eve, for example,
is not at all what it seems; nor is the story of Noah's Ark, nor the story
of Moses and the Exodus.
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- All of these legends conceal a great secret which was
shared by all religions of the pagan world. It is a secret which explains
why mankind was guilty of original sin, and which explains God's decision
to create mankind 'in his own image'. The secret is ultimately the identity
of God himself - the exact nature of the celestial body which we today
call 'God' and 'Heaven'.
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- This newspaper [sic], it must be said, is not the appropriate
place for this secret to be revealed. The sanctity of the ancient mysteries
is to be respected, for they have been guarded judiciously for thousands
of years. It is a rule of the game that the secrets of the ancients should
not be divulged lightly to casual inquirers.
-
- Suffice to say that the legends of Adam and Eve, Noah
and Moses (among others) are edited versions of older Hebrew legends, in
which pagan man celebrated his celestial origins and heavenly destiny...
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- IT SHOULD by now be apparent to attentive readers that
the God of the Holy Bible was conceptually no different from the Sky-god
of the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians.
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- The creation of the Earth as we know it was the physical
act of a physical, dying God. The spiritual Yahweh-Elohim had begun his
career as a physical celestial body, which had disintegrated in the depths
of space. In short, our heavenly Father was the Father-of-the-Meteorites.
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- Was God a comet? Or was he some other kind of celestial
body? This is the great secret which cannot be disclosed here, but it is
discussed and resolved quite categorically in my book When The Gods Came
Down.
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- SO, as we enter the 2000th year of Christianity, the
possibility exists for us to reconnect to the past and recapture the meaning
of our religious rituals.
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- A case in point is the Easter celebration of the death
and resurrection of the Son of God. What would this sacrifice mean if God
the Father was to be understood as a celestial body - a body which died
catastrophically at the beginning of time? And what would this mean for
our understanding of Jesus Christ?
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-
-
- Copyright Alan F. Alford; adapted from his book When
The Gods Came Down, published by Hodder & Stoughton (UK) on 6th April
at £20.00. Available by mail order from Eridu Books (http://www.eridu.co.uk).
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- TOMORROW: FINAL PART: 'WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN JERUSALEM
2,000 YEARS AGO?'
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