It may be, that everything we consider as high tech has been developed thousands of years ago, but it has been vanished and now we are discovering it again:
The Gods and Their Flying Machines
The major attribute of the gods is that they could fly. Here are a few clues:
– When flying Quetzalcoatl appeared to the ancient Mexicans as a feathered serpent: “…first it flies, quite high up, well up it goes, and it just descends…”. And when it flies or descends a great wind blows. Wherever it goes, it flies” (Baldwin, 1998).
Don’t you wonder what kind of aircraft might appear to the natives as a “plumed serpent” accompanied by a “great wind”?
– “…there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” (2 Kings 2:11).
– “And Jehovah was going before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them in the way, and by night in a pillar of fire, to give light to them, to go by day and by night…” (Exo 13:21).
– Yahweh lands on Mt Sinai. “…And on the third day, it being morning, it happened. There were thunders and lightning, and a heavy cloud upon the mountain, and the sound of a ram’s horn, very strong! And all the people of the camp trembled… And mountain of Sinai was smoking, all of it, because Jehovah came down on it in fire. And it’s smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace; and the mountain quaked exceedingly…” (Exodus 19:16-18).
– “…And the spirit lifted me up, and I heard behind me the sound of a great tumult, saying, Blessed be the glory of Jehovah from his place; and the sound of the wings of the living creatures touching each other to the other; and the sound of the wheels along with them; and the sound of a great tumult…” (Ezekiel 3:12).
– Jehovah comes down on the high places with a great heat: “For behold, Jehovah is coming out of his place, and will come down and walk on the high places of the earth. And the mountains shall melt under him, and the valleys shall cleave themselves as wax before the fire, as waters poured out on a steep place…” (Micah 1:3-4).
– A reference to flying gods in the Mahabharata:
“The gods, in cloud-borne chariots… bright celestial cars in concourse sailed upon the cloudless sky.” (Sitchin, 1985).
– Sitchin (1985) also mentions the flying Maruts:
“…loud roaring as the winds make the mountains rock and reel…(as they) lift themselves aloft…these verily wondrous, red of hue, speed on their course with a roar over the ridges of the sky…and spread themselves with beams of light…bright, celestial, with lightning in their hands and helmets of gold upon their heads.”
– Egyptian King Pepi ascends:
“As an imperishable star; Flies who flies! He flies away from you, O men! He is no longer upon earth; he is in the sky! He rushes at the sky like a heron. He has kissed the sky like a falcon. He has leapt skyward like a grasshopper.” (Frankfort, 1948).
– An angelic messenger announces to Manoah about the birth of Samson to his wife, and who, after telling Manoah that his name is secret,
“…ascends in a flame of fire from the altar.” (Judges 13:2-15).
– Naymlap, the leading god of the Indians of Ecuador, was
“taken heavenward by the god of the speaking stone” (Sitchin, 1990).
– Von Daniken (1982) states that the “fiery heavenly chariots”, described by Enoch and Elijah are also found in Buddhist (Padmasambhava) and Hindu (Ardjuna) mythology. Apparently every child in India is well aware of ancient flying gods and their aircraft, which they called Vimanas.
– In the Sumerian tale of Nergal and Ereshkigal (Pritchard, 1975), there are hints that there were periods when the gods were not able to travel from one location to another, perhaps because their orbital positions or the planetary alignments were not favorable:
Anu opened his mouth to say to Kaka:
I will send thee, Kaka, to the Land of no Return,
To Ereshkigal…thou shalt say: “‘Thou art not able to come up,
In thy year thou canst not ascend to our presence, And we cannot go down,
In our month we cannot descend to thy presence…”
Probably the most familiar description of the AA’s aircraft (possibly spacecraft) is in the biblical book of Ezekiel. It is a very convincing description by a very astute observer. From this description former NASA engineer J. F. Blumrich designed and patented his impression of the vehicle (Blumrich, 1974) (Fig 7-1). A small cockpit, where Ezekiel observed the “Lord”, rested atop the body of the vehicle.
Fig 7-1.
The body, which Ezekiel called the “fiery firmament”, terminated in a single main engine. Attached to the body were four helicopter engines and blades, which enabled the vehicle to land vertically without using the main engine, which would have either covered poor Ezekiel with rubble or blown him away!
Not so well known, and more interesting in my opinion, is the tale of the “Divine Throne-Chariot” from the Dead Sea Scrolls (Vermes, 1962). The introduction to the piece reads:
“The Divine Throne-Chariot draws its inspiration from Ezekiel (1:10) and is related to the Book of Revelation. It depicts the appearance and movement of the Merkabah, the divine Chariot supported and drawn by the cherubim, which is at the same time a throne and a vehicle. The ‘small voice’ of blessing is drawn from 1 Kings 19:112: it was in a ‘small still voice’ that God manifested himself to Elijah. In our Qumran text this voice is uttered by the cherubim and it is interesting to note that although the Bible does not define the source of the voice, the ancient Aramaic translation of 12 Kings (Targum of Jonathan) ascribes it to angelic beings called ‘they who bless silently.’”
“The Throne-Chariot was a central subject of meditation in ancient as well as in medieval Jewish esotericism and mysticism, but the guardians of Rabbinic orthodoxy tended to discourage such speculation. The liturgical use of Ezekiel’s chapter on the Chariot is expressly forbidden in the Misnah; it even lays down that no wise man is to share his understanding of the Merkabah with a person less enlightened than himself…”
Not being a “wise man” I guess I’m free to share my speculation regarding the Merkabah. Of course the ancient Hebrews did not have the words to describe the technology which they were observing; regardless Ezekiel did quite an impressive job with the words available to him.
The description of the vehicle in operation, excerpted from Vermes by Barnstone (1984) reads:
“…and the cherubim utter blessings. And as they rise up, there is a divine small voice and loud praise; there is a divine small voice as they fold their wings.
“The cherubim bless the image of the Throne-Chariot above the firmament, and they praise the majesty of the fiery firmament beneath the seat of his glory. And between the turning wheels angels of holiness come and go, as it were a fiery vision of most holy spirits; and about them flow seeming rivulets of fire, like gleaming bronze, a radiance of many gorgeous colors, of marvelous pigments magnificently mingled. The spirits of the Living God move perpetually with the glory of the wonderful Chariot.
“The small voice of the blessing accompanies the tumult as they depart, and on the path of their return they worship the Holy One. Ascending, they rise marvelously; settling, they stay still. The sound of joyful praise is silenced and there is a small voice of blessing in all the camp of God.”
Here it is again with my “interpretations” in parenthesis:
“…and the cherubim (and the objects with wings – the helicopters) utter blessings (make a soft sound resembling prayer). And as they rise up (as the helicopter blades rise into place), there is a divine small voice (the blades make a swishing sound in the air) and loud praise (along with the loud noise of the engine); there is a divine small voice as they fold their wings (when the main engine is stopped only the swishing sound of the blades is heard as they drop down and stop).
“The cherubim (The helicopters) bless the image of the Throne-Chariot above the firmament (make a soft sound like prayer), and they praise the majesty (and they speak louder, and in amazement, about the brightness) of the fiery firmament beneath the seat of his glory (of the glowing, idling engine under the main body of the aircraft). And between the turning wheels (between the helicopter’s blades), angels of holiness come and go (wispy changing patterns), as it were a fiery vision of most holy spirits (of flames and vapors from the main engine); and about them flow seeming rivulets of fire, like gleaming bronze, a radiance of many gorgeous colors, of marvelous pigments magnificently mingled (the exhaust from the helicopter engines mingled with the multi-colored exhaust from the main engine). The spirits (the helicopters) of the Living God move perpetually with the glory (always move with the flaming exhaust) of the wonderful Chariot (of the wonderful vehicle).
“The small voice of the blessing (the soft sound of the blades) accompanies the tumult (accompanies the roar of the main engine) as they depart, and on the path of their return they worship (they make a loud noise) the Holy One (the god-pilot). Ascending, they rise marvelously (the blades ascend quickly); settling, they stay still (the blades drop down and stop,). The sound of joyful praise is silenced (the loud noise of the main engine ceases) and there is a small voice of blessing (the helicopter blades slow and drop down) in all the camp of God.”
I do not think there is a better description of Ezekiel’s “spaceship”!
Another interesting tale is that of Elijah meeting the Lord. In I Kings 19:11-12, Yahweh makes himself known to Elijah (Eli-yahu):
“And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the earthquake; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
My translation: As the spacecraft approaches the exhaust was first perceived as a powerful wind; as it descended on the mountain the engine caused the earth under it to vibrate; the engine’s fiery exhaust then came into Elijah’s view; finally, the main engines are stopped and only the sound of the helicopter blades is heard as they slow and stop.
Zecharia Sitchin (1998) gives an interesting description of Elijah’s ascent to heaven. This apparently was also the time when Ezekiel wrote of his experiences with the Lord’s aircraft – about 592 bc:
“…a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, came. And they separated between them both (Elijah and Elisha), and Elijah went up in a tempest to Heaven. And Elisha was watching, and he was crying ‘My father, my father! the chariot of Israel and its Horsemen!’ And he did not see him again…”
(2 Kings 2:11).
If your language did not include the words aircraft, or rocket, or spaceship, or any other thing that could carry men through the air, what could you possibly call it but a “chariot”? And it seems clear that some of them were what we now call VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft.
So I am left with no doubt that the AAs possessed the technology to come to Earth in spacecraft, and to move about the Earth in various kinds of aircraft which did not require runways.
Ancient Nuclear Warfare
“We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then turned everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow”
– Physicist Leo Szilard, atomic bomb builder
“(It was) a single projectile, charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as the thousand suns, rose in all its splendor… it was an unknown weapon… which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas… the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. The hair and nails fellout; pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white… after a few hours all foodstuffs were infected…”
– The Mahabharata.
During the first Egyptian “pyramid war”, between Horus and Seth, Horus strikes:
“…(and he) let loose against them a storm which they could neither see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears. It brought death to all of them in a single moment…” (Sitchin, 1985)
This sounds to me like the gamma-ray and neutron pulse from a sub-kiloton nuclear weapon, which has no fireball and the nuclear radiation extends far beyond the blast wave.
Zeus battles the Titans:
“The hot vapor lapped around the Titans, of Gaea born, flame unspeakable rose bright to the upper air. The Flashing glare of the Thunder-Stone, its lightning, blinded their eyes-so strong it was. Astounding heat seized Chaos… It seemed as if Earth and wide Heaven above had come together, a mighty crash, as though Earth was hurled to ruin. Also were the winds brought rumbling, earthquake and dust storm, thunder and lightning.” (Sitchin, 1985).
I would guess that this was a large nuclear weapon which was detonated on or close to the ground, thus producing a large mushroom cloud.
Zeus conquering Thyphon:
“A flame shot forth from the stricken lord in the dim, rugged, secluded valley of the Mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor, melting as tin melts when heated by man’s art…in the glow of a blazing fire did the earth melt down.” (Sitchin, 1985).
Biblical references to nuclear warfare:
– The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah:
“…(Abraham) looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah…and he beheld and saw a smoke rising from the earth, as the smoke of a furnace.”
(Gen 18:27).
– “…and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt.”
– Exodus 9:23
“And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.”
– Joshua 10:11
“And the fire of God came down from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.”
– 2 Kings 1:12
-“Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them.”
– Psalms 21:9
“A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about.”
– Psalms 97:3
“Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.”
– Isaiah 29:6
There are many other clues regarding nuclear warfare. Childress (2000) discusses ancient atomic warfare, first Hattusas (Bogazkoy) in Turkey where “parts of the city are vitrified, and the walls of rock are partly melted.” He then discusses Sodom and Gomorrah and compares them with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He thinks Sodom, Gomorrah, Zoar, Admah and Zeboiim (Gen. 14:2) were destroyed, creating the Dead Sea. He quotes L.M.Lewis, “Footprints on the Sands of Time”, who argues for atomic explosions. And he quotes from the Mahabharata an excellent description of an atomic battle in which Arjuna is given a “celestial weapon” which he cannot use against humans “for it might destroy the world”, but he could use it against “any foe who is not human.”
From the Mahabharata, as quoted by Charles Berlitz (1972), is probably the best description of ancient atomic warfare one can find:
“…(it was) a single projectile, charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as the thousand suns, rose in all its splendor… it was an unknown weapon, and iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas… the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. The hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white… after a few hours all foodstuffs were infected… to escape from this fire the soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment.”
Steinhauser (1975) relates a story from the Ramayana:
“…when the god Rama was threatened by a ‘army of monkeys’ (men or robots?) he put a ‘magic arrow’ into action. This produces a flash of lighting ‘stronger than the heat from a hundred thousand suns’, turning everything to dust. The hair of survivors falls out, their nails disintegrate. We know of such magic weapons from Sodom and Gomorrah, and from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, Pakistan: David Davenport (1996), who spent 12 years studying ancient Hindu scripts and evidence at the ancient site of Mohenjo-Daro, declared in 1996 that the city was instantly destroyed 2,000 years bc. The city ruins reveal the explosion’s epicenter which measures 50 yards wide. At that location everything was crystallized, fused or melted. Sixty yards from the center the bricks were melted on one side indicating a blast… the horrible mysterious event of 4000 years ago was recorded in the Mahabharata.
According to that text,
“white hot smoke that was a thousand times brighter than the sun rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes. Water boiled… horses and war chariots were burned by the thousands… the corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings…”
From one of the oldest chronicles of India… the Book of Dzyan:
“Separation did not bring peace to these people and finally their anger reached a point where the ruler of the original city took with him a small number of his warriors and they rose into the air in a huge shining metal vessel. While they were many leagues from the city of their enemies, they launched a great shining lance that rode on a beam of light. It burst apart in the city of their enemies with a great ball of flame that shot up to the heavens, almost to the stars. All those who were in the city were horribly burned and even those who were not in the city – but nearby – were burned also.
Those who looked upon the lance and the ball of fire were blinded forever afterward. Those who entered the city on foot became ill and died. Even the dust of the city was poisoned, as were the rivers that flowed through it. Men dared not go near it, and it gradually crumbled into dust and was forgotten by men. When the leader saw what he had done to his own people he retired to his palace and refused to see anyone. Then he gathered about him those warriors who remained, and their wives and children, and they entered their vessels and rose one by one into the sky and sailed away. Nor did they return.”
Childress (1999) also presents sketches of the Citadel of Mohenjo-Daro and a discussion of its destruction by nuclear explosion. Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were the main cites of the “Harappa Culture” of the Indus Valley, an amazingly uniform and advanced urban civilization existing between 2500 and 1500 bc, the beginnings of which remain obscure.
About Parshaspur near Srinagar, Kashmir, David Childress (2000) states,
“It is a scene of total destruction; huge blocks of stone are scattered about a wide area giving the impression of explosive annihilation.”
Zecharia Sitchin (1985) devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of nuclear warfare in ancient times in Mesopotamia and the Sinai peninsula. In this book he also suggests the destruction of the Sinai “space facilities” by nuclear weapons. He offers as evidence
“…the immense cavity in the center of the Sinai and the resulting fracture lines (see figure), the vast surrounding flat area covered with blackened stones, traces of radiation south of the Dead Sea, the new extent and shape of the Dead Sea – is still there, four thousand years later”.
He maintains that the radioactive fallout from this operation wiped out the area around Sumer for a period of 70 years, until 1953 bc.
So did the gods use nuclear weapons in their struggles with each other and with mankind? You be the judge!
The Biotechnology of the Gods
“There are 193 species of monkeys and apes, 192 of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo Sapiens”
– Desmond Morris
“It is difficult to say what is impossible – for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow”
– Robert Goddard
Tales from various sources suggest that the gods possessed an advanced knowledge of biology many millennia ago:
– The Egyptian god Thoth helped Isis, the wife of Osiris, to extract from the dismembered Osiris the semen with which Isis was impregnated to bear Horus.
– “The Telleriano-Remensis and Florentine codices declare that Quetzalcoatl, as great artificer, ‘formed’ and ‘molded’ the first human beings in his image, and that only he – and no other god – ‘had a human body’.” (Baldwin, 1998).
– “Before I (the Lord) formed you (Jeremiah) in the belly I knew you; and before you came out of the womb I set you apart…” (Green, Jay, 1986, Jeremiah 1:5).
– “…‘though it is said that in truth Zeus, King of the Gods, whom you call Amen-Ra, was her father’. Seti nodded when he heard this and murmured, ‘Even as Amen-Ra was the father of Hatshepsut. Yes, the gods can indeed be the fathers of the spirits that dwell in the bodies of kings and queens’.” (Green, Roger, 1967).
– In the tale of the birth of Samson, Manoah’s wife, who was barren, was visited by “the Angel of Jehovah” who said,
“Behold now you are barren and have not borne. But you shall conceive and bear a son…(who shall be)…a Nazirite to God from the womb” (Green, Jay, 1986, Judges 13:2-14)
(Nazirite: Endowed with special psychic or physical qualities to be used in God’s service).
– “The god Citlaltonac sent an ambassador to see the virgin Chimalma…The god told her that she was to conceive a son, which she did soon after…” (Fernandez, 1982).
– Concerning the birth of the Toltec god Huitzilopochtli: “…a woman called Coatlicue, who was charged with keeping clean a temple on the Cerro de Coatepec, near Tula, was sweeping the building when she saw a beautiful ball of feathers drop from the sky, and put it away in her bosom. When she had finished her work, and tried to find the feather ball, it was no longer there, it had disappeared. At that same moment she became pregnant, although she had been a widow for many years.” (Demetrio, 1983).
– In his discussion of the Sumerian story of the creation of The Adam (” the earthling”) from Mesopotamian texts (clay tablets), Zecharia Sitchin (1985) writes,
“…to achieve the feat Enki suggested that a ‘being that already exists’, Ape woman, be used to create the Lulu Amelu (‘the mixed worker’) by ‘binding’ upon the less evolved beings ‘the mold of the gods’. The goddess Sud purified the ‘essence’ of a young male Anunnaki; she mixed it into the egg of an Ape woman. The fertilized egg was then implanted in the womb of a female Anunnaki, for the required period of pregnancy. When the ‘mixed creature’ was born, Sud lifted him up and shouted: ‘I have created! My hands have made it!’”
These stories raise several interesting questions:
In prehistoric times how in fact did the gods incorporate their ‘essence’ into ape females, a different species (but possibly the same genus), to create modern humans, as ancient texts have suggested?
How could gods and humans, of different but possibly similar species, marry and reproduce as suggested in Genesis?
Within historical times how did the AAs incorporate their ‘spirit’ into the prophets, humans again of a different but probably similar species?
How could the ancient ‘god-kings’ of Mesopotamia and Egypt marry their immediate family members, as custom required, and reproduce without apparent damage to the family gene pool?
Before speculating on how these things were done it will be useful to list some of the bioengineering methods in use at the present time:
IVF: In-vitro fertilization. Sperm and egg of the same species is fused in-vitro. The embryo is implanted in the uterus. A common method of treating infertility since the 1978 British ‘test tube baby’.
CSCT: Cross-species cell transfer (or nuclear transfer). An in-vitro fertilization in which a somatic (e.g. skin) ‘donor’ cell is fused in vitro with the ‘host’ egg of a different but similar species (but of the same genus). The embryo is implanted in the uterus of the host.
CCSCT: Cloned cross-species cell transfer. Same as CSCT except the egg is de-nucleated, resulting in a clone of the donor animal (although a small amount of DNA, in the mitochondria, always comes from the egg). This was the method employed by Advanced Cell Technology, Inc, to regenerate the recently extinct Asian Gaur using an ordinary cow as host (which died shortly after – darn!).
RDNA: Recombinant DNA. Since, in most cases, DNA cannot be transferred directly from one organism to another, in this technique a desirable DNA fragment, isolated from the animal ‘donor’ cell, is incorporated into the plasmid of a benign bacteria (the vector). The bacteria reproduces the fragment as a part of it’s own DNA, and the hybrid bacteria cells are injected back into the animal. This is currently the method of human ‘gene therapy’, but one would expect that the technique could also be used for cross-species cell transfer if the bacteria were benign to both species.
HESC: Human Embryonic Stem Cells. A human somatic cell is fused in vitro with a de-nucleated egg of a different species. “These differentiated cells began to grow as an embryo and then reverted to become embryonic stem cells, which can grow into virtually any type of tissue for transplant use”
So let’s speculate.
Zecharia Sitchin’s statement concerning the development of the Adam sounds like our current technique of cross-species cell transfer (CSCT), the ‘essence’ being DNA fragments (genes) which the gods wanted incorporated into the Ape woman’s egg. The resulting Adam, a hybrid like mules or hinnies, was sterile. Later on some procedure was employed to enable the “mixed creatures” to procreate.
Incorporating the “spirit” (certain traits or abilities) of the gods into the prophets, apparently a partial and selective reprogramming of the central nervous system, could have been accomplished via the technique of recombinant DNA.
Finally, the custom of the ancient ‘god-kings’ of Mesopotamia and Egypt of marrying their sisters and reproducing without apparent damage to the family gene pool would have been possible using the technique of cloned cross-species cell transfer (CCSCT) in the following scenario:
Harvest an egg from a human female and remove the DNA.
Collect a skin cell from a living god, or a deceased god whose cells have been preserved by freezing (or embalming?).
Fuse the skin cell and egg in vitro, and electrically stimulate the embryo to start dividing.
Implant the embryo back into the female, whose immune system will accept it.
If all goes well the human will birth a clone of the god. Now repeat the procedure using a skin cell from a goddess. The cloned god-son and goddess-daughter would be totally genetically different, and could marry and reproduce without genetic damage or violating rules pertaining to incest. Furthermore, since the god-son and his mother are genetically different, they may marry, as was required in ancient Egypt, without violating taboos.
But what if the god and human are of a very different species, or even of a different genus? That this is probable is evidenced by literature suggesting that some of the gods were frightful to look at, and took great care not to be seen by humans, except possibly by the highest priest:
– Concerning the appearance of (the angel) Eleleth. “…now as for that angel, I cannot speak of his power…No, truly, my mouth cannot bear to speak of his power and the appearance of his face.”
(Robinson, 1978, “The Hypostasis of the Archons’)
– In the tale of the birth of Samson, the wife of Manoah says, “A man of God has come to see me, and His appearance was like the appearance of an Angel of God, very terrifying.”
(Green, Jay, 1986, Judges 13:2-14) (This might have been an android).
– “Quetzalcoatl…only he, no other God, had a human body. He was ‘el hombre-dios’, the god made flesh, man embodied with divine spirit.”
– Fanged (Tlaloc) or grotesque (Xipe Totec – ‘The Flayed One’), the gods sometimes hid behind skins of flayed humans.
– “…now it is revealed to us concerning the race of the gods, and we confess it along with everyone else, that they have come into being out of a pure matter, and their bodies are heads only.” (Robinson, 1978, the Asclepius tractate, 21-29)
– “…they (the first male and female earthlings-Adam and Eve?) saw that they were naked, and they became enamored of one another. When they saw their makers, they loathed them since they were beastly forms.” (Robinson, 1978, “On the Origin of the World”).
In these cases probably the techniques of recombinant DNA or the generation of human embryonic stem cells was used. Scary as it sounds the “the hominid-animal mixtures” described by the Babylonian priest Berossus (Burstein, 1978) could have resulted from the modern human embryonic stem cells technique. In
fact when this experiment was announced two years ago by Advanced Cell Technology, biotechnology watcher Jeremy Rifkin strongly objected:
“They should never, ever have done this. We don’t know what kind of creature could develop from that.”
I think we now do know of at least one kind of creature that can “develop from that ” – the Adam!
In summary it appears that our current knowledge of animal biology and physiology permits a close understanding of how the gods might have accomplished their bioengineering feats. Furthermore, since we are assuming that the gods had this ability millennia ago, it’s exciting to speculate concerning their current biotechnology. I suspect we would find it indescribable.
The Immortals
“The more science learns what life is, the more reluctant scientists are to define it “
Leila M. Coyne
“Eternity is very long, especially near the end”
Woody Allen
A universal attribute of the “gods” was their immortality, or at least their very long lives compared to humans. Several references to this characteristic follows:
– “For a thousand years, in your eyes, are as yesterday when it passes, and as a watch in the night.” (Green, Jay, 1986, Psalm 90:4).
This represents a time dilation factor of 1/365,000.
– “…that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (Green, Jay, 1986, 2 Peter 3:8).
Also a time dilation factor of 1/365,000.
– “…adding up to 1200 divine years of 432,000 Earth years” – The Vishnu Purana, as quoted by Zecharia Sitchin (Sitchin,1993).
A time dilation factor of 1/360 or 1/432,000, whichever way it is interpreted.
– “Put not thy faith in length of years, for the gods regard a lifetime as but an hour.” (Frankfort, 1948).
A time dilation factor of 1/52,840 for a 60 year lifetime.
– Mead (1921) writes,
“Jesus tells his initiated of the dissolution of the universe after its expansion is completed ‘in the years of the light’. Mary Magdalene asks him: ‘My Lord, how many years of the years of the world is a year of the light?’ Jesus answered: ‘A day of the light is a thousand years in the world, so that thirty-six myriads of years and a half myriad of years of the world are a single year of the light.’”
Translating we have 1 day of light = 1000 Earth years; 1 year of the light = 365 days of the light = 365,000 Earth days = 36.5 myriads of Earth years, i.e. as used here “myriad” represents the multiplier 10,000.
– From The Vision of Isaiah:
“After taking Isaiah to Heaven, the angel was requested to return the prophet to Earth. Isaiah said: ‘Why so soon? I have only been here two hours.’ The angel said: ‘Not two hours, but thirty-two years…’” (Slemen, 2000).
A time dilation factor of 1/140,160.
These references seem to imply that the AAs did not live forever, but so much longer than humans that they appeared to be immortal. The texts report that the Sumerian goddess Inanna did age, but she was considered immortal.
One obvious advantage of being even relatively immortal is that one could move about the galaxy without having to achieve very high, and very expensive, speeds. As astronomer Sandy Faber noted, “If we could live longer we wouldn’t have to accelerate to high speeds”. Living longer instead of going faster is of course a familiar science fiction theme.
I can think of four possibilities to account for the alleged immortality of the gods:
(1) Organ replacement, if the gods are biological, or parts replacement if they are not – some of the ‘angels’ and other emissaries of the gods seemed suspiciously robotic:
“Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions, for my name is in him.” (Exodus 23:20-21).
(2) Rejuvenation by somatic cell nuclear transfer.
(3) Time dilation via travel at relativistic speeds relative to Earth.
(4) Gravitational time dilation by orbiting a large black hole.
I am not aware of any references to organ or parts replacement by the gods; however rejuvenation was likely since there was a “Tree of Life” which the gods had access to but humans did not. Zecharia Sitchin (1980) suggests that to be taken up in ancient Egypt meant that one would be immortal, so the rocket ship represented the “tree of life”, and was also symbolized by the obelisks.
According to the ancient king lists the 1st god-king of Ur reigned for 28,800 Earth years, but the texts also mention that the goddess Inanna grew old and fat after being on Earth for an extended period. So was the Tree of Life a repository of spare parts, a cellular rejuvenator, or was it a location such as the vicinity of a black hole?
Time dilation via high speeds seems unlikely, since the degree of time dilation implied by all of the foregoing statements would require velocities very close to the speed of light, which we currently consider to be impossible (although physicists have recently claimed to have transmitted photons, which have no mass, faster than the speed of light, moving a spacecraft faster than the speed of light would seem to require most of the energy in the entire universe).
Rejuvenation by somatic cell nuclear transfer was probably employed since the gods possessed a very advanced biotechnology. In this “still largely theoretical procedure…(the procedure) can ‘rejuvenate’ an aged cell, restoring the proliferative capacity inherent in cells at the beginning of life.” (West, 2000).
Rejuvenation (replacement) by cloning is also very probable. This procedure, which can be used to produce “young cells of any type”, avoids the “Hayflick limit” in which the “telemeres” on the ends of the chromosomes are reduced every time the cell divides until they are used up and division stops (Cibelli, 2000).
I think it’s also logical that the gods might reside, at least some of the time, in an equilibrium orbit about a black-hole which is massive enough to provide an acceptable tidal force across the width of their spacecraft. How massive? If we assume a spacecraft of any length, but having a width of a kilometer (this is a big spaceship folks!), orbiting a black-hole of 32,425 solar masses, the tidal force across the width of the craft would be a comfortable 1g (the pull of gravity at the Earth’s surface). For the case of “1200 divine years of 432,000 human years”, i.e. a time dilation of 0.00278, the ratio of the circumference of the event horizon to the circumference of the orbit of the spacecraft is 0.999992.
Since the horizon circumference for this mass is only about 601,585 kms, our gods would need to drive very carefully! But in this orbit, one Earth year in the life of the gods is 360 years on Earth. The case of “…a thousand years, in your eyes, are as yesterday when it passes” is more difficult since the orbit of the spacecraft would essentially have to coincide with the event horizon.
But there is another clue. In the Sumerian tale of Nergal and Ereshkigal (Pritchard, 1975), there are hints that there were periods when the gods were not able to travel from one location to another, perhaps because their orbital positions or the planetary alignments were not favorable:
Anu opened his mouth to say to Kaka:
I will send thee, Kaka, to the Land of no Return,
To Ereshkigal…thou shalt say: “‘Thou art not able to come up,
In thy year thou canst not ascend to our presence, And we cannot go down,
In our month we cannot descend to thy presence…”
Gravitational time dilation is the logical explanation here. The time dilation factor is of course 1/12, so that the 96,410 km radius of Anu’s orbit is now a comfortable 665 km greater than the horizon radius. Notice that even this modest time dilation, if not close to a black-hole, would require a speed of 99.6% the speed of light – not possible according to current knowledge.
Although astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way’s core contains a massive black hole of about 2.6 million solar masses (Science News, 153:59) it is over 30,000 LY from Earth. So how likely is it that there is a suitably large black hole reasonably close to us, say in the Orion nebula? (The solar system used to be in the Orion nebula but is now about 1500 LY away). One clue may come from Stephen Hawking’s (1988) observation that,
“The number of black holes may well be greater even than the number of visible stars (about 1011 in our galaxy)…then the black hole nearest to us would probably be at a distance of about a thousand million kilometers, or about as far away as Pluto…”.
Furthermore the Space Telescope Science Institute reports recent observations which suggest that they may be numerous:
“Two international teams of astronomers using NASA’S Hubble Space Telescope and ground based telescopes in Australia and Chile have discovered the first examples of isolated stellar-mass black holes adrift among the stars in our galaxy.” (stsci, 2000) .
Finally astrophysicists have recently postulated that there may be as many as 25,000 black holes within 15 LYs of the center of our galaxy (Escude, 2000).
Lacking other clues I’ll speculate that a combination of cellular rejuvenation for those that are biological, parts replacement for those who are not, and gravitational time dilation are probably how the gods achieved their incredibly long lives, relative to Earthlings.
