Transcription
Is there a hidden history? What if ancient myths are not what we're taught? What if they're distorted memories of contact? Encounters with something so overwhelming that they could only be called gods, angels, or demons. Across the ancient world, civilizations that never spoke with one another reported eerily similar things. Beings descending from the sky imparting knowledge, demanding obedience, rituals, and sometimes even blood. Now, we call them myths, but clearly the ancients held these experiences with the highest possible reverence. And here's an unsettling thought. In the modern era, we've seen disturbingly similar things. Advanced technology appearing like magic to isolated populations. Actual cargo cults forming around technology like airplanes and radios. Could this be a hint as to what the ancients experienced?
Chapter 2 of Secret Machines, God, Man, and War by Lenda and Dong doesn't just revisit ancient stories, it reframes them as part of a long hidden history. One that may stretch from our earliest civilizations to modern UFO encounters. And if even a fraction of this is true, then human history isn't just incomplete or misinterpreted, but very likely deliberately concealed or even classified. Before we get into this read through proper, a little bit of orientation because this secret machines book is not just another UFO book or a ancient aliens tale. It's an attempt to do something incredibly ambitious. It's the first book in a series of three that attempts to stitch together mythology, religion, the esoteric history, and classified intelligence operations into something of a cohesive thesis. A thesis that states that the phenomenon definitely did not begin in the 1940s, that it's been with us in the deepest sense since time immemorial, maybe even the very origins of the human species. And I also have to point out the timing of this transmission feels crazy, like a little bit eerie and synchronistic because just a couple of days before posting this, we got an insane promise from the president of the United States, a promise to release previously classified UFO related files.
Now, if you're skeptical, if you are incredulous, if you think this is a complete sigh up or at the very least a misdirect, I completely understand. I'm right there with you. That said, I do think it's a possibility that we could be on the precipice of some level of disclosure for reasons that are outside of the government's control at this point. So, at the very least, let's just do a thought experiment. A thought experiment that he is being sincere here in saying he will release the files or some files. Within any promise of disclosure, there's a huge assumption being made that disclosure itself is just a matter of releasing some files or opening some vaults, officially acknowledging what crashed where, who saw what, and maybe something about the nature of the entities we've encountered. But what if disclosure is not that simple? I for one suspect that the truth is a lot more complicated than releasing a few files. I suspect that the phenomenon in some form at least touches everything. Our religions, our governments, our wars, possibly even our origins. And this book argues for that possibility. It argues that we may not be at the top of the food chain intellectually or spiritually. That we could be part of a system we barely perceive. Maybe we are a species that is managed. Maybe we're victims. Maybe we're a forgotten science experiment. Or maybe we're just so psychosspiritually handicapped that we can't see the truth. Ancient Gnostics imagined that humanity was trapped in some kind of cosmic enclosure, watched by higher intelligences, shaped by forces that we can't understand. And of course, now most of us swap words like angels and demons for extraterrestrials, interdimensionals, ultraterrestrials, but the idea remains the same. So, if what we've begun to lay out and what we're going to continue to lay out in this video is even partially true, disclosure would not just be shocking, it would be ontologically reorienting. It would not just be a question of are we alone, it would be a question of what are we and do we even want to know?
Welcome back to it, my friends. And I am elated for this one. Uh my my wonder nuggets are actually exploding to bring you this transmission because what follows is one of the most uh insane chapters from one of the most impressive books I've read on the topic of the phenomenon spirituality human origins and the esoteric. But I believe by now I've already bombarded you with an introduction. So, let's just get into this chapter. It is a long one. We'll see if we end up doing this in one or two parts. Um, but without further ado, Chapter 2, The Gate of the Gods.
From time immemorial, man has felt himself to be confronted with evil supernatural beings. Amid such fears and wonders lived the river peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates, the legendary Samrians. On broad plains, on terraces of temples and towers, the priests scan the night sky, pondering over the riddle of the universe, the cause of all being, of life and death. By conjuration, by the burning of incense, by shouts and by whispers, by gesture, and by song, the priest sought to attract the attention of the fickle gods. Spirit of the earth, remember. Spirit of the sky, remember. That experience we are calling the phenomenon was known to ancient civilizations just as it is to our own is as much a fact of history as Kenneth Arnold's sighting in 1947 or the thousands of similar sightings that have taken place all over the world since then. To demonstrate this and to get some idea of the earliest direct experience of the phenomenon in recorded history, it is necessary to go back to what is arguably the world's oldest known civilization whose writing has come down to us and has been translated. The Samrians. The Samrians will give us some context for an understanding of how human beings have interacted with the phenomenon when there were no internal or external sensors to alter the reports or confuse the issue with political agendas. That does not mean that their accounts are reliable from the point of view of scientific inquiry. What they experienced was as difficult for them to describe as it remains for us. Yet the consistency of their emotional and cultural response to the phenomenon or to the memory of the phenomenon which was handed down from earlier generations gives us a stable platform from which to begin our investigation. Further, we will see that there is enough similarity between the ancient Samrian and Babylonian records on the one hand and the biblical record on the other that we can use the one to help understand the other. The pre-biblical accounts are a polytheistic version and the biblical account is monotheistic, but they share many essentials aside from their ideological differences. The importance of the Samrian originals is that their legends give us the oldest written evidence of what we may call contact.
The Two Worlds Interpretation. One of the essential characteristics of the phenomenon is its other worldly aspect. The phenomenon does not seem to originate in our world. It raises the question, what is our world? How do we determine what is part of it and what isn't? The answer may seem obvious. Whatever comes from the earth is part of our world. If something does not come from the earth, it must come from elsewhere, the other world. However, things are never that easy. The concept of world has changed considerably over the millennia since the earliest recorded history. The world was whatever was known and discovered in the course of the rise and fall of civilizations. Alexander the Great was considered to have conquered most of the known world in his time, stopping only at the border of India, even though there were vast territories, including the entire Western Hemisphere that he did not know existed. The Roman Empire stretched from Palestine and Egypt to the British Isles, but that was nowhere near the whole planet. Old maps would show blank areas outside of whatever empire in which they were designed. The Western Hemisphere was not part of the world until it had been officially discovered in the 15th century CE. Even though there had been expeditions to the eastern seabboard by the Norsemen before that and even though the Clovis people and earlier migrations had traveled across the bearing straight landbridge and down into North and South America long before there was an Egyptian dynasty or ziggurat at today we believe we know the limits and boundaries of our world but that confidence depends on an old paradigm that is largely geographic and spatial and which does not take into account other dimensions of experience. and of theories of modern physics that challenge our comfortable sense that we know our world and our position in it. In fact, the English word world itself is problematic. It has a Germanic origin and comes from two words, man and age, thus a world. It is an age of man. This gives the concept of world a decidedly anthropocentric spin as well as focusing on the idea of age and thus of time. In Sanskrit, an age is a yuga. Similar to the Gnostic concept of Aon, the age we are living in now is called the Kaliuga, the age of Kali, a time that is also a personification and a deification. For the romance languages, the words mondo, Mundo, and Mandi, etc. derive from the Latin Mundus, which means clean, neat, elegant, and refined as well as ornament. In other words, this understanding of world indicates order, neatness, even elegance. A world is something that has been designed perfectly with associations of symmetry and beauty. What then is the other world? If we are to go by the assumptions in the English and Roman language interpretation, the other world would be the domain of the nonhuman, the dirty, the messy. The age of man would become the age of non-man. It would be a time as well as a space populated by beings of which we have no knowledge or recognition. Something outside the symmetry of the beautiful world. Thus, the world is not the domain of everything. The way we usually think of it. We may visualize a ven diagram in which the world is one circle and the other world is another circle. When it comes to the phenomenon, the two circles overlap in a small area. That region is the domain of the phenomenon called in Mesopotamia the gate of the gods or Babylon. Now this idea is predicated on the assumption that there are only two worlds. This one and another. That is by no means certain. There may be multiple worlds not only multiple dimensions or multiple universes but domains in which the physical laws that seem to apply in our world seem similar to ours but modified or altered in some way. If this other world were entirely different, a parallel universe for instance, it might remain invisible or otherwise undetectable to ours forever, even as it impinges upon our own. What we suggest is a world that is enough like ours that it provides some degree of reference. That is why the phenomenon appears to be almost real, almost contemporary, but not quite.
What is another characteristic of the phenomenon? That it is visible. The visual sense is the first of the five classic senses according to biologists and paleontologists that appears before the process of the evolution of consciousness. The auditory, olfactory, and other senses involved in consciousness arrive somewhat later. The third characteristic is one normally associated with sightings of unidentified aerial vehicles. They seem to defy the laws of Newtonian physics, particularly where gravity is concerned. However, in addition to that obvious characteristic, there is another that should be mentioned. They appear as technology that is only slightly more advanced than anything humanity has devised up to the time of that sighting. As we will see in book two, some of the more famous sightings in North America, the famous airship sightings of 1897, for instance, demonstrated technology or technological design that was perhaps 20 or 30 years at most beyond the capabilities of 1897 man flight. There is thus a time factor involved in the phenomenon that is difficult to understand but it exists. The visual information that is gathered during these sightings is the beginning of a kind of communication. It indicates an interface between the two worlds. As noted above, one that will require a sophisticated definition of consciousness because it is the meeting place between two conscious beings that are otherwise dissimilar. Whatever is causing the phenomenon to exhibit these characteristics has stepped down its visual impact so that it teases at the edge of our imagination. Imagination is a key concept here. For whatever cause the 1897 airship sightings did so by making an appearance that was almost credible to the level of technology of the general public at that time. They looked like flying boats with various contraptions and appendages hanging off of them whose function was mysterious. They were often silent but could change direction suddenly without an obvious propulsion system. They were just advanced enough to cause wonder and astonishment. If they were gas-filled balloons, no one would have noticed, and it seems important that they be noticed, but not too much so that they would be virtually invisible or beyond description. In other words, the phenomenon is not looking to be ineffable, just wonderful. Fantastic as in a manifestation of fantasy. It is as if we are being urged to dream a little more daringly to imagine the possibilities of which we are capable. They have baited a hook which we imagine to be a worm and we take the bait. Just in case you're not familiar with this um airship flap of the late 1890s, there was this phenomenon where airships were being widely reported. And if you just look up 1890s airship sightings, uh you'll see all these newspaper articles about them from all over the country. So yeah, it is a very curious moment in history. Uh there's been some good videos made on this topic by people like I think Mr. Methos made one may maybe Y files, I can't remember, but you'll find some some good videos if you find this topic intriguing. Okay, continuing now.
In Sumer, a similar situation occurred by reading through their creation legends and some of the other otherworldly texts produced by the Samrians, the Acadians and the Babylonians, and by examining their monuments and other architecture, we can see that they were similarly affected by the things seen in the sky. Their gods and cultural heroes went on journeys to the underworld and to the heavens. Their high priests met with incarnations of a goddess on the top of their ziggurats at certain times of the year, anticipating the contact between the high priests of the Israelites and their god once a year on Yam Kapor in the holy of holies in the temple of Solomon. As stated above, the earliest civilization in the world with any kind of written documentation, the Samrians provide the template for much that will follow and will introduce us to the concept of two worlds and the phenomena that accompany them. And they will lead us to ask an important question, one that may be at the heart of the government secrecy concerning the phenomenon. Who is in charge? By the power invested in whom? Oddly, as long as the Earth was considered the center of creation, the authority held by human ruler was said to derive from the gods. Once the sun was moved to the center, at least of our planetary system, then authority shifted from the gods to human beings and rulership became anthropocentric. This seems somewhat counterintuitive. Just when we realized that we were not the center of the universe, our science, philosophy, and culture began to insist that humans were more important than the gods, religion became a quaint hold out against this anthropocentric point of view. Even as human beings themselves seem less and less capable of running anything for any length of time without screwing it up, the Samrians were deeply concerned with the issue of divine authority. The Samrian rulers were believed to be in contact with the gods through the enactment of rituals which reinforced their authority in the eyes of their people. Even as they met the gods on specific days of the year, each Samrian city had its ruler who was both a secular leader as well as a high priest of the Samrian mysteries. Further, each Samrian city was ruled by a different god. There were chapels devoted to lesser gods. But at the very top of the ziggurat was a small chamber or temple of glazed brick. This was the holy of holies where the god of the city would descend and meet with the city's ruler. In the case of Babylon, the ziggurat had seven levels and the top chamber was blue glazed brick. Blue glazed bl blue blue blue glazed brick where Marduk would appear one day a year to a high priestess designed for ritual marriage. If Babylon was the gate of the gods, then this chamber of blue glazed brick at the top of the ziggurat at the center of the city was the point of tangence between the two worlds, the one small space on the planet where god and human met face to face.
Various new age authors have emphasized the importance of Sumer and its rituals, scriptures, and architecture to be the ancient alien hypothesis. And there is an element of truth to these assertions, although it may not be obvious at once. Though Zachariah Sitchin has written extensively about his beliefs that the Sumerian concept of the Anunnaki refer to alien technicians, most contemporary scholars of Sumer find no substance to these ideas, citing poor translations of Sumerian texts as well as misinterpretations of Samrian scriptures and conflation between Samrian and later Babylonian texts. Sometimes though, the most revealing evidence for nonhuman or non-aterrestrial contact is hidden in plain sight. In this case, it can be found in the Babylonian creation epic, the Anuma Elish, and the story of Marduk himself. Most are familiar with the creation story as it appears in the book of Genesis. In that version, God creates the heavens and the earth and eventually creates Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman. This story is told in different ways in the Bible, even within Genesis itself. And it is believed that this seeming inconsistency in the accounts is the result of two separate versions, the priestly version and the Yowist version being included. That the creation story of Genesis is a reframing of the Mesopotamian original with a view towards presenting a monotheist interpretation as opposed to the prevailing polytheist version we find in most creation stories in the Middle East is the subject of some debate among biblical scholars today. The biblical process of creating the universe and then the humans who inhabit the earth is a relatively benign one. There is no violence involved in Genesis 1, no struggle between opposing forces. In fact, in Genesis, God appears as a single unccreated entity with no consort or female companion. Yet, he is anthropomorphic enough that he can walk through the Garden of Eden and speak with Adam. This is explained by saying that God created Adam in his own image and likeness. Thus, human beings are somehow reflections or versions of the divine original. The character or extent of this likeness is nowhere specified, however. Do humans look like God? Do they possess faculties similar or equivalent to those God possesses? We are only told that we share something in common with our creator. Indeed, when God creates Adam from the dust, he breathes life into him. This divine spirit may be the key to understanding how human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. It may be a way of explaining consciousness. I think this is a really sophisticated take because the notion, you know, if there is any truth to the Genesis uh story in general, like the notion that we physically resemble God is a is a tough one to swallow, right? But the notion that we may hold some kind of core essence in common with God, that makes so much more sense to me. That resonates with me so much more. As does the idea of consciousness being key to the whole thing. Of course, the scholar Alan F. Seagull has written about the fact that for a long time there is a tradition among the Jews of quote two powers in heaven unquote. There was the invisible transcendental God that we know from the Bible but also a kind of vice regent of God a visible largely anthropomorphic entity that would walk and talk among the created humans. It was only much later that this belief was quote unquote corrected and that the idea of a vice regent officially exised from Jewish theology as a heresy. In fact, it was still a common understanding during the time of Jesus, which is one reason why the pious Jews could contemplate the idea that God would look and live like a human being and dwell among them. In this case, it is clear that the image and likeness means just that. At the very least, human beings are simulag.
In the Babylonian creation story, the Anuma Ellish, there is a long protracted battle between various gods that finally results in the creation of human beings. This story pre-existed the biblical version by hundreds if not thousands of years. It is now generally believed that the Pentatouic, the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Torah or the books of Moses, was written or compiled in the 6th century B.C.E. The Anuma Elish has been dated to anywhere from 1,000 B.CE to 1,800 B.CE at the earliest. In the Anuma Elish, divine powers existed in a primordial state before the universe was created. Foremost among these was Absu and his spouse, Tiiamat. Tiiamat is described as a serpent or dragon deity connected with the waters that preexisted the land and the stars. Tiiamat represented saltwater. Her husband Absu or Abzu represented sweet or fresh water. It was the co-mingling of these waters that gave rise to the generation of gods. As pointed out in several sources, Abpsu and Tiiamat are not gods per se, but seem to represent proto deities, perhaps natural forces out of which the Sumerian pantheon was born. We know from Genesis 1:2 that God is depicted as hovering or moving above the face of the waters. Thus, there is some general agreement between the two texts that water pre-existed the rest of creation. This sentiment is echoed in the Hebrew word for the deep or the abyss which is te a word cognit with tiamat. Very interesting. The similarity ends there. However, the Middle Eastern scriptural texts usually incorporate the motif of a chaos conf or struggle against chaos that gives rise to order in the created universe. This struggle takes place between gods with one set of deities winning the battle against another set. The Anuma Ellish epic is no different and may indeed represent the earliest recorded version of this type of narrative. But because the Bible is a monotheistic text, there can be no chaos comp where creation is concerned, for that would indicate the presence of multiple deities and an ensuing struggle between them that would imply a certain degree of equality. In a monotheistic context, there can only be one God, and that God must be all powerful. Thus, there is no space for any kind of struggle. We may say that the biblical version of creation is a deliberate ideological challenge to the prevailing polytheistic view and does not represent the method of creation, particularly the creation of human beings as it was understood by most cultures in the ancient Middle East. However, there was no escaping several basic elements that are common to polytheism and which hint at non-human actors which have given scholars headaches as we shall see.
In the Enuma Alish, the younger gods, the children of Abpsu and Tiiamat, are noisy. They're creating enough of a disturbance that Absu wants to destroy them. Absu, however, is killed during his confrontation with the younger gods. And this angers Tiiamat to the extent that she creates 11 hideous monsters to do battle with the other gods. The leader of the resistance against Tiiamat is Marduk. Marduk is the god worshiped specifically at Babylon, dating from the period when Babylon was not as powerful as some of the other Sumerian cities to the time when Babylon controlled much of Mesopotamia, making Marduk even more important. There is evidence for the existence of the worship of Marduk called Amarutu in Samrian or calf of the sun as early as the 3rd millennium B.CE which is roughly the period of the earliest examples of Samrian writing. The Samrian people most likely settled in Mesopotamia around 4,000 B.CE or earlier, and it is considered likely that they migrated from what is now Bahrain. It is not certain whether Amar Utu was the god they brought with them from Bahrain, or if he was a Samrian version of a local Mesopotamian deity whose culture is now lost. He does however have associations with water, with astronomy, with a calendar, and magic. Marta combined in himself elements we would find distributed among the gods of Egypt. For instance, he was part Thudi, part Horus, part Amunra, and after his defeat of Tiiamat in the great cosmic battle that gave birth to the cosmos, he became the ruler of the divine pantheon. He is sometimes said to have been born in the Absu, the abyss, indicating that he is a direct descendant of Absu, the partner of Tiiamat, and not actually born of the union of Absu and Tiiamat. He sometimes was considered the son of Enki, another deity who's associated with water or an underground ocean, whose temple was known as the eopsu or house of the abyss. Without delving too deeply into the Samrian epic, it is enough to mention that Marduk became the hero of creation by defeating Tiiamat, capturing her 11 monsters and her consort, Kingu, who replaced her first husband, the slain Absu, and slicing her body into halves, one for the heavens and one for the earth. He then sets the stars in their courses and establishes order out of the chaos.
What is often neglected in the popular telling of the Anuma Ellish is the story of the tablet of destinies. This is the device which gives Marduk his authority over the other gods. The possession of which indicates his kingship. It is the mark of sovereignty and according to the Anuma Ellish, it is worn as a breastplate. Its name tablet of destinies implies a divination or fortuneelling function as well. Marduk feels entitled to the tablet because Tiiamat has given it to Kingu whom she married upon the death of Absu. Kingu is a weaker and somewhat eth replacement for Absu and does not seem to merit the authority that the tablet offers or recognizes. Marduk through sheer force of character, perhaps what sociologist Max Weber calls charisma after the Greek word for gift or grace, an inherent quality that is not earned but which is intrinsic and which may be related to the Samrian concept of me is depicted as being the rightful heir to the tablet of destinies. I hadn't heard of this tablet of destinies before reading this book. I'm wondering if there are other um, you know corollaries in other cultures and other myths. Um, it's a fascinating one to me. I'll leave that there though. It is this idea of sovereignty and authority as deriving not from humans or from human institutions but from other worldly sources that suggests trace evidence of contact. In this case, authority over human institutions is not conferred by humans themselves. The authority derives from elsewhere. Even Marduk, a god, does not automatically receive the tablet of destinies by right of birth or origin, but must win it by killing the holder of the tablet Kingu. A close reading of the Enuma Ellish suggests that Tiiamat committed a grave error by giving the tablet to the grossly unworthy Kingu, a situation that contributed to her own defeat. There is another tradition concerning the tablet of destinies that it is the sum total of human knowledge in written form designed to withstand a deluge written in stone so it would survive almost any environmental disaster of the time. It represented the continuity of information from the anti-doluvian to the post Deluvian period. Thus it was wisdom, knowledge and authority, a single device without which human civilization would not be able to jumpstart itself after the flood. This idea of a written document that has been buried in order to survive a catastrophe is a very old one and found in many different cultures worldwide. There is the tradition of the emerald tablet of Hermes, a stone carved with the secret of the universe, buried in a cave in Egypt under the sea, found centuries later and resurrected from its hiding place. There is the Tibetan tradition of the Turma, esoteric texts that were buried by teachers in ancient times, then rediscovered by those chosen by the gods. Even in 19th century America, this tradition is found in the story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written. Smith had performed a series of magical rituals in the woods of upstate New York, and eventually an angel, Moroni, directed him to the spot where the plates were buried. I kind of just answered my own question there by rereading that. I I forgot that he gives a few examples there. And another one that comes to mind that he doesn't mention is um I was just reading about this the other day like in the opening line of um on the mysteries by Amamicus which maybe is an obscure work if you're unless you're a neoplatonic nerd like myself. In one of the opening lines it refers to something called the stelle of Hermes which would be to my mind another example of this. It's supposed to be this some kind of wisdom of Hermes tric majestice carved into some kind of stone monument or pillars. Sometimes it's called the pillars of Hermes, I believe. Um, yeah, that that's an interesting topic in and of itself. Um, and I believe these two are supposed to be like anti-dolivian, like survived the flood and now preserved and managed by these high priests of Egypt.
All right, continuing. And at this point, I'm thinking we will do two parts here. Um, probably want to get a little bit of riffage in toward the end of part one. Anyway, so okay, continuing on, we are taking some time to look at this myth even before we begin to discuss the creation of human beings by Marduk or Enki in order to focus on the peculiarity of the idea of authority and sovereignty and how it changed from a theocentric model to an anthropocentric model and how that switch made it virtually impossible for human institutions to come to any kind of agreement on the nature of the phenomenon. One of the sources for this interpretation of authority is a 2008 paper co-authored by Alexander Went and Raymond Duval entitled Sovereignty and the UFO. Another potential read through right there. Perhaps the abstract that begins the paper sets out the problem clearly by stating that quote modern sovereignty is anthropocentric constituted and originated by reference to human beings alone enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects. However, it has limits which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be known only by not asking what it is. This is an important approach to the problem for it sets out language and concepts borrowed from modern philosophers like Jacquadera, Michael Fuko and Giorgio Giorgio Agambin. The essential problem at the core of the UFO discussion, which is that our human institutions, having seized authority, essentially the tablet of destinies, from the gods, are now capable of addressing the UFO issue. Since the phenomenon demonstrates superhuman characteristics that show it is not human-based or of human origin, our human institutions cannot say anything meaningful about it. The entire basis of human sovereignty is predicated on an anthropocentric view of the world of reality. In other words, we will never have disclosure the way we understand it because that would involve our human authorities acknowledging another higher potentially more powerful authority in the world. Paradoxically, if our human authorities did acknowledge the existence of another authority, that would automatically undercut their ability to make such an acknowledgement. Catch 22. It was not always thus. However, I I do want to zoom in on that point quick because that's a really fascinating point. Like that's that's a really that's some really good rationale right there for not only why there can't be catastrophic major disclosure but I think also implied in that why we might not even be equipped to do it because we would also then be thinking from this anthropocentric anthropocentric point of view and maybe you can't even really begin to understand the phenomenon when you're thinking that way about it from an egoic human perspective. Maybe you need to be thinking through an entire different frame. And I think that's kind of where Lventa is eventually going to go with this, though maybe maybe not in this chapter. You may have to get into the later chapters for that. Okay. Uh back to it.
It was not always thus, however. Nevertheless, historically, sovereignty was less anthropocentric. For millennia, nature and the gods were thought to have causal powers and subjectivities that enabled them to share sovereignty with humans, if not exercise dominion outright. In modernity, God and nature are excluded. This is what gives us the fundamental problem. We cannot assign the phenomenon to the realm of religion since we do not respect religion as a source of knowledge about the world. If we refer to our ven diagram above, we can say that science has pushed religion from this world to the other world. This world is the realm now of humans and institutions based on what the authors call a metaphysics of anthropocentrism and is no longer the realm of the gods. Humans are sovereign and human sovereigns rule over other humans. Anything that calls this into question is a threat to modern ideas of rulership and to the loyalty of human subjects to human rulers. Again, even though the earth is no longer the center of the universe, the anthropocentric, the humanentric view of the world has replaced the theocentric, god-centric one. Humans are now the center of the universe and scientists and governments the sole arbiters of what is real. The entire structure of human societies depends on it. In fact, the very word real is cognate with the word royal. Reality is whatever the king says it is. This is why the phenomenon is unacceptable to both science and government. This is why there can be no such thing as a UFO. At least that is why we are not able to define what it is. For that would challenge automatically the sovereignty of our institutions. It would shift the focus away from us to them. And we have no idea what the repercussions of that shift would be. For both science and the state, it seems the UFO is not an object at all, but a nonobject, something not just unidentified, but unseen and thus ignored.
What of theocratic societies? Even though modernity has dominated the worldview of societies in the west, in the United States, Australia, and Europe primarily, there are areas of the world that still emphasize the centrality of religion, such as religions in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, where economic development lags behind Western material achievements. It may be no coincidence that religions where economic development is slow are also regions where religious sentiments and a religious spiritual worldview predominates. The association of matter with science, technology, and anthropocentrisism is reflective of Gnostic ideas of the corrupting influence of the material world. Yet, even in these cases, there seems to be a reluctance to accept or acknowledge the reality of UFOs. Is it possible that to do so would be a challenge to certain dogmas? I I think that there's no doubt in my mind of that. In fact, we have evidence that even organized religion is willing to accept the idea of alien life. The Vatican recently came out with a statement that indicates a willingness to view the possibility of alien existence as not being at odds with Catholic belief. There has never been a problem with considering the possibility of alien life and alien contact in Islam, for instance, which generally has been more comfortable with science and scientific attitudes toward life on other worlds. Of course, this can be seen as a strategy to hedge one's bets to maintain a degree of authority over the faithful by incorporating scientific and even pseudocientific scenarios and thereby extending sovereignty over all forms of knowledge. In modern societies, however, the adherence to a specific viewpoint as if it were an ideology or a dogma has effectively painted the skeptics into a corner. The omnisient God has been replaced by the omniscience of science, and it cannot admit of knowledge that may be at odds with what is already known about the nature of the world and of reality. So true. It cannot admit that the other world has any kind of objective existence. Instead, the other world is a trash receptacle for rejected knowledge. It is the domain of error, hallucinations, and the irrational. To be sure, the Sumerians and Babylonians entertained a similar viewpoint. For them, the other world was the underworld, the realm of the dead, of evil spirits, of all the ills that pastor humanity, and tend to inject an element of chaos into order, thus to challenge the supremacy of Marduk and the state. But to Samrians, the other world did exist. It was necessary to believe that it existed. Otherwise, there would be no need for divine authority. The existential threat posed by the other world, the source of danger and hostility, made rulership and societal organization necessary. The Samrians did not deal with the irrational or the chaotic by wishing it away. They understood that eternal vigilance was required. Life was replete with dangers from environmental catastrophes to sickness to defeat and war. All of these dangers emanated from the other world threatening to bring about a new chaos.
Marduk can provide us with a template for rulership in Babylon. Marduk was clearly a supernatural being with divine origins either directly from Absu as indicated in some texts or from Enki according to others who fought against the hideous sea monster created by Tiiamat as well as Tiiamat herself. Thus, he embodies both the very human attribute of a warrior as well as a spiritual force whose battles took place before creation. By ordering the universe, he becomes a secular ruler as well. The ultimate authority over the reality he created. The kings of Babylon, Marduk city were also both sacred and secular rulers. It is important to point out that the division between sacred and secular did not exist as sharply in ancient Mesopotamia. A ruler was believed to possess authority over all realms of experience. Indeed, the word Babylon itself derives from a word of unknown origin. Babyl thought to mean gate of the gods. It was a liinal space between this world and the other world. In Hebrew, word play on the name gave it different etmology. Babel meaning confusion. Yet another ideological choice that can be said deliberately to characterize the religion of Babylon as a polytheistic confusion of gods as well as of tongues. Research has shown that the word Babylon often was extended to identify other cities in Mesopotamia. almost as if the word was a title rather than a geographic location, but with the original site as being of prime importance. According to Babylonian sources, Babylon was the first city that Marduk created, and for that reason alone, it could be considered a gate of the gods. The authority of Marduk extended from the temple enclosure at the top of the ziggurat, the point of tangence between this world and the other world down seven levels to the surface of Earth. and from there to the seven descending levels of the underworld. Some of this was retained in the Jewish tradition. The tablet of destinies became the breastplate of Aaron with its associated Urim and Thumim, a divination system that is the subject of some academic discussion and controversy, which seems to have been a simple method of casting lots or dice. The temple enclosure at the top of the ziggurat became the holy of holies of Solomon's temple. The new year ritual of face-to-face contact with Marduk became the Yam Kapour ritual during which the high priest was permitted to enter the holy of holies. Much of Genesis is an elaboration or rendition of material that has been found in the Samrian and Babylonian texts. The great flood, Noah and his ark, even the idea that the kings who lived before the flood enjoyed enormous longevity, all prefigured in Samrian literature and belief. So too, the famous Tower of Babel, which is an obvious reference to the ziggurat of Babylon. According to Genesis 11:19, this tower was built on the quote plane of Shinar. Shinar is the Hebrew word for Sumer. The tower itself is intended to reach the heavens and so make a name for the people of Babylon. According to Genesis 11:5, the Lord came down and saw what the Babylonians were doing, complaining that nothing they plan to do will be possible for them. For that reason alone, according to Genesis, God confused their tongues so that they would not be able to cooperate. He made the people of Earth divided so that they would not compete with him. That's it. That's the entire story. There is no mention of God punishing the Babylonians because of the sin of pride or anything else as this story has often been interpreted in Sunday school and Catholic confrater. The only problem God had with the builders of the tower is that they were able to do whatever they set their minds to do and God could not allow that. So he quote came down, a phrase that would be interpreted as to mean descended from the sky or simply that he showed up in some fashion. In either case, he seems to have been absent during most of the construction of the tower and only arrived when it seemed that they were succeeding in their efforts. This continual absence of God from the earth in Genesis is notable. The God of the Torah appears, issues edicts, then disappears. He reappears at moments when humanity seems on the brink of some major breakthrough and then stymies it. What we have here is an iteration of Genesis 3 where God has created two human beings, told them what to do and what not to do and then disappears. Eve is told by the serpent of the garden that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she shall quote be like God, knowing both good and evil unquote. God reappears and learns of the disobedience of his creations, which is really their desire to become the equal of God. God cannot tolerate that and removes them from the field of operation, the Garden of Eden, where their newly acquired knowledge would enable them to compete with him. And when the Babylonians demonstrate their capabilities by building a tower, God once again intervenes to keep human beings from attaining divine status. Human beings in the Bible have a slave status visa vod. And it can be argued that this is the inheritance from the Samrian beliefs. Powerful powerful point right there. Which obviously if you just begin to think through that has major implications for the phenomenon for the idea that we may be the pro that that what we think of as gods may be different than what they really were. But I I won't I won't spoil anything. I will continue.
In Genesis, humans have the power to do what they want, but they do not have the authority to do what they want. The authority is God's alone. The biblical version represents a monotheistic authority, and the Enuma Elish, among other Sumerian, Acadian, and Babylonian epics, represents a polytheistic authority. But in essence, they are identical. For all practical intents and purposes, authority, whether in a monotheistic or polytheistic context, remains the most important attribute of God, of a god. Any human authority must derive from divine authority. It must be bestowed by a god upon a human and can be taken away as quickly as it is given. Thus too, the phenomenon represents a challenge to human anthropocentric authority. The sight of a vessel flying through the air would not be ignored or ridiculed in a society where authority emanates from a divine source. The paranormal in general is consistent with religious documents, rituals, beliefs, and experiences. One of the reasons it is ridiculed by science, guilt by association, visions, dreams, apparitions, and supernatural phenomena create a space for the experience of the UFO. In modern society, however, where a constantly evolving scientific paradigm determines the contours of reality, these phenomena are judged to be non-existent. They lack reality. They are not real in any kind of scientific sense. And thus, there is no need to attempt to explain them, analyze them, critique them because to do so would be to undercut the very foundation of the model of science. They do not represent phenomena that can be tested, predicted or measured even though they are known to leave physical traces. Theories of UFOs are not in scientific parlance falsifiable. In modern society where a dominant political model of human rulership demands loyalty and obedience from humans to humans, these phenomena are ignored. To do so otherwise would be to undermine the very foundational model of human sovereignty. As we are told in 1 Samuel 15:23, witchcraft, the domain of the Antonyomian religious practice and belief, is the equivalent of rebellion against the state. It is an old equivalency, one that obtained in ancient Sumer as it did in ancient Palestine, and it holds to this day, as there was no science as a recognized discipline separate from a religious or spiritual context. In those days, then methods of science that were not part or supportive of the prevailing attitude also would be considered witchcraft and treasonous. Vid Galileo. Ironically, the only way any of this makes any sense at all is if we remember the near universal understanding that all authority ultimately derives from the fact that human beings are not autonomous. They are not self-creating but merely self-replicating. like Vonoyman's universal constructor. More about this later in book three. Humans are a product of something else, some other factor that the ancient sources tell us were the gods. And we are going to wrap right there for now. More thoughts to come though before we conclude part one because uh there are some riffs that need riffing.
So, just in the first half of this chapter, we've got something pretty provocative unfolding. The notion that ancient religions, creation myths, and esoteric traditions across the world may not just be symbolic stories, but attempts to describe something that really happened. Encounters with something profoundly powerful and other, something that the ancients called the gods, angels or messengers of the divine because that was the language they had available. It also introduces the idea that human beings may have very different origins than what we're taught either in religion or in modern science. Are we created? Are we controlled? Uh free or something in between? The second half of this chapter is going to answer those questions in more depth. If even part of this framing is true, our assumptions about reality, religion, science, uh, our metaphysical situation might all be built on an incomplete picture at the very least, if not an outright lie. So, with that, just as things, in my opinion, are starting to get really interesting and novel, we're going to wrap this one. But in part two, my god, do things get juicy. More direct ancient accounts of contact with higher intelligence, the Nephilim come into play. Hybrid beings, repeated traditions claiming interaction with higher beings between humans and whatever these gods were. And then toward the end of the chapter, one of the most mind-blowing, perplexing clues. A highranking military officer tells the authors that if they want to understand the phenomenon, they need to understand Greek myth. Prometheus in particular. I'll see you for part two. Huge gratitude for hanging out, my friends. If you enjoyed it, do like and subscribe. We've also got an ever growing library of memberonly/patron content. In fact, I am now posting an additional transmission weekly over at patreon.com/theryrops or in the YouTube member section. So, initiate yourself into either one if you want to get in on the content and support the channel. Much love, my friends, and I will see you in the next one.