The Ancient Sumerians May Have Left Us Our True Legacy

The 12th Planet: Book I of the Earth Chronicles – Zecharia Sitchin (1976)

            I have always enjoyed my forays into what mainstream writers refer to as “the Fringe,” or, if they are being blunt, “the Lunatic Fringe.”  Ideas and subjects once considered ridiculous or plain deluded, have been shown throughout history to be valid, sometimes because it takes time for society to catch up to the ideas being described, and sometimes because what may come intuitively to a human being as a Truth cannot be verified until years or centuries later. 

An example of the former is Copernicus, whose writings were deemed heretical, solely because the mass consciousness at the time was living under a reality tunnel that did not allow for anything other than the will of a god to determine what happens to our world.  In a world rife with illiteracy, those who were literate and powerful (the church) controlled what the illiterates thought and believed.  An example of the latter would be Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist who, in the early 20^th century, wrote up his ideas that the continental plates were in constant motion, and that the landmasses were all connected at one time in the distant past.  His ideas, while consistent with the observational data, were dismissed out of hand by geologists and earth scientists, who still believed the Earth was an unchanging rock, only altered by erosion and wind.  Once we humans began to create tools to explore the possibilities and history of plate tectonics, it was discovered that all the landmasses had indeed been connected in the past, and not just once, but at least 5 different times that can be verified through rock strata.  There are countless such examples.

I am not stating that what Mr. Sitchin describes in his book is factual, or even possible, but who am I to know?  I am just a well-read, educated reader, but in no way am I an expert on ancient cultures, especially the Sumerian kingdom, and what came before it.  What I do have experience with is reading about religion and myth and exploring how truth can be coded into legend, and how legends can betray truth when misread.  I say that as a caveat.  Mr. Sitchin studied the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew, and has studied the Greek early translations.  I am not sure if he has taught himself to read cuneiform and earlier writings, or if he is using other’s work, but I have to take all of his translations with a grain of salt.

That being said, what is described in this book is, to my mind, plausible, and a bit frightening if even slightly true.  There are some very serious and unanswered questions regarding the evolution of Homo sapiens, from the previous hominid species (Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis, etc.) that immediately preceded our species.  The anthropological record seems to show that hominids evolved in Africa, and around 100,000 years or so ago (maybe longer), the ancestors of our species migrated out of Africa, settling in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and spreading through the world.  The earliest civilization that we can find any record of, whether archaeologically, or in ancient myths and writings, seemingly began out of nowhere around 8-10 thousand years ago, complete with agriculture, livestock, and societal structures we would recognize already in place.  This also coincided with the end of the last Ice Age on record.

Sitchin claims that the legends of Sumer and their tales of their gods are actually factual accounts retold as legendary history.  The 12^th planet of the title, is supposed to be a planet on an inclined elliptical orbit of the Sun, taking it out way past Pluto, and then back into the Solar System, between Mars and Jupiter, every 6,400 or so years.  This planet was the home of beings that sought out the mineral riches of Earth for their benefit, and who settled down on our planet, building several cities in the Euphrates to serve as their “space port” in a way, for every one of their years afforded them a chance to return to Earth or return from Earth back home.

In this tale, the beings asked their lesser brethren to work on Earth, gathering the minerals (gold, lithium, plutonium) that they needed from the southern areas of Africa.  According to Sumerian myth, these workers got fed up and asked their leaders to create a race of beings to serve as their work slaves.  This was to be us, the humans.  Much is discussed about how the biblical story of creation seems to describe exactly such events, especially when the god of genesis describes how he is one of many gods, and how they created humans in the gods’ image.  Sitchin goes into a lot of detail regarding this, and it makes for very interesting reading.  Humans served the gods.  The gods watched over the humans.

In recent times, WWII air forces would set up temporary bases in secluded Pacific Ocean islands, bringing with them everything modern, and, once the usefulness of the island was gone, the Air Forces would leave.  The people who lived there, the native islanders who had very little, if any, knowledge of the world outside their islands, started very quickly to believe they were gods, who, if placated or inspired, would return, providing the islanders with the modern goods and luxuries they saw as nearly magical.  They would build effigies of WWII propeller fighter planes, and create landing strips, hoping to inspire the visitors to return again and grace them with their godly presence.  They stopped their native religious practices in the attempt to feed this new belief.  That is our human nature.  It is very plausible to me that if beings from another world ever came to our planet and interacted with us that we would see them as gods and build our entire culture around them.

There are a lot more examples and cool stories in this book.  While it may all be a writer-created hope, there is always the possibility that what Sitchin is describing is the truth of our existence.  Ancient man had deities that were eternal, always with us, always a part of the world around us.  In fact, the world itself was full of life spirit.  Modern man, however, created civilization, rigid religion, and the idea that the god/gods came once in our past, and will return again in the future.  This makes no sense if it was just a truth gathered by our experience in the world round us.  This makes more sense if we are collectively remembering a past in which humans were the subservient slaves of what seemed to us to be god-like beings.

 

This book is from 1976, and helped foster the Ancient Aliens hypothesis that I so deeply loathe.  (This states that the great works of humanity’s past were too hard for lowly ancient man, and must have been created by aliens, or with the help of aliens, etc.  This insults the brain of ancient man which was exactly like ours today.  If we can do something, they could have done it too.  The only difference is in our storehouse of aggregated knowledge that we can all build upon.)  What Sitchin proposes is not that aliens came down and helped humans, but that an alien race came down to Earth, genetically altered Homo erectus, and created what we call Homo sapiens.  This is why our upward mobility and societal structures have exponentially grown in the past 6,000 years, where before our ancestors were pleased enough to just chill in family groups, and enjoy their lives.  It is a crazy idea, but there have been far crazier ideas that have turned out to be correct.  Many of the criticisms I read about this book and Sitchin's work pertain to very specific instances of sections that critics state are mistranslated from the Sumerian language.  They outright dismiss any of the other claims in this book, without properly addressing them.  That is lazy criticism.  The jury is still out!

(This book can be downloaded and read as a PDF here: The 12th Planet - Sitchin )

Grant Morrison ran out of steam before finishing the Invisibles

The Invisibles Omnibus – Grant Morrison (1994-2000)

            The Invisibles Omnibus collects all the issues released of the Invisibles series which ran from 1994 to 2000.  Compiling comic books like this can be an issue as many are created to be open-ended, allowing the story to continue with new writers and artists indefinitely.  In the early 90’s a wave of comic book writers started to break away from the corporate comic book structure, in which anything created is the sole property and responsibility of the parent company.  They wanted to control, to “own” the content they were creating, without having to resort to the comparatively limited publishing and distribution capabilities of small presses and underground publishers.  This allowed some of the industry’s top people to set up deals with the big publishers, where they would hold the rights to the material and essentially have free rein as to what stories they wished to craft, and where the stories would lead to and ultimately end.  Neil Gaiman took this and ran with it in the Sandman series.  Alan Moore did so as well with a sequence of amazing titles.  One of their contemporaries was Grant Morrison, the British writer that penned the entire run of the Invisibles for the Vertigo imprint.

            Both Moore and Morrison are fringe thinkers, interested in the esoteric, occult, and mysterious in the world we exist in.  Both draw from the mass of occult literature and their own personal studies into the weird to write their stories.  Whereas Alan Moore’s work has a serious, intellectual feel to it, as if you are being told a preposterous story by the world’s wisest man, Grant Morrison’s work is like spending a month with a LSD-addled speed-freak who wants to share everything they have heard/seen/read/experienced regarding the Occult and esoteric, and whose narrative cannot be fully trusted due to the disjointed, haphazard nature of his mind.  It is an odd difference, and one which has divided the two writers.

            The Invisibles is an exciting book, for the most part.  It is an interesting tale, for the most part.  It is clever and witty, for the most part.  Perhaps it would have benefitted me to read just one issue’s worth of it every month like comic book fans have to do.  Since I do not have that luxury of time, I had to read it over the course of a month.  The story, like so many others, builds and builds as we meet new characters, explore their lives, both past, present, and future, and discover countless conspiracies, secrets and horrors, until it comes at you like an onrushing tsunami, unstoppable and violent.  It really does “fry your brain” at times with the vast amount of freaky conspiracy and magic, all with double and triple meanings and outcomes. This tempo and intensity are not sustainable in a work of literature of this length.  The book drags heavily around the ¾ mark, and the ending is nowhere near as inspired as the earlier parts of the book.  Perhaps, having aged many years since he began the work, Grant Morrison’s anarchic sensibility was tempered by time and wisdom.  Who knows?  All I can say is that for all the wild information contained within, I do not see how anyone who was not already deeply familiar with the weirdness presented in this book would enjoy the story, which is the standard “secret society exists to fight another secret society, both of which are mortal enemies of each other, or ARE THEY?”  Boring.

            The Invisibles is one of those works where the creator decided to throw everything including the kitchen sink at the page and see what sticks.  While I was entertained mostly, and informed very slightly (I already knew about nearly every aspect of weird that Morrison details in this book), I was left with an empty feeling.  There is no real substance behind this book.  I do not think it will hold up well as the years go by.  It in fact becomes a tedious read toward the latter parts.  Part of this is due to the inability of Morrison to craft an ending as satisfactory and weird as his beginning and middle, and part of it is due to the lack of cohesive focus in the way the story is presented.

            The very best work is crafted by either an individual or by equal partners who see things through from beginning to end.  The Invisibles did not use the same artist for the run of the comic.  In fact, many issues have 4-6 different illustrators drawing the story, which to me distracts from the tale being told.  Art and the decisions made in the process of making Art require purpose, actual purpose.  Neil Gaiman’s Sandman epic did not use the same artist for every tale, but it did use the same artist for all the cover art, and the same artist for each complete “chapter” of the stories.  This adds a cohesion that is absent in the Invisibles.  The book suffers from this greatly.  Comic books are the ultimate combination of Art and Words.  The very best of the genre is created by dedicated teams.  The Dark Knight Returns was a masterpiece, and it was only helped by the fact that the same writer (Frank Miller), artists (Frank Miller, Klaus Jansen), and colorist (Lynn Varley) handled every panel of every page of every issue.  Alan Moore’s The Watchmen also benefitted greatly from the partnership of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  Having the artist and the writer share in the design, layout, and creation of any comic greatly improves it.  

            While there are many cool things in this comic, it never captured me, and I never felt any affinity to any of the characters involved.   Much of it seemed overly complex, and disjointed, for no discernible reason.  Every two pages the story flips from one sub-plot to another, creating a very shitty reading rhythm. It’s like Grant Morrison tried to create magic through a comic book and did so purely by regurgitating every single occult and conspiratorial idea he had ever run into, but without the humor and intelligence of The Illuminatus Trilogy for example, or the deep exploration of history found in Alan Moore’s From Hell, a far more disturbing and beautiful book.  Oh well.  Live and learn.  On to the next book.

(This book can be purchased here:  The Invisibles Omnibus  )

Philip K. Dick, a Mystic for our Modern Times.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick – Philip K. Dick (2011)

As a life-long science fiction reader, and avid follower of the nuttier, “fringe” sci-fi writers, I would hear the name of Philip K. Dick (PKD) spoken of in reverential tones.  He had died in 1982, soon after my family moved to the USA from Puerto Rico, and did not actually penetrate the mainstream culture until years later.  Because of that I did not get around to reading any of his works until I was in college, in the early 90’s.  At that time I had the good fortune of knowing other freaks who liked freaky books, and I began my dive into the world of Philip K. Dick.

It was easy to see why so many people idolized his work.  It was deeply inventive, highly cynical, and overflowing with insights and questions about topics which the standard sci-fi fare never bothered to analyze. PKD explored ideas about consciousness, what makes a person real, what makes thoughts real, what is the difference between thought and reality, and what can we truly know about the world around us when we have to filter it all through a very imperfect instrument (the human brain).  This was perfect for the Gen-X nihilists that found in PKD a sort of cultural prophet.  Here was a writer asking very deep and esoteric questions about the human experience without relying on the standard answers otherwise provided by religion, politics, and society at large.  He was a weirdo’s weirdo.  If Kurt Vonnegut was the caustic, depressed but funny grandfather of Gen X, then PKD was its warped, wasted, ranting uncle, disrupting all family gatherings with his inability to go along with the bullshit.

In-between February and March of 1974, PKD experienced a neurological/spiritual/pharmacological event that changed the course of his life from then until his death 8 years later. In one of the simpler re-tellings of this story, PKD went to his front door to answer a knock, encountered what would be described now as a “goth” girl standing there delivering something.  He fixated on her “Jesus fish” necklace and when he asked about it, she touched it and at that moment a pink laser light filled his whole sensory world.  This “light” spoke to PKD, shared inconceivably vast amounts of data in the forms of a sickeningly fast sequence of images flashed into his brain, and in every single respect scrambled him up pretty bad.  This experience, and several other similar ones that continued for the next 2 months or so, became the sole focus of his internal life until his death.

For a human being wired to instantly analyze and explore any new idea that came into his head, this event proved to be too much.  In the course of the next 8 years, PKD would repeatedly and exhaustively explore the event, the “knowledge” that was imbued in him, and the changes that this event brought to his mind in every way that a man like PKD could think of.  He analyzes it in letters to friends.  He discusses it from every possible angle.  He finds an answer, that answer is then negated, and another answer is found, eventually leading him to what is a maze of metaphysical thought.  PKD would sleep very little as he stayed up night after night, ingesting massive amounts of amphetamines in an attempt to stay awake and process what he experienced.  This led to over 8,000 mostly hand-written pages exploring the event of 2-3-1974.  (PKD always named the event 2-3-1974 as it happened between Feb-Mar of that year)

The human mind can explore a subject so deeply, that it becomes hard to tell if what is being thought is of any use.  It can quickly devolve into vicious logic circles.  For example, at one point PKD thinks that what happened must have been the “soul” of a former friend, a Reverend Pike, who came back to impart knowledge to PKD.  This is explored for possible correlations until PKD realizes that even though Reverend Pike knew Latin (some of the messages “beamed” into PKD were in Latin, a language that PKD never knew), he never knew ancient Greek, and some of the “messages” PKD received were in ancient Coptic Greek.  This led him to thinking that perhaps he had somehow connected with a re-incarnated Greek deity who had also happened to have incarnated as his friend Rev. Pike.  It goes on and on.  PKD, no matter how he turns the problem around in his head, cannot come to a satisfactory answer.

Thank goodness some of PKD’s loyal fans and editors got around to working on those 8,000+ pages.  The Exegesis contains around 900 pages and it is hard to imagine how much more recursive and self-referential the other 7,100 pages must be like.  PKD was a man who loved to learn for learning’s sake, and because of this his head was as full as any library.  He brought all of his prior studies and reading to bear in his attempt to explore the events of 2-3-1974.  A simpler man may have latched on to the first somewhat satisfactory answer and lived the rest of their life thinking an alien from Sirius came to visit him, or that he had somehow tapped into what esoteric mystics have described as the “Book of Life,” which contains all the information that the universe has ever, and will ever create.  Not PKD.  Every conclusion he arrives at can be turned on its head, since it is just his own assumption.  This makes for a very engrossing, frustrating, yet intellectually arousing philosophical work. It was never meant to be published or shared.  It was a personal exploration into his own mind.

Not many people have the ability or the temerity to fully explore the truly life-altering events of their life.  Most of us just move on, trying to forget the strange stuff, and shuddering when the memory comes back at odd times.  Others change their entire lives and blindly follow what they feel is the true interpretation of what happened to them without questioning any deeper.  Philip K. Dick was willing to exhaust himself to understand his own experience.  That takes a lot of guts and a maniacal devotion to truth, even knowing that the final Truth will never be reached.  This is a kick-ass book, and I recommend it to anyone who has read PKD’s works and wants a deep glimpse into the mind behind them.  It is not an easy read.  It is not a clear and logical read.  It is however, one of the very few mystical explorations we have into a metaphysical event from a thinker of our modern times.  In time, I could see this Exegesis being codified and worked into a visionary treatise, much like the Prophets of the Old Testament.  It may all have been a hallucination brought on by a stroke, a vision brought on by too many drugs, or a genuine inter-dimensional communication, but the fact that it happened, and PKD chose not to ignore it, is amazing indeed.

(This book can be downloaded (VERY large file) in PDF form here: Exegesis of Philip K. Dick )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Paranoia is for the strong!

Everything is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults & Cover-Ups – Robert Anton Wilson, Miriam Joan Hill (1988)

My man Robert Anton Wilson never disappoints!  His books have blown my mind countless times and altered how I perceive my reality tunnel, all to my benefit.  Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), due to his exposure to so much of the fringe, has compiled a vast storehouse of information on conspiracies, perceived conspiracies, and the people involved in them.  With this book, he has created an encyclopedic collection of most of the important names, places, and events dealt with by “conspiratologists.” 

The listings are alphabetical and nearly every one provides links to further online reading about the subject.  Everything is covered, from the far-right (“The Federal Reserve is run by communists!”), to the far-left (“The Federal Reserve is run by fascists!”), and from ridiculously implausible ideas (“Jesus was an alien from Orion and the Opus Dei organization keeps this a secret”) to actual real-life conspiracies that came to light (The P2 conspiracy where the Vatican, the CIA, and the MAFIA were all hand in hand creating many dozens of fake banks worldwide and laundering cocaine money, or the Iran/Contra conspiracy where the CIA was buying cocaine with guns and selling the cocaine in the USA to buy more guns, in an effort to undermine the elected government of Nicaragua).  The overall effect either leaves you doubting everything you hear or open to anything you may hear.  Either way it is a good change from the norm!

"They" were out to get Hunter S. Thompson too....

There are many people these days that dismiss anything called a “conspiracy” with a shrug, as if the very term “conspiracy” means fanciful or make-believe.  This is part of the ruse!!!  Conspiracies are very real and take place every day all around us.  If they were not real why does every government in the world have laws against conspiracy, and top secret intelligence offices to combat conspiracy?  Only the truly deluded and stupid dismiss outright the idea that conspiracies exist.  The world is full of unscrupulous people, all with specific agendas, and all with the desire to avoid the eye of the government or the police.  It happens every single day, especially IN the government, as organizations like the CIA do not have to report what they do to anyone, and purposefully maintain shields and ruses to deflect attention away from their actual activities.  Those that get too close to uncovering the truth are “exposed” as quacks believing in conspiracy theories, and the idiots who like to live their lives thinking as little as possible automatically dismiss them.  Like RAW quotes in this book, “Just because you’re paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.”

(To read this book, click here: http://endthelie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Everything-Is-Under-Control-Conspiracies-Cults-and-Cover-ups-0062734172.pdf )

Why do humans go to war? Could it be we have no choice in the matter?

Gods of Eden – William Bramley (1993)

            This book is quite the mind-fuck.  Bramley starts off the book with the question, “Why do humans go to war?”  War is hurtful.  War is seen as an evil thing by most.  War destroys nations and whole generations.  War sometimes decimates an entire people.  It makes no sense for humans to war.

            This is all well and good, and people will usually agree that war makes no sense, but this assumes that those in power have the same common good in mind for everyone.  That is the lie fed to everyone.  Those in power do not fight wars.  They choose when and where to fight and then send off the “regular” people to kill and die.  In essence, war as it is currently practiced is a form of social control.  This is the foundation for Bramley’s exploration into why humans war, when it is in the best interests of very few.

            A nation divided by war does not focus on who is calling the shots.  Fear reigns.  War makes living be about “Us” versus “Them.”  Internal strife can be escalated and inflamed until a country tears itself apart.  On the flipside, war is highly profitable.  Those in power are also the ones who supply goods, weapons, assistance, and equipment to any war effort, with many of them making money from both sides of any conflict. William Bradley goes into deep human history to try and shine a light on what he sees as the true source of all human war and conflict.

            Like many people who look at old legends and myths and try to translate them as just “uneducated history,” Mr. Bramley takes the reader on a journey through the many hypothesis which say that the old religious stories are really coded/disguised versions of actual events.  Because of this he comes to the conclusion that two races of extraterrestrials have fought for control of the Earth since before modern humans came to be.

            A lot has been presented (or disseminated, depending on your point of view about this), in the mass media about the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis and the like, usually focused on the distraction of technology gained from the aliens.  Mr. Bramley, however, delves into what the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis means as it applies to war and human suffering. He states that the descendants of the alien races that old humans talked about in their myths are still around, controlling the world through war and war’s economic impacts.  A “Brotherhood” which functions at the highest strata of human society, has controlled, and will control, humans since the earliest times.  According to Bramley, we humans are all seen as slaves, or more bluntly, as cattle.  It is hard to dismiss these claims offhand even though the details seem quite far-fetched.

This is how they genetically engineered our sheep!

            Decades after any war the true causes are usually brought to light.  Recently the USA went to war in Iraq, based on outright lies.  We were told that Iraq and their leader Hussein helped terrorists attack the USA (9/11, World Trade Center).  This was a straight lie, proven so soon after, but that proof did not stop the war, nor did it come back to bite anyone in the ass, as President George W. Bush was re-elected following those war-mongering lies told on his behalf.  In Vietnam, the USA went to war to supposedly fight against the evils of communism.  (How one fights a physical war of killing and death against an ideology is anyone’s guess)  In the 1990’s it came out that the entire 14 year war was partly an attempt to make the USSR exhaust it’s resources.  No one making the real decision to go to war in the USA gave a flying fuck about the Vietnamese, and after years of attrition, where the USSR spent money on fighting the USA instead of on the space race, the USA was ahead in wealth, power, influence, and had reached the Moon several times.  The powerful in the USA funded and supported both sides of the Second World War with money and industry.  History reads that World War I, the “war to end all wars,” was started by an assassination, but it has been shown to have been in the works in international power circles for years in an attempt to re-draw national borders in Europe.  Why do people keep supporting the killing of our fellow man?  Because they are controlled and lied to.

            These seemingly endless lies told to regular people to make them happy to go and kill and die for those who would never kill or die for them feeds paranoia.  It makes the ideas in books like the Gods of Eden plausible.  At the least, they should help to foster a deep incredulity about the shit government feeds the masses around the world.

            I would recommend this book to those who wish to know more about the implications of the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis, rather than the distractions presented in shows such as Ancient Aliens.   

(This book is available for download as a .pdf file here: http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/alien.ufo/Bramley,%20William%20-%20The%20Gods%20of%20Eden.pdf )