I began commenting upon Zecharia Sitchin's series of six books, "The Earth Chronicles", last month with my post entitled "Further Out" on 5-25-06, and "Creation Story" on 6-9-06. Now that I've finished reading this series and had a bit of time to digest what I've read, I can say without any doubt that Sitchin's universe of alternate reality is quite electrifying. Consequently, if you're the type of person who's spent years at a time adhering to one dogma as the result of reading one book, and maybe even changed to a whole new dogma as the result of reading one more book, then reading Sitchin will probably change your life. On the other hand, if you're like me, and you can immerse yourself in somebody else's paradigm of reality (however bizarre) for however long it takes to really understand what it's about, then extricate yourself afterwards for a relatively objective analysis of the subjective experience... well, then you'll probably enjoy the incredible ride that Sitchin takes you on.
There's a lot of amateur scholarship in this series. There's a lot of references to real things, objects, documents, studies, scientific discoveries, and totally mystifying artefacts from all over the world. All of this is presented, however, from a preconceived thesis upon which all this "evidence" is stacked. So it's clear that this isn't scholarship, it isn't science, and it often includes so many non-sequitur references that I found myself laughing at many points. This would be a typical sequence... He'll make a long and detailed argument with all sorts of conclusions, and when it comes time to reference the "evidence", he'll put in an illustration of a clay tablet covered with cuneiform. I mean, so what? Who can read the ancient writing on the tablet?
Nonetheless, this is really fun stuff!
I remember reading Eric Von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods" in the late 1960's, along with some of his subsequent books into the 1970's. No more credible than Sitchin, at the outset, Von Daniken was soundly relegated to the trash heap within a few short years for having clearly forged some of his "evidence". This terminatedly knocked the wind out of Von Daniken's sails.
In the three decades since Sitchin published his first book ("The 12th Planet", 1976), his detractors have been able to amass a large amount of very scholarly material to debunk him. The difference between Sitchin and Von Daniken, however, is that nobody has managed to so soundly drub his work, as was the case with Von Daniken. The amazing thing is that many scholars are still spending an awful lot of time and doing an awful lot of research to debunk this guy.
No-one has succeeded in knocking the wind out of HIS sails!
The truly credible part of his work is the extensive explanations of how the old testament creation story is a highly abridged version of an earlier creation story, which, in turn, is a somewhat altered and abridged version of an even earlier creation story, all going back, ultimately, to a creation story out of ancient Sumeria. That creation story, according to Sitchin, isn't about how God created the universe in six days. This seminal creation story out of ancient Sumeria descibes the formation of the solar system, as told to the Sumerians by their pantheon of Gods.
Sitchin's oft repeated quote from more than one clay tablet is that, for the ancient Sumerians, (and this isn't a direct quote) "Everything we know was told to us by the Gods". This includes how the solar system formed (and was subsequenlty shaped to what we see now) over the course of billions of years. Oddly enough, the story (as published by Sitchin in 1976) is not only credible in a scientific sense (as a possible theory), but it also pre-dates evidence of astronomy and NASA mission discoveries that, ultimately, tend more to support the ancient creation story out of Sumeria than to refute it!
That, alone, in my opinion, is worth the price of admission. In other words, thirty years later, the "crackpot" theory has been lent MORE credence over the years than not.
The "hard nut to swallow", however, is Sitchin's more fundamental premise that the ancient Sumerian Gods did, in fact, exist. Whether they did or not, however, there is also the more credible genealogy and progression of these Gods tending to persist in altered form over the ages. His genealogical pantheon, in fact, is one of the reasons I ended up reading the whole series.
It starts with Anu, the main God, who sent his two sons, EnLil and EnKi, to Earth on a mission to do some mining operations. This is explained in the context of these Gods actually being from another planet, so this is why the comparisons between Sitchin and Von Daniken are so rife.
No-one has to believe that claim, however, to yet find the whole work interesting.
EnLil was the "commander" of the mission, and his brother EnKi was the "science officer". EnLil set up the transportation camp in Mesopotamia, and EnKi set up the mining operations in southeast Africa. These two were "royalty", their father (Anu) being the big cheese on the planet they came from. The ones they ruled over were called the Anunnaki. Sitchin describes several phases of the mission, which began a half a million years ago.
Come forward in time to somewhere around a couple to three hundred thousand years ago, and the Anunnaki who are working the mines in southeastern Africa start rebelling, pissing and moaning about the horrible working conditions, and demanding to know why they should be working like slaves. A council is held, and it's decided that something should be done about it. EnKi, the "science officer" comes up with a solution. They can create a race of slaves by genetic engineering. This is done by taking some of the extant hominids and making a hybrid between them and the Anunnaki.
In the Sumerian versions, these hybrids are called (ready for this?) "the adam", as it ended up being called by the time this story of creation filtered down to the old testament.
As a hybrid, this race of slaves had to constantly be replenished by genetic engineering, or cloning, in some manner involving Anunnaki female surrogate mothers. The hybrids couldn't reproduce. This also ended up becoming a source of complaints, pissing and moaning about all the time consuming work, and so the slave race was re-engineered to be able to reproduce. This filtered down, according to Sitchin, from the ancient Sumerian story to the old testament in the "eating the apple" story.
EnKi, the science officer who did the genetic engineering that enabled the hybrids to reproduce, filters down to the old testament story as the "serpent".
Much later, after this hybrid race of slaves began breeding all over the place like rabbits, another problem arose. This time, the problem was that many Anunnaki were finding lots of time to get horny and start eying the human women. Before long, there were babies being born all over the place that were half Anunnaki and half human. This really pissed off the "commander" (EnLil) at one point, and he kicked all the slaves out of his personal residence at mission headquarters. This story, according to Sitchin, filters down from the Sumerian version to the "expulsion from Eden" story in the old testament.
By this point, it becomes clear that the God's name "EnLil" filtered down from the Sumerian versions to the old testament versions as "Yahweh".
EnLil runs the mission from the middle east, and EnKi runs things in Africa. They have children. EnLil has, among others, a son named Ba'al. EnKi has, among others, a son named Ra. And Ra has a kid named Toth.
Get the idea? This is well beyond the realms of archeology or any other science. As a study of the roots of mythology, however, it's absolutely fascinating.
This pantheon of Gods from another planet, however tenuous the deciphering and "connecting of the dots" that Sitchin manages to accomplish, is still pretty exciting stuff to read. It's exciting because it doesn't matter whether the Sumerian origins of these "God" concepts were real or imagined, THIS is apparently a possible thesis for the earliest origins that may be found for the religious foundations that have ended up in our hands today.
We have no way of knowing whether the "Gods" were real or imagined. We can believe what we want. But it's Sitchin's mission in life to convince us that these Gods were very real, and he's spent his entire life on this quest. The major evidence that I find to be mystifying, as presented in the context of Sitchin's work, comes down to us in the form of ruins of buildings existing today that have either no explanation, speculative explanations, or dogmatically tenuous explanations. Sitchin's explanations fall into the second category.
One such ruin is the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck. It was there that the Romans built a temple structure that was the largest ever built by the Roman Empire. It was built upon earlier ruins, which, in turn, were built upon even earlier ruins. Down there underneath all of that are the largest hewn granite blocks that exist anywhere on the entire face of the Earth. Why would the Romans build the largest temple in the entire history of their empire in Lebanon???
Sitchin's explanation is that this site was one of several over the ages where the Anunnaki maintained one of their "landing places". In the case of Baalbeck, it was one that Ba'al (son of EnLil) was in charge of.
Another ruin is the Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem, where now stands a Mosque upon a million square foot flattened stone covered area. On the western side of this (according to Sitchin, a "landing area") is the "wailing wall". This ruin has, as is the case at Baalbeck, some huge hewn stone megaliths, down there near the lowest levels (only recently discovered), which are completely inexplicable.
Sitchin's explanation is that this "landing site" was run by EnLil prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorah.
Yet another ruin is the three pyramids on the Giza plateau in Egypt where, according to Sitchin, the smallest pyramid was built as a model for the other two, then the other two were built as navigational landmarks. His arguments for this are no less plausible than the officially agreed upon theories of current Egyptologists, which he spends a lot of text carefully refuting, point by point, until finally coming down to the one link upon which all current official theories rest, in their entirety. That link is the financial straits of one man, in charge of ALL the people who "discovered" the only existing evidence, who clearly benefitted from the discovery in a way that really does cast severe doubt onto the whole thing. His arguments are more than convincing to me that currently accepted theories concerning the Great Pyramid are based upon one man's forgeries. (This doesn't mean, however, that I believe his speculations, either, but it does allow for the establishment of the more definite fact that we simply do NOT know who built those pyramids.... or when, for that matter.)
Even more perplexing evidence exists in Central and South America where, according to Sitchin, EnKi's son, Ra, and/or his grandson, Thoth, took expeditions of African humans to establish mining operations. For those areas he presents explanations for Machu Picchu and other ruins around Lake Titicaca, and many other sites, with inexplicably large and intricately shaped megaliths comprising the earliest remains. As with Baalbeck and the Temple on the Mount, these earliest megalithic mysteries are explained by Sitchin, unabashedly, in terms that go well beyond the realms of science.
He explains the Olmecs for what they appear to be on numerous stone heads and other ancient artefacts that abound, ie- black Africans. He explains the presence of ancient stone depictions out of mesoamerica clearly showing men with beards, in a land whose indigenous people do not have facial hair. He calls attention to so many similarities between mesoamerican ancient artefacts and middle eastern and african ancient artefacts of the same vintage, that you really have to scratch your head and wonder!
Has this man really come so much closer to expaining all these mysteries than anyone else?
I mean, this guy even explains StoneHenge with comparisons to similar archeological remains that actually exist in the middle east AND mesoamerica! And despite the length of this one post, I've hardly even scratched the surface against the mountains of evidence that Sitchin has cited in six books. His genealogical pantheon is no more and no less than the most fantastic concoction of "fringe" speculation that I've ever read!
Well, there's no doubt that it's "fringe", and there's no slightest doubt that it's speculation. Once the reader is able to separate the facts from the purely speculative in Sitchin's work, there yet remains some very poignant and enigmatic questions that have puzzled scholars for generations. The sources of the myths, legends, and even major religions across the globe get much light shed upon them, and not within the context of any fear of being laughed at for the speculations that anyone else might easily make, otherwise. There is, moreover, no fear on the author's part in revealing information that, ultimately, would be taken as the deepest of blasphemy and offensive assertions regarding even Sitchin's own religious heritage, Judaism.
Anu's son, EnKi, is his firstborn by his wife, but Anu's younger son, EnLil, is his heir because he was born to Anu's half-sister. This makes EnLil's bloodline heritage the more "pure" for succession. This is a source of the brothers' enmity and subsequent wars between them and their sons.
EnLil (etymological percursor name of Yahweh) falls in love with NinLil and ends up raping her! He's sent into some period of exile for this crime, but later ends up marrying NinLil and having children. But prior to this, before ever meeting NinLil, this God of the nations of Israel, the God before which humans are to put no others (the first commandment), the God of Stitchin's very own religious heritage, has a child by his half-sister, NinMah, who is none other than Ba'al.
Meanwhile, EnKi (etymological precursor name of Ptah) spends no small amount of time on the very same half-sister trying to produce an heir that will outrank EnLil's ranking heir, Ba'al. This results in a female child which, once she's old enough, EnKi also spends time on and produces yet another female child, which, again, he works on once she's old enough... at which point other members of the family intervene and pull this lecher off.
...And the Catholic Church has issues with "The Da Vinci Code"??? I mean, just from this particular angle, alone, Sitchin's EIGHT books over the course of THIRTY YEARS should be enjoying AT LEAST the kind of publicity that put Salman Rushdie's ONE book, "Satanic Verses", onto the best seller list! And the "Da Vinci Code", a complete work of fiction, elicits the kind of publicity that puts it on the best seller list, just because it makes Jesus look human?
Sheesh! Sitchin's somehow escaped the notice of the kind of people from Judaic heritage, as well as those of all Christian heritages, who would absolutely EXPLODE over this stuff!
GOD's brother is Ptah? HIS nephew is Ra? HIS son is Ba'al? The LORD OF THE HOSTS actually RAPED his wife before he married her? GOD was MARRIED???
I mean, this is the SAME GOD that we're talking about in all the Christian denominations around the world, according to Sitchin. This is the same Yahweh that blessed Abraham, led Moses out of Egypt, and who is worshipped to this day by Jews all around the globe. He had sex with his SISTER??? ...and they had a kid that outranked GOD's brother???
Boys and girls, I just can't say enough about what a fantastic (albeit, somewhat difficult) read this series of books really is. Obviously, I enjoyed them immensely, and being the white infidel heretic blashpemer that I am, I'm hoping that the word gets out and vast numbers of people are outraged by them. ...So outraged that Sitchin gets to ride a huge wave of publicity that sends his life's work to the top of the charts.
I would really get a kick out of that, and I'm sure that Zecharia Sitchin would enjoy it as well.
