CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 3 (CONTINUED)
While Chariots of the Gods?, first published in 1970, was a best-seller, Von Daniken was considered by many at the time to be a sensationalist. Respected theologians remained indifferent to his views, treating the notion of space aliens as a mere passing fad, to be indulged in by those whose literary tastes run to those expressed by the supermarket tabloids. Much of Von Daniken’s work, however, is insightful enough to merit more respect than he has received from the mainstream religious community. Since Von Daniken, moreover, others have taken up this particular baton with quite serious scholarship. Notable among these researchers is Zecharia Sitchin, who authored the Earth Chronicles book series centered on his 12th Planet concept.
Many aspects of Sitchin’s arguments are not original with him. He repeats a variety of facts and conclusions that were presented before by Von Daniken. Nevertheless, like many scholars who flesh out the pioneering work of others in greater detail, Sitchin brings out a wealth of additional background information in support of Von Daniken’s original claims. Furthermore, his theories regarding the source of the cosmic visitors do indeed appear to involve some original concepts which add depth to the discussion. Because of his scholarship, consistency of thought, and clarity of presentation, Sitchin’s writings will be included with Von Daniken’s as the generally representative focus of discussion.
Regardless of whether one agrees with part or all of Sitchin’s thesis, he presents a good case, providing in the process a very concise, readable story of how the history of man developed through the eyes of nineteenth and twentieth century archaeologists. As Sitchin follows the successive discoveries of the sites of ancient near-Eastern civilizations, he manages to convey a sense of excitement over the archaeologists’ growing grasp of the information which was revealed therein and of his own developing realization of the enormous implications of their discoveries. The civilization of man, Sitchin asserts in The 12th Planet, began in the fourth millenium B.C. along the Euphrates River just above the Persian Gulf, at Eridu in the Biblical land of Shinar which modern historians call Sumer. Its expansion from there followed the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into Akkadia and Babylon, and from thence northward into the region of Mount Ararat and eventually into Europe, westward via the Mediterranean Sea to Crete and then Greece, back southward along the eastern bank of the Mediterranean into Canaan and Egypt, and eastward into the Indus Valley. Its northward progression was facilitated by the Horites (Hurrians), who communicated with the Akkadian civilization to their south and the Hittites to their north.
The change that the civilization of Sumer represented from the primitive lifestyle of man up to that time was so sudden that scholars called it astonishing. Modern society could easily identify with it: it had a Government with a bicameral congress, a code of laws including those to protect the poor (preceding Hammurabi by almost a millenium), schools, artistic sophistication, music with the flavor of our own Country/Western music, a pantheistic religion of twelve primary dieties which formed the basis of the Grecian, Roman, Canaanite, Hittite, Amorite, and Egyptian systems of worship, and a written language which was passed on to these same societies. Its people practiced law, medicine, agriculture, studied mathematics and history, and concerned themselves with world peace.
Sitchin claims that the rise of the Sumerian civilization was too abrupt to have been accomplished by man alone. The suddenness of man’s progress there led Sitchin to surmise that man was given a big push by outside influences. Mankind had help, he says, and that help came from beyond earth. Moreover, he claims, the Bible speaks of it. In his book The 12th Planet, Sitchin interprets the Biblical book of Genesis as describing humanoid beings from another planet who visited earth many thousands of years ago. Their first and principal occupation was in the region of ancient Sumer, where they built several cities. The Sumerian name for the region was E.din, which means ‘home of the righteous ones’. The Biblical implication of this name is obvious.
Portions of the Bible, as a matter of fact, have a startling similarity to some recently-decipered Sumerian texts. To support his view that humans were visited by aliens, Sitchin points out the many Sumerian, Biblical, and other ancient records alluding to ‘gods’ who possessed an advanced technology having characteristics paralleling those of our modern age, including flight above the earth and into space. He also shows that mankind, while venerating these beings as gods, attributed curiously human characteristics to them, chief of which was their ability to mate and have offspring. They also had shortcomings of a human nature, such as jealousies, anger, untruthfulness, unfaithfulness, and self-serving motives. These records, Sitchin asserts, are consistent with passages in the Bible, if those passages are interpreted from the perspective of an alien presence on earth which, despite its advanced technology, fell far short of the Godhood which mankind attributed to it.
Among this ancient literature is a rich and colorful tradition of dieties who form a family dynasty. The members of this dynasty are subject to the same nobility and moral faults as mankind. Stories of their personalities, the relationships among themselves and with mankind, and their exploits form a cosmic drama whose main players seem to be somewhat akin to the characters of Dallas. Indeed, their loves, jealousies, sexual liaisons, and adventures would make good material for a television soap opera.
Sitchin notes a close correlation between the pantheon of gods in other cultures and their Sumerian counterparts. He furnishes compelling evidence to support his claim that this Sumerian pantheon was the basis of the Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religious systems, and that Sumerian knowledge and religious concepts greatly influenced religious thought throughout the world, including that of the Hindus and the Hebrews. The Egyptians, for example, believed that their gods came from a far land, most likely in the region of ancient Sumer, after the Deluge. In fact, the primary deities associated with both earthly and heavenly activities and celestial bodies, in particular, have been accepted among many archaelogists as having originated in Sumer. Sitchin notes, in support of this supposition, that the hierarchical structure of the gods, which was maintained at a constant number of 12 in the Sumerian pantheon as some of them were replaced by others, was similarly maintained at 12 in the later Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pantheons.
There is some minor overlap of material between Sitchin and Temple, but it is not known to what extent they may have shared data, if at all. There are, however, significant differences in focus. Where Sitchin primarily (but not exclusively) references Mesopotamian, i.e. Sumerian and later Akkadian and Babylonian, clues to extraterrestrial visitations, Temple extracts his information from historically more recent source data, including epics and myths from Egypt, Greece, Rome and other civilizations from the Mediterranean area. Temple engages in much speculation out of a comparative review of mythology and word roots. His primary intellectual tools are an unusually comprehensive knowledge base of legends and myths, an impressive memory, and a rather freely-employed flair for creative associations. Many of his associations are tenuous at best, while others are somewhat more plausible. Although his treatment often lacks the integrating theses which other authors such as Sitchin employ to tie together the various components of their developments, the sheer aggregation of the associations gives weight even to some of his more tenuous connections. Temple believes, as Sitchin does, that an extensive knowledge was imparted to mankind 5,000 or so years ago. A part of this knowledge, elements of which it is highly unlikely that man could have obtained on his own, concerned the Sirius star system, as noted in the commentary above regarding the Dogon tgribe o Mali, Africa.
Temple went on to claim that the knowledge which the Dogons possess is but the tip of the iceberg: the Greeks as well as the Dogons borrowed this knowledge from the more ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, which were not only contemporary with but in communication with each other. Intrinsic to their common knowledge were the same elements which the Dogon most probably borrowed and display in their rituals: understanding of the Sirius system, including the small size and great density of Sirius B, its approximately 50-year orbit about Sirius A, and the ellipticity of the orbit. Greek language and mythology, he asserts, encodes a somewhat imperfectly-understood vestige of this ancient knowledge and its associated rituals.
Temple, like Von Daniken, supports his thesis of alien visitations with the observation of records of strange hybrid partly-human, partly-animal creatures. According to Temple, the creatures, some of which were considered to be quite ugly and fear-inspiring, were supposedly intelligent, extremely knowledgeable, and adept in the arts of civilization. He implies that the aliens themselves may have had these forms. Von Daniken, on the other hand, attributes these forms to experimentation on species indigenous to the Earth. A variety of such beings, mostly amphibious but sometimes possessing features of snakes or other creatures instead of fins in their lower parts, were depicted in the ancient art of a number of societies, including the Dogon, Chinese, and especially the Egyptians. It is only with recent advances in genetic science that we can perceive the possibility that the depictions represent reality: perhaps at some time in the distant past there was much experimentation with gene splicing. In Gods from Outer Space, Von Daniken notes the many references to hybrid creatures in ancient literature and art from the Sumerian civilization forward. As he implied in The Eyes of the Sphinx, the many odd forms of artifacts uncovered in Egypt, which often combine portions of vastly different species, indicate that the genetic manipulation may have attempted to cross species boundaries. Whatever the origin of these odd creatures, the depictions appear to represent something other than fiction. They lend weight to the alien thesis.
But in reviewing the works of these authors of the historical alien genre, one can discern a number of common assumptions that are not necessarily true, and, in fact, severely restrict their visions of our past. Their primary assumption is that the Bible, while it might contain interesting and perhaps even valuable historic information, is just another document written by men. As such, there is nothing in it that can be attributed to the influence of God, nor is the majority of information treated by it as fact anything more than oft-repeated fable. Even the fables are considered to be degenerations of earlier, more accurate accounts. Several other assumptions directly follow this first one, especially the notion of evolution – that mankind, in opposition to the events catalogued in Genesis, evolved from a lesser creature, and from a primitive state to increasing levels of sophistication. In lockstep with the theory of evolution and equally opposed to the notion of Biblical truth is the companion doctrine of uniformitarianism, that the present is the key to the past and the state of the earth and life within it as we see it today is the result of billions of years of slowly-working processes. With the rejection of Scripture as truth, God Himself doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant to science, or even history for that matter. Thus in attempting to address the UFO phenomenon, God isn’t seen as particularly relevant to that issue either, and the researchers are left to their pursuit of answers along the lines of cutting-edge technology. When researchers find evidence of technical sophistication in our historical past, the rigid constraints that they impose on themselves by their godlessness impels them toward one of only two possible answers: either mankind was visited in the past by technologically superior beings, or there is insufficient data to say what went on in the ancient past and the subject would be best left alone (for now). This is why the group of investigators who are interested in ancient technology are predominantly spokespersons for UFO visitations in the past.
What if the Bible is historically accurate after all? Then it’s immediately another ball game. According to Genesis 6:1-7, we started out with a lot of talent, and quickly became corrupted, probably worshipping the same inventive spirit that modern man does:
“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”
We would no longer need ancient aliens to account for the Nazca Lines, the Great Pyramid, the Egyptian Tombs, and a host of other intriguing archaeological relics. Intelligent and sophisticated humans may have existed in the ancient past, turning into cave-dwelling primitives only temporarily until they recovered from the necessity for mere survival following the Great Flood. Perhaps their technology even surpassed our own. After all, it took us less than 400 years after we got on the technology wagon to achieve the sophistication in the mathematical and physical sciences that led to automotive transportation, manned flight, supersonic flight, space flight, worldwide communication, radio, television, computers, robotics, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers and gameboys.
Actually, it is no longer logical to reject the historical accuracy of the Bible in favor of the opposing pseudoscience. Not after the The notion of uniformitarianism, at best a conceptual tool but not a very good one at that, has pretty much received a well-deserved comeuppance, with numerous former adherents rushing to discard it. With the arrival on the scientific scene of fresh new insights into the process of life, especially at the microscopic level, the theory of evolution is following suit, only not so quickly. The major hindrance to its utter rejection is the lack of any other theory of life’s origins that doesn’t involve God.
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