[CTRL] Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy Refuted
-Caveat Lector- The Stichin scenario is a scientology mud/control-op. MHO Om K Return to Doug's archaeology page Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy Refuted by Chris Siren Here's a repost of my take on Sitchin from reading Genesis Revisited. I send this out to people who ask me about Sitchin through my Sumerian or Assyro-Babylonian Mythology FAQs. I don't include it in the FAQ because I don't want to lend legitimacy to his writings. Now my interest in Mesopotamian mythology is purely amateur, but I have done a fair amount of research into it and I am also a physics doctoral student with a special interest in astronomy and astrophysics so I have a little insight into the astronomical aspects of this: Enough people have written to me about his astronomical ideas that I have developed a form reply which I include below. As for the genetic engineering business, I don't think that holds much water either. This much is true: there are myths from Mesopotamia dating back to about 4000 years ago which describe the creation of man. In a couple of versions of those myths man is created in order to do the work that the minor gods, the Igigi, don't wish to do. In one version, a god who is mentioned no where else, Geshtu-e, is killed and his blood is mixed with clay to create the first humans. This bit is where Sitchin gets the idea of genetic engineering. Later, Enlil, the ruling god, gets tired of the noise that man is making and starts sending disasters after him, including the flood. In another version of the creation of man story, more in-line with the Sumerian version, man is created with clay, but without any blood. Several flawed versions are fashioned before the final form is arrived upon. I think these myths speak more to the desire of the appreciation of human life and the desire to see the divine within humanity than hint at alien designs. His planetary identifications don't sit well with me. I have yet to see any evidence, such as an ancient sky chart or telescope, that would suggest that the Sumerians could have possibly seen Neptune or Pluto, or that they noticed Uranus. Uranus is only visible with the naked eye on the clearest of nights, moves so slowly that one would have to watch it over years to notice movement without telescopic aid, and fails to show up on any known pre-Galilean sky charts. (I've seen the diagram he claims comes from this Berlin cylinder seal in Genesis Revisited, but the "planets": a) seem out of proportion compared to their relative sizes in reality (which is how one would expect one informed by the Annunaki to depict them) b) they are also not in proportion to the relative brightness of those objects as seen from Earth (which one might expect had the Sumerians heard about them from someone else and then figured out how to find them). c) it's not clear to me from that sketch what the Sumerians identified those objects as. The central object --- the 8 pointed star with the circle in the middle, was often associated with Ishtar/Inanna as the morning or evening star. I have some suspicion that if the seal is meant to be a depiction of the heavens, it might be a map of a region of the sky as the planet Venus (or perhaps another planet, but not the sun, which was usually depicted as a disk or a winged disk) against a background of stars. d) for an outsider's description of the solar system, it seems particularly odd. Why include Pluto, but not its moon Charon, which is very large in proportion to it? Why include Pluto, but not the asteroid Ceres, which is about 1/2 the diameter of Pluto? Why include Pluto and Mercury and not include those moons in the solar system which are larger than those two planets? Why no depiction of Saturn's rings? Below I list what planets were identified by what names by the Sumerians, It also seems clear from the mythology that Tiamat and Ea were both associated with the Abyssal waters (the Apsu) beneath the mountains and underworld as well as those same waters which lay above the dome of the sky. Ea was designated one band of space in the sky by the Babylonians, but it did not include all of the zodiacal region - which would have fit for a planet - but only the southern most portion, which a planet might wander through during one sixth of its orbit. This makes sense as the Persian Gulf, a source of an outflow of those Abyssal waters, lay to the south of Sumer. The stars in his region would be below the horizon to the south for most of the time. Anu held a similar region to the north of the celestial equator, only covering 1/6 th of the zodiacal region. The stars in his region would be above the horizon longer, which is fitting as he was the god of the heavens. Tiamat was split in to two - her celestial half forming all the heavens, and her eyes and lower half going to the waters beneath the earth and being used as the source of rivers and oceans. I have not seen her associated with a particular celestial body. I think Sitchin is over interpreting the Ennuma
Re: [CTRL] Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy (origins)
-Caveat Lector- See Micrea Eliade, *Shamanism*, for some mindblowing stuff on the similarity of shamanic beliefs and practices in virtually all "native" cultures. Also, what you're suggesting here looks like the thesis of Julian Jaynes' *The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*. If you can excuse a reductio ad absurdum, Jaynes argues that the "gods" of peoples like the Sumerians were in fact the rational side of their minds trying to break through. Neal Stephenson, in *Snow Crash*, proposes that the pre-consciousness Sumerians were like (well this is my metaphor, not his) an old pre-Macintosh Apple computer, with no hard drive and any program you wanted to run on floppy disk. The *me* so jealously guarded by the gods were programs which you downloaded from the temple whenever you wanted to perform a particular task. Stephenson suggests that Enki was in fact the first fully-conscious human being... Thus, in a very real sense, we created our selves by sacrificing ourselves: "Three days I hung upon the Tree,/Myself a sacrifice to myself", as the Old Norse *Havamal* has Odinn say of his (probably shamanic) ordeal to learn the secret of the runes. Eden/Dilmun was Paradise precisely because we were--as far as our experience went--incapable of doing anything for ourselves and had to rely on Someone Else (the other hemisphere of our brains) to tell us what to do. Becoming fully conscious, with the ability to discern right and wrong, good and evil, automatically meant expulsion from Eden, from the Golden Age, because we had begun to integrate the "gods" into our everyday thought processes. That's a very rough summing up of some extremely difficult material, but hopefully it will make some sort of contribution to the discussion (which, BTW, is one of the most important threads, IMHO, that I have seen raised on CTRL). -Original Message- From: Das GOAT [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, October 17, 1999 9:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [CTRL] Sitchin's "Sumerian Astronomy" (origins) -Caveat Lector- snip One is that these "beings from Beyond" originated in human SUBJECTIVE experience, in "shamanic" circumstances like the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime, wherein early man's embryonic intellectual capacities --abstract IDEAS, for example-- could manifest to him in a SYMBOLIC form, semi-independent of the perceiver's ego because from, in effect, his "higher" self, not yet realized or converted into controllable thought patterns, i.e., "reduced" to abstraction. The use of psychedelics might account in part for this ... A shaman-leader who was "possessed" by one of these "entities" arising from his own unconscious mind, who behaved as an "oracle" or "medium" of such a sub-personality, would naturally cause others more ordinary to believe in the OBJECTIVE PHYSICAL existence of such entities, "somewhere," at "some time," in some World BEYOND ... I'd bet good money that the kind of "tribal" communities evident everywhere in non- urbanized societies outside the "mainstream" leading to "Civilization," with their "totemic" systems and with "shamans" as "priests," are what preceded the earliest known form of social organization in Egypt and in Sumer -- a loose-knit collection of urban centers, each of them devoted to a different deity, the pattern of the whole --the relationships between them-- apparently modelled after some "cosmological" order -- simply a more sophisticated evolution of the older totemic clan-and-phratry system. snip DECLARATION DISCLAIMER == CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substancenot soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
Re: [CTRL] Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy (origins)
-Caveat Lector- In a message dated 99-10-17 04:08:02 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hey Das,, Just how do you think man got here then? I think Sitchen's idea of aliens is the most probable..so what do ya say Good, fundamental question, of some importance to "Conspiracy Theory" in general, and especially important in our attempts to understand ancient "mystery cults" and "secret societies," which have their counterparts among the Ruling Class even today. Myself, I don't know ... But I note one recurring element in the lore of almost all ancient cultures, back to the very oldest we know of, and it's this -- "culture" (or the basis of everything that became Civilization) came to The Indigenous People from OUTSIDE, brought to them by some group of FOREIGNERS who in effect INVADED their land, conquering, domesticating and "enlightening" them with their SUPERIOR acumen. As time went on, these "foreigners" become glamorized as SO "superior" as to be thought of as descendants of the "gods," if not indeed "gods" themselves. Now, we have a bit of a problem here, if, as we note, the allegedly oldest Near Eastern culture began in the invasion of the Tigris and Euphrates delta by Sumerians, who believed their SUMERIAN culture was a product of their "gods" arriving from ELSEWHERE in the Persian Gulf area, from "Dilmun," a Garden-of-Eden-type place. How far back do we go in this infinite regress, the "oldest" culture itself born of OUTSIDE intervention? (Overlooking for the moment the very important fact that SETTLED human communities, not yet too large or "urbanized," have existed going back to AT LEAST 40,000 BC!) The easy way out is to postulate an "Atlantean" High Civilization that perished in the defrosting of the Ice Age ca. 10,000 BC, but which transmitted its heritage to others. Too easy, because again we have the "infinite regress" problem, only situated now in a new context, leaving us to ask WHO brought "culture" to the earliest "Atlanteans"? Either Homo sapiens has a kind of innate "capacity" for Civilization, realized unaided, just as our brains are pre-wired for language --relatively unique in the animnal world-- or Civilization came to Homo Sapiens from "beyond," much as Sitchin has described. I find great appeal in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which would SEEM to explain the near-universal archetype of "culture" coming from OUTSIDE ordinary human beings, but I've not given up looking for ALTERNATIVE explanations of the same "metaphor" -- of which there are at least a couple which are too seldom discussed at length ... One is that these "beings from Beyond" originated in human SUBJECTIVE experience, in "shamanic" circumstances like the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime, wherein early man's embryonic intellectual capacities --abstract IDEAS, for example-- could manifest to him in a SYMBOLIC form, semi-independent of the perceiver's ego because from, in effect, his "higher" self, not yet realized or converted into controllable thought patterns, i.e., "reduced" to abstraction. The use of psychedelics might account in part for this ... A shaman-leader who was "possessed" by one of these "entities" arising from his own unconscious mind, who behaved as an "oracle" or "medium" of such a sub-personality, would naturally cause others more ordinary to believe in the OBJECTIVE PHYSICAL existence of such entities, "somewhere," at "some time," in some World BEYOND ... I'd bet good money that the kind of "tribal" communities evident everywhere in non- urbanized societies outside the "mainstream" leading to "Civilization," with their "totemic" systems and with "shamans" as "priests," are what preceded the earliest known form of social organization in Egypt and in Sumer -- a loose-knit collection of urban centers, each of them devoted to a different deity, the pattern of the whole --the relationships between them-- apparently modelled after some "cosmological" order -- simply a more sophisticated evolution of the older totemic clan-and-phratry system. I for one do NOT believe that the "advances" found "fully developed" in the oldest known age of Egypt and Sumer --after thousands of years of social life about which we know little (from the absence of WRITTEN records, which DEFINE our idea of "Civilization") during which time hundreds of generations of systematically pursued development, ORALLY preserved, COULD have occurred-- suddenly just "appeared out of nowhere," without precedents. The CAPACITY for "Civilization" certainly existed, in potential, in the most primitive of human societies, as far back as 40,000 BC or even earlier, just given an opportunity -- and the development of agriculture, and of craft specialties born of a larger population made POSSIBLE by agriculture and the domestication of cattle, resulting in a more "orderly" and "stable" relationship to the environment, permitting OBSERVATION of natural laws and REFLECTION on their wider significance, offered exactly that opportunity. Take
[CTRL] Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy
-Caveat Lector- SITCHIN'S SUMERIAN ASTRONOMY REFUTED by Chris Siren http://pubpages.unh.edu/~cbsiren Here's a repost of my take on Sitchin from reading "Genesis Revisited." I send this out to people who ask me about Sitchin through my Sumerian or Assyro-Babylonian Mythology FAQs. I don't include it in the FAQ because I don't want to lend legitimacy to his writings. Now my interest in Mesopotamian mythology is purely amateur, but I have done a fair amount of research into it and I am also a physics doctoral student with a special interest in astronomy and astrophysics so I have a little insight into the astronomical aspects of this: Enough people have written to me about his astronomical ideas that I have developed a form reply which I include below. As for the genetic engineering business, I don't think that holds much water either. This much is true: there are myths from Mesopotamia dating back to about 4000 years ago which describe the creation of man. In a couple of versions of those myths man is created in order to do the work that the minor gods, the Igigi, don't wish to do. In one version, a god who is mentioned no where else, Geshtu-e, is killed and his blood is mixed with clay to create the first humans. This bit is where Sitchin gets the idea of genetic engineering. Later, Enlil, the ruling god, gets tired of the noise that man is making and starts sending disasters after him, including the flood. In another version of the creation of man story, more in-line with the Sumerian version, man is created with clay, but without any blood. Several flawed versions are fashioned before the final form is arrived upon. I think these myths speak more to the desire of the appreciation of human life and the desire to see the divine within humanity than hint at alien designs. His planetary identifications don't sit well with me. I have yet to see any evidence, such as an ancient sky chart or telescope, that would suggest that the Sumerians could have possibly seen Neptune or Pluto, or that they noticed Uranus. Uranus is only visible with the naked eye on the clearest of nights, moves so slowly that one would have to watch it over years to notice movement without telescopic aid, and fails to show up on any known pre-Galilean sky charts. (I've seen the diagram he claims comes from this Berlin cylinder seal in "Genesis Revisited," but the "planets": a) seem out of proportion compared to their relative sizes in reality (which is how one would expect one informed by the Annunaki to depict them) b) they are also not in proportion to the relative brightness of those objects as seen from Earth (which one might expect had the Sumerians heard about them from someone else and then figured out how to find them). c) it's not clear to me from that sketch what the Sumerians identified those objects as. The central object -the 8 pointed star with the circle in the middle-- was often associated with Ishtar/Inanna as the morning or evening star. I have some suspicion that if the seal is meant to be a depiction of the heavens, it might be a map of a region of the sky as the planet Venus (or perhaps another planet, but not the sun, which was usually depicted as a disk or a winged disk) against a background of stars. d) for an outsider's description of the solar system, it seems particularly odd. Why include Pluto, but not its moon Charon, which is very large in proportion to it? Why include Pluto, but not the asteroid Ceres, which is about 1/2 the diameter of Pluto? Why include Pluto and Mercury and not include those moons in the solar system which are larger than those two planets? Why no depiction of Saturn's rings? Below I list what planets were identified by what names by the Sumerians. It also seems clear from the mythology that Tiamat and Ea were both associated with the Abyssal waters (the Apsu) beneath the mountains and underworld as well as those same waters which lay above the dome of the sky. Ea was designated one band of space in the sky by the Babylonians, but it did not include all of the zodiacal region - which would have fit for a planet - but only the southern most portion, which a planet might wander through during one sixth of its orbit. This makes sense as the Persian Gulf, a source of an outflow of those Abyssal waters, lay to the south of Sumer. The stars in his region would be below the horizon to the south for most of the time. Anu held a similar region to the north of the celestial equator, only covering 1/6 th of the zodiacal region. The stars in his region would be above the horizon longer, which is fitting as he was the god of the heavens. Tiamat was split in to two - her celestial half forming all the heavens, and her eyes and lower half going to the waters beneath the earth and being used as the source of rivers and oceans. I have not seen her associated with a particular celestial
