Paradise Lost, Part 7: Endless Sumer

Will Religion turned-Myth turned-History become Religion once more?

We all know about the famous statue of “Prometheus” at Rockefeller Plaza, but did you know Zecharia Sitchin — the ancient astronaut theorist who did more than anyone to make words like “Nibiru” and “Anunnaki” near-household names — kept an office there as well?

There’s been a weird campaign to bury this fact, for whatever unknown reason. But I have it on good authority that from someone who actually met with him there, someone who a lot of you might be familiar with.

So what does this all mean? Read on…

Just as the Watchers (AKA the Grigori) have turned out to be another people’s (the brutal, war-mongering imperial Assyrians, in this case) gods demoted to “fallen angel” status, you get the same feeling with the Titans.

Meaning that they were not only gods of an earlier Greek tradition, but an earlier people as well, or at least an earlier version of them.

Scholarly opinion has the Titans as some kind of archaic, shamanic hand-me-down, but I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the Titans weren’t just some leftovers that the Greeks warmed up for their potluck pantheon, but in fact were themselves the gods of a people who the proto-Mycenaeans encountered when they stormed down from the mountains of Eastern Europe.

You won’t find a lot of academics who agree with this opinion, but the fact is they have no real idea where the Titans really came from either.

Note too that the Titans were said to be banished to Tartarus by Zeus, except for all the ones that weren’t, such as Helios, Atlas, and — of course — Prometheus himself. Those Titans were given pretty important gigs in the new Greek’s god economy, which feels to me like the end result of negotiation.

There’s politics at work here. Another important clue.

THE ORIGINAL GODSTER

Given the importance the Greeks invested in Prometheus, it seems clear that he wasn’t just another tribal hero absorbed into the pantheon, as the Greeks went along vacuuming up every nymph, sprite, dryad, Gorgon and giant they came across. He was obviously something much, much more.

Prometheus seems to stick around here a bit too long, and play WAY too important a role in Greek religion and culture. Much too much for a figure who is allegedly some prehistoric, Neolithic hand-me-down. Would you really assign all the civilizing and scholarly responsibilities to such a figure? Would the Ancient Greeks?

Call me crazy, but I’ll eat my hat if Prometheus wasn’t brought to Greece (like so many of their gods) in some earlier migration. If he wasn’t in fact the supreme god of an earlier pantheon that was displaced when a more aggressive tribe moved in and said the hell with your lousy old fire gods, worship our shiny new mountain gods.

FIRE GODS

Zoroastrians — who introduced our modern concept of angels to the world — think they know the answer. They believe that Prometheus is a hijacking of their own myths:

Hesiod believed that the Greeks were descended from a golden race that lived in idle luxury in the distant past, before Zeus was lord, when Zeus’s father was king, and Hesiod sought to account for the golden race’s demise and successive declines in civilization.

This is close indeed to the Persian myth, and might reflect the common origins of these Indo-European peoples or Persian influence—Persians migrating south of the Caucasus at this time might have begun to make a mark on history through their own mythology.

To explain the fall, Hesiod reworked a Caucasian myth about the god Prometheus—a tale admired by the Greeks. Like the Hindu god Agni, Prometheus was a god of fire, a benign god for humans and a god who taught humanity their arts and crafts. Hesiod described Prometheus as stealing fire from the heavens and giving it to mankind.

That sounds perfectly reasonable, but only if you discount that the fall of the Sumerian kings long predates the Zoroastrians, not to mention the Persians themselves.

BACK TO SUMER

There’s something deeper here, something older. Something that ties directly back to my theories about Lugalzagesi and the fall of the Sumerian kings (or giants) to Sargon of Akkad. And the clue about the Caucasus Mountains - where Prometheus was chained - is vital to our search.

Try these theories on for size:

• “Lugalgazesi the Giant” ultimately became “Prometheus the Titan” when a band of Sumerian rebels headed north for the Caucasus Mountains, in search of gold to help finance their campaign to reconquer their homeland.

• Over time, Lugalzagesi passed into legend, and eventually either evolved into Prometheus or was syncretized with an earlier version of him.

• The stories of the Titans cast into Tartarus are derived from Sumerian exiles working gold mines that were already ancient when Sargon was still a gardener.

• Some of the Sumerian exiles eventually migrated to Greece and were absorbed into the proto-Hellene peoples.

• These exiles had a major influence on the development of Greek religion, since the “Descent into the Underworld” myths also seem to originate in Sumer as well.

• “Descent into the Underworld” myths may have been inspired in part by those ancient mines on the Black Sea. Note that Hades, Lord of the Underworld, was also known as the “Lord of Riches.”

Moreover, Prometheus very much gives the impression that he was the supreme being of a powerful constituency in the formation of the Greek nation. Read this:

“I taught them to read the risings of stars and their settings, which up to now they ignored. I gave them numbers, that knowledge most to be prized, and the art of writing words to help memory, the mother of all the muses.

“I first yoked beasts and made them work so they could relieve Man’s back of his heaviest burdens. I harnessed horses to the chariot and made them respond to reins, a delight for the wealthy.

“It was me who invented the ship with sails that wanders the sea, a chariot for sailors. All this, to my own misery, I dared to invent and pass on to Man, but for all my cleverness I could devise no escape from my present suffering.

“...Then I taught about the smoothness of entrails, the right color of gall so that it please the gods, and how to read the liver’s lovely mottled lobe. I showed Man thighbones wrapped in fat, and how to burn the long backbone, and thus I taught Man the obscure art of prophecy, sacrifice, and the language of fire, which had not yet been understood.

“I’ll make a long story short: all the arts and crafts that Man possesses came from me, Prometheus, the god you see suffering before you now.”
— Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Compare that to this quote about the Watchers (or Grigori) from First Enoch, written at least 200 years later:

And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.

And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.

Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, ‘Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal (taught) astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.

And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven.

The parallels are unmistakable.

Now, compare what was written about Prometheus and the Watchers to the famous “Sumerian Firsts”:

• Writing & Communication: Developed cuneiform, the earliest known writing system.

• Technology & Engineering: Invented the wheel (used for pottery and transportation), the plow, sailing boats, and advanced irrigation systems with canals and ditches.

• Mathematics & Time: Created a sexagesimal (base-60) system, leading to the 60-second minute and 60-minute hour. They also developed a 12-month lunar calendar.

• Urbanization & Law: Established the first city-states and the first written legal codes.

• Daily Life & Culture: Among the first to brew beer, use soap, create tools from copper and bronze, and build with arched structures and ziggurats.

• “Firsts” in Social Structure: Records indicate they had the first schools, the first medicinal book) the first farmer’s almanac, and the first love song.

Now let’s go back what the Zoroastrians say about Hesiod’s prehistorical narrative:

Hesiod believed that the Greeks were descended from a golden race that lived in idle luxury in the distant past, before Zeus was lord, when Zeus’s father was king, and Hesiod sought to account for the golden race’s demise and successive declines in civilization.

Bullseye.

TO BE CONTINUED