by Harvey Kraft
VULTURES
A climate catastrophe102 due to Ice Age meltdowns had caused the rise of oceans and seawaters across the world. The dramatically colder waters then caused a sudden drop in air temperature along with drier conditions generating dust storms. For more than a thousand years surface conditions in the Black Sea region (today Turkey) became virtually uninhabitable, leading to the extinction of animal species and driving people underground. The Cappadocians had descended below ground to protect their communities from a Great Freeze that made the surface uninhabitable. But to survive in underground cities became a constant challenge. Social cooperation was essential for food gathering and health practices.
Once they re-emerged from the catacombs the Cappadocians built strange villages with surface structures indicating that they must have grown accustomed to living in the underground world for a very long time. The living spaces were composed of attached compartments forming mud-brick honeycomb103 colonies with no streets between them. These concentrations were set on sacred mounds. Each “hive“ included several apartment homes nestled together all sharing a common rooftop dotted with holes large enough for access and ventilation, a remembrance of the topside openings used in the underground complexes. Up to 10,000 hive residents would enter or exit their homes through ceiling ladders from the rooftop plazas that served as public spaces for these interconnected huddles.
The kings of these communities were vulture-worshipping shamans. In their royal great rooms were painted murals depicting the nearby snowcapped Mount Hasan, representing the classic Cosmic Mountain with its twin peaks—a testament to the axis mundi of the mondial cosmology and the trance viewing practices of pre-historic shamanic civilizations. In the open lands some distance away from Catal Huyuk’s beehives, they carried out unusual purification rituals and funerary practices. These shamans practiced the custom of excarnation, or sky burial, the placing of a corpse on a wooden tower where vultures picked at the body until nothing was left of it but the bones. This practice may have started in the era of underground dwelling. Its original shaman facilitators wore vulture-head masks and transported corpses to the world above. There they would turn them over to old world vultures regarded as noble guides who would take the soul to an afterlife in the underworld, an image later adapted by the first civilized religions in Sumer and Egypt.
Based on the Arya premise that prehistoric shamanism held the purest form of divine knowledge, Zoroaster advocated the practices of similar funerary customs and rituals for the purification of body and soul. He addressed the disposal of corpses and other “impure dead matter“ (nasu) so as to avoid polluting the elements. His premise was that at death, when the soul vacated the body, it left a vacuum that was filled immediately by a Demon Spirit (Daeva) who rushed in to contaminate it, causing its decomposition. The principle of demonic possession occurring when a good spirit abandoned its host had been derived from ancient Spiritualism. Possession by a malevolent spirit was applied both to living beings and the forces of Nature to explain chaos, destruction or illness.
Assura Mazda had sent pure spirits to inhabit three primordial elements (water, earth, and fire). Hence it was imperative in Zoroaster’s view to keep the elements from becoming contaminated by contact with evil spirits for fear of infecting the elements. Such contaminated spirits were blamed for causing windstorms, polluted water, desertification, or wildfires, as well as human depravity.
It fell upon the Zoroastrian clerics to dutifully protect the elements from contact with any corpse. Zoroaster approved of two containment methods, mummification and excarnation, for the disposal of corpses. Placing a decomposing body directly into the ground was forbidden because its contaminated spirit could leach into the earth. Using honey and beeswax for mummification to seal a corpse completely prior to burial, the Zoroastrians were able to preserve it and prevent it from polluting the environment.
Cremation was also forbidden, as direct contact with the body would pollute the element of Fire. It its place Zoroastrians adopted whenever possible the old Anatolian sky burial practice of excarnation, the serving of corpses to scavenging birds. Naked dead bodies were placed on the higher tiers of circular funerary structures called “Towers of Silence” (Dakhma) to be denuded of their sinful flesh by birds of prey. They would be left there until the bones were thoroughly bleached in the sun, and only then could they be collected for safe disposal. After the remains were decontaminated they could be placed on a sacred altar of fire or buried.
In his battle against demonic possession, Zoroaster viewed the practices of the pre-historic vulture-headed shamans as purifying rituals. Conversely, he associated the creation of sin with the worship of false gods. He viewed the Vedic teachings as a corrupt legacy inherited from the Devil God who brought upon the world divine punishment in the form of the Great Freeze, Great Flood, and Epic Drought, and who corrupted the clergies of Sumer/Akkad and Egypt.
Ironically, those he accused of impurity were the purity-minded ascetics. They also regarded the early days of humanity as a time of virtue and viewed humanity’s progress since then as a decline from wisdom and health into sin and corruption.
THE GREAT FALL
A hundred years after the fall of the brutal Assyrians, the region now under the rule of the Persian Empire was still engulfed in militarism and suffering. This was a sure sign to religious aspirants that the world was still stuck in material greed and spiritual corruption. The ascetic movement blamed the growing sinfulness on institutional clergies interested in their own personal enrichment, spoiled lifestyles, and positions of power.
The authors of the Bible’s Exodus had reflected on this point when they wrote about the arrival of the Moses-led Israelites at the gates of Canaan after a forty-year self-imposed sojourn in the desert. At Mount Sinai, Moses discovered that his people had forged an idol of a golden calf-god for their alter, in imitation of other religions’ worship of the Bull-Moon. He realized that a new generation must be raised free of the corrupting influence of their long stay in Egypt. Finally, when they arrived at the outskirts of their Promised Land, he sent in spies to survey the land. They reported to have seen the Nephilim, abominable giants first described in Genesis as the offspring of the “Sons of God” who had reigned since the first civilizations were established.
According to the Bible’s Book of Genesis:
The Sons of God saw the daughters of men (and) that they were beautiful; and they chose wives for themselves (from them) . . , Those (Sons of God) were the mighty men of old, who were men of renown . . . When the Sons of God came in to the daughters of men who bore children to them . . . there (appeared) giants on the earth (first) in those days, and also afterward.
Who was the Bible referring to as the “Sons of God”? Who were the women who bore them giant children? Who were the Nephilim, their giant offspring?
Enoch,104 said to be the great-grandfather of Noah, was described as a seer from the antediluvian era prior to the Great Flood. From his perspective, a corrupt clergy, giant idols of false gods, towering temples, wealth and debauchery characterized the sinfulness of man’s early religions.
The Book of Enoch, a five-volume biblical commentary of Aramaic-Jewish origin, described the giant children begot by the Sons of Gods and their wives:
The great giants . . . consumed all the acquisitions of men.
And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, devour one another’s flesh, and drink their blood.105
When scouts from the Moses-led Israelite tribes peered into Canaan, they reported seeing giants. The giants (Heb. Anakim) were idols. The word Anakim echoed the Annunaki, the Titan gods of the Sumerian Assembly of Gods. The scouts saw people throughout the land worshipping idols of the old giant gods from the era before the Great Flood.
The “Sons of God” referred to the self-aggrandized Sumerian and Egyptian clergies. The “beautiful women they took as wives” de
scribed the temple priestesses who “consorted“ with the Sons of God “to bear” the Annunaki, the Titan gods, representing thousands of local deities from throughout Mesopotamia, including Canaan. Enoch also seemed to use the “taking of wives” as a euphemism for sinful sexual behavior, but, in mythic terms, he was saying that the priests and priestesses made gods bent on destruction.
The Book of Numbers from the Bible called these giantgods Nephilim— “ruinous” or “fallen ones”—evoking the Akkadian myth of six hundred rebellious Annunaki who had been banished from Paradise. The God of Heaven (Anum) sent them to eternal imprisonment in the Underworld for giving knowledge and self-awareness to humans. The Nephilim, depicted as giants with ferocious and insatiable appetites, referred to the appetite of the giant idols of Sumer/Akkad and Egypt for consuming obscene amounts of wealth and food donations levied upon the people.
Hebrew scribes writing Genesis in Babylonian exile, expanded the biblical framework of this tale to comment on the fall of false religions. In hindsight they associated the “sins of civilization’s fathers” with the old Mesopotamian gods, upon whom the Babylonians heaped much of the blame for the moral decay and economic collapse of what they believed to be antediluvian civilizations. In the eyes of a new generation of religious challengers, the corruption and sins of the old, powerful, and rich clergy caused the fall of the gods. Perhaps under the auspices of the Magi’s scholarly studies, the Hebrew writers accepted the Babylonian marking of the mythic Great Flood as the new starting line for civilization, rather than the Epic Drought that actually caused the fall of the old regimes.
Enoch, a self-described visionary traveler, referred to the “Sons of God“ as ’The Watchers,’ an appropriate description of Sumer/Akkad’s seers and stargazers. During Enoch’s trance-travels of Heaven, Earth, and Hell (Heb. Sheol) he “saw” the “Sons of God” in the afterlife where they were named and identified as demons. Hence the stargazers had fallen into hell. They had become “fallen angels,” each reflecting various “contemptible” roles associated with the ancient Sumerian clergy, such as: those who used the stars to divine the destinies for the powerful and corrupt; those responsible for making contracts with military leaders; and, those hiring artisans and courtesans in order to enchant people into depraved and vane behaviors. Enoch wrote:
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 cosdy stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armâros the resolving of enchantments, Barâqijâl, taught astrology, Kokabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon.
By the time the Persian Empire came to power, the general view had emerged among that the challengers to organized religion that the “fallen gods” represented a perversion of the ancient shamanic roles of channeling the authentic voice of divine aspiration. Like Zoroaster, Enoch regarded the worship of the titanic celestial bodies, the sun, moon and stars, as an insult to the one Almighty God.
SIN AND SOUL
The original Arya Vedic shaman tradition diverged into two distinct paths. One stream, the Sramana, required a total personal commitment to the purification of one’s soul. Determined to return to an authentic religious practice that would be free of social contingencies, they aspired to purify the soul independent of any god. They believed that the soul itself was eternal and pure and must become unblemished again before returning to its eternal abode.
The other major stream, Brahmanism, espoused that with the use of rituals, study, and reading of hymns an individual’s soul could merge with the soul of God. Its clergy, the Brahmins, espoused the idea of the soul’s evolution from primitive to divine status.
The human soul underwent a number of reformations. Originally it was an independent and mobile Spirit able to inhabit or detach from any host it inhabited. Although everyone started out with a stable, good-natured soul, it could leave the body at any time, even prior to death, if the human body became an untenable receptacle for it. Once the good soul departed, the “sinful” human being would become inhabited by an unsanctified, malevolent soul that invited loneliness, chaos, hunger, sickness, and suffering.
In another version the soul became a permanent fixture from birth to death. This soul acted as the recorder of information about its owner-host’s life and reported to the Heavens when its mission was complete. Free will determined an individual’s virtue or lack thereof, and one’s actions either kept the soul clean or tainted it.
Some seers espoused the notion that an Eternal Soul inhabited the mortal being. They posited that if a mortal human being became as pure as his soul, in the afterlife the soul would return to its eternal, pure state. It would be free of rebirth.
Newer religions increasingly tied one’s moral cleanliness to the afterlife. Morality was equated with becoming civilized, a code word for controlling one’s impulses. Instincts were the agents of immoral, impure behavior, and, as such, they stained the pure soul and weighed it down.
In earlier, ancient religions, the condition of the soul made less or no difference in terms of a reward in the afterlife. The power of birthright or a socially harmonious contribution had more to do with afterlife success. Only special souls had enough merit to ascend to Heaven. Most souls were heavy and as such descended to the underworld. The next wave of religions in the Second Millennium BCE turned the empty, dusty underworld where nearly all souls were entombed into the abode of Hell, a fearful afterlife destination designed to punish instinctual and antisocial behavior.
To explain the heavy weight of a tarnished soul, some Aryan shamans proposed that immoral behavior produced a form of spiritual tar. This sticky dark substance was composed of infinitesimal particles, the byproduct of a built-in human propensity toward reflexive attractions, sensual passions, and material attachments. When the soul reincarnated, the physical embodiment of sin, the dark matter, would transfer with it to its next existence. This was their definition of original sin.
Zoroaster took a different approach on this matter. Based on his Doctrine of Oppositional Dualism, he reserved the application of original sin to people born into sinful families and communities. By becoming a pious follower of Assura Mazda, sinners could purify their souls and be given a seat in the ’House of Heavenly Song’ in the afterlife.
In Zoroaster’s afterlife scenario all dead souls come upon a ’Bridge of Judgment,’ where the good were separated from the evil ones. As a devout male follower approached the bridge, it magically widened. Upon crossing it he would be welcomed by a woman whose beauty increased in proportion to his good deeds in life. She would escort him into the “House of Heavenly Song,” an exclusive meeting place where all the righteous souls gathered to sing hymns to Assura Mazda.
Should an impure soul approach Zoroaster’s bridge, it would turn on its side and become sharp like the edge of a knife. There, the God Mitra would weigh the soul on a scale,106 and deem it to be evil. Its owner would be forced to walk the thin edge of the endless bridge, as an ugly old shrew tormented him until he fell into Hell.
Like the “Great Fall” that befell the Sons of God who sinned against their makers, the soul of the unfaithful would plunge into a terrible, deep abyss where either painful tortures or the soul’s annihilation awaited,107 and its demonic fate would be revealed.
INDRA
Arya shamanism began in northern Eurasia (2500–1500 BCE) in the Black Sea and Steppes region. During the Epic Drought (2100–1800 BCE) many Arya-led tribes migrated east and south as the world plunged into conflict and scarcity. During their journey the descendents of the Lion-Sun Fellowship recorded their adventures, v
isions, and rituals in hymnal form (Rig Veda). These seers worshipped the Devas, the Light-emitting Spirits, and looked to the Sky God, Indra, for protection. The Vedic Indra was a Soma-drinker who loved human beings and was a warrior with the power to create storms, thunder, and lightening.
Like the Babylonian God Marduk, Indra fought the Nagas (Water Dragons).
In the Seven Tablets of Creation, the Enuma Elish, Marduk ripped apart the Water Dragon Goddess Tiamat, a violent expression against the old Sumer/Akkad pantheon, their clergy, and women priestesses. She was blamed for the Epic Drought. In the Rig Vedas, Indra ripped apart Vritra, the Water Dragon of the Clouds, a male Assura blamed for withholding the rains that caused the Epic Drought.
Footless and handless, still Vritra challenged Indra, who smote him with his bolt between the shoulders . . . thus Vritra lay with scattered limbs dissevered.108
Indra slew the dragon, forced the rain out of its shredded body, and returned the world’s climate, thus ending the Epic Drought after much damage had been done. The presence of this myth in the Rig Veda indicated that the Epic Drought had reached far across Central Asia. The Saraswati River, once the home of the Harrapa culture, had dried up by 1900 BCE.
The mythic link between Marduk and Indra also confirmed that the Arya tribes making their way east, had come into contact with the Amorite Babylonians (approx. 1800-1500 BCE), as well as the brutal Assyrians. During the Arya migrations the Rig Veda writers had witnessed Assyrian atrocities and used the violent Babylonian myth to convey their outrage with the Assuras. The Aryans viewed Vritra as the next generation Water Dragon, “son of Tiamat,” but also chose to declare that Indra destroyed Vritra’s serpent mother, Danu, the female equivalent of the primordial Babylonian chaos monster.
But the Aryas and Babylonians shared more than a mythic rendition. They both inherited the classic mondial cosmology with its axis mundi visionary channel. The Sumerian Cosmic Mountain, Mashu, was the model for the Vedic Cosmic Mountain, Meru. In Sumerian, the middle level Earth named Gulu was like the Vedic biosphere Gay a (also Grk. Gaia). In both renditions, the immortal gods lived on the summit in Heaven.
