Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  The word used for “sage” comes from the Sumerian for “Great Water,” thus associating Adapa-Oannes with the sea, as Berossus seems to have confusedly remembered, an association strengthened by the memory that Eridu had been located at the head of the Persian Gulf, where Oannes supposedly operated. In the Erra and Ishum, the Seven Sages are banished to the underground sea, the Apsu, the home of Adapa’s father Ea, because they angered the gods (cf. Fallen Angels). From this watery abyss, whose entrance was believed to be beneath Ea’s temple at Eridu, they became described as “pure puradu-fish,” a type of carp still held sacred in the region, thus yielding the literalized description of Oannes as a hybrid fish-man, when hero and symbol became identified. (This is like the way Jesus is sometimes depicted as the Lamb of God.) In short, Berossus’ description (as related by the Greeks) is a very late, somewhat confused synthesis of the earlier myths of a human hero who was banished to the underground sea (which of course does not actually exist), took a fish as his symbol, and returned from the sea to teach wisdom. It’s worth noting that Adapa is paired in myth with Tammuz, another who ended up in the underworld (this time the realm of the dead) and returned.

  Since we can trace in historical texts and iconography the evolution of Adapa from human figure in the ancient Library of Ashurbanipal (as well as at Akhenaton’s city of Amarna) to fish-man much, much later in Beros-sus, and from banished sage to risen denizen of the waters, we have no warrant for assuming the final, jumbled Greek summaries of Berossus are in any way historical. If the Babylonians failed to tell Akhenaton that Adapa was an alien from space in 1335 BCE, or their own king in the 600s BCE, why should we trust a demonstrably corrupt Greek summary of a text written centuries later?

  This is the “best evidence” of ancient astronauts?

  26. Was Oannes John the Baptist or a Sleeping King?

  Rummaging through the 1969 New Age alternative history classic Hamlet’s Mill, I ran into a weird little claim that I had forgotten about since I first read the book many years ago. The book’s authors, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, endorse the claim of Robert Eisler (1921), citing Arthur Drews (1910) and Charles François Dupuis (1795), that John the Baptist was originally the Oannes of Babylonian myth[192] (see previous chapter). This story is a giant mess, and I can only sketch the outline of the problems involved in this silly identification.

  The problem comes from the fact that “Oannes” is a transliteration in Latin characters of a Greek transliteration of an uncertain original. In the Greek texts, the names Oannes and Iannes appear, suggesting a similarity to Ioannes, the Greek form of Yohanan, the Hebrew name of John the Baptist. Both figures have something to do with water and fishes, so they must therefore be the same. De Santillana and von Dechend ignore the subtle distinction Eisler tried to make: He merely claimed that Oannes myths paved the way for acceptance of the Baptist in Mesopotamia, not that they two were the same man.[193] They do so because their concern is that Oannes is the principle representative and originator of the myth of the Sleeping King, exemplified by Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa, asleep in their mountains awaiting the time when they are needed again. We shall return there anon.

  Eisler saw fish symbolism everywhere and assumed a connection between Christianity and pagan fish cults. He also claimed that Jesus’ statement that the Baptist came “eating no bread and drinking no wine”[194] shows dependence on Berossus’ statement that Oannes “took no food” during daylight hours when he was above sea level.[195] Eisler elides both of these statements to make them say that neither figure ever “ate nor drank,” though this is clearly not the meaning of either. (John eats locusts and honey in the book of Mark, for example.[196]) Eisler also leaves out the fact that abstaining from certain earthly food or drink is a mark of holiness in the Bible. John the Baptist is forbidden wine by divine decree because it was forbidden to all Nazarites, a mark of special holiness.[197] But also: God forbids fermented liquids in the Tent of Meeting.[198] Similarly, while in the presence of God on Sinai, Moses “ate no food and drank no water,”[199] just as Saul abstained from food and drink in the presence of Jesus on the road to Damascus.[200] Are all they Oannes, too?

  By contrast, Oannes partook of no human food because he was not a human any longer. But to understand this means exploding one more misconception. Eisler and de Santillana and von Dechend assume wrongly that Oannes is a corruption of “Ea-Hani,” making Oannes an avatar of the water god Ea (the Sumerian Enki). This was somewhat possible to support when all that was known of him was Berossus, but in light of the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh and Tel-al-Amarna, it is insupportable. These inscriptions confirm that Oannes is a Greek transliteration of Uan, an alternate name for Adapa. Adapa is one of the Seven Sages, who was offered the food of the gods but, on bad advice, declined it, losing immortality. (See previous chapter.) When Berossus says Oannes ate no human food, he is referencing a somewhat corrupt tradition about Adapa and the gods’ food. (Or, more likely, the Greek summarizers misunderstood whatever Berossus really said—as evidenced from discrepancies between the Greek summaries of Berossus and the Enuma Elish, as discussed in Chapter 25.)

  Now, as a point toward the Baptist comparison, it is true that John the Baptist was called a fisher of men in southern Mesopotamia, and Adapa was known as he who “fish[ed] for his [Ea’s] temple at Eridu.”[201] Adapa was believed to have been banished by the gods to the underground sea for hubris, but to have returned from time to time to teach wisdom. In this, he may well have been seen in late Antiquity as an analogue to John the Baptist, much the way the similarity in name and iconography between Elijah and Helios led to the saint with the fiery chariot taking over for the god with his fiery chariot in some local cults.

  But Eisler is wrong to claim Berossus knows six reincarnations of Oannes. He seems here to be referencing Berossus’ statement that several beings like Oannes rose from the sea “after him.” These would be the Seven Sages, I suppose, though elsewhere he calls them seven of the first ten kings of Babylon. There is no indication that they are reincarnations, or that their lives were successive rather than overlapping.

  De Santillana and von Dechend see in Eisler’s mistakes the prototype of the Sleeping King. They follow him in mistaking Oannes for Ea, and identify Ea with the planet Saturn, which they then identify with the god Kronos (the Roman Saturn). However, Ea was not associated with the planet Saturn but with Mercury, according to the Sumerian tablets (though this was not consistent through time). In the Enuma Elish Ea casts a spell on the god Abzu to put him to sleep,[202] but this is hardly the same as being the sleeping god himself.

  By contrast, the Sleeping King story is very much an Indo-European story, found from the Celtic fringe straight through Europe to Greece. (A very few, very late stories from the Americas use the same motif, but these are post-Conquest in origin and derive from European sources.) There are dozens upon dozens of these sleeping gods/kings in their mountains, of whom Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa are among the latest. The best-known version of the story is that of King Arthur, who was taken to the Isle of Avalon, where according to a Welsh legend, he and his knights sleep in a cave awaiting the time when they will rise again to defend Britain during a great conflagration. But this is hardly the only version of the story, or even the first.

  In Denmark, the hero Holgar Danske sleeps beside his knights in a tomb beneath Kronberg Castle. Both Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa (or sometimes Frederick II) are believed to be entombed within mountains (Odensburg and Kyffhäuser, respectively) waiting to rise up and reclaim their thrones, as are the Saxon King Harold, the Duke of Monmouth, Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI, and Portugal’s King Sebastian. (Some of these are entombed in caves rather than mountains.) In most cases, the sleeper is a powerful man with a long white beard.

  An interesting sidelight to this story comes from Serbia, where the hero Marko is believed to be asleep in a cave high atop a mountain, awaiting the moment he is needed. A large number of Europ
eans gathered at the foot of Mount Rtanj (also called Šiljak after its highest peak), believing that an extraterrestrial-built pyramid was concealed within the mountain and would save them from the predicted disaster of the 2012 Maya apocalypse (which, of course, never happened).

  The suggestion that the mountain is hollow may derive from the fact that for many years a large coal mine operated on the mountain, at an elevation of 800 meters. (It might still, for all I know.) But the mountain has always been important in its region since it is the only tall peak in its area and has a seemingly (but not really) unnaturally regular pyramidal shape. Traditionally, it was considered the “navel of the world,” around which the axis of the world spins. In the aftermath of World War I, Romanian nationalists traveled the region in gaudy robes preaching that the mountain was sacred, claiming it was the focus of divine portents, and offering prophecies of doom if it did not become part of Romania.[203]

  But an older layer of legend also claimed that the peak once held the tower of a powerful wizard, as tall as the mountain itself, within which a fabulous treasure lay concealed. Due in part to the peak’s propensity for being struck by lightning, legend also says it is surrounded by spirit lights. These, in turn, gave rise to the modern myth that it was a base for UFOs, thus yielding the alien pyramid story when all these tales merged into a newer, sillier one.

  The idea that a mountain is the right location for a hidden treasure is an old one in Indo-European lore, going back to the idea of the Sleeping King beneath the mountain as well as the myth of the dragon, the serpentine monster that supposedly guards such treasures. Consider, as mentioned above, the stories of Beowulf or Sigurd, or, more to the point, the fact that the Serbian hero Prince Marko is one of the Sleeping Kings. This Marko was a historical figure, but his folklore counterpart incorporated older myths and legends from pre-Christian times. Thus, the Marko of folklore was a giant who did not die but either was sealed up in a cave atop a mountain or lived in a vast house concealed in a pit under the earth. It isn’t hard to see the alien pyramid within Mt. Rtanj as a variant of a supernatural underground palace like that of Marko (not to mention that of neighboring deity Zalmoxis, as discussed in Chapter 25), which allows those within to live on past the point of natural death.

  Many scholars believe all of these myths trace their source back to Odin, the Norse (and also Germanic) god of war who was the first to slumber within a sacred mountain (note that one such mountain is Odensburg, “Odin’s Mountain”). Odin shares the long white beard of the dead heroes, and many scholars also believe that the knights routinely entombed with the hero originate in the dead warriors who rested in Odin’s Valhalla awaiting the violent end of the world, Ragnorak, when they would be needed for the final battle against the forces of evil.

  That this story is ancient can be seen in Plutarch, who reports a myth from the Celtic fringe of the Roman Empire in two sections of his Moralia. Here Cronus, the father of the gods, can be read as Odin:

  …in this part of the world there is one island where Cronus is confined, guarded while he sleeps by Briareus; for his sleep has been devised as a bondage for him, and round about him are many demigods as attendants and servants.[204]

  There are three other islands equidistant from Ogygia and from one another, in the general direction of the sun’s summer setting. The natives have a story that in one of these Cronus has been confined by Zeus, but that he, having a son for gaoler, is left sovereign lord of those islands and of the sea, which they call the Gulf of Cronus.[205]

  This ancient myth is the model for the sleeping god stories, whether they be, like Cronus and Arthur, on an island, or like Charlemagne and Frederick, in a mountain. The difference is probably due to geography—islands being less plentiful than mountains in Europe’s interior.

  De Santillana and von Dechend discuss Plutarch’s report of Kronos’ imprisonment on Ogygia and ask us to read it as cosmology, but it is just another variation on the Sleeping King motif. The fact that Plutarch’s longer discussion of the myth in the Moralia (De Faciae 27) is very much a morality tale about what makes one Greek does not inspire confidence that it hides a cosmological core. The shorter of the two discussions (De Defectu Oraculorum 18), is attributed to British holy men—Celts, possibly Druids—and suggests that a separate Celtic version was then in existence and that some syncretism between Celtic and Graeco-Roman versions had already occurred by Plutarch’s day.

  If this is true, then Plutarch’s use of the planet Saturn is a Greco-Roman layering onto the myth of Hellenistic astrology (which, incidentally, did know of precession), not necessarily an original characteristic—especially since it isn’t found in any other Indo-European version of the story, and, no, not even in the unrelated story of Oannes.

  27. Was the Golden Fleece an Airplane?

  Have you heard about Erich von Däniken’s claim that the Golden Ram of Greek mythology, the flying creature who rescued Phrixus and Helle from their murderous stepmother and whose fur later became the Golden Fleece, was an airplane? Von Däniken makes the claim in Odyssey of the Gods (1999):

  The greatest ship of the time [the Argo] is supposed to have been built, and sons of gods and kings to have freely offered their services, in the quest of a ridiculous bit of fur? [...] No, definitely not, for the Golden Fleece was a very particular skin with astonishing properties. It could fly! [...] So the Golden Fleece was some kind of flying machine that had once belonged the god Hermes. [...] Sometime or other, many millennia ago, an alien crew landed upon earth. Our forefathers[‘ ...] simple minds must have regarded the aliens as ‘gods’—although we all know there aren’t any gods.[206]

  Would it surprise you that von Däniken was copying an earlier writer? Of course it doesn’t. In this case, he’s copying Robert Charroux, who made the same claim almost thirty years earlier:

  An important detail is that the golden fleece was that of a flying ram, traditionally identified with a flying machine used by Initiators. This particular relic, which no doubt was the wreck of an airship, was to be located in Georgia.[207]

  More interesting is the fact that Charroux wasn’t the first to suggest this, either. An Afrocentrist named Drusilla Dunjee Houston asserted the Fleece was an airplane in 1926 and claimed the Ethiopians built it!

  [We will discuss the] “Wonderful Ethiopians,” who produced fadeless colors that have held their hues for thousands of years, who drilled through solid rock and were masters of many other lost arts and who many scientists believe must have understood electricity, who made metal figures that could move and speak and may have invented flying machines, for the “flying horse Pegasus” and the “ram of the golden fleece” may not have been mere fairy tales. [...] We seek for the place and the race that could have given the world the art of welding iron. The trail reveals that the land of the “Golden Fleece” and the garden of the “Golden Apples of Hesperides” were but centers of the ancient race, that as Cushite Ethiopians had extended themselves over the world.[208]

  Now this is all well and good, but it rests on the assumption that the Golden Ram actually flew. But that is only one variant of the story. In the oldest known versions of the story, the ram is swimming, not flying. The swimming ram appears on the oldest Greek vases to depict the tale, from the fifth century BCE, predating our written sources. (A few older versions are known, but they are in too poor a condition to determine flight.) The literary warrant for flight dates back perhaps to the second century BCE and Callimachus, though the oldest extant text is that of Apollodorus, which, in its entirety states that “borne through the sky by the ram they [Phrixus and Helle] crossed land and sea.”[209] Eratosthenes, by contrast, talks of a swimming ram.[210] (Apollodorus’ version is the basis for modern myth manuals, which is where ancient astronaut writers get their information, not from primary sources.)

  Since ancient astronaut writers counsel us to take ancient texts literally, we have a problem: the Ram both flew and swam according to the ancient texts, which, of course, cannot err. W
orse, the ancients weren’t entirely comfortable with this whole “Ram” thing, either. Palaephatus, a euhemerist, said that “Ram” was merely the name of a person who built a ship to haul Phrixus and Helle away, and “Fleece” was the name of a golden statue in the ship’s cargo![211] Diodorus instead states that the “Flying Ram” was really a ship whose prow was carved in the likeness of a ram,[212] which Tacitus also considered a likely explanation.[213] Diodorus further preserves an alternate version whereby the Golden Fleece is rather grimly supposed to be the gilded skin flayed from the corpse of Phrixus’ executed tutor, a man named Mr. Ram (Greek: Krios, Latinized as Crius—an actual ancient first name):

  And much like to this story, is what they say concerning Phryxus: for they say that he sailed in a ship, upon whose fore-deck was carved the head of a ram, and that Helle by leaning too much forward over the sides of the ship to vomit, fell over-board into the sea.

  Others say, that about the time that Phryxus with his schoolmaster was taken by Æetes, the Scythian king, the father-in-law of Æetes, came to Colchis, and fell in love with the boy, and upon that account he was bestowed by Æetes upon the Scythian, who loved him as his own child, and adopted him as his heir and successor to the kingdom. But that the school-master whose name was Crius, was sacrificed to the gods, and his skin, according to the custom, was fastened to the walls of the temple.[214]

  Well, that’s quite the quandary for ancient astronaut writers. I’m glad I don’t have to try to explain why we should accept one sentence from one writer against all the other writers’ texts and all the artists’ vases depicting a swimming ram.