Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  28. Were Bible Characters Worshiped as Gods?

  It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of ancient astronaut writer Robert Temple, who argued that flying space frogs from Sirius taught the Sumerians astronomy (see Chapter 42). But I do have to thank him for something. One of his articles[215] called my attention to a passage in the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius’ Panarion that I would not otherwise have seen. In it, Epiphanius describes heretics who worship Biblical figures as gods:

  The profundities and glories of the sacred scriptures, which are beyond human understanding, have confused many. The natives of Petra in Arabia, which is called Rokom and Edom, were in awe of Moses because of his miracles, and at one time they made an image of him, and mistakenly undertook to worship it. They had no true cause for this, but in their ignorance their error drew an imaginary inference from something real. And in Sebasteia, which was once called Samaria, they have declared Jephthah’s daughter a goddess, and still hold a festival in her honor every year. Similarly, these people have heard the glorious, wise words of the scripture and changed them to stupidity. With overinflated pride they have abandoned the way of the truth, and will be shown to have fabricated stories of their own invention.[216]

  Temple, characteristically, takes the ancient text at face value, but there is more to the story than a bunch of crazy pagans going around worshiping Bible characters.

  The second half of Epiphanius’ passage (unquoted by Temple) suggests the truth behind Epiphanius’ denunciation. In Judges 11, Jephthah makes a vow to god to sacrifice his daughter to God if God will help him defeat his enemies. He grants the girl two months to run through the meadows mourning her virginity before dealing the fatal blow. Commentators have for centuries noted that this story has clear parallels to Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia to Artemis, as well as the meadow through which the virgin Kore plays before her rape by Hades. In later myth, Iphigenia “was not killed but, by the will of Artemis, became Hecate,” the underworld goddess, according to Pausanias.[217] In fact, Thomas Römer argued in 1998 that the redactor of Judges had indeed written the Biblical tale to conform to its Greek antecedents.[218]

  The implication is clear: The Samarians did not mistake Jepthah’s daughter for a goddess; they had a ceremony similar to the mystery rites of Persephone or adolescent coming of age rites of Iphigenia which were, either for religious or political reasons, given a Jewish gloss through identification with the story in Judges. (This was a fairly common practice; after Christianization, for example, several pagan gods were co-opted as unofficial Christian saints in rural Greece.[219])

  At Petra, the inhabitants worshiped Arabian gods and goddesses down to the coming of Christianity in the fourth century, and they also deified their kings and worshipped them as gods. So, when the inhabitants of Petra “worshiped” an “image” of Moses long before Epiphanius wrote, they weren’t confused about the true nature of Moses as Robert Temple would have it; instead they were offering to the Jews—then the dominant power in the region—the highest honor their civilization could bestow, worshiping one of their “kings” alongside their own. This was not unprecedented; the Romans welcomed such foreign gods as Cybele and Isis into their pantheon, and the Roman emperor Severus Alexander was said to have placed a statue of Jesus among the deified emperors in his collection of household gods.[220]

  29. Who Were the Nephilim?

  Andrew Collins, who believes in “sentient” “light beings” composed of plasma that can be contacted by buying his books, wrote a tome about the Nephilim in 1998.[221] He claimed that these Biblical beings were in fact a “shamanic elite” from the last Ice Age who sparked the Neolithic Revolution and reigned as a parasitic ruling class until the end of the Bronze Age. These same Nephilim are also found in Zecharia Sitchin’s work as space aliens. This is quite a bit to read into a single line from Genesis, the only[222] Biblical description of these creatures:

  There were giants [nephilim] 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.[223]

  Scholars have differed on the origin and meaning of the specific word nephilim. Some claim that it means “fallen” and refers to fallen angels; Biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser has made a persuasive case that the King James translators had it right in following the Greek text in assigning the meaning of “giants.” He identifies the Hebrew term as a loan word for giants taken from the Aramaic.[224] But in Chariots of the Gods, Erich von Däniken, reading the passage in Genesis, immediately recognized aliens:

  “Giants” haunt the pages of almost all ancient books. So they must have existed. What sort of creatures were they, these “giants”? Were they our forefathers, who built the gigantic buildings and effortlessly manhandled the monoliths, or were they technically skilled space travelers from another star? One thing is certain. The Bible speaks of “giants” and describes them as “sons of God,” and these “sons of God” breed with the daughters of men and multiply.[225]

  The passage in Genesis (chapter 6, verses 1-4) and later tradition actually differentiate between the “sons of God” and the giants, who were their offspring. In the earliest interpretations, the “sons of God” were identified with angels, though later commentators came to favor a more earthly interpretation in which the “sons” became “sons of Seth” (i.e. the righteous), who mated with the daughters of Cain (i.e. the sinful). Shimon bar Yochai is said to have cursed any attempt at an interpretation of Genesis 6:4 other than this in the first century CE.[226] The later Book of Enoch and Book of Jubilees favor the fallen angel version, explicitly identifying the “sons of God” with angels who descended from heaven and taught men such forbidden arts as metallurgy and cosmetology (yes, I mean make-up[227]). According to these texts, the angels rebelled against God because they were overcome with sexual desire for human females.

  I’m going to admit here that what follows is mostly speculation, though I hope based on fact. I find Genesis 6:4 interesting, but I think it belongs in the broader context of early Near Eastern myth. Literally, the phrase translated as “sons of God”[228] says in Hebrew “sons of the gods” in the plural. This has been rationalized as something akin to the Royal We, but many have suggested it is a remnant of a pre-Judaic polytheistic pantheon. We know than in other Near Eastern cultures, the gods had sons and these sons were considered superhuman beings. The most famous is Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third man, the hero who built the high walls of Uruk. Another is Humbaba, the terrifying, radiant giant who was the child of Hanbi and the ward of the sun god. The Greeks, too, imagined that the race of heroes that preceded their own—mostly the sons of the gods—were of gigantic stature, which they “confirmed” by claiming the bones of prehistoric elephants to be the remains of the giant heroes.

  But here is where it gets interesting. By 100 BCE, the writers of the Jewish apocryphal text called the Book of Giants—a sort of sequel to the Book of Enoch—included both Gilgamesh[229] and Humbaba[230] as two of the antediluvian giants. This in and of itself is not conclusive, since it is centuries after Genesis, but it suggests that there was a tradition that the giants of Genesis reflected a Jewish interpretation of the widespread Near Eastern claim that the giants of old were the sons of the pagan gods.[231] Since we know that other widespread Near Eastern myths had Biblical versions, including the Near Eastern Flood myth and the battle between the storm god and the chaos monster, it seems to me that the origins of Genesis 6:4 are to be found in Near Eastern hero stories that would have been the common folk culture of the region.

  I’m not the only one to see such a connection; unfortunately, though, most of the alternative writers who see the same connection claim that Gilgamesh is one of the Nephilim and therefore is an alien hybrid! It comes down to the key assumption one makes in thinking about ancient myth: are these stories to be taken as literature, or as fact? Until some skeletons of these giants show up—and
no, the elephant bones don’t count—it is terribly dangerous to take literally stories that have been told and retold in countless forms across time and space.

  Bonus: Alternative theorists like to take ancient texts literally, but for those paying attention, this poses a problem. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh lives after the Flood, but in the Book of Giants, he lives before the Flood. Clearly, both ancient texts can’t be right, and if one is wrong, this calls into question the practice of using ancient texts uncritically as literal reports of mythic events.

  30. Did Aliens Design the Pyramids?

  In response to a tweet questioning whether human beings were responsible for “the pyramids,” by which I presume the author was referring to the pyramids of Egypt, ancient astronaut proponent Giorgio Tsoukalos issued a tweet in late 2012 asserting that while humans were responsible for their construction, the “ancients” said that they received help from aliens in so doing. Tsoukalos made a similar claim about the “ancients” attributing the design of the pyramid to the “Guardians of the Sky” back in 2011. In that tweet, Tsoukalos cited as his source an Arabic text from the fourteenth century, the Al-Khitat of Al-Maqrizi—at 4,000 years remove from the pyramids’ construction!

  Because I’m not willing to take claims at face value, I tracked down a French edition of Al-Maqrizi in 2012 and translated all the references to the pyramids in the book, since Tsoukalos provided no specific reference. Al-Maqrizi says that the Arabs had many traditions about the pyramids (which he quotes at great length), but no one knows who actually built them. Since Al-Maqrizi knows nothing of the builders, whom Tsoukalos concedes were the pharaohs of old, how can we trust that he somehow preserved a perfect tradition of the aliens who assisted them? Al-Maqrizi offered more than a dozen different explanations, drawn from various authors. But none of them featured “Guardians of the Sky.” I finally found, though, the source for Tsoukalos’ claim of supernatural interference in the building of the pyramids.

  Among Al-Maqrizi’s discussions is the following, which Maqrizi borrows from the early medieval poet Said al-Lagawi:

  Said al-Lagawi, in his book The Biography of Peoples, reported that all the sciences known before the Flood were first taught by Hermes, who lived in Upper Egypt. This Hermes was the first to ponder celestial bodies and the movement of the stars. He was the first to build temples to worship God. He occupied himself with science and medicine, and he wrote well-measured poems for his contemporaries about things terrestrial and celestial. It is also said that he was the first to predict the Flood and anticipate that a celestial cataclysm would befall the earth in the form of fire or water, so, fearing the destruction of science and the disappearance of industrial processes, he built the pyramids and temples of Upper Egypt. Within these he included representations of the trades and tools, including engraved explanations of science, in order to pass them on to those who came after him, lest he see them disappear from the world. This Hermes is the same as Edris.[232]

  Lest there be any confusion, note: Hermes is not the Greek god but is here identified with Edris (Idris), the Islamic prophet, who is otherwise identified with Enoch, and is in any case human, not extraterrestrial. There are no aliens here, only claims for really good astrology. But, as it so happens, I actually found the passage Tsoukalos has been talking about, no thanks to him! Here it is in all its ancient astronaut glory:

  Master Ibrahim bin Wasif Shah said that King ‘Adim (or ‘Ad), son of Naqtarim, was a violent and proud prince, tall in stature. It was he who ordered the rocks cut to make the pyramids, as had been done by the ancients. In his time there lived two angels cast out of heaven, and who lived in the Aftarah well; these two angels taught magic to the Egyptians, and it is said that ‘Adim, the son of El-Budchir, learned most of their sciences, after which the two angels went to Babel. Egyptians, especially the Copts, assure us that these were actually two demons named Mahla and Bahala, not two angels, and that the two are at Babel in a well, where witches meet, and they will remain there until the Day of Judgment.[233]

  Ibrahim bin Wasif Shah lived c. 1000 CE, and the quotation comes from his book, A Summary of Marvels, though there is a question whether the book, which Maqrizi quotes and which still exists, was actually written by him. But do note: In the passage, ‘Ad built the pyramids, but the text doesn’t say the “angels” had anything to do with it. They taught science, sure, but it says nothing about helping out with the pyramids.

  I think it should be fairly obvious that this is merely the story of the Watchers from the Book of Enoch filtered down through Arabian folklore, especially the story of Harut and Marut, the angels of the Qur’an who encountered the sorcerers of Babylon.[234] In Islamic folklore, these angels ask to become human, commit sins as humans, and are punished by Allah. Many commentators on the Qur’an believe the story is an Islamic interpretation of an earlier Christian tale about the Fallen Angels.[235] The same tale is also found in the Jewish Midrash, where the two sinning angels are hung up by their feet in Babylon.[236] Note that the Al-Khitat passage even uses the Hebrew form of the name ‘Ad, “‘Adim.” The story of the “fallen” angels, the teaching of science, and the confinement underground, are all identical to the account in Enoch. Since we already know that the Arabs associated the pyramids with Idris, who was thought to be Enoch, this is a very logical connection. So, this means that some 3,500 years after the pyramids were built, some people with pre-existing Enochian mythology attributed the pyramids to that myth cycle. I fail to see the aliens at work here. That said, in his Menippus, Lucian describes an underground watery cave in the marshes near Babylon where the Babylonian mages would go to consult with the chthonic gods,[237] so there actually is something to this witches’ well, and perhaps this is the origin point for conflating the fallen angels with the underground sorcerers to produce two demons in a well.

  However, the ‘Ad mentioned here is the king of the Adites, whose son Shaddad built Iram of the Pillars, and whose people were punished by God for their sins, as given in the Qu’ran[238] and Arabian Nights.[239] These fellows were also said to be giants, sinful, etc. They’re the Watchers from Enoch, which is quite plain. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft will remember “Irem, the City of Pillars” from Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” (1921), where the ancient Arabian city is mentioned in connection with a fabulous race of lizard people, and again in the “Call of Cthulhu” (1926), where it is a cult center for the Old Ones. The city is described in the Qur’an:

  Hast thou not considered how thy Lord dealt with Ad, the people of Irem, adorned with lofty buildings, the like whereof hath not been erected in the land; and with Thamud, who hewed the rocks in the valley into houses; and with Pharaoh, the contriver of the stakes: who had behaved insolently in the earth, and multiplied corruption therein? Wherefore thy Lord poured on them various kinds of chastisement…. [240]

  Later legends, embellishing on this story, suggest Allah buried the city in the sands of the Arabian desert after “a loud cry assaulted us from a tract of the distant horizon,” as reported in a poetic fragment recorded in the Arabian Nights.[241] (How this was remembered when the city and all in and around it perished, I can’t fathom to guess: the poem in question is allegedly spoken by the dead king of the city and recorded by his son!) I was amused, therefore, to read in Bob Curran’s Lost Lands, Forgotten Realms (2011), a supposedly nonfictional examination of lost civilizations, the following passage about Iram and its alleged connection to the Arabian demons, the djinn:

  Some traditions say that Irem was built by the djinn themselves before the time of Adam, and was later inhabited by men. This tradition stems from the name “Irem of the Pillars”—the ancient Arabic word for “pillar” corresponding to another meaning, namely “Old One.” The name, therefore, was a city of the Old Ones (that is, the djinn).[242]

  Philip Gardiner’s Secret Societies (2007) also repeats the same alleged facts and accepts Lovecraft’s Necronomicon as real, and embodying real traditions of Iram! By contrast, Jacques Berg
ier, who did more than anyone to try to make Lovecraft “real” (see Chapters 2 and 3) failed in his Extraterrestrial Visitations (1970) even to understand that Iram was a genuine Arabic myth and instead claimed that Lovecraft originated the story, though drawing, he thought, on secret pre-Islamic traditions.[243]

  Would it surprise you to learn that the “tradition” of a pre-human Iram is not a mythological one but rather a “tradition” invented by Lovecraft and the writers of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the “magickal” practitioners of Lovecraftian magick? Asenath Mason, in the Necronomicon Gnosis (2007) claims that “pillar” is “code” for “Old One,” not an actual translation,[244] but Curran has gone beyond the Mythos (and Mythos-magickal) writers to invent a fake Arabic translation!

  The actual Arabic as given in the Qur’an is somewhat ambiguous. It may mean “Iram of the Pillars,” or it could also mean “the people of Iram, who were very tall, like pillars.” The “legend” that it predates Adam appears to be a conflation of the Lovecraft’s imaginary Cthulhu cult (probably via the common misreading of the Nameless City as being Iram itself) and a misreading of a line in the Arabian Nights, in which a visitor to Iram found within it no “created being of the sons of Adam.”[245] The Nights, however, make clear that a human king named Shaddad built it. I can find no support for the claim that angels or djinn built the city outside of Lovecraftian or magickal texts.