The sirrush, recounted in chapter one, not only comes to mind reading these texts, but with the advent of genetic engineering techniques, has a very real possibility of coming to life.
And that’s the point, for if certain ancient texts can be interpreted along technological lines and give hints and clues as to the existence of just precisely such a genetic engineering technology in high antiquity, even being used in the engineered creation of mankind himself as was seen in a previous chapter, then the horrible possibility arises that in reading about those ancient accounts of chimeras and monsters, we might not be reading ancient science fiction at all, but a reality, dimly remembered and passed down through the ages.
However, there are a number of points to notice about these fragments from Berossus that are quite important, for they play directly not only to the interpretive method one brings to ancient texts, but, if one takes them seriously, raise many chronological problems that will be dealt with not only here, but much more extensively in the next and final chapter. These points may be summarized as follows:1. As noted, Berossus refers to creatures “of a two-fold principle,” i.e., to chimerical hybrids. On the face of it, these are either the offspring of the mytheological imagination, or, if one grants the existence of a sophisticated technological society in high antiquity, were possibly the products of genetic engineering;
2. These creatures were in most instances a mixture of species, though in one special instance, were masculo-androgynous mixtures of male and female humans, an odd statement for an ancient text to make, since males carry both sexual chromosomes;
3. They were associated with “the sea,” a primordial abyss of waters that the Greeks called “Thalassa.” In mythological terms, this is none other than the goddess Tiamat;
4. Tiamat, who created these “productions,” was destroyed by a god named “Belus,” and from her remains the modern heaven and earth were fashioned. Thus, Berossus is referring to the ancient war between Tiamat and Marduk, recounted in the ancient Mesopotamian “war epic,” the Enuma Elish;383
5. Mankind is specifically stated to be himself a chimerical creation from the blood of a “god” (who had removed his head for the purpose!) and the earth, dimly recalling the O’Briens’ technological interpretation of the Kharsag tablets in chapter five, a fact that, if tested scientifically, should show up in the genetic markers of humanity (not that we’ll ever be told about it!);
6. The “Noah” character of the second passage cited — Xisuthrus — takes not only his own family but his friends into his ark along with all the animals. His family is specifically stated to have been “translated” to the gods, leaving the remainder of the human family to descend from the friends he took with him;
7. Prior to entering the Ark, Xisuthrus is commanded to write the antediluvian history of mankind and deposit it at Siparra, and upon conclusion of the episode, his companions and friends return there to recover and disseminate that history;
8. The second passage cited makes specific reference to the god “Cronus,” the ancient Greeks’ name for the planet Saturn, and Cronus, when queried by Xisuthrus as to where he is to pilot his ark, is answered “to the gods,” which, given the planetary reference, means off the “earth” entirely. This extraterrestrial, interplanetary context is confirmed in loose fashion by Xisuthrus’ family being “translated to the gods” after the deluge;
9. The Deluge is stated to have occurred some four hundred and thirty-two thousand years ago, long before the rise of the societies recording the event, and, as we shall see from the genetic evidence to be presented in the next chapter, long before the rise of modern Homo sapiens sapiens;
10. The war of the gods (Tiamat and Marduk, or Thalassa and Belus as they are called in Berossus), occurred prior to the deluge, and moreover, a subsequent war was associated with some “Tower of Babel moment”: “They say that the first inhabitants of the earth, glorying in their own strength and size, and in despising the gods, undertook to raise a tower whose top should reach the sky, and in the place in which Babylon now stands; but when it approached the heaven, the winds assisted the gods, and overthrew the work upon its contrivers; and its ruins are said to be still at Babylon: and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language; and a war arose between Cronus and Titan.”384 Notably, the language of this fragment of Berossus is oddly ambiguous, for the first inhabitants of the earth are referred to not as “men” but merely “inhabitants,” and then he subsequently refers to them as “men.” These “first inhabitants” are also referred to as glorying in their “size,” a statement which lends credence to the idea that they were of large stature. Finally reference is made to the war between Cronus (Saturn), and Titan, who of course in the Greek version of this war sired a race of giants.
11. It is to be noted that some of the references in Berossus (as well as in the Enuma Elish) are astrological: e.g. “scorpion men” in the Enuma Elish, “centaurs” in Berossus.
Of course, all this is rather breathtaking stuff... if one reads it “literally” and as containing glimmers of a technological past only dimly remembered. If read that way it presents numerous chronological and scientific difficulties, as we shall discover in the next and final chapter.
What is important to note here is the agenda that these ancient texts suggest is in place in modern times, for with modern experiments in “manimals” and the creation of other chimerical creatures, it would appear as a possibility that someone has an agenda to (re-)create the chimerical creatures of ancient myth and astrological lore. If so, then the one possible motivation for doing so is also perhaps suggested by those ancient myths: someone is attempting to create the conditions and lost technology of the ancient war against the “giants and monsters.”
But there is the other possibility of interpretation of these ancient texts, the mythological one, and its own problematical difficulties may be revealed by asking a simple question: What did the ancients themselves think when they encountered the fossilized bones of large humanoid beings, or of dinosaurs? To answer this question, we must travel from Mesopotamia to Greece, and from there, across the ocean to North America, where two unlikely traditions — the Greek and the Native American Indian — give oddly parallel answers, answers that ultimately, and if read carefully, do not support a standard academic and “mythological” interpretation. As this careful comparison will reveal, there are astonishing similarities of traditions from places in the world otherwise disconnected from each other.
A. GREEKS, GIANTS, MONSTERS, AND WAR
One scholar who has been collecting precisely such accounts, legends and traditions, and doing so with a great deal of skill and analytical thoroughness, is Adrienne Mayor. Her works, Fossil Legends of the First Americans and The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, are not only the only such thorough studies, they are magisterial catalogues of obscure references and traditions all but forgotten to paleontological science.385
1. The Gigantomachy, or the War Against the Giants
The best place to afford an entry into the subject of Graeco-Roman responses to fossil remains is in the myth of the gigantomachy, the war between the Greek gods and the Titans, or giants. The “Titan wars” or wars against the giants began when the first “supreme god” of the pantheon, Cronos (Saturn) and his consort Rhea gave birth to Zeus and his siblings. Zeus in turn, with the assistance of the Titans, overthrew Cronos as supreme god and thus ushered in the era of the Olympian gods of classical Greek mythology. Then began the “Titan Wars” or wars of the giants, as some of the older giants and monsters waged war “against Zeus and the new, more human, gods.”386 This point about monsters, giants, and “more human” gods is an important one, and we shall be returning to it again in this and the next chapter.
At this juncture, Zeus defeated the giants by throwing his lightning bolts, destroying the giants’ legions and their leader, Typhon.387 Interestingly enough, the locations on ea
rth where these titanic battles were alleged to have occurred are often found near fossil fields dotted throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and particularly in Greece.388 In other words, the ancients explained their encounters with fossils by interpreting them from the standpoint of their preexisting myths.
Interestingly enough, however, the key to the giants is their chimerical nature:In early Greek art, giants were imagined as quadruped monsters, or as warriors, huge ogres, or primitive strongmen armed with tree trunks and boulders; some later artists added serpent legs to symbolize their earth-born nature. It’s important to keep in mind that giants were not necessarily visualized as human.389
In other words, the Gigantomachy was a literal war, a struggle for survival between at least two different species, one an older race of “monsters and ogres,” and the other the new “more human” Olympian gods. This will be an important clue in resolving the problems presented by modern genetics and ancient texts, as will be seen in the next chapter. For now, we note once again that the struggle, read at face value, is between two species, one less, and one more, “human.”
Mayor cites an impressive list of classical sources attesting to the ancients’ perceptions of these giants as “deformed” creatures, from Flavius Josephus,390 Manilius,391 to the church fathers Clement of Rome,392 and Augustine of Hippo.393 Two of the classical sources Mayor cites are worth mentioning in more detail, however.
Diodorus Siculus observes in his Library that the giants “Started a war against the gods... and were completely exterminated.” The one doing the exterminating was, according to Diodorus, Heracles, a.k.a. Aries, Mars, Errakal, or, in the Babylonian tradition, Nergal.394 Notably, the tradition of the “gods” annihilating the giants is dimly reflected in the biblical tradition, where Yahweh orders the extermination of the populations of Canaan during the Hebrew conquest, a population that according to the biblical text is of giant stature.395
The other interesting source is Herodotus, whose credentials as an accurate historian are, to say the least, a matter of hot debate within modern academic circles. In Herodotus’ case, the example Mayor cites is of a coffin over ten feet long, in which was found a skeleton of a “man” as long as the coffin.396 One may take this at face value, or rationalize that the “skeleton” was of some unknown creature whose bones had been arranged to look like a hominid, but really was not.
2. The Griffin
The latter strategy of rationalization is that followed by Mayor in a fascinating examination of the legendary creature, the griffin. Noting that the griffin played no real role in Greek mythology,397 nonetheless there are artistic depictions of such creatures in Greek art. One of the most interesting aspects of accounts of griffins according to Mayor is both their consistency,398 and the fact that they were consistently described as guarding “treasures.”399 Seeking a scientific explanation for this consistency and the origin of these legends, Mayor traces it back to the Gobi Desert tracer gold fields, and to the fact that the same fields exhibit fossils of the dinosaur protoceratops, which bears a strong resemblance to the griffin.400
3. Mayor’s Interpretive Paradigm
The problem of the griffin highlights the same problem we encountered in chapter one — the sirrush — and the academic agendas in place to deal with such problems. For Mayor, the answer lies in the “mythological paradigm” itself:If some nonhuman features were detected in fossil assemblage, they could be explained by the mythological paradigm. Everyone knew that giants and heroes of myth were not merely bigger and stronger than ordinary humans, but they could also have grotesque anatomical features, such as multiple heads or animal parts.401
Just how this paradigm works out practically can be seen in Mayor’s other signal study of such mythologies, Fossil Legends of the First Americans.
B. INDIANS, GIANTS, MONSTERS, AND WAR
1. The Age and War of the Giants and Monsters
The tradition of monsters, giants, and of a “war with the giants” is mirrored in the unlikely place of Native American Indian traditions and legends. As with the traditions of giants and gigantomachy in the eastern Mediterranean, Mayor notes that it is necessary, when viewing these Indian legends and traditions, to “keep in mind that in many Native traditions, ‘giants’ of ancient eras were often understood to be primeval beings that were neither animal nor human.”402 That said, this indigenous Native American tradition is very rich and diverse.
Like the early colonial Christians in North America who sought to interpret fossil evidence within the context of biblical stories of creation, the Nephilim, and the Flood,403 Native American Indians, when encountering such bones and other evidence, “turned to mythic traditions about giants and monsters to account for them...”404 The uniformity of this tradition of ancient giants and monsters across different tribes even called forth a comment from the famous Puritan Cotton Mather.405 As for their Puritan counterparts, the Indians, like the Greeks, interpreted such fossil evidence within the context of their already-existing tribal traditions about human prehistory. The method in both cases is identical.
There are but two logical ways in which to view such traditions, be they biblical, Sumerian, or Native American, and they are that (1) either the myths were created by those cultures to explain such fossil evidence; or (2) the myths were handed down to such cultures and contained some kernel of actual historical truth, or to put it somewhat more provocatively, the myths pre-existed both the evidence which was to be encountered and interpreted, and the cultures that would encounter and interpret it. This is a phenomenon we have already encountered with the Greeks, and to a certain extent, it is true of all cultures of ancient times and their attempts to understand and interpret such evidence.
Needless to say, the first alternative is that favored by academia and may be designated “the standard view.” As we proceed with our survey of Native American traditions, however, we shall see that there are a number of things that suggest that the second alternative, for all its radical nature, is the more rational alternative, and one deserving of a detailed exploration.
Just as for the Greeks across the Atlantic, the nature of the giants was not a settled matter for Native Americans. In some traditions, the giants were said to be made of stone and lived almost 1300 years before the arrival of Columbus, according to the Iroquois scholar David Cusick;406 in others, the giants were “humanoid” creatures,407 and there were debates within, and differences between, traditions over whether or not the giants were even hostile or indifferent to humans.408
There is an amazing consistency of Native American traditions regarding the “age of the giants and monsters” and in some traditions, the war that was fought against them. Again, according to the Iroquois scholar David Cusick, the “northern giants, called Ronnongwetowanea, had harassed the early Iroquois in the past, but the giants all died out about twenty-five hundred winters before Columbus discovered America.”409 Running these numbers (1492 - 2500 = 1008 B.C.) places the Native American account of the extinction of the giants and the end of the “age of giants” at very roughly the same period of time as biblical accounts of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan, in which giants were a specific target for extinction.410 Other Iroquois tribes placed the death of the last giant at eight to ten generations prior to 1705,411 again, in a time frame roughly consistent with other Native American traditions and broadly consistent with similar legends from the Middle East.
One of the most intriguing, and as we shall discover, most important, features of Native American traditions and legends concerning the giants and monsters is the fact that many of these traditions taught the idea that various “past ages (were) distinguished by different kinds of creatures,” a belief that was “a long-standing concept in many Native American traditions, and discoveries of unusual vertebrate fossils would certainly reinforce the idea.”412
Among the Aztecs in Mexico, this idea found further expansion, and in the expansion, an eerie parallel with the Mesopotamian and Middle Eastern accounts sugges
tive of an engineered humanity:In Aztec mythology, there were four previous ages of the world, each destroyed by a different cataclysm: flood, earthquake, hurricane, and fire. The first age was dominated by the earth-giants, followed by three ears of primitive humans. The Aztecs believed that inhabitants of the later worlds sometimes encountered terrifying giants who were relict survivors of the great flood and earthquakes that had destroyed the past worlds. To re-create life in the present, fifth age, the Feathered Serpent god Quetzalcoatl retrieved the scattered and broken bones of the human ancestors destroyed in the fourth age. He ground the bones to powder in a jade mortar. Mixed with blood donated by the gods, these bones produced today’s humans.413
There are a number of very important points to note here.
Firstly, the Aztec tradition is broadly consistent with North American Native American traditions of different ages distinguished by different creatures, which suggests three possibilities for the resemblance: (1) either both traditions stem from a common and earlier source; or (2) all Native American cultures were in much closer contact with each other than the Isolationist school championed by the Smithsonian and “official archaeology and anthropology” would have it; or (3) some combination of (1) and (2) was true. It should be noted that if the Isolationist interpretation were true, then option (1) would be a way to explain it, but this would present academia’s “standard view” with the problem of having to explain why so many disparate tribal traditions maintained the concept with such consistency over a wide area and prolonged period, and “independently” of one another. Conversely, if the disparate traditions did not spring from a common source, then how would one account for the amazing similarity of “the mythological imagination” over such a wide area — a similarity, moreover, that bears amazing resemblances to modern evolutionary theory? In other words, the consistency of the concept itself strongly suggests a scientific basis from which the various mythologies arose, and thus suggests a time and culture antedating the Meso- and North American Native traditions and stemming from very high antiquity.
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