Thus, the complex matrix of conceptual levels of meaning associated with “Tiamat” are the following:
1. Personal Ruler or succession of rulers (of);
2. A Planet;
3. The “Deep” or “Primeval Waters,” understood as the transmutative medium or material prima; and,
4. The Milky Way galaxy.
As the Enuma Elish relates, however, Tiamat is destroyed by Marduk. And not surprisingly, Marduk has his own multi-leveled set of associations. The Sumerologist Stephanie Dalley informs us that the name “Marduk” may mean “bull-calf of the Sun.”440 Marduk, like his Egyptian “cousin” Aten-Ra and his Hindu cousin Rama is a “sun god.” But De Santillana and Von Dechind also point out that Marduk is associated with the planet Jupiter.441 Like Tiamat then, Marduk in the Enuma Elish is not only a personal ruler, but is also associated with a planet and also a star, i.e., with massive bodies.
According to the Enuma Elish, after his defeat of Tiamat, Marduk then (re-)measured the “structure of the Deep.” In other words, the implication is that Marduk recovered the Tablets of Destinies, and with their assistance “measured the structure of the Deep”, an operation that was necessary since Tiamat, the exploded planet, was no longer in the picture, and the local celestial mechanics and geometry had changed drastically. With this, the structure of the Deep, of that transmutative medium or materia prima in local space, had been altered, and hence its new geometrical characteristics had to be ascertained anew. The Tablets of Destinies thus appear to give Marduk the power to do just that. Thus, the Tablets have some intimate connection to the geometries of space and time of the local system.
Thus, one has a similar if not identical list of meanings or levels associated with Marduk, or over which Marduk has “kingship” or power. Marduk is a
1. Personal Ruler, or succession of rulers (over);
2. The Sun
3. A planet
4. The “deep,” or transmutative aether.
The situation changes somewhat, though, with the next series of owners and possessors of the Tablets of Destinies: Enlil, Zu, and Ninurta.
2. Enlil, Zu, and Ninurta
Presumably the Tablets of Destinies were passed on from Marduk to Enlil. Here, of course, things took another turn for the worse, as the Tablets were stolen again, this time by Zu. Ninurta, Enlil’s son, was sent to lead the effort to recover them, and another terrible war ensues, ending in the defeat and execution of Zu, Ninurta’s recovery of the Tablets and his Inventory of the Stones. As was seen in the previous chapter, however, a new association has entered the picture, and this is the relationship:
Mountains ≈ planets ≈ gods ≈ pyramids(or “ekurs”).
While in possession of the Tablets, Zu waged a war with Ninurta similar in its ferocity and the types of weapons - some implying weather weapons - as was used by Tiamat after her theft of the Tablets. And this likewise implies once again that there possession conveyed the “kingship” or power over those things. So, Zu is
1. A Personal Ruler or succession of rulers (over)
2. A “mountain”, which is associated with
3. A planet, which is now also associated with
4. A pyramid, or “ekur”.
The obvious association of the last item with stones should not be overlooked.
Similarly, Ninurta after his victory and the recovery of the Tablets, performs his now celebrated “inventory of the stones,” in which he destroys some and preserves others. But let us recall the strange connections of Ninurta, and the associations that those connections bring to the light. Stephanie Dalley states that Ninurta was not only a warrior God, but was “probably pronounced Nimrod.”442 As such, Ninurta is associated with that famous “tower that reaches to the heavens,” an allusion clearly associating him with a pyramid.443 This tower, we learn from Genesis, was of concern because it would enable mankind to do whatever it had a mind to do. Its power, in other words, was “universal,” and hence God took the decision to destroy it and to confound mankind’s language. Let us recall that for the Mesopotamians, this “ekur” or tower, or pyramid, was the DU-AN-KI, the “bond heaven-earth,” coupling the earth to the heavens and vice versa. This strange reference would seem to associate the DU-AN-KI with the Tower of Babel, and both in turn to the only structure in that region to clearly embody both celestial and terrestrial geometries in its dimensions: the Great Pyramid.444
B. A Summary Thus Far
At this juncture, it is worth pausing once again to summarize the clues assembled thus far. By sifting the evidence from the texts carefully, we know that the Tablets of Destinies
1. Convey universal power, or the power of the universe, to their possessors;
2. Were associated with electromagnetic energy, since they are referred to as ME-LAMs, or light emitting crystals, and their theft causes “radiance” to depart;
3. Were associated with Marduk’s re-measuring of “the structure of the deep” after his defeat of Tiamat, that is, they are associated with the geometry of local space and the celestial bodies in it, since a new Zodiac system is emplaced by Marduk, replacing that used by Tiamat;
4. Were associated with the DU-AN-KI or “Bond heaven-earth,” and with the Tower of Babel;
5. Conferred the power to manipulate weather.
But there are other clues to be considered.
C. The Mythological Component and the Meaning of “Destinies” in “The Tablets of Destinies”
One of the most significant clues as to what the Tablets of Destinies were may lie in the second term of the phrase used to describe them, “Destinies.” This term strongly suggests some connection to the pervasive role that astrology played in the ancient Mesopotamian cultures. The movements of the stars and planets, after all, were the movements of the “gods” themselves, decreeing the fates or “destinies” of things on earth below. But where does this belief come from, and why? No one really knows, but the famed Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge does provide a significant clue in his books Amulets and Superstitions, a study of ancient Middle Eastern magical artifacts.
The Sumerians and Babylonians believed that the will of the gods in respect to man and his affairs could be learned by watching the motions of the stars and planets, and that skilled star-gazers could obtain from the motions of and varying aspects of the heavenly bodies indications of future prosperity and calamity. They therefore caused observations to be made and recorded on tablets, which they interpreted from a magical and not astronomical point of view, and these observations and their comments on them, and interpretations of them, have formed the foundation of the astrology in use in the world for the last 5,000 years. According to ancient traditions preserved by Greek writers, the Babylonians made these observations for some hundreds of thousands of years, and though we must reject such fabulous statements, we are bound to believe that the period during which observations of the heavens were made on the plains of Babylonia comprised many thousands of years.445
It is the pervasive habit of recording these astrological observations, and the sheer amount of such tablets, that surely led Assyriologists and translators to translate the term “Me” and “Me Gal Gal” as “Tablets of Destinies.” And their educated guess, as will be seen in this chapter, was much more appropriate than they might have cared to know!
But notice something else that Budge brings to our attention: there is a tradition in the cultures of the Middle East that these observations extend back to a period of time hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of Sumer and Egypt themselves! The Sumerian and Babylonian astrological sciences, in other words, were a legacy, and a declined legacy at that, of something far older, and as we shall see, something far more sophisticated.
This last point may be more fully understood by asking a very obvious question: Why was astrology such a pervasive “scientific” presence in almost all the great cultures of antiquity - Sumer, Egypt, Greece, the Vedic and Hindu, the Chinese, the Mayan, the Aztec, the Incan? Mainstrea
m and even alternative scholars have labored over this question for decades, and have come to essentially the same conclusion: the ancients observed the motions of the heavens, were occasionally victims of some sort of celestial catastrophe, needed to know when to plant and harvest their crops, and so on, and felt awe and religious reverence for these tremendous powers that clothed, fed, and sometimes destroyed them, and embodied it all in the astrological lore we know today. De Santillana and Von Dechind’s classic study Hamlet’s Mill is perhaps the prime example of this line of thinking, but there are many, many others. One is left, in other words, with a well-footnoted reassertion of the old paradigm that the ancients were primitive and superstitious peoples and that this sort of thing is just the sort of thing that they did. The standard line is that one need not look further into the possibility that their knowledge is a residue of an actual science left over, misunderstood - or understood as best as they could - by the cultures that were legacies of an incomparably more sophisticated civilization. According to that standard school of interpretation, therefore, one must not take those civilizations’ own assertions that they are the legacies of that much older, much more ancient, and much more sophisticated culture at their word.
But Budge presents information - tantalizing information - that something more must have been going on. He notes that the Babylonian zodiac in use throughout Babylon was “set up by Marduk” after his defeat of Tiamat, and that its signs “were different from the old ones, which he had disbanded...”446 Indeed, Budge even produces the previous zodiac in use by Tiamat, Kingu and their associates prior to the war that destroyed her.447 In other words, in addition to the Enuma Elish’s statement that after the war and the explosion of the Planet Tiamat, Marduk “measured the structure of the deep,” there was also the introduction of a new zodiac, which is precisely a new “measure of the structure of the deep.”
So we may draw our first tentative answer, our first clue, to unraveling the enigma of what exactly the Tablets of Destinies were: They concerned “astrological” information, written or transcribed on “tablets.” But since we know the consistent belief of astrology is that the positions and motions of the stars have subtle influences on life, emotions, and consciousness, we must add that this information was somehow included in whatever the Tablets of Destinies were.
So far, so good.
1. The Astrological Association of Certain Stones with Celestial Bodies
But there is more to this ancient astrological lore, according to Budge, than this, and here is where it begins to get very interesting. Most modern people only encounter astrology, if they encounter it at all, in the “horoscope” page of the local newspaper, or in little booklets of sun signs in the grocery store aisle. Because of this type of exposure, most people think of astrology as having only to do with the subtle influences of the stars and planets on human life. But there is most decidedly more to the ancient view, as Budge observes:
The old astrologers believed that precious and semi-precious stones were bearers of the influences of the Seven Astrological Stars or Planets. Thus they associated with the-
SUN, yellowish or gold-coloured stones, e.g. amber, hyacinth, topaz, chrysolite.
With the MOON, whitish stones, e.g. the diamond, crystal, opal, beryl, mother-of-pearl.
With MARS, red stones, e.g. ruby, haematite, jasper, blood-stone.
With MERCURY, stones of neutral tints, e.g. agate, carnelian, chalcedony, sardonyx.
With JUPITER, blue stones, e.g. amethyst, turquoise, sapphire, jasper, blue diamond.
With VENUS, green stones, e.g. the emerald and some kinds of sapphires.
With SATURN, black stones, e.g. jet, onyx, obsidian, diamond, and black coral.448
But what is this, this new association of crystalline stones with the stars (the Sun) and with planets? And more importantly, where did it come from? Why is it there? Almost no one seems to know, but the implication of Budge’s remarks are clear: this too is a component of that astrological lore that dates back into that tradition of “hundreds of thousands of years” of observation.
It is, in other words, part of the “sciences of the ‘gods.’” Recall the association of similar stones with the war between Ninurta and Zu, his careful inventory of Zu’s “stones” after his victory, his relegation of some of them to destruction, others to other uses, and some - a very few - which could not be destroyed nor adapted, were simply secreted away in temples to be used in rites, and presumably never heard from again. Recall too the association of the “stone of exile,” the “jewel” in Lucifer’s crown, which he lost when he fell. And of course, recall the most obvious thing: the whole cosmic war in both its phases, the struggle between Tiamat and Marduk, the later struggle between Ninurta and Zu, was a war for the possession and control of stones, of the “Tablets of Destinies.”
We now observe another obvious thing: Ninurta’s “Inventory of the Stones” as recorded in the Lugal-E occurs when he has defeated Anzu, and since the whole war was caused by the latter’s theft of the “Tablets of Destinies”, we conclude that Ninurta’s inventory was an inventory of the “stones” or components that constituted the Tablets of Destinies. We now have another clue to answering what exactly these Tablets of Destinies were, and why they conferred such tremendous powers to their possessors, power that, if one recalls our examination of the texts in the two previous chapters, was an almost “universal” power, i.e., conferred the power of the universe - of the stars and planets, and indeed the galaxy (recalling the “galactic context” of De Santillana and Von Dechind) - on their possessors. In this respect, De Santillana and Von Dechind record a very peculiar fact about Marduk’s war with Tiamat: two of the stars of the constellation Scorpio were some of his weapons.449
If one now recalls the association of particular types of “stones” with certain celestial bodies that is a signal part of this ancient astrological lore, then one might draw the conclusion that “stones” could be “weapons” when connected with such celestial bodies as Marduk’s “star weapons”. This conclusion seems warranted by the very fact of Ninurta’s “Inventory of the Stones,” which, as we have learned, was an inventory of the recovered components of the Tablets of Destinies, which conferred “the power of the universe.”
2. The Tablets of Destinies Jam the Talk of the Galaxy
Anzu’s theft of the Tablets of Destinies from Enlil brought forth a most unusual complaint, which I cite here from the Old Babylonian version:
(Anzu) stole the Ellil-power; rites were abandoned,
Father Ellil their counselor was dumbstruck.
Radiance faded (?), silence reigned...450
Zechariah Sitchin observes that “In Sumerian the name ZU meant ‘He Who Knows,’ one expert in certain knowledge. Several references to the evil hero of this tale as AN.ZU - ‘He Who Knows the Heavens’ - suggest” for Sitchin a disruption in communications between the gods on Earth and elsewhere in the universe.451 Sitchin, of course, maintains that the theft of the Tablets shut down communications between a “spaceport” from which rockets maintained a steady traffic between Earth and the gods’ “homeworld,” Nibiru. While this is not the place to delve into the particulars of Sitchin’s “paleophysical” interpretations, needless to say, I do not subscribe to this particular detail of Sitchin’s scenario for the simple reason that mere rockets would be a far too slow and inefficient method for any practical travel between worlds.
But his observation here is nonetheless an intriguing and important one for two crucial reasons. The first is that (An)Zu’s actions give him the characteristic of a rebel and warrior, while his name gives him characteristics similar to Egypt’s wisdom-god, Thoth. The second important point about Sitchin’s observation is that the theft of the Tablets of Destinies breaks down communications between Earth and “Elsewhere.”
3. Thoth’s Tablets Once Again
Ninurta’s “Inventory of the Stones” and the Tablets of Destinies, viewed in this total “astro-mythological conte
xt,” begins to sound peculiarly familiar, for it implies that his “Inventory” was nothing less than a lithographic record of a vast body of knowledge, encompassing celestial geometry, the properties of celestial bodies, and the mutual influences that existed between them and particular stones. They are, in one sense, summaries of information.
And in this respect, they begin to sound like the Tablets of another well-known Middle Eastern god, the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth. Here, I quote from pages 58 - 62 of my book The Giza Death Star Destroyed once again, this time in order to show the similarities between Thoth and Ninurta, and more importantly, between The Book of Thoth and Ninurta’s Tablets of Destinies:
“a. The Role of Hermes-Thoth in the Founding of Esotericism
“Scattered throughout (Manly) Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages are numerous references to the enigmatic figure of Hermes-Thoth, and his crucial role in the post-diluvian founding of esotericism. Aside from his identifications with Enoch and other figures in various traditions,452 the figure of Hermes-Thoth is ”of first importance to Masonic scholars, because he was the author of the Masonic initiatory rituals, which were borrowed from the Mysteries established by Hermes.“453 This connection of Hermes-Thoth with ante-diluvian knowledge and its survival in Masonic traditions is made even more apparent by the identification of Thoth with the figure of Hiram Abiff, a figure who plays such a central role in the death-resurrection rituals of the first three degrees of Masonry.454 This tradition ascribes the identification to the so-called Emerald Tablet of Thoth, about which we shall have more to say in a moment. More important for the subject of esoteric continuity are the numerous references to the survival of Hermes-Thoth’s knowledge in the forms of books or inscribed tablets. In some versions, forty-two volumes of his works were removed from the Library of Alexandria prior to its burning, and secreted with “initiates” who buried them in the desert for safekeeping.455
The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics and Ancient Texts Page 26
