Chariots of the Gods

Chapter Five - Fiery Chariots From The Heavens

A sensational find was made in the Hill of Kuyundjik around the turn of the century. It was a heroic epic of great expressive power engraved on twelve clay tablets and it belonged to the library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal. The epic was written in Akkadian; later a second copy was found that goes back to King Hammurabi.

It is an established fact that the original version of the Epic of Gilgamesh stems from the Sumerians, that mysterious people, whose origin we do not know, but who left behind the astonishing fifteen-digit number and a very advanced astronomy. It is also clear that the main thread of the Epic of Gilgamesh runs parallel to the biblical Book of Genesis.

The first clay tablet of the Kuyundjik finds relates that the victorious hero Gilgamesh built the wall around Uruk. We read that the 'god of heaven' lived in a stately home, which contained granaries, and that guards stood on the town walls. We learn that Gilgamesh was a mixture of 'god' and man—two-thirds 'god', one-third man. Pilgrims who came to Uruk gazed up at him in fear and trembling because they had never seen his like for beauty and strength. In other words, the beginning of the narrative contains the idea of inter-breeding between 'god' and man yet again.

The second tablet tells us that another figure, Enkidu, was created by the goddess of heaven, Aruru. Enkidu is described in great detail. His whole body is covered with hair, he wears skins, eats grass in the fields and drinks at the same watering-place as the cattle. He also disports himself in the tumbling waters.

When Gilgamesh, the king of the town of Uruk, hears about this unattractive creature, he suggests that he should be given a lovely woman so that he will become estranged from the cattle. Enkidu, innocent fellow, is taken in by the king's trick and spends six days and six nights with a semi-divine beauty. This little bit of royal pandering leads us to think that the idea of cross-breeding between a demi-god and a half-animal was not taken quite as a matter of course in this barbaric world.

And the third tablet goes on to tell us about a cloud of dust which came from the distance. The heavens roared, the earth quaked and finally the 'Sun God' came and seized Enkidu with mighty wings and claws. We read in astonishment that he lay like lead on Enkidu's body and that the weight of his body seemed to him like the weight of a boulder.

Even if we grant the old story-tellers a fertile imagination and discount the additions made by translators and copyists, the incredible thing about the account still remains: how on earth could the old chroniclers have known that the weight of the body becomes as heavy as lead at a certain acceleration? Nowadays we know all about the forces of gravity and acceleration. When an astronaut is pressed back into his seat by a force of several G's at take-off, it has all been calculated in advance.

But how on earth did this idea occur to the old chroniclers?

The fifth tablet narrates how Gilgamesh and Enkidu set out to visit the abode of the 'gods' together. The tower in which the goddess Irninis lived could be seen gleaming in the distance long before they reached it. The arrows and missiles which the cautious wanderers rained on the guards rebounded harmlessly. And as they reached the precincts of the 'gods', a voice roared at them:

'Turn back! No mortal comes to the holy mountain where the gods dwell; he who looks the gods in the face must die.'

Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live ...', it says in Exodus.

On the seventh tablet is the first eye-witness account of a space trip, told by Enkidu. He flew for four hours held in the brazen talons of an eagle. This is how his story goes literally:

'He said to me: "Look down at the land. What does it look like? Look at the sea. How does it seem to you?" And the land was like a mountain and the sea was like a lake. And again he flew for four hours and said to me: "Look down at the land. What does it look like? Look at the sea. How does it seem to you?" And the earth was like a garden and the sea like the water channel of a gardener. And he flew higher yet another four hours and spake: "Look down at the land. What does it look like? Look at the sea. How does it seem to you?" And the land looked like porridge and the sea like a water-trough.'

In this case some living creature must have seen the earth from a great height. The account is too accurate to have been the product of pure imagination. Who could have possibly said that the land looked like porridge and the sea like a water-trough, if some conception of the globe from above had not existed? Because the earth actually does look like a jig-saw puzzle of porridge and water-troughs from a great height.

When the same tablet tells us that a door spoke like a living person, we unhesitatingly identify this strange phenomenon as a loudspeaker. And on the eighth tablet this same Enkidu, who must have seen the earth from a considerable height, dies of a mysterious disease, so mysterious that Gilgamesh asks whether he may not have been smitten by the poisonous breath of a heavenly beast. But where did Gilgamesh get the idea that the poisonous breath of a heavenly beast could cause a fatal and incurable disease?

The ninth tablet describes how Gilgamesh mourns for the death of his friend Enkidu and decides to undertake a long journey to the gods, because he is obsessed by the idea that he might die of the same disease as Enkidu. The narrative says that Gilgamesh came to two mountains which supported the heavens and that between those two mountains arched the gate of the sun. At the gate of the sun he met two giants and after a lengthy discussion they let him pass, because he was two-thirds god himself. Finally Gilgamesh found the garden of the gods, beyond which stretched the endless sea. While Gilgamesh was on his way, the gods warned him twice:

'Gilgamesh, whither are thou hurrying? Thou shalt not find the life that thou seekest. When the gods created man, they allotted him to death, but life they retained in their own keeping.'

Gilgamesh would not be warned; he wanted to reach Utnapishtim, the father of men, no matter what the dangers. But Utnapishtim lived on the far side of the great sea; no road led to him and no ship flew across it except the sun god's. Braving all kinds of perils Gilgamesh crossed the sea. Then follows his encounter with Utnapishtim, which is described in the eleventh tablet.

Gilgamesh found the figure of the father of men neither bigger nor broader than his own and he said that they resembled each other like father and son. Then Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about his past, strangely enough in the first person.

To our amazement we are given a detailed description of the Flood. He recounts that the 'gods' warned him of the great flood to come and gave him the task of building a boat on which he was to shelter women and children, his relations and craftsmen of every kind. The description of the violent storm, the darkness, the rising flood and the despair of the people he could not take with him has tremendous narrative power even today. We also hear—just as in Noah's account in the Bible—the story of the raven and the dove that were released and how finally, as the waters went down, the boat grounded on a mountain.

The parallel between the stories of the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible is beyond doubt and there is not a single scholar who contests it. The fascinating thing about this parallelism is that we are dealing with different omens and different 'gods' in this case.

If the account of the Flood in the Bible is a second-hand one, the first person form of Utnapishtim's narrative shows that a survivor, an eye-witness, was speaking in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It has been clearly proved that a catastrophic flood did take place in the ancient East some thousands of years ago. Ancient Babylonian cuneiform texts indicate very precisely where the remains of the boat ought to be. And on the south side of Mount Ararat investigators did in fact find three pieces of wood which possibly indicate the place where the ark grounded. Incidentally the chances of finding the remains of a ship that was mainly built of wood and survived a flood more than 6,000 years ago are extremely remote.

Besides being a first-hand report, the Epic of Gilgamesh also contains descriptions of extraordinary things that could not have been made up by any intelligence living at the time the tablets were written, any more than they could have been devised by the translators and copyists who manhandled the epic over the centuries. For there are facts buried among the descriptions that must have been known to the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, if we look at them in the light of present-day knowledge.

Perhaps asking some new questions may throw a little light on the darkness. Is it possible that the Epic of Gilgamesh did not originate in the ancient East at all, but in the Tiahuanaco region? Is it conceivable that descendants of Gilgamesh came from South America and brought the Epic with them? An affirmative answer would at least explain the mention of the Gate of the Sun, the crossing of the sea and at the same time the sudden appearance of the Sumerians, for as is well known all the creations of Babylon, which came later, go back to the Sumerians. Undoubtedly the advanced Egyptian culture of the Pharaohs possessed libraries in which the old secrets were preserved, taught, learnt and written down. As has already been mentioned, Moses grew up at the Egyptian court and certainly had access to the venerable library rooms. Moses was a receptive and learned man; indeed he is supposed to have written five of his books himself, although it is still an unsolved puzzle in what language he could have written them.

If we work on the hypothesis that the Epic of Gilgamesh came to Egypt from the Sumerians by way of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and that the young Moses found it there and adapted it for his own ends, then the Sumerian story of the Flood, and not the biblical one, would be the genuine account.

Ought we not to ask such questions? It seems to me that the classical method of research into antiquity has got bogged down and so cannot come to the right unassailable kind of conclusions. It is far too attached to its stereotyped pattern of thought and leaves no scope for the imaginative ideas and speculations which alone could produce a creative impulse.

Many opportunities for research into the ancient East undoubtedly foundered on the inviolability and sacredness of the Books of the Bible. People did not dare to ask questions and voice their doubts aloud in the face of this taboo. Even the scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ostensibly so enlightened, were still caught in the mental fetters of the 1,000-year-old errors, because the way back would inevitably have called in question parts of the biblical story. But even very religious Christians must have realised that many of the events described in the Old Testament cannot really be reconciled with the character of a good, great and omnipresent God. The very man who wants to preserve the religious dogmas of the Bible intact ought to be interested in clarifying who actually educated men in antiquity, who gave them the first rules for a communal life, who handed down the first laws of hygiene and who annihilated the degenerate stock.

If we think in this way and ask questions like this, it need not mean that we are irreligious. I myself am quite convinced that when the last question about our past has been given a genuine and convincing answer SOMETHING, that I call GOD for want of a better name, will remain for eternity.

Yet the hypothesis that the unimaginable god needed vehicles with wheels and wings to move from place to place, mated with primitive people and dared not to let his mask fall remains an outrageous piece of presumption, as long as it is unsupported by proof. The theologians' answer that God is wise and that we cannot imagine in what way he shows himself and makes his people humble is really dodging our question and is unsatisfactory for that reason. People would like to close their eyes to new realities, too. But the future gnaws away at our past day after day. In about twelve years the first men will land on Mars. If there is a single, ancient, long abandoned edifice there, if there is a single object indicating earlier intelligence, if there is one still recognisable rock drawing to be found, then these finds will shake the foundations of our religions and throw our past into confusion. One single discovery of this kind will cause the greatest revolution and reformation in the history of mankind.

In view of the inevitable confrontation with the future, would it not be more intelligent to use new imaginative ideas when conjuring up our past? Without being unbelieving, we can no longer afford to be credulous. Every religion has an outline, a schema, of its god; it is constrained to think and believe within the framework of this outline. Meanwhile, with the space age, the intellectual Day of Judgment comes ever nearer. The theological clouds will evaporate, scattered like shreds of mist. With the decisive step into the universe we shall have to recognise that there are not two million gods, not twenty thousand sects or ten great religions, but only one.

But let us continue to build on to our hypothesis of the Utopian past of humanity. This is the picture so far:

Dim as yet undefinable ages ago an unknown space-ship discovered our planet. The crew of the space-ship soon found out that the earth had all the prerequisites for intelligent life to develop. Obviously the 'man' of those times was no homo sapiens, but something rather different. The space men artificially fertilised some female members of this species, put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Thousands of years later the space travellers returned and found scattered specimens of the genus homo sapiens. They repeated their breeding experiment several times until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it. The people of that age were still barbaric. Because there was a danger that they might retrogress and mate with animals again, the space travellers destroyed the unsuccessful specimens or took them with them to settle them on other continents. The first communities and the first skills came into being; rock faces and cave walls were painted, pottery was discovered and the first attempts at architecture made.

These first men had tremendous respect for the space travellers. Because they came from somewhere absolutely unknown and then returned there again, they were the 'gods' to them. For some mysterious reason the 'gods' were interested in passing on their intelligence. They took care of the creatures they bred; they wanted to protect them from corruption and preserve them from evil. They wanted to ensure that their community developed constructively. They wiped out the freaks and saw to it that the remainder received the basic requirements for a society capable of development.

Admittedly this speculation is still full of holes. I shall be told that proofs are lacking. The future will show how many of those holes can be filled in. This book puts forward a hypothesis made up of many speculations, therefore the hypothesis must not be 'true'. Yet when I compare it with the theories enabling many religions to live unassailed in the shelter of their taboos, I should like to attribute a minimal percentage of probability to my hypothesis.

Perhaps it will do some good to say a few words about the 'truth'. Anyone who believes in a religion and has never been under attack is convinced that he has the 'truth'. That applies not only to Christians, but also to the members of other religious communities, both large and small. Theosophists, theologists and philosophers have reflected about their teaching, about their master and his teaching; they are convinced that they have found the 'truth'. Naturally every religion has its history, its promises made by God, its covenants with God, its prophets and wise teachers who have said ... Proofs of the 'truth' always start from the centre of one's own religion and work outwards. The result is a biased way of thinking which we are brought up to accept from childhood. Nevertheless generations lived and still do live in the conviction that they possess the 'truth'.

Somewhat more modestly, I claim that we cannot possess the 'truth'. At best we can believe in it. Anyone who really seeks the truth cannot and ought not to seek it under the aegis and within the confines of his own religion. If he does so, is not insincerity godfather to a matter which demands the greatest integrity? What is the purpose and goal of life after all? To believe in the 'truth' or to seek it?

Even if Old Testament facts can be proved archaeologically in Mesopotamia, those varified facts are still no proof of the religion concerned. If ancient cities, villages, wells and inscriptions are dug up in a particular area, the finds show that the history of the people lived there is an actual fact. But they do not prove that the God of that people was the one and only god (and not a space traveller).

Today excavations all over the world show that traditions tally with the facts. But would it occur to a single Christian to recognise the god of the pre-Inca culture as the genuine god as the results of excavations in Peru? Quite simply what I mean is that everything, both myth and actual experience, makes up the history of a people. No more. But even that, I claim, is quite a lot.

So anyone who really seeks truth cannot ignore new and bold and as yet unproved points of view simply because they do not fit into his scheme of thought (or belief). Since the question of space travel did not arise a hundred years ago, our fathers and grandfathers could not reasonably have had thoughts about whether our ancestors had visits from the universe. Let us just venture the frightful, but unfortunately possible idea that our present-day civilisation was entirely destroyed in an H-bomb war. Five thousand years later archaeologists would find fragments of the Statue of Liberty in New York. According to our present-day way of thinking they would be bound to assert that they were dealing with an unknown divinity, probably a fire god (because of the torch) or a sun god (because of the rays round the statue's head). They would never dare to say that it was a perfectly simple artefact, namely a statue of liberty.

It is no longer possible to block the roads to the past with dogmas.

If we want to set out on the arduous search for the truth, we must all summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything that we previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop up our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical and absurd?

After all, the idea of a landing on the moon was absurd fifty years ago.

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