Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (20 page)

The Egyptian ram still haunts the stories of the Order of Knights Templar founded in the twelfth century. He is depicted walking upright, with human hair on his head, goat's feet, goat's hind parts and a large phallus. In his Egyptian History, Herodotus (490-425 B.C.) speaks of strange black doves, which were supposed to have been women (II, 57). The Indian Vedas tell of mothers who 'walk on their hands'. The Epic of Gilgamesh says that Enkidu must be 'estranged from the animals'. At the wedding of Pirithous, the Centaurs, who had human torsoes and horses' bodies, violated the wives of the Lapithae. Six youths and six maidens had to be 'sacrificed' to the bull-headed Minotaur. Lastly it is obvious that Hephaestus's lively maidens had a sexual connotation. I also have very little doubt that the dance around the golden calf was the climax of a sexual orgy.

Plato writes in his Symposium: 'Originally there was a third sex in addition to die male and female sexes. This human had four hands and four feet ... great was the strength of these humans, their minds were presumptuous, they planned to storm heaven and to lay violent hands on the gods ...'

The Cabeiri, mostly called the 'great gods' in inscriptions, carried on a mysterious cult with fertility demonds, which continued from ancient Egyptian times through the Hellenistic period and down to the flowering of the Roman culture. As the Cabeiri's rites were secret, it has not yet been possible to find out what sort of hearty sex games die ladies and gentlemen played with one another. Nevertheless, it is certain that two male and two female Cabeiri, as well as an animal, always took part in these diversions. The man and woman were not the only ones to copulate, the animal played an active role, too!

Perhaps I also ought to mention in this connection the Egyptian bulls of Apis, the 'sacred bulls of Memphis'. Because of their fertility they were mummified in sarcophagi over nine feet long and twelve feet high. Three years ago I stood in some of these musty burial chambers deep below the sands of the desert and asked myself what these fertile animals had done in their lifetime.

Tacitus (Annals, XV, 37) describes a nocturnal orgy in the house of Tigellinus at which illicit intercourse took place with the cooperation of half men, half animals. It cannot be ascertained how long these perversions were carried on in secret societies.

Sometimes the business seems to have been rather embarrassing to Herodotus and he tries to gloss it over (II, 46): 'In this province not long ago, a goat tupped a woman in full view of everybody—a most surprising incident.'

The god Pan was depicted with goat's feet and goat's head by classical artists. That, too, upset Herodotus (II, 46): 'But that is how they paint him, why, I should prefer not to mention.'

The Jewish Talmud recounts that Eve coupled with a snake. This idea inspired many artists. A woman with well-developed breasts and a snake's tail is depicted on potsherds found at Nippur—a representation, incidentally, that is not unlike those of the sirens who covet handsome young men.

Distressing as it is, the sinful side of our past cannot be wiped out. Pornography has been a sought after stimulant in all ages. Prehistoric pictures of sexual excesses on clay tablets, rock faces and animal bones speak for themselves.

Strange half human, half animal beings can be made out on the reliefs on the black obelisk of Salmanasar II in the British Museum. In the Louvre, the Museum of Baghdad and elsewhere there are pictures of remarkable couplings between animals and humans. Large stone figures with an extraordinary anatomy exist on the Island of Malta. They have globular thighs and pointed feet; they cannot be defined sexually at all. Pictures of demi-men on Assyrian works of art are no rarity. The accompanying texts tell of 'captured men-animals', who were chained, carried off and given as tribute from the land of Musri to the great king. An early stone-age bone from Le Mas d'Azil (France) shows a hybrid—half man, half ape—whose phallus must have been particularly attractive.

According to present-day biological knowledge a cross between man and animals is impossible, because the chromosome count of the partners does not tally. Such mating has never produced a viable being. But do we know the genetic code according to which the chromosome count of the mixed beings was put together?

The sexual human-animal cult which was practised with gusto and enjoyment by the people of antiquity seems to me to have been celebrated against their better judgment. Cannot the 'better judgment' of coupling with one's own kind have come only from unknown intelligences?

Did the earth's inhabitants lapse after the 'gods' had left?

And was this lapse the same thing as original sin?

Did they perhaps fear the day when the 'gods' would return because of their backsliding? The factor that impeded evolution in primitive times was probably interbreeding with animals. From this point of view the Fall was simply arrested or recessive evolution owing to admixture with bestial blood. 'Original sin' only becomes logical if at each birth something of the former animal side is inherited : the bestial in man.

What other kind of 'sin' was there to inherit, for heaven's sake?

The Sumerians had one single concept for the universe: an-ki, which can be roughly translated by 'heaven and earth'. Their myths tell of 'gods' who drove through the sky in barks and fireships, descended from the stars, fertilised their ancestors and then returned to the stars again. The Sumerian pantheon, the shrine of the gods, was 'animated' by a group of beings who possessed fairly recognisable human shape, but appear to have been superhuman, indeed immortal. But the Sumerian texts do not refer to their 'gods' with vague imprecision; they say quite clearly that the people had once seen them with their own eyes. Their sages were convinced that they had known the 'gods' who completed the work of instruction. We can read in Sumerian texts how everything happened. The gods gave them writing, they gave them instructions for making metal (the translation of the Sumerian word for metal is 'heavenly metal') and taught them how to cultivate barley.

We should also note that according to Sumerian records the first men are supposed to have resulted from the interbreeding of gods and the children of earth.

Sumerian tradition says that the sun god Utu and the goddess of Venus, Inanna (at least) came from the universe. The Sumerian word for rib is 'ti'; 'ti' also means 'to create life'. Ninti is also the name of the Sumerian goddess who creates life. Tradition has it that Enlil, the god of the air, made many humans pregnant. A cuneiform tablet says that Enlil discharged his seed into the womb of Meslamtaea: 'The seed of thy lord, the gleaming seed, is in thy womb; the seed of Sin, the divine name, is in my womb ...'

Before men were created and only gods dwelt in the town of Nippur, Enlil raped the delightful Ninlil and made her pregnant on orders from above. At first the lovely child of earth, Ninlil, was unwilling to be fertilised by a 'god'. The cuneiform text from Ninlil's fear of the act of violation: 'My vagina is too small, it does not understand intercourse. My lips are too small, they do not understand how to kiss ...'

The divine Enlil overheard Ninlil's words of refusal, but it was a decision of the 'gods' to wipe the loathsome brood of unclean beings from the face of the earth and so Enlil discharged into Ninlil's womb. On one of the tablets translated by the Sumerologist S. N. Kramer we read: 'In order to destroy the seed of mankind the decision of the council of the gods is proclaimed. According to the commanding words of An and Enlil ... their dominion shall come to an end...'

So it was quite clearly a matter of wiping out the impure. Another tablet says:

'In those days, in the chamber of creation of the gods, in their house Duku were Lahar and Ashman formed ...

'In those days Enki said to Enlil:

'"Father Enlil, Lahar and Ashman,

they who were created in the Duku,

let us allow them to descend from the Duku."'

Was the 'chamber of creation of the gods' the same as the 'Duku'? And was the 'Duku' from which the two were to descend the space-ship of the gods? This assumption is automatically suggested by the vivid description.

In 1889, scholars of Pennsylvania University brought home from an expedition the oldest true-to-scale town plan in the world, the plan of the town of Enlil-ki (=Nippur). In this town of the god of the air, Enlil, there was a 'gate for the sexually impure'. I think this gate was a protective measure by the gods after their work was done. After they had produced a new generation, they wanted to prevent a lapse into bestiality by separating the 'new men' from their still contaminated environment. One cuneiform tablet even gives a brief reference to the gods' method of fertilisation, namely to the implantation of the divine seed.

The Pentateuch, which has already supplied me with such a wealth of illustrative material about the means of locomotion of the galactic supermen of primitive times, is a mine of information for my theory, so long as the texts are read imaginatively, with the eyes of a man living in the age of space travel. So let us make the 'gods' come down to earth again, as it were, from Moses' descriptions. Perhaps his accounts also have something new and surprising to tell us about the practice of bestiality among primitive beings.

In Exodus, 19:16-19, It is written:

'And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpets exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.

'And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.

'And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.

'And ... the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder ...'

Exodus 20:18, says:

'And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.'

Does anyone still believe today that the Lord God Almighty had to travel in a vehicle that smoked and flashed and caused earthquakes, and made a fiendish noise like a jet fighter? God was omnipresent. But if he was, how could he watch over and guard his 'children' and yet appear in such a terrifying way? Why did he frighten his 'children' so much that they ran away from him? The great compassionate god! Nevertheless he ordered Moses to keep the people away from the mountain where the landing took place. Exodus xix, 23-24, describes this as follows:

'...The people cannot come up to mount Sinai: for thou chargedst us, saying, Set bounds about the mount, and sanctify it.

'And the LORD said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt come up, thou, and Aaron with thee: but let not the priests and the people break through to come up unto the LORD, lest he break forth upon them.'

One of David's psalms gives a particularly dramatic description of God appearing (Psalm 29:7-9):

'The voice of the LORD divideth the flames of fire.

'The voice of the LORD shaketh the wilderness; the LORD shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh.

'The voice of the LORD maketh the hinds to calve and discovereth the forests ...'

There is an enthusiastic account of the landing of a spaceship in Psalm civ, 3-4:

'...who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind:

'Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire....'

But the Prophet Micah outdoes all this (1:3-4):

'For, behold, the LORD cometh forth out of his place, and will come down, and tread upon the high places of the earth.

'And the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire....'

Imagination needs something to spark it off. But what sparked off the chroniclers of the Old Testament? Were they describing something they had not seen at all? Time and again they implore us to believe that everything was just as they described it. And I believe them implicitly; they gave eye-witness accounts. In those days no fantasy could have given them the idea of a vehicle that spits fire, whirls up the desert sand and makes the mountains melt under it. We children of the twentieth century who have read the story of Hiroshima sense for the first time what God's epiphany as described in the Old Testament might really mean.