Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Read online

  Our focus in this book is obviously on the last of these five points, on both the “text” in the proper sense of actual written artifacts, oral myths and traditions, and upon the physical monuments themselves, and upon how they might illuminate those hidden agendas and their purposes.

  But now a new consideration enters the picture, and that is the meaning of “monument” or “artifact” within the context of the above methodological assumptions about “texts,” for it will be evident upon a little consideration, that DNA itself is a monument, an artifact, a text that can be decoded via the decryption techniques of modern genetics. This step, once embarked upon, yields curious anomalies of its own, for it leads to even deeper connections to other, more occulted traditions and texts; it also leads to deep connections between the physics of those anomalous monuments, the manipulations of DNA recorded in those ancient stories, and the texts themselves. There are, so to speak, “codes” within the “code,” and some of these codes were perhaps known in very ancient times, a relic, a legacy of that sophisticated scientific culture that blew itself apart. There is, as we shall see, a suggestive and direct link between human DNA and the physical medium itself, and it comes from an unsuspected time and place.

  As such, this book, like all my books on ancient lore, esoteric doctrine, and science, is a book of high speculation. It is argued speculation, to be sure, but it remains speculation nonetheless. In this case, however, there is an additional factor, and that is its cursory nature, for to explore any one of the topics outlined herein in any fashion even close to thorough would require a book for each topic. Consequently, this book is but synoptic panoramic overview. It is an exploratory essay on how such post-Cosmic War matters might profitably be viewed; it is therefore perforce not a dissertation on all possible ways to view it.

  Joseph P. Farrell

  Spearfish, South Dakota

  2010

  I.

  POST-BELLUM AFTERMATH:

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF ANOMALIES

  “When we speak of suppression of evidence, we are not referring to scientific conspirators carrying out a satanic plot to deceive the public. Instead, we are talking about an ongoing social process of knowledge filtration that appears quite innocuous but has a substantial cumulative effect. Certain categories of evidence simply disappear from view, in our opinion unjustifiably.”

  — Michael A. Cremo, “Introduction and Acknowledgements,” from The Hidden History of the Human Race, p. xvii.

  “In addition to the general process of knowledge filtration, there also appear to be cases of more direct suppression.”

  — Michael A. Cremo, “Introduction and Acknowledgements,” from The Hidden History of the Human Race, p. xviii.

  One

  KOLDEWEY’S CONUNDRUM AND DELITZSCH’S DILEMMA

  “At first this fabulous creature was classed along with the winged, human-headed bulls and other fabulous monsters of Babylonian mythology, but profound researches gradually forced the professor to quite a different conclusion.”

  — Ivan T. Sanderson6

  ROBERT KOLDEWEY, famous German architect and “amateur” archaeologist, faced a problem. A big problem. In the intellectual world of the nineteenth century, the myth that all ancient myths were nothing but myths was quickly collapsing. Von Schliemann would prove that ancient Troy, far from being a figment of Homer’s overactive and quite epic Hellenic imagination, actually existed, for he was the one who, using clues from Homer’s “myth,” actually dug it up. Whoops. Sorry, academia. Wrong again.

  Koldewey also entered this typically German quest to verify the reality of ancient myths not only by unearthing Babylon from her sandy tomb, but the actual fabled “hanging gardens,”7 one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the equally impressive Ishtar Gate of Babylon. He was one of the principal architects, in fact, of what would become something of an archaeological obsession with the region for the Germans, and they’ve been there ever since, scratching in the sands of Mesopotamia for clues to the actual history of mankind. And that was the problem, for the deeper they dug, the stranger that picture became. And in Koldewey’s case, the problem was even more acute, for the problem was a picture.

  The problem was a picture, or to be more precise, the ideas he was entertaining about that picture, for it was one thing to maintain Troy and Babylon really existed, but this? Could it be? And if so, what would the academic world think? Had he been under the desert sun too long? Had he a touch of Wahnsinn? Was he perhaps ein bisschen Verrükt? He surely must have wondered those things himself, given the thoughts he was conceiving, not to mention the fact that he was actually thinking about publishing those thoughts. But the insanity of World War I still raged... perhaps no one would notice (until it was too late) if he just snuck a most unorthodox, nonacademic “idea” into an otherwise serious scholarly and archaeological study. After all, he needn’t comment on its implications, which were many and profound. He could leave commentary to others. All he had to do was “sneak it in,” point the way, hint at those wide and profound implications.

  And that’s exactly what he did in a book published in Leipzig in 1918.

  The book was innocently entitled Das Ischtar-Tor in Babylon, The Ishtar Gate in Babylon. And like the Ishtar Gate itself, Koldewey’s book will be our gate into a very epic, and very Babylonian, problem.

  A. KOLDEWEY’S CONUNDRUM: THE SIRRUSH

  The picture, or rather, bas-relief, that was causing the good Professor Koldewey such grief was this, the middle animal on either side of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the reconstruction of which is shown below:

  The Reconstructed Ishtar Gate of Babylon

  And a close-up of the left side will reveal the problem:

  Close-up of the Ishtar Gate Animal Reliefs

  Note the top and bottom reliefs, like so many other reliefs in Babylonian and Assyrian artwork, are of fairly conventional-looking cattle or other very ordinary animals. But these were not Professor Koldewey’s problem. The problem is the middle relief, appearing as it does between two very normal-looking bulls.

  A closer look at that middle relief is in order:

  The Creature from Babylon: The Sirrush

  While the head of this creature — whatever it is — is obscured somewhat in the photo, the feet alone should tell us, as they told Koldewey, that “we have a problem,” for the front “paws” look somewhat like the paws of a large feline, while the rear “claws” look everything like the claws of some gigantic bird.

  As if that were not enough, there is a long “spiraling” tail...

  Spiraling Tail of “the Creature from Babylon”

  ...a long thin body that appears to be feathered or scaled...

  The Long Scaled or Feathered Body of “the Creature from Babylon”

  ...and topping it all off was the head of a dragon or serpent of some sort:

  Dragon’s Head of “the Creature from Babylon”

  However, the problem for Koldewey (and everyone else since, as we shall see shortly) was not that the Babylonians had given full freedom to their artistic flights of fancy; the problem was that they apparently had not, for the creature, known as a “Sirrush,” appeared right in the middle of other creatures known as aurochs that were self-evidently real, and though they are now extinct as well, they were not extinct in Babylonian times. The problem was the very real context in which the otherwise fantastic and bizarre “Sirrush” appeared. But that wasn’t the only problem.

  Koldewey wrote:A creation of another, essentially different type confronts us in the “dragon.” This is the sirrush of legend, or as it is often referred to today, the Mus-rushu, which Delitzsch renders as “splendid serpent.”

  The slender body, the wavy-lined tail, the similarly steep, solemn slender neck with its small scale-covered head... stands out better in color reproduction. The scaly attire shows itself on the hind legs downward to the middle of the shins. One observes larger diagonal scales on the abdomen. The forelegs resemble those of a l
ong-legged type of cat, perhaps a panther. The hind feet are those of a bird of prey.... On the end of the tail one can observe a curved quill, as in a scorpion. The head is entirely that of a snake with a closed mouth from which a forked tongue protrudes. It also bears a large upright, prominent horn from which an appendage spirals or curls out.... Behind the “whiskers” a tuft of three locks of hair falls, pictured as three long spiraling locks....

  This strange animal, with the above-enumerated features, as per Jastrow’s picture portfolio of the religion of Babylon and Assyria, was found in the oldest Babylonian art and preserved these features unchanged for millennia. Thus one may not say that it is a fantastic production, a chimerical picture of Babylonian-Assyrian art.8

  In other words, one had a creature with the forelegs of a great cat, the hind legs of a bird, with a curving tail with what appeared to be a scorpion’s sting, a long scaly body, a snake’s head, out of which grew a horn! And this creature appeared in the artwork of the region with amazing consistency through the millennia, and in the context of other very real creatures, one of which was the now-extinct aurochs (about which more in a moment). It could not be, Koldewey concluded, merely the chimerical production of a fevered Mesopotamian artistic imagination, for in cases where such mythological creatures were encountered in Babylonian art, these showed a great deal of change over time; the sirrush did not.

  Koldewey attempted to rationalize the creature’s strange appearance by various comparisons to the features of known dinosaurs, and concluded, somewhat less than convincingly, that “When one finds a picture such as our sirrush in nature, one must reckon it as belonging to the order of dinosaurs and indeed of the sub-order of ornithopods.”9 However, one would be hard-pressed to find dinosaurs with the forelegs of a cat, the hind legs of birds of prey, with spiraling tails and scorpion’s quills, and snake’s heads growing horns, all in one fantastic creature. Koldewey proposed one dinosaur, the iguanodon, which did indeed have hind feet similar to a bird, as being a close match to the sirrush.10 But that does not really make the dilemma any more palatable, since that would mean that long after dinosaurs were supposed to be extinct according to standard evolutionary theory, the ancient Babylonians were depicting them in the clear context of other very real, and very living, creatures, the aurochs.

  To make matters very much worse, it even appeared to Koldewey that the sirrush might have been the basis behind at least one biblical story, that recounted in the Greek versions of the book of Daniel, and known as Bel and the Dragon: And in that same place there was a great dragon, which they of Babylon worshipped. And the king said unto Daniel, Wilt thou also say that this is of brass? lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh; thou canst not say that he is no loving god: therefore worship him.11

  In the story, Daniel kills the dragon by poisoning it. But the sirrush and the problems it posed could not be gotten rid of so easily, for there it was, boldly emblazoned on the enameled bricks of the Ishtar Gate which Koldewey himself had unearthed.

  The renowned naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson summed up Koldewey’s conundrum this way:(Despite) his solid Teutonic background, Professor Koldewey became more and more convinced that it was not a representation of a mythical creature but an attempt to depict a real animal, an example of which had actually been kept alive in Babylon in very early days by the priests. After much searching in the depths of his scientific soul, he even made so bold as to state in print that this animal was one of the plant-eating, bird-footed dinosaurs, many types of which had by that time been reconstructed from fossil remains. He further pointed out that such remains were not to be found anywhere in or near Mesopotamia and that the “Sirrush” could not be a Babylonian attempt to reconstruct the animal from fossils. Its characters, as shown in Babylonian art from the earliest times, had not changed, and they displayed great detail in scales, horns, wrinkles, the crest and the serpentine tongue, which, taken together, could not all have been just thought up after viewing a fossilized skeleton.12

  So there it was, and the conundrum was extraordinary, any way one sliced it.

  Lest it have been missed, however, it behooves us to retrace the steps of Koldewey’s logic in order to exhibit the conundrum with the full force of its implications:1. There were no fossil remains near Babylon by which the Babylonians could have artistically reconstructed such a fantastic creature;

  2. The closest dinosaur resembling the sirrush was the iguanodon, but again, there were no remains of such a creature near Babylon that would have allowed an artistic reconstruction;

  3. The sirrush appeared throughout Mesopotamian art with amazing consistency, whereas other mythological and chimerical creatures depicted in the art of the region varied over time;

  4. The sirrush appeared in a context with other really existing animals, namely, the now-extinct aurochs; and thus,

  5. Either the Babylonians managed to encounter some sort of dinosaur long after they were supposed to be extinct; or,

  6. The sirrush, notwithstanding a generalized resemblance to the iguanodon, was some other sort of bizarre and chimerical creature unknown to modern paleontology, but nevertheless, really existing.

  And to top it all off, the creature may have even been the basis for a famous story from the biblical Apocrypha.

  Robert Koldewey, 1855–1925

  Left View of the Sirrush

  However, while Professor Koldewey was busily digging up all sorts of problems for standard academic fundamentalisms of ancient history and the evolution of life, yet another German was posing problems of a different sort, for a very different sort of fundamentalism.

  B. DELITZSCH’S DILEMMA: BABEL UND BIBEL

  Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922) was a noted German Assyriologist who had the distinction of having caused an international firestorm of controversy that it took no less than the efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II, acting in his capacity as the chief bishop of the German Lutheran Church, to stamp out.

  The controversy began innocently enough.

  The Cambridge scholar C.H.W. Johns, in his 1903 “Introduction” to Delitzsch’s lectures, summarized its rather innocent beginnings in the following way:The announcement that Professor Friedrich Delitzsch, the great Assyriologist, had been granted leave to deliver a lecture upon the relations between the Bible and the recent results of cuneiform research, in the august presence of the Kaiser and the Court, naturally caused a great sensation; in Germany first, and, as a wider circle, wherever men feel interest in the progress of Science. The lecture was duly delivered on the 13th of January 1902, and repeated on the 1st of February.

  Some reports of the general tenour of the discourse reached the outside world, and it was evident that matters of the greatest interest were involved. In due course appeared a small book with the text of the lecture, adorned with a number of striking pictures of the ancient monuments. This was the now celebrated Babel und Bibel. 13

  The title was a neat one, emphasizing the close relation between the results of cuneiform studies and the more familiar facts of the Bible.14

  One may easily imagine the scene: the Kaiser resplendent in his uniform, his marshals and ministers surrounding him, sitting in ornamented chairs, listening to the distinguished professor elaborating his discoveries and conclusions.

  But then, according to Johns, events took a decidedly strange turn. Indeed, “it came, therefore, as a shock of surprise to find that rejoinders were being issued.” That wasn’t all:

  A rapid succession of articles, reviews, and replies appeared in newspapers and magazines, and a whole crowd of pamphlets and books. These regarded the lecture from many varied points of view, mostly with disapproval. The champions of the older learnings assailed it from all sides. Even those who had been forward to admit nothing but a human side to the history and literature of Israel were eager to fall on the new pretender to public favour; and, to the astonishment of many, these arose a literature zum Streit um Babel und Bibel.

  As the echoes of this conflict reached our ears,
we seemed to gather that the higher critics, usually known for their destructive habits, were now engaged in defending, in some way, the Bible against the attacks of an archaeologist and cuneiform scholar. This seemed a reversal of the order of nature. We had been used to regard the archaeologist, especially the Assyriologist, as one who had rescued much of the Bible history from the scepticism of literary critics.15

  But then, to make matters even worse, Delitzsch was invited to deliver yet another lecture in the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm and his court.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II von Hohenzollern

  And that was when the “cuneiform hell” broke loose, requiring the Kaiser’s personal imperial intervention to quiet the controversy:But now reports of a very disquieting nature reached us. Our papers had it from their correspondents that a very direct attack was made on Holy Scripture, and even, it was not obscurely hinted, on the fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Faith. The storm broke out afresh in Germany, and spread hither also. We learnt, to our amazement, not exactly realizing the Kaiser’s position as Summus Episcopus, that he had seen fit to address a letter, the text of which appeared in the Times of February 25th.