In5D

The planet is going through a mass transformation. There are many aspects to this transformation, and in the end one must come to realize the basic building block for global change starts with us, humanity on a collective level, together. We are being called to evolve past our current way of living, tap into our infinite potentiality, let go of our training wheels and fly. We continue to search for external factors like technology and alternative ways to function, which is great. But humanity cannot evolve past its current paradigm unless the souls on Earth themselves change first. From that place of change we can begin to implement new ways of operating on this planet which can propel us past our current limitations and into an existence of abundance, peace , prosperity, and discovery. Humanity must operate from a place of love, peace, cooperation, acceptance and understanding if it is to move on and expand past the current limitations and definitions it has placed upon itself. A portion of the paradigm change we are witnessing on planet Earth today is people waking up to what has really been taking place. This can be a tough process because many humans have been made to believe certain realities are true when they are not. Through the use of mainstream media, education and more, we have been programmed with false ideas and belief systems of how the world and the industries that govern it work. We’ve also been programmed with the idea of how to be, how to act, and what to do in certain situations. This type of programming has taken us away from our soul’s voice, our heart, and our ability to be our true self. We are a young race, and we are only just discovering our hearts now.

Only a small group of people and the corporations they run are in control of all the world’s resources. When something new comes along and threatens these industries and multinational corporations they put a tremendous amount of effort into concealing and covering up information. A part of this transformation is the apocalypse, which is an ancient Greek word that carries the meaning of “transparency.” This is not always an easy process. Sometimes it is hard for one’s mind to take in certain information when after carrying a specific belief system for almost all of one’s life. We are an infant race of seven billion, separated by many different belief systems. The belief systems that once separated us are beginning to crumble, and we are all coming to the realization of oneness. That’s what we are: one human race. Imagine a race united in knowing instead of separated by belief systems. Someone once said that the mind works best like a parachute, when it is open!

Many find the idea of mass brainwashing hard to believe, but it’s really not. The brain and our consciousness is highly programmable. The way we perceive reality is directly correlated to the reality we create, you can read more about this here. Throughout human history intellectual authorities have affirmed their supremacy by purposely ridiculing ideas and new concepts of reality that did not fit the accepted framework. They accomplished this by using their position of ‘power’ to dictate, and dispense their resources into brainwashing the public. The best historical example is ancient Rome and Christianity. The elite banned and punished those who did not follow. Even all the way up to recent history when ancient Rome spread its power all over the globe, scientists were sought after and killed while their works were taken and hidden from the public, they were considered heretics. Galileo is a classic example of this.

So how do they do it today? Is it a conspiracy? Well, if you would like to inquire about that, the first question you must as yourself is who is in control now? Who is dictating ‘truth’ to people, how do they do it, and how do we find out what is really going on in the world? After all, nobody can really deny that human beings have an innate desire for knowledge and truth. The only difference is that everybody seeks it using different methods. Some simply believe what they are told, and others search more in depth. Truth can never be hidden, and it is always possible to discover certain aspects of our reality that is kept from the masses.

For quite some time the dominating ‘truth givers’ have come from television programming. It’s no secret that mainstream media sources are extremely manipulating. They are owned by a handful of multinational corporations who we all know are in control of government and governmental policy, such as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, CBS Corporation, and NBC Universal. What is even more strange is that all of these corporations have connections to each other. Multiple CEO’s and employees are members of the Council On Foreign Relations and all of these organizations always lead up to the same group of families, like the Rockefellers. Does that not make people scratch their heads? I am not asking you to believe me blindly. I take it that this is a known fact. You can browse through our website if you are looking for proof, or you can simply do the research yourself. If you’d like to see an example of these mainstream media connections. you can click here get you started. What is even more amusing is that the corporations that own and run the mainstream media also own big oil companies, big pharmaceutical companies, big energy companies, big food companies and more. Basically, a small group of people and the corporations they run own all aspects of our lives. What is becoming more transparent by the day is that everything that surrounds us is not good for us at all. For example, the food and pharmaceutical industries both complement each other in that one makes us sick and the other treats us. It’s a cycle.

We no longer desire the type of environment that surrounds us daily and we are starting to realize that we can change it any time we want. Change can’t happen in a second. Sometimes our perception gets in the way. What seems like ten or twenty years to some may seem like one second to others. This transformation we are going through is rapid, and it starts with the recognition that many of us here no longer resonate with the current system planet Earth uses to govern itself. This feeling that does not resonate with many has caused many to ‘leave’ the system and begin to create for themselves. It has also encouraged others to begin spreading information to spark more awakening across the world. A massive ripple effect is moving around the planet right now. All we have to do is follow our hearts, let go of the fear to do so. and realize that in these times the Earth is truly our playground.

Much Love.

source

In5D Addendum:

Society is waking up on many levels. Since September 11, 2001, many truths have arisen regarding the “few who control the many”. Right now, the few (The Builderbergs) are in a private meeting in the UK deciding what is on their best interests, not ours. This is why it is so important to begin within because the only person who should be deciding your future is you… not the corporate elite who have raped this planet and is currently running a eugenics program designed to cull the population.

So how can you do this? By looking within for answers. The mainstream media will rarely report anything that is not within their own agenda. You can also set intentions on the world that YOU envision for yourself as well as others. For example, on our last New Moon, I envisioned a world that lives in abundance, good health, prosperity and peace. It all begins with YOU! <3

This article originally appeared at Collective-Evolution.com. Hat tip to In5D.com for bringing this to our attention!

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

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The word “Illuminati” has become a catch-all term for the defacto Rulers of Planet Earth. Definition is crucial because the words “Conspiracy” and “Illuminati” have themselves become code-words for the occult (hidden) machinations of the Powers That Be. With the advent of the internet and its rough cut of “news” and disinformation, what was once considered esoteric knowledge has been revealed for all to see. Even the cowans – a derogatory Masonic term for non-Masons – and the goys – a derogatory Yiddish term for non-Jews – are learning about the Illuminati black magic hoodoo that permeates the planetary matrix.

Illuminati originally meant “the enlightened ones” in Latin, and it refers to those who control the political, economic and social infrastructures of the planet. By their reasoning, they believe they are the (self) designated rulers of Planet Earth.

Also called “Olympians” and “Moriah Conquering Wind,” the Illuminati are a “network” of interconnected “bloodlines” who call themselves “The Family” or “The Circle.” Intergenerational satanism, or more accurately Luciferianism, is their primary Belief Structure (That’s BS to you, partner).

Also don’t forget their fatal flaw… The Illuminati consider themselves a tribe apart – Bande à part – a proud super-race who trace their genealogical origin back to the biblical Nimrod.

To add to the confusion, people sometimes refer to the Illuminati as the Bavarian secret society which infiltrated Freemasonry – even as the term “Illuminatus” is an actual title in Freemasonry.

Current understanding of the Illuminati comes from first-hand knowledge of mind control survivors like Arizona Wilder, Cathy O’Brien, author of Trance Formation of America, Brice Taylor, author of Thanks for the Memories, Kathleen Sullivan, author of MK, and Annie McKenna, author of Paperclip Dolls.

Their accounts describe a parallel Illuminati “culture” whose primary goal is to keep the populace “productive” and under control, as their corporate motto promises to deliver, “Ordo ab Chao” (Order Out of Chaos).

This parasitic Illuminati culture also uses mind control programming to keep its own members of the Family, as well as the rest of society, locked in a grid of compliance. (See “Mind Control Slavery and the New World Order”, www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=36&contentid=8774)

Various authors have further introduced errors in their “exposés” of the Illuminati by interpreting history with a bias that reflects their own political and religious indoctrination.

For example, the works of Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler, while informative about the Illuminati’s sociopathic “traditions” (no es mi costumbre) and psychopathic behaviour, which includes torture, human sacrifice and mind control, nevertheless belie a Christian programming which adds to the chaos and confusion of trying to untangle history from disinformation.

Likewise even as the writings of John Coleman, author of The Committee of 300 and Eustace Mullins, author of The World Order, describe various Illuminati organisations which exercise political and religious control in pursuit of their oft-stated goal of establishing a New World Order (One World Government), their asides reveal a rigid Christian fundamentalist mindset which undermines their credibility.

The greatest confusion, however, seems to lie in the connection between the Illuminati and the Gnostics. For example, authors like Nesta Webster in her book on Secret Societies claims the Illuminati can be traced back to the Gnostics. In other words, she frames her argument that Illuminati and the Gnostics are “bad” because they appear to be antithetical to Christianity.

This conflict then refers to the perennial battle between the Gnostics, representing the Mystery Schools, and the Roman Catholic Church which fought fiercely against self-knowledge, mysticism and other metaphysical concepts, inimical to the mind control confabulations of the Vatican.

Today this animosity is evident in the Belief Systems (BS) of Christian evangelicals, among others, who see all secret societies, Gnostics, New Agers, and the like as devil worshippers and ignorant (or conscious) agents of the Illuminati.

Not so… The Mystery Schools were pre-Christian mystical communities that were in effect educational centres with libraries and workshops amid a vibrant cultural life.

This just may be the scene of the crime, so to speak, and the origin of the current metaphysical confusion.

Was this where the great ideological schism, or the Dividing of the Way, began?

Gnostics vs. Illuminati

Comparative mythologist John Lamb Lash, the world’s foremost authority on Gnosticism and esoteric traditions, is the author of the indispensable groundbreaking book Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief.

According to Lash, Mystery School adepts (so-called Gnostics) were originally members of the Magian order of shaman-initiates whose purpose was to guide humanity as teacher-mystics in pursuit of spiritual/ human evolution.

The controversy began when certain initiates of the Mystery Schools began to abuse their mystical knowledge and redirect it into behavioural manipulation, psychological programming and mind control technology. In essence, the Illuminati gave up their role as teachers to become social engineers and advisors to the Ruling Class. This coincided with the rise of the patriarchal Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, which also required techniques of mind control to keep their followers (“believers”) in line.

“Around 4000 BCE with the rise of urban civilisation in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering,” writes Lash, describing the spiritual devolution of the Kali Yuga. “They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show.”

“Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods,” continues Lash. “The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority.”

Civilisation – the Civil Lie in Action – needed an iron fist in a velvet glove from the beginning, and the Illuminati were there to ensure compliance. “Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess,” writes Lash. “Their purpose was not education and enlightenment but social management.”

The control freak tendencies of the Illuminati are evident everywhere now, as their failure in managing the world financial system is rushing the planet headlong into economic collapse.

“Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society, but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management,” Lash continues. “The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough, to create a humane world.”

Of course Lash is being too “liberal” in labelling the Illuminati as “dissident” since their spiritual betrayal in the Mystery School was more of a bitch slap to Gaia, than the red flag of a covert rebellion.

“The difference in views of human potential was the main force that precipitated the division of the Magians,” writes Lash, meaning that the judgmental arrogance of the Illuminati who believed they were indispensable, even as they think they’re nothing less than “God’s gift to mankind.”

“It’s simple enough to see that this mind set would develop the hierarchal structures in society today,” Lash continues.

True enough. The so-called Global Elite keep the planet under control utilising Illuminati Gofers known as politicians, military personnel, police officers, and religious leaders, whose function is to be the shepherds of society – guarding the sheep… until they’re ready for slaughter in their endless wars and intertribal rivalries.

People who behave as sheep, or so-called “sheople,” are always the ones who suffer the most because of their programming. Meanwhile the Illuminati Gofers pretend that this is the way it’s supposed to be. This long-standing ideological disagreement in the Mystery Schools has, it appears, resulted in the gross inequities of life on Planet Earth.

“The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its cover, perpetrator religion,” writes Lash, describing the global conspiracy which has conquered the world.

“While it cannot be exactly said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it,” continues Lash. “And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states (‘entrainment’), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person (‘platforming’), and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (The Manchurian Candidate technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world.”

Attempting to disentangle the erroneous idea that Gnostics and Illuminati refer to the same characters, Lash writes: “If we accept that the Mysteries were schools for Gaian co-evolution dedicated to the Goddess Sophia, they could not have been run by the Illuminati, as some contemporary writers (who believe they are exposing the Illuminati) have supposed. Everything the Gnostics did in the schools was intended to counterbalance and correct the machinations of the deviant adepts.”

Right intent once again becomes critical and the radical difference in ideology between the Gnostics and the Illuminati become self-evident.

“Initiation involved melting ego boundaries in preparation for deep rapport with nature, not lowering the ego consciousness, so that the subject could be behaviourally programmed using the power of suggestion, imprinting and other psychodramatic methods. These behavioural modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by the Gnostics.”

The metaphysical perverts known as the Illuminati have structured today’s society to reflect the manipulation of humankind through religious belief systems, political affiliations as well as the non-stop onslaught of media programming known as “news” and “entertainment.”

The Defeat of the Illuminati

As renegades from the Mystery Schools who betrayed the Mysteries and subverted Gnosis (“Knowledge”), the Illuminati plan to divide, conquer and rule the world has worked quite well because people are easily programmed into belief systems contrary to their own welfare.

As Lash notes, “Skilled in theology and dialectical argument, the Gnostics were able to refute fanatical beliefs, but unable to protect themselves against the violence driven by those beliefs.”

In other words Judeo-Christian Annihilation & Apocalyptic Theology sponsored by the Illuminati was responsible for the destruction of the Mystery Schools and the murder of the Gnostics, who were no match for those who perceived them as a threat to their planetary dominion.

“Not only were the gnostokoi like [the female philosophy teacher] Hypatia [who was murdered by the Church] apolitical, they deliberately refrained from involvement in politics in order to dissociate themselves from the other type of initiates, the Illuminati who had been enmeshed in patriarchal and theocratic power games from their outset,” Lash concludes.

The Illuminati may be considered to be apostate Gnostics who abandoned their role of enlightening humankind in order to reap the benefits and entitlements of the Ruling Class.

Now as before the Illuminati continue to move towards their goal – a feverish dream of world domination culminating in the so-called New World Order (One World Government), which simply means Global Techno-Feudalism.

This has always been Metaphysical Warfare. And humankind’s choice is once again – Freedom or Slavery.

Maybe the “Know-It-Alls” – a derogatory term used by the Church against the Gnostics – might be able to help them out…

About the Author

Writer and Artist URI DOWBENKO is the author of Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy and Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open. He is also the founder and publisher of www.ConspiracyPlanet.com, www.ConspiracyDigest.com,www.AlMartinRaw.com, and www.InsiderIntelligence.com, as well as the publisher of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider by Al Martin. You can visit Uri atwww.UriDowbenko.com and www.NewImprovedArt.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 18.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice.

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Someone recently asked: “Should the oppressive content of monotheistic religions be respected and left alone or challenged and questioned?” It’s a loaded question which, needless to say, provoked a lively debate on the nature of religion as a force for oppression and negativity in the world today. As one person expressed it: “Christianity is a restrictive, damaging, violent, oppressive, totalitarian, hypocritical, patriarchal cult that has caused 2000 years of pain, suffering and misery to countless millions.”

It’s not hard to see why so many people think this way – religious wars and persecution have, over the centuries, killed untold millions; the tenets of Holy scriptures used as a justification for a litany of crimes against humanity, from the Crusades in the Near East and the conquest of the New World and subsequent genocide of the indiginous population, to the horrific Inquisition and the frequent slaughter of heathens “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Today, religious institutions continue to come under intense criticism, often completely justified, as is the case with the ongoing scandals of child abuse and corruption or encouragement of violent extremism (something fundamentalist Christians are as guilty of as their fundamentalist Islamic counterparts). Judaism, too, is often deliberately equated with Zionism, in order to absolve the state of Israel any culpability for its crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people and other Arab neighbours.

The considerable atheist backlash against religious organizations and their impact on the development of the species is understandable – and yet, ironically, sometimes these reactions betray another type of close-minded dogmatism, one which seeks to deny that religion has any form of value whatsoever and should be entirely discarded in favour of a new ideology; a kind of “militant atheism” whose adherents set out to attack religion whilst propagating their own perceived certainties. It is an irony which is perhaps best summed up by the foundation of the first “atheist church” in London earlier this year; while calls to stamp out religion altogether resound with Evangelical zeal.

A legitimate response to the view that religion is a destructive force in the world is that the institution has perverted decent and right-thinking tenets for its own nefarious ends; that Holy scriptures intended to enlighten and liberate have become warped into dogma and orthodoxy – tools of control to manipulate the masses. The ambiguous nature of these texts – the allegories and parables loaded with hidden meaning and symbolism – are, by their nature, open to misinterpretation and abuse.

But while this may be true, to suggest that this quality makes them somehow inherently flawed on account of their institutional manipulation and therefore ultimately worthless is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Christianity, for instance, has a rich and diverse history which denies simplistic characterization. Compare the Christian Gnostics or Neoplatonists with the early Roman Christians where Greco-Roman pantheism still played a role, to the Catholic church and the huge schisms of the Protestant Reformation, and it is clear how impossible it is to define Christianity as any one thing. There are probably more Christian denominations scattered around the globe today than at any other point in history, with an influence as equally varied.

Few would deny that the current economic system is one of the most destructive forces in the world today, exacerbating poverty as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow exponentially. Loans made with excessive and abusive interest rates plunge millions into debt, an immoral practice known as usury. All the main religions, from Judaism and Christianity to Islam and Buddhism, have condemned this practice, with numerous references found throughout the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Qur’an and even the ancient Indian Vedas. Few would disagree that the world would be a significantly better place without the unscrupulous practices of modern day moneylenders.

The luminous poetry of William Blake – a religious man hugely critical of the church – may well be one of the finest examples of the reconciliation of the rebellious nature against religious orthodoxy existing paradoxically within the framework of faith in God; a man who understood that “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” and sought equality and liberty for all. Heavily influenced by the Gnostics, Blake has been described by some as a visionary anarchist.

Other historical religious groups have spearheaded radical political movements: the 17th century Diggers were a group of Protestants who sought to reform the social order and create a system of small rural communities based on egalitarian principles – they were to influence the San Francisco Diggers of the 1960s, the community anarchists and radical activists of Haight-Ashbury. Their influence was felt again in the revival of anarchism and the anti-road movements in the UK in 2011. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s views on anarchism were pacified by his devotion to Christianity. In his 1900 essay “On Anarchy”, Tolstoy wrote: “The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution.”

William Blake is one who recognised how the profound spiritual truths of religious texts were sunk into obscurity by the institution of the Church. He condemned the sophistry of theological thought, which endorsed individual repression where “sin” bound men’s desires, while at the same time excusing acts of evil and injustice. These criticisms still stand today, not least in the manner in which religious institutions often deny that any kind of spiritual understanding can come from within. The Gnostics and many others were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church after the Council of Nicea in 325, and the Church ended up becoming self-proclaimed arbiters of “spiritual enlightenment” whereby the average person could only encounter the divine through the medium of the priest.  The pulpit often stands as an emblem for the spreading of dogmatic ignorance in the form of false wisdoms, subverting Christ’s teachings with skillful sophistry to protect its own wealth and authority.

As the mainstream monotheistic religious institutions continued to dominate and expand their global influence, “dissenting” groups such as the Gnostics were forced underground where they would become part of a rich Western tradition of esoteric wisdom and hidden knowledge, incorporating the occult teachings of the ages, from Hermeticism and the Kabbalah through to alchemy and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Isaac Newton, a founding father of the modern scientific method, was profoundly influenced by the occult and was described by John Maynard Keynes in 1942 as “not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians”. As well as being a practicing alchemist, he believed he was specially chosen by God for the task of understanding Biblical scripture. These characteristics certainly cast a new light on a man who is often thought of as the archetypal materialist scientist. Newton ushered in an era dominated by the mechanistic view of the universe which went on to exclude the alchemical and religious views that Newton himself considered of vital importance.

Newton’s broad-ranging study of the occult coupled with his profound influence on shaping modern scientific thought exemplifies the way in which freedom from ideological restrictions of any description encourages thinking with the potential to create new paradigms. Dogmatism which inhibits these paradigm shifts can be scientific as well as religious, as has become increasingly apparent in the recent developments into the study of consciousness. Graham Hancock’s TEDx talk The War on Consciousness, in which he discussed the role  of ancient and sacred visionary plants and shamanism in our understanding of the mind, is a prime example of the negative impact of such scientific dogmatism.

After only a short time available to the public on the TED YouTube channel the organization removed the video, claiming the presentation “contained serious factual errors that undermine TED’s commitment to good science” and accusing Hancock of “pseudoscience”. After failing to qualify these accusations with any supporting evidence and facing an intense backlash from the public, TED was forced to backtrack and retract their initial statement. The video was uploaded in an obscure location on their blog, with TED maintaining that Hancock’s views were well outside “orthodox scientific thinking”.

For many, the expression “orthodox scientific thinking” lay at the heart of the decision to remove Graham Hancock’s talk from their channel – the attacks on his credibility and the petty, unprofessional accusations, unsupported by any kind of rigorous analysis of specific details which he could refute, were little more than masks to hide what was fundamentally an ideological issue. TED demonstrated that they represent precisely the kind of materialist scientific thinking which Hancock explicitly stated in his talk was incapable of dealing with the difficult questions of consciousness. A paradigm which precludes even the possibility of the experiential validity of shamanic altered states of consciousness and refuses to question the position that consciousness resides entirely in the brain inevitably greets such ideas with automatic ridicule and rejection.

Yet progress is only ever made when orthodox thinking is challenged – the scientific method itself involves proposing hypotheses as explanations of phenomena not fully understood. In taking the position of the rigid sceptic in dealing with Hancock’s approach to consciousness, TED, whose slogan is “Ideas Worth Sharing”, demonstrated that conformity to established doctrines takes precedence over radical new ideas truly worth sharing.

Just as the “oppressive content” of monotheistic religions should be rigorously challenged, so too should we challenge scientific materialism when it seeks to deny explorations into new avenues of inquiry which contradict its ideological position, as well as atheism when it calls for the abolition of religion and everything associated with it. But we should also recognise the positive aspects of different beliefs and integrate them in order to gain a broader understanding with the potential to surpass “conventional wisdom” (which, as history shows us, more often than not turns out to be untrue). As Einstein said (and Newton appeared to understand), “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

About the Author

Andy Dilks writes on culture and politics at http://orwellwasright.wordpress.com/ - he is currently working on a book about the complete hisfory of mind-altering drugs.

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Feeling a bit aerie fairy lately?

Feeling a bit like: Shiiit, I went real cosmic there, say for almost 4 weeks and now 3D reality kicked in…. What happened?

Had my karma, dharma, downloading new software, high frequency charged master cleansing going on, so nothing should predictably go wrong here…Was about to enter the Ashtar-Command big effing spaceship for the few chosen ones, but they suddenly decided I wasn’t worthy… and sure didn’t want my kids on the cosmic-matrix-shooting for the Nebula – whatever constellation.

Ain’t that a bitch.

No it ain’t. It´s very cool.

It’s all about being here. Head in 5D maybe, I might rephrase that to: The clouds, and feet – u know those walking devices you’ll see if you look down – on the ground please. Of course your cosmic babbling got interrupted because that’s why you are here.
You know: Incarnation and shit.

If you weren’t supposed to be here: you wouldn’t.

Or maybe that equation is simply too hard to handle. If you think so, dang!
We just discovered your Dharma: to sort that equation out…

It’s very hard to approach spiritual excuses or explanations for a bit of a “too much” spiritual sugarcoating very distorted behavior. Because people don’t like to get that myth punctured. The myth of them being on the wrong planet on the wrong time in the wrong country with the wrong partner and the wrong friends or whatever.

The fact that you are bitching about these circumstances in your life could maybe reveal: You’re not orbiting cosmos after all, or you wouldn’t complain. See?

Still subscribing to the: I create my own life and its circumstances?

Okay: Have a contradiction here?

Touchdown.

I mean I have seen grown women profoundly infantile covering that up with being in touch with their inner child.

I mean I have seen grown men with a backbone soft as a sloppy noodle afraid to take a decision in order not to produce negative karma.

Lotta folks are very spiritually afraid. And that’s exactly what a Sticky-New-Age-Cliché-Matrix will do. Transform ordinary problems into cosmic ones and the misunderstood airhead is ready for the rising – the elevation – aborting the planet in strange patterns, fleeing every mundane challenge with the:
Cosmic Excuse to calm the self-percepted elitist mind-game-shit stir up.

C´mon. Get effing real.

We all have a lotta shit in our burden basket, that UFO`s or 46 Teddy bears in the bed won’t solve. 3D – 3D – 3D!

It’s really difficult if you engage in this and try to make people comprehend, that they would need to touch down in earthly reality to solve their earthly problems. Maybe solve them from a spiritual higher perspective, yes: Most beneficial.

But solving not fleeing could be the key… think?

Maybe it’s not worth it, maybe one shouldn’t.

Being far from perfect, I must admit that if I see a person is about to be run over by a bus I like to give them a holler.

Now I find myself gazing at people standing, while elevating into the Ashtar-matrix, cuddling their pinky teddy bear and going: I´m too cosmic for this place.

Really?

Want to sober a bit up, join in the sweet pull of gravity and go for nut cracking in the Matrix.

It´s such a joy.

About the Author

Soren Dreier is the author of Zen-Haven, an excellent blog with mind-blowing perspectives on the modern world.

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As I write this dozens of trainers in Philadelphia near completion of a 17-day intensive called the “Super-T,” a kind of boot camp for trainers. In the 1950s, there was no place I could go to learn this kind of activist facilitation training, even though Paulo Freire was doing groundbreaking work in his “pedagogy of the oppressed” and the Gandhi-influenced Muslim leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan had used training to prepare his Pashtun nonviolent army for combat with the British Empire.

We’ve come a long way since the 1950s, when the civil rights movement was being seeded by Congress of Racial Equality trainings in church basements and Rosa Parks attended workshops at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. Now even advanced training for activist trainers is available. Training for Change, an organization I co-founded, has led over 20 Super-Ts. These facilitator marathons have attracted activists from dozens of countries on five continents.

I’m grateful that today’s teenagers don’t need to get lucky and find a mentor, as I did by apprenticing to Charlie Walker in the 1950s. Today the Ruckus Society, Seeds of Peace UK, Pace e Bene, the Centre for Applied Non Violent Actions and Strategies — that is, CANVAS — and many other training organizations exist to help people gain skills. Training organizations in turn use Training for Change to upgrade their own skills and work collaboratively on projects like the Global Power Shift this week in Istanbul. We’ve made major progress just in my lifetime, but much more is needed to meet the multiplying opportunities for change.

Why more training now?

The history of training is a history of playing catch-up. Very few movements seem to realize that the pace of change can accelerate so rapidly that it outstrips the movement’s ability to use its opportunities fully. In Istanbul a small group of environmentalists sit down to save a park, and suddenly there are protests in over 60 Turkish cities; the agenda expands, from green space to governance to capitalism; doors open everywhere. It would be a good moment to have tens of thousands of skilled organizers ready to seize the day, supporting smart direct action and building prefigurative institutions. But excitement alone may slacken; as with the Occupy movement, spontaneous creativity has its limits.

With the right skills, movements can sustain themselves for years against punishing, murderous resistance. The mass direct action phase of the civil rights movement pushed on effectively for a decade after 1955. Mass excitement doesn’t need to fizzle in a year. A movement thrives by solving the problems it faces.

Anti-authoritarians don’t want to count on a movement’s top leaders to be the problem-solvers, but instead to develop shared leadership by fostering problem-solving smarts at the grassroots. There’s nothing automatic about grassroots problem-solving. How well people strategize, organize, invent creative tactics, reach effectively to allies, use the full resources of the group and persevere at times of discouragement — all that can be enhanced by training.

Nothing is more predictable than that there will be increased turbulence in the United States and many other societies. Activists cause some of the turbulence by rising up; other turbulence results from things like climate change, the 1 percent’s austerity programs and other forces outside activists’ immediate control.

Increased turbulence scares a lot of people. It’s only natural that people will look around for reassurance. The ruling class will offer one kind of reassurance. The big question is: What reassurance will the movement offer?

When students in Paris in May 1968 launched a campaign that quickly moved into nationwide turbulence, with 11 million workers striking and occupying, there was a momentary chance for the middle class to side with the students and workers instead of siding with the 1 percent. The movement, though, didn’t understand enough about the basic human need for security and failed to use its opportunity. That was a strategic error, but to choose a different path the movement would have required participants with more skills. Training would have been necessary. We can learn from this, inventory the skills needed and train ourselves accordingly.

What is training ready to do for us?

Here are a few of the key benefits that we should expect to gain from one another through training:

1. Increase the creativity of direct action strategy and tactics. The Yes Men and the Center for Story-Based Strategy lead workshops in which activist groups break out of the lockstep of “marches-and-rallies.” We need to have a broad array of tactics at our disposal, and we have to be ready to invent new ones when necessary.

2. Prepare participants psychologically for the struggle. The Pinochet regime in Chile depended, as dictatorships usually do, on fear to maintain its control. In the 1980s a group committed to nonviolent struggle encouraged people to face their fears directly in a three-step process: small group training sessions in living rooms, followed by “hit-and-run” nonviolent actions, followed by debriefing sessions. By teaching people to control their fear, trainers were building a movement to overthrow the dictator.

3. Develop group morale and solidarity for more effective action. In 1991 members of ACT UP — a militant group protesting U.S. AIDS policy — were beaten up by Philadelphia police during a demonstration. The police were found guilty of using unnecessary force and the city paid damages, but ACT UP members realized they could reduce the chance of future brutality by working in a more united and nonviolent way. Before their next major action they invited a trainer to conduct a workshop where they clarified the strategic question of nonviolence and then role-played possible scenarios. The result: a high-spirited, unified and effective action.

4. Deepen participants’ understanding of the issues. The War Resisters League’s Handbook for Nonviolent Action is an example of the approach that takes even a civil disobedience training as an opportunity to assist participants to take a next step regarding racism, sexism and the like. When we understand how seemingly separate struggles are connected, it helps us create a broader, stronger, more interconnected movement.

5. Build skills for applying nonviolent action in situations of threat and turbulence.In Haiti a hit squad abducted a young man just outside the house where a trained peace team was staying; the team immediately intervened and, although surrounded by twice their number of guards with weapons, succeeded in saving the man from being hung. Through training, we can learn how to react to emergencies like this in disciplined, effective ways.

6. Build alliances across movement lines. In Seattle in the 1980s, a workshop drew striking workers from the Greyhound bus company and members of ACT UP. The workshop reduced the prejudice each group had about the other, and it led some participants to support each other’s struggle. Trainings are a valuable opportunity to bring people from different walks of life together and help them work toward their common goals.

7. Create activist organizations that don’t burn people out. The Action Mill, Spirit in Action, and the Stone House all offer workshops to help activists to stay active in the long run. I’ve seen a lot of accumulated skill lost to movements over the years because people didn’t have the support or endurance to stay in the fight.

8. Increase democracy within the movement. In the 1970s the Movement for a New Society developed a pool of training tools and designs that it shared with the grassroots movement against nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement went up against some of the largest corporations in America and won. The movement delayed construction, which raised costs, and planted so many seeds of doubt in the public mind about safety that the eventual meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant brought millions of people to the movement’s point of view. The industry’s goal of building 1,000 nuclear plants evaporated. Significantly, the campaign succeeded without needing to create a national structure around a charismatic leader. Activists learned the skills of shared leadership and democratic decision-making through workshops, practice and feedback. In my book Facilitating Group Learning, I share many lessons that have evolved from Freire’s day to ours.

I hope that readers of this column will add to the list of training providers in the comments, since I’ve only named some. My intention is to remind us that this could be the right moment, before the next wave of turbulence has all of us in crisis-mode again, to increase training capacity for grassroots skill-building. We’ll be very glad we did.

About the Author

George Lakey is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation(City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

This article originally appeared at WagingNonViolence.org, an outspoken voice for peaceful change in our violent world.  Click here to support their noble efforts.

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If man is not affected in some way by the Moon, he is the only thing on Earth that isn’t.
– Robert Millikan (1868-1953), US physicist & 1923 Nobel Prize winner

Probably no heavenly body has received as much attention down through the ages as our Moon. The causes of this fascination are obvious: the Moon enlightens the night and appears as a remarkable and large object in the sky. As a regulator of Earth’s tides and life’s biological cycles, the Moon’s importance to our physical existence is second only to that of the Sun.

Sacred scriptures, ancient myths, and even modern day pagans, all exalt the Moon in one way or another. Omens, spells, wishes, oracles, divination, and calendars cluster around it throughout history. Moon magic, the belief that working rituals at the time of different phases of the Moon brings about physical or psychological changes, is essential to various pagan and witchcraft systems. Witches in Greek and Roman literature were regularly accused of ‘drawing down the Moon’ by use of a magic spell.

Nevill Drury, a respected authority on mystical and occult traditions, says “traditionally… the Moon has been regarded as a ‘funnel’ drawing on the light of the stars and constellations and transmitting their energies to the Earth.”¹

In Western astrology the Moon is said to represent the feeling intuitive nature of the individual as well our deepest personal needs, our basic habits and reactions, and our unconscious. In esoteric astrology the Moon represents attachment to form, and under certain circumstances a variety of limiting conditions are related to the Moon, ranging from blatant materialism to subtler forms of limitation such as debilitating nostalgia, sentiment and regret.

The word “lunacy” – which derives from the Latin for Moon, “luna” – denotes the traditional link made in folklore between madness and the phases of the Moon. Several studies have tried to get to the bottom of this age-old belief. A 1976 report compared 34,318 crimes against lunar cycles. It found offences occurred more frequently during a full Moon. Other research, however, failed to find any firm link between the cycles of the Moon and irrational behaviour.

England’s Lunacy Act of 1842 gave allowances for uncharacteristic crimes committed during the full and new Moon. This law distinguished between the chronically insane and the lunatic. It was argued the lunatic became deranged at these times because of the Moon’s power and thus could not be held accountable for his or her actions.

Interestingly, a study of the Moon’s effect on mental health patients, conducted by the University of Liverpool in 2000, found a significant change at the time of the full Moon, but only in subjects with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, the Moon exerts some sort of influence upon our biological and psychological states. But does it go any deeper than this?

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

The Fourth Way philosophy claims to help individuals cease to be slaves of external and internal influences by building up a core of heightened consciousness. Its ultimate goal is the realisation of the full potential of human evolutionary possibilities. Its founder, George Gurdjieff (1872-1949), frequently spoke of the thoughtless mechanical behaviour of humanity, and was fond of commenting humans are “food for the Moon.”

What did Gurdjieff mean by this phrase? Many interpreted “food for the Moon” as a figure of speech – perhaps Gurdjieff meant we are slave to our mechanical conditioning and feed our baser impulses. But while it can be interpreted in this fashion, Gurdjieff was primarily being literal.

Peter Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most famous disciple, lectured at length concerning the Moon’s role in human affairs and its place in the cosmological scheme of things.

Ouspensky said the Moon drives the individual’s mechanical aspects like a pendulum moves the gears of a clock. The degree to which one’s actions are driven by the Moon is proportional to one’s level of contact with higher influences. For people incapable of moving themselves through life by nobler spiritual impulses, the Moon provides a propulsive force. Without this force, mechanical individuals would be passive as puppets without a puppeteer.

In the cosmological scheme proposed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Earth is like a mother to the Moon which is still a fetus in the sense it cannot yet “breathe” on its own, hold an atmosphere, or support life. Someday, the Earth will evolve into a being like the Sun, while the Moon will transform into a second Earth. Humanity was simply a stage in this process.

“The Moon is actually a fragment of this Earth, which must now constantly maintain the Moon’s existence,” Gurdjieff said.² In that sense, the Moon is like a parasitic thought form. Nevertheless, the equation is balanced because in exchange for the Moon propelling our mechanical movement, we feed the Moon so that it may grow and one day be born as a living planet.

As to how organic life feeds the Moon, Gurdjieff taught that most human beings are mere “slugs” with no souls and that following death their remaining psychic energy is “food for the Moon.” Like a magnet, the Moon draws the fine matter of human souls into it: “Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the Moon. The Moon is a huge living being feeding upon all that lives and grows on the Earth.”

Only through an intensive effort of conscious evolution – what he called “self-remembering” – was it possible for an individual to escape being eaten by the Moon. “The liberation that comes with the growth of mental powers and faculties is liberation from the Moon.” Gurdjieff always maintained Man is not truly conscious, and his actions are entirely mechanical: “Everything ‘happens,’ he cannot ‘do’ anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside.”

To escape these deleterious lunar influences, Ouspensky said we must “create Moon within ourselves.”³ By this he meant we must develop within a driving mechanism that takes the place of the external lunar influence; in this way we can break free of the puppeteer.

Boris Mouravieff, who was an associate of both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, formulated an esoteric system for spiritual evolution founded upon the inner traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy and Fourth Way principles. His extensive three volume work, Gnosis, deals extensively with the question of lunar influences and spiritual development.

He concurs with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky on the role of the Moon, but also warns “that organic life functions as a transmitter station sending refined energy to the Moon to assist its growth. Despite increases in the human population and thus an increase in quantity of energy transferred, times of peace do not produce sufficient energy and so catalysts for suffering such as wars and catastrophes arise to sustain the process.”⁴

Mouravieff and Ouspensky emphasise that despite the hypnotic nature of the Moon and the urgent necessity for individuals to overcome its influence, there is still an important cosmological reason for its existence. If nothing else, the Moon’s unique position in relation to the Earth was paramount in making physical ‘conscious’ life possible.

Theosophy

Together with Henry Steel Olcott, Madame H.P. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Theosophy, the “grandmother” of today’s “New Age” movement, tells us the Moon was home to an earlier “life wave” which has since migrated to Earth.

In The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky states the Moon served a dual purpose in religious rites: “Personified as a female goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded… But whether male or female…, the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good.”

Perhaps the Moon is identified with evil rather than good because it is now what Madame Blavatsky calls “a dead planet.”

How did this occur? An article by William Quan Judge elaborates: “in a remote period, when there was no Earth, the Moon existed as an inhabited globe, died, and at once threw out into space all her energies leaving nothing but the physical vehicle. Those energies revolved and condensed that matter in space nearby and produced our Earth; the Moon, its parent, proceeding towards disintegration but compelled to revolve around her child, this Earth.”⁵

To fully appreciate why all this happened, a study of Theosophical cosmology is required, but space does not permit a full explanation here.

Elsewhere in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky’s view of the Moon’s relationship to the Earth is similar to Fourth Way thinking:

“The moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers are transfused. She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny. Constantly vampirised by her child, she revenges herself on it, by soaking it through and through with the nefarious, invisible and poisonous influence which emanates from the occult side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although the body which they had formed, is soulless and lifeless.”

Theosophy differs from the Fourth Way which holds the Moon is not yet ready to sustain life. But they both agree the Moon is vampirising the life forms of Earth.

Are we food for the Moon, or are these warnings the ravings of lunatics? Although modern science tells us we have nothing to worry about, ancient wisdom and folklore paint a very different picture. Ignoring these dangers has perhaps left us wide open, more so when we do not recognise the signs or symptoms of the Moon’s ‘drawing up’ effect.

Whatever the reality, the Fourth Way, Theosophy and all schools of esoteric philosophy have the solution. By overcoming our mechanical tendencies, we strengthen our resistance to the lunar effect, and for that matter all planetary influences. And by “creating Moon” within ourselves – that is, building up our essential self – we not only gain victory over the negative lunar influence, but awaken to a higher level of consciousness.

About the Author

JASON JEFFREY holds an interest in a wide range of subjects including geopolitics, the ‘New World Order’, Big Brother, suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development, ancient civilisations and esotericism. He can be contacted at jasonjeffrey88@gmail.com

Footnotes:

1.  The Dictionary of the Esoteric by Nevill Drury, Watkins Publishing, London 2002
2.  In Search of the Miraculous by P. Ouspensky, 1949
3. The Fourth Way by P. Ouspensky, 1957
4.  Gnosis II: Study And Commentaries On The Esoteric Tradition Of Eastern Orthodoxy, Book Two, Mesoteric Cycle, by Boris Mouravieff, Praxis Institute, 1992
5.  “Moon’s Mystery and Fate”, Path, June, 1894.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

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Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organised religion?

Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.

Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as ‘men’, who sit down to take food like any mortal person.

Influence of the Magi

It was not until post-exilic times – i.e. after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC – that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.

The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or ‘shining ones’, and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.

Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels – a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone – the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch

Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as ’îrin (’îr in singular), “those who watch”, or simply ‘watchers’ as the word is rendered in English translation.

The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and ‘descend’ on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).

The 200 rebels realise the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.

After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen ‘wives’, and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning ‘those who have fallen’, which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or ‘giants’.

Heavenly Secrets

In between taking advantage of our women, the 200 rebel angels spent their time imparting the heavenly secrets to those who had ears to listen. One of their number, a leader named Azazel, is said to have “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals (of the earth) and the art of working them”, indicating that the Watchers brought the use of metal to mankind. He also instructed them on how they could make “bracelets” and “ornaments” and showed them how to use “antimony”, a white brittle metal employed in the arts and medicine.

To the women Azazel taught the art of “beautifying” the eyelids, and the use of “all kinds of costly stones” and “colouring tinctures”, presupposing that the wearing of make-up and jewellery was unknown before this age. In addition to these crimes, Azazel stood accused of teaching women how to enjoy sexual pleasure and indulge in promiscuity – a blasphemy seen as ‘godlessness’ in the eyes of the Hebrew storytellers.

Other Watchers stood accused of revealing to mortal kind the knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy, the knowledge of the clouds, or meteorology; the “signs of the earth”, presumably geodesy and geography, as well as the “signs”, or passage, of the celestial bodies, such as the sun and moon. Their leader, Shemyaza, is accredited with having taught “enchantments, and rootcuttings”, a reference to the magical arts shunned upon by most orthodox Jews. One of their number, Pênêmûe, taught “the bitter and the sweet”, surely a reference to the use of herbs and spices in foods, while instructing men on the use of “ink and paper”, implying that the Watchers introduced the earliest forms of writing. Far more disturbing is Kâsdejâ, who is said to have shown “the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away”. In other words he taught women how to abort babies.

These lines concerning the forbidden sciences handed to humanity by the rebel Watchers raises the whole fundamental question of why angels should have possessed any knowledge of such matters in the first place. Why should they have needed to work with metals, use charms, incantations and writing; beautify the body; employ the use of spices, and know now to abort an unborn child? None of these skills are what one might expect heavenly messengers of God to possess, not unless they were human in the first place.

In my opinion, this revelation of previously unknown knowledge and wisdom seems like the actions of a highly advanced race passing on some of its closely-guarded secrets to a less evolved culture still striving to understand the basic principles of life.

More disconcerting were the apparent actions of the now fully grown Nephilim, for it says:

And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

By now the cries of desperation from mankind were being heard loud and clear by the angels, or Watchers, who had remained loyal to heaven. One by one they are appointed by God to proceed against the rebel Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim, who are described as “the bastards and the reprobates, and the children of fornication”. The first leader, Shemyaza, is hung and bound upside down and his soul banished to become the stars of the constellation of Orion. The second leader, Azazel, is bound hand and foot, and cast for eternity into the darkness of a desert referred to as Dûdâêl. Upon him are placed “rough and jagged rocks” and here he shall forever remain until the Day of Judgement when he will be “cast into the fire” for his sins. For their part in the corruption of mankind, the rebel Watchers are forced to witness the slaughter of their own children before being cast into some kind of heavenly prison, seen as an “abyss of fire”.

Seven Heavens

The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over mountains and seas to the “seven heavens”. Here he sees multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.

Elsewhere in ‘heaven’ is Eden, where God planted a garden for Adam and Eve before their fall – Enoch being the first mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.

Finally, during the life of Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah, the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.

The Sons of God

What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic passages in Chapter 6. The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads as follows:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.

By ‘sons of God’ the text means heavenly angels, the original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim. In Verse 3 of Chapter 6 God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh its life-span will henceforth be shortened to “an hundred and twenty years”. Yet in Verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:

The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.

As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC. If this was the case, then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasise the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch’s great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the compilation of Genesis. This claim of precedence over the Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine (AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!

Roots of the Nephilim

There is another enigma contained within the lines of Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different traditions.

Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse 4 states firmly: “The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and also after thatwhen the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men (author’s emphasis)”.

And also after that…

The meaning seemed clear enough: there were two quite separate traditions entangled here – one concerning the fallen race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the Watchers in Enochian tradition. Theologians are aware of this dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels fell from grace twice – once through pride and then again through lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much later term – plausibly from Iran – that entered Genesis 6 long after its original compilation.

In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.

So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited this world, then who or what were these seemingly physical beings? Where did they come from? What did they look like? Where did they live and what was their ultimate fate?

The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with regard to their former existence, but I needed more – other less tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.

Then came an important break.

The Dead Sea Connection

Hebrew scholars had long noted the similarities between some of the reactionary teachings in the Book of Enoch and the gospels according to the Essenes – a fundamental, yet very righteous religious community spoken of by classical scholars as having existed on the western shores of the Dead Sea. This connection was strengthened after 1947 when it was realised that among the Dead Sea Scrolls, now considered to have been written by the Essenes, were various fragments of texts belonging to several copies of the Book of Enoch. Up until this time the only complete manuscript copies available to the literary world had been various copies written in the Ethiopian written language of Ge’ez, the first of which had been brought back to Europe by the Scottish explorer and known Freemason James Bruce of Kinnaird following his famous travels in Abysinnia between 1769 and 1772.

Not only did the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the authenticity of the Book of Enoch, but they also showed that it had been held in great esteem by the Essene community at Qumran, who may even have been behind its original construction sometime after 165 BC. More importantly, Hebrew scholars also began to identify various other previously unknown tracts of an ‘Enochian’ flavour among the Dead Sea corpus, and these included further references to the Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim. Many of these individual fragments were eventually realised by Dead Sea scholar J.T. Milik to be extracts from a lost work called the Book of Giants.

Previously this had only been known from isolated references in religious texts appertaining to the Manichaeans, a heretical gnostic faith that swept across Europe and Asia, as far as China and Tibet, from the third century AD onwards.

The Book of Giants continues the story told in the Book of Enoch, relating how the Nephilim had coped with knowing that their imminent destruction was due to the improprieties of their Watcher fathers. Reading this ancient work allows the reader a more compassionate view of the Nephilim, who come across as innocent bystanders in a dilemma beyond their personal control.

Visage Like A Viper

Yet aside from this still very fragmentary treatise, other Enochian texts have surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls which in my opinion are just as important. One of these is the Testament of Amram.

Amram was the father of the lawgiver Moses, although any biblical time-frame to this story is irrelevant. What is much more significant is the appearance of the two Watchers who appear to him in a dream-vision as he rests in his bed, for as the heavily reconstructed text reads:

[I saw Watchers] in my vision, the dream-vision. Two (men) were fighting over me, saying… and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, ‘Who are you, that you are thus empo[wered over me?’ They answered me, ‘We] [have been em]powered and rule over all mankind.’ They said to me, ‘Which of us do yo[u choose to rule (you)?’ I raised my eyes and looked.] [One] of them was terr[i]fying in his appearance, [like a s]erpent, [his] c[loa]k many-coloured yet very dark… [And I looked again], and… in his appearance, his visage like a viper, and [wearing...] [exceedingly, and all his eyes...].

The text identifies this last Watcher as Belial, the Prince of Darkness and King of Evil, while his companion is revealed as Michael, the Prince of Light, who is also named as Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness. It is, however, Belial’s frightful appearance that took my attention, for he is seen as terrifying to look upon and like a ‘serpent’, the very synonym so often used when describing both the Watchers and the Nephilim. If the textual fragment had ended here, then I would not have known why this synonym had been used by the Jewish scribe in question. Fortunately, however, the text goes on to say that the Watcher possessed a visage, or face, “like a viper”. Since he also wears a cloak “many-coloured yet very dark”, I had also to presume that he was anthropomorphic, in other words he possessed human form.

Visage like a viper…

What could this possibly mean? How many people do you know with a “visage like a viper”? For over a year I could offer no suitable solution to this curious metaphor.

Then, by chance, I happened to overhear something on a national radio station that provided me with a simple, though completely unexpected answer. In Hollywood, Los Angeles, there is a club called the Viper Room. It is owned by actor and musician Johnny Depp, and in October 1993 it hit the headlines when up-coming actor River Phoenix tragically collapsed and died as he left the club following a night of over-indulgence. In the media publicity that inevitably surrounded this drugs-related incident, it emerged that the Viper Room gained its name many years beforehand when it had been a jazz haunt of some renown. Story goes that the musicians would take the stage and play long hours, prolonging their creativity and concentration by smoking large amounts of marijuana. Apparently, the long term effects of this drug abuse, coupled with exceedingly long periods without food and sleep, would cause their emaciated faces to appear hollow and gaunt, while their eyes would close up to become just slits. Through the haze of heavy smoke, the effect was to make it seem as if the jazz musicians had faces like vipers, hence the name of the club.

This amusing anecdote sent my mind reeling and enabled me to construct a mental picture of what a person with a “visage like a viper” might look like; their faces would appear long and narrow, with prominent cheekbones, elongated jawbones, thin lips and slanted eyes like those of many East Asian racial types. Was this the solution as to why both the Watchers and Nephilim were described as walking serpents? It seemed as likely a possibility as any, although it was also feasible that their serpentine connection related to their accredited magical associations and capabilities, perhaps even their bodily movements and overall appearance.

The Appearance of Feathers

Another important reference to the appearance of Watchers comes from the so-called Secrets of the Book of Enoch, also known as 2 Enoch, a kind of sequel to the original work written in Greek and dating to the first century AD. The passage refers to the unexpected arrival of two Watchers as Enoch rests on his bed:

And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers:… [purple], their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.

White skin (often ruddied “as red as a rose”), tall stature and facial radiances “like the sun” all recur frequently in connection with the appearance of angels and Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature. Yet what was this reference to their dress having “the appearance of feathers”? Might it relate in some way to the “cloak” worn by the Watcher named Belial who appears in the Amram story, which was said to have been “many-coloured yet very dark”, precisely the effect one might expect from a coat of black feathers, like those belonging to crows or vultures perhaps?

In spite of the fact that Christian art has invariably portrayed angels with wings, this tradition goes back no further than the third or fourth century AD. Before this time true angels (Cherubim and Seraphim did have multiple sets of wings) appeared in the likeness of “men”, a situation that often prompted textual translators to add wings on to existing descriptions of angels. This has almost certainly been the case in the above account taken from 2 Enoch, which was re-copied many times during the early years of Christianity.

With this observation in mind, I felt that the statement concerning the Watchers dress having “the appearance of feathers” was very revealing indeed. It also seemed like an over-sight on the part of the scribe who conveyed this story into written form, for having added wings to the description of the two “men”, why bother saying they wore garments of feathers? Surely this confusion between wings and feather coats could have been edited to give the Watchers a more appropriate angelic appearance.

Bird Shamans

Somehow I knew it was a key to unlocking this strange mystery, for it suggested that, if the Watchers had indeed been human, then they may have adorned themselves in garments of this nature as part of their ceremonial dress. The use of totemic forms, such as animals and birds, has always been the domain of the shaman, the spirit walkers of tribal communities. In many early cultures the soul was said to have taken the form of a bird to make its flight from this world to the next, which is why it is often depicted as such in ancient religious art. This idea may well have stemmed from the widely-held belief that astral flight could only be achieved by using ethereal wings, like those of a bird, something that almost certainly helped inspire the idea that angels, as messengers of God, should be portrayed with wings in Christian iconography.

To enhance this mental link with his or her chosen bird, shamans would adorn their bodies with a coat of feathers and spend long periods of time studying its every movement. They would enter its natural habitat and watch every facet of its life – its method of flight, its eating habits, its courtship rituals and its actions on the ground. In doing so they would hope to become as birds themselves, an alter-personality adopted on a semi-permanent basis. Totemic shamanism is more-or-less dependent on the indigenous animals or birds present in the locale of the culture or tribe, although in principle the purpose has always been the same – using this mantle to achieve astral flight, divine illumination, spirit communication and the attainment of otherworldly knowledge and wisdom.

So could the Watchers and Nephilim have been bird-men?

The answer is almost certainly yes, for in the Dead Sea text entitled the Book of Giants, the Nephilim sons of the fallen angel Shemyaza, named as ’Ahyâ and ’Ohyâ, experience dream-visions in which they visit a world-garden and see 200 trees being felled by heavenly angels. Not understanding the purpose of this allegory they put the subject to the Nephilim council who appoint one of their number, Mahawai, to go on their behalf to consult Enoch, who now resides in an earthly paradise. To this end Mahawai then:

[...rose up into the air] like the whirlwinds, and flew with the help of his hands like [winged] eagle [...over] the cultivated lands and crossed Solitude, the great desert, [...]. And he caught sight of Enoch and he called to him…

Enoch explains that the 200 trees represent the 200 Watchers, while the felling of their trunks signifies their destruction in a coming conflagration and deluge. More significant, however, is the means by which Mahawai attains astral flight, for he is said to have used “his hands like (a) [winged] eagle.” Elsewhere in the same Enochian text Mahawai is said to have adopted the guise of a bird to make another long journey. On this occasion he narrowly escapes being burnt up by the sun’s heat and is only saved after heeding the celestial voice of Enoch, who convinces him to turn back and not die prematurely – a story that has close parallels with Icarus’s fatal flight too near the sun in Greek mythology.

In addition to this evidence, a variation of this same text equates Shemyaza’s sons “not (with) the… eagle, but his wings”, while in the same breath the two brothers are described as “in their nest”, statements which prompted the Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that, like Mahawai, they too “could have been bird-men”.

This was compelling confirmation that angels were originally a culture or tribe who practised a form of bird shamanism, perhaps associated with a dark carrion bird such as the crow or vulture.

* * *

Since the Enochian and Dead Sea literature was written by olive-skinned Jews of the post-exilic period, it is quite clear they were reciting traditions concerning a completely different race from a completely different climate. So who were these human angels, and where might they have lived?

Since we now know that the legends of the fall of the angels most probably originated in Iran, more precisely in the north-western kingdom of Media (modern-day Azerbaijan), then there is every reason to associate these traditions with the mountains beyond Media. This is tentatively confirmed by another Dead Sea text entitled the Genesis Apocryphon which records that after his ascent to heaven the patriarch Enoch spent the rest of his life “among the angels” in “paradise”. Although the term “paradise” is used in some translations of the original text, the actual word is “Parwain”.

I was therefore quite stunned to find that among the ancient traditions of the Mandaeans, a Magi-linked religion found mostly among the Marsh Arabs of Lower Iraq, “Parwan” is a holy mountain apparently located in the vicinity of Media in northwestern Iran. Furthermore, both “Parwan” and “Parwain” would appear to derive their root from the old Median word “Parswana”, meaning “rib, side, frontier”, used to describe the peoples and territories beyond the borders of Media.

These would have included the region of Parsa to its south and, more significantly, the mountainous region known as Parsua to its west.

Was Enoch therefore believed to have lived “among the angels” in the harsh mountainous territoriesbeyond the limits of the ancient kingdom of Media? In the remote region of Parsua, to the west of Media, perhaps? Is this where the Watchers came from? Is it from here that they descended on to the plains to take mortal wives and reveal the forbidden arts and secrets of heaven?

In Iranian tradition the realm of the immortals and the seat of the mythical godkings of Iran (who like the fallen race of Judaic tradition were said to have been tall in stature with ivory white skin and shining countenances), was known as the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse. Traditions fostered by the Magi imply quite clearly that this ethereal domain was located among the mountains of Media.

All roads appeared to lead to the mountainous region of modern-day Azerbaijan, which forms the eastern-most flanks of a vast snow-capped expanse that stretches west to the Taurus mountains of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria; north to the remote regions of Russian Armenia; and south-east along the length of the Zagros mountains, as they gradually descend towards the Persian Gulf and act as a virtually impenetrable barrier between Iraq and Iran.

This enormous, mostly desolate part of the earth, home in the most part to wandering nomads, bands of warring rebels, isolated religious communities and the occasional village, town or city, is known to the world as Kurdistan – the cultural and political homeland of the much troubled Kurdish peoples.

Yet according to biblical and apocryphal tradition, it was here also that the Garden of Eden, the resting place of Noah’s Ark and the stomping ground of the early patriarchs could be found. It was here too that I now realised I would have to go in search of the realm of the immortals.

Eastwards, in Eden

The Book of Genesis speaks of God establishing a garden “eastwards, in Eden”. Here Adam and Eve became humanity’s first parents before their eventual fall from grace through the beguiling of the subtle Serpent of Temptation. Serpents were not only a primary synonym for the Watchers and Nephilim, but the Book of Enoch even states which “Serpent”, or Watcher, led our first parents into temptation. Interestingly enough, the Bundahishn, a holy text of the Zoroastrian faith, cites Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit and father of the daevas, as assuming this same role, and like the Watchers he too is described as a serpent with “legs”.

So where was Eden? All we know is that it was situated among the Seven Heavens, a paradisical realm with gardens, orchards and observatories in which the angels and Watchers reside in the Book of Enoch.

The word ‘Eden’ is translated by Hebrew scholars as meaning ‘pleasure’ or ‘delight’, a reference to the fact that God created the garden for the pleasure of mankind. This is not, however, its true origin. The word ‘Eden’ is in fact Akkadian – the proto-Hebrew, or Semitic, language introduced to Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) by the people of Agade, or Akkad, a race that seized control of the ancient kingdom of Sumer during the second half of the third millennium BC. In their language the word ‘Eden’, or edin, meant a ‘steppe’ or ‘terrace’, as in a raised agricultural terrace.

Turning to the word ‘paradise’, I found that this simply inferred a ‘walled enclosure’, after the Persian rootpairi, ‘around’, and daeza, ‘wall’. It is a late-comer to Judaeo-Christian religious literature and was only really used after the year 1175 AD.

The English word ‘heaven’, on the other hand, is taken from the Hebrew ha’shemim, interpreted as meaning ‘the skies’. It can also refer to ‘high places’, such as lofty settlements. Moreover, the Hebrew word-root shm can mean ‘heights’, as well as ‘plant’ or ‘vegetation’, implying perhaps that the word ‘heaven’ might be more accurately translated as a ‘planted highlands’.

This quick round of simple etymology, in my opinion at least, conjured the image of a walled, agricultural settlement with stepped terraces placed in a highlands region. So is this what Eden was – a ‘walled, agricultural settlement’ placed among the mountains of Kurdistan? Had it been tended by angels under the dominion of the heavenly Watchers as is suggested by the text of the Book of Enoch?  More importantly, where had it been located?

The Rivers of Paradise

The Book of Genesis says that from Eden stemmed the headwaters of the four rivers of paradise. The names of these are given as the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Of these four, only the last can properly be identified by name. The Euphrates flows through Turkish Kurdistan, Syria and Iraq before emptying into the Persian Gulf. The other three were identified by early biblical scholars respectively with the Ganges of India (although occasionally the Orontes of northern Syria), the Nile of Africa and the Tigris of western Asia, which, like its sister river the Euphrates flows through Iraq and empties into the Persian Gulf. The first two were chosen as suitable substitutes simply because they were looked upon by scholars as the mightiest rivers of the classical world; only the connection between the Hiddekel and the Tigris made any sort of geographical sense.

In no way could it be said that all four of these rivers rose in the same geographical region, a problem that was conveniently overlooked by theologians before the re-discovery of cartography in the sixteenth century. Other sources, particularly the Armenian Church, accepted the Euphrates and Tigris as two of the four rivers of paradise, yet chose to associate the other two, the Pishon and Gihon, with, respectively, the Greater Zab, which rises in Turkish Kurdistan and empties into the Tigris, and the Araxes, which rises in Armenia and empties into the Caspian Sea.

Had the Armenian Church been right to do this? Possibly yes, as they were the inhabitants of the geographical region in question and may well have been privy to local traditions unavailable to the outside theological world.

Whatever the identities of the four rivers of paradise, Kurdish tradition places their headwaters in the vicinity of Lake Van, an enormous inland sea – some 60 miles across and around 35 miles wide – situated on the border between Turkish Kurdistan and Armenia. Indeed, legend records that the Garden of Eden now lies ‘at the bottom of Lake Van’, after it was submerged beneath the waves at the time of the Great Flood.

Curiously enough, it is the mountain of Cudi Dag, or Mount Judi, south of Lake Van that the Moslems as well as the various different faiths of Kurdish extraction locate the so-called Place of Descent, the site where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the Great Flood. The attribution of this very same location with the more familiar Mount Ararat is a pure Christian invention that has no real basis in early religious tradition.

All this therefore implied that the compilers of the Book of Genesis placed both the birth-place of humanity, i.e. the Garden of Eden, and its point of regeneration after the Great Flood in the same general region of northern Kurdistan, surely a clue to the fact that the key to the origins of the Watchers lay in this same geographical area of the map.

The Heavenly Mountain

There is much more, however, for it is not just the Iranian and Jewish races that cite Kurdistan as the cradle of civilisation. The mythologies of both the Sumerians, who ruled the various Mesopotamian city-states from around 3000 BC onwards, and their eventual conquerors, the Akkadians, placed the homeland of the gods in this exact same region. The Akkadians originated as a Semitic, or proto-Hebrew, race of uncertain origin, and in their religious literature this heavenly abode is referred to asKharsag Khurra, the heavenly mountain. Here the gods, also known as the Anannage, lived in a paradisical realm with gardens, orchards, temples and irrigated fields that not only resemble the Seven Heavens described in the Book of Enoch, but is actually referred to on more than one occasion as edin, the Akkadian for ‘steppe’ or ‘plateau’.

Even further linking Kharsag with the Jewish domain of angels is the knowledge that the Anannage, like the Enochian Watchers, were governed by a council of seven. These undoubtedly equate with the seven archangels of post-exilic Judaism as well as the six so-called Amesha Spentas, or ‘bounteous spirits’, who with the supreme god Ahura Mazda, preside over the angelic hierarchies in Iranian tradition.

Were the Anannage, the gods and goddesses of Kharsag, simply another form of the Watchers of Enochian and Dead Sea literature, whose homeland was a lofty agricultural settlement called Eden or heaven, located somewhere amid the mountains of Kurdistan?

The Search for Dilmun

Kharsag is not the only name used by the ancient Mesopotamians to refer to their place of first beginnings. This cradle of civilisation was also known by the name Dilmun, or Tilmun. Here, it was said, the god Ea and his wife were placed to institute “a sinless age of complete happiness”. Here too animals lived in peace and harmony, man had no rival and the god Enlil “in one tongue gave praise”. It is also described as a pure, clean and “bright” “abode of the immortals” where death, disease and sorrow are unknown and some mortals have been given “life like a god”, words reminiscent of the Airyana Vaejah, the realm of the immortals in Iranian myth and legend, and the Eden of Hebraic tradition.

Although Dilmun is equated by most scholars with the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, there is evidence to suggest that a much earlier mythical Dilmun was located in a mountainous region beyond the plains of Sumer. But where exactly was it located?

Mesopotamian inscriptions do not say; however, the Zoroastrian Bundahishn text and the Christian records of Arbela in Iraqi Kurdistan both refer to a location named Dilamân as having existed around the headwaters of the Tigris, south-west of Lake Van – the very area in which the biblical Eden is said to have been located.

Furthermore, Ea (the Akkadian Enki) was said to have presided over the concourse of Mesopotamia’s two greatest rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – which are shown in depictions as flowing from each of his shoulders. This would have undoubtedly have meant that the head-waters, or sources, of these rivers would have been looked upon as sacred to Ea by the cultures of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent.

More curious is the knowledge that, as in Hebrew and Iranian myth, there would appear to have been a fall of the gods of Anu, the Anannage. Whilst 300 of their number remained in heaven, some 600 others, under the leadership of Nergal, god of the underworld, settled among mortal kind. Here they provided mankind with everything from basic agriculture, to astronomy, land irrigation, building technology and structured society.

Sounds familiar?

These rebel Anannage lived “in the earth”, a reference to an “underworld” realm connected with the ancient city of Kutha, north of Babylon. In this “House of Darkness” lived “demons” and Edimmu, giant blood-sucking vampires who would return to the surface world after dark to steal the souls of the undead.

Could these infernal beings be a distorted memory of the rebel Watchers and their monstrous offspring, the Nephilim? Might these fallen angels have lived in underground cities after their descent on to the plains?

The Bodies of Birds

Ancient Mesopotamia fathered whole pantheons of devils and demons – each class having its own appearance, functions and attributes. Some were beneficial to mankind, while others caused only pain, suffering and torment in the mortal world.

In the story of the goddess Ishtar’s descent to the underworld, preserved in Assyrio-Babylonian tradition, the “chiefs” of the “House of Darkness” were said to have been “like birds covered with feathers”, who “from the days of old ruled the earth, (and) to whom the gods Anu and Bel have given terrible names”. In one cuneiform tablet written in the city of Kutha by a scribe “in the temple of Sitlam, in the sanctuary of Nergal” it describes the incursions into Mesopotamia of a race of demons, fostered by the gods in some nether region. They are said to have waged war on an unnamed king for three consecutive years and to have had the appearance of:

Men with the bodies of birds of the desert, human beings with the faces of ravens,

these the great gods created,

and in the earth the gods created for them a
dwelling…

in the midst of the earth they grew up and became great, and increased in number,

Seven kings, brothers of the same family,

six thousand in number were their people.

These “men with the bodies of birds” were looked upon as “demons”. They would appear only once a storm-cloud had consumed the deserts and would slaughter those whom they took captive, before returning to some inaccessible region for another year.

There seems every reason to suggest that these fierce “demons” were not incorporeal spirits at all, but beings of flesh and blood adorned in cloaks of feathers and bird paraphernalia.

But who were these human demons, and how did they relate to the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia?

Uncertain Forces

The Sumerians were a unique people with their own language and culture. Nobody knows their true origin or where exactly they may have obtained the seeds of knowledge that helped establish the various city-states during the fourth millennium BC. Yet the Sumerians themselves were quite explicit on this point. They said their entire culture had been inherited from the Anannage, the gods of Anu, who had come from an ancestral homeland in the mountains. To emphasise this point they used an ideogram of a mountain to denote “the country”, i.e. Sumer, and built seven-tiered ziggurats in honour of these founder gods.

Was it possible therefore that the proposed Watcher culture of Kurdistan provided the impetus for the rise of western civilisation?

Archaeologists have no problem accepting Kurdistan as the cradle of Near Eastern civilisation. Shortly after the recession of the last Ice Age, c.8500 BC, there emerged in this region some of the earliest examples of agriculture, animal domestication, baked and painted pottery, metallurgy and worked obsidian tools and utensils. Curiously enough, from c.5750 BC onwards for several hundred years the trade in raw and worked obsidian throughout Kurdistan seems to have been centred around an extinct volcano named Nemrut Dag on the south-western shores of Lake Van, the very area in which both the mythical lands of Eden and Dilmun are likely to have been located.

Kurdistan was undoubtedly the point of origin of the so-called Neolithic explosion from the ninth millennium BC onwards. Indeed, it is because of this settled community lifestyle in Kurdistan that the earliest known form of token bartering developed. This primitive method of exchange eventually led to the establishment of the first written alphabet and ideogram system on the Mesopotamian plains sometime during the fourth millennium BC. It is therefore understandable that civilisation first arose in the Fertile Crescent during this same age. From here, of course, it quickly spread to many other regions of the Old World.

In the light of this information it appears that the evolution of the Middle East seems cut and dry, the actions of a few sophisticated protoneolithic farming communities located in the mountains and foothills of Kurdistan being responsible for the growth of civilised society. Yet what caused this so-called ‘neolithic explosion’, and why on earth did it start in this remote, and very mountainous, region? Something was missing, for as Mehrdad R. Izady, a noted scholar of Kurdish cultural history, has observed:

The inhabitants of this land went through an unexplained stage of accelerated technological evolution, prompted by yet uncertain forces. They rather quickly pulled ahead of their surrounding communities, the majority of which were also among the most advanced technological societies in the world, to embark on the transformation from a low-density, hunter-gatherer economy to a high-density, food producing economy.

What might these “yet uncertain forces” have been? Were they the Watchers, who were said to have provided mankind with the forbidden arts and sciences of heaven? If so, was I overlooking important evidence already unearthed by the spades of palaeontologists and archaeologists that might support such a wild hypothesis?

Turning to the archaeological reports and transactions on excavations in Kurdistan, I searched long and hard. What I found astounded me. For instance, in the late 1950s Ralph and Rose Solecki, two noted anthropologists, were uncovering the different occupational levels inside a huge cave overlooking the Greater Zab river at a site known as Zawi Chemi Shanidar, when they made a discovery of incredible significance to this debate. They unearthed a number of goat skulls placed alongside a collection of wing bones belonging to large predatory birds. All of the wings had been hacked from the bodies of the birds in question, while many had still been in articulation when found. Carbon 14 dating of the organic deposits associated with these remains indicated a date of 10,870 years (+/-300 years), that is 8870 BC.

The bird wings were subsequently identified as those of four Gyptaeus barbatus (the bearded vulture), one Gyps fulvus (the griffon vulture), seven Haliaetus albicilla (the white-tailed sea eagle) and one Otis tarda (the great bustard) – only the last of which is still indigenous to the region. There were also the bones of four small eagles of indeterminable species. All except for the great bustard were raptorial birds, while the vultures were quite obviously eaters of carrion.

The discovery of these severed bird wings had posed obvious problems for the Soleckis. Why had only certain types of birds been selected for this purpose, and what exactly had been the role played by these enormous predatory birds in the minds of those who had placed them within the Shanidar cave?

Shaman’s Wings

In an important article entitled ‘Predatory Bird Rituals at Zawi Chemi Shanidar’, published by the journal Sumer in 1977, Rose Solecki outlined the discovery of the goat skulls and bird remains. She suggested that the wings had almost certainly been utilised as part of some kind of ritualistic costume, worn either for personal decoration or for ceremonial purposes. She linked them with the vulture shamanism of Çatal Hüyük, a protoneolithic community in central Anatolia (Turkey), which reached its zenith a full 2000 years after these bird’s wings had been deposited 565 miles away in the Shanidar cave. Rose Solecki recognised the enormous significance of these finds, and realised that they constituted firm evidence for the presence of an important religious cult in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area, for as she had concluded in her article:

The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal remains we have described for the site must represent special ritual paraphernalia. Certainly, the remains represent a concerted effort by a goodly number of people just to hunt down and capture such a large number of birds and goats… (Furthermore, that) either the wings were saved to pluck out the feathers, or that wing fans were made, or that they were used as part of a costume for a ritual. One of the murals from a Çatal Hüyük shrine… depicts just such a ritual scene; i.e., a human figure dressed in a vulture skin…

Here was extraordinary evidence for the existence of vulture shamans in the highlands of Kurdistan c.8870 BC! What’s more, all this was happening just 140 miles south-east of the suggested location for Eden and Dilmun on Lake Van at a time when the highland peoples of Kurdistan were changing from primitive hunter-gatherers to settled protoneolithic communities. Might these goats skulls and predatory bird remains have some connection with the “yet uncertain forces” behind the sudden Neolithic explosion in this region? Remember, I had already established that the Watchers wore coats of feathers, plausibly those of the crow or vulture.

My mind reeled with possibilities. What on earth had been going on in this cave overlooking the Greater Zab, which, of course, has been cited as one of the four rivers of paradise? Had it been visited by Watchers, human angels, in the ninth millennium BC? The presence of the predatory bird remains made complete sense, but what about the fifteen goat skulls – how might they have fitted into the picture?

A Goat for Azazel

The Pentateuch records how each year on the Day of Atonement a goat would be cast into the wilderness “for Azazel”, carrying on its back the sins of the Jewish people. Moreover, Azazel, one of the two leaders of the fallen angels, was said to have fostered a race of demons known as the seirim, or ‘he-goats’. They are mentioned several times in the Bible and were worshipped and adored by some Jews. There is even some indication that women actually copulated with these goat-demons, for it states in the Book of Leviticus: “And they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices unto the he-goats (seirim), after whom they go a whoring”, perhaps a distant echo of the way in which the Watchers had taken wives from among mortal kind. This clear relationship between the Watchers and he-goats is so strong that it led Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that Azazel “was evidently not a simple he-goat, but a giant who combined goat-like characteristics with those of man”. In other words, he had been a goat-man – a goat shaman.

So it seemed that not only were the Watchers “bird-men”, vulture shamans indulging in otherworldly practices, but also goat shamans. It is bizarre to think that this association between Azazel and the goat was the impetus behind the goat becoming a symbol of the devil, as well as the reason why the world is so adverse to the inverted pentagram today.

The Peacock Angel

Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady also sees the predatory bird remains of the Shanidar cave as evidence of a shamanistic culture whose memory influenced the development of angel lore. Kurdistan is home to three wholly indigenous angel-worshipping cults – the most notorious and enigmatic of these being the Yezidis of Iraqi Kurdistan. Their beliefs centre around a supreme being named Melek Taus, the ‘peacock angel’, who is venerated in the form of a strange bird icon known as a sanjaq. These statues, which sit on a metal column similar to a candlestick, are usually made of copper or brass. More curious is that the oldest known sanjaqs are clearly not peacocks at all, showing instead a bulbous avian body and head with a hooked nose. Izady has suggested that the sanjaq idols are more likely to be representations of a predatory bird like those apparently venerated by the shamans of Shanidar, in other words either the vulture, eagle or bustard.

The Jarmo People

All this was good news, for its helped vindicate the idea of an advanced culture existing in the mountains of Kurdistan at the point of inception of the Neolithic revolution. If it was these vulture shamans who had carried this superior knowledge to the gradually developing farming communities of the lower foothills, then perhaps they really were the truth behind the myth of the Watchers who imparted the heavenly sciences to mankind. There was, however, no description of these shamans beyond the appearance of their ceremonial garments. Did they in any way resemble the tall, white-skinned individuals with shining countenances and viper-like faces referred to in the Enochian and Dead Sea literature? Might there also be archaeological evidence for the former existence of a race bearing at least some of these distinctive features?

Indeed there is, for at a place called Jarmo, which overlooks the Lesser Zab river in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an advanced protoneolithic community that thrived from around 6750 BC for up to 2000 years; indeed, the oldest known examples of primitive metallurgy have been found at Jarmo. More interesting is the knowledge that these people were a dab hand at producing small sculpted images in slightly-baked clay. Literally thousands of these figurines have been unearthed from the earliest occupational levels upwards. Most of them depict animals and birds. Some represent typically human heads, while others show a female figure, plausibly a representation of the Mother Goddess.

It almost appeared as if the Jarmo community enjoyed capturing images of the world around them, in much the same way that we take photographs today. Yet if this was the case, then how can we explain the presence among these small figurines of several anthropomorphic heads with elongated faces, slit eyes and clear ‘lizard’, or more correctly serpentine features? They are virtually inhuman in appearance and have more in common with bug-eyed aliens than abstract human forms.

Seeing pictures of these Jarmo heads sent a shiver down my spine, for the better examples bore striking similarities to the description of Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature. Was it therefore possible that the neolithic people of Jarmo were depicting in partially abstract form the viper-like faces of the tall strangers in feather coats who would pay them uninvited visits? Was it these strangers who had provided communities like the one at Jarmo with the knowledge of metallurgy as well as the basic rudiments of agriculture?

We can only speculate, but it is worth pointing out that obsidian tools found at Jarmo are known to have been fashioned from raw material obtained from the base of Nemrut Dag on Lake Van. Did the Watchers deal in obsidian? Might these finely-worked tools be a sign of their presence among other similar-like communities of Kurdistan?

* * *

By 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish foothills were beginning to descend in great numbers on to the plains of Mesopotamia. It was around this date that Eridu (the biblical Erech), the Fertile Crescent’s first city, was established with its own temple complex that included an underground ritual pool.

Sometime around 5000 BC saw the arrival on to the northern plains of Mesopotamia of a new culture who are known today as the Ubaid (after Tell al’Ubaid, the mound-site where their presence was first detected during excavations by the eminent Near Eastern archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1922). They brought with them their own unique artistic style and funerary practices, including the habit of placing very strange anthropomorphic figurines in the graves of the dead. The statuettes were either male or female (although predominantly female), with slim, well-proportioned naked bodies, wide shoulders, and strange reptilian heads that scholars generally refer to as ‘lizard-like’ in appearance. They bear long, tapered faces like snouts, with wide, eye-slits – usually elliptical pellets of clay pinched to form what are known as ‘coffee-bean’ eyes – and a thick, dark plume of bitumen on their heads to represent a coil of erect hair (similar coils fashioned in clay appear on some of the heads found at Jarmo). All statuettes display either female pubic hair or male genitalia.

Each Ubaid figurine has it own unique pose. By far the strangest and most compelling shows a naked female holding a baby to her left breast. The infant’s left hand clings on to the breast, and there can be little doubt that it is suckling milk. It is a very touching image, although it bears one chilling feature – the child has long slanted eyes and the head of a reptile. This is highly significant, for it suggests that the baby was seen as having been born with these features. In other words, the ‘lizard-like’ heads of the figurines are not masks, or symbolic animalistic forms, but abstract images of an actual race believed by the Ubaid people to have possessed such reptilian qualities.

In the past these ‘lizard-like’ figurines have been identified by scholars as representations of the Mother Goddess – a totally erroneous assumption since some of them are obviously male – while ancient astronaut theorists such as Erich von Daniken have seen fit to identity them as images of alien entities. In my opinion, both explanations attempt to bracket the clay figurines into popular frameworks that are insufficient to explain their full symbolism. Furthermore, since most of the examples found were retrieved from graves, where they were often the only item of any importance, Sir Leonard Woolley concluded that they represented “chthonic deities” that is, underworld denizens connected in some way with the rites of the dead.

In addition to this realisation, it seems highly unlikely that they represent lizard-faced individuals, since lizards are not known to have had any special place in Near Eastern mythology. Much more likely is that the heads are those of serpents which are known to have been associated with Sumerian underworld deities such as Ningiszida, Lord of the Good Tree.

Since the heads of the Ubaid figurines appear to be styled on the much earlier examples found at Jarmo in the Kurdish mountains, were they highly abstract representations of viper-faced Watchers?

That these figurines were found specifically in grave sites suggests that they were connected with some kind of superstitious practice involving rites of the dead. What were the Ubaid attempting to achieve by placing such strange images alongside their deceased relatives? Were they trying to ensure the safe passage of the soul into the next world, or were they attempting to protect the corpse once the burial had taken place?

In later Babylonian tradition there was a true fear that if the dead were not interred in the correct manner, then their souls would be taken down into the underworld to become blood-sucking Edimmu. Is this what the Ubaid feared – that their departed would be made into vampires if the viper-faced Watchers were not appeased in the current manner? Did this include the burial of figurines bearing abstract features connected with their distorted memory of the fallen race?

The Underworld

Although no trace of any underworld domain can today be found in Mesopotamia, chthonic citadels of extreme antiquity do exist in the Near East. For example, beneath the plains of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey there are no less than 36 underground cities, the most famous being the one at Derinkuyu which is estimated to have housed some 20,000 inhabitants. Those cities explored so far penetrate downwards for anything up to a quarter of a mile. They have streets, complex tunnel systems, living quarters and communal rooms and areas. Each one can be sealed off from the outside world by rolling into place huge circular doors, while on the surface the only visible sign of their presence are upright megalithic stones marking the positions of deep wells that double-up as air shafts to the various levels.

No one knows who built these underworld domains. They are at least 4000 years old, while tentative evidence suggests they were constructed as early as 9000 BC, when the final thrust of the last Ice Age was about to bring arctic-style conditions to the Middle East. At the same time rains of fire spewed out of active volcanoes, and when the Ice Age finally receded floods comparable with the deluge of the Bible wreaked havoc in low-lying areas. Moreover, Persian myth records that the ancestors of the Iranian race had escaped the long winter of snow and ice by building a var, a word denoting an underground city (curiously, the word ark means “city” in the Persian language).

The memory of such subterranean worlds are also likely to have been behind the Judaeo-Christian belief in Gehenna and Hell – the fiery realm into which the fallen angels were cast as a punishment for their interference in the affairs of mankind.

Cappadocia’s Lunar Landscape

In the same general vicinity as the underground cities of Cappadocia is a virtual lunar landscape made up of thousands of enormous rock cones whittled into shape by fierce winds over many thousands of years. Local tradition refers to them as peri bacalari, the fire chimneys of the Peri – beautiful fallen angels born of Iblis, the Arab-Persian form of Satan. These ‘fairy chimneys’, as they are inappropriately referred to in English, are today said to be haunted by the djinn, spectral relatives of the angels who also once lived in heaven before their fall.

Many of these ‘fairy chimneys’ were occupied during early Christian times, while a number of them were actually fashioned into rupestral or troglodyte churches from the sixth century onwards. The oldest contain many fascinating images beyond the accepted iconography of the Early Church. These include recurring geometric designs and, in one case a stylised bird-man, which may well reflect an art-style found in the 8000-year-old vulture shrines at Çatal Hüyük. The close proximity of both this unique ‘Christian’ art and the site of Çatal Hüyük to the underground cities cannot be overlooked. Remember too that in the story of Ishtar’s descent into the underworld the goddess encounters beings “like birds covered with feathers”, who “from the days of old ruled the earth”.

Is it possible that the dwellers of the underground cities were indeed the forerunners of those who built the sub-surface citadel of Çatal Hüyük? Might they have been connected with the shamanistic Watcher culture of the Kurdish highlands, which lay some distance to the east of Cappadocia?

Children of the Djinn

If so, then where might these strange shamanistic cultures have originated? Did it simply develop in Turkey and Kurdistan shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, or had its original ancestors migrated from some foreign land? The angel-worshipping cults of Kurdistan see themselves only as descendents of the patriarch Noah, the saviour of humanity whose direct family settled in their land. In contrast, the Kurdish Jews preserve a very curious story concerning the origins of their gentile neighbours, whom they refer to as “children of the djinn”. They say that long ago King Solomon ordered 500 djinn to find him 500 of the most beautiful virgins in the world. They were not to return until every last one was in their possession. The djinn had set about their immense task, going to Europe to seek out the maidens. Finally, after gathering together the correct number, the djinn were about to return to Jerusalem when they learnt that Solomon had passed away. In a dilemma, the djinn decided what to do. Should they return the girls to their rightful homes in Europe, or should they remain with them? Because the young virgins had “found favor in the eyes of the jinn, the jinn took them unto themselves as their wives. And they begot many beautiful children, and those children bore more children… And that is the way the nation of the Kurds came into being”.

In another version of the same story, 100 genies are dispatched by Solomon to search out 100 of the world’s most beautiful maidens for his personal harem. Having achieved this quota, Solomon then dies and the 100 genies decide to settle down with the maidens amid the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan. The offspring of these marriages result in the foundation of the Kurdish race, “who in their elusiveness resemble their genie forefathers and in their handsomeness their foremothers”.

As non-sensical as these legend may seem, they attempt to explain the inexplicable foreign features of certain Kurdish communities and point to their origin in the biblical kingdom of Solomon, in other words modern-day Israel.

Mountain of the Madai

The Mandaeans of Lower Iraq are more specific about the origin of their race. Although their direct ancestors are said to have come from a mythical location known as the Mountain of the Madai in Iranian Kurdistan, before that their most distant ancestors apparently originated in Egypt. Even though this might seem a mere fantasy on the part of the Mandaeans, it is a fact that their language contains various words that are undoubtedly of ancient Egyptian origin. More importantly, they believe that after death the soul flies north (i.e. towards the mountains of Kurdistan) where it enters a mythical domain known as Mataratha, the place of judgement. Here the intelligences of the neter, the watch-houses, can be found. The term neter can be used as a noun in some Near Eastern languages to mean ‘watchers’, the very name of the first angels given in Enochian and Dead Sea literature, while in the ancient Egyptian language this same word is used to define the semi-divine beings who lived in a golden age known aszep tepi, the First Time. Was it possible that the Watchers of Kurdistan were descendents of the neter-gods of Egypt?

The First Farmers

Although the neolithic explosion is known to have begun in the mountains of Kurdistan sometime around 8500 BC, this was not the genesis of early agriculture, animal domestication, precision tool manufacture and structured community lifestyles. There is strong evidence that they were all present at various sites along the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan as early as 12,500 BC. These advanced communities continued to develop at a steady pace until 10,500 BC, when suddenly they ceased farming for no obvious reason. Scholars have put this complete and utter cessation of a sophisticated agricultural-based lifestyle among the Nilotic peoples down to the extremely high Nile floods which occurred during this epoch. Yet in my opinion there was something more behind this extraordinary U-turn on the part of these communities.

It almost seemed as if those who had taught the Nilotic peoples the rudiments of an agricultural lifestyle had suddenly departed the scene, leaving their obedient pupils to return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles more familiar to the age in question. It is therefore interesting to note that after its apparent disappearance from Egypt c.10,500 BC, agriculture does not reappear again until it blossoms in Kurdistan a full 1500 years later. Is it therefore possible that the teachers of the Nilotic communities departed Egypt for Kurdistan sometime between 10,500 and 9000 BC? Who exactly were these hypothetical agronomists and what made them leave the cultivated steppes of palaeolithic Egypt for pastures new? More importantly, were they the ancestors of the Watchers, the human angels of Enochian and Dead Sea tradition?

Redating the Sphinx

Hard evidence now emerging from Egypt strongly suggests that the Great Sphinx of Giza was not carved during Pharaonic times, as has always been believed, but much earlier instead. As has been widely publicised over the past few years, the geological profile of this most ancient of monuments suggests that it was fashioned before the gradual desiccation of the Middle East in the fourth millennium BC. The intense weathering on its body would appear to have been induced, not by sand erosion, but by rain precipitation over the course of many thousands of years. The last time that rain fell in such profusion was during the period known to climatologists as the neolithic sub-pluvial which occurred between 8000 and 5000 BC. This suggests that the Sphinx was carved either during or before this time.

The Sphinx is quite obviously a lion, the head of which was re-carved in Pharaonic times to represent a king wearing the nemes-headdress. Orientated exactly due east, it gazes out towards the point on the horizon where the sun rises each spring and autumn equinox. Its function is like that of a time-marker, a minute hand on a clock, recording the return of the solar orb as it passes through its 365-day cycle. Yet it also possesses a less obvious, though perhaps more important ‘hour’ hand, and this one marks the minuscule shift in the starry canopy as it turns about its 26,000-year cycle of precession. This visual effect is caused by the extremely slow wobble of the earth, which might be compared with the swaying action of a child’s spinning top if revolving at a snail’s pace.

Built in the Age of Leo

In astronomical terms the phenomenon known as precession causes the 12 zodiacal constellations to shift backwards in line with the ecliptic, the sun’s path, in a regular sequence. In simple terms, this means that the stars rising alongside the sun make way for another constellation every 2160 or so years until all 12 signs have completed this astronomical merry-go-around. To ‘read’ precession as a long-term time-cycle the ancients noted which sign rose with the sun on the spring equinox, the zero-point of the yearly calendar in many Middle Eastern cultures. If we look today towards the eastern horizon just before sun-rise on 21 March we will see the stars of Pisces. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 330 BC, the stars of Aries the ram were seen rising with the equinoctial sun, and when the Pyramids of Giza were built in c.2500 BC, it was the stars of Taurus the bull that rose with the sun on the spring equinox.

If the Great Sphinx was carved as an equinoctial marker at the same time the neighbouring Pyramids were constructed in Pharaonic times, then surely it would make more sense if it was a bull. Making it a lion hints at a connection with the stars of Leo, suggesting that it marked an age when the constellation of Leo rose with the equinoctial sun. The last Age of Leo occurred between 10,970 and 8810 BC, suggesting that the construction date of the Great Sphinx fell somewhere within this time-frame. This is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. As far as I am aware, this theory was first put forward by British astro-mythologist Gerald Massey in 1907. In an extraordinary work entitled Ancient Egypt – The Light of the World he boldly concluded that “… we may date the Sphinx as a monument which was reared by these great (Egyptian) builders and thinkers, who lived so largely out of themselves, some thirteen thousand years ago (i.e. in the age of Leo, its astronomical counterpart).”

More recent astro-mythological evidence presented by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval in their 1996 book Keeper of Genesis, convincingly demonstrates that the Great Sphinx, as well as the ground-plan of the Giza plateau as a whole, must date as early as 10,500 BC, the very time-frame given for the sudden cessation of proto-agriculture along the Nile.

Since we know that the great stone blocks removed from the sunken enclosure around the leonine monument at the time of its construction were used to build the nearby Sphinx and Valley Temples, then these too must date from the same distant epoch of human history. All this indicates the presence in Egypt around 10,500 BC of an advanced culture adept in agronomy, engineering, building technology, as well as astro-mythology and geomythics that included a profound knowledge of the earth’s 26,000-year precessional cycle.

Who were these people? Were these builders of the Great Sphinx really the ancestors of the tall, viper-faced Watchers of Kurdistan? Folklore, legend and the spread of Old World agriculture would appear to support this view. Yet if this was the case, then what happened to make this Egyptian Elder culture want to migrate to the highlands of Kurdistan?

Global Destruction

As has already been adequately demonstrated elsewhere (Hapgood, 1958 & 1970; Hancock, 1995; Flem-Ath, 1995), there is ample evidence that as the last Ice Age came to a close in the eleventh and tenth millennia BC, the world was shaken by a series of severe climatic changes and geological upheavals. Volcanoes erupted, earthquakes shook the ground, floods poured across the landscape and long periods of darkness blotted out the sun. This led to the destruction of countless millions of animals and the outright extinction of dozens of individual species.

Cataclysm legends across the world appear to record these events in colourful and often symbolic detail.

Egypt’s proposed Elder culture would have been right in the thick of this global destruction. Certainly it is known that the climatic changes during this epoch caused wide-spread flooding along the Nile, the reason scholars have suggested for the cessation of its proto-agriculture.

Father of Terrors

It seems likely that these troubled times forced Egypt’s high culture to fragment and disperse, hence the sudden cessation of proto-agriculture among the various Nile communities. This supposition is supported by vivid accounts of fire and flood from Egypt itself. For example, surviving Coptic-Arab texts speak of the land being devastated both by floods and a great fire that came from “the constellation of Leo” – a reference not necessarily to some astronomical boloid coming from this part of the heavens, but to the time-frame in which these events occurred, in other words during the Age of Leo.

More telling is the myth of Sekhmet, the lion-headed deity in the Egyptian pantheon. Because the human race had turned its back on the ways of the sun-god Ra, or Re, whom it saw as “too old”, the fierce goddess unleashed an all-consuming fire. Her mass genocide would have resulted in the destruction of humanity had it not been for Ra’s personal intervention. He sent an intoxicating brew to cover the earth. Consuming this mixture made Sekhmet drunk so that she fell asleep.

Assuming that Sekhmet’s fierce fire was in some way representative of an all encompassing conflagration that devastated Egypt, then might the intoxicating brew that covered the earth be a memory of a subsequent flood that also overwhelmed the land? If so, then was Sekhmet herself simply an allegorical allusion to the Age of Leo? The indications are that the lion of Leo came to symbolise the age of chaos and destruction that surrounded the end of the Ice Age, perhaps the reason why the Arabs referred to the Great Sphinx as the “Father of Terrors”.

In the story of Sekhmet the survivors of the human race attempt to escape the goddess’ devastating fire either by climbing a mountain or by hiding in ‘holes’ like ‘snakes’ or ‘worms’. Similar means of protection against the cataclysms that raged during the Age of Leo are found in mythologies around the globe, while the presence of such stories in Egyptian legend point towards the break-up of the Elder culture and its subsequent re-establishment in other regions. Might this have included Cappadocia, where underground cities would appear to have been built as early as 9000 BC, and the mountains of Kurdistan, where the Watchers may well have catalysed the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as early as 8500 BC?

The date for this apparent diaspora of the Elder culture towards the end of the last Ice Age can actually be pinned down with some degree of accuracy. For instance, a ninth-century Coptic-Arab text known as Abou Hormeis records that the astronomer-priests of Egypt, having realised the imminent destruction of their race, conceded that: “The deluge was to take place when the heart of the Lion entered into the first minute of the head of Cancer.” The ‘heart of the lion’ was the name given in classical times to the star Regulus, Leo’s ‘royal star’, which lies exactly on the ecliptic, the sun’s perceived daily course across the sky. Since the constellation of Cancer follows Leo only in the precessional cycle (Leo follows Cancer in the yearly cycle), then this appears to confirm that this legend preserved, not just the memory of probable historical events, but also the approximate date in which they occurred.

At my request, electronics engineer Rodney Hale punched the astronomical information contained in the Abou Hormeis account into a computer using a Skyglobe 3.5 programme. He ascertained that the last time Leo’s ‘royal star’ would have risen and been visible on the eastern horizon just prior to the equinoctial sunrise, was around 9220 BC. When the star Regulus, the ‘heart of the lion’, no longer rose with the sun on the spring, or vernal, equinox, this would have been seen by the astronomer-priests of Egypt as a signal that the Age of Leo had come to an end, and the age of Cancer was either about to commence, or that it had already entered its ‘first minute’ of arc across the sky. This information therefore suggested that it was at this point that the Elder culture had departed Egypt in anticipation of a major deluge that was about to over-run their land.

Kosmokrator

If we now turn to Iranian tradition we find that various Zoroastrian texts, including the Bundahishn, speak of world history beginning 9000 years before the traditionally accepted date for the coming of its great prophet, Zoroaster, in 588 BC. This gives a date of 9588 BC. It was at this time, so one text states, that the faith’s dualistic deities, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were born from “the fire of the air” and “the water of the earth” – cryptic references once again to fire and flood during the age of Leo.

The twin deities vie for superiority over heaven and earth, a battle that is only settled when Zoroaster is said to have vanquished the daeva-worshipping Magi priesthoods during his own life-time. Ever since this time the ‘Good Spirit’, Ahura Mazda, has ruled supreme.

Did all this imply that the ancestors of the Iranian god-kings had first inhabited their mythical homeland, known as the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse, around 9585 BC? Give or take a few centuries, this date was remarkably close to the timeframe in which the Egyptian Elder culture would appear to have broken up. Since the Airyana Vaejah is equated with the Kurdish highlands, might this tradition also record the arrival in the region of those Elders who went on to establish the proposed Watcher culture?

According to Iranian mythology, the dualistic forces of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were born to a supreme being known as Zurvan, who symbolised ‘infinite time’. In the Roman cult of the god Mithras, which developed from primary Iranian sources, the concept of ‘infinite time’ was symbolised by a lion-headed deity. Statues depicting this leonine figure show the twelve signs of the zodiac on its chest and a snake curling up over the top of its mane. Although the deity is not identified by name (although it is occasionally linked with Aeon, a gnostic god of time), scholars of Mithraism describe it as akosmokrator, the controlling intelligence behind the phenomenon of precession.

To find a lion-headed kosmokrator that originated in a tradition that saw world history as having begun in 9588 BC, during the Age of Leo, was impossible to ignore. Could it be possible that although knowledge of the precessional cycle was understood by the Elder culture of Egypt, later cultures who inherited this tradition failed to comprehend its mechanics. So instead of Leo making way for the age of Cancer, and then Gemini, and then Taurus, the symbol of the lion became the one and only kosmokrator, or guardian of infinite time, in much the same way that the Great Sphinx became a precessional time-marker on the plateau at Giza.

Tragedy of the Fall

Egypt’s Elder culture never made it into the pages of history. The memory of their apparent descendents, the Watchers of Kurdistan, is but a hollow victory on their part. Being remembered as beautiful angels who fell from grace, or as immortal gods and goddesses, or as lustful demons who corrupted the minds of mankind, hardly befits their incredible achievements in astronomy, agriculture, geomythics, building technology and structured society. It was almost certainly the descendents of the Egyptian Elder culture who paved the way for the growth of civilisation in the Old World.

Yet these individuals did much more than this, for they would also appear to have left the world an important legacy. It can be traced in the astro-mythology and geomythics of the Giza plateau as well as in the universal myths and legends concerning global cataclysms and precessional data. It transcends all language barriers and can be ‘read’ by all. It is a simple message repeated again and again, like a recurring SOS Mayday signal, and it suggests that what befell their race could one day happen again. For whatever reason, we as a race could sink into oblivion without trace and be wiped clean from the pages of history, unless, that is, we wake up from this collective amnesia we seem to have been experiencing for the past eleven thousand years and realise that we were never the first.

Free thinkers, mystics and maverick scholars have been telling us that civilisation is much older than science would like us to believe for the past hundred years or more. Often their books repeat almost exactly the same evidence time after time. The Pyramids, Tiahuanaco, the Maya, Piri Reis, Hapgood, Plato and the Baghdad battery are just some of the buzz-words repeated again and again. Yet no one other than believers has ever taken these matters seriously.

With the re-dating of the Great Sphinx in particular, there is now too much evidence to deny that at the end of the last Ice Age a high culture existed in this world. Where these people came from is completely unknown. Some might suggest Atlantis, others will say they came from the skies, but to be honest we simply do not know. What is far more important is that we take each step at a time, and stick to hard facts, in the hope that this time the whole world will share in these greatest revelations of our time.

All notes and references used for this article can be found in the author’s book From the Ashes of Angels (published by Michael Joseph, London, ISBN 0-7181-4132-6)  

Be sure to check out the author’s article with new information in New Dawn 138 (May-June 2013). 

Selected Booklist

Bauval, Robert, and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, Wm Heinemann, London, 1996

Boyce, Mary, A History of Zoroastrianism, 1975, 3 vols., E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1989

Charles, R.H., The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1912

Eisenman, R., and M. Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Element, Shaftesbury, Dorset, 1992

Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose, When the Sky Fell – In Search of Atlantis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995

Fix, William R., Pyramid Odyssey, Jonathan-James Books, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1978

Hancock, Graham, Fingerprints of the Gods – A Quest for the Beginning and the End, Wm Heinemann: London, 1995

Hapgood, Professor Charles, The Path of the Pole, Chilton, New York, 1970

Hapgood, Professor Charles, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966, Tumstone Books,  1979

Izady, Mehrdad R., The Kurds – A Concise Handhook, Crane Russak, London, 1992

Massey, Gerald, Ancient Egypt – The Light of the World, 2 vols., T. Fisher & Unwin, London, 1907

Milik, J.T., The Book of Enoch – Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4, OUP, 1976

Morfill, W.R., edit and intro R. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1896

Ulansey, David, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries – Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, OUP, 1989.

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The other day I was talking with a person who is an addiction counselor, and of course our conversation turned to the young people who are her clients. I wondered what she sees as the core problem that brings a young person into addiction… is it peer pressure, drug advocacy in music, drug availability, escape from traumatic life events, or what?

Her opinion is that it can be any one or more of those things, but problems in the family – the mom and dad and family dynamic – this is her main culprit. Now, let’s ask ourselves… is that the real truth, or is it the system-sanctioned truth.

We know that addiction is just another manifestation of the messed up world we’re living in, and things often do come down to how men and women relate to each other, and relate to their children, but I’d like to go a little deeper.

I was there, in the California 1980s when the crack cocaine epidemic began. Without even going in to the CIA connection, I can just ease off and say that young people went for a cheap high and they didn’t know how addictive it was. It had nothing to do with how good their moms and dads were, or their families. Availability, price and the popularity of that ‘high’ drove quite a few of the people I knew into a degraded life.

Today there are definitely family problems, but there is also a huge proliferation of pharmaceutical drugs on the street, especially the opiates to which so many are addicted. How did the drugs get to the street I wonder… who is manufacturing so much more than can be prescribed legally, and who is at the top behind the drug proliferation. Who is it in the seat of power within the music industry, promoting violence, perversion, drugs and death? It’s not the kids… they’re just providing what the powers want.

Forces behind forces behind forces: so there’s a lot that young people face… the worst of it being a future under far more difficult conditions than what their parents experienced, or, no future at all.

And yet the addiction counselor says it’s mom and dad. Should we settle in then to the belief that moms and dads used to be better… our own moms and dads were better? Has something gone wrong and the male/female relationship is devolving into hell?

Yes, there is devolution going on: broken families, poverty, joblessness, abuse, sexual abuse, fatherless families – all of the manifestations of a society in a downward spiral. But at the same time there is also evolution going on. We are in a time of transformation… some turn in to the downward wind and some seek liberation from it.

I want to focus on the evolution, because this is the light at the end of this dark time… the place where there is hope to be found, for the children.

There was no illegal drug abuse in my community when I was 18 years old – alcohol abuse, but that was the norm. Families stayed together and there was a foundation to stand on… an out of balance foundation, but a foundation. I married at 18 and divorced at 27. My husband blamed the divorce on women’s liberation.

Everything out of balance must find balance, so we’re going to see whether women’s liberation can eventually be viewed as human liberation. When I was young I didn’t know that women had been beaten, imprisoned and force-fed because they wanted the right to vote and own property. I had no clue of what went before, and I imagine I wasn’t supposed to have a clue. Suffragette wasn’t in the history book.

But there was a book that led to an awakening in me… it was, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Information on Women’s Health and Sexuality. I was 25 years old at the time I read it, and the mother of two children. What a novel idea… that I could understand and appreciate my reproductive system and even enjoy a sexual response!

Everything about my body had been presented to me as something we don’t talk about: keep it in the dark please! The natural instinct of breast feeding was not addressed at all when my first child was born: the doctor handed me pills to dry up the breast milk… you don’t want that stuff leaking out! So the book on my body opened the door.

What happened at that time was that a lot of women began to realize how badly they had been made to feel about their femininity. It led to angry reactions, and women trying out free love, radical opinions, domination and aggression. We can see the spin off from that today: mothers running the show with no male counterbalance; fathers abandoning out of frustration or a programmed diminishing of responsibility.

So this is what the drug counselor bases her view upon, and it’s a legitimate phenomenon… a profound learning experience on how to catch the wrong wind in your sail.

Still I’m claiming there’s an evolutionary side… things getting better instead of worse. When women gained the right to vote it was an equalizer. Men and women remained men and women, they just both had a say. So what happened when we realized that our female physical bodies were capable of so much more than vessel duty? Some took that info in and asked themselves about the feminine sexual response. Conclusion: upgrade required of both parties.

I need to select a partner more carefully… he’ll be someone with a lot more than a casual interest and a penis. Search begins for an energy/heart/mind match: someone who knows there is treasure in the depth of me. With that match a new type of bond is created, starting from the zero point. We’re in this thing as equals, and is that ever beautiful… I’m still feminine, you’re still masculine, and every time we wish, the twain shall meet for a cosmic reunion.

What does this do for the children born of such a relationship? It makes them creators and inheritors of the renewal energy. Dad doesn’t diminish his daughter, mom doesn’t dominate her son, and I suspect there won’t be any employment for the addiction counselor.

I can’t help but believe that the renewal is built upon the masculine and feminine relationship in balance on all levels. The profound reward of this is the ultimate draw. It’s how we’re meant to be, it’s how the beginning began, and it’s happening now at the new beginning.

This is something we can offer young people… keep it in mind. There is a natural high to life when male and female are in balance: no external opiates needed.

About the Author

Ida Lawrence is an author, blogger, copywriter and editor based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has authored two books on racial justice and human rights, and numerous articles on human rights, self-empowerment and related subjects. Ida is also a certified Tai Chi instructor with a special interest in helping seniors and the disabled with Tai Chi and Chi Kung practices modified for their use. Her goal in life has been to find answers to the question of ‘why’ and then to explore the question of ‘what is’. More of her work is available at her personal blog, http://talk2momz.com/.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

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There are some difficult problems facing us that threaten not only our fundamental rights as human beings but also our very survival. We can and must tackle a seemingly endless stream of issues in a struggle for truth, freedom, security and justice. But unless we can get to the underlying causes of these issues, they will not only keep repeating, but will continue in their slide to a dark abyss.

The wars, environmental destruction, mounting debt, poverty and so on, are symptoms of deeper underlying causes, which have their root within each individual. If the problem was only limited to a handful of sinister people, then the difficulties facing the world would never have got this far. Corrupt institutions for example, are often a symptom of large numbers of individuals who are easily bought off, and are willingly ready to serve their own selfish interests before those of the people. Huge corporations often have their foundation upon the greed of populations who almost demand an endless stream of cheap, fashionable, throw-away goods. Even some who want world change can alienate and become aggressive towards others who don’t fit in with their future world view – so once any current oppressive force is defeated, will we all then just magically get along?

Empires, dictatorships and entire civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history. Therefore I see the struggle to bring about positive change in the world as being not only about providing the information on what is happening, but perhaps even more importantly, how to address the root causes of it within each person.

I’m sure many others, who look from their own perspective will see other causes that I‘ve left out, but here’s what I see as some of the main causes of the problems we face:

1. A lack of inner awareness of what drives us psychologically as people.
2. A lack of awareness of the mechanisms behind society.
3. The inability or unwillingness of individuals to change.
4. The loss of guiding principles and values.
5. The devolution of our brains?
6. The network of darkness (evil) and the lack of an equally organized and matched response from light (good).

I believe we need to acknowledge these problems and deal with them, as we are already paying the price for neglecting or being unaware of them and I feel unless large numbers of people change radically, the situation is only going to get worse. My perspective on the underlying causes is from my own spiritual angle, but the spiritual to me is life and consciousness itself, rather than being of a fixed ideological or religious perspective.

Here are the points in more detail:

1. A lack of inner awareness of what drives us psychologically as people.

This to me is the root of the problem. Everyone is driven by subconscious drives and desires. Because by definition the subconscious is something beyond ordinary awareness, its effects are unseen and yet profound. It affects how we think and feel, and that in turn determines how we act. So it’s important to shed some light on it. That light is conscious awareness or consciousness; it’s the light within. To shine that light, to be aware of what’s within, requires self-observation and that gives self-knowledge. When we become aware of what’s within, we uncover its hidden effects and from there we can begin to be free of them.

That means for example being able to make rational decisions without the coloration of out of place emotions, as inner awareness allows us to uncover the secret motivations behind attitudes or feelings towards other people, situations or things.

When we don’t have this, we are not only driven by unseen desires but other people can influence our own thoughts or behavior by manipulating our desires, and desire can be related to pleasure or pain, as in the struggle for survival for example. Institutions and corporations know this and spend lots of money and research discovering how to manipulate the population. This is what most product advertising and even political campaigning is based upon.

2. A lack of awareness of the mechanisms behind society.

We all know there’s more going on behind every society than is immediately obvious, and yet most won’t look too deeply if at all. At the same time the mainstream media, who many trust to inform them of events, often covers up truth and promotes untruth. And it’s so easy to believe more or less what everyone else believes and to live a lifetime seeking pleasure. But this is to live a life asleep, not just in terms of the awareness of the material world, but spiritually as well. It’s necessary to awaken from slumber to live a fulfilling life, as not doing so brings awful consequences not just to oneself but to others as well.

As pleasure and desire lead people from within, the result is that most people love the sleep of consciousness and don’t want to wake up from it, and so it’s inevitable they won’t wake up by themselves. The information is available for most to discover more about what’s going on than the usual ways of thinking that society presents, and it’s every person’s responsibility to see how their actions affect other people’s lives. Unfortunately most people are choosing ignorance, and that has its repercussions not only for themselves but upon society.

The awareness of society extends further to an awareness of life, as we live in a multi-dimensional universe and have within us the ability to perceive far more of it than ordinary waking consciousness allows.

This spiritual awakening is mostly substituted by religion for the majority of people, which often presents a simplified version of cosmic principles rather than empowering an objective study of them. Moreover, religions often become embroiled in the politics of nations and can become instruments of oppression rather than purveyors of cosmic truths.

Anyone can go into higher dimensions using astral projection and meditation and have an out-of-body experience. Whoever does this would have access to truths that are hidden from view, giving a greater perception of reality than just a material perception brings.

Everyone has a responsibility to discover how their society works, as knowledge of it empowers good and uncovers evil. And that can only lead to the empowerment of good people and the establishment or preservation of good principles and values in society.

3. The inability or unwillingness of individuals to change.

Most of this has already been covered, but the problem is that not only do most people not want to change their lives but even fewer want to change themselves. And moreover the knowledge of how to fundamentally change has been lost.

The cosmic principles governing the spiritual development of humanity have been lost in the mists of time. What remains are religions containing fragmented and often incorrect remnants of those principles.

The alternative to religion is often seen as science, but due in part to the inflexibility of the scientific community we have a very material based science, which is unwilling to understand the non-physical realms of our existence.

Spirituality and science should be part of one study of life. I hope we can get to that one day.

4. The loss of guiding principles and values.

Unfortunately we are no longer capable of creating truly spiritual civilizations with an understanding of cosmic principles, such as those that existed in ancient times. This indicates that spiritually the human race looks like it’s not evolving, but is devolving, and has been for some time.

It is deceptive because we have advanced so much technologically, but each individual is learning the information of those who went before. The human race has developed technology and advanced institutions but lacks the intelligence to use it wisely, and our whole existence is threatened by it.

Society is developing in certain ways but few individuals show much independent thinking outside the norms of society. And, while the ability to process information has been developed, so too have the tendencies to follow, be led, believe and be told what to do. The majority of people within any single society are unwilling or even incapable of thinking outside the box and are developing many of the characteristics of sheep.

The principles of universal cosmic spirituality that give a society its strength and support it in good have to a large part been lost. Not knowing many of the values and laws of light, society follows those of darkness without realizing it. Society nurtures darkness, ignorance and animal drives without even knowing, and it can’t lift itself up because it doesn’t know many of the principles which could elevate it nor the ones that cause it to decline.

And the individuals within society go through the same thing in their own lives, feeding darkness within and staying without light, without realizing what’s happening. The result is a society that falls from within, and becomes prey to those of a sinister nature who are more aware of reality, who take advantage of the ignorance of society to extract from it what benefits them. The end result of this for a society can be catastrophic.

A set of guiding principles define a society’s values and give it a secure platform to stand upon. These should be based upon principles of cosmic spirituality, goodness, truth and justice. If an area is missing or not covered by these principles, darkness takes its place, and darkness spreads without anyone realizing it, until its bad effects become obvious. For the principles to be founded and upheld requires knowledge and that comes from freely seeing, interpreting and sharing information.

The blind spots in both principles and perception have been exploited by evil and have become so great as to deeply condition the way we think and act.

Speaking of becoming like sheep:

5. The devolution of our brains?

Scientists say that the human brain is shrinking; it has shrunk by the size of a tennis ball in the last 20,000 years and that if it continues at the same rate, in another 20,000 years it will be the same size as that of homo erectus – ape man.

This is due to the process of domestication. It happens to many different types of mammals due to specialization, where development occurs in specific areas due to use; decline also occurs due to non-use. Compare the intelligence of a dingo (early domestication) with other dogs and you’ll see what a difference domestication makes.

Could this be a reason why we’re becoming more sheep like?

In us, our intellectual capacity has been reasonably well developed, but that’s a small part of what a brain does. The faculties required for intelligence are much more than that and they are being lost. Could this be part of the reason why so many people today are so passive and are so easily distracted with entertainment and the simple slogans of those with power, by those who know how to manipulate and control the domesticated majority?

Spiritually, the shrinking of the brain could be a disaster, as the areas of the psyche required for spiritual development are most likely to be atrophied and diminished, as they are amongst the least used and therefore probably the first lost.

It’s very unfortunate that most people don’t experience much in the way of profound spiritual or esoteric realities today. If people are not actually capable of perceiving a wider reality, it explains why most don’t have an interest in it, and why many people blindly follow religious institutions, which tend to promote simplistic versions of cosmic truths. It doesn’t seem as though the majority of people are capable of anything more. Many unfortunately seem to be domesticated humans, and appear to have little interest in living for a higher cosmic purpose.

6. The network of darkness (evil) and the lack of an equally organized and matched response from light (good).

Here’s something that can become apparent with a little research and also with out-of-body experiences. One of the main things going against us is that those who wish to do evil in the world have a powerful connection with the forces of darkness. Behind the sinister controlling elements doing evil in the world are not just evil people, it’s the forces of darkness itself. Those who fight for truth and freedom in the world fight this, without even realizing it.

You would think there would be a corresponding group of people of light and goodness that could counter this, that could be a positive influence on society, but there’s not at the esoteric level. There used to be in the past and these kind of people worked to instil and uphold benevolent principles, but through the passing of time they have been lost to the world. Some exist today as remnant semi-secret societies which retain many of their symbols, but for whom the knowledge of their meanings is long gone, while others have gone into dark practices or have been infiltrated and become vehicles for the spread of evil.

Today cosmic spiritual knowledge is not valued by society in general and those fighting for truth don’t realize what they are facing. Ironically while ignoring esoteric knowledge, so many fighting for truth are being defeated by the occult knowledge of those using it in its negative form.

In conclusion.

Good and evil are locked in an eternal struggle through which consciousness learns in the school of life. Those who participate in the struggle for good are the active learners in the school, and benefit personally in life’s difficult journey even if the cause they fight for is not successful.

I believe everyone working for truth and good should in some way form a unity to counter the large network of evil. That means understanding that others have differences and views that may seem confronting and even strange, but to put aside these differences for the common good, and to create a strength that is capable of pulling its weight against the force of darkness.

In the long term I don’t believe it’s enough to do good without understanding what is propelling events. We need an awaking of consciousness not just in the material world but within as well – an inner awakening that facilitates not only love, but also the courage to face the darkness both within and without. It’s difficult for all of us to do, but I believe it’s absolutely necessary.

About the Author

Belsebuub is the author of a number of books on out-of-body experiences, dreams, self-knowledge, and esoteric wisdom including A Course in Astral Travel and Dreams which became a bestseller in its genre. His book Gazing into the Eternal was finalist in the Best Book Awards 2009 in spirituality, and he has appeared on over 60 radio and television programs internationally.

Belsebuub is the name of his spirit/soul/consciousness, everyone has their own unique spiritual name, it’s a matter of knowing it. Please visit his excellent website, Belsebuub.com.

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