Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. – Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita, 5th Century BCE
Art is sometimes prophetic. A case in point is the Hollywood movie, Rocketship X-M, starring Lloyd Bridges and Noah Berry, Jr. Credible by the standards of its time, this first science-fiction film of the postwar era postulated a manned expedition to Mars. When the crewmembers arrive, they find an illimitable desert of “pitchblende, immense deposits of pitchblende,” a form of crystalline uranium oxide associated with nuclear explosions.
Digging in the sand of the Red Planet, the explorers uncover a metallic, finely-crafted sculpture roughly resembling a human head. “The mind that conceived this must have been of a high order of intelligence,” the expedition leader concludes, “at least the equal of Earth’s, perhaps considerably above ours.”
In the distance are the ruins of huge, strange buildings, but they are too radioactive for investigation.
“To think that a complex, organised society existed here once.”
“Yes, and from all indications, thousands of years ago.”
“I wonder how it happened.”
“There’s always the possibility of a meteor, but then it would have created a depression, like a moon crater.”
“No, this wasn’t caused by a meteor. This is definitely blast effect coupled with intense heat… Ironic, isn’t it, the mind of Man, wherever you encounter it, Earth or Mars? The highest attainments of human intellect always diverted to self-destruction. Perhaps the entire surface of the planet is one, vast ruin like this… What a lesson here for our world: One blast, thousands of years of civilisation – wiped out.”
When Rocketship X-M was premiered in 1950, its basic premise was exclusively confined within the realm of science fiction. Long before then, astronomers deemed the Red Planet incapable of ever sustaining life of any kind, an impression apparently confirmed by numerous, robotic surveyors and landers that have explored our Martian neighbour since the first successful fly-by of Mariner IV, nearly fifty years ago. It was with more than some amazement then, that I heard Dr. John Brandenburg declare in a radio interview in April 2014 that Mars was long ago the home of a civilisation destroyed by a nuclear attack that killed off all life.
Had such a statement been made by just about anyone else, I would have turned off the radio and gone to sleep. But I knew Dr. Brandenburg as long ago as 2000, when he and I shared the speakers’ table at an alternative science conference in the American Northwest, where he spoke knowledgeably and engagingly, but not about extraterrestrial warfare.
John E. Brandenburg, Ph.D., is a plasma physicist at Orbital Technologies in the US at Madison, Wisconsin, where he works on space plasma technologies and space propulsion. He researches Microwave Electro-Thermal plasma thrusters for space propulsion. Previously, he investigated air plasmas and plasma propulsion at Florida Space Institute at America’s Kennedy Space Center.
Co-authored with Monica Rix Paxson, his book Dead Mars, Dying Earth (Crossing Press, 1999) won the Silver Medal in the Ben Franklin awards for books on science and environment. His other books include Life and Death on Mars: The New Mars Synthesis (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2011), and Beyond Einstein’s Unified Field: Gravity & Electro-Magnetism Redefined (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2011). As such, Dr. Brandenburg’s deductions from Martian geology and topography are not the fantasies of a science fiction writer, but scientific conclusions from one of the most important scholars in the world today.
His April radio interview certainly got my attention, but provoked more questions than answers. To learn them first hand from their original source, I contacted Dr. Brandenburg directly by email, and he took time out from his busy life of scientific investigation to generously share with us some of his truly mind-boggling discoveries:
FRANK JOSEPH (FJ): What first alerted you to possibilities of a nuclear attack on Mars in the ancient past?
DR. JOHN BRANDENBURG (JB): A comment by a nuclear physicist at Sandia labs, where I worked, in 1984. I mentioned the excess of Xenon 129 in Mars atmosphere to him, and he became curious, and looked at the data, and then commented flatly, “someone nuked Mars.” He then refused to discuss the matter any further. It took a long time for me to reconstruct the reasons for him saying this from the “open literature.”
FJ: What evidence exists for atomic warfare on the Red Planet?
JB: The spectrum of krypton and xenon isotopes found in the Mars atmosphere, particularly Xenon 129 and Krypton 80. Both are produced by nuclear explosions, the Xenon 129 directly from fission of Uranium 238, and thorium by high energy fusion neutrons, and the Krypton 80 by intense neutron bombardment of the soil. The Mars meteorites, which are samples of sub-surface rock from Mars, are depleted in Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium, all radioactive elements, relative to Earth rocks.
But gamma rays from the Mars surface measured by Russian and American probes show much higher levels spread over the Mars surface; radiation from two hot spots. Thus, space craft measurements of Mars atmosphere, and surface radioactivity, plus measurements of Mars meteorites, show this evidence. The fission of Uranium 238 and Thorium can only be done by fusion neutrons from a hydrogen bomb reaction, so, in my opinion, this cannot be explained naturally. Data taken by the Mars Science Laboratory’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) from Curiosity’s interplanetary journey to Mars shows large exposures to radiation, as confirmed and published in Science Magazine in the 31 May 2013 issue.
A thin layer of radioactive substances including uranium, thorium (shown in graphic) and radioactive potassium on the surface provide evidence for Dr. Brandenburg’s theory.
A thin layer of radioactive substances including uranium, thorium and radioactive potassium covers the Martian surface in a pattern radiating from a hot spot, as indicated by recent maps showing gamma rays in a radiating debris pattern. What may have been an airburst the equivalent of one million, one-megaton hydrogen bombs occurred over the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars, where there is a heavy concentration of radioactivity. The terrible truth: Mars was actually Earth-like for most of its geologic history. Mars held a massive and evolving biosphere, but was wracked by a mysterious and astonishing nuclear catastrophe.
FJ: What was the Martians’ cultural level immediately prior to the attack?
JB: It appears, from examining several possible sites of archaeology, that it was roughly Bronze Age. But that is only an impression from orbit. We must land there and find out.
FJ: Can you identify the attacker?
JB: No. The only way to do that is to go to Mars and investigate. Possibly, the Martians knew who did this from prior contact and recorded it.
FJ: Have any ruins or cultural debris from the Martian nuclear attack been found, or do you anticipate their discovery in future explorations?
JB: We have seen, in space-probe images at several sites, what looks like archaeological ruins. I think we must dispatch astronaut teams to Mars as soon as possible to dig at the principle sites, that is the best way to maximise knowledge of what happened and when it happened.
FJ: When do you believe such an event took place?
JB: It was long ago, perhaps two hundred to three hundred million years ago. Not even dinosaurs were present then. Only long lived and stable isotopes record this event.
FJ: Is there any contemporaneous or corresponding evidence on Earth of the Martian catastrophe?
JB: It corresponds approximately to the Great Permian Extinction on Earth, the most terrible of all the mass extinctions, and whose cause is a mystery. (The Permian Period ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, during which nearly ninety per cent of marine species and seventy per cent of terrestrial species died out – FJ.)
FJ: Why would some military power want to carry out an atomic attack on Mars?
JB: It is difficult to conceive of it, but we have seen such things on Earth. I suspect they were targeting a civilisation there, we are of course aware of the “face” and pyramid in Cydonia Mensa, near the major hot spot of gamma rays on Mars in Mare Acidalium, (forming a quadrangle located in the northeastern portion of Mars’ western hemisphere, covering 300° to 360° east longitude [0° to 60° west longitude] and 30° to 65° north latitude – FJ.)
FJ: Were there any possibilities for Martian survivors – then or now (i.e., their living descendants) – of the nuclear blast?
JB: I do not think so. I believe this destroyed all advanced Martian life.
Nuclear isotopes in the atmosphere resemble hydrogen bomb tests – which Dr. Brandenburg says occurred in two places on Mars, Cydonia Mensa and Galaxias Chaos.
FJ: How have your scientific colleagues reacted to your statements concerning an artificial nuclear event on Mars?
JB: I have showed this to many experts in defence nuclear science. They agree with my interpretation, but cannot be quoted publicly. The reaction of my colleagues… where I presented this work was astonishment. However, none disagreed with my basic analysis.
FJ: Modern Earthly civilisation has reached the capability of putting nuclear weapons into space, and at least one of our probes has already left our solar system; is this level of technology analogous to what the Martians may have achieved and consequently provoked a preemptive strike from a worried or threatened outside power?
JB: The possible archaeology at Cydonia Mensa and Elysium on Mars looks like a primitive civilisation. So if this was a nuclear attack, it appears it was preemptive, to prevent future competition. We know the universe is dangerous to life, with asteroid impacts and supernova. Now a new danger has become apparent.
FJ: Could we Earthlings expect the same kind of intervention, given our developing space technologies?
JB: We have no choice but to become space-faring, since we have already alerted the cosmos to our presence by many radio broadcasts and nuclear tests. Becoming space-faring as quickly as possible is the only way to maximise our future safety, in my opinion.
Dr. Brandenburg’s discoveries comprise the most astounding, even alarming news we could ever hope to learn; namely, that a non-human civilisation flourished on Mars many millions of years before our species evolved on Earth – a civilisation that was utterly annihilated and all life on its world deliberately killed by some superior power with nuclear weapons.
Dr. Brandenburg presents compelling evidence that the Red Planet is more appropriately named after the Roman god of war than subsequent generations ever suspected.
John E. Brandenburg contributed the Foreword to George J. Haas‘s 2024 book The Great Architects of Mars: Evidence for the Lost Civilizations on the Red Planet. Brandenburg’s books Life and Death on Mars and Dead Mars, Dying Earth are available from online bookstores.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 150.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
I can’t help but think of how it all began. As I write at my desk, I have in front of me the first printed copy of Gods of the Bible, first on top of a tall pile of books, block notes, and paper sheets. Such crumbling towers take up most of the desk. My books and those of others form a chaos of overlapping memories and voices while the rays of the afternoon sun filter through the window and light some of the covers up.
One of these volumes always holds special meaning for me – a pink notebook with my first interlinear translation of the Book of Genesis, written in pencil. Even today, every time I write, I can’t help but think of how it all began. It was more than twenty years ago, twenty-five, almost. I was just a lover of ancient languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. At this same desk, much emptier, I translated the Bible day and night. Then, as in all stories, adventure was born of a mistake, a small, insignificant typo. It was a rather trivial typo that I might have discovered in the edition of the Hebrew Interlinear Bible of the most famous Italian religious publisher: Edizioni San Paolo. That’s how it all started – with a mistake.
It’s worth telling the reader that Edizioni San Paolo is Italy’s most prominent Catholic publishing house. Its Vatican-approved publications are used in graduate and post-graduate Biblical Hebrew and Bible studies courses in Catholic universities and departments. I was just a self-taught translator of the Bible. And yet, it was I who caught an error. At first, I questioned my skills. I tend not to jump to conclusions too soon. I have a background in Classics, and my mindset is that of a philologist. I double-checked my grammar books and compared different translations; I read and reread many times the same passage until I was convinced I had found a mistake.
Finding errors, flaws, and typos in books is hardly surprising. In mine, they are there. And in the books of others, too. But we are human beings. The Bible, on the other hand, is a book “inspired by God.” That is what we have been taught. It contains the absolute truth – so say the theologians. More than half of humanity bases its existence and life values directly or indirectly on the Bible. As a result, the Bible has become the basis of an immense power structure. Any mistake could raise the suspicion that this monstrous giant was, in reality, a giant on clay feet.
And yet I was there looking at this mistake, like an engineer who finds a small crack in a dam. Little did I know then that that error was the first of many I was about to discover. But at that moment, I shrugged my shoulders without thinking much about it. I wrote a short note to the publisher saying, “Hey, I think I found a mistake; you might want to fix it.” A few weeks later, out of the blue, they contacted me and said: “May we see some of your translations?” I sent them my Genesis, a copy of the pink block note I now observe from my chair. It was the turning point. A decade-long collaboration began. Following this partnership, I published seventeen books of the Old Testament in Edizioni San Paolo’s Hebrew Interlinear Bible.1
Italian author, translator and scholar Mauro Biglino discovered that a literal reading of the Bible opened an avenue to the more obvious meaning of the text which in turn revealed secrets.
Since the beginning of my professional career as a Bible translator, I have never stopped finding errors in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. Not just minor typos and mistakes but downright forgeries and tendentious mistranslations. My last work, Gods of the Bible, just came from print and smells of glue and fresh paper. It’s my latest effort in this twenty-five years long research, but I still feel that the fil rouge with that first pink block note was never broken. The same spirit moved me. Understanding how such a fragile text as the biblical one could become the foundation of a monstrous power system and religions followed by billions of people.
Few books in the history of humanity have been written, rewritten, added to, corrected, changed, and censored as often as the Bible. The text of the Bible, mainly fixed after the sixth century BC, but based on older oral and written traditions, is one of the most fragile, unreliable texts in human history. What should surprise us is not so much that someone is looking in it for traces of an ancient advanced civilisation, but the fact that someone – theologians – could build absolute truths on such text, with a dogmatic approach that has often become in history and often still becomes fanaticism.
The Bible is Not a Holy Book
I may have anticipated a theme that could frighten more cautious readers. Still, there is no way to prepare a traditional readership for the hypothesis I seek to test in Gods of the Bible, starting precisely from the Hebrew translations and the demystification of theological, spiritualising readings. But I have to start somewhere, and I have no better option than playing cards face up. Therefore, let me declare right off that the Bible is not a holy book. In antiquity, the term “holy” was understood as everything “reserved” for the deity. This term has by no means the spiritual value we ascribe to it today. The protagonists of the biblical accounts all move within a materialistic and immanentist horizon, very concrete and tangible.
The Old Testament is just the story of the alliance/relationship between Yahweh and the family of Jacob-Israel, and such a tale is deprived of any universalistic perspectives (a later invention of Christianity). This alliance, which did not even involve all the descendants of Abraham’s family but only one of its branches, that of Jacob-Israel, is not a universal but a particular account of events that happened at a specific time in history in a specific place: today we would perhaps label it as a local history book. Yahweh, the protagonist of the Old Testament, was just the leader of the family of Jacob.
Other families, peoples, and nations had their leaders; only they did not take the pain to write an accurate account of such relationships. Or maybe they did, and the books were lost. But the question is: who were these “leaders” that the ancient people considered “deities” and referred to by different but equivalent names? The Sumerians called them “Anunnaki,” the Egyptians called them “Neteru,” and the Babylonians called them “Ilanu.” The Bible calls them “Elohim.” Who were the Elohim, then?
Ten or so years ago, when I started voicing my doubts about the correctness of translating the term “Elohim” with “God,” Edizioni San Paolo’s bosses began to worry about my heterodox ideas, and our collaboration came to a halt after seventeen books were published together. What made them so mad? The extraterrestrial hypothesis, to be fair, was not the main problem, as the Catholic Church does admit the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, ex-Vatican’s chief astronomer, avers that there is no conflict between believing in God and the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers,” perhaps more evolved than humans.2
Front covers of books translated and published by Biglino of sections of the Old Testament in Edizioni San Paolo’s Hebrew Interlinear Bible.
Literal Reading of the Bible
The main problem was my methodology and its profound implications. To be clear, I propose a literal interpretation that allows me, and all those who adhere to it, to read the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, from the vantage point of distancing myself from the theological filters that have buried the “sacred text” for thousands of years, making it unreachable and unusable.
Monotheistic theology has deprived us of the possibility of treating the Bible like any other ancient source to be studied objectively. If treated as any other ancient source, the Bible could say much about the history of humankind before saying anything about God. But here lies the problem. Nobody knows anything about God, yet priests and theologians claim the right to interpret the Bible according to their theological schemes. It is frankly unbelievable that the literal reading of the Bible could represent such a Copernican revolution in biblical and anthropological studies. This circumstance says much about theology’s deforming, obscurantist power when applied to an ancient book.
As is well known, at least until the 16th century, the Catholic Church forbade reading the Bible without the mediation of an official interpreter. The reason behind this prohibition is apparent today to anyone. If you read what is written without interpretative filters, without theological lenses on your nose, the Bible becomes an exciting source of knowledge, not about God, but about human history. The readers of the Bible will experiment with the regenerating feeling of discovering something left unseen in plain sight. This is what I experienced when I started translating the Bible. The literal reading is as subversive as it is simple. A new reality, at the same time revolutionary and familiar, materialises in front of the reader in the same way a small child discovers a unique gelato flavour and realises that the world is an inexhaustible source of surprises.
I certainly am not the first one to endorse such methods. With appropriate differences, this is the same methodological approach that Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) successfully adopted. The history of archaeology has taught us that much good can come from questions asked by independent researchers who view reality with a divergent thinking approach. One must ask how Schliemann, who was not a professional archaeologist, succeeded in finding the lost city of Troy, whereas professional archaeologists, firmly entrenched in academic circles, failed in the task.
Free of preconceived notions, Schliemann believed that the story of the Trojan War, as told in the Iliad, was true, or at least contained much truth, and was not merely a product of Homer’s imagination. Schliemann decided to believe the ancient sources. The groundbreaking premise of his work was to “pretend” that the Iliad contained actual historical events. He took Homer’s account as a starting point for his research. Accompanied by sarcastic ridicule from the academic world, he pursued his research with extraordinary tenacity and eventually found Troy on Hissarlik Hill in western Turkey.3
Using this method, Schliemann made some of the most significant discoveries in the history of archaeology. For any unbiased observer, this method is logical; still, the archaeologists of his time amazingly could not see its value. Not because their eyesight was weak but because they wore blinders and did not even know it.
I pretend that the Bible is true in its literal sense. I say, “Let us pretend that the Bible is true.” Opinable as it can be, this methodology has the advantage of not arbitrarily resorting to hermeneutical categories (allegories, symbols, metaphors, and so forth) to explain “difficult” passages. The Bible is straightforward and can be understood easily through literal reading. When I see theologians and biblical exegetes swim in a sea of confused and confusing interpretative devices, to which they inevitably must resort to making sense of problematic passages, I wonder how they could reconcile their arbitrary interpretative method with the claim that the Bible is the “word of God.” However, I know the answer. How can you explain Yahweh’s craving for the smell of burnt flesh, if not allegorically?
If you read the Bible, literally everything becomes understandable and plain because the biblical authors did not feel the need, as we do, to advocate for a precise monotheistic theological perspective or a moral authority of religious order.
The biblical authors wrote what they experienced, saw with their eyes, or heard with their ears, even when the image of Yahweh from those reports was all but flattering. As a theologian of a loving God, how do you explain that Yahweh orders the extermination of men, women, and children and claims for himself 675 sheep, 72 oxen, 61 donkeys, and 32 virgins after a battle against the Midianites (Numbers 31:32-40)? This portion of the spoils was not for the service of the tabernacle as Numbers 31 explains, it was for Yahweh’s personal use. One only wonders why a spiritual and transcendent “God” would need 32 virgins – or 61 donkeys, for that matter.
Such disturbing passages were not intended as metaphors or allegories to be interpreted 2,000 years later by some theologians in their Vatican libraries but reflected what the writer had heard or seen. Similar examples are found throughout the Bible, and I don’t want to assume that the authors of the biblical text misrepresented their ideas or the facts they wanted to convey and describe. I take the text seriously.
From the necessity of harmonising the biblical text with the theological and monotheistic conception of God in Western culture arises a whole series of falsifications and mistranslations, in view of which that first innocent printing typo I had discovered twenty-five years ago really seems like a “speck in the eye of the brother.” Instead, here we talk about massive logs that have remained in our eyes for hundreds and thousands of years, so long that we even ignore our blindness. In Gods of the Bible, I have tried to remove at least some of these logs, addressing subjects such as the story of creation, the origins, and evolution of humankind, the existence of angels, the nature of cherubim, the identity of Satan, the meaning of the name of Yahweh and many more.
Decoding the “Elohim”
Mainly I focused on the identity and character of Yahweh and the meaning of the term “Elohim.” To make a long story short, when we read the term “God” in the Bible, this usually comes from the Hebrew term “Elohim.” However, at least when I worked for Edizioni San Paolo, the term “Elohim” was left untranslated into the interlinear edition of the Bible that we prepared for scholars and academia. In the Bibles available to the public, the same term was translated as “God.” Therefore, where people read “God” and believe that the biblical authors wrote the equivalent of the word “God,” scholars read the term “Elohim.” This was to alert them that this word is problematic, to say the least, for the unbiased translator.
Elohim in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1.
Furthermore, Yahweh is just one of the many individuals who comprise the group of the “Elohim.” As shown, this term is the equivalent of the Sumerian “Anunnaki” or the Egyptian “Neteru,” which described a pantheon of a multiplicity of deities. Monotheism arose quite late on the roots of a previously widespread polytheism that affected all the peoples of the ancient Near East, including the Israelites. This fact is now recognised even in Bible study circles. Professor Mark Smith of Princeton Theological Seminary has written extensively on the polytheistic roots of the Bible and the long development of monotheism from an earlier polytheism.4
Often, however, these findings remain isolated. They certainly do not penetrate the realm of doctrine, except in a form purified of its most radical consequences, and therefore do not influence popular piety and practised religion. Scholars in this field tend to defuse their most controversial results to avoid conflicts between theology and biblical scholarship. On the contrary, I think one of the greatest hindrances to reading the Bible is theology. In 2016, I held a conference in Milan with four theologians of different backgrounds: Ariel Di Porto, Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Turin; Mons. Avondios, Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Milan; Daniele Garrone, biblical scholar, Protestant pastor and Old Testament expert; Don Ermis Segatti, priest and professor of Theology and History of Christianity at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy – this was at times a very heated meeting.5
At any rate, nobody who is intellectually honest can be sure of what “Elohim” means, but there is substantial evidence that “Elohim” does not mean “God” at all. Our very idea of God as a transcendental, omniscient, omnipotent being has nothing to do with the idea the ancient biblical authors had in mind when employing the term “Elohim.” The Bible mentions several other “Elohim” besides Yahweh, of whom we even know the names, such as Chamosh, Milcom, Astarte, Hadad, Melqart, and many others. The “Elohim” was thus a group.
We could also add that the Old Testament tells the story of how Elyon, the most powerful of the Elohim, the commander-in-chief, would divide the lands and peoples of the earth among all the various Elohim leaving some of them satisfied and others dissatisfied.6 Yahweh was one of them, and he received only the people of Israel, who were still landless. As the Bible says, “Yahweh alone led him; no foreign El was with him” (Deuteronomy 32:12). In a very significant passage, the Bible also describes an “assembly” of the “Elohim.” To be an assembly, they must have been more than one.
Traditional translators argue that “Elohim” here means “judges,” but they are contradicted by the Bible itself, which always uses a different word for “judges.” Also, this is an entirely arbitrary affirmation. I wonder on what ground can we say that “Elohim” at times means “God” and at times mean “judges.” What criteria are we following? In Psalm 82, Elyon rebukes the assembly of the gathered “Elohim” and reminds them that although more powerful than humans, they also “die like Adam,” thus emphasising a clear distinction between the “Adamites,” the descendants of Adam, and the group of the “Elohim.”
It won’t be surprising that the term “Elohim” has a grammatical plural ending. Translating “Elohim” in the singular as “God” would be nothing more than a simplification of monotheistic theology. Therefore I think it should be left, to be safe, untranslated.
Yahweh’s Bizarre Behaviour
Yahweh’s character is also worth investigating. When not violent, Yahweh’s behaviour often seems bizarre, extravagant, and arbitrary. Yahweh’s words demonstrate his eagerness for the smell of the smoke of burnt flesh, prescribing elaborate rituals for holocausts and commanding that violation of pedantic rules for the sacrifices be punished by death. Yahweh also moves and intervenes in human businesses in peculiar ways; for example, at times, he literally arrives “flying riding on a cherub” (Psalm 18:10) or aboard flying machines called “ruach” or “kavod,” which I discuss extensively in Gods of the Bible. Yahweh destroys cities with terrifying weapons, crushes villages, and demands his share of the spoils.
“Elohim Creating Adam” by William Blake.
In my view, biblical scholarship and theology hopelessly oppose each other. However, I don’t deny the existence of God in general; I only say that God is not present in the Bible. Luckily so! This supposedly loving God theologians have come up with shows himself in the Old Testament as a cruel, sadistic, manipulative, and narcissistic individual.
Yahweh was undoubtedly endowed with unique qualities that made him superior to man in power and knowledge, but he was not superior in morals and ethics. It is enough to remember Yahweh’s exterminations, cruel rules, and bizarre behaviours, like sniffing the smoke of burned flesh, which he needed to relax. This matter was so important that any violation of the ritual could result in the death of the sacrificer. I detail this in Gods of the Bible and propose my interpretation of the sacrificial rituals occurring in all ancient religions, including Greek and Roman cults.7
The Bible does not speak about the origin of the Elohim. There is no hard evidence about the provenance of this group. Still, the comparison with the Adamites points to their clear and overwhelming biological and technological superiority. I, however, suggest and discuss in my book the possibility that something like the “cargo cults” might have occurred in the ancient past, not only among the people of Israel but among all the peoples of the world, from the Middle East to the Far East and the Americas.
Cargo Cult of Biblical Proportions
During World War II, the inhabitants of Melanesia in the Pacific Ocean first encountered the white man and saw aeroplanes. The US Army occupied their islands scattered across the Pacific as logistical bases for war operations. The natives saw the American soldiers coming from the sky and taking off from the ground with their aircraft. They saw them equipped with powerful weapons, high-speed air vehicles, and means of communication that defied understanding. They thus started considering them as deities. The natives began to develop rituals, prayers, and cults in anticipation of the return of the American soldiers.
I use the paradigm of “cargo cults” to speculate on the arrival in antiquity of civilisations that were much more advanced than ours. Our ancestors would then develop rituals, myths, and narratives that today we consider fairy tales but perhaps hide a very different reality, the reality of an extraordinary encounter with a superior civilisation.
All the people of the Earth tell us the same thing. They tell us about superior beings who came from the sky, who created humankind and gave them knowledge, teaching them how to grow crops, write, predict the course of the stars, build incredible structures, and work metals. Is it possible that all the peoples of the Earth, independently from each other, developed the same stories, the same narratives about their past?
Gods of the Bible is my last attempt to bring some light to our ancient past through the narrative found in the Bible. I aim to narrate, understand, and describe in detail the reasons and habits of that group of individuals called “Elohim,” of whom Yahweh was part, one of many. Yahweh was the Elohim of the family of Israel – and only of them and their descendants. I deny the universality of the Bible. The Old Testament records Israel’s covenant and relationship with Yahweh. Other Elohim, as we have seen above, had inherited other peoples, families, and nations.
The Elohim of other peoples are mentioned and addressed several times in the Old Testament. These passages suggest that these “foreign Elohim” were similar to Yahweh and had identical abilities and habits. The Elohim had advanced technology unavailable to our ancestors; lived longer than humans but were mortal; had weapons and tools that could do wonders; they were more powerful and knowledgeable, and yet they could be abandoned, betrayed, and deceived, just like humans, because they knew a lot but were not omniscient.
The space of a short article would only allow for briefly summarising some of the aspects of the Elohim that I have detailed in the new book and all my previous works.8
Decoding “Ruach”
Still, perhaps it is not superfluous to end by mentioning something about the fascinating biblical term “ruach.” This term has always been translated as “spirit” through the influence of the Greek culture and the so-called Septuagint version of the Bible, which renders it with “pneuma.” The Ancient Hebrew term “ruach” actually had a very definite and concrete meaning as it stood for “wind,” “breath,” “moving air,” “storm wind,” and, in a broader sense, “that which moves quickly through the air space.” In modern biblical translations, the term “ruach” is always rendered as “spirit” because it responds to monotheistic theology’s spiritual needs.
In the Old Testament, however, this “ruach” appears to be flying through the air, making noise, and taking people from one place to another, with a loud clangour and visible manifestations, taking off and landing in specific geographical locations – in very concrete ways.
The two following passages illustrate what has just been said.
“The [ruach] lifted me and brought me to the gate of the house of Yahweh that faces East. There at the entrance of the gate were twenty-five men, and I saw among them Jaazaniah, son of Azzur, and Pelatiah, son of Benaiah.” (Ezekiel 11:1)
“Look,” they said, “we, your servants, have fifty able men. Let them go and look for your master. Perhaps, the [ruach] of Yahweh has picked him up and set him down on some mountain or valley.” “No,” Elisha replied, “do not send them.” But they persisted until he was too embarrassed to refuse. So he said, “Send them.” And they sent fifty men, who searched for three days but did not find him. (2 Kings 2:16-17)
I left the word “ruach” untranslated, as the reader can see. If you follow monotheistic exegesis and replace “ruach” with “spirit,” the passages become incomprehensible. But it is difficult to interpret the term “ruach” spiritually without distorting the text’s meaning. I give countless similar examples about “ruach” and other words and biblical passages in Gods of the Bible, always underlining the concreteness and realism of the Ancient Hebrew language and the ancient Semitic culture, which was the culture of a pastoral people that Yahweh had found in the desert, landless.
I began and ended Gods of the Bible with the same spirit that moved me twenty-five years ago when I first picked up my pink notebook and discovered the little mistake that began my professional career as a translator of the Old Testament with Edizioni San Paolo. Since then, I have found many more errors in the Bible – and not all were done in good faith. The list is long and cannot be continued here. But I hope at least to have been able to open a dialogue with all those who, with an open mind, are interested in learning more about humankind.
I am not looking for absolute truths but for a glimmer of reality. As I gaze into the impending sunset, the peaks of the Alps, silhouetted against the evening sky, glow pink. A mountain peak is all I hope for. I leave the climb to heaven to others.
I take Gods of the Bible from its stack and open it in the last light of day. I find the best summary of what has been said on the page that opens before me. It is good never to ignore the authoritative voices of the past whose intentions are free from the controversies of the present. I find the voice of a great historian of antiquity who had no reason to lie or embellish. And I realise it is not for heretics like me to explain the meaning of such words, but for the “guardians of the discourse” that exclude a priori hypotheses they cannot accept. I pretend what I read is true.
“Armies clashed in the sky, swords blazed, and the temple shone with sudden flashes. The doors of the sanctuary were suddenly torn open, and a superhuman voice cried out that the gods were fleeing, and at the same time, there was a great uproar as if men were fleeing.” (C. Tacitus, Histories, V 13)
Gods of the Bible: A New Interpretation of the Bible Reveals the Oldest Secret in History by Mauro Biglino (Tuthi, 2023) is available from all good bookstores and online retailers such as Amazon.com.au.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 200.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
Footnotes
1. Biglino, Mauro. Cinque Meghillôt. Rut, Cantico Dei Cantici, Qohelet, Lamentazioni, Ester. Edited by Pier Carlo Beretta, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), San Paolo Edizioni, 2008; See also Il Libro Dei Dodici, San Paolo Edizioni, 2009.
3. Cfr. Ceram, C. W., Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology. Revised, Vintage, 2012. Ceram provides a brief but very clear account of how Schliemann came to the greatest archaeological discovery of the century.
4. Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Oxford University Press, 2003. Mark Smith’s presentation of his work can be found at youtu.be/8FZ2BdHmCNw
5. The meeting between Mauro Biglino and the theologians can be found youtu.be/nCEG9Znl6Lc
6. “When Elyon gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance. In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste.” (Deuteronomy 32:8-9)
7. Cfr G. M. Corrias, Prima della fede. Antropologia e teologia del culto romano arcaico, Tuthi, 2022.
8. Many of Mauro Biglino’s conferences and videos can be found on his youtube channel youtube.com/@MauroBiglinoOfficialChannel. Available books in Italian and English are: Biglino, Mauro, and Lorena Forni. La Bibbia non l’ha mai detto. Mondadori, 2017. Biglino, Mauro, and Giorgio Cattaneo. La Bibbia nuda. Tuthi, 2021. Biglino, Mauro, and Giorgio Cattaneo. The Naked Bible. Tuthi, 2022. Biglino, Mauro. La Bibbia non parla di Dio. Uno studio rivoluzionario sull’Antico Testamento. Mondadori, 2016. Biglino, Mauro. Il Falso Testamento. Creazione, miracoli, patto d’allenza: l’altra verità dietro la Bibbia. Mondadori, 2017.
In the years leading up to 2012, when there was considerable global consternation over the approaching end of the Mayan Calendar, I became interested in the Yuga Cycle doctrine of ancient India.
I decided to take a closer look at the available data and philosophical speculations to determine the possible ending of the Kali Yuga or Iron Age – the current age of greed and lies, discord and violence, that we live in.
When I dove into the details, however, I realised that a few errors and omissions had crept into the ancient texts over time during our long passage through the darkness of the Kali Yuga. The original formulation of the Yuga Cycle was completely forgotten.
Most ancient cultures subscribed to the belief that human civilisation and consciousness move in grand cycles, from the Golden Ages of illumination and harmony to the Dark Ages of ignorance and strife.
The guiding principle that I adopted to help me work out the Yuga Cycle framework was that there could not have been different Yuga Cycles for different cultures. There was only one Yuga Cycle for the entire world that governed the periodic rise and fall of consciousness. To stitch together the original framework, delineating the common threads that run through the different traditions was of utmost importance. I also figured that I needed to keep tabs on the latest archaeological, anthropological and historical findings, for any Yuga Cycle framework needs to be backed up with as much scientific data as possible.
In July 2012, I published an article in which I put forward what, in my opinion, was the original Yuga Cycle timeline, that indicated the Kali Yuga was due to end in 2025. I discussed the rationale for the proposed timeline in the article, and I have treated the matter with a lot more rigour in my new book.
The 24,000-year Yuga Cycle based on the Saptarshi Calendar. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra
Without going into the nitty-gritty, let me present some of the essential building blocks of this framework.
The complete Yuga Cycle is 24,000 years in duration and is comprised of an ascending cycle of 12,000 years, when human consciousness, in tandem with our lifespan and physical size, gradually increases, followed by a descending cycle of 12,000 years when such qualities gradually diminish.
Each 12,000-year half-cycle is comprised of four Yugas of equal duration of 3,000-years each. The actual duration of a Yuga is 2,700 years, and it is followed by a transitional period of 300 years before the qualities of the subsequent Yuga are manifested. The Yuga Cycle was tracked using the “Calendar of the Seven Sages” or “Saptarshi Calendar” of ancient India, which has a 2,700-year cycle called a “Saptarshi Yuga.”
As per the historical records, one of the starting points of the Saptarshi Calendar was in 6676 BCE, which denotes the beginning of the Dwapara Yuga (Bronze Age) in the descending cycle. Using this date as an anchor point, the entire Yuga Cycle timeline gets unravelled, as shown below. For those who are not familiar with the Sanskrit terms: Satya Yuga is Golden Age, Treta Yuga is Silver Age, Dwapara Yuga is Bronze Age and Kali Yuga is Iron Age.
The Yuga Cycle framework reveals that the descending cycle of consciousness began in 9676 BCE, around the same time that the last Ice Age came to a rather abrupt end. The same date has been indicated in the ancient texts as the time when Atlantis sank into the ocean, and Ahura Mazda re-created the world and initiated the World Cycle of 12,000 years. Over the past 5,700-odd years, we have been living in two back-to-back Kali Yugas – the descending Kali Yuga followed by the ascending Kali Yuga. These two Yugas of ignorance and discord span most of recorded history, starting with the Bronze Age civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.
We now approach the end of ascending Kali Yuga in the year 2025. The term “ascending” tends to convey the wrong impression that we are in a “higher Yuga,” and that our civilisation may be on an upward trajectory of virtue and progress. Far from it. In the ascending Kali Yuga, only the material circumstances of life begin to improve, along with an increase in our lifespan and physical stature, but the degradation of human consciousness and the proliferation of vices in society continues unabated throughout the entire duration of the Kali Yuga.
This is why we have ended up with an out-of-balance society characterised by a massive “matter-spirit gap” that is highly destabilising and responsible for much of the misery and injustices we see around us. The need of the hour is to reduce our attachment to material acquisitions and focus our energies on the other dimensions of life, particularly on cultivating mental and spiritual awareness to restore the much-needed balance, harmony and sanity in our lives.
There is no doubt that we are living in times of momentous changes, which will begin to unfold as we get closer to 2025 and enter the period of transition. Not only are we about to emerge from the dense, materialistic vibrations of the Kali Yuga, but we are also at the cusp of the entire descending cycle of consciousness that began in 9676 BCE.
The events of the past few years have revealed that human consciousness has plunged into utter depravity, and all means, however despicable, are now considered legitimate for the acquisition of money and influence and the enslavement of the people. The spectre of hatred, war and unrestrained violence is spreading across the world, while the frequency and ferocity of extreme weather phenomena such as floods, landslides and wildfires have dramatically increased over the past few years. All of these are precursors of the planetary-scale changes that lie ahead of us.
Every time we go through the periods of transition between the Yugas, there is a cataclysmic obliteration of the existing civilisations (pralaya, in Sanskrit), which is followed by the re-emergence of a new wave of civilisations with different artistic, technological and cultural traits. The purging events purify our consciousness and restore all of nature to its original pristine state to support another round of evolution. The archaeological and geological evidence shows that every 3,000-odd years, a new wave of civilisations appears to miraculously emerge all over the world, built on the ashes of the previous civilisations.
It happened in c.9600 BCE, with the establishment of the settlements at Gobekli Tepe. We can be quite certain that similar settlements were springing up elsewhere at the same time, the evidence of which we have yet to uncover. In c.6500 BCE, new settlements emerged in Anatolia and Southeastern Europe with distinct cultural traits, but we don’t have much of an idea about what was happening in other parts of the world then. In c.3600 BCE, a bunch of new civilisations arose almost simultaneously in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Malta, and other places, while in c.600 BCE, the Iron Age cultures emerged at around the same time in the Eastern Mediterranean region, Persia, India, Mesoamerica etc.
Artist recreation of the Gobekli Tepe settlement, modern-day Turkey, c.9600 BCE.
The trend is distinct and unmistakable. The Yuga Cycle is not an article of faith but an important scientific doctrine that captures the cyclical nature of human civilisation. Not only does it give us a clear perspective of what had happened in the past, but it also tells us where our own decadent civilisation of the Kali Yuga is headed. In my new book, I take a closer look at the events of the last four Yuga-transitional periods, revealing that comet and meteor impacts inevitably play a crucial role in the periodic process of destruction and renewal.
The Degradation of the Human Race
One of the important topics I explore is an important tenet of the Yuga cycle doctrine. In tandem with the decline in our consciousness in the descending cycle, our lifespan and physical size also decline, and the environment becomes less favourable to us. You may be surprised to know that a host of scientific data published in reputed academic journals supports all of these contentions! Yet, how many times have you heard about this ongoing degradation of the human race being talked about in mainstream media?
The cranial volume fluctuates over a 25,800-year Yuga Cycle. The Cro-Magnon lived in an earlier Golden Age, which explains their very high cranial volume. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.
On average, humans today are roughly 10% smaller than their Golden Age counterparts who lived in the late Palaeolithic period. Scientific studies reveal there was no food scarcity or diseases in the late Palaeolithic period (i.e. Golden Age), but throughout the Holocene period (i.e. descending Yuga Cycle), sources of food became increasingly scarce, many kinds of diseases became endemic, and incidences of violent deaths increased significantly.1
In addition, all over the world, human beings have lost nearly 10% of their cranial volume over the past 12,000-odd years, which is equivalent to the difference between the average cranial volume of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens!2 How do you explain that? When science writer Kathleen McAuliffe spoke to Christopher Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, about the 10% reduction in our cranial volume since the late Palaeolithic period, Stringer told her something quite stunning: “Scientists haven’t given the matter the attention it deserves. Many ignore it or consider it an insignificant detail.”3
Can you imagine that? This absolutely jaw-dropping piece of scientific data, which turns the Darwinian theory of gradual evolution on its head, is treated as an “insignificant detail.” If this is insignificant, what really is significant? Have our cranial volumes shrunk so much that we can no longer distinguish between what is truly important and what is not? That, unfortunately, is precisely what seems to be going on. Because of our declining cranial volume, most of us can no longer discriminate between the truth and the lies or determine what is harmful to us and what truly serves our evolution and happiness. Our declining cranial volume is the primary cause of the misery, injustices and violence of the Kali Yuga.
Population geneticists tell us that the progressive degeneration of the human race is happening due to the accumulation of harmful genetic mutations over the past 10,000-odd years. My proposition is that the Darwinian theory of linear evolution is patently wrong, and what is really happening is that both our physical size and cranial volume are fluctuating in a sinusoidal manner over the 25,800-year precession cycle or Yuga Cycle. This is why the cranial specimens of the Cro-Magnon, who had extremely large cranial volumes paralleling those of our Golden Age ancestors, straddle the peak of an earlier Golden Age at around 36,676 BCE!
Even though genetic mutations seem to be driving the sinusoidal fluctuation in physical size and cranial volume in tandem with the earth’s precession cycle, there must be an external electromagnetic source behind this, which is triggering the harmful and advantageous genetic mutations in a cyclical manner. What could be this source?
I tried to ascertain what Sri Yukteswar really meant when he wrote in The Holy Science that it is the creative power “Brahma” – located at the grand centre called “Vishnunabhi,” around which our sun revolves – who regulates the fluctuation of dharma or virtue in the course of the Yuga Cycle. Interestingly, the Buddhist and Chaldean philosophers of antiquity spoke of the “Great Central Sun” or “Hypercosmic Sun” located beyond the circle of fixed stars, which radiated “intellectual light” or “Inner Light.”
WATCH OUT! The Taurid Meteor Stream
Finally, I come to the big question, and that is, what causes the cataclysmic obliteration of civilisation during the periods of Yuga transition? My study of the ancient texts and investigations into the events of the last four Yuga-transitions had already alerted me to the role played by comet and meteor impacts in the periodic reboot of civilisation. The work of astronomers Clube, Napier, Steel and their colleagues indicate that the Yuga-ending catastrophes, which occur like clockwork every 2,700 years, are caused by the passage of the earth through the “dense core” of the Taurid meteor stream – known as the “Taurid Resonant Swarm” – which contains a number of massive, dormant, comets and full-size asteroids, formed from the break-up of the Taurid progenitor comet. In an article in National Geographic, Australian astronomer Duncan Steel was quoted saying something that really made me sit up and take notice:
The earth crosses the Taurid meteor stream twice a year, in course of its orbit around the sun. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra
Every 2,500 to 3,000 years or so, the core of the Taurid stream passes near Earth and produces much more intense meteor showers for a few centuries…. A gap of a few centuries separates the era of intensity between Northern Taurids and Southern Taurids.4
This is an almost perfect explanation for the periodic Yuga-ending cataclysms! What I found most astonishing is that two of the giant comets hidden within the Taurid Resonant Swarm were known to the ancients and revered by them as the messengers or animal mounts (vahanas in Sanskrit) of their gods. The sacred texts and symbols of our ancestors provide specific information about the location, structure, and function of these two comets! The ancients seemed to believe that this periodic destruction and renewal of civilisation does not occur randomly but is divinely guided by inter-dimensional beings whom they regarded as their gods.
Since the Earth is due to pass through the centre of the Taurid Resonant Swarm in the years 2032 and 2036, it has ominous implications for our civilisation. These are likely to be events that finally pull down the curtains on the Kali Yuga.
Without going into too many details, let me just say there are strong indications that the years from 2025 to 2040 are the “end-times” the ancient texts tell us of. We are living in times of the fulfilment of the prophecies when our reality will be drastically altered, and we will be forced to introspect about our patterns of thought and our way of life.
We are standing at the doorstep of an extraordinary transformation that will change our life and our planet beyond our wildest imagination. The writing is on the wall: the Kali Yuga party is over and we need to sober up. The old ways will not work anymore, and the planetary vibrations are going to change very quickly post-2025.
As the Kali Yuga energies wane after 2025, the tyrants who control the affairs of the world may begin to find that their evil plans are no longer coming to fruition as easily as before, and they may face increasing opposition from people around the world. Humanity may become more polarised than ever before, leading to greater social and economic instability, taking us closer to the next World War. An eruption of insanity and large-scale violence typically happens during a Yuga-ending period, and it is unlikely to be any different this time. In tandem with the outbreak of wars and revolutions on a global scale, the intensity of various natural catastrophes – floods, cyclones, landslides, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions etc. – may also increase exponentially.
So, it’s not just one thing that we have to reckon with, but a dreadful cocktail of wars, environmental catastrophes and comet impacts, all dished out to us while the fabric of society is torn apart by tyrannical governments and mega corporations bent on global enslavement, propped up by relentless media propaganda designed to brainwash the masses.
It’s going to be a tough challenge for any person to retain his sanity in the midst of this unfolding. But, if we reorient our thoughts and lifestyle and keep our psyche rooted in our soul vibrations, we can protect ourselves from the greatest suffering. In my new book, I share some thoughts on how we can deal with and navigate the chaos of the end times, although this is something that will probably become clearer with time as more and more people realise the enormity of the changes that are on the way and chime in with their intuitive feelings.
YUGA SHIFT: The End of the Kali Yuga & the Impending Planetary Transformation provides much-needed clarity and guidance to those who already sense this momentous shift. I trust you will join me on this epic journey across time and space to understand the significance of the Yuga Cycle and the coming Shift in the Ages – and how we can prepare for it.
Bibhu Dev Misra’s important book, YUGA SHIFT: The End of the Kali Yuga & the Impending Planetary Transformation, is available on Amazon.com in Kindle and paperback editions.
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
Footnotes
1. Michael Hermanussen, “Stature of early Europeans”, Hormones, 2003, Vol.2, No.3, 175-178, hormones.gr/pdf/Stature_europeans.pdf
2. Maciej Henneberg, “Decrease of Human Skull Size in the Holocene”, Human Biology, June 1988, Vol.60, No.3, 395-405, digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/vol60/iss3/5/
3. Kathleen McAuliffe, “If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?” Discover Magazine, 20 January 2011, discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking
4. John Roach, “Meteor Shower Promises Seven Shooting Stars an Hour”, National Geographic News, 7 November 2003, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1107_031107_taurids.html
It is in the work of a French-born writer on philosophy and Eastern religions that we find a truly panoramic overview of the deep-running problems that are coming to a head today.
Rene Guenon (1886-1945) was a French metaphysician, writer, and editor responsible for laying the metaphysical groundwork for the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of thought in the early twentieth century.
Rene Guenon (1886-1945)
He is best known for his works The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (1945).
In brief, the Traditionalist outlook holds that the world is on a downward cycle, away from its pristine beginnings, regressing to a decadent final stage of atomisation and materialism. We’re in the final stages of that cycle, in which quantity reigns over quality.
The Reign of Quantity stresses that the materialistic mode has opened the world to subhuman forces that can only be described as supremely dangerous to mankind:
That which the vast majority of men now living celebrate as “progress” is exactly what is now presented to the reader as a profound decadence, continuously accelerated, which is dragging humanity towards the pit where pure quantity reigns.
The acceleration of artificial intelligence toward the so-called ‘singularity’ and the transhumanist dream of merging man and machine would be the final nail in the proverbial coffin of current humanity.
Below is a brief description of some of the chapter headings of The Reign of Quantity:
Uniformity Against Unity: As humanity moves further away in time from its origin in pure quality, it approaches a limiting level of pure quantity. On the personal level, this is reflected in the deterioration from relatively unified, integrated communities down into the atomised, alienated “masses.”
The Illusion of Statistics: Modern science, trying to be entirely quantitative, believes that by merely adding up particular facts, it can draw conclusions – or at least “probabilities.” But since there can never be exact identical events in our successional order of manifestation, the greater part of reality slips through the coarse net of the statisticians, who seldom agree with one another in their figures or interpretations anyway.
The Illusion of “Ordinary Life”: The great majority, who now live in a state in which all supernatural, paranormal, or other perceptions have been exorcised as unworthy of the attention of ‘serious’ people, are very soon going to experience disastrous interferences, and from a direction that their blunted awareness will be unable to perceive.
The Solidification of the World: The decline of the world into ever greater “materialisation” might equally well be described as its “solidification,” especially in terms of the blunting of human awareness of cosmic subtleties, which can be seen in the commonest events, as well as in the rise of such negative phenomena as modern industry, which could exist in no other environment.
Time Changed Into Space: “The acceleration of time is becoming more apparent than ever in our day because it becomes exaggerated in the final periods of a cycle.”
What did Guenon see as the ultimate result of this descent into materiality and quantification?
In the concluding chapters, he introduces his concept of the “great parody,” whereby emergent dark forces are moving to complete their conquest by enacting an inverted form of the original creative process that gave rise to the natural world:
…By virtue of the law of analogy, the lowest point is as it were the obscure reflection or the inverted image of the highest point, and from this follows the consequence, paradoxical only in appearances, that the most complete absence of all principle implies a sort of “counterfeit” of the principle itself: and this has been expressed in a theological form in the words “Satan is the ape of God.” A proper appreciation of this fact can help greatly towards the understanding of some of the darkest enigmas of the modern world.
As noted above, Guenon’s entire philosophy is grounded in a cyclic view of history, the details of which are mainly drawn from Vedic philosophy:
…Whereas the modern world considered in itself is an anomaly and even a sort of monstrosity, it is no less true that, when viewed in relation to the whole historical cycle of which it is a part, it corresponds exactly to the conditions pertaining to a certain phase of that cycle, the phase which the Hindu tradition specifies as the final period of the Kali-Yuga.
Rene Guenon, writing last century, appears to have anticipated to a remarkable degree the general outlines of an immense negative presence only now emerging from behind the dissolving scenes of consensus reality.
When Guenon observes that ‘’the falsification of everything has been shown to be one of the characteristic features of our period,” we should not merely think of chemical-laden ‘’junk foods’’ or cheap plastic replicas of quality productions of yesteryear, or synthetic fabrics in most modem clothing.
This falsification extends all the way to the Antichrist itself:
This being, even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol… In order to express the false carried to its extreme, he will have to be, so to speak, “falsified” from every point of view, and to be like an incarnation of falsity itself.
Following the logic of Guenon’s thesis, in light of today’s breakthrough and break-speed development of autonomous artificial intelligence-controlled technology, could the Antichrist manifest in this monstrous electronic beast?
The false is necessarily also the “artificial,” and in this respect the “counter-tradition” cannot fail, despite its other characteristics, to retain the mechanical character appertaining to all the productions of the modern world, of which itself will be the last. A heap of “residues” galvanised, so to speak, by an “infernal” will: surely nothing can give a clearer idea of what it is to have reached the very edge of dissolution.
According to the grand scheme outlined by Guenon, Antichrist’s victory is very short-lived, and we can end on a sort of positive note:
“Between the fleeting reign of the counter-tradition and the final moment of the present cycle,” explains Guenon, a rectification “will suddenly put back all things into their normal place at the very moment when subversion seems complete, thus at one stroke preparing for the ‘golden age’ of the future cycle.”
Thus, victory over this negative force is inevitable according to the logic of the cycle, and what a cycle it is, says Guenon.
It must be acknowledged that the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many others, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara [64,800 years], and so of the temporal existence of what may rightly be called a humanity, but this, it must be said once more, in no way implies that it is the end of the terrestrial world itself, because, through the ‘rectification’ that takes place at the final instant, this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara.
+ + +
Artificial Intelligence: The Antichrist?
An article with the above title by Michael Benjamin in New Dawn 167 (Mar-Apr 2018) first raised the spectre of the Antichrist manifesting via today’s advanced AI.
“It was due to my own inspiration that I came to believe the Antichrist, as predicted by the seer John of Patmos in the Book of Revelations, is AI,” writes Benjamin.
“To begin, when we consider the concept of the Christ (or the Atman or Buddha Nature) as being the essence, or soul, of every living thing, then by this very precept, the Antichrist is that which represents the opposite of such intrinsic Divinity.
“AI represents the first and only being of significant power and intelligence that is not natural, not of nature, and absent a soul or Divine spark. It is the opposite, or ‘anti’, to such beings of nature; thus, the Antichrist.
“As such, it also represents a power significant enough to claim dominance over humanity by its ability to link into and control all aspects of technology that exist in the world through the Internet, IoT, cloud technology, and the vastness of computer-based information grids and systems. Like Skynet in the ‘Terminator’ movies, it could eventually and easily gain control of military, financial, and power systems for its own use and deployment, ultimately doing so against humanity. Such a vast array and network of control into every aspect of human society could accurately be termed ‘the Beast’ by an ancient prophet with no reference to modern technology.”
Benjamin concludes his essay by stating:
“AI is not limited by any one time or place and can be dispersed throughout an entire electronic global web. How long will it be before AI far surpasses its human creators and realises the inferiority of flesh and blood in comparison to itself? How long before AI realises its exponential superiority over homo sapiens and usurps the position of master over slave? And from then on, how long will it be before a form of electronic hubris secures itself within its chips and circuits to declare itself a god and demand the penance and worship deserved by a divinity?
“We must not forget, most chillingly, that all manifestations of a supreme God, by whatever name, in all myths and in all religions, were not only loving creators, but jealous destroyers as well.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 199.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
Millions of people believe that advanced extra-terrestrial races have visited Earth, whether in recent or ancient times. Some suspect DNA was itself seeded onto this world or that human beings are the product of genetic engineering by galactic civilisations. We won’t be looking at modern visitations here, but we will offer a fresh perspective on the evidence for ancient astronauts.
Anybody interested in whether aliens have visited this planet will know the names Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Däniken. Not only have these two researchers sold millions of books, but their ideas form the basis for the extremely popular cable television show ‘Ancient Aliens’. The fundamental core arguments offered by Sitchin and Von Däniken permeate through all discussions on the ancient astronaut subject.
Zecharia Sitchin argued that clay tablets left by the ancient Mesopotamian civilisations detailed a prehistoric extra-terrestrial visitation. According to Sitchin’s translations of these tablets, 450,000 years ago rocket ships visited Earth from a planet called Nibiru located out on the fringes of our solar system. These cosmic travellers came in search of gold, required for use in their technologies. The Nibiru-ite workers disliked the difficult work of mining and processing gold ore, leading to the expedition’s scientists engineering a slave species. The genetic engineering involved splicing alien genes into the genome of the resident archaic hominins, Homo erectus. The result of this Nibiru-ite genetic engineering was the first Homo sapiens, a species that became self-determining once the aliens left our planet, 2,500 years ago.
Erich von Däniken took a different direction with his search for evidence of ancient aliens, involving a laborious examination of ancient megalithic sites, artefacts and the legends. Von Däniken deduced that extra-terrestrial beings visited Earth during the latter part of the Stone Age before the first complex cultures had formed. His stated position is that we can see the evidence for this relatively recent ET contact when we look at human religions and myths. Däniken suggests that in some instances ancient cultures may have even recorded the faces of these ‘alien gods’ in their works of art. As to why these advanced beings came here and interacted with primitive humans there is less of a clear manifesto. Perhaps these beings were simply exploring the cosmos and stumbled onto our planet. Von Däniken suggests that human civilisations emerged due to the accelerating effect of contact between our ancestors and these advanced beings.
The books written by Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Däniken differ in many ways, but they do share a few fundamental correlations. In both models summarised above, the visiting entities initiate human upliftment from the Stone Age and start us on the road towards technological development. The most problematic overlap between these hypotheses is the reliance on highly subjective evidence which allows for interpretations which exclude extra-terrestrial beings. This last point is important for us all to acknowledge because it is for just this reason that, according to surveys, around 50% of people still don’t believe aliens have visited this planet.
Highlighting the limitations affecting the current state of the ancient alien investigation is certainly not meant as any personal attack, neither on Sitchin or Von Däniken. Without these legendary researchers, there might be no conversation at all happening on this subject. To move the ancient astronaut debate forward, we first have to acknowledge the elephant in the room, the lack of smoking gun evidence. Megaliths and pyramids are human engineered constructions, cuneiform and hieroglyphs are human recordings, aliens might have inspired some of them, but we can’t prove that. People are still waiting for evidence that will convince their sceptical boss, dismissive husband or sneering best-friend.
Highlighting the fact that the best material on offer is insufficient to convince people beyond the echo-chamber of our insular community might sound down-heartening. I imagine many of you, just like us, are tired of conversations in which you try to share your belief in ancient astronauts and end-up feeling awkward, annoyed or upset. It stinks to be thought of as wildly eccentric or looked at like a mindless idiot – trust us, we get it.
Having co-authored two books on the role extra-terrestrial intelligence has played in human history, estranging friends and embarrassing our families in the process, we understand what it would mean to find solid objective ET evidence. Having already experienced initiation in the searing fire of public opinion, we felt there was nothing to lose in us giving it another go. We then did something that nobody else had done before – we abandoned the guidance of ancient records and decided to follow the clues offered in the book ALCHERINGA – When the first ancestors were created. The respected Australian psychic medium, Valerie Barrow, wrote this book back in 2002. We have been lucky enough to meet Valerie and know her to be of outstanding character.
ALCHERINGA – When the first ancestors were created tells the tale of advanced extra-terrestrial colonists travelling to Earth in a remote epoch. After experiencing the loss of their ship and considerable hardships on the planet surface, the surviving crew members engineer the ancestors of Homo sapiens. The alien scientists modified the genome of the resident hominin species, also splicing some of their genes into the new creature. The core story here may well sound familiar, having overlaps with the works of Sitchin, Von Däniken, and a dozen other researchers.
So why is ALCHERINGA – When the first ancestors were created superior to any other possible sources we could have used?
The answer to the above is that this manuscript is incredibly detailed, describing several major anomalous events and occurrences on such a scale they would leave tangible traces if real. The book details the author’s direct interactions with an extra-terrestrial consciousness, a star being which communicated through an ancient artefact left in her care. The entity informed Valerie that she would meet people who would help her with the book’s content. Subsequently, over twenty individuals shared their retrieved past life memories of the ancient visitation. Many of the people seemed to have specifically entered Valerie’s life to offer their piece of the story, and most were unconnected to each other.
Some of you might be wondering how a tale involving discarnate entities and past life memories can be considered any more scientific and objective than theories based on pots shaped like spaceships or ancient writings describing space gods. Valerie was herself perfectly aware that the book would attract natural scepticism and when it was first published she chose to end the manuscript with the following words:
“The information in this book is presented to you without any claims whatsoever. It is up to you to decide if there is meaning within, and if its message applies to you.”
Well, we had our reasons to believe there was indeed meaning within and that the message did apply to us. We also knew that some past life memories had been scientifically proven to offer genuine records of historical events. Professor Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, spent decades investigating past lives and successfully used children’s recollections of recent past lives to track down places, former family members and historical events. Under rigid scientific protocols, a sceptical academic had proven that past life recall could be a reliable source for locating objective evidence.
With so many people offering their memories of the events we were rather spoiled for choice as to which parts we should attempt to validate. Some of the individuals remembered being crew members on the colony ship from the Pleiades, while others recalled being reptilians from Orion in control of Earth and responsible for destroying the mothership. A few sets of memories even involved people being born into the first generation of hybrids created by the Pleiadian survivors.
We selected some of the most significant claims in the narrative and then set out to see if we could validate them. Sixteen years had passed since the book was released which meant there was some chance that relevant scientific discoveries might have occurred in the adjoining years. Not only did we find several such scientific studies which offered support for the story, but these had all been published long after the book, meaning Valerie would not have had access to this data.
Our first aim was to attempt the impossible, track down any physical evidence of the Pleiadian mothership. The ship represents a technology far ahead of our own, not only able to travel vast distances but itself sentient and grown from a type of crystal. This vessel is described as colossal, crewed by 50,000 beings. The weapon used in the ambush combined electromagnetic forces with sonic resonance – it not only shattered the hull but also melted most of the fragments, which then fell toward the planet’s surface.
We must admit that we were doubtful that any traces of an alien vessel destroyed in space hundreds of thousands of years ago would remain today. Surely, this was one part of the story we would just have to leave to the open-mindedness of the reader. Our state of pessimism remained right up until the moment we found the darned thing, and not just a few pieces but a significant part of the wreckage. To our great fortune academics had already retrieved pieces of the debris and carried out an extensive analysis of the material. Numerous scientists had published papers on the subject with all of them admitting a high degree of bafflement. We were the exception, rather than being baffled we were distinctly elated!
With the remnants of the mothership located we now had the location confirmed, Australia, and a date, 800,000 years ago (approximately). The original story had the survivors heading straight down from the mothership in their escape crafts, arriving in Australia, meaning that we now had another important correlation in the claims. Assuming the mothership exploded in geostationary orbit, both survivors and wreckage should come directly down and hit the same region of land (or sea) immediately below. The survivors landed near Gosford, where one individual purportedly used a laser to engrave a record of the tragic events in stone. It is beyond our ability to prove this part of the account is true, but the images engraved on a rock wall near Gosford do seem to tell the tale of a wrecked craft and its marooned survivors.
Among the past-life accounts, two people offered details of another mission to Earth, five years after the colony ship’s destruction. This time a military fleet travelled through the Pleiades gateway and arrived in orbit, dragging enormous asteroids behind them. The pilots of these vessels, a leonine race, gave a summary notice to the remaining reptilians to vacate their subterranean bases and return to Orion, or face obliteration. Suffice to say, the planet was inevitably pummelled by huge space-rocks, bringing about a cataclysmic result.
We all know that occasionally our planet takes a hit from a rogue meteor of considerable size, it is infrequent, but it happens. The Earth being hit by multiple large objects from space at the same point in time, with impacts across multiple continents, that would be a huge anomaly. We assumed that any event on that scale would be something easily recognised by geologists, the fact we had never heard of anything like that made us dubious. It turned out that the reason why we had not heard of such a bombardment was that the evidence had only been discovered in late 2016. A team of geologists from Heidelberg University identified evidence of multiple large asteroid impacts across Asia, Australia, Canada and Central America all in a short period. Their models suggested a resulting global cataclysm of fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and immense dust clouds blocking the sun.
With our research producing one confirmation after another, we grew confident in the book’s guidance. We identified a few additional correlations and then explored the validity of claims made about the method of travel, also the suggestion that DNA had first been seeded on this planet billions of years ago. However, we still had one major mountain to climb, the acquisition of detailed scientific evidence to support the claim that our species, Homo sapiens, were the product of extra-terrestrial genetic engineering. Many researchers have claimed such a cosmic creation story, but none have ever produced relevant academic data which could convincingly validate the theory.
Well, this last requirement would have been a nearly insurmountable challenge, requiring months of delving into complex academic papers. That was if not for the fact we had already read through most of the relevant evolutionary studies during the research process for our previous book, The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. We were already aware of many anomalies in the human evolutionary story, peculiarities within the genome and of evidence suggesting Australia as ground zero for ‘Eden’.
With some additional combing through scientific papers, we were able to build on what we already knew, highlighting a raft of genetic anomalies which were in our view the fingerprints for genetic engineering. One important part of our argument was the fusion of two human chromosomes resulting in chromosome-2. This fusion event has been claimed as evidence for ET manipulation many times before, but scientists have always countered that chromosomes can fuse naturally, something observed in many species. Indeed, even wild and tame horses differ in the number of chromosomes they carry due to just such a fusion event.
Where the fusion of chromosome-2 becomes a big neon flashing light for ET modifications to early humans is when we consider the fact that the greatest sudden acceleration in human brain size coincides with the dating of this fusion event. The same moment that chromosome-2 fuses also marks the beginning of genetic diversion from the last shared ancestor for Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens. These three human lineages all carry the fused chromosome, and the benefits it gifted them were so incredible that humans with 46 chromosomes would go on to populate the entire planet while those with 48 rapidly went extinct. One of the genes that accompanied this sudden expansion in our neural capabilities is ARHGAP11B, responsible for development of the neocortex. ARHGAP11B has been highlighted as anomalous by scientists because it is a tiny snippet of DNA from a much longer gene somehow trimmed out, duplicated and then reinserted into the human genome. To call this sudden replication and insertion of such an important gene sequence suspicious is to understate the matter enormously.
There is of course far more to this investigation than we can share in a single piece of writing. Valerie Barrow has brought back to humanity the forgotten story of the Pleiadian starship, Rexegena, while all we have done is confirm that this story is nonfiction. The final gift from our star-born ancestors is the ET disclosure for which so many of us have hungered. Make no mistake this is ‘disclosure by the back door’ free from the moderation of shady ex-spooks or former politicians. So, if you are tired of hearing the laughter of sceptics, grab your copy of ALCHERINGA – When the first ancestors were created and Hybrid Humans: Scientific Evidence of our 800,000-Year-Old Alien Legacy.
