Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? (23 page)
Connors’s boss said brusquely, “Go get the book!” He immediately retrieved the book from his car and turned it over to the two men, asking, “How will I get the book back?”
“We will contact you,” they replied.
Connors was flabbergasted and never thought to ask the men how they knew he had checked out this book from the library or why a book on ancient Greek gods would have any application to national security. Since he had mentioned the book’s title in an e-mail to a friend, Connors suspected the agents learned of it through e-mail interception, and he suspected that the Greek god connection, whatever it may be, is a serious matter to certain federal authorities. “If there is one thing I’m sure of at this point in time [it] is that—and this is what I got from the first message I received—is that this is very important to mankind—not to governments—not to leaders—not to power brokers—but to mankind,” he told journalist Linda Moulton Howe.
John Coleman, a veteran best-selling conspiracy author and a self-proclaimed former MI6 agent, provided connective tissue bringing the tales of Greek gods right up to date. In his book on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Coleman said in modern America a “closely knit group of social psychologists, pollsters and media manipulators” is presided over by an elite group of powerful patrons, known as the Committee of 300 or, more significantly, “the Gods of Olympus.”
After the Greeks came the Romans. The Roman civilization is said to have been founded in 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the Trojan leader Aeneas, who fled to Italy with other refugees following the fall of Troy in modern-day Turkey. It was said Aeneas was the son of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and with his death, at his mother’s request, he was deified as the god Jupiter Indiges. Venus, the goddess of beauty, sex, fertility, and victory, was the Roman counterpart of Aphrodite. Her Anunnaki counterpart would have been Inanna. Such connections indicate the ongoing cult worship that began in Sumer and then passed through Egypt and Greece.
About 80 BC, General Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, better known simply as Sulla, founded a college in Rome dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. However, Isis worship was discouraged by the Roman consuls, who did not want to share control over the population. The worship of Isis at Rome continued to be suppressed by a succession of decrees until the reign of Caligula.
In 212 BC, a different man, Gaius Sulla, an ardent worshipper of Apollo, organized the first of the annual Ludi Apollinares, or Games of Apollo, honoring the Greek god whose counterparts were Osiris and Enki. The later warlord, Sulla Felix, was known to wear a small golden image of Apollo into battle. In many ways, Roman culture was merely the latest incarnation of Sumer, bringing with it many of the older centralized religious and political structures.
The Roman Empire was formed in 27 BC after Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian (Caesar Augustus) had emerged victorious from a series of ruinous civil wars, first primarily between Julius Caesar and his former ally Pompey, and then between Octavian and his former ally Mark Antony. Before his assassination in 44 BC by a group of senators hoping to restore the republic, Julius Caesar had seen to it that his name became so popular that it was used as a title for subsequent rulers; soon the title Caesar evolved from being a family name of the Julian clan of Rome to a title held by a Roman emperor. The name has lived on in the German word
kaiser
and the Russian title czar.
At the height of its power in about AD 117, the empire commanded most of the Western world. Like Greece and the United States, Rome began as a democratic republic but evolved into a voracious and aggressive empire ruled by a succession of tyrannical Caesars, its people distracted by bread and circuses—government-sponsored free food and weekly gladiatorial spectacles in the various coliseums.
However, after the death (possibly another assassination) of the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, the true ruling power was the Roman Church, collector of tithes and lender of money to the government. As the power of the later Roman state rested on the power of the Church, it is instructive to review the rise of Christianity.
In the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Jews in Palestine were fragmented among the clerical and politically powerful Pharisees, the pious Sadducees, and the unconventional Essenes. Moreover, the interpretations of the Old Testament found in the Dead Sea Scrolls illuminate the ways in which the interpretations of James and the Jerusalem Christians devoted to the teachings of Jesus differed from those of Paul and his followers outside Palestine. It is interesting to note that in the Scriptures Jesus condemned both the Pharisees and Sadducees but pointedly ignored the Essenes, leading many to believe he favored the Essene philosophies.
As leaders of the Jerusalem church, Jesus’s brother James and Mary Magdalene were at odds with Paul, who was bringing his version of Christianity to the gentiles to the north. There were immense squabbles over the most minute issues. In Galatians 5:12, Paul had become so exasperated with a continuing argument over circumcision that he expressed the hope that those initiating the controversy would emasculate themselves.
Bible scholar and former intelligence analyst Patricia G. Eddy wrote, “The first Jewish Christians believed that obeying all of the stringent Jewish religious laws, including circumcision and eating only Kosher food, were necessary for salvation.” Yet according to Eddy, “Paul preached that salvation could be attained through faith and that the Jewish religious laws should not be allowed to impede people from becoming Christians. Paul’s view eventually won out, as more and more gentiles converted to Christianity. By the third century, they outnumbered the Jewish Christians by a large margin, defined Christianity according to Paul’s theology, and began castigating the original Jewish Christians as heretics.”
By the middle of the second century, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, was condemning the followers of Jesus and James as heretics. These followers were known as Nazarenes, or the poor. The author Laurence Gardner noted that Irenaeus complained that these Nazarenes “reject the Pauline epistles and they reject the apostle Paul, calling him an apostate [rejecter] of the Law … the Nazarenes … denounced Paul as a ‘renegade’ and a ‘false apostle,’ claiming that his ‘idolatrous writings’ should be ‘rejected altogether.’ ”
Elaine Pagels wrote that “diverse forms of Christianity flourished in the early years of the Christian movement. Hundreds of rival teachers all claimed to teach the ‘true doctrine of Christ’ and denounced one another as frauds. Christians in churches scattered from Asia Minor to Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome split into factions, arguing over church leadership. All claimed to represent ‘the authentic tradition.’ ”
After becoming an established institution, the Roman Church quickly gained wealth and power. It derived a great deal of power from collecting tithes and lending money to the government. “Far above the wrangling in the local churches sat the Roman Church, unconcerned, untroubled, and probably, uncomprehending,” Patricia Eddy wrote, adding that the Church at this time was primarily concentrating on missionary work in Europe, an activity which paid unexpected benefits. “Unwittingly, the Christianization of these heathen ultimately saved the Roman Church because the barbarians and their priests regarded the Roman Church as the authority for their religious beliefs. When the barbarians overran Rome, the Roman Church was spared. …”
Though spared by the barbarians, the Church still had to contend with a variety of sects, all with their own version of Christianity. Church control was maintained predominantly by fear of God’s wrath as evoked by the priesthood. If that failed, there was always force.
And all of the Church’s machinations were said to be supported by biblical scripture, which had been edited numerous times to eliminate certain messages that contradicted Church dogma. Editing, or redactions, as they are euphemistically called, over the years has led to errors in our translations of the Bible, which in turn have led some to misunderstandings over modern terms, such as
flight
, or when it came to secret codes hidden within its language. The Essenes of Jesus’s time produced literature containing their own intricate codes and allegories to protect their knowledge from the uninitiated as well as from the Roman authorities. For example, when writing about the Romans, they used the term
Kittim
, but this word was often misinterpreted to refer to the ancient Chaldeans of Mesopotamia or some of the Greek islands.
In addition, according to C. L. Turnage, some Bible codes and symbols referred to multiple deities. “These coded references pointed the way toward an understanding that such beings were the gods, or Elohim, of the Bible, whose worship began in Sumer, and who ultimately originated on another world.”
The conflicts both within and outside of Christianity were settled by the Roman emperor Constantine in a compromise to gain power. “Apart from various cultic beliefs, the Romans had worshipped the Emperors in their capacity as gods descended from others like Neptune and Jupiter,” explained author Laurence Gardner. “At the Council of Arles in 314, Constantine retained his own divine status by introducing the omnipotent God of the Christians as his personal sponsor. He then dealt with the anomalies of doctrine by replacing certain aspects of Christian ritual with the familiar pagan traditions of sun worship, together with other teachings of Syrian and Persian origin. In short, the new religion of the Roman Church was constructed as a ‘hybrid’ to appease all influential factions. By this means, Constantine looked towards a common and unified ‘world’ religion—Catholic meaning
universal
—with himself at its head.”
Once Christianity became the accepted religion of the empire, pagan holidays were expropriated. Saturnalia, for example, was the winter festival in honor of the god Saturn, the equivalent of the Sumerian god of the heavens, Anu, and the Egyptian god Amen-Ra (known to the Greeks as Cronos). Saturnalia was merely a latter-day extension of the Greek festival of Kronia, a remembrance of the “Golden Days” when Cronos ruled the world. By the end of the republic, it had evolved into a gay time of gift-giving, lighting candles, feasting, and general frivolities for the entire population, including slaves. But when Christianity arrived, the Roman rulers found it difficult to stamp out this holiday, so the Church simply announced that it was celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, an observance that has been carried forward to this day as Christ Mass, or Christmas.
The church’s co-optation of Christianity was sealed at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. During the council, the priest Arius was beaten and tossed out because he and his followers believed that only God created everything and therefore Jesus was not God but simply a heavenly inspired teacher. His followers, the Arians, were banished from the Church, and the Nicene Creed was established, which formally defined God as a deity of three equal and coexisting parts—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost.
One year later, Constantine ordered the confiscation and destruction of all works that questioned the newly constructed orthodoxy and then opened the Lateran Palace, which was a precursor of the Vatican, to the Bishop of Rome. In 331, the emperor ordered new copies made of Christian texts, most of which had been lost or destroyed during the previous persecutions. The resulting editing included alterations that have become the foundation of modern Christianity.
Although history lavishes praise on the Greek and Roman empires for the advances they brought in military strategies, construction, and sanitation, scant attention has been paid to the destruction of ancient sacred sites and indigenous cultures as these empires spread across the world.
Ancient knowledge and history were forgotten by the masses, often because the ruling classes destroyed libraries and historical records. Only a few of Homer’s poems survived the destruction of his works by the Greek tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. Nothing survived the destruction of the Egyptian library in the Temple of Ptah in Memphis. Likewise, an estimated two hundred thousand volumes of priceless works disappeared with the destruction of the library of Pergamum in Asia Minor.
When the Romans leveled the city of Carthage in their drive for world conquest, they destroyed a library said to have contained more than five hundred thousand volumes. Then came Julius Caesar, whose war against Egypt resulted in the loss of the great library at Alexandria, considered the greatest collection of books in antiquity. With the loss of the Serapeum and the Bruchion branches of that library, a total of up to seven hundred thousand volumes of accumulated knowledge went up in flames.
European libraries also suffered under the Romans and later from zealous Christians. Between the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204 and the Catholic Inquisition (1137–1825), an inestimable number of ancient works were irretrievably lost.
Collections in Asia fared little better, as Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti ordered all histories of ancient China burned just before he died in 210 BC.
“Because of these tragedies we have to depend on disconnected fragments, casual passages and meager accounts,” lamented Australian author Andrew Tomas. “Our distant past is a vacuum filled at random with tablets, parchments, statues, paintings, and various artifacts. The history of science would appear totally different were the book collection of Alexandria intact today.”
Always this destruction was done in the name of God or the people. In Rome, the official slogan was
Senatus populus quis Romanus
, meaning the Senate (government) and the Roman people are one, or synonymous. It was an early and eerie forerunner of the German Nazi slogan
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer
, or One people, one Empire, one Leader.
The book burning of the Nazis is well known, but such destruction of knowledge did not stop with the end of World War II. In Iraq, the central al-Awqaf Library, founded in 1920, contained 45,000 rare books and more than 6,000 documents from the Ottoman Empire. At the onset of the U.S. invasion, arsonists set fire to the building in April 2003. Although the staff managed to save 5,250 items, including a collection of older Korans, all else was lost. The fire spread, destroying all 175,000 books and manuscripts at the library of the University of Baghdad’s College of Art. The entire library at the University of Basra was reduced to ash, and the Central Public Library in Basra lost 100 percent of its collection. Also lost in the invasion and subsequent occupation were volumes from the Iraqi National Library as well as those at Bayt al-Hikma, the Central Library of the University of Mosul, and others. According to Fernando Báez, director of Venezuela’s National Library and author of
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books
, almost one million books and ten million priceless documents have been destroyed, lost, or stolen throughout Iraq since 2003. Báez described the losses as “the biggest cultural disaster since the descendants of Genghis Khan destroyed Baghdad in 1258.”