- creation
- gods and goddesses
- heaven
- the gods and their toys (space ships or chariots?)
- the quest for immortality
Could it be that those ancient stories of the gods were more than just the product of someone's fanciful imagination? Is it possible that the writers, chroniclers, and scribes of our distant past actually record an accurate view of our origin? Could it be that we are really children of the stars?
- creation
- gods and goddesses
- heaven
- the gods and their toys (space ships or chariots?)
- the quest for immortality
Could it be that those ancient stories of the gods were more than just the product of someone's fanciful imagination? Is it possible that the writers, chroniclers, and scribes of our distant past actually record an accurate view of our origin? Could it be that we are really children of the stars?
The E.T. Chronicles: What Myths and Legends Tell Us About Human Origins
240
The E.T. Chronicles: What Myths and Legends Tell Us About Human Origins
240Paperback
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Overview
- creation
- gods and goddesses
- heaven
- the gods and their toys (space ships or chariots?)
- the quest for immortality
Could it be that those ancient stories of the gods were more than just the product of someone's fanciful imagination? Is it possible that the writers, chroniclers, and scribes of our distant past actually record an accurate view of our origin? Could it be that we are really children of the stars?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571747167 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Barbara Hand Clow is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Loyala University Chicago. She cofounded, with Matthew Fox, the publisher Bear & Company.
Read an Excerpt
The E.T. Chronicles
What Myths and Legends Tell Us About Human Origins
By Rita Louise, Wayne Laliberte
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Rita Louise and Wayne LaliberteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57174-716-7
CHAPTER 1
The Box
What holds a cultural group together? Is this glue a combination of their customs and beliefs? Could it be the foods they eat, the way they dress, or perhaps the habits they have? Each of these mesh together to identify us and our place in the world. Social groups and cultural norms establish the customs in our lives.
Pressure to conform to the norm (or rules) is true in any kind of personal organization, whether professional, educational, or spiritual. In order to fit in, we submit ourselves to the extreme power of "group norms." We are often bullied, managed, or controlled by the group. They can manipulate our thoughts, beliefs, and views of the world. The key to social success in any group is conformity in what we think, say, and do.
We do not normally recognize the impact social pressures have on us or how group norms can manipulate our choices and decisions. It was not long ago that sporting a tattoo was viewed as socially incorrect. Individuals with tattoos were avoided because they represented the shadier side of society. Many assumed that the tattooed individual was bad, evil, or somehow dangerous. Today, tattooing has become a fadlike social norm for both men and women.
In a 2008 article in the Los Angeles Times, Shari Roan reported that about 93 percent of women who had indulged in getting a tattoo felt stigmatized as a result of their tattoos. About 40 percent of these women felt as if they had to endure negative comments at work or in public versus 20 percent and 5 percent of men, respectively. This has led many women to decide to have their tattoos removed. The article suggests (ah ... yes, even more control by the experts and the media) that women should think long and hard about where they get their tattoos placed. It goes on to suggest that perhaps they should select an area they could cover.
In the Western world we have been brainwashed into one way of thinking about ourselves. When we hear of something that is "outside the box" (i.e., outside the boundaries created by our social organizations), we often assess this breach of our norms with skepticism, disbelief, dislike, or hate. Since the concept did not come from "one of us," we automatically assume it must be flawed. This is true especially if it contradicts our current beliefs or the beliefs of our social group.
Much of what we think and believe has been spoon-fed to us from the first day following birth. Case in point: Who discovered America? I will bet you are saying to yourself, That question is easy—it's Christopher Columbus. Are you sure? Think about it again and use the contradictory historical facts you know are true. The Native Americans were here long before Columbus! Then there were the Vikings! According to Nordic tradition, Bjarni Herjólfsson, a Norse settler in Greenland, sighted a continent west of Greenland when he was blown off course. Leif Eriksson and many others after him, not much after Herjólfsson's discovery, explored this new continent they called "Vinland." All of this transpired at least 500 years before Columbus spotted land on that fateful day. It might be interesting to ask someone from Scandinavia who discovered America. Would their response also be Christopher Columbus? Are their norms flawed?
The same holds true in non-Western countries. In nations such as India and China, the thoughts, beliefs, and traditions they share are vastly different from ours. The same can be said about ancient cultures. They believed in a world far different from what we were taught and hold to be true.
How did we get ourselves into such a mess? How did we become so separated from our origin, our past? The schism started in 325 CE when the First Council of Nicaea put its stamp of approval upon the canonized books of the Christian Bible. This started Western society's break from fact. A chasm formed between what was fact in the ancient world and what was deemed appropriate and true by the Nicene Council. And then, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria ultimately sealed our fate.
The Library of Alexandria was established in Egypt around 300 BCE. It was designed to be a storehouse of ancient knowledge. Through a well-funded and aggressive directive, Egyptians, while under Greek rule, were charged with collecting knowledge from around the world. The vast amounts of ancient wisdom that was lost when the library burned is anyone's guess. There are several theories as to how or why the library ended up in ruin. These theories include a fire during the Alexandrian War in 48 BCE, a decree of the Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391 CE, and the Muslim conquest in 642 CE. If you are interested in conspiracy theories, this ancient mystery is one that is yet unsolved.
The net result was that many of the documents that recorded our distant past were lost. What was left was a few pages of biblical text. Anything that fell outside its black and white lines was considered heretical. It did not take long before social stigma as well as persecutions in the name of "God" caused us to close our eyes to anything that went against the approved ways. Sadly, the Catholic Church is not the only one to use religious doctrine as a form of social control. The Romans persecuted the Catholics. The Catholics persecuted everyone ... and the Jews, over the millennia, seemed always to be the subject of persecution.
Our connection to our ancient past took another blow during the Dark Ages, which began with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. The Catholic Church gained strength and increasingly dominated the lives of the people who lived during this time. The church became rich and powerful, which enabled it to influence and at times completely control the rulers of Europe.
From birth to death, the people of the Dark Ages lived in fear of excommunication. Excommunication from the church meant that when you died you would spend eternity suffering in the fires of hell. This religious programming forced people to live inside the box prescribed for them. Out of fear, they hid their true feelings and were reluctant to vocalize any thoughts that might have differed from church edicts.
People who strayed from the tried-and-true ways were condemned as heretics. Punishment for heresy included imprisonment, torture, or execution. The rise of Catharism, a Gnostic form of Christianity, in the twelfth century caused the persecution of heretics to become more frequent. Pope Gregory IX, in the thirteenth century, began assigning individuals from the Dominican Order the duty of judging individuals suspected of heresy. So began the Inquisition. By the end of the century, a Grand Inquisitor was assigned to each proceeding. The most famous inquisitor was the Spanish Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, who headed the Spanish Inquisition and whose name has become synonymous with the horrors of the Christian Inquisition.
The church controlled every aspect of people's lives for over 1,000 years. This control included their religious beliefs but also bled over into the sciences. The Pope, during this time, was solely responsible for interpreting the Bible. He did not have modern technology, such as radio carbon dating, to identify the period in which an item was originally used. He did not have DNA testing to evaluate the differences between one species and another, nor did he have the Hubble Space Telescope to look out into the vastness of space and identify our place in it. He also did not possess the knowledge of gravity, electricity, or the makeup of the subatomic world we take for granted today. His interpretations were based upon the facts of the day and assumptions he made.
The dawning of the Renaissance changed all of that. Starting in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Renaissance brought about a resurgence in the study of the science and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This opened the door to entirely new thoughts. Well, not new thoughts, but ones that had not been explored or expressed in the Western world for centuries.
Even with the new and wonderful insights gained during the Renaissance, the damage was already done. The Bible, as both history and science, had established the very foundation for society in the Western world. This foundation was built upon assumptions made by someone, somewhere, and are based upon what these individuals learned, heard, or read. It was not built upon science or even pseudoscience. Much of it was based upon superstition and conjecture.
Today, discoveries in astronomy, archeology, genetics, and many other sciences directly conflict with the Bible. This divergence leaves many of us increasingly confused. We do not question what the Bible says. What we question is its interpretation. Through our investigation into the past, we have found that the facts presented in the Bible can work very well with current science if the prevailing interpretation is removed or at least reassessed.
Here is an example of how an interpretation of the Bible formed the basis of scientific thought for hundreds of years. In 1650 CE, a bishop named James Ussher tried to identify when the world was created. He used the dates given in the Bible (see table 1 on the following page) of the pre-flood people (Adam, Enoch, Noah, etc.) to establish when Adam and Eve lived.
Counting back so many years, plus six days, he discovered the date God had created the earth. He determined it was sometime in 4004 BCE. The vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, also looking to determine the date of creation, went one step further. He fine-tuned the date and stated that the Earth was created on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 a.m.. It was a Sunday.
For hundreds of years people believed that creation happened in 4004 BCE. Discoveries in science tell us a different story. Today, most Westerners have let go of the 4004 BCE date. They reason, "How could such a recent date account for things such as trilobites, the dinosaurs, and the action of plate tectonics?" It only took one hundred years for our societal viewpoint to change. If we want to understand where we came from, we must be willing to look outside the box, or should I say, "the Book."
We continue to live entrenched in a cultural timeline that is incorrect—even with all of the recent discoveries in the sciences. The currently accepted timeline tells us that civilization began in Sumer around 4000 BCE. Supporters of this notion state that the pyramids in Egypt were built shortly thereafter. Archeologists, historians, and researchers into our distant past want us to believe that humanity moved from living in caves and huts into a full-blown society nearly overnight.
Alternative historians, such as Brad Steiger, Michael Cremo, Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, Klaus Dona, Zecharia Sitchin, and Erich von Däniken, believe that evidence of our past is being hidden from us. At worst, new discoveries are not being discussed, and mainstream researchers are overlooking important finds. The suppression of evidence keeps our history nice, neat, ordered, and controlled. The exposure of newly acquired facts and information that do not conform to the norm would force us to look outside the box. For some, this is a very uncomfortable idea.
Recent archeological discoveries in Syria and Turkey are challenging contemporary mainstream archeologists. In Bosnia, a series of pyramid structures have been found. Called the Bosnian Pyramids, they have been dated, conservatively speaking, to 7000 BCE. In Turkey, a presumed religious structure filled with monolithic columns and detailed carvings, called Göbekli Tepe, has been dated to have been built around 10000 BCE. Have you heard about either of these sites in the media? Have there been any shows on the Discovery Channel or History Channel talking about these incredible finds? Thanks to the Internet, information about these amazing discoveries is slowly being revealed. The result of these discoveries could revolutionize our thoughts about history.
Our myths, legends, and oral tradition provide us with an image of our ancient past. These tales tell of the lives and experiences of our ancestors. Dating the events, chronicled in these ancient tales, is difficult if not impossible. The date of Noah's flood, for example, is lost to posterity. Stone carvings, which describe the flood, have been found in Sumer. The carvings by themselves do not help us determine the date of the flood. Scientists are obliged to date the evidence in hand: the carved tablet, the rock, and other strata in which the carving was found. If, on the other hand, there was a reference to a known (dated) person, a place, or a thing found within the writing itself, a reasonably close if not exact date could be determined. This, in most instances, is not the case. The writings, stories, and myths we have inherited never sound like a modern newspaper. The tales never begin with "On Friday, December 21, 2012 ..." (If only they did!)
Many historians are quick to dismiss information that comes to us from ancient cultures. They state that primitive people, in order to explain their surroundings, invented these creative stories. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's History of the Incas, written in 1572 CE, use this line of reasoning:
This absurd fable of their creation is held by these barbarians and they affirm and believe it as if they had really seen it to happen and come to pass.
When anthropologists investigated the cosmology of the Dogon people, their peers quickly dismissed their findings. The Dogon are an ethnic group living in Mali in West Africa in and around the Bandigara Cliff. French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen studied these primitive people in the early twentieth century. Dogon priests, over time, revealed to the anthropologists many of their secret myths, lores, and traditions.
Griaule and Dieterlen reported the advanced astronomical knowledge these people possessed. The Dogon were aware of the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. The Dogon also claimed that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, had a companion star. The Dogon describe it as being very small, incredibly heavy, and white in color. Today, astronomers call this secondary, binary star, Sirius B. Sirius B is not visible to the naked eye. It was first observed with a telescope in 1862.
Astronomers such as the legendary Carl Sagan dismissed the potential knowledge of the Dogon, suggesting that the priests of this primitive group must have encountered Westerners prior to Griaule and Dieterlen's investigation. The Dogon, according to Sagan, took this scientific information about Sirius's binary star and in the course of sixty years incorporated this new knowledge into their cultural mythology. This explanation, nevertheless, does not address the Sigui ceremony that has been performed by the Dogon people every sixty years since at least the twelfth century that celebrates the renewal of the world.
Mythic epics such as the Hindu Mahabharata and the Ramayana are described as being ambitious tales of fiction, or, should I say, science fiction. These stories are portrayed as a figment of someone's wild imagination. Homer's epic tales The Iliad and The Odyssey also fall into the category of fantasy. Homer's sagas provide detailed descriptions of the people, places, and events that transpired during the war between the people of Troy and the Greeks, the Trojan War. These heroic tales apparently provided enough factual information that in the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann discovered the mythic city of Troy. This find changed our view of Homer's work forever. What was once believed to be a fairy tale overnight became recognized as an important historical document.
If the events documented in The Iliad are shown to be based upon historical information, then why not others? If the Dogon knew about specific astronomical information of our solar system, then how are we to say that other technical information from ancient sources is false or make-believe? Is it possible that the myths and legends from around the world are accounts of what occurred in our past?
Another problem encountered when dealing with a culture's mythology is it was often recorded long after the event occurred. What little we do have is memorialized in stone, on papyrus, and on wood. This has created problems for many scholars. For example, we recognize the books contained within the New Testament were not written right after Jesus's death. Stories of Jesus's life were memorized and then told and retold for years before pen was put to paper. It is theorized that at least fifty years went by after Jesus's death before his life and work were collected and documented. These books are touted as the one and true word of God, despite a fifty-year delay in documenting the facts of the day.
Books of Jesus's life and teachings that fall outside the current Bible, called the Apocrypha, are not accepted in much the same way. Manuscripts such as the ones found in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi are believed to have been written sometime during the fourth century CE. These books include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Secret Book of John. Were the concepts depicted in these texts a part of the original teachings of Jesus's ministry? Religious scholars resoundingly say, "No!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The E.T. Chronicles by Rita Louise, Wayne Laliberte. Copyright © 2014 Rita Louise and Wayne Laliberte. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Barbara Hand Clow xiii
Introduction xv
Part 1 Myth as History
1 The Box 3
2 In the Beginning 17
3 A God by Any Other Name 37
4 Who Art in Heaven 51
5 The Gods and Their Toys 63
Part 2 The Original Shock and Awe
6 Cycles of Time 73
7 Emergence 79
8 The Progenitors 87
9 The Golden Age 101
10 The Fight for Immortality 109
11 Conquest Planet Earth 127
12 The Rebellion 149
13 The Age of Man 153
14 The Flood 175
Epilogue: Unnatural Selection 199
Acknowledgments 207
Bibliography 209