3
Have Astronomers Discovered Sky World?
Johannes Megapolensis, the
Dutch colonist who captured the first known
Mohawk creation story in 1644, probably would have been amazed that the
Mohawks would continue to believe in it for more than three and a half
centuries, but that is indeed what has happened.
The story of creation, which
has often been called by the more formal
name of The Myth of the
Earth Grasper,
is still the foundation of not only traditional Mohawk beliefs, but
those of our brother Iroquoians, just as it was in the time of
Megapolensis. It has evolved over time, as all great traditions
do, but there are many important aspects of it that have survived
virtually intact over the centuries. One of them is the central
premise that life on earth has extraterrestrial origins. As
Megapolensis said:
They
think that there are more worlds
than one, and that we came from another world.
That’s right, an integral part
of Iroquoian spiritual beliefs is that
life on earth was in part seeded from another planet.…a place known to
us as Karonhià:ke, or Sky World. It’s one of those areas
where our traditional teachings agree with those of other peoples, for
it was almost universal among the ancients that beings from the heavens
were involved in creation.
For years, these “heavenly
beings” were the basis of all of the world’s
religions, but today we only associate the concept with one thing:
little green men from Mars.
We owe this in part to Erich
von Däniken, whose pseudo-scientific
book Chariots of the
Gods? Unsolved
Mysteries of the Past
reintroduced the concept of “ancient
astronauts” into the public consciousness in1967. Ancient
astronauts have become a staple plot device of science fiction movies
since then, but few scientists take the idea seriously. As
mysterious as the Great Pyramids of Giza are, there is no question that
men made them, not alien gods, although their makers certainly had a
rich cultural world that spoke of celestial gods and goddesses…the Star Wars of their time.
One scientist who does take
the ancient astronauts seriously is
Zecharia Sitchin, the Israeli scholar who authored The Twelfth
Planet, The Stairway to
Heaven, The Wars of
Gods and Men, The Lost Realm, When Time Began, and The Cosmic Code. These books
are collectively known as The Earth
Chronicles.
Sumerian
clay seal depicting ancient gods
Sitchin’s take on the ancient
astronauts scenario is much more detailed
and involved than von Däniken’s work, but it is not without its
share of skeptics. At the heart of his theory is the belief that the
ancient Sumerians knew of a tenth member of our solar system…the planet
Nibiru, the birthplace of
their gods. Based on his reading of ancient Mesopotamian texts,
Sitchin says that this “planet of the gods” has a massive orbit that
brings it around the sun once every 3,600 years, and whenever it comes
closer to the inner planets, it usually wreaks havoc. This was
the cause of the great flood talked about in the biblical story of
Noah’s ark.
Although this planet’s orbit
takes it quite a distance from the warmth
of the sun, it apparently has a means of generating enough heat of its
own to support life. Sitchin says that the beings who lived on
this planet-the Anunnaki, or
“Those who from heaven to Earth came” -traveled here to mine for gold,
but quickly grew tired of their toil. A member of the Anunnaki
royal family, a scientist named Ea,
noticed that the planet already had a creature similar to themselves,
and suggested a solution to the labor crisis: genetically engineer a
“hybrid” from the DNA of these primitive beings and the gods
themselves.
Once perfected, the hybrids
were immediately put to work to relieve the
gods. Eventually they made enough of these new hybrids that the gods
began to take some of them as wives. The noise from all of this
debauchery angered Ea’s brother, Enlil, who decided that it was time
for the end of this new creation. When the Planet of the Gods
came around for another visit, its gravitational pull caused a massive
flood on earth that wiped out most of humanity. Fortunately, Ea
was able to prevent mankind’s total destruction by advising a chosen
few to build an ark and save themselves.
If this sounds similar to the
Book of Genesis in the Bible, it’s
because Genesis is a regeneration of these earlier Near Eastern
tales. Yahweh (Jehovah)
is an amalgamation of these two ancient Sumerian gods, Ea and Enlil.
(Since the ancient Jews were nomadic, they had to travel light, both
physically and spiritually, and that meant no idol worship and only one
deity!)
I mention Sitchin’s theory
because in the original Sumerian legends
about the creation of man, they speak of the new worker being fashioned
from clay mixed with the blood of a god. Life is then “breathed
into” the new creation, which Sitchin interprets as the mixing of
Anunnaki DNA with that of our evolutionary predecessors. It is
reminiscent of how man was created in modern versions of our own
creation story, such as the one found in the North American Indian
Travelling College’s Traditional
Teachings (1984):
When
Teharonhiawako created all the
waters, plants, trees, and animals of the world, he decided that he
should create a being in his likeness from the natural world.
He wanted this being to have a superior mind so it would have the
responsibility of looking after his creations. Then he decided
that it would be better if he created more than one being and give to
each similar instructions and see if over a period of time, they would
carry them through.
The first being Teharonhiawako made was from the bark of a tree; the
second from the foam of the great salt water, the third from the black
soil...
Now Teharonhiawako thought to himself, it is getting towards the end of
the day and I have created three beings, since everything on this world
exists in cycles of four, I will create one more being. Thus he
again looked for something different within the natural world and this
time he found some reddish-brown earth. With this he again
combined other elements from the land and created a human form.
When he finished he observed that his form blended very well with the
natural surroundings, especially against the setting sun, which gave
the form a reddish color.
Are these “battling brothers,”
the great flood, and the creation of man
from clay just more examples of universal human archetypes, or could
there be a more tangible connection between Ea and Enlil of the
Sumerians and Teharonhiawá:kon and Tawískaron of our own
creation story? It was something I thought I would never know the
answer to.
That all changed on July 29th,
2005, when a NASA website announced some
surprising news:
“It’s
definitely bigger than Pluto.” So
says Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology who
announced today the discovery of a new planet in the outer solar system.
The planet, which hasn’t been officially named yet, was found by Brown
and colleagues using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory
near San Diego. It is currently about 97 times farther from the sun
than Earth, or 97 Astronomical Units (AU). For comparison, Pluto is 40
AU from the sun.
This places the new planet more or less in the Kuiper Belt, a dark
realm beyond Neptune where thousands of small icy bodies orbit the sun.
The planet appears to be typical of Kuiper Belt objects-only much
bigger. Its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that
it can only be classified as a planet itself, Brown says.
One would expect that Zecharia
Sitchin would be thrilled to hear that
the existence of his “Planet of the Gods” had been confirmed by
science, but as he stated on his website, he didn’t believe this “icy
rock” was the same planet:
So
is it Nibiru? Have astronomers
now found the planet from which, according to my understanding of
Mesopotamian and biblical texts and illustrations, astronauts had come
to Earth some 450,000 years ago?
Based on the sketchy information so far available, the answer is No.
This regrettable answer stems, first of all, from comparing the
information released regarding the new object and the ancient data
concerning Nibiru. The latter was described as a radiating planet
(i.e. one that has its own heat source and atmosphere), a planet that
sustains life, home planet of the Anunnaki (“Those who from heaven to
Earth came”) – the biblical Nefilim…It was not an “icy rock” in the
Kuiper belt.
It seems doubtful that NASA is
contemplating a manned space mission to
the outer solar system to see if God is home, so it may be some time
before we find out if this “tenth planet” is Sitchin’s Nibiru, the
Planet of the Gods…or Karonhià:ke, the Sky World of the Iroquois.
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