The Secret History of the Reptilians: The Pervasive Presence of the Serpent in Human History, Religion and Alien Mythos
224
The Secret History of the Reptilians: The Pervasive Presence of the Serpent in Human History, Religion and Alien Mythos
224Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601632517 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2013 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 226,318 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Philip Coppens is an internationally renowned investigative journalist, author, and regular contributor to magazines such as Atlantis Rising and NEXUS Magazine. He is labeled a skeptic by the believers, and a believer by the skeptics—a unique position which makes him a well-recognized voice of reason. He is the author of 11 books, including The Ancient Alien Question and The Lost Civilization Enigma, and is one of the leading contributors to The History Channel's popular series, Ancient Aliens. He lives in Edinburgh and Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Annunaki and Their Sumerians
"[The realm of myth and magic] is a dangerous field: fairies abound, good fairies and bad fairies, dragons and dragon-slayers, gods and goddesses, truth and untruth, history and legend, science and fiction, inextricably mixed and fused. But what has archaeology to do with it, you will say? Archaeology is concerned with bones and flints, with pots and pans and post-holes, with stone and metal, in short, with the material remains and spades to dig them up with."
— F.J. Tritsch, "Myth, Magic and Archaeology"
Going back to the very beginning is generally the best place to travel when looking for the roots of any mythology. It's in the fertile soil of creation that we find the seeds that sprouted and grew into the massive, towering beanstalk that has led us to the realm of the giants and the golden goose in the clouds. And whether allegorical, mythological, legendary, or the stuff of fable, there is generally always an incontrovertible fact at the core — that thing that started the whole story. And let's make no mistake about it: Once you start delving into the depths of comparative ancient stories, their encoded similarities and subsequent decipherment, you enter a muddled world of interpretation that will raise both dust and ire. Clearing the air is the monumental task with which you are left.
There are mindsets that are at complete odds here, like two trains running at high speed toward each other on the same set of tracks. There is bound to be an eventual collision of catastrophic proportion — in this case, the repeating scenario of science colliding with belief and archaeology running headlong into myth (and vice versa). But there has to be an accounting on both parts. Faith and belief open themselves to upholding the sometimes-nonsensical, mystical, un-provable, capricious, and many times ambiguous, spiritual soul of religion and mythology, whereas science and archaeology will eschew — many times with great disdain — the unquantifiable as folly, rooting out what they define as fact from fiction, no matter how grounded in their own sense of objectivity and importance — rather like when the science of the day upheld that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun rotated around it. Those were simply the facts based on the available knowledge and interpretation, and they were religiously adhered to by the academia of the day — until, that is, science developed the capability to move beyond its limits and recalculate its positions, determining that the earth, indeed, rotated around the sun.
Now, bear with me as I work through laying a little background that will serve as the platform from which we will engage in an examination of the secret history of the Reptilians.
The Naked Truth
When I completed my work on The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim, I recall sitting back in my office chair and staring at the ceiling for a long, silent time. In those minutes I was contemplating what it was that I had just written. In all the research I did into the Book of Genesis, from both Christian and Rabbinic standpoints, I found myself drawing further and further away from the God of my youth. It was not a deliberate distancing, but after stepping outside the box and looking back in, I found that the God I had discovered in my youth was not the same God that seemed to materialize after taking a closer look at more than dogmatic systematic theology. The God I grew up knowing was one of holiness, of benevolence, and ultimately of eternal, sacrificial, propitiating, atoning love. His was a love that transcended everything and embraced me where I was, saving me from myself, and the horrors of an eternal existence void of His loving presence.
Perhaps this was simply a byproduct of my need to step "outside the box" in order to see things from as objective a point of view as possible. This seems to be the problem with a purely academic — or secular — examination of these things: When you distance yourself from the possibility of the weird, odd, spiritual, and mythological, you deliberately set yourself up to look beyond the wonder and the possibilities, to funneling all research through a sterile filter.
What is even more profound is to observe the distillation of research by secular scholarship and that the scientific and skeptical approach to biblically themed topics, such as the Nephilim, seems to operate under a preconceived notion that the Bible cannot be taken literally in any form, including its historicity. One critic of The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim stated that I erred simply by placing any veracity at all in the biblical record. However, it has been quantified time and time again that the Bible is quite irrefutably strong in its historical presentations, albeit at times vague, limited, and deliberately not forthcoming in detailed information, as the contextual themes inclusive of some historical data were meant to present a faith principle, rather than historical documentation. Therefore the historical information was sometimes sketchy, at best. Skeptical researchers, honest to their scholarship, are finding it increasingly more difficult to dispute the overwhelming archeological evidence for the historical accuracy of the biblical accounts. Any corroboration of biblical historical facts, however, does not by any means emphatically state that the faith story wrapped around these events is "truth," but it does lend to the veracity of the Bible as a historically accurate document, aside from the religious and spiritual aspects of Judaism and Christianity. Biblical accounts that include such things as listings of nations, historic personages, customary rituals, and colloquial practices have been verified by archeological evidence and anthropological research. Secular academecians who have corner-stoned careers on criticism of biblical history have many times found themselves humiliated by new discoveries that validate the biblical accounts they had previously deemed to be myth (academic embarrassment). Among these are such discoveries as the existence of the obscure Hittites, King David of Israel, Goliath of Gath, and Pontius Pilate, the praefect of Judea during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. Nelson Glueck, noted 20th-century Jewish archeologist whose work in biblical archaeology led to the discovery of more than 1,500 ancient sites, put it this way: "It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible."
Not surprisingly — as some think of the biblical record as being inaccurate and rife with faith stories alone — when stacked up against non-biblical accounts of historical events, the scriptural narratives reveal unflinching veracity. In his 1919 collection of essays and other journal work, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, R.D. Wilson, who was fluent in 45 ancient languages and dialects (inclusive of all the biblical languages of common etymological origin, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Phoenician, Sumerian, Babylonian dialects, Ethiopic, as well as several Egyptian and Persian dialects), engaged in a meticulous analysis of 29 different monarchs from 10 different nations mentioned in Masoretic texts (the Old Testament). By way of comparative analysis, every one of these monarchs had corresponding archeological artifacts documented by secular historians containing their names, syllable-by-syllable, consonant-by-consonant. Wilson demonstrated that the monarchical names as recorded in the biblical record matched the findings of secular historians and archaeological artifacts, accurate in minute detail to the chronological order of the kings. Conversely, Wilson also demonstrated that many secular historical accounts were often filled with gross inaccuracies and were eventually deemed quite unreliable. Ptolemy, the famed Librarian of Alexandria, and even Herodotus were horrendously inaccurate in their documentation of royal names, and in many instances even misspelled the names (in the Library of Alexandria) to the point of nearly being unable to be recognized when compared to their respective archaeological artifacts or ancient monuments. Their research simply required more evidentiary research to establish any sort of accurate corroboration.
Even the well-known 19th-century archaeologist and historian Sir William Ramsay, a noted scholarly skeptic of biblical history, converted to Christianity after his travels to Asia Minor to conduct meticulous research and archaeological excavations into the New Testament's Gospel according to Luke and Luke's follow-up historical record, the Acts of the Apostles. The evidence Ramsay uncovered continually and incontrovertibly supported the historical record of the biblical writings of Luke. At a time when many secular historians and scholars dismissed the existence of most of Luke's record of governmental officials and geographical name-places, Ramsay's archeological digs actually flipped the naysayers' claims on their heads. Without error, Ramsey established through his excavations that Luke was accurate in naming countries, cities, islands, Roman officials, and many other salient details of historical record contained in the New Testament writings. As a result of his discoveries, Ramsay wrote: "I began with a mind unfavorable to it ... but more recently I found myself brought into contact with the Book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne upon me that in various details the (biblical) narrative showed marvelous truth."
Ramsay also wrote: "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy ... this author should be placed along with the very greatest historians."
Although the previous paragraphs may have seemed a bit of a rabbit trail — for which I have become very well-known, as there is so much information that could be incorporated to illuminate any tidbit of information out there — I included them for the purpose of establishing the fact that not all religious literature is merely faith-based alone, despite many secular, skeptical opponents, in their own particular biases, wishing it were so. When you step outside the box of a particular faith, and look to find corroboration between historical data and scriptural teaching, using the faith writing as a guide, not a filter, you will find that biblical history, in particular, stands the test of historical scrutiny.
However, because the historical data may be reliable, this does not always necessitate the spiritual information it's housed within is universal truth. Though I can insist that the Constitution of the United States is a historical document and uphold it as closely as possible to its original intent, there will be others who interpret its words through different filters, thereby causing decades of debate on its veracity versus its interpretability. The same is true with religious writings.
On a spiritual level, my personal universe was very small back in the days of my youth, and God was a God, I was told, who waited for me with open arms, to take my troubled life and make it something beautiful through His saving, undeserved grace. Yet the older I got, and the more I dug into the topic of the biblical Nephilim, the more I found a God emerging from the murkiness that was, in nature and human-like emotional volatility, ultimately detached from humanity — a God who didn't give (and pardon my plain vernacular here) two shits about humanity. This is mythological interpretation as opposed to historical veracity, but it is the result of my spiritual studies and evolving understanding of the spiritual content of these ancient documents. Despite all the teaching about God and all the systematic theology in my Bible school and seminary days, the Elohim of the Old Testament seemed more concerned and focused on the stuffs going on in the realm of the heavens than he did with human beings. There are many instances in the Bible's stories of God's dealings with mankind where human life was as dispensable as yesterday's news, and several occasions where God insisted on their extermination and even followed through with it by divine judgment or mandates passed on to His followers. And once I discovered that the Elohim were a plurality — a pantheon, if you will — dominated by a superior member of their caste of gods, the one, singular, omniscient, omnipresent God of my upbringing took a decidedly rear seat in the family van. Although there were plenty of scriptures that were interpreted as God's presence, love, and interaction with people, there were even more that spoke to His ability to be as human and unjust as any earthly monarch establishing his jealous reign over his subjects, enacting the wiping out of non-believers and the genocide of whole peoples in His justified wrath. There was even an account in the Old Testament Book of Exodus where God was going to destroy His promised people, and it took the intervention of Moses to hold back God's wrath, reminding Him of His promise to Abraham and caused God to "repent of the evil he was going to do" (Exodus 32:14).
The Jewish Midrash teaches (Ecclesiastes 5:4) that "Three things annul evil decrees: 1) prayer; 2) charity [righteousness]; 3) repentance [tshuvah]." In striking contrast, however, in Bamidbar Rabbah (23:8; cf: Exodus 32:14) we read that Moses "came forward and made God repent (author's emphasis)." In this case, it was the intervention of a righteous human being that preceded prayer, righteousness, or teshuvah on the part of evil-doers. There are several instances in Hebrew scripture where men intervened and changed the mind of God; Moses, Abraham, and Jonah, in particular, seemingly all had the influence to reverse what can be understood as God's "evil inclination." In fact, Exodus 32:9–14 passage says:
9–10 God said to Moses, "I look at this people — oh! what a stubborn, hard-headed people! Let me alone now, give my anger free reign to burst into flames and incinerate them. But I'll make a great nation out of you instead(author's emphasis)."
11–13 Moses tried to calm his God down. He said, "Why, God, would you lose your temper with your people? Why, you brought them out of Egypt in a tremendous demonstration of power and strength. Why let the Egyptians say, 'He had it in for them — he brought them out so he could kill them in the mountains, wipe them right off the face of the Earth.' Stop your anger. Think twice about bringing evil against your people! Think of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants to whom you gave your word, telling them 'I will give you many children, as many as the stars in the sky, and I'll give this land to your children as their land forever.'"
14 And God did think twice. He decided not to do the evil (author's emphasis) he had threatened against his people.
In short, there are several biblical instances in which God looked more and more like Zeus, Neptune, Elil, and the other superior reigning gods of mythology than He did a real, substantive heavenly father that was so presented throughout my life. God began to look no different than all the other "false" gods we learned about in comparative religions courses. He started to take on the traits and attributes of a god created by man for the purpose of rallying the troops or controlling the erstwhile yet sinful courses of common folk who needed to be reigned in and controlled.
Further, as I began the research into ancient religions for the purpose of this book, I found much of what I had believed by faith to be the only-one-true-religion, to be simply the stuffs of revitalized, rewritten, reworked — possibly even plagiarized — religions of thousands of years prior to the writing of the compiled books we refer to today as the Bible. When Moses penned the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament) in and around 1400 BCE (I believe there is absolutely no reason to doubt that these books were, at least originally, authored by Moses, and that he indeed was a real, historical person, as established in the dating system set forth in my previous work), it is very clear that Moses "borrowed" information from the earlier Sumerian and Akkadian religions, recorded in cuneiform 1,500–2,000 years earlier, sometime between 2500 and 2800 BCE. (Author's Note: In The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim, when stating that the date of the Sumerian civilization flourished around "4500–4800 BCE," I meant to say 2500–2800 BCE, but inadvertently stated the number of years from today, backward, rather the correct date. Ah, the things that can get missed even in your most meticulous editing!) The evolution and migration of humans from the Fertile Crescent region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south and west into the Canaanite region brought with it, also, the evolution and transformation of ancient religion. The Hebrews picked up on the name "El" and incorporated it into their religion — their own, homespun version of a superior god and the pantheon of the Sumerians. Elil became Elohim, El Eliyon, El Shaddai of the Hebrew religion, while Enki/Ea, the base word for Ywhw, became Yahweh, or Jehovah.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Secret History of the Reptilians"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Scott Alan Roberts.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Philip Coppens 11
Preface 15
Introduction 23
Part I The Empire of the Serpent
Chapter 1 The Annunaki and Their Sumerians 33
Chapter 2 That's Not What I Learned in Sunday School 65
Chapter 3 Coiled Around Many Cultures 87
Part II The Serpent in Alien Subculture
Chapter 4 The Reptoids...Reptilians-No, Wait...Reptilian-Humanoids 121
Part III The Serpent's Bloodline
Chapter 5 The Remnant of the Nephilim 145
Chapter 6 The Merovingian Connection 157
Chapter 7 The New Age and the Serpent 189
Conclusion: The Continued Presence of the Serpent 199
Afterword 201
Notes 207
Index 215
About the Author 221
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