How I Became A God: Step 2

As told by the writing on the clay tablets, the Creation story is like a fantastic science fiction tale, and the second step in becoming a god not only involves knowing it, but also how it relates to the Bible. There are a lot of aspects to it which are unclear, but as far as we know to be true, the Sumerians where the first to use a written language, and signed off each tablet saying so--that they were taught to write by their creators and were only retelling what they had been told.

According to them an aristocracy of twelve “gods” ruled over some lesser gods, and they all splashed down for a mining operation about a half billion years ago. They wanted precious metals and minerals to take back to their home planet. As it turns out, the captain and chief science officer were brothers. Enlil was captain in charge, and Enki was the chief science officer. Their names, attributes, and aspects of their stories have altered over the centuries so that through time they became known as Zeus and Poseidon, and later as Yahweh and Lucifer. Enlil outranked Enki, just like Zeus outranked Poseidon, and Yahweh outranked Lucifer. At some point there was a decision to create a worker. They took DNA from one of the hominids running around then, mixed in some of their own, and created us--humans.

According to the clay tablets the first male and female, the Adam and Eve, were given a portion of the Garden to watch over each day, and each day at a certain hour the lesser gods, or angels, would leave them alone to go up and hang out with Enlil. Then one day Enki stayed behind to talk with Eve.

    "Is it true Enlil said you shall not taste of every tree in the Garden?"

    "We can eat of others, but of the tree in the middle of the Garden, our lord said we shall not taste or we will die."

    "You will not die, your lord knows that on the day you taste of it you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

    Later that evening, Enlil is down to take a stroll in the Garden, calls out, and Adam and Eve hide. He asks why they’re hiding and they say they’re ashamed because they went against his command. Enlil says that because they can now distinguish between good and evil, they must be banished from the Garden because, as he tells the others: “For behold, if they eat of the Tree of Life, they will live and endure forever.” Watching them leave, Enlil says, “Behold, they are now alone in the world as we are alone in the heavens.”

Sometime after we had gone out from the Garden and began to multiply, like it says on the clay tablets, and like it says in the Bible, some of them started getting it on with us. That was when Enlil ruled the experiment was over, and as they knew of coming Earth changes, they decided not to tell us. There was a huge argument about it, but in the end they all swore they wouldn’t tell what was coming--except Enki. He figured he’d give us a shot to survive. He found the most righteous guy around at the time--the guy who came to be known as Noah--and told him to stand behind some reeds and listen. Enki then went on to talk about a coming flood, and how a big boat needed to be built and some animals gotten aboard. From there the rest is history.

Sometimes important elements of plot occur off stage. In our narrative, there had to have been a discussion between Enlil and Adam and Eve about the Tree of Knowledge at some point prior, where the command was issued for them to not taste the fruit from a certain tree. The question then raised is, why would the Enlil character create a worker, tell it not to eat something, then leave it alone with that thing each day? In other words, if we look at things objectively, Enlil had no business placing the workers in proximity to something that would alter their consciousness if he didn’t want it altered; and to compound that negligence is the injustice of punishing Adam and Eve when they had no intention of going against the command to begin with--it was only after they were persuaded by Enki that they did it. In addition to all that, the narrative shows it was Enlil who lies and Enki who tells the truth: eating of the tree did not kill them, it only upset Enlil with the fear of his creation becoming like him.

So, what to take away from all this? The first thing is that the Creation story was told to us by the Sumerians--the ones every other civilization pointed to as the first writers--and that they themselves say they were taught to write by the ones who told them the story. Unless you believe those later civilizations lied about where they learned how to write, or that the Sumerians lied and made up a story about where they learned, you realize the scientific record shows that humans really were taught how to write at some point. In other words, that means we really are not alone in the universe, that there really are other sapient beings in it along with us. The advent of writing and a Creation story still familiar to half the population on Earth is proof. If we didn’t have fired, clay tablets detailing such things, we might be able to explain away the Creation story as a myth built up over the centuries. But we can’t, because the tablets exist, and the writing and notations on them say specific things which refute the notion that it’s all a figment of our collective imagination.

So we have to ask: is the Enlil/Zeus/Yahweh sapience superior to ours? If left to our own devices, would we not one day reach a mastery of gene manipulation and modification? Of course we would. That means sapience is sapience--the ability to know--and it doesn’t matter if you have blue skin, bleed yellow, and live a thousand years, or if you have human skin, bleed red and live a hundred years--sapience is the ability to know and create and we humans have it. Even the creators themselves remarked, “Look, they’re alone on Earth just like we’re alone in the cosmos.”

How I Became A God: Step 1

The process began as most do in the west--brought up in a family of monotheists--people who believe what the King James Bible describes. Of course as a kid I believed whatever the family did. I was singled out at church, said things others wanted to hear, a Jesus Freak at fifteen. Then science turned my head, the truths of numbers and facts were more attractive. I couldn’t look at fossils and geology, obviously hundreds of thousands of millions of years old, then embrace the explanations of King James. I reconciled, saying that just because the Bible and science didn’t square doesn’t mean there isn’t a creator.

Most humans have heard of Genesis and the Creation narrative: the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve; and how they got kicked out because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge; and how they had to go out into the world to live by the sweat of their brow. Not only 2.2 Billion Judeo-Christians know the story, but also 2.1 Muslims, because the same story is part of the Koran. Half the people on the planet today know the Creation story.

It was less than two hundred years ago, in the 1850s, that the Europeans went back to Mesopotamia to excavate the mounds of lost civilizations. They went back through the layers mentioned in the Bible--the Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians, all the way to the Sumerians. After we figured out their writing, for a long time we believed they were the oldest known civilization, that they were the ones who first employed writing because every group that followed named them. Their script was a bunch of tiny triangles and arrow points pressed into clay. Sometimes they would fire it, and like pottery the record would last forever. The French, British and Germans brought back tens of thousands of these fired, clay tablets with writing all over them, and to this day they’re scattered about the globe in the world’s finest museums. Besides laws, records of property, trade, marriages and the like, the oldest tablets begin with the original version of the Creation story, the one with the most information. We know the King James’ version can’t be superior to the clay tablets because it tells less and came after the first telling.

If one were to ask for a rough account of the evolution of human beings according to Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution, we might say that sea creatures moved onto land, land animals evolved into apes, and apes into us. Then after awhile we figured how to bang rocks together to make sharp edges. From there, for two million years, from hominids until we arrived on the scene, physical appearances were similar. Then there was an inexplicable progression where brain mass increased fifty-percent, our face became flat, and we slipped into a hairless, modern anatomy, thumbs and all. When framed by the idea of Evolution, it happened in the blink of an eye. Oldest known cave paintings are forty thousand years old. Suddenly we looked like movie stars compared to millions of years of monkeyness. And on top of those sudden changes, suddenly use of fire and art too. The random mutation/natural selection required in that short a period, for us to have become what we are from what we were, cannot be explained by Darwinism and the Evolution story. This doesn’t mean the science of natural selection is invalid, only the notion that we went from monkey to movie star naturally, that there wasn’t some sort of “creation” outside of nature’s process. The takeaway is that the Evolution story and the Creation story both require faith because the explanations don’t square with all we know to be true.

Whether you lean towards one story or the other, or believe something different altogether, it still remains true that Sumerians made use of the wheel, mathematics and writing, agriculture and animal husbandry, poetry and music, beer and wine—laws, sciences, and arts--everything we equate with high civilization existed with them. We still don’t have a clear idea how or why their civilization appeared, but we’ve since discovered it was by no means the first. We’ve since discovered settlements that predate the Sumerian by tens of thousands of years. If that’s true, what does it mean alongside the fact that half the people on the planet today know what’s on those clay tablets? You might say it means nothing--just a bunch of myth and metaphor--but it’s not that simple. This is the first step to becoming a god, you have to become cognizant that there’s the Creation story and the Evolution story, and both have their flaws.

Late Notes, early June 2012

Check this out! I'm stoked! I went to hang out at this place I used to live, high up in the mountains by the sea. I needed some mountain magic to help pass a big piece of writing or it might’ve killed me. When you’re an artist you have to get rid of stuff or it’s ugly, ugly. I got the writing out of the way, or got it out at least. I was able to puke up the pieces. Yes, the work of writing is a bunch of puke and shit. Where was I? Oh yeah, art discovery. Got back from the writing retreat wanting to make visual art, couldn’t look at a page of words if you paid me. Previously I’d been trying to figure about how to make one of the primary components of my art myself, instead of buying pastels for two bucks apiece. It’s the colorless oil pastel I use to rub out dry pastel that makes the colorfields I do, and I knew I should be making them myself instead of melting down a box into a block. What I'd been doing.  I’d already bought bees wax and paraffin and other types, but they didn’t have that oily skid the two dollar sticks did. All afternoon I heated up and melted stuff, and although I didn’t get the recipe tonight, I will soon, and from there on I’ll be able to make big cakes of it. Happy artist. A few days of art, then back to making the puke and shit beautiful. I'm not writing a novel! It's a novella I might slap onto parts of the first novel..Who knows? Who cares? Not me ;)