The Earth Adam

Two readings sit on this desk, and I use both. Academic Assyriology is the better dictionary. It has the tablets, the grammars, and the honesty to say when a line is broken. Zecharia Sitchin did not win that argument about the words. What he got, and what I actually run, is the vibe. A cargo cult. Dominant, warlike, aggressive non-human intelligences show up with a technical gap so wide that the people who meet them file them as gods and then copy their quarrels. Inside that vibe is a superior Adam. Not the inventor of all life. Not a cosmic factory stamping the biosphere. An Earth Adam, the reading Mauro Biglino gives the Genesis creature: a local build, made with the tzelem of an elohim class, out of ground this planet already had. Michael Tellinger's last chapter, "The Story of Humankind," is the tale I tell here. The emerald material supplies attributes for the Egyptian memory. It does not supply a chart on which every pantheon's officer is the same person in a different hat.

What the academy actually has is already strange, which is why the "it was only ever a metaphor" sermon feels thin to me. The Anunna, later Anunnaki, are a company of gods in the Sumerian and Akkadian texts. The ordinary gloss is princely seed, offspring of An. "Those who from heaven to earth came" is Sitchin's phrase, and Tellinger prints it as if a king issued it at a briefing. Nibiru, neberu, is a crossing in the astronomical lists, a station, in some contexts Jupiter. It is not a signed 3,600-year planet. The shar is a real Mesopotamian 3,600. Using it as an orbital period is the synthesis, not the lexicon. Eridu is real. So is Enki's temple, E-abzu. The abzu is the freshwater deep and the god's house. The me are real: the powers and arts of a civilization, the offices Inanna takes from Enki. Enuma Elish is a Babylonian combat poem in which Marduk splits Tiamat and builds a world from the corpse. Atrahasis is the labor text. The Igigi toil, they rebel, a lullu is made from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god who had planning intelligence, and later a flood is decreed. Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, and Noah are four names on one motif. None of that requires me to pretend the dictionary is a flight log. All of it already says that, in the oldest long telling we can still read, humans were made because a company of powers wanted relief from work.

Tellinger is plain about his source, and I appreciate the plainness. Much of that chapter, from the start of his human story down to about 2000 BC, comes from Sitchin's translations and from The Lost Book of Enki, which is Sitchin's compilation, not a tablet a museum can hand you under that title. He wants the critics silent. I do not. The academy reads the words more carefully. I still tell the tale, because the tale is where the cargo-cult vibe is written out at epic length, and because that chapter is the story-basis of this page. Mark the years as Tellinger-via-Sitchin arithmetic. He has the flood in the 120th shar, and he treats a Great Flood around 11000 BC as something scholars generally agree. They do not. A climate break near the end of the Pleistocene is a live argument. A worldwide extinction dated by a clay tablet's orbital clock is his premise. Even inside his own chapter the clocks slip. The opening says the worker was modeled some 443,000 years ago. The Adamu sequence sits far later, near the horizon he wants for Homo sapiens. Arrival is not the Adam. The Earth Adam is a later build. That slip is useful. It keeps the tale from pretending the day the boat landed was the day biology began.

Told as his tale, it runs like this. A world with a breached shield tries to patch the sky with gold ground to a dust. Gold is rare at home and, in the story, abundant on a watery planet counted seventh. A deposed king steals a chariot and lands where a beam says the metal is. The scientist son, Ea, comes with fifty heroes, a splashdown, a house the tale wants to be Eridu. A second son outranks him by a seed-law and takes the command, the ports, the upper settlements the tale calls Edin. Lots put the scientist over the mines. The children born on the new world are harder than the parents. The workers copy them. That is the cargo cult in one sentence: the gap looked like divinity, and the people under the gap inherited the war. The miners burn their tools. Then the tale leaves the academy. The scientist says the being they need already exists. It walks erect. It has hands. Put the mark of their essence on it. A lulu. Not from nothing. Ninmah, in the tale, says the Darwinian sentence first: one being from another over aeons, none from nothing ever came. A male is born, smooth-skinned, black-headed, the hue of the clay of that country. They name him Adamu, one who is like the earth's clay. A female follows, Ti-Amat in their gloss. The pair are kept in an enclosure, taught, and then expelled when the command discovers they have been given knowledge and the means to reproduce. The miners get their relief. The made thing gets a master.

That is the superior build, and it is why the Genesis Adam can be an Earth Adam without me signing every year in the epic. Biglino's walk through the Hebrew is already on this site. The short form: Elohim is a class, not a solo spirit later theology forced into the singular. The adam is not made merely "in" a spiritual likeness. The phrasing he defends is with the tzelem, with that something that contains the image of the makers. Adam is also the ground. The creature is named from the earth he is taken from. A group says let us make. On this reading they are not inventing the biosphere by decree. They are specifying a form and placing it into a body of this world. Tellinger's best line, the one that survives even if every shar is thrown out, is the scientist's: the being already exists; put our mark on it. Atrahasis already knew a cruder version, divine flesh in clay so the worker can carry the basket. The reading I run is the upgrade of an earthly creature. A superior local Adam. Not a patent on all life. The chromosome story in the tale, and the "where the blonds came from" passage in the same chapter, are not a pigment chart I am willing to run. A cargo cult of warlike powers does not need one, and a superior build is about the mark, the mind, and the office, not a cosmetics aisle.

The flood, in the tale, is the loss. Ice off the white land at the bottom of the world, a wall of water, the powers in boats of heaven watching mountains become islands. The survivor is Ziusudra, warned through a wall because the warner will not quite break an oath, told to build a boat, handed a box of life-essence. The boat settles on the mountain Tellinger identifies with Ararat. Noah, in his telling, is the later and thinner copy. Here the academy and the tale touch and then part. A flood hero, a boat, a warning that dodges an oath, a mountain, powers who disagree about whether the creature should live: those are in the poems. Antarctic ice as the mechanism, a DNA crate, a 3,600-year planet as the cause: those are the reconstruction. Tellinger also wants the commander of the flood to be the vengeful god whose voice later fills the Bible. I do not sign that equals-sign. A hard commander in a tale can stay a hard commander. Enlil does not have to become Satan, Yahweh, or a target for me to take the story seriously. The names stay in their files.

After the water, what I am willing to say about the world's pantheons is smaller than a merger and larger than a shrug. They are, more or less, speaking of the same distant Earth civilization: advanced, and lost, presumably to that flood. What is left is rudimentary. A valley keeps the labor, the assembly, the boat. Another keeps the measure. Another keeps a first time and a ruin it can no longer operate. The names drifted. I am not sold on how close each name is, and I will not sell that closeness. Ancient Aliens: Requiem remains fiction. The letterhead matching in that plot is the story shelf, not this one.

The emerald file has to be split before it is useful. The short text, the Tabula Smaragdina, is a Hermetic tablet known in Arabic and then Latin. Gerald Clark, in The 7th Planet, Mercury Rising, walks it as seven rubrics. The attributes are what I take: above and below; a single One Thing, a life-force rather than a biography; the four elements as operations of a craft; a way of speaking about entry into the Above; a quintessence; a pattern of transformation. That is a memory of measure and of a making. The long document people mean by the Emerald Tablets of Thoth is a different object. Clark reprints a preface that presents itself as a 1925 translation: emerald-green tablets, a language said to answer thought, Thoth the Atlantean raising the people of Khem, the Great Pyramid over the Halls of Amenti, records, guards, a darkness after he leaves, a promise to return with keys. Egyptology does not need that preface to know that Djehuty already carries writing, number, the moon, and the scribe's record. Those are the attributes worth keeping. Clark's books then do the thing I am not doing. They set Thoth equal to Ningishzida, to Hermes, to Enoch, to a Jesus, to the Roman Mercury. The equals-sign is declined. A caduceus can remain a mark of healing and of the double strand. It does not draft every healing god into one passport.

So the ancient-astronaut conduit, as I actually hold it, is this. The tablets remember a company, a labor, a hybrid worker, a flood, and a boat. The Hebrew remembers an Earth Adam specified with the image-material of an elohim class. Sitchin and Tellinger remember the same cluster as a colonization: gold, war, a cargo cult, a superior build put onto a creature that already walked, a flood that ends the high culture and leaves scraps. The dictionary is better on the words. The vibe is better than the sermon that says the texts were only ever allegory. The emerald scraps add what the Egyptian file kept, without welding that file to the Mesopotamian cast. Worldwide, the pantheons are rudimentary research into one lost advanced Earth civilization. I expect those powers, or what remains of that civilization, to return eventually. That is an expectation, not a date, and not a knee. The nuclear-age classified culture is a different clock. It lives in the breakaway file. I am a practitioner reading a tale and a lexicon. A better tablet can change my mind. I am not embarrassed to be running this one.