Landing on Planet Earth

The central religious event of ancient Mesopotamia, the 12-day New Year Festival, was replete with symbolism that had to do with the orbit of the 12th Planet, the makeup of the solar system, and the journey of the Nefilim to Earth.

The best-documented of these “affirmations of the faith” were the Babylonian New Year rituals; but evidence shows that the Babylonians only copied traditions going back to the beginning of Sumerian civilization.

In Babylon, the festival followed a very strict and detailed ritual; each portion, act, and prayer had a traditional reason and a specific meaning.

The ceremonies started on the first day of Nisan—then the first month of the year—coinciding with the spring equinox. For eleven days, the other gods with a celestial status joined Marduk in a prescribed order. On the 12th day, each of the other gods departed to his own abode, and Marduk was left alone in his splendor.

The parallel to the appearance of Marduk within the planetary system, his “visit” with the eleven other members of the solar system, and the separation on the 12th day—leaving the 12th God to go on as King of the Gods, but in isolation from them—is obvious.

The ceremonies of the New Year Festival paralleled the course of the 12th Planet. The first four days, matching Marduk’s passage by the first four planets (Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn), were days of preparation.

At the end of the fourth day, the rituals called for marking the appearance of the planet Iku (Jupiter) within sight of Marduk. The celestial Marduk was nearing the place of the celestial battle; symbolically, the high priest began reciting the “Epic of Creation”— the tale of that celestial battle.

The night passed without sleep. When the tale of the celestial battle had been recited, and as the fifth day was breaking, the rituals called for the twelvefold proclamation of Marduk as “The Lord,” affirming that in the aftermath of the celestial battle there were now twelve members of the solar system. The recitations then named the twelve members of the solar system and the twelve constellations of the zodiac.

Sometime during the fifth day, the god Nabu—Marduk’s son and heir—arrived by boat from his cult center, Borsippa. But he entered Babylon’s temple compound only on the sixth day, for by then Nabu was a member of the Babylonian pantheon of twelve and the planet assigned to him was Mars—the sixth planet.

The Book of Genesis informs us that in six days “the Heaven and the Earth and all their host” were completed. The Babylonian rituals commemorating the celestial events that resulted in the creation of the asteroid belt and Earth were also completed in the first six days of Nisan.

On the seventh day, the festival turned its attention to Earth. Though details of the rituals on the seventh day are scarce, H. Frankfort (Kingship and the Gods) believes that they involved an enactment by the gods, led by Nabu, of the liberation of Marduk from his imprisonment in the “Mountains of Lower Earth.”

Since texts have been found that detail epic struggles between Marduk and other claimants to the rulership of Earth, we can surmise that the events of the seventh day were a reenactment of Marduk’s struggle for supremacy on Earth (the “Seventh”), his initial defeats, and his final victory and usurpation of the powers.

On the eighth day of the New Year Festival in Babylon, Marduk, victorious on Earth, as the forged Enuma Elish had made him in the heavens, received the supreme powers. Having bestowed them on Marduk, the gods, assisted by the king and populace, then embarked, on the ninth day, on a ritual procession that took Marduk from his house within the city’s sacred precinct to the “House of Akitu,” somewhere outside the city. Marduk and the visiting eleven gods stayed there through the 11th day; on the 12th day, the gods dispersed to their various abodes, and the festival was over.

Of the many aspects of the Babylonian festival that reveal its earlier, Sumerian origins, one of the most significant was that which pertained to the House of Akitu. Several studies, such as The Babylonian Akitu Festival by S. A. Pallis, have established that this house was featured in religious ceremonies in Sumer as early as the third millennium B.C. The essence of the ceremony was a holy procession that saw the reigning god leave his abode or temple and go, via several stations, to a place well out of town.

A special ship, a “Divine Boat,” was used for the purpose.

Then the god, successful in whatever his mission was at the A.KI.TI House, returned to the city’s quay by the same Divine Boat, and retraced his course back to the temple amid feasting and rejoicing by the king and populace. The Sumerian term A.KI.TI (from which the Babylonian akitu derived) literally meant “build on Earth life.”

This, coupled with the various aspects of the mysterious journey, leads us to conclude that the procession symbolized the hazardous but successful voyage of the Nefilim from their abode to the seventh planet, Earth.

Excavations conducted over some twenty years on the site of ancient Babylon, brilliantly correlated with Babylonian ritual texts, enabled teams of scholars led by F. Wetzel and F. H. Weissbach (Das Hauptheiligturn des Marduks in Babylon) to reconstruct the holy precinct of Marduk, the architectural features of his ziggurat, and the Processional Way, portions of which were reerected at the Museum of the Ancient Near East, in East Berlin.

The symbolic names of the seven stations and the epithet of Marduk at each station were given in both Akkadian and Sumerian—attesting both to the antiquity and to the Sumerian origins of the procession and its symbolism. The first station of Marduk, at which his epithet was “Ruler of the Heavens,” was named “House of Holiness” in Akkadian and “House of Bright Waters” in Sumerian. The god’s epithet at the second station is illegible; the station itself was named “Where the Field Separates.” The partly mutilated name of the third station began with the words “Location facing the planet…”; and the god’s epithet there changed to “Lord of Poured-Out Fire.”

The fourth station was called “Holy Place of Destinies,” and Marduk was called “Lord of the Storm of the Waters of An and Ki.” The fifth station appeared less turbulent. It was named “The Roadway,” and Marduk assumed the title “Where the Shepherd’s Word Appears.” Smoother sailing was also indicated at the sixth station, called “The Traveler’s Ship,” where Marduk’s epithet changed to “God of the Marked-Out Gateway.”

The seventh station was the Bit Akitu (“house of building life on Earth”). There, Marduk took the title “God of the House of Resting.”

The 7 stations in the procession of Marduk represented the space trip of the Nefilim from their planet to Earth:

1. The first “station,” the “House of Bright Waters,” represented the passage by Pluto
2. the second (“Where the Field Separates”) was Neptune
3. the third, Uranus
4. the fourth—a place of celestial storms—Saturn.
5. The fifth, where “The Roadway” became clear, “where the shepherd’s word appears,” was Jupiter
6. The sixth, where the journey switched to “The Traveler’s Ship,” was Mars.
7. The seventh station was Earth—the end of the journey, where Marduk provided the “House of Resting” (the god’s “house of building life on Earth”).

How did the “Aeronautics and Space Administration” of the Nefilim view the solar system in terms of the space flight to Earth?

Logically—and in fact—they viewed the system in two parts. The one zone of concern was the zone of flight, which embraced the space occupied by the 7 planets extending from Pluto to Earth. The second group, beyond the zone of navigation, was made up of four celestial bodies—the Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the Sun. In astronomy and divine genealogy, the two groups were considered separate.

Genealogically, Sin (as the Moon) was the head of the group of the “Four.”

Shamash (as the Sun) was his son, and Ishtar (Venus), his daughter. Adad, as Mercury, was the Uncle, Sin’s brother, who always kept company with his nephew Shamash and (especially) with his niece Ishtar.

The “Seven,” on the other hand, were lumped together in texts dealing with the affairs of both gods and men, and with celestial events.

They were “the 7 who judge,” “seven emissaries of Anu, their king,” and it was after them that the number seven was consecrated. There were “seven olden cities”; cities had 7 gates; gates had seven bolts; blessings called for seven years of plenty; curses, for famines and plagues lasting seven years; divine weddings were celebrated by “seven days of lovemaking”; and so on and on.