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Transcript of Paul Wallace’s Talk

Introduction

[0:01] (Music)
[0:11] Paul Wallace is an internationally best-selling author, researcher, and scholar of ancient mythologies.
[0:19] Paul’s work has explored the world’s mythologies and ancestral narratives for their insights on our origins as a species and our potential as human beings.
[0:25] As a senior churchman, Paul served as a church doctor, theological educator, and archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia.
[0:31] He has published numerous titles on Christian mysticism and spirituality.
[0:36] A popular speaker at summits and conferences worldwide, Paul’s work in church ministry has included training pastors in interpreting biblical texts.
[0:42] His work in biblical translation and interpretation has revealed a forgotten layer of ancient history, one with enormous implications for our understanding of the human race and our place in the universe.
[1:01] (Music)

Expanding the Concept of God

[1:09] As soon as you accept the probability of a populated universe, your image of God has to expand. In Genesis 3 in the Bible, any Christian or Jewish believer reading that text knows straight away they are not reading the earliest version of the story because the holy name Yahweh shouldn’t be in it.
[1:25] The holy name Yahweh wasn’t revealed until ages later to Moses, and this is an event long before Moses. So you know straight away somebody after the time of Moses is retelling an ancient story, and they’ve altered it. They’ve altered it in plain sight.
[1:47] Going to the sources reveals that this is not originally a story of God and the devil. It doesn’t make sense that way because the devil’s the good guy in the story, which cannot be right. What it really is, is the story of Enlil and Enki retold, with new names airbrushed over the top.
[2:10] This is part of a massive airbrushing done through the centuries, with the most significant one perhaps in the 6th century BCE, where the great library of texts that form the Hebrew scriptures was reworked to turn it into a single book that gave the impression of being about monotheism with a single story of God Almighty from beginning to end.
[2:42] It sort of works that way, except for these moments that don’t make any sense, which clue you in that something else was the original form. The shape of the stories remains, so you still have that conflict of Enlil and Enki just beneath the surface, just beneath the veneer.
[3:02] In Genesis 3, you get to the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, and it’s pretty clear you have two warring entities there with Abraham caught in the middle. You get to the Ten Commandments, and the people are commanded to forget the other powerful ones and serve only this one.
[3:21] You get to Joshua, and he says don’t work for the powerful ones of Egypt or Mesopotamia, don’t serve the dragon of Egypt, serve Yahweh, the leader of us. There is an equivalence there that makes sense of the moments when you realize that Yahweh sees himself in peer-to-peer competition with other powerful ones in the land.
[3:51] None of that makes sense when you think you’re reading a story of Almighty God from beginning to end. It all makes sense when you peel off that final layer of editing from the 6th century BCE, go to the root meanings of the names used for God, and it becomes clear that you’ve got a panoply of advanced beings on the planet’s surface, each dominating their own human colonies and bumping up against each other in competition for resources and hegemony.
[4:14] That’s the actual story of the Old Testament of the Hebrew scriptures. All through that period, you can hear prophets and kings trying to erase the knowledge of these other entities, trying to clean up Judaism so that it will be monotheistic.
[4:34] But for most of that period, it is not monotheistic; it’s polytheistic and anatheistic. You use the root meanings, and we’re not talking about theistic things at all; we’re talking about ETs and our struggles with them in the deep past. (Music)

The Problem with Old Testament Translation

[4:55] So that’s the problem. If the Old Testament is a story of colonization, okay, we can understand it. But the moment you don’t allow yourself to read it that way and pretend that Elohim means God, you’ve then got to justify all these violent behaviors as the behavior of a loving, transcendent God.
[5:18] So now God is doing the colonizing, God is doing the bullying, God is punitive, can turn on a dime, will punish your family to the seventh generation for a mistake you might make, will slaughter people who are actually trying to serve him. It’s monstrous behavior, and if you have to worship the entity that you’ve now credited with that behavior, you’ve just done something to your own conscience in that moment.
[5:44] If you worship a God who will do genocide, you have to justify genocide, and you’ve done something to your own moral compass. You can draw a straight line from that translation choice that says these are God’s stories, a straight line through history to all the enslavements, colonizations, brutalizations, xenophobia—it’s justified all kinds of atrocities through the ages in the name of God because apparently that’s what God is like.
[6:24] This is what flows from the translation error. If you’ve been in a church where the pastor feels he has to justify the violence of the Old Testament God, you know straight away how that feels—you know that’s off. Either you’re going to maintain your own moral compass and probably leave the church, or you’re going to stay in the church and learn to distrust all your own thoughts and feelings. At some point later, hopefully, you’ll come to terms with the fact that’s what you’ve done, and you make a change.
[6:59] I was very fortunate that my ministry was, for the most part, in the Anglican Church, which has a little bit more wiggle room for people to do theology and develop their thinking. It’s not a fundamentalist type of church where you have to keep reciting the same exact ideas. But any preacher knows there are issues here; every preacher knows there’ll be dragons.
[7:22] That’s part of my motivation in writing the Eden series—to say let’s get real, let’s talk about what’s in the texts, let’s talk about the problems of believing that God is the way Jesus says he is, and then trying to square that with what’s in the Old Testament. You know there’s an issue here.
[7:39] A decade ago, theologians and preachers around the world were challenged by the Roman Catholic Church to go back to the scriptures and recognize that there are ETs in the Old Testament and New Testament alike.
[7:51] When that challenge happened in 2009 under the most conservative pope in my lifetime, Benedict XVI, I would have hoped that more books might have emerged since then saying, “Yes, we’ve done that work and we’ve realized there are aliens in the Bible,” but in the end, it didn’t happen.
[8:09] I thought, “Well, I’ll do it because it’s that important and the time is right for it.” So I jumped in, knowing it would alter the shape of my ministry somewhat and perhaps alter my social life a little bit, but feeling it was too important to have seen these things and not shared them. (Music)

Addressing Tight Thought Control Environments

[8:42] I hear from a lot of people from week to week, sometimes every day, from people who’ve grown up in very tight thought control environments—conservative churches where we all believe these 12 fundamental truths and where thinking out loud isn’t really encouraged, and where they may be fearful for their own salvation if they allow themselves to ask too many questions.
[9:12] I hear from a lot of people who’ve come from that and who maybe sat with that for decades but not felt right all that time. For those people, it doesn’t take much for them to begin asking the questions they would have loved to have asked. All it takes is a context—other than Sunday morning, other than their Bible study group.
[9:36] In the 21st century, of course, we have the internet, we have YouTube, and I find often I meet people on YouTube who will come in very aggressively, having sat through one of my videos or documentaries, and they’ll say, “What you’re saying is wrong, it’s blasphemy, you’re luring people to the pit of hell. Why don’t you go back and read your Bible, idiot,” and comments like that.
[10:01] Ninety percent of the time, if I respond by saying, “Thank you so much for your comment. You raised an interesting point. The reason I think that is this,” we get

into a conversation. Ninety percent of the time, we’re giving each other respect by the end of the conversation, and hopefully, they might have something different to think about, and I might have finessed my own thinking in some way.
[10:38] It’s only a tiny fraction of those who want to get into an argument who will remain angry and implacable at the end of it. So then I ask, “Well, who were the 90% who wanted to get into an argument?” They were the ones who were wrestling with things. Even though they came in so definite—”That’s wrong because of A, B, C, D, E, and F”—they were people who wanted their world to make sense. If something doesn’t quite make sense, they will wrestle with it. They might think they will wrestle it to the ground, but sometimes it will wrestle them to the ground.
[11:16] Just because somebody is very staunch and says, “I believe A, B, C, D, E, and F,” doesn’t mean they’re not wrestling inwardly. It doesn’t mean they don’t have contrary feelings; it doesn’t mean that their moral compass has been totally extinguished. Part of the pain of living in thought control communities is that you continually suppress your own thoughts and instincts.
[11:41] For most of us, those instincts do not go away; they’re just repressed. They just need the opportunity to come to the surface and have somebody else to bounce off.
[11:49] I was blown away the other day listening to the granddaughter of the founder of Westboro Baptist Church. There may be people listening who are huge fans of Westboro Baptist Church; I don’t know, but it is known around the world for being one of the most aggressively anti-everybody-outside-our-own-church churches in the world.
[12:07] It’s only sort of two generations old. When they go out and preach, it’s not a message of love; it will be anti-this, anti-that, anti-marriage, anti-homosexuals, anti-single mothers—whatever it is, it’s always anti-something that’s happening in the world.
[12:30] It comes from a theological heritage rooted in Calvinism and Augustinianism that basically says you shouldn’t listen to a word a non-Christian says because of this doctrine of total depravity, original sin, and so forth. Only we, the redeemed, can think clearly; everybody else’s thinking is full of lies of the devil. That is the world that a person grows up in if they grow up in Augustinianism and Calvinism at Westboro Baptist Church.
[13:10] I’m not doing them any injustice; this really is their own theology I’m reporting back. The granddaughter of the founder of that church came out of that cultic way of thinking—that extreme case scenario of groupthink. Do you know how? By joining Twitter.
[13:27] Suddenly, she started having conversations with people outside of Westboro Baptist, and she found people who, like me, would hear her say something, and they’d say, “Thank you for your comment. I hear where you’re coming from. The reason I think this is this,” and they would get into a conversation 120 characters at a time.
[13:45] Bit by bit, she realized there was actually truth-seeking outside her church. There was actually rational thought outside her church. There were actually spiritually sensitive, compassionate, loving people outside her church, and they thought something different, and what they were saying seemed to have some merit to it.
[14:10] The thing she noticed immediately was the emotional difference between what was repeated in her community and what she was hearing from these other people. That is all it took to break her out of this very tight world of fundamentalism.
[14:28] When I heard her story, that really gave me hope because I think that’s the case with most people. We might have been told to shut up and stop asking questions; we might have learned to ignore our own judgment and suppress our own moral compass, but it’s all still there. All it takes is a conversation—expose yourself to another line of argument—for that wrestle to get onto different territory, and other possibilities begin to emerge.

Explaining Complex Ideas to Children

[15:02] Something my wife Ruth and I had to think about with our kids—they’ve sort of followed Daddy as he’s been doing this research journey that’s led to “Escaping from Eden,” “The Scars of Eden,” “Echoes of Eden,” and of course they ask, “What are you writing about today, Daddy?” and I have to find some way of explaining it in a way that makes sense to a seven-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 13-year-old.
[15:31] Years ago, there was an Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who said the role of the scholar is not to make simple things complex; it’s to make complex things simple. If you cannot explain your thinking to a child, perhaps you haven’t really understood the thing.
[15:54] That’s a really good challenge. If I can’t explain what I’m saying to a seven-year-old, have I really grasped it myself?
[16:01] Our kids go to a Christian school, which we love, and it’s got a wonderful ethos to it. Our kids are very happy and secure there, but from time to time they’ll come home, and they’ve been doing this since my oldest was 10, and she and her brother would say something like, “We were doing Bible studies today in school, and the teacher said this, and I wasn’t sure about that.”
[16:18] I’ll say, “Oh, well, what did you think about it?” and they’ll say, “Well, actually, I thought that was wrong. What I think is probably the case is this. No, I don’t think God would do that; he would do this.” Usually, my response is, “I love how you’re thinking. I think you’re onto something there.”
[16:38] So I encourage them to think their own thoughts and ask their questions. They might hear things they’re perfectly happy with, but a lot of the time they come home, and I think, “Wow, their theological compass is pretty good, and they can spot when the teacher is saying something that even the teacher doesn’t really believe.”
[17:04] The other day, in fact, my daughter said, “I didn’t think our teacher quite had this right when he talked about this text.” I said, “What did you think?” She said what she thought. I asked, “Did you ask him?” She said, “Yes, I did put my hand up and ask him to explain why he sees it that way, and he gave an answer, but I’m not sure he really believed what he was saying.”
[17:25] I thought, “Oh good, if you can pick that up—that the teacher doesn’t really believe this, he’s not convinced by it, doesn’t like the answer he has to repeat—then you have got the wherewithal to navigate these kinds of questions that adults wrestle with.”
[17:52] In that way, I think we prepare our kids to do their own thinking, to be willing to listen to all kinds of points of view, and then do the math for themselves.
[18:00] I’ve heard from a number of people who will say, “I grew up in a traditional Catholic family, and my mom was very devout, and she’d take us to Mass every week, and she would always make sure that we knew our catechism, but then she’d also tell us the stories of our family, the stories of our people, the stories of our land.
[18:13] They are stories of a non-human presence, stories of abductions, stories of hybridizations, stories of higher human cognitive abilities that we might call psychic abilities or clear sight or clear audience, stories about an invisible team of helpers.
[18:31] It delights me to hear those stories, and it’s often from Scottish and Irish families who’ve been Catholic families, where they have maintained the Celtic heritage alongside the Catholic heritage.
[18:48] In “Echoes of Eden,” I talk about families who’ve maintained their Catholic heritage alongside their indigenous heritage, so there’s this whole mix of story for the children to think about and ask questions about from the get-go. (Music)

Reframing the Concept of God

[19:12] As soon as you accept the probability of a populated universe, your image of God has to expand. God has created more than I thought, and then you think through the implications of that, and you realize your whole concept of God has to become less anthropomorphic if we’re not the only species in the cosmos.
[19:40] It took me back to some words of the Apostle Paul’s in Acts 17, where he is having to define what he means by God to a non-religious audience. He says, “By God, I mean the source of the cosmos and everything in it, that in which we all live and move and have our being.”
[20:03] I think that’s a wonderful definition of God. I like it because

it’s not a very religious definition. I like it because there’s no hint of separation in it between us and the source. It hints that my intelligence is a participation in source intelligence, my consciousness a participation in source consciousness. There’s no room for the kind of manipulative religion that builds on separation anxiety.
[20:49] It happens in all kinds of religions: you are separated from God, and we, the priesthood, will tell you how to claw your way back into his presence, and we’ll tell you when you’ve made it. That is the footing for all manipulative religion.
[21:15] But in that definition by the Apostle Paul, “we all live and move and have our being in the divine, in the source,” and then Paul goes on to say, “as one of your own poets has said.” It affirms that the source has been in contact, in communication with, and expressing itself through all of humanity, not just the Apostle Paul and the Christian clique he’s part of.
[21:33] Thinking through the implications of that has really opened up my relationship with people because it breaks down all the tribalism by which I think I’m right and everybody else is wrong, or I’m saved and everybody else is unsaved. So there’s a lot of thinking that flows on from understanding God in a more cosmic light.
[21:52] Rediscovering Plato was important for me in that regard as well because I had to recognize that many of the early church fathers, their start point in understanding reality was Plato. It was from that footing that they then understood Jesus.
[22:10] Whereas I had come into a church that believed that the Old Testament and this angry God was the footing on which we should understand Jesus, and that never quite worked. There is this dissonance, this incompatibility, that you really can’t resolve.
[22:23] Going back to Plato and thinking, “What did the early Christians believe?” and finding that they believed in a populated universe, that they believed in a human race that had been adapted by ET visitors, and that this didn’t in any way unravel their belief in God, I thought was very significant.
[22:47] Church fathers like Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Marcion were very significant early church fathers who held these beliefs and said the things I was saying. That gave me a bit of courage, realizing that what I was saying was part of the Christian tradition before the wider views got pushed out.
[22:55] To remember that Christianity was originally a kaleidoscope of experiences and ideas and theologies and practices before it got narrowed down into the orthodoxy that we would all be familiar with today—the heaven and hell narrative, the church/non-church, Christian/non-Christian—and I found that very empowering and encouraging. (Music)

Understanding Other Cultures and Stories

[23:20] Also, when you’re reading the Bible and you realize it’s one of a whole family of narratives saying very similar things, again, it alters your relationship to other cultures, and you can start listening with genuine interest and respect. (Music)

[23:38] In my family, on my wife’s side, we have Pentecostal Baptist Christianity along with the indigenous Ghanaian knowledge of non-human presence, abduction, hybridization, higher cognitive powers, and ancestral narratives often interweaving those themes of human origins and human potential.
[23:57] If permitted, those stories will be told alongside each other, but for the most part, in school, in church, it’s one story, and then at home is where you hear the indigenous story that has these other aspects to it.
[24:10] I love hearing those things that have been held together in families. We’re very closely connected with another family that had this experience where the daughter, an adult daughter, went missing on the beach in the Anloga and Keta district of the Volta Region of Ghana. She was missing for three years, and then she reappeared on the beach and made her way home.

Mami Wata

[24:30] The family was thrilled to receive her home, obviously wanted to know where she’d been, how she had survived, why she hadn’t been able to contact them—they’d assumed she’d been kidnapped, trafficked, maybe a failed elopement.
[24:47] Yes, she’d been kidnapped, but it was quite some while before she would say who had kidnapped her. Finally, she told her mom, “The reason I couldn’t contact you is that the people who took me took me to an underwater base, and there was no means of communication. The people who took me used me to produce children.”
[25:17] The final detail she was willing to share was, “The people who took me were not human. They were Mami Wata.” When her mother heard that last detail, she knew what that meant because this is an ancient story in Ghana of people being taken from near the water to underwater bases for a number of years by beings that look human but are incredibly attractive and not human.
[25:36] They will use you for a number of years to produce children for them to improve their gene pool, and then they’ll return you. Often you’ll come back healthier than when you went away. That is a story that is hundreds, maybe thousands of years old in Ghana.
[26:00] It’s not a story somebody is going to tell to advantage themselves—people don’t get respect, don’t get a better job, aren’t loved more if they share that story. They’re more likely to be medicated, hospitalized, or taken to the priest for an exorcism. But it’s a long-standing narrative tradition in Ghana.
[26:24] I heard it first there, and as I started talking about it, my friends from Kenya said, “Yes, the Maharani tradition here speaks of exactly the same thing.” My southern African friends said, “We have the same story, we have this name for it.”
[26:41] My friends in Colombia, Brazil, Malta, Cuba, the Philippines, India, Greece, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales—all around the world, the story repeats, and every single detail repeats. The fact that people are not taken by force—they’re enticed by people who look incredibly beautiful, who look almost human but not quite. The fact that it’s underwater bases, the fact that it’s for hybridization, the fact that it’s to strengthen the gene pool of the others, and then you’ll be returned.
[27:25] Every detail repeats all around the world. Why? Why would that be the case unless it was a phenomenon that different cultures were experiencing? It doesn’t correlate with any human path—that’s not the shape of human trafficking or slavery or slave trade. It’s a totally different pattern.
[27:44] Why would they invent that independently all around the world? A lot of people hearing that story today from an individual would think, “Oh, fifty dollars from the National Enquirer explains that story.” That doesn’t explain thousands of years of narratives all around the world. Thank you very much.
[28:01] The whole of Europe is named after a woman who had this experience. The daughter of the king of Phoenicia, her name was Europa, was abducted by a being that could shape-shift, and with that being, she had three hybrid children, one of them called Minos, the progenitor of the Minoan culture in Greece.

Flood and Creation Narratives

[29:01] The flood is very widely recurring, and what I learned through researching “Escaping from Eden” is that the flood narrative coincides with the creation narrative of a lot of cultures. These creation stories begin on a planet that is flooded and shrouded in darkness.
[29:26] In Genesis, before any word of creation is spoken—there’s that wonderful poetic passage, “Let there be light, and there was light,” and then we go through all the sequence of creation—did you notice that before light was created, the planet already exists, and it’s flooded and shrouded in darkness?
[30:01] Before the sun is created, the planet already exists. Before the stars and the moon, the planet already exists, flooded and shrouded in darkness. This is not a creation story—this is the memory of a devastation of the planet and a rehabilitation of the planet when others turn up from somewhere else and assist with the rehabilitation of the environment and the re-nurturing of life on Earth.
[30:38] There’s an overlap from there to the Filipino stories, the Nigerian stories of Osanobua, the Almighty One above the waters. He descends from the skies on a chain and starts terraforming. In the Philippines, a hawk arrives, hovers over the water, creates vortices of wind to start terraforming.
[31:00] In the Hebrew scriptures, the ruach turns up and hovers hawk-like—that’s the word in the Hebrew—and again, the ruach, the vortices of wind, start terraforming the planet, separating salt water from fresh water and creating dry land. The Sumerian begins with the four winds separating the waters. This is a rehabilitation story. The Andean stories of Viracocha coming up out of the waters and then terraforming that environment—it’s the same thing.
[31:30]

How many floods are we looking at in Genesis? Because there’s a flood in chapter one—that’s when the ETs turn up, that’s when the Elohim first appear and start doing their work. Is it the same flood as in Genesis 6, or are we looking at a sequence of devastations and cataclysms? I think we are.
[31:49] I’ve come to the conclusion that by the time you get to Genesis 11, you’ve seen five planetary resets and resets of civilization. This is what Plato taught two and a half thousand years ago. Go to the Vedas, and in that tradition is the idea of cycles of civilization, cycles of life on this planet, that we are not the first civilization to grace the land on this planet.
[32:16] There’s enough archaeology to point us to that fact because conventional wisdom is that civilization as we know it began at Karaca Dag in southeast Turkey when farming was invented, when 11 naturally occurring plants were cultivated for the first time by a family who worked out how to genetically modify them so they could be cultivated and at the same time worked out how to do animal husbandry.
[32:45] Bit of a miracle, but there you are, that’s the story. Then that expertise suddenly pops up around the planet. Farming means you have specialized society, you can build a town, a city, a civilization—awesome, coherent picture. Except 800 miles (1287.47 kilometers) down the road, there’s Gobekli Tepe, the megalithic remains of another culture from that same period 10,000 years ago.
[33:09] You’ve only got to look in that one place to realize there’s a pivot of a previous civilization to a new civilization. All around the world, we find megalithic remains of places that would have been populated and/or above sea level no more recently than 10,000 years ago.
[33:31] So we can find objective material evidence of at least one pivot of a previous civilization to the current, and our ancient texts say that has happened several times. (Music)

[33:54] There’s a moment in Genesis 9 that says it was in the generation of Peleg that the lands were divided. Genesis 11 begins with the verse saying, “In the beginning, all the land on Earth had a single coastline.” That’s referring to what we call Pangaea. That would suggest there was a civilization on Pangaea.
[34:16] Well, that has nothing to do with Homo sapiens—that is before the dinosaurs, that’s before the Cambrian explosion. If there was a civilization on Pangaea, we wouldn’t know anything about it; it would be ground to a powder, it would be millimeters of sedimentary layer. We would only know that if we were told that by other means, by cosmic neighbors. But it’s there in the ancient texts.
[34:42] That’s a great unknown. You go to Ecclesiastes, and it says, “In time, there will be no memory of us or anything we did, and we have no knowledge of what went before us.” Now, that was written when there was writing, so he’s not talking about us individually or empires; he’s talking about civilizations coming and going and being forgotten and obliterated.
[35:08] I think that is the pattern. I think civilization on Earth is far older than we are, and our ancestors had some notion of it and sewed it into world mythology. (Music)

The Nephilim and Hybridization

[35:27] Genesis 6: Nephilim evacuate the planet for the flood, coming back later. They’re not introduced—they seem to come from out of the blue. Nephilim may be a word for various demographics who are bigger than your average human being—a couple of different groups.
[35:54] Then you’ve got these other entities called the Bene Elohim—they’re not explained, but I argue in “Escaping from Eden” that Elohim means the powerful ones. Bene Elohim are the ones like the powerful ones—the next generation of powerful ones, the next incursion of powerful ones. So it’s the second wave of ET arrivals in the biblical text.
[36:19] They turn up and hybridize with human beings. So there’s the hybridization story in the Bible, and there’s something different about the offspring of the Bene Elohim and human females, because that’s how that story goes.
[36:36] Apparently, they don’t have a growth inhibitor in them. This is rather like what happens if you breed a liger. I think I have this the right way around—a liger is a big cat where the dad is a lion and the mom is a tiger. In lions, the growth inhibitor is in the female lion, and in tigers, the growth inhibitor is in the male tiger. So if your dad is a lion and your mom is a tiger, you’ve got no growth inhibitor, and you’ll just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger until you’re bigger than the tiger, bigger than the lion.
[37:01] Something like that apparently happened with the Bene Elohim hybridizing with human females, and their offspring became giants—referred to as Titans in the Greek tradition, as Josephus points out many ages later—the men of legend, says Genesis 6, and they are called Nephilim in the biblical story.
[37:35] Nephilim may be a word for various demographics who are bigger than your average human being, and some of them left for the period of the flood and came back later. In the biblical story, the flood happened to get rid of this awful hybridized presence on the planet that was again a breaking of authority in some way, on the basis of agreements among the sky council governing Project Earth.
[38:07] That’s the Genesis story of it, but it’s assumed we know this—it’s told so quickly in Genesis 6. The writer clearly thinks the reader already knows this whole story, so he’s just going to tell it in summary form. Where would he know it from? Well, he’d know it from the Book of Enoch. The writer of Genesis 6 assumes we’ve all read it, and the writer of the New Testament Book of Jude assumes we’ve all read it.
[38:34] It unpacks in greater detail this whole hybridization narrative that, as we’ve already said, existing cultures all around the world. (Music)

Questioning Advanced Civilizations

[39:16] If they’re so advanced, how come they’re not more loving? (Music)
[39:50] All the indigenous peoples around the world could have asked that of the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, British, as they invaded their land: “If they’re so advanced, how come they’re not more loving?”
[40:03] Our whole planet’s experience of being invaded is just that same story on a global scale. The name Yahweh has become understood as a name for Almighty God, the source of the cosmos, and that is the holy name that’s been pasted over all the stories of God from the beginning to the end of the Hebrew scriptures.
[40:26] That name is used by the later prophets, for instance, to refer to a God of love, the cosmic source God who is in a love relationship with the whole of creation and with the whole of humanity. But the name Yahweh has been pasted over Elohim stories that are stories of colonizers.
[40:43] I believe that the name originates with the dragon stories, which will horrify a lot of people who will say, “Oh no, there are profound esoteric meanings to the Tetragrammaton, which we pronounce as Yahweh—profound meanings.” Talk to Christians, and they’ll say, “Oh no, that name means ‘I Am,’ and there’s a profound truth to using that language.”
[41:03] These are all wonderful insights about the nature of us and reality and divine source, but that’s not where the name came from. When Yahweh introduced himself to Moses, Moses had no idea what that word meant because it was not a word in his language. Yahweh is not a Hebrew word at root—it is a loanword. We don’t know what it means—it’s a loanword.
[41:22] I am beginning to think it’s a proper name, but there’s another possibility: it’s not even a name; it’s a sound at root. What Moses repeated was the sound he heard, and then he had to think, “What does that sound mean?”
[41:45] Generations of theologians have had to ask, “What does that sound mean?” Yahweh sounds the way it does because we’ve inserted vowels into the Tetragrammaton to make it pronounceable, and when we do that, it makes the H’s almost silent.
[41:39] In “Echoes of Eden,” I point out that H’s in Proto-Semitic were not silent—they sounded like this: chhh.
[41:49] Now, if I tell you that all around the world there are stories of our ancestors being governed by beings that were as violent and punitive and hungry for beef, gold, and virgin girls as Yahweh appears to be in the Bible, if you go to Mesoamerica, you will read about feathered serpents or what we might call dragons called Kukumatz or Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl.
[42:24] Go to Georgia, it’s the Caucasus; Japan, you’ve got the Akuchi or Kuchi-dera; go to Spain and Portugal, Pacoca; go to Greece, it’s the Drakos. You’ll notice there’s a phonetic similarity to all those names representing dragons who all love beef, gold, virgin girls. They all have this chhh sound associated with them.
[43:01] In the Bible, we’ve got a chhh who wants beef, gold, and virgin girls. If you think that’s just a coincidence, then put Yah alongside chhh.
[43:50] When Joshua stands up and says, “Don’t work for the powerful ones of Egypt, serve Yahweh,” the words themselves tell you he’s talking about very similar entities.
[43:01] Yahweh is the dragon of Egypt. It explains why they are in competition with one another—why Yahweh is so jealous of the other Elohim. “You must never mention them, don’t draw pictures of them, never work for them.” Why does he get so jealous of the other powerful ones of Ekron that when one of his kings has broken his back and wants to know if he’s going to live, he sends some of his servants to Ekron to get a prognosis? Yahweh says, “Is there no Elohim here that he has to run off to the Elohim there to get his answer?”
[43:35] They’re the same kind of being. If anyone wanted to say, “The dragon narratives of the rest of the world are one thing, but the dragon narrative of the Hebrew scriptures is something else,” well, no, it isn’t. When you read Bel and the Dragon, we’ve got the Babylonians being mocked because they don’t have a real dragon in their tent.
[43:01] The priests are eating the beef and enjoying the gold and use of the virgin girls—that’s what the Babylonians do. We, the Hebrews, really do have a dragon in our tent, thank you very much.
[44:41] I think you’ve got an auditory memory that’s been carried all around the world, and the Yahuwah narratives fit absolutely squarely within that family of narratives. That’s where that word has come from—it’s a sound associated with ancient dragons.
[45:27] It doesn’t mean all the Yahweh stories of the Bible are dragon stories because that name then comes to be used differently. You go to the later prophets, and you see that name Yahweh—they’re talking about God in the way the Apostle Paul meant. Or you go to Genesis 3—Yahweh in Genesis 3 is not necessarily a dragon; it’s just the later name that’s been put into that text. The real name of that entity is Enlil.
[45:50] It’s been made deliberately confusing in the 6th century BCE when they pasted the name over the whole of the Bible so that you wouldn’t see there are different kinds of entities—you’d think it’s all the same one.
[46:03] Put all that together, and you will begin to realize this is why Jesus never talked about Yahweh. If Jesus really was the continuation of the story of the Hebrew scriptures, he would have talked about Yahweh, wouldn’t he? He would have talked about the Elohim. No, he identifies God as Abba—my Father. That’s Jesus’s concept of God.
[46:27] He makes a very clear separation between him and the Yahweh stories in one moment in the Gospels when he says, “What kind of father?” Because that’s how he understands God. “What kind of father would give a child who’s hungry and thirsty a stone? What kind of father would give a child who’s hungry and thirsty a snake? You evil lot know how to give good things to your children—a father who gives a stone and a snake is no father.”
[46:48] That sounds like a really perverse scenario for Jesus to come up with—the father who gives a stone instead of food and drink, who gives snakes instead of food and drink. He’s talking about Yahweh, and his Jewish viewers knew it. That’s exactly what Yahweh does in the pages of the Old Testament. His people are angry and thirsty; they’ve been on emergency rations for I don’t know how long with this manna that they’re provided with—they don’t even know what it is.
[47:25] They come to Moses and complain a couple of times, saying, “We cannot live like this.” When they come back to him one time, they’re presented with a stone—”Get water from the stone.” They come back another time—stone. They complain about the food, and Yahweh sends snakes, dragons, serpents instead of food to bite them, to punish them for moaning. Unless they kowtow to the image of the dragon or the serpent, they will die.
[48:06] That is the story Jesus is identifying, and so he’s cutting himself off from the dragon stories, from the Yahweh stories, and talking instead about God who is our Father, God who is our source. (Music)

The Early Church’s Struggle

[48:53] This was not missed in Acts 15. The leaders of the early church said that faith in the Hebrew scriptures was not the prerequisite for Christianity moving forward. The only way they could come to that decision was because they realized that Jesus had distanced himself from that whole interpretation and translation of those books.
[49:24] I think knowing that ought to give us the freedom to say the same thing. I’m a fan of Jesus, and that’s precisely why I reject those stories as God stories and regard them as stories of other kinds of entities. (Music)

[49:53] This is what the early church wrestled with. There was a wrestle as to what to do with the Hebrew scriptures. Had Jesus come to continue the Hebrew tradition and improve it or not? The reason they had to have that council in Acts 15 was because he had said some things that sounded like he was affirming the Hebrew tradition, and they had to talk it through before they realized, “No, he wasn’t,” and come to the decision they did in Acts 15.
[50:33] There’s a moment where Jesus says that the law would remain until everything was fulfilled, until everything was accomplished. So the question is, what does that mean—fulfilled? What does that mean—accomplished? He says not one jot, not one tittle will pass from the law until everything has been accomplished. Some people read that to say that the law will remain forever, and some people read it to say, “No, there’s a completion date—that’s what accomplished and fulfilled means.”
[50:52] If we read that in the light of Acts 15, it means completed, end of story. That was the decision Jesus’s brother and the early apostles came to, and that’s a decision I affirm. Christianity is not built on a fundamental reading of the prophetic texts or any of the texts of the Hebrew canon. It’s not built on it at all—that’s the Acts 15 decision.
[51:24] I think fulfilled means that’s the end of it—it’s completed, done, and dusted. That’s how I read that. Jesus would often use the theology of his audience against them. He would quote something from the Hebrew text and then turn it against the Hebrew text-believing audience in order to show that he had transcended it.
[51:51] There were many times when he said, “Moses said this, but I say this. In the past, it said this, but I say this.” Each time, he is putting an end to that old story because a better story has arrived. Even those moments where he deliberately goes about fulfilling Old Testament scripture—there are a whole number he does by simply riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey—the context of that is he’s putting everything to an end.
[52:24] Everything is getting fulfilled, everything is being completed, done, dusted, sayonara, and that is why Acts 15 happened. That is why we can have the liberty to go back and say, “What were those stories really about?” (Music)

Monotheism and Suppression of Truth

[52:43] It’s very easy to demonize the Bible translators who hid the ET stories in the 6th century BCE and tried to make Judaism look like monotheism. It’s easy to get very angry with them because they’re part of such a long history of suppression of truth, but that’s actually only half of what they did. They layered some very beautiful and important theology into the Bible.
[53:06] Let’s not rubbish monotheism for a moment. If what they wanted people to know is that you shouldn’t be running around worshiping things that claim to be gods because there is only one cosmic source—the source of all things in the cosmos, that in which we all live and move and have our being—I think they’re right.
[53:33] That’s actually a very liberating thing to know, and there are plenty of clues that there was other information they were lacing into the texts in the way they reshaped it at that time. It’s not all a story of darkness and error

and distortion. There’s real information that goes in at that time. (Music)

Technological References in the Hebrew Scriptures

[54:11] I feel I’ve spent a long time in the top layer, in the most recent edit, and in this season of my life, I actually want to go to the primitive versions of these stories and the ancient and the forgotten and the suppressed material. (Music)

[54:38] There are a number of things in the Hebrew scriptures that appear to fulfill technological functions. The Ark is one of them. The Ark was used as a communications device in a period after which the Elohim had left the planet’s surface.
[54:52] They’ve come, they’ve colonized, they’ve governed over humanity, and now they’re no longer present. From King David on, the role of the kings and priests was to try and establish remote communication with these entities who were no longer on the planet’s surface. The Ark was used for that purpose—it had other purposes as well, as did the Urim and the Thummim, except people couldn’t remember how to operate them.
[55:33] You’ve got other technology referenced—the Ruach turns out to be a craft, we discover in Ezekiel. It’s also called a Kavod, which can fly, and we’re told the sound it makes when it flies and the size and textures of the materials. The Tab refers to heavy equipment that moves and launches—that’s in Moses’s encounter with Yahweh.
[55:52] We’ve got various references to technology. Stargate is another—Genesis 11. We’ve got a device that has been built—it’s not a tall building that breaches building codes; it’s a device that enables people to reach the heavens. You read it alongside the Sumerian source story, and it says specifically it was from there that the observers were dispatched from the planet’s surface to the stations in the stars.
[56:26] All this technology is there. However, if you’re translating the Bible into English, for instance, to produce the King James Bible of 1611, do you have a word for wormhole? Do you have a word for rocket launch? Do you have a word for life form that’s in Ezekiel? How are you going to express something that’s described as being like a human being that’s piloting a Kavod, and so on?
[56:42] We have language for these things—we know the word wormhole, we know the word portal, we know the word stargate. We can go back to the ancient texts and translate them that way in the light of the root meanings. But in 1611, none of those words existed. We didn’t have in vitro fertilization, we didn’t have artificial insemination, so it all becomes magic.
[57:00] It all becomes mystery; it all becomes something spiritual, and that’s how the knowledge of ancient technology got lost—not by some nefarious bunch of translators who wanted to hide ancient information. They just didn’t know. They didn’t know what they were looking at; it didn’t make sense to them. They’re in a spiritual religious book, so they expect to find religious texts.
[57:12] It’s only now that we can look back and say, “You missed something that was technology,” and the Ark is part of that picture.

Human Hybrids and Star Children

[57:38] Ancestral narratives all seem to suggest that we’re all hybrid beings, that as Homo sapiens sapiens, we are a blend of earthling and a bit of ET that has been spliced into us at some point.
[57:52] This is what Plato referred to as the upgrade for higher consciousness and higher intelligence. I believe that’s the case. To understand us as we are, we need to recognize we’re part of a wider cosmic family, and we’ve had some help and interventions. In that regard, we’re all hybrids—Jesus the same. The New Testament is very emphatic he had the same kind of humanity as the rest of us.
[58:18] We have the narrative around his conception and birth, and that story places him in a family of narratives we might refer to as stories of star children or indigo children—children whose conception, birth, and development have been tweaked in some way to ensure they have even higher consciousness and intelligence than we have, and greater facility in engaging higher cognitive abilities.
[58:52] His story is that his mom became pregnant after a close encounter with a being we call an angel or an archangel. We often forget that that word doesn’t explain what kind of being it is—it just means a being with a message or being on assignment.
[59:23] Mary, according to Luke, has a close encounter and then she’s pregnant by some artificial means. Of course, in the deep past, we didn’t have the language of IVF or artificial insemination, so it’s a story of the supernatural.
[59:59] Christianity is told that story as a story of uniqueness, except it’s not unique. Exactly the same thing happened to his cousin, John the Baptist. He was born because his mom, who was not going to have a baby because she was post-menopause, had a close encounter with the same entity, and then she’s pregnant with a very powerful and intelligent person, someone who Jesus described as the greatest human being who ever lived.
[1:00:35] Those stories are not unique—the same thing happened to Abraham and Sarah. They weren’t going to have a baby because Sarah was post-menopause. They had a close encounter with three Elohim or sky people, as we now know them to be, or ETs as we call them, and now Sarah is pregnant. They have Isaac.
[1:00:59] This is an amazing story for a number of reasons. One being that if you go to the Vedic tradition, you will hear about the progenitors of the human race, Brahma and Saraswati. Do those names sound familiar? Abraham, Brahma. Sarah, Saraswati.
[1:01:35] In the Hebrew tradition, Isaac is the beginning of the story of the people of God. In the Vedic tradition, Brahma and Saraswati are the progenitors of the human race. So it’s a story of origins—it’s a story of how we get to Homo sapiens after an ET intervention.
[1:02:04] Let’s go back to the Bible again. Look again at what’s happening there—Abraham and Sarah. Two generations away from that, you’ve got two different kinds of human beings: one smooth-skinned and intelligent, one bigger, stronger, and covered in red hair.
[1:02:29] The smooth-skinned one has to work out how to get the upper hand and be the dominant species on the planet when there’s this other kind of human running around, who’s much stronger and covered in red hair.
[1:02:35] You begin to wonder, is this a story of origins? We have a number of stories of origins just lined up alongside each other in the Bible. We think they finish in Genesis 11 or perhaps they extend into Genesis 12. Abraham means the father of many nations; Brahma is the father of the many nations.
[1:03:01] I think it’s a story of origins where we’ve got different kinds of human beings as a result of close encounters. Jesus’s story is part of a huge family of stories within the Bible.
[1:03:08] It doesn’t stop there—go to the stories around the mother of the Yellow Emperor in China, or the Pasi Buddha, the 22nd incarnation of Buddha before Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, or to the stories around the mother of Laozi.
[1:03:26] Again, close encounter, anomalous experience of light shining upon them from an object in space, and then they have a baby who’s very significant and highly intelligent.
[1:03:40] Some people might say, “Look, these people needed a story like that. If you’re going to be a prince or a religious leader, you’ve got to have some impressive ‘This is where I came from’ story.” It’s made up to give them extra kudos, except these stories are part of an even wider family of stories.
[1:03:59] You can hear this story from people today, but only if they absolutely trust you and only if you get close to them because they’re not stories that women boast about. They’re not stories women tell so their sons and daughters will get better jobs or become kings and queens.
[1:04:09] They’re stories that are held very, very closely, very secretly. I’ve heard from a number of women who would say something like this: “I have four children. The third one is different—highly intelligent, has always been advanced, very sensitive, pre-cognitive, telepathic ability.
[1:04:23] There was something different about his conception and birth—it was an experience of light.” It takes me back to years ago when I was a teenager studying Renaissance art at school, and we were shown a painting by Carlo Crivelli, which was supposed to be the Annunciation—that’s the moment when Mary is told she’s going to have a baby and the baby is going to be Jesus.

[1:04:47] Carlo Crivelli, the painter who painted it in the 1400s, doesn’t paint it the way the written text recalls it. He paints Mary with a beam of light shining upon her from a flying saucer that’s hovering above her in the sky. That’s not a random thing he’s come up with.
[1:04:57] Ask an art critic, and they’ll say, “Well, that’s the traditional way of depicting supernatural events.” Why did that become a tradition—flying saucer, beam of light? There’s no answer to that other than that’s exactly how these artificial inseminations are described in the Eastern tradition.
[1:05:08] The Pasi Buddha, the Yellow Emperor, Laozi—the texts describe it that way. Carlo Crivelli paints it that way. This suggests a whole layer of story about star children that says, “Yes, we’re all hybrids, but there is ongoing contact that is fine-tuning our progress as a human society and responsible for very particular people having heightened intelligence or heightened consciousness who then make a contribution that can move the whole experience of humanity forward.”
[1:05:14] That is the wider context into which the story of Jesus fits. (Music)

Personal Reflections on Reframing

[1:05:48] I’ve found it a really exciting reframing. At first, it’s very scary because all your familiar ideas have given you security. It’s been the world in which you’ve lived—you’ve had an idea of God, of Jesus, of our place in the cosmos.
[1:06:07] I certainly can remember a couple of moments when I felt like the floor was falling away from me as I realized that story didn’t quite add up anymore, didn’t match with what’s really in the texts.
[1:06:13] I would just want to encourage people that on the other side of the reframing is a far more exciting, intimate sense of connection with the source.
[1:06:20] I have a better opinion of Jesus than ever before. I still love Jesus and Jesus’s teachings, and I continually go back to re-understand what he was really about. The most amazing invitation to explore what is real and to explore what is possible.
[1:06:25] I believe that what the stories say about what Jesus did so amazingly with his life is told as a wonderful example of what a human life can look like when we take away all the aspects of fear that keep us limited, that keep us to our familiar scripts, and give ourselves the permission and encourage one another to explore what’s out there and what’s in here. (Applause, Music)

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