Premium Episode 166: The Anunnaki & Ancient Astronaut Theory (Sample)
Mesopotamian gods? Or ancient alien astronauts? We explore the "Anunnaki", a term familiar to anyone who has watched the History Channel, Gaia TV, or Ancient Aliens. But the tradition of this so-called "ancient astronaut theory" was actually popularized in the late 60s by a Swiss hotel manager turned best-selling author. From there, it flourished into a hugely popular belief system and industry.
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Episode music by Matthew Delatorre. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 166 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Anunnaki episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we're continuing our exploration of so-called ancient astronaut theory, which grew in popularity in the late 1960s and has mushroomed into a lucrative open-source intellectual property in top Western markets.
Specifically, we're going to be focusing on the term Anunnaki, which was cribbed from ancient Mesopotamian myths to sell a new theory of archaeology and an alternate history of science, one based on the idea that extraterrestrials visited Earth long ago, and are responsible for our most impressive scientific discoveries, monuments, and maybe even our DNA.
This story begins both five millennia ago in the Fertile Crescent, or 50 years ago in West Germany, depending on your perspective.
Around 5,000 years ago, a group of people known as the Sumerians divided themselves into several city-states in the region of Mesopotamia.
Which roughly encompasses modern-day Iraq and part of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Kuwait.
There in the Fertile Crescent, along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, they built pyramid-like temples to their gods called ziggurats and complex irrigation canals that allowed them to farm the land efficiently.
The largest of the Sumerian city-states, Uruk, was estimated to house between 40,000 and 80,000 people at its peak in 2800 BC, making it the largest urban center in the world.
Historians are constantly squabbling about the history of Mesopotamia, mostly because it's difficult to study it before the invention of cuneiform records, which the city-state of Uruk had a crucial role in developing in around 3200 BC.
The Sumerians were polytheists and created a pantheon of gods tied to an elaborate set of myths.
These beliefs persisted and evolved, so that to explain the modern term Anunnaki, one must study the myths of several intermingled ancient Mesopotamian cultures that dominated the region along the centuries, like that of the Akkadians, Assyrians, Armenians, and Babylonians.
Alright, so you gotta learn actual ancient history.
It's just not pilled shit.
I mean, it's about them being pilled.
We are studying them being pilled.
We're just not studying the myths as if they were real.
Yes, which is what I will get into in my section, which is brain-breaking.
There'll be time for that.
This is a tiny moment of actual history before we absolutely slide down the slope at full speed.
Can we stay in the actual history?
Into a tree and Sonny Bono ourselves?
I feel warm.
I feel protected.
I feel safe.
Death awaits us all at the bottom of the slope, Jake.
So let's dig into it.
An, that's A-N, was the Sumerian god of the sky, and he consorted with the goddess of the earth, Ki, spelled K-I.
They had several kids, all gods, who were named Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag, Nana, Utu, and Inanna.
The concept of the Annunaki basically emerged in Samaria to refer to this group of gods, but they called them the Annuna or Anna.
I say basically because they're really only referenced in literary texts of the period, and there also seems to be disagreement among Samarian primary sources about how many gods were part of the group and what exactly their divine function was.
At first a local pantheon, this particular set of gods only became popular on a regional basis later, when empires started forming in Mesopotamia.
One major shift in the popular use of the term Anunnaki appears to have occurred in late Sumerian times, to then be enshrined more permanently in myth by the Akkadians.
Essentially the Anunnaki went from being considered celestial beings of great power, descendants of the sky god An, To representing deities of the underworld in broader Mesopotamian culture.
So basically, they broke bad.
Yeah, it is interesting because this plays into how conspiracy theorists sort of view them today.
A crucial myth related to the Anunnaki is the Sumerian story about Goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and her descent into the Underworld, which they describe as a quote, shadowy version of life on Earth, which is ruled by her sister, Ereshkigal.
To allow Inanni access to the Underworld, Ereshkigal ordered each of the seven quote-unquote Anunnaki to strip her sister of a piece of clothing or jewelry, symbolizing her great powers, until she ended up standing before her sister naked.
According to this story, here's what happened next.
After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away.
Then she made her sister, Ereshkigal, rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne.
The Anunnaki, the Seven Judges, rendered their decision against her.
They looked at her.
It was the look of death.
They spoke to her.
It was the speech of anger.
They shouted at her.
It was the shout of heavy guilt.
The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse, and the corpse was hung on a hook.
So just normal fun stuff about how essentially God got turned into a corpse in hell by her own sister.
They're always doing this shit though, right?
They're always- Yeah, that's what they're up to, the gods.
The gods, they always have a brother.
Yeah, who did something wrong or, you know, they ate the wrong piece of fruit or whatever.
Something.
And, like, they're roasted in the flames of eternity.
Like, it's not just, you know, I mean, sometimes they're exiled, but then the exile becomes another god.
I mean, it's always complicated with these gods.
In this version of the myth, while Inanna was a corpse, all sex on Earth ceased.
The Queen of Heaven was eventually resurrected and restored, and humans, as a result, were able to fuck again.
It seems like that would be a famous period in history.
It was like, remember that few months when, like, nobody was fucking?
What was going on there?
Insane.
Yeah, I know.
Like, the myths even, they kind of say stuff like, everybody slept in their own bed.
Like, which sucks, dude.
So clearly the Mesopotamians were, you know, fucking a lot.
And they were like, this is horrible.
We need to liberate the Queen of Heaven from her sister so we can get balling again.
And yeah, it's kind of annoying because it makes the Anunnaki seem like people who don't want you to bust.
In their version of this mythical story, the Akkadians renamed Inanna Ishtar and abandoned the term Anunna or Anna in favor of Anunnaki when referring to the seven gods of the underworld that judged the Queen of Heaven before stripping her of her clothes and power.
To complicate things, early Babylonians introduced a whole new set of gods they called the Igigi, which for a while was a term used interchangeably with Anunnaki.
But Igigi came to represent the heavenly gods, whereas Anunnaki grew to be a reference to those of the underworld.
Having said that, even among Babylonians, definitions of the Anunnaki varied wildly.
One of their epic poems appeared to describe 600 Anunnaki belonging to the underworld and 300 to heaven, for example.
By the time the term Anunnaki is used in the standard Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, around 1200 BC, they are more or less understood to be a group of gods residing in the netherworld, acting as judges.
Religious beliefs in Mesopotamia continued to syncretize from there onwards, and the Neo-Assyrians added all kinds of weird subplots, changed the gods' names, sent all the characters to war.
You know, all the plot points you'd expect from an exhausted writer's room asked to work with quite dated material at this point.
So, it seems like these shifting references to the Anunnaki and ancient religious myths is a story spanning thousands of years of human history that paints a fascinating picture of mankind's perennial longing for a world beyond the physical.
Or what if it were something cooler?
Fellas, join me in a little thought experiment.
Alright.
What if instead of religious myths, these inconsistent and evolving ideas about the Anunnaki were actually first-hand accounts left by ancient civilizations who'd been visited by extraterrestrials with advanced technology?
What if these foolish primitive people took one look at the cool spaceships and aliens in astronaut suits and decided that they were gods?
I'm totally on board, unless it involves getting in bed with a Swiss.
That is the one thing I cannot stand.
Enter Swiss hotel manager, Eric Von Daniken.
Fuck!
And yes, this is basically about how the Swiss are responsible for all of this.
Which I think our people, we deserve a moment in the spotlight.
The last one I think was the Order of the Solar Temple.
I think you guys deserve a good beating.
You stripped of your clothes, hung up on a hook in the underworld, judged by the gods.
Turned into a corpse?
Turned into a corpse.
I don't like that.
In the mid-60s, Von Deniken would wait for his hotel guests to be asleep so he could hole up in his office and write about how extraterrestrial astronauts had visited ancient human civilizations.
In 1964, he had published a piece in the German-Canadian periodical Der Nordwestern, entitled, Did Our Ancestors Have a Visit from Space?
But what he was now working on late into the night was a full-fledged book.
He called it Memories of the Future.
After being turned down by several publishers, the book was picked up by a Berlin publishing house after von Däniken got one of his hotel guests to vouch for him with them.
Their agreement included the condition that his book be thoroughly rewritten by a professional editor called Utz Utermann.
Now, Utermann had in the early 40s written for a German newspaper called the Völkisch Observer, which was at the time owned by Adolf Hitler.
He was also a best-selling Nazi author.
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