The Gods of Eden

THE IDEA THAT human beings are a slave race owned by an extraterrestrial society is not a new one.

It was expressed thousands of years ago in mankind’s earliest recorded civilizations. The first of those civilizations was Sumeria: a remarkably advanced society which arose in the Tigris-Euphrates River valley between 5000 and 4000 B.C., and flourished as a major civilization by 3500 B.C. *

* Until recently, ancient Sumeria was thought to be the site of mankind’s earliest city. Excavation has revealed a city in Jericho (near modem-day Jerusalem) built as long ago as 7000 B.C. Almost nothing is known about that city.

Like other ancient societies which arose in the Mesopotamian region, Sumeria left records stating that humanlike creatures of extraterrestrial origin had ruled early human society as Earth’s first monarchs. Those alien people were often thought of as “Gods.”

Some Sumerian “Gods” were said to travel into the skies and through the heavens in flying “globes” and rocket like vehicles. Ancient carvings depict several “Gods” wearing goggle like apparel over their eyes. Human priests acted as mere intermediaries between the alien “Gods” and the human population.

Not all Mesopotamian Gods were humanlike extraterrestrials. Some were obvious fabrications, and fictitious attributes were often ascribed to the extraterrestrial humanlike Gods. Once the blatant fictions are stripped away, however, we discover within the Mesopotamian pantheon a distinct class of beings who do indeed fit the “ancientastronauts” mold.

In order for me to better discuss these “high tech” “Gods,” * it will be necessary for me to invent a new term.

* For a detailed analysis of the apparent “high tech” nature of many ancient Sumerian Gods, I recommend Zecharia Sitchin’s five books, The Twelfth Planet, The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, The Lost Realms, and Genesis Visited.

The word “God" alone contains too much undeserved awe. Historical and modern-day testimony indicates that these ”Gods” are as “human” in their behavior as you or I.

The term “ancient astronaut” pigeonholes them into the distant past when, in fact, they appear to have maintained a continuous presence all the way up until today.

The label “extraterrestrial” is too broad.

I cannot name the “Gods” after any star or planet from which they might hail because I will not speculate as to their place of origin. Furthermore, it is conceivable that the alleged ownership of Earth may have changed hands over the millennia, in the same way that ownership of a corporation can pass among different owners without the public being aware of it.

That leaves me to invent a new label based upon the “Gods’ “ apparent relationship to the human race.

For lack of anything better, I will simply refer to them as the “Custodial” society, meaning that specific extraterrestrial society (or succession of societies) which appears to have had ownership and custody of the Earth since prehistory. For brevity, I will often refer to them simply as “Custodians.”

What sort of creatures are these newly-labeled “Custodians”?

Historical records and modern testimony describe them as physically humanlike, racially diverse, and, most importantly, very similar to human beings behaviorally. For example, some modern-era UFOs have exhibited adolescent prankishness by racing at airplanes as though they were going to collide, and then abruptly veering away just as impact seemed imminent: an apparent game of aerial “chicken.” At least one modern witness has allegedly been “zapped” by a UFO for no other apparent reason than malice.

Ancient writers describe their extraterrestrial “Gods” as being capable of love, hate, amusement, anger, honesty, and depravity. Ancient records and modern testimony alike would indicate that Custodial personalities run the entire gamut from saints to sinners, from the most degraded of despots to the most true-hearted of humanitarians. Sadly, it is the brutal and despotic element of their society that would appear to be the most influential in the affairs of Earth, as we shall document.

The ancient Mesopotamian civilizations recorded a great deal of their history on clay tablets. Only a fraction of those tablets have survived, yet they manage to tell a remarkable story about the Custodial “Gods” and their relationship to Homo sapiens.

According to the history inscribed on Mesopotamian tablets, there was a time when human beings did not exist at all. Instead, Earth was inhabited by members of the Custodial civilization. Custodial life on Earth was not pleasant, however.

Custodial efforts to exploit the rich mineral and natural resources of Earth proved backbreaking.

As one tablet tells us:

When the Gods like men
Bore the work and suffered the toil—
The toil of the Gods was great,
The work was heavy, the distress was muck—I

The tablets described lives of endless drudgery as the “Gods” carried out building, excavation, and mining operations on Earth.

The “Gods” were not at all happy with their lot. They were prone to complaining, backstabbing, and rebellion against their leaders. A solution was needed, and it was found: to create a new creature capable of performing the same labors on Earth as the Custodians. With this purpose in mind, the Custodial “Gods” created Homo sapiens (man).

Mesopotamian tablets tell a creation story in which a “God” is put to death by other “Gods,” and the body and blood are then mixed into clay. Out of this concoction a human being is made. The new Earth creature is very similar in appearance to its Custodial creators.

In his book, The Twelfth Planet, author Zecharia Sitchin exhaustively analyzes the Sumerian creation stories. He concludes that the tale of a God’s body being mixed with clay may have referred to biological engineering. Mr. Sitchin supports his surprising conclusion by pointing to those Sumerian tablets which state that the first humans were bred in the wombs of female Custodial “Gods.” According to the tablets, Custodians had male and female bodies, and they bred by sexual intercourse.

In fact, ancient Mesopotamians stated that they provided ruling Custodial “Gods” with human prostitutes.

Mr. Sitchin believes that the “clay” was a special substance that could be inserted into a Custodial womb. That substance held the genetically-engineered cells of the new slave creature, Homo sapiens. Humans could apparently be bred in that fashion because they were physically very similar to Custodians. Interestingly, modern scientists have bred animals in a similar fashion, such as a zebra in the womb of a horse.

Ancient Mesopotamian tablets credit one “God” in particular with supervising the genetic manufacture of Homo sapiens. That “God’s” name was Ea. Ea was reported to be the son of a Custodial king who was said to rule another planet within the far flung Custodial empire.

Prince Ea was known by the title, “EN.KI,” which means “lord [or prince] of Earth.”

Ancient Sumerian texts reveal that Ea’s title was not entirely accurate because Ea was said to have lost his dominion over major portions of Earth to his half brother, Enlil, during one of the innumerable rivalries and intrigues that seemed to forever preoccupy Custodial rulers.

In addition to engineering Homo sapiens, Prince Ea is given credit in Mesopotamian tablets for many other accomplishments. If he was a real person, then Ea could best be described as a scientist and civil engineer of considerable talent. He is said to have drained marshes by the Persian Gulf and to have replaced them with fertile agricultural land.

He supervised the construction of dams and dikes. Ea loved sailing and he built ships in which to navigate the seas. When it came time to create Homo sapiens, Ea demonstrated a good grasp of genetic engineering, but not, according to the tablets, without trial and error. Most importantly, Ea was described as goodhearted, at least in regard to his creation, Homo sapiens.

Mesopotamian texts portray Ea as an advocate who spoke before Custodial councils on behalf of the new Earth race. He opposed many of the cruelties that other Custodial rulers, including his half-brother, Enlil, inflicted upon human beings. It would appear from Sumerian tablets that Ea did not intend Homo sapiens to be harshly treated, but his wishes in that regard were overruled by other Custodial leaders.

As we have just seen, our ancient and highly civilized ancestors told a very different story of humanity’s emergence on Earth than we tell today. The Mesopotamians were clearly not schooled in Darwinian theories of evolution! Nevertheless, there is some surprising anthropological evidence to support the Sumerian version of prehistory.

According to modern-day analyses of the fossil record, Homo sapiens emerged as a distinct animal species somewhere between 300,000 B.C. and 700,000 B.C. As time progressed, a number of subspecies of Homo sapiens emerged, including that subspecies to which all human beings belong today: Homo sapiens sapiens.

Homo sapiens sapiens appeared a mere 30,000 years ago—some say only10,000 to 20,000 years ago. This raises an important question: were the Sumerians referring to Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens sapiens in their creation stories? There seems to be no firm answer. Excellent arguments have been made that they were referring to original Homo sapiens.

I tend to favor the argument that they were probably referring to modern Homo sapiens sapiens, for the following reasons:

1 The oldest surviving creation stories were written circa 4000-5000 B.C. It is more likely that a true record of mankind’s creation would survive 5000 to 25,000 years than it would survive 295,000 years or more.

2 If the Sumerians were describing the creation of Homo sapiens sapiens, later events described in Mesopotamian tablets fall within a more plausible time frame.

3 The Mesopotamians themselves were members of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. They were primarily concerned with how they themselves had come into existence. In their various works, ancient Sumerians depicted hairy animal-like men who appear to be a more primitive subspecies of Homo sapiens. The Sumerians clearly viewed those primitive men as an entirely different race of creature.

If the Mesopotamian creation stories are based upon actual events, and if those stories refer to the creation of Homo sapiens sapiens, we would expect Homo sapiens sapiens to appear very suddenly in history. Remarkably, that is precisely what happened. The anthropological record reveals that Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on Earth abruptly, not gradually.

F. Clark Howell and T. D. White of the University of California at Berkeley had this to say:

These people [Homo sapiens sapiens] and their initial material culture appear with seeming suddenness just over 30,000 years ago, probably earlier in eastern than in western Europe.2

The mystery of this abrupt appearance is deepened by another puzzle: why did the more primitive Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) suddenly vanish at the same time that modern Homo sapiens sapiens appeared? Evolution is not that fast. Messrs. Howell and White pondered this question and concluded:

. . . the utter, almost abrupt disappearance of Neanderthal people remains one of the enigmas and critical problems in studies of human evolution.3

The Encyclopedia Britannica concurs:

The factors responsible for the disappearance of the Neanderthal peoples are an important problem to which there is unfortunately still no clear solution.4

The Sumerian creation stories do offer a clear solution to the riddle, but it is one that many people would have a difficult time accepting: the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens, accompanied by the abrupt disappearance of Neanderthal man, was caused by intelligent intervention.

It might be conjectured that Neanderthal man was either exterminated or hauled off the Earth to make room for the new slave race, and perhaps to prevent breeding between the two subspecies. Whatever the precise truth of this might be, we do know two facts with certainty: modern anthropology has discovered a sudden replacement of Neanderthal man with modern man, and Mesopotamian records state that intelligent planning by an extraterrestrial race lay somewhere behind that dramatic event.

In Chapter 2, we discussed the fact that humans appear to be spiritual beings animating physical bodies. The spirit seems to be the true source of awareness, personality, and intelligence. Without a spiritual entity to animate it, a human body would be little more than a reactive animal, or dead. The people of ancient Mesopotamia thoroughly understood this critical fact when they mentioned a spiritual being in connection with the creation of Homo sapiens:

You have slaughtered a God together with his personality [spiritual being] I have removed your heavy work, I have imposed your toil on man.5

Custodial rulers knew that they needed to keep spiritual beings permanently attached to human bodies in order to animate those bodies and make them intelligent enough to perform their labors:

In the clay God [a spiritual entity] and Man [physical body of Homo sapiens] shall be bound, to a unity brought together; So that to the end of days the Flesh and the Soul which in a God have ripened— that Soul in a blood-kinship be bound. 6

The tablets are silent about which “personalities” were chosen to animate the new slave bodies. Based upon how things are done in human society, we might guess that the Custodial society used criminals, deviates, prisoners of war, detested social and racial groups, nonconformists, and other undesirables to obtain the spiritual beings it needed to animate the new slave race of Earth. Humans were certainly treated like convicts sentenced to hard labor:

With picks and spades they [human beings] built the shrines,

They built the big canal banks.

For food for the peoples, for the sustenance of [the Gods]. 7

As beasts of burden, humans were brutally treated by their extraterrestrial masters. The clay tablets tell of vast and catastrophic cruelty perpetrated by the Custodians against their human servants. Cold-blooded population control measures were carried out frequently:

Twelve hundred years had not yet passed When the land extended and the peoples multiplied. The land was bellowing like a bull,

The God got disturbed with their uproar. Enlil [half-brother and rival of Ea] heard their noise*

And addressed the great Gods, “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me,

With their uproar I am deprived of sleep. Cut off supplies for the peoples, Let there be a scarcity of plant-life to satisfy their hunger.

Adad [another Custodian] should withhold his rain, And below, the flood [the regular flooding of the land which made it fertile] should not come up from the abyss.

Let the wind blow and parch the ground, Let the clouds thicken but not release a downpour, Let the fields diminish their yields,

There must be no rejoicing among them.” *

* These lines suggest that Enlil had lived more than 1200 years. A similar longevity is attributed to Ea and other Custodial rulers. Many people find it difficult to believe that any creature, including an extraterrestrial, could live that long.

The surprising longevity attributed to Custodial rulers may perhaps be explained by Sumerian spiritual beliefs. The Sumerians believed that a “personality” (spiritual being) survives the death of a physical body and that it is possible to identify the “personality” after it has abandoned one body and taken on a new one (in the same way that one can identify a driver who jumps out of one automobile and climbs into another).

A “personality” could therefore hold the same political or social position body after body, as long as the “personality” could be identified.

When Sumerians gave Custodians an extensive longevity, they were not necessarily suggesting that a single Custodial body survived for centuries; in many cases they appear to have been saying that a Custodial “personality” held a political position for a very long time even though it may have done so through a succession of bodies.

An Assyrian tablet adds:

“Command that there be a plague, Let
Namtar diminish their noise. Let disease,
sickness, plague and pestilence Blow upon
them like a tornado.” They commanded and
there was plague Namtar diminished their
noise. Disease, sickness, plague and
pestilence Blew upon them like a tornado.9

The tablets describe ghastly conditions in which food supplies were cut off, in which diseases were laid upon the people that constricted wombs and prevented childbirth, and in which starvation became so rampant that human beings were forced to resort to cannibalism. Lesser diseases, such as one resembling influenza, were also visited upon Homo sapiens, suggesting that the Custodial “Gods” understood and engaged in biological warfare.

When this genocide did not produce a sufficient drop in the human population, the Custodians resumed it. Eventually, a decision was made to destroy the human race entirely with a great flood.

Many archaeologists today believe that there was a cataclysmic flood in the Near East thousands of years ago. One description of the “Great Flood” is found in the Babylonian ”Epic of Gilgamesh,” which predates the Bible.

According to the Epic, a Babylonian named Utnapishtim was approached by Prince Ea, who opposed the decision to destroy his creation, Homo sapiens. Ea told Utnapishtim that the other “Gods” planned to cause a deluge to wipe out the human race. Ea, who is described in other writings as a master shipbuilder and sailor, gave Utnapishtim instructions on how to build a boat which could survive the flood.

Utnapishtim followed Ea’s directions and, with the help of friends, completed the vessel before the flooding began. Utnapishtim then loaded the boat with his gold, family, and livestock, along with craftsmen and wild animals, and hoisted off to sea.

Babylonian and Assyrian tablets relate that just prior to flooding the land, the Custodians scorched it with flame. Then they flooded the region by causing a long rainstorm and by breaking the intricate system of dams and dikes that had been built in Mesopotamia to control the erratic flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

The Gilgamesh Epic relates that Utnapishtim and his crew survived the ordeal. When it was over, they sought out dry land by releasing a series of three birds; if a bird did not return to the boat, Utnapishtim would know that it had found dry land nearby on which to alight.

Once back on solid ground, Utnapishtim was joined by several Custodians returning from out of the sky. Instead of destroying the survivors, a degree of leniency prevailed and the Custodians transported the surviving humans to another region to live.

The tale of Utnapishtim should ring a bell with anyone who is familiar with the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark. That is because the tale of Noah, lace many other stories in the Old Testament, is taken from older Mesopotamian writings. Biblical authors simply altered names and changed the many “Gods” of the original writings into the one “God” or “Lord” of the Hebrew religion. The latter change was an unfortunate one because it caused a Supreme Being to be blamed for the brutal acts that earner writers had attributed to the very God-like Custodians.

Early Mesopotamian writings gave us another famous Old Testament story: the tale of Adam and Eve. The Adam and Eve narrative is also derived from earlier Mesopotamian sources which described life under the Custodial “Gods.”

The “God" or “Lord God" of the Bible’s Adam and Eve story can therefore be translated to mean the Custodial rulers of Earth. The story of Adam and Eve is unique in that it is entirely symbolic, and through its symbols it provides an intriguing account of early human history.

According to the Bible, Adam, who symbolizes first man, was created by “God" from the “dust of the ground.” This idea reflects the older Mesopotamian belief that Homo sapiens was created partially from “clay.” Adam’s wife, Eve, was also created artificially. They both lived in an abundant paradise known as the Garden of Eden. Modern versions of the Bible place the Garden of Eden in the Tigris-Euphrates region of Mesopotamia.

The Old Testament tells us that Adam (first man) was designed to be a servant. His function was to till the soil and to care for the lush gardens and crops owned by his “God.” As long as Adam and Eve accepted their servant status and obeyed their ever-present masters, all of their physical needs would be met and they would be permitted to remain in their “paradise” indefinitely.

There was, however, one unpardonable sin that they must never commit. They must never attempt to seek certain types of knowledge. Those forbidden forms of knowledge are symbolized in the story as two trees: the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the “tree of life.” The first “tree” symbolizes an understanding of ethics and justice. The second “tree” symbolizes the knowledge of how to regain and retain one’s spiritual identity and immortality.

Adam and Eve obeyed the commandments of their masters and lived in material bliss until another party entered the scene. The intervening party was symbolized in the story as a snake. The serpent convinced Eve to partake of the “fruit” * from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Eve followed the serpent’s suggestion, as did Adam.

“God" (i.e., Custodial leadership) became immediately alarmed:

And the Lord’ God said. Look, the man has become as one of us, knowing good from evil: and now, what if he puts forth his hand, and takes also of the tree of life, and eats, and lives forever?
GENESIS 3:22

* This fruit is usually portrayed as an apple, but that is the invention of later artists. The Bible itself does not mention a specific fruit because the “fruit” was only a symbol to represent knowledge.

The above passage reveals an important truth echoed by many religions. A true understanding of ethics, integrity, and justice is a prerequisite to regaining one’s spiritual freedom and immortality. Without a foundation in ethics, full spiritual recovery becomes nothing more than a pipe dream.

The Custodians clearly did not want mankind to begin traveling the road to spiritual recovery. The reason is obvious. The Custodial society wanted slaves. It is difficult to make thralls of people who maintain their integrity and sense of ethics. It becomes impossible when those same individuals are uncowed by physical threats due to a reawakened grasp of their spiritual immortality. Most importantly, if spiritual beings could no longer be trapped in human bodies, but could instead use and abandon bodies at will, there would be no spiritual beings available to animate slave bodies.

As I we recall, Sumerian tablets revealed a Custodial intention to permanently attach spiritual beings to human bodies. Early man’s attempt to escape this spiritual bondage by “eating” from the Biblical “trees” therefore had to be stopped...and fast!

Therefore the Lord God sent him [Adam] forth from
the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he
had been taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the
east of the garden of Eden cherubim [angels], and a
flaming sword which turned every way, to shield the
way [prevent access] to the tree of life.
GENESIS 3:23-24

The “flaming sword” symbolizes the no-nonsense measures that the Custodians undertook to ensure that genuine spiritual knowledge would never become available to the human race.

To further prevent access to such knowledge, Homo sapiens was condemned to an additional fate:

And to Adam, he [God] said,

Because you have listened to the urgings of your wife, 

and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to, saying,

You shall not partake of it: cursed is the ground for you, in
toil will you eat its yield for all the days of your life:
Thorns, too, and thistles will it bring forth to you;
as you eat the plants from the field: By the sweat of
your face will you eat bread, until
you return to the ground; for out of it were you taken:
for dust you are and to dust will you return.
GENESIS 3:17-19

This was a highly effective way to deal with Adam’s and Eve’s “original sin.” The above passage indicates that Custodial rulers intended to make humans live their entire lives and die without ever rising above the level of arduous material existence. That would leave humans little time to seek out the understanding they needed to become spiritually free.

A common misinterpretation of the Adam and Eve story is that the “original sin” had something to do with sex or nudity. This confusion comes from that part of the story in which Adam and Eve eat from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and immediately become ashamed of their nakedness. It was not nudity, however, that shamed them. Adam and Eve were mortified by what their nakedness represented.

Ancient Mesopotamian records depict human beings stark naked when performing tasks for their Custodial masters. Custodians, on the other hand, were depicted as being fully clothed. The implication is that Adam and Eve felt degraded by their nakedness because it was a sign of their enslavement—not because being naked in itself is bad.

As we have seen, early humans were reported to be a constant headache to their Custodial masters. The slave creatures not only disobeyed their rulers, they often banded together and rebelled. This made human unity undesirable to Earth’s Custodial rulers—it was better that humans be disunited. One of the ways in which the problem of human unity was solved is described in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel—a tale which also has its roots in early Mesopotamian writings.

According to the Bible, this is what happened after the Great Flood:

And the whole earth spoke one language, and used the same words.
And it came to pass, as they migrated from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Sh’nar [Babylonia: a region in Mesopotamia] and settled there.
And they said, Come on, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top will reach the skies; and let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we will be scattered all over the face of the earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the men were building.
And the Lord said, Look, the people are united, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will stop them from doing what they take in their minds to do.
Come on, let us go down, and there confuse their language so that they cannot understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there all over the face of the earth: and they stopped building the city.
Therefore the name of it is called Babel: because the Lord did there confuse the language of the entire earth: and from there did the Lord scatter them abroad over the face of the whole Earth.
GENESIS 11:1-9

In The Twelfth Planet, Mr. Sitchin offers an intriguing analysis of the Tower of Babel story.

According to his research, the word “name” in the above passage (“let us make a name for ourselves”) was a translation of the ancient word shem. The Bible’s translation of shem may be in error, says Mr. Sitchin, because shem comes from the root word shamah, which means “that which is highward.” Ancient shems are the obelisk monuments that were so prevalent in many ancient societies.

Those shems, or obelisks, were copied after the rocket-shaped vehicles in which the Custodial “Gods” were said to fly. Mr. Sitchin therefore believes that the word shem in Mesopotamian texts should be translated to “sky vehicle,” meaning rocketship.

When this translation is placed into the above Biblical passage, we find that the ancient Babylonians were not trying to make a name (i.e., reputation) for themselves; they were trying to make a “sky vehicle” or rocket! The implication is that they wanted to match the technological might of their hated Custodial masters and thereby put an end to their enslavement. The tower itself may have been intended as the launching pad for a human shem.

If Mr. Sitchin’s provocative analysis is accurate, we would better understand why the Custodial entities became so alarmed by the Tower of Babel and felt such a compelling need to thoroughly disunite the human race.

Ancient stories and legends from other parts of the world indirectly support the Tower of Babel story. The Japanese people, Alaskan Eskimos, South Americans, and Egyptian shall have traditions stating that their earliest forefathers had either been transported by humanlike “Gods” to where the modern descendants live today, or that those “Gods” had been the source of the local languages or writing.

It may be difficult to accept Mesopotamian and Biblical statements that ancient human society had been split apart thousands of years ago in a “divide and conquer” effort by flying extraterrestrials, even though the “divide and conquer” technique is frequently used by military and political leaders on Earth during wartime.

Interestingly, using the technique was advocated a number of years ago by a distinguished Yale professor if Earth should ever colonize other planets. The good professor suggested that Earth could control another inhabited planet by pitting one native group against another.

If we compare ancient and modern ideas about how mankind came into existence, we find two very different versions. The ancient version is that an extraterrestrial society had come to possess Earth and sought to exploit the planet’s resources. To make the exploitation easier, a work race was created:

Homo sapiens...

Humans were treated as livestock and were frequently butchered when they became too numerous or troublesome. To preserve Homo sapiens as a slave race and to prevent future rebellion, spiritual knowledge was repressed, human beings were scattered geographically into different linguistic groups, and conditions were created to make physical survival on Earth an all-consuming chore from birth until death.

This arrangement was to be maintained indefinitely for as long as the Custodial society possessed Earth. In contrast, the modern view is that human beings had evolved accidentally from “star stuff” into slime, into fishes, into monkeys, and finally into people. The modern view actually seems more fanciful than the ancient one.

In the story of Adam and Eve we noted the appearance of a snake. The serpent was said to be “God’s” enemy, Satan, who had literally transformed himself into a reptile. The Bible suggests that snakes are feared and disliked today because of Satan’s alleged transformation back in the Garden of Eden. However, it should be remembered that the Biblical Adam and Eve story is entirely symbolic. The snake, too, was a symbol, not an actual reptile.

To determine what the Biblical snake represented, we must go back once again to older pre-Biblical sources. When we do so, we discover that the snake symbol had two very important meanings in the ancient world:

it was associated with the Custodial “God” Ea, reputed creator and benefactor of mankind, and it also represented an influential organization with which Ea was associated.

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