by John Lash

from MetaHistory Website

 

 

 

My proposed term for the extraordinary concurrence of events in 1947, including the invention of the holograph, the creation of the CIA and Operation Majestic, and the famous wave of UFO sightings including the alleged crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

To introduce the 1947 Nexus, I invite readers to consider these two concurrent events:

  • In December 1945, an Arab peasant discovered the Nag Hammadi codices concealed in a jar in a cave in Upper Egypt, near Thebes (Luxor), but it was not until June 1947 that a French scholar, Jean Doresse, recognized what the documents were.

  • In the same summer of 1947, a Bedouin shepherd discovered the first of a massive cache of parchments and scrolls in the cave at Khirbet Qumran, overlooking the Dead Sea, about 30 miles south of Jerusalem.

  • Primary chronological nexus: the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) emerged from two thousand years of obscurity in the same historical moment.

But wait, there's more. Much, much more.

 

In the fall of 1947, the world was shocked by the announcement of the formation of the sovereign state of Israel. Israeli scholars and soldiers alike were inspired by the realization that a modern state in the "Promised Land" was being established at the very moment the Dead Sea Scrolls resurfaced - no mere coincidence, perhaps, since the Scrolls were evidence of a nationalist and messianic movement in Palestine, headed by an extremist apocalyptic sect whose stated aim was to invoke the intervention of supernatural powers to establish Israel as a sovereign realm: the Zaddikim.

Is this wild enough?

 

If not, hang on, because we're just beginning to roll into the Nexus: Scholars on the scene in Jerusalem in 1947 present first-hand testimony that agents from the newly formed CIA were present in their midst, and even took microfiche photos of the parchments.

 

This happened on the rooftop of the American Embassy (as described by a source I will cite the next time I lay my hands on that book. I believe that Baigent mentions the incident in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception).

So far the Nexus shapes up like this: NHC - DSS - CIA - UFO, and the links are intricately convoluted. For instance, we are not merely looking at a temporal coincidence between, say, the Kenneth Arnold sightings, the alleged Roswell crash, and the discovery of the DSS, for there is actually a textual coincidence as well. Some passages in the DSS describe the appearance of shining wheels, the circular vehicles of the Kenoshim, the "Heavenly Host" worshipped by the Qumranic sect as supernatural overlords who come and go in sky chariots.

 

I challenge the most sober of readers: Can you distinguish the religious language of the "Song of the Holocaust" from a modern description of a UFO sighting?

As they rise, a whispered divine voice [is heard], and there is a roar of praise. When they drop their wings, there is a [whispere]d divine voice. The cherubim bless the image of the throne-chariot above the firmament, [and] they praise the majesty of the luminous firmament beneath his Seat of glory. When the wheels advance angels of holiness come and go.

 

From between His glorious wheels there is as it were a fiery vision of most holy spirits. About them, the appearance of rivulets of fire in the likeness of gleaming brass... The spirits of the living 'gods' move perpetually with the glory of the marvelous chariots. The whispered voice of blessing accompanies the roar of their advance... When the ascend, they ascend marvelously, and when they settle they stand still.

This is from 4Q405, fragment 405 found in Cave 4 at Qumran, translated in The Dead Sea Scrolls in English by Geza Vermes, p. 261-2. Other translations are more explicit in describing "shining wheels."

 

The celestial chariots or merkaba of the Kenoshim behave in a way that matches the sudden shifts and accelerations of UFOs in modern sightings. Their awesome movements are accompanied by roaring and hushing sounds, also consistent with modern technological vehicles. To answer my own question, just posed: Yes, it is possible to distinguish the religious language in this passage from the language used by modern witnesses and contactees, but the imagery, and the impression of awe felt in the presence of a divine or supernatural entities, is identical.


UFO-like sightings were by no means unusual in antiquity. The inventory usually starts with the report from the court of Thutmose III, an Egyptian pharoah who lived around 1350 BCE. (See Kerner, The Song of the Greys, p. 5, and Jacques Vallee - Passport to Magonia, for an extensive inventory of sighting in antiquity.)

 

At the shift from the Arien to the Piscean Age, circa 120 BCE, radical and apocalyptic movements were sharply on the rise in ancient Palestine. The emergence of the Zaddikim of Qumran was timed to the revolt of the Macabees described in the two apocryphal books. For nearly 200 years, from 120 BCE to 70 AD when Titus destroyed the Temple of Solomon and exiled all Jews from Jerusalem, there was extreme violence, intersectarian conflict, and social unrest all across Palestine, and this destabilization was accompanied by many, many UFO sightings.

 

I maintain that it is not at all improbable that the Zaddikim were a UFO contact cult who embraced an apocalyptic agenda so violent and alienating they had to retreat to the caves above the Dead Sea. They perished, along with many other ordinary Jews who we as shocked about the Zaddakite belief-system as we are today, but their agenda survived, and was revived in the program of Christian salvationism.

Primary phenomenological nexus: In the year of the post-WW II UFO flap and the alleged Roswell crash, events that made extraterrestrials a worldwide obsession, ancient religious documents surface in Palestine indicating what appears to have been a UFO contact cult that existed on the Dead Sea from around 150 BCE, though its origins go much further back into the history of the ancient Hebrews.

As I have shown elsewhere in this site (in Armageddon Politics, for instance), the Dead Sea sectarians, an ultra-radical cult called the Zaddikim, produced the salvationist ideology that later emerged in Christian doctrines of the "divine redeemer," the very one who tucks George W. Bush into bed every night. Zaddikite ideology, recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is the seminal form of fundamentalist Christian religion.

 

Or, to put it the other way around, Christian religion is the full-blown, pandemic virus that mutated from a minute dose (in biological terms, a "vector") incubated in the rabid, hate-driven, apocalyptic visions of the Zaddikim.

Not wild enough yet?

 

Well, consider this: Because scholars who specialize in the Dead Sea material do not dabble with the Nag Hammadi texts, and vice versa, it has escaped the attention of the experts that the "War Scroll" of the Zaddikim cites at the top of its "hit list" of arch-enemies (and the Zaddikim had plenty of enemies!).

 

Directly linked to the "Star and Sceptre" prophecy, the keynote vision of Jewish apocalypticism, the text 1QM (4Q491-496) announces:

"There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, a scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall crush the forehead of Moab and tear town all the sons of Sheth."

(The War Scroll, Column 11, in The Dead Sea Scrolls - A New Translation, by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, and Edward Cook, p. 160. The "Sons of Sheth" was a code name used by Gnostics to describe the secret transmission of spiritual knowledge via a succession of Illuminators. Kerner interprets "Star" and "Sceptre" as direct allusions to disk- and cigar-shaped UFOs. )

Likewise, it has escaped notice that a Gnostic text (The First Apocalypse of James) warning that "Jerusalem is the dwelling of many Archons," is a direct reference to the fanatics of the Zaddikim cult. Hence, the Egyptian codices of the Gnostics and the sectarian Scrolls from the Dead Sea present evidence of two cultic groups in conflict, and most probably in contact, as well. It could be said that the secret conflict between the Zaddikim and the Gnostics who attempted to expose them decided the fate of the religious life of humanity.

Primary intertextual nexus: The Deads Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hamadi Codices, both discovered in 1947, present textual evidence of a spiritual conflict between two groups, Zaddikim and Gnostics, who most certainly had physical contact.



In the introduction of The Gnostic Scriptures, Bentley Layton presents a map of ancient Palestine (Map 1, "The Gnostic Sect and its Opponents") that shows clear archeological evidence of Gnostics who called themselves "Archontics," encamped on the West bank of the Dead Sea, just below Qumran Khirbet.

 

The name "Archontics" was adopted by this particular group because it was their special mission to observe the activity of the Archons in the religious life of ancient Palestine.

 

They were, in effect, agents of Archontic counter-intelligence. As such, they detected a wave of Archontic religious mania among the Palestinian Jews and especially in the cult of the Zaddikim.

 

Until the surfacing of the Nag Hammadi codices, it was impossible to reconstruct the Gnostic expose of Archontic mania - a socio-religions phenomenon known to scholars as "Jewish apocalyptism," which is misleading, because these extremist views were firmly repudiated by mainstream Jews and even by the more orthodox religious authorities in the Jewhish communities of the time.

 

Ignoring the sectarian conflict with Gnostics, scholarship on the Zaddikim has been pursued in an adequate and inaccurate manner.

 

With the benefit of cross-textual comparison today, we can understand that Gnostics detected in Judeo-Christian salvationism an alien implant, an ideological virus infecting the human mind. In this view, Christianity is the outgrowth of a UFO contact cult, the Zaddikim. It is truly an extraterrestrial religion whose spurious tenets and supernatural suppositions are alien to human life on Earth.

 

Such, in any case, was and is the Gnostic analysis.

I propose developing a data base of events that occurred in 1947 that can be seen as clustering around these primary two nodes, DSS and NHC, both of which imply UFO and CIA, etc...