“The fact is that throughout the religion of the Sumerians is not one of love but of fear, fear whose limits are confined to this present life, fear of Beings all-powerful, capricious, unmoral. Somehow or other virtue does appeal to the gods (that this should be so seems to be rather a necessity of human nature than an attribute of the godhead as conceived of in Sumer), but experience shows that mere virtue is not enough to engage and keep their favour; practical religion consists in the sacrifices and the ritual that placate and in the spells that bind them.”
-- C. Leonard Woolley, in “The Sumerians”

Upon death, the bodies of the antediluvian Sumerian “god” “kings” as well as the “demigod” “kings” that immediately followed the Deluge were entombed with their entourages. They were buried with their dead servants, their servants’ tools, chariots, dead charioteers and even dead beasts to pull the chariots. This is to say that after the death of an early Sumerian “king,” the support staff of that “king” would be herded into his tomb and ritualistically executed. This way the “king” would not enter the realm of the dead alone.

These early “kings” apparently saw death as a journey, an expedition, meriting an entire team of toadies to do any dirty work that may arise on it.

This tradition of burying the “king” with his staff and a ton of gear was phased out over time, as the “kings” reportedly became more “human.” Eventually the Sumerian “kings” were entirely human and were buried alone with a few of their keepsakes.

Conventional historians might tell us that this represents something of an evolution in humanity. As time passed, the human family became more humane and eventually decided that the death of a “king” didn’t mandate the blood sacrifice of everyone serving immediately under him.

But could the opposite be true. Instead of representing an ascent towards humanity, could newer death rituals represent a “fall” from divinity?

Consider that the Sumerians held that the antediluvian “kings” weren’t human. They were “gods.” According to the Sumerian “King Lists” eight “kings” reigned prior to the flood. Each had a reign that spanned not years, not decades, not centuries, not millennia, but tens of thousands of years. The first eight Sumerian “kings” ruled for a combined total of more than 240,000 years. They didn’t measure time in years. They measured it in “sars,” blocks of time each spanning 3,600 years. The first Sumerian “king,” named A-lu-lim reigned for eight sars, or 28,800 years.

The Deluge and a systemic overhaul of power-brokering traditions

The Deluge presented a fairly major crisis for the Sumerian “king” system.

According to conventional history, after the Deluge, the Sumerians came from the sea to Mesopotamia after that region had drained its floodwaters. Those waters left behind a fertile floodplain, on which resided various Asian, Semitic and Aryan tribes. Upon arrival from the sea, the Sumerians, organized and with cultural norms that galvanized their peoples into a cohesive societal unit, quickly overtook the atomized tribes and established “civilization,” and did so using what to them amounted to a New World Order.

The old, antediluvian, system of power had proven itself to be a failure. According to it the “gods” jockeyed for kingship and whomsoever won out ruled according to the natural relationship of “gods” to “humans.” Some of the “god” “kings” didn’t Truly like “humans” and when their “godly” powers enabled them to accurately forecast the Deluge, it was decided that such an event was due, as was a “human” population crash.

One of the “gods” rebelled against this idea and warned his favorite “human” who then built a vessel, the Biblical ark, which saved the lives of him, his family, and some members of his sociosphere. The “gods,” had vacated Earth for the Deluge and upon returning afterwards began to comprehend the extent of the damage done. Perhaps out of guilt they decided to lord over mankind from behind the scenes, deferring superficial power to the “demigods,” or part-god-part-human “kings.” One example of a demigod was Gilgamesh. The demigods ruled for a few centuries and eventually, after many generations, the “god” gene became a recessive trait among an elite few and kingships were filled by mostly-human “humans.”

Ergo what some historians may consider the evolution of humanity is in fact possibly the devolution of divinity.

Let’s not digress.

Death and the return to godhead

Why did the “gods” seek to be buried with a support staff? What did they know about death that the “human” kings did not?

The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes death as the possible onset of a journey. That is if the recently deceased chooses not to reincarnate. According to the ancient Tibetans, the recently deceased need the guidance of a navigator god and such a god typically discriminates. The Mayans basically say that at the center of the Milky Way is the birthplace of souls, which travel along energy corridors (gama ray burst channels) to various parts of the galaxy, including Earth. Perhaps that journey is indeed quite an expedition. And what if one is ill prepared for that journey? Is this what the Sumerian gods feared and is this why they brought with them to death a legion of helping hands?

If the Sumerian gods were unmoral, then perhaps the gods of death, as described by the Tibetans, would have rejected them passage along the road back to the sacred birthplace of souls, as described by the Mayans.

Knowing this would be the case, perhaps the Sumerian gods brought to the realm of the dead with them their slaves and various tools and weapons so they could attempt the journey on their own, without the assistance of the Tibetan gods of death.

This being the case, the gods of death, described by the Tibetans as “watchers,” serve as tollbooth operators on the road back to the birthplace of souls, what the Hindus call “godhead.” Without gaining their favor, the individual soul is perhaps marooned on Earth. And perhaps with their favor, these gods of death, doubling as cabbies on the road to godhead, escort the individual soul to one of many other plane(t)s to experience the next stage of existence, the next round of lessons, on the way back to godhead.

Alas, Philosophical Order of the Quest scribe, Manly Palmer Hall, agrees to disagree, or at least to go much deeper than the above explanation.

Says Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, “The religious and philosophical writings of all nations abound with acroamatic cryptograms, that is parables and allegories. … The creation myths of the world are acroamatic cryptograms, and the deities of the various pantheons are only cryptic characters which, if properly understood, become constituents of a divine alphabet.”

What we call gods are really symbols that combine to form the thoughts, the stream of consciousness, of the Infinite Eternal Overmind, from which every thing manifests and to which every thing returns.

Of gods and men

Certainly this explanation fits. The Sumerian gods are described as unmoral and fearful. These are “human,” not “godly,” traits. Ergo, perhaps the explanation for their humanness is that the “gods” were indeed “human.” This is to say that the gods were men. And there is an explanation for their godly abilities: Flight, incredible weapons, deep understanding, the power to bring order out of chaos. They were employing high technology, the same sort of technology that enables time travel. They were from the future. Indeed the possibility must be entertained that our “evolutionary” successors employed time travel technology to intervene in the lives of our “evolutionary” predecessors.

Certain ideas now begin to snap into place. The Christians call the Freemasons “Satanic” for asserting, among other things, the now apparent truism that “man” is “god” and vice versa. Once time travel, as was conducted during the Philadelphia Project, circa 1943, is proven to be within our capabilities, all of history will have to be rewritten to make apparent the reality that on some future day time travel will likely be practiced. If it is practiced in the future, than by definition those time travelers will be traveling to what we call history, where they will more than likely be seen as otherworldly, extraterrestrial and perhaps, depending on where transhumanism takes us, quite alien. Go back far enough in time and the knowledge you take back with you that enabled time travel will make you a “god” in comparison to the “people” you will meet then. The people of that time will bow to “gods” that are really, Truly, “men.”

Such lines of thought make vital fodder for speculation.