1. The Interpretive Paradigm of Alan Alford
Alford’s case for
catastrophism is ably set out in three masterful tomes:
The Phoenix Solution: Secrets of a Lost
Civilisation, The Atlantis Secret: A Complete Decoding of Plato’s
Lost Continent, and perhaps the most important study of the
three, When the Gods Came Down: The
Catastrophic Roots of Religion Revealed. Indeed, as the last
title reveals, Alford’s intention is somewhat different than
Velikovsky’s, though both men consult a similar range of texts.
Whereas Velikovsky aims merely at explaining a broad cosmological
history in terms of the physics that his texts suggest, Alford’s
aim is narrower, seeking to explain the origin of those myths and texts, and the religions based upon them. In other words,
for most catastrophists, the paradigm is used to explain certain
types of physical evidences, and certain types of statements in
texts, on the basis of physical theory. In a new twist on
philosophical naturalism and materialism, however, Alford uses the
catastrophist paleophysical paradigm to explain the origin of
religions and certain types of expressions in religious texts
themselves.
This caveat
notwithstanding, it is safe to say Alford’s works constitute the
most scholarly and well-researched continuation of the
catastrophist paradigm of mythological interpretation since
Velikovsky first gave it textual flesh and bones. Here our
concentration will be on his Atlantis Secret
and When the Gods Came Down, for it is in these works that
he makes the most sweeping claims for the interpretive power of
this paradigm. Indeed, in The Atlantis
Secret Alford is quite explicit about the universal
explanatory power that he claims for his version of
catastrophism:
In this book, I present not only a complete decoding of the lost continent of Atlantis, but also a complete decoding of ancient Greek religion in its entirety. I am able to decode the myths of the Olympian gods and their associated mystery cults; I am able to decode the myth of the golden age and the fall of man; I am able to to decode the scientific cosmogonies of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Philolaos; I am able to decode the ‘soul religion’ of Orpheus, Pythagroas, Parmenides, Socrates and Plato; and I am able to decode Plato’s Theory of Forms, his account of creation by the Demiourgos, and his story of Atlantis. Behind all of these ideas there lies a single secret of stunning simplicity - the age-old myth of exploded planet. 129
In other words,
behind all the complex imagery and themes of the Greeks, behind all
their arcane and well-reasoned philosophy, behind all the arcane
rituals of their mystery schools, lies one simple
concept
for which they are
all metaphors and allegories:
all of it is but “the age-old myth of
the exploded planet.”
But lest one think
that the catastrophist paradigm is restricted merely to the Greeks,
Alford pointedly states that the same applies to the other
religions of the region: “The religions of the ancient Near East
are best described as ‘exploded planet cults,’”130 even, as we shall
see, Judaism and Christianity in their very core doctrines. Lest
one think that Alford is unaware of the sweeping nature of his
claims for the universal explanatory power of the catastrophist
paradigm, he spells it out explicitly:
• The exploded planet was invisible by nature, thus explaining the ancients’ worship of visible substitutes - meteorites, statues, fertility-gods, weather-gods, Sun, Moon and stars.
• The worship of the gods in anthropomorphic form was an entirely predictable offshoot of the exploded planet cult.
• The exploded planet cult was as profound as profound gets, involving the death of a living planet and the rebirth of life on another planet - the Earth. There is no need to suppose any deeper, hidden meaning to the ancient myths.
• The mythical (Exploded Planet Hypothesis) is entirely separate from the scientific (Exploded Planet Hypothesis) and does not require the actual explosion of a planet. There is no law that requires ancient religious beliefs to be scientifically true.131
However, it is this
last point that highlights the problematic inherent in Alford’s
version of catastrophism, and indeed inherent in most catastrophist
interpretations of ancient myths, and that is, if the texts are
not to be correlated with any
scientific theory - ancient or modern - of an exploded planet in
nearby space, then how and why would the ancients, across such a
broad diversity of cultures and dispersion of this one theme, hit
upon the idea in the first place? And if this scenario is, as
Alford says, “one of a ... world that was once saturated with the
cults of numerous exploded planet deities, each personifying
exactly the same idea, but expressed in a variety of different
ways,”132 then why employ
such a confused jungle overgrowth of symbols to portray it? The
ancients, on Alford’s problematical view, were obsessed across
cultures and religions with this one idea to such an extent that
this obsession itself must be explained. As will be seen, this, too
is another problematic inherent in Alford’s approach.
a. Chimeras as Meteorites
Alford produces a
veritable blizzard of thematic motifs and references in his books
in support of his contention that most if not all such motifs refer
to the “hidden” truth of an exploded planet. A basic formula,
however, underlies all the motifs he explores in his works, and
that is that anything referring to mountains, cities, or islands in
the “sea” or “the deep” is a metaphor for a planet, which is an
“island” or “mountain” in the midst of the “deep” or “sea” of
space.
This formula has a
corollary: anything chimerical or of a “hybrid” nature“,
particularly if it involves a heavenly component and an earthly one
- the Nephilim or “sons of God” who
sired chimerical giant offspring with human women in the Old
Testament for example - is a meteorite,
since a meteorite, as a remnant of the exploded planet, has both a
heavenly component since it fell from heaven, and an earthly one,
since it fell to, and in some cases, penetrated under, the surface
of the earth.
Accordingly, as
Alford explicitly states, “it is worth mentioning that even the
Sphinx - a supreme solar symbol in the eyes of Egyptologists - was
actually an exploded planet symbol.”133
b. Giants and Titans as Meteorites
Similarly, even the
hero of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh
becomes a similar symbol, for as the epic itself states, “Two
thirds of him is god and one third of him is man.”134 Since Gilgamesh was
also a “giant” according to the Babylonian epic, the meaning of the
symbol thus becomes crystal clear for Alford:
Once we marry up this information with the other legends of Gilgamesh’s Titan-like birth, together with the fact that the senior gods were exploded planets, it becomes evident that the “flesh of the gods” was the meteorite efflux of the gods. The name Gilgamesh, then, meant “meteorite...”135
So far so good, but
the reader may perhaps have already detected a difficulty with
Alford’s methodology: there are no external controls or checks on
it. Once his basic formula is unleashed on mythological texts,
anything fitting its general parameters becomes a symbol of the
catastrophism of an exploded planet.
c. Planetary Collisions as Wars
Thus, when ancient
mythological texts speak of the “wars” of the gods, they are
speaking of the “collisions” of celestial bodies, notwithstanding
the fact that not all ancient texts can be construed as collisions
between objects. In other words, while it is certainly true that
some ancient texts speak of divine “arrows” and “stones” or
“missiles” being used to slay some divine opponent, not all war
references include these types of weapons. Just as often
mythological texts speak of the “lightning” or “bolt” of the gods,
and even the theme of “divine arrows” could be a metaphor for
lightning discharges. Thus, Alford’s formula begins to show a
subtle crack. Nonetheless, there is a consistency with which he
applies it, for the “children” of the “gods” then become the
meteors and asteroids that crash to the earth.
For example, the
“‘people’ who came forth from the womb of the goddess Ishtar were
not really ‘people’ at all - they were the
meteorite offspring from an exploding planetary body. ”136
d. The Ultimate Reductio
Alford’s
catastrophism knows no bounds. Even “Noah was not a man but a god -
a fallen meteorite.”137 And if that were
not enough, Alford reaches his ultimate reductio ad absurdum with the following
passage:
How would the Church explain the fact that Jesus Christ was originally a physical flood of meteorites?And, if this long-hidden-aspect of Jesus Christ was revealed, how would the Church explain the role of Jesus-the-man from the 1st century AD? Would the Church admit that Jesus-the-man was an actor in a Mystery Play or Passion play? Would the Church acknowledge that the crucifixion was in fact an ingenious esoteric parable for the death of a planet?The mind absolutely boggles at the thought of all this.138
Yes indeed, the mind
truly does boggle at the thought of all
this, for it would seem that, following his well-footnoted formula
with the absolute devotion of a fundamentalist, one can interpret
literally all mythological references
or religious texts in such a manner as to construe it as referring
to nothing more than an exploded planet.
But - if I may be
permitted to paraphrase the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis for a
moment - to see through everything is to see nothing at all; there
must be some opacity to the
text.
Thus, how would
Alford explain the fact, referred to in my book The Giza Death Star Destroyed, that these same
planets-as-gods then go on to sire very human offspring and teach them the various arts and
sciences necessary to civilization, as those very same texts,
across several cultural traditions, attest? Alford’s answer is to
maintain that this meteoric bombardment seeded the earth with life
which then evolved, via the familiar mechanisms of “evolution,”
into mankind.
So how does one
answer someone like Alford?
Very
simply.
If all the textual
references to giants, titans, Nephilim, Anunnaki and so on are
nothing but cleverly concocted metaphors for an exploded planet,
and thus not real, then one should
never be able to find any evidence or ancient artifact of
intelligent life on nearby planets, nor any evidence of giants,
titans, and such on earth. If, however, such things are found, then
by the very nature of the sweeping and universal explanatory power
that Alford claims for his “method” of interpreting the texts,
these things would constitute loose corroboration of my own reading
of the texts, and the fatal “exception” to Alford’s claims, for to
claim universal validity and powers of explanation is to claim no
exceptions. We shall turn to the evidence for the existence of
ancient giants in the next chapter.
e. An Intriguing Formula: Gods Equal Mountains Equal Planets
Here we shall
concentrate on the implication of the discovery of ancient
extraterrestrial artifacts of
intelligent life for Alford’s hypothesis, by focusing on the
significant, and truly important and legitimate insight that Alford makes regarding the
equation “mountains equal planets equal gods.” Referring to the
fact that Mesopotamian texts often refer to the god Enlil as “the
Great Mountain” who engenders the four seasons, Alford then makes
the following insightful observation: “It must be said that the
idea of summer and winter being engendered upon a ‘mountain’ only
makes sense if the ‘mountain’ in question was the entire planet of
Earth.”139 Thus one arrives at
a significant formula that guides Alford (and as we shall see in
later chapters, contains another constant or variable that Alford
does not take into account). That formula is, once again,
“mountains equal planets equal gods.” And I mean the word “equals”
here in its entire logical and ontological significance; if “a”
equals “b” and “b” equals “c”, then by the laws of logic and
commutivity, “a” equals “c”.