Transcript
A (0:03)
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In the 29th Jubilee, in the first week in the beginning thereof, Arpakshad took to himself a wife. And her name was Rasu Eha, the daughter of Susan, the daughter of Elam, and she bore him a son in the third year in this week, and he called his name Cainum. And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize a city, and he found a writing which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it, and sinned owing to it for it contained the teaching of the watchers, in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it, for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it, lest he should be angry with him on account of it. The Book of Jubilees, chapter 8, verses 1 through 4 When our Father Adam and mother Eve set out on their journey into the wilds east of Eden, what met them there? What unfolded along that road? Of course we could say much in answer. We could say that Cain murdered Abel, that his blood cried out to God from the ground. We could say that Cain went on to build the first city named Enoch in an unknown land. We could say that Seth reinstituted the righteous line of God's people from Adam, and that his descendants began to call upon the name of the Lord. But we would be remiss if we did not say that somehow and somewhere along the line, a twisted and evil form of worship began to take shape and propagate through almost all of the peoples of the world in that time. For proof of this, we need look no further than Jude, who tells us of Enoch's prophecy of woe and destruction upon the ungodly and their ungodly deeds. And yet, even before Jude, as is our conviction, we see traces of this false counter religion's formation in the early verses of Genesis 6, where fallen angels mate with human women to give birth to a tainted corruption of the line of man called the Nephilim. At any rate, we know that false worship took place before the flood, and we know that it was a motivating reason behind the waters of judgment which fell upon the earth. But what exactly was the nature of this dark religion? And how did it deceive so many so early on? There is an idea that the various pagan religions one sees suffusing the poetry and epic myth of the ancients is anything but a fabrication, anything but the mere inventions of dullards made up out of whole cloth to cope with things they didn't understand in nature. Instead, speaking loosely, it was in a sense, true, not capital T. Truth. Of course, after all, poets have always been happy to take artistic license. But at the root of it, this idea says that the drama between gods and gods and gods and men that we read about in texts like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Kumarbi myth of Mesopotamia actually did happen in some form. The idea is that though the different authors who put all these stories to verse and eventually paper or stone, may have altered details of what actually happened in time in order to fit with the ever changing cultural moments in which they were transmitting them, the core shape of the myths, seeing as how they are common from culture to culture, are to some degree things that actually happened, things that actually witnessed by the common ancestors of all these different groups. Spirit speaking of a common ancestor of all these groups, it is at this precise point that this theory begins to hit its stride. It's hypothesized that these myths are mutations which grew from a central and cataclysmic epoch in the story of man, namely, that epoch immediately following the original great reset, the Flood in Noah's day. In Christian terms, Noah fathered sons who fought fathered sons who fathered sons until the time of Genesis 11 and the events surrounding the Tower of Babel a fairly good chunk of time, given the generational table in Genesis 10. It therefore stands to reason that in the time between Noah's curse of Canaan and Babel, there could have been a false religion that sprang up and started to take hold. After all, the Tower of Babel was a tower of worship. And so this idea simply states that maybe the false gods telling them to build the tower were the same ones, though again garbled over time, that we read of in all the most ancient myths. It's a compelling idea, isn't it? An idea which helps us to reconcile the common mythic religious motifs one finds scattered across virtually all of these ancient texts. Think again about the events leading up to the Great Deluge. What was it which filled God with such wrath as to judge the world? That then was what horrors would make the God of creation de create the world he had fashioned. Well, in Genesis 6. 5, we read that God saw the wickedness of man and that every intention of his heart was only ever and always evil. Well, in Genesis 6. 5, we read that God saw the wickedness of man and that every intention of his heart was only ever and always evil. Think on that for a moment. What kinds of evil does God hate with perfect hatred? What stands at the very foundation of sin? Look at the Ten Commandments and you'll see the whole first table is about proper worship. God hates the worship of false and fallen lesser gods. Doesn't it then make sense to say that one of the great evils, Polaris polluting the earth was the widespread pagan worship of false gods by the very race God had created for his worship? And so, taking this into account, we could propose a slight alteration of this grand idea we've already outlined. Or perhaps it would be better to call it an addition as opposed to an alteration. I will give my yes and amen to the plotline of false gods deceiving man after the flood and leading him to new forms of fallen worship. But I will also say that even then, the worship was not strictly new. What if, in some measure, the enemy was picking up after the flood where he had left off beforehand? What if the celestial pagan worship taken up by the wicked men at Babel echoed a far more robust form of similar worship undertaken by their ancestors before the deluge? What if it's the same lies all the way down from Helicon's western face, across the summit to her eastern ramparts, spanning the time from Cain to Nimrod and even on down to our own day. And what if I told you that we have very good archaeological evidence to support this idea? See, in the early 1900s and on some of the very old rolling hills in the southeast of Turkey, farmers began to reclaim the once sacred land. For more practical considerations, they cleared out stones and debris, some of which had stood in the same spot since ilium could be seen glowing with fire in the night. During the Trojan War, they made fields for themselves in which to plant their crops. Yet every once in a while, a row of crops would contain a visible gap of unused space. You see, peppered at apparently random points. Throughout the fields stood massive chunks of limestone shooting up from the earth like gravestones of a forgotten age. At first, the farmers figured these stones for exactly that, just grave markers. But whenever they tried to dig down and pull them out, they found the stones to be buried much deeper than they were willing to dig. Thus they started cutting off the stones where they met the surface of the dir and settling for a few feet feet of gap in the crop rose. At least then, so they thought they would not have to work around the blocks when harvest time came. Some of them surely had some pause in what they were doing. After all, wasn't this just a way of desecrating and dishonoring the long dead? But they resolved the internal conflict by convincing themselves that the people had been dead for so long and they probably would not want to be in the way of things living anymore. So it was that block after block of deeply buried limestone was shorn from the hillsides to make room for the planting of their seed. Eventually, some academic types caught wind of the strange limestone graves littering the sacerdotal hills of Turkey and decided to investigate some light digging. All, of course, with the farmer's permission, didn't uncover any profound revelations about the nature of the gravestones. But it did lead to the discovery of ancient stone tools and bone fragments that appeared to contain man made etchings in a few places. This was no doubt an impressive discovery, but the fact of the matter remained that what was found was not in good condition and was not older or any different from sites elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent that had yielded far more interesting results already. So it was that this brief impulse of interest in these hills, or Tepes, as they were called in Turkey, evaporated like a few drops of water on a hot cast iron pan. Years went by with any more investigation. The land was cultivated in that pragmatic modern sense. It became a new kind of sacred to the people sustained by it. But then, in 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt, a man who had already given his best years to of finding old settlements along the Euphrates and Anatolia, decided to revisit the site where the stone tools had been found, just to see if something else might be there. After arriving in the very ancient city of Sinlorfia, he embarked on his normal routine, asking local farmers where one might find the highest deposits of flint in the area. They all, with one voice, directed him to a hill due east of the small downtown, a hill called Gobekli Tepe. Schmidt made his way with a small team of local hired help and scientific aides to the hill, where they made arrangements with the farmer who tilled the land and began right away to dig. Schmidt and his team, like all those who had gone before them, were less interested in the tool fragments that were fairly easy to find, and instead focused their efforts on solving the riddle of the limestone slabs themselves. The difference between the predecessors to the area and Schmidt, though, though was that Schmidt was so familiar with the ancient ways of building in Anatolia that he alone figured these slabs to be something other than mere grave markers. He posited that they were likely the bones of some kind of megalithic structure. Schmidt soon left the site with both excitement and unfinished business, returning to Germany in search of further funding for what he thought might be a massive discovery. Between the sheer force of his fierce conviction, the importance of the work, and his general likability, he quickly secured the needed grant money and booked his return trip to Gobekli Tepe. Day after day saw Schmidt and his team digging frantically around one of the larger limestone slabs. It forced them to dig deeper and wider than any of them had expected beforehand. But after much labor, an otherwise ordinary day in the heat gave way to wonder. They had finished excavating the first of the monuments and all they could do was step back in awestruck wonder before the glory that they had unearthed. Before them stood an 18 foot tall, 16 and a half ton column of solid limestone in the shape of a capital T. It was covered with etchings of animals, and in some places it seemed strange looking people. Following the discovery, a mad rush of money and manpower poured into the otherwise forgotten region of the world. Soon enough, more and more pillars were unearthed, all of them huge and most of them ornately decorated with precise reliefs and carvings and etchings of nature, the stars, man and animals of all kinds. Soon, Schmidt's work became the epicenter of of cutting edge archaeology. There was only one problem. None of this was supposed to exist at all. The radiocarbon dating methods used on the megalithic network that soon became known simply as Gobekli Tepe indicated that the earliest, largest and most intricately carved pillars were erected about 12,000 years ago. That's a full 7,000 years before Stonehenge was made and 6,000 years before the Great Pyramids. Now, of course, we know that there are issues with these dates and the efficacy of carbon dating in general. But consider the following illustration. Suppose you make a measuring rod that you say is a foot long, but in reality it's two feet long. This means that anything you measure will be incorrect if you trust your measuring stick to be one foot. However, just because the measuring stick is incapable of giving an objectively accurate measurement, it can still tell you true things about two distances relative to each other. For example, if you measured a field with the bad rod, and it tells you that the field is 150ft long. You know it's not actually 150ft long, but if you measure the length of your house with the same measuring stick and it comes out to 20ft, you @ least know one thing with certainty. The field is longer than the side of your house. In the same way, though carbon dating is imperfect, precise, and untrustworthy as an objective measurement, it still does contain potential value in helping us understand relative time frames between the two things measured. Because of this, though we know by the biblical timeline that Gobekli tepe is not 12,000 years old, we do know that it really is older than the pyramids, older than Stonehenge, Much older. As the site was more fully excavated, the desire to understand what the different pillars meant and what the whole place was used for became paramount. Spread across over 64,000 square feet of excavated space, three primary stone ring enclosures house dozens of massive T shaped limestone pillars, all situated around the circumference of the circular enclosures and pointing towards 2 much larger t pillars in the center of each. Nearly all of these pillars, as has been said, contain intricate carvings of man, beast, or other types of symbols. Certainly some pillars have more carving than others, but they almost all have something. One curious thing is that the older pillars, for what has been discovered of Gobekli Tepe, was apparently constructed over a period of over 1000 years. Contains the most detailed and well preserved carvings, as if the founding generation had architectural and artistic skills that subsequent builders somehow lost. One thing that has surprised researchers is the relative lack of human or humanoid pictures at the site. To be sure, there are some humanoid images which will be of interest to us in a moment, but it's mostly animalistic or astrological symbolism. But this conclusion may be deceiving in the face of one of Schmidt's most striking data points. See, many of the gigantic T pillars have arms and legs attached into the vertical tall sections, indicating that they were supposed to be seen as humanoid figures themselves, with the horizontal upper section serving as the head and the lower portion the entire body. Keep that in mind, because this idea of the pillars themselves representing human or humanoid figures will be important. As investigation into the site's intended use gained momentum, the eyes turned to the larger pair of pillars in the center of each circle. These pillars faced one another precisely, with space between them for one or maybe two people to stand abreast. They discovered that if one stood between the pillars and looked out to the far horizon. Now remember, the whole site is slightly elevated on a hillside. They would be looking directly through a bored out limestone block. On the far side of the enclosure, the circle bored through the stone was a window displaying the horizon through it. This finding caused researchers to wonder if the alignment of the enclosures might be far from accidental or arbitrary. As they enlisted the help of astronomers and tried to wind the clock back on the celestial field that would have shown itself to the ancients. They discovered that over the course of about 1,000 years, the enclosure followed the path of one star system, Cygnus. The entire development displaying a level of technological advancement millennia before any archaeologist would have expected to see. It was a temple, a shrine to the gods of the stars. And while much more could be said, and almost certainly will be said about all the strange and fascinating details of this place, the celestial liturgical aspect of it is really what drives the narrative and gives us clues as to how this odd place might line up with the non materialist timeline of the world. For in the midst of the celestial worship and etchings depicting the signs and seasons somehow important to to the gods that were commemorated in this place, one pillar stands out as particularly foreboding. It's pillar 43. Pillar 43 sits in one of the main enclosures just adjacent to the bored out seeing stone which pointed the viewer between the pillars towards Cygnus in the sky. On this pillar is an array of highly detailed images. At the top, one sees three a bird, a lioness and a frog standing up next to blocks with handles on them that resemble the outline of a purse or a bag of some kind. Many believe these arched blocks represent sunsets and the animals represent zodiac signs in the stars. Below them is a line of piled chevrons that resemble water or stormy seeds. Under the water is the appearance of a vulture's head with a more humanoid body holding out an orb in its extended hand. To the right of the orb is another smaller vulture figure and the profiles of two other long legged birds. On the lower section of the pillar there is just as much activity. A scorpion stands out as the centerpiece, which many take to indicate the Scorpio constellation. Next to the Scorpio outline is a humanoid figure that is without its head. Finally, at the bottom of the pillar there is a figure as of another bird's head and neck. The deeper meaning of this pillar in relation to the others near it is evident from just how much work went into this message, for that is certainly what it is message. Studies have concluded that religions of antiquity frequently associated the human soul with the head and the body with, well, the body, thus implying that the headless humanoid on the pillar is representative of a man or many men who have died. The outline of Scorpio being below the T cross on the upper half of the pillar, mixed with the vulture figure being above the T cross, indicates this pillar is also a celestial date. The reason for believing this is twofold. First, the Vulture figure, despite having human characteristics, is also a perfect outline of the Cygnus constellation, the constellation apparently at the center of all of this worship. And two, because between the scorpion and the vulture, there is a thick line relieved from the stone. This line could correspond to the Great Rift in the Milky Way, which would have been clearly visible in every night sky in those days. When we take these things into account while remembering the water imagery around the zodiac signs at the top of the pillar, an incredible possibility emerges. If we grant that these propositions are true for a moment, that pillar 43 really does show some sort of celestial date involved in the Cygnus worship, mixed with swarming waters and the imagery of man dying and his soul departing to be with Cygnus in the sky, then one may not be crazy to infer that pillar 43 is an ancient prophecy. Specifically, pillar 43 is thought to be an ancient prophecy for a massive flood that would someday come and swallow up the land. There is one additional detail that we have thus far not mentioned that also lends some credence to this idea. You see, when they were unearthing Gobekli Tepe, they continuously encountered sections of soil that didn't fit. In fact, they were not really soil at all. Most of the excavation was the excavation not of dirt, but of loose rock that had been compacted heavily over time. The conclusion was clear. Gobekale Tepe had been buried on purpose. In bringing these monoliths back to the light of day, the researchers were doing something the ancients either never intended to or never got around to doing themselves. They had buried the place themselves and they had also failed to ever resurrect it. Maybe it should have stayed that way. The grand conspiracy theory therefore sits as follows. Around the time of Genesis 6, 4, as the fallen watchers began to breed with human women, demanding the worship of their subjects and teach them various gifts of technology and skill. The first celestial enclosures of Gobekli Tepe were built being in the antediluvian world. This would ensure that its age would measure far further back than any other man made thing we have. As the watchers and their stars were worshiped more and more, culminating in ancient fertility cults whose phallic symbols can be found all over Gobekli Tepe, men like Enoch began to prophesy about the coming judgment. As the fallen gods grew even more malevolent and their Nephilim children became more brutal in their rule, the skill portrayed in sites like Gobekli Tepe started to wane, until generations just before the floodwaters could only hope to produce the things as great as their ancestors. Yet the lie continued and the degeneracy grew. Eventually, whether by the word spread of Noah or the portents of judgment given before him by Enoch and his sons, pillar 43 was made to warn future generations of when the wrath would come so they could be ready. All the while, those new generations would build new enclosures to follow their God Cygnus around the night sky. Eventually, the time came. Perhaps it was when the rains began to fall, perhaps somehow before. Either way, in a rush of effort, all the people buried Gobekli Tepe to protect it from the coming destruction. Of course they succeeded, but perhaps they did too good at the job, since nobody ever found it again. Or did they? If we grant any credibility at all to the book of Jubilees cited there at the beginning of this cold open, which we know is a big assumption and we'll talk more about that later, but if we do, then the passage we read to begin the show might be true, or at least some garbled version of the truth. Maybe Arpachshad, Noah's grandson, did have a son named Cainum. Maybe he did, in a spirit of rebellion, or for some different reason, go into distant lands to find a city for himself. Maybe he stumbled upon some semi exposed remains of Gobekli Tepe. Maybe he knew it for the demonic doctrine that it was. After all, it says he learned the worship of the stars from what he found carved in the rock. Maybe he gave in to the temptation and ensured these wicked ways of worship would endure after the flood. Maybe Noah or Shem eventually found out. Maybe they went and destroyed or covered up what little remained to try and stop the spread of this new lie. And maybe it rested like that for thousands more years before Klaus Schmidt found it and brought all of this ancient worship of the starry host and the One Watchers back from the grave by mistake. Regardless of his own beliefs, he has unearthed powers beyond his reckoning. As Aslan says, you have appealed to Tash, to Tash you shall go. And far more than just the earth and air around this plot of hillside in Turkey has changed since Schmidt made his discovery. The ownership of the land itself has also shifted hands. Where before Schmidt had lived the rights to dig from a family which had owned the farm for generations before him. It appears now they've sold it entirely. To whom, you might ask? Well, believe it or not, to a group with strong ties to the World Economic Forum. You heard that right. Members of the World Economic Forum think it's worth placing their money and effort behind raising up the place of celestial worship from potentially before the waters of the flood even came. Go figure. Myth is history. The world is far stranger a place than you or I probably think, and Gobekale Tepe is just the tip of the iceberg. All around the world, even in places next to Gobekli Tepe, there are places being found that throw the widely held secular archaeological timeline out of the proverbial window. And what is found is far more than settlements and pottery, but places of worship. Giant humanoid figures, serpentine faces in sacrificial pits, maps of the stars and windows to old gods in the sky. Oh, and just one last thing. In case you think the possibility of Noah's grandson finding Gobekli Tepe is completely stupid. The Bible says that the ark landed somewhere on the mountains of Ararat. Those mountains are not a very long range, and they reach their easternmost point on the tallest mountain of the spine, Mount Ararat. Now, whether the ark is somewhere on that particular mountain or on one of its little brothers is mainly beside the point. What matters is that those mountains, the place where Noah and his family began to rebuild the world, and the place where Khainom may have set out from to find himself a city, is a mere 300 miles from Gobek. Tappy.