If You Go Looking

Ancient astronauts

META/5/D

Paleocontact · the Watchers and the Nephilim

Gods and angels of old texts, reread as visiting spacemen.

The claim that extraterrestrials visited in the distant past and were remembered as gods. Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods (1968) made it a mass phenomenon, and Sitchin gave it its fullest form with the Anunnaki. The biblical version draws on Genesis, where the sons of God father the Nephilim, and on the Book of Enoch, where the Watchers descend and teach forbidden arts; both are reread as astronauts and their offspring. The pattern is the same throughout: an old text is made to say something its authors did not, and monuments built by real ancient peoples are credited to visitors instead.

If you go looking

No practice attachedCommercial ecosystem

No practice is attached. The cost falls on history: the theory repeatedly credits monuments built by Egyptian, Maya, Andean and other peoples to visitors rather than to them.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

META/5/D

Outside the system · embodiment 5 of 5, an ordinary biological body · source: disputed documents · key

Dates

Chariots of the Gods: 1968

Genesis and Enoch: ancient texts

Related

The Anunnaki entry is the same move applied to Mesopotamia. The Watchers are fallen angels in their own tradition. The Sirius argument is the astronomical branch.

Anunnaki →Angels →Sirians →

Terms used on this page

META: outside the system

Origin code

Not a being to sit alongside the others. A framework that reframes the whole catalogue, a tradition that travelled in the opposite direction from the rest, or an intelligence people say they made rather than met.

Degree of embodiment: 5, an ordinary biological body

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

D: disputed documents

Source code

Founded on texts of contested or admitted authorship rather than on witnesses.

Zecharia Sitchin

From 1976

Reinterpreted Sumerian and Akkadian texts as an account of extraterrestrial gold miners from a planet Nibiru. Assyriologists reject both the translations and the philology. The version most people know is his, not Sumer's.

The Book of Enoch

Jewish apocalyptic text, 3rd to 1st century BCE

A text outside most Bibles, canonical only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, in which the Watchers, a group of angels, descend, teach humans forbidden arts and father the giant Nephilim.

No practice attached

Tradition-side

There is nothing to do here: no inherited method of engagement, whether the tradition is a text, an argument or a set of reports. Anyone offering you one has invented it.

Commercial ecosystem

Documented harm

A paid economy has grown around this tradition, whether readings, courses, retreats and private sessions, or books, tours and media that keep promising more. Not automatically predatory, but it does mean some of what you will read was written to sell something, and that people in distress are a market.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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