22. V3 ZEUS

Who were they, and when? APPROVED 2026-10-11, after critical review

Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic writer who set down the Norse myths about eight centuries ago, said that Odin and the Aesir were real people. In his history of the kings of Norway he places their land, with its capital Asgard, east of the river Don, which runs through today's southern Russia. In the prologue to his other book, the Edda, he brings them instead from Troy, in today's Turkey. And Snorri was a Christian, writing some two centuries after Iceland's conversion; many scholars read his human Aesir as a learned way of explaining old gods as ancient kings.

The myths of the Norse and the Greeks describe these beings doing things that read like technology. Zeus throws thunderbolts. Thor's hammer strikes like thunder and comes back to his hand after every throw. Odin rides an eight-legged horse that carries him between the worlds, even down to the realm of the dead, and from his high seat he sees all the worlds.

If these were extraterrestrials, a question follows at once: when did they live among people?

There is a way to find out. A story travels with the people who tell it. If peoples who parted from each other very long ago tell the same story, each of them carried it away at the parting, so the story is at least as old as the parting. If only one family of related peoples tells it, the story is younger: it arose among the ancestors of that family after they had parted from everyone else. A story can also pass between neighbours much later, and the words of a language show that it happened, and from which side, since a borrowed name keeps its foreign shape. And some stories may arise again and again among peoples who never met, since there is a sky above every people and thunder everywhere; so a figure shared between peoples counts for more when it shares its name, or the details of its story. And geneticists, reading the DNA of living and ancient people, can tell, roughly, when peoples parted.

So we can take the stories of Zeus, Odin and their company and look, people by people, at who tells them and who lacks them.

Odin and Zeus

Let's begin with Odin himself, and with the first thing anyone notices on meeting him: he reminds us of someone. Of Zeus.

Both rule the other gods. Both are called the father of gods and of men. Both watch the world from a height, Zeus from the top of Mount Olympus, Odin from his high seat in Asgard. Both have a son who fights giants and monsters: Zeus has Heracles, Odin has Thor.

Is this only our impression, or did the people of the ancient world see it too? We go looking, and the Romans answer. They met the Germanic peoples on their northern border, and their writers described the gods of those peoples by matching them with their own. Tacitus, writing about 1.9 KY (thousands of years) ago, says the Germans worship Mercury above all other gods. By Mercury he means Wodan, the German name of Odin.

That surprises us. We expected the Romans to match Odin with Jupiter, their king of the gods. They matched him with Mercury: the wanderer, the guide of the souls of the dead, the god of cunning and of magic words. And Odin is exactly that as well. He wanders the world in disguise, he gathers the souls of fallen warriors, and he won the runes, the signs of magic and of speech. So the Romans looked closer than we did.

The match is still with us, in the days of the week. In English, Wednesday is Woden's day, Thursday is Thor's day, Tuesday is the day of Tiw, the Norse Tyr, and Friday the day of Frigg, Odin's wife. In French, which comes from Latin, the same days are mercredi, the day of Mercury, jeudi, the day of Jupiter, mardi, the day of Mars, and vendredi, the day of Venus. Each Germanic god sits on the day of the Roman god the Romans matched him with.

So the people who knew both families of gods saw them as one family under two sets of names. Is that a real kinship, or only a convenient comparison? Let's look further.

The sky father's name

How could we tell a real kinship from a convenient comparison? The Romans matched gods by what the gods did, and a comparison of that kind is easy to make and easy to make wrongly. We need something the Romans could not have arranged.

Names. If two peoples inherited a god from common ancestors, his name should be the same word in both languages, changed only by the regular sound shifts each language went through over the centuries. If one people simply borrowed a god from another, his name arrives in a foreign shape.

So we look up the name of the sky father in the oldest texts we have. The linguists who studied them, Martin West of Oxford among them, have done the hard work for us.

In India, the oldest hymns, the Vedas, composed about 3.5 KY (thousands of years) ago, call him Dyaus Pita: Dyaus, the bright sky, and pita, father. Sky Father.

In Greece, Homer, about 2.7 KY ago, calls out Zeu pater: O Zeus, father.

In Rome the two words grew together into one name, Iuppiter, which English writes Jupiter, once Dyeu-pater, Sky Father.

In Lithuania, by the Baltic Sea, the sky god is Dievas.

And among the Norse, the god Tyr carries the same old word in his name, which survives in English as Tuesday, the day of Tiw.

Dyaus, Zeus, Ju-, Dievas, Tyr. Each is the same ancestral word, which meant to shine, the bright sky of day, changed by the rules of its own language. The same root gave the Latin deus, god, and dies, day.

That answers our question. It is a real kinship. These peoples inherited their sky father from common ancestors, under one name: Sky Father. They are one family, the family of languages linguists call Indo-European, and it reaches from India across Europe.

Not younger than

How old is the name of the sky father? Before we answer, we have to be careful about what we are dating. We are dating a word: the name people used for this being. That is a narrower thing than the being himself, who may be far older, and narrower than the whole body of stories about him. A word can be dated because it leaves traces in writing and in the movements of the peoples who carried it.

And we want methods that hold even if the scholars who use them bend their interpretations. So we look for the hardest kinds of evidence: writing that can be dated by the events around it, the decay of carbon in bones, and DNA read from those same bones.

First, writing. Where does the name first appear on something we can hold? Three places.

In ancient Turkey, the Hittites wrote on clay tablets from about 3.7 KY (thousands of years) ago. They ruled the middle of what is now Turkey, around today's capital, Ankara. Their language has died out; the people of that land today speak Turkish, a language that arrived much later from Central Asia, and carry in their genes much of the ancient population of the land. The Hittite word for god, siu-, comes from the same root as Zeus and Dyaus. The tablets are dated by the lists of Hittite kings and by letters those kings exchanged with the pharaohs of Egypt, whose reigns are counted year by year.

In Greece, clay tablets in the oldest Greek script, from the palaces of Pylos and Knossos, name Zeus outright, as di-we and di-wo. They were written by the Greeks of the age of the Trojan War, the ancestors of the Greeks of today, whose genomes, compared in 2017, proved close to theirs. The tablets survived because the fires that destroyed the palaces, about 3.4 to 3.2 KY ago, baked them hard.

And from northern Syria comes a treaty, sealed about 3.4 KY ago between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma and a king of the Mitanni, a kingdom in what is now northern Syria and southeastern Turkey, the land of today's Kurds. The treaty calls on the gods Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins as witnesses: the gods of the Vedas of India, written down in cuneiform, far from India, and dated by the reigns of the two kings.

So the name, and the company it belongs to, existed by about 3.7 KY ago. That is the first lower bound, and it rests on dated writing.

Second, the bones. By the time of those tablets, the Hittites, the Greeks and the people of the Vedas were already separate peoples, far apart. They share the name, so their common ancestors had it before they parted. When did they part? Here we need no theory, only the bones.

Radiocarbon gives each bone its age: carbon-14 in a dead body decays at a fixed rate, losing half of itself every 5,730 years, which is physics. DNA read from the same bones shows whose descendants those people were. And in each land the record is the same kind of observation: bones older than a certain date lack the ancestry of the steppe herders, and bones younger than it carry it. In northern Europe that change comes about 5 KY ago, in Greece about 4 KY ago, in India about 3.5 KY ago.

The Hittite branch went its own way even earlier. The geneticists who read the genomes of 435 people of that region, published in 2025, found that the people of ancient Turkey carried the ancestry of the first speakers of these languages but lacked the later ancestry of the Yamnaya herders, so their branch left before the Yamnaya appeared, about 5.5 KY ago. The Yamnaya grazed their herds on the steppe of today's Ukraine and southern Russia, and their ancestry now makes up a large part of the genes of Europeans, from Norway to Russia, and a smaller part of the genes of northern Indians.

What does this give us? The name of the sky father is older than the parting of these branches. So it is not younger than about 5 KY, and, since the Hittite branch carried it too and left before the Yamnaya appeared, it is at least about 5.5 KY old.

At the base

We have found the base: the steppe of southern Russia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the first people to call on the sky father lived about 6.5 KY (thousands of years) ago. Before we look further afield, let's stay here a while. Who were these people? How did they live? And is anything of their gods still visible in the ground?

Something nags at us as we look at the map. The land between the Don, the Volga and the Caucasus. Where have we met the Don before? In the first lines of this chapter, in the words of Snorri Sturluson.

Who was Snorri? An Icelandic chieftain, poet and historian who lived about eight hundred years ago. He wrote down the Norse myths in two books, the Prose Edda and the Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway, and those books are the main source anyone has for Odin, Thor and the rest of the Norse gods. Without Snorri we would know very little about them.

At the start of his history of the kings, Snorri says that Odin and the Aesir were real people, rulers, who lived in a land called Asaland, with its capital Asgard, east of the river Don, and who later migrated north to Scandinavia. He wrote this from the tradition of his own people, centuries before anyone could read a gene. We note it, and go on to the archaeologists. The most readable guide is the American archaeologist David Anthony, whose book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, of 2007, walks through this steppe grave by grave.

The first stop is Khvalynsk, on the Volga River near today's city of Saratov. Here, between about 7 and 6 KY ago, people buried their dead with copper ornaments brought from as far as the Balkans, and with parts of sacrificed cattle, sheep and horses. Already some graves are much richer than others.

The second stop is in the foothills of the North Caucasus, in today's Republic of Adygea in southern Russia. In 1897 diggers opened a great burial mound near the town of Maikop. Inside lay a chief under a canopy held up by rods of silver and gold, surrounded by figures of bulls cast in gold and silver and by silver vessels engraved with animals and mountains. It is about 5.5 KY old. We stay here longer. Nobody before him on this steppe was laid to rest like this: a man under a canopy on rods of precious metal, among golden bulls, buried as if he were more than a man.

The third stop is the people who came out of this land, the Yamnaya, about 5.3 to 4.6 KY ago. They lived on the open steppe of today's Ukraine and southern Russia with herds of cattle and sheep, they drank milk, which archaeologists have found in the hardened plaque on their teeth, and they rolled across the steppe in wagons with solid wooden wheels. Their important dead lie under high earth mounds, the kurgans that still stand across the steppe by the thousand. A few families stand above everyone else here, and each is given in death a mountain of earth.

Now let's put together what we have seen.

Here is what we found. The first people who called on the sky father lived exactly where Snorri, the Icelandic historian, eight centuries ago and knowing nothing of sound laws or of genes, put the home of Odin and the Aesir: east of the Don. And in that same land, about 5.5 KY ago, a few families began to be buried like gods. Much later, far from here, the kings of the peoples who came out of this land would call themselves the children of Odin, of Freyr and of Zeus.

Who were they? We keep that question open, and walk on.

The name of Zeus and its two figures

We had dated the name of Zeus. Dyaus in India, Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Rome, Dievas in Lithuania, Tyr in the North: one inherited word, meaning the shining sky. It stands on dated objects by about 3.7 KY (thousands of years) ago, it is older than the partings of the peoples who keep it, at least about 5.5 KY, and it was first spoken north of the Caucasus, in today's southern Russia, about 6.5 KY ago. The next question was who carried this name.

Following the name from people to people, we found that it belonged to two different figures.

The first is Father Sky, cosmic principle: the sky as a divine principle lying over Mother Earth, with no body, no household and no royal line. The sky gives the rain, and the earth gives birth from her own matter. In the Vedas of India, hymns about 3.5 KY old, Dyaus Pita is mostly called on together with Prithvi Mata, Mother Earth, as one pair, heaven and earth. Hesiod, in Greece about 2.7 KY ago, has Ouranos, the sky, lying over Gaia, the earth. The Maori of New Zealand tell of Rangi, the sky, and Papa, the earth, who lay locked together until their son Tane pushed them apart. Scholars of myth call such a pair the world parents.

The second is the sky father as physicalized ruler: a being who rules in a physical body over a household of humanlike beings, fathers children with women, and stands at the head of royal lines. Zeus is a physicalized ruler. He lives with his family on Mount Olympus, quarrels with his wife Hera, fathers Heracles with Alcmene and Perseus with Danaë, and the kings of Sparta and of Macedonia trace their line to him. Odin is a physicalized ruler as well. He and the Aesir hold in the North the place that Zeus and the Olympians hold in Greece: two parallel households of gods, each with a ruler, a thunder, a god of war and a goddess of love. In the North the name of Zeus went to the god of war, Tyr. The kings of the Anglo-Saxons counted Odin, as Woden, among their ancestors.

So the name of Zeus belongs to Father Sky, cosmic principle, in the Vedas of India, and to the sky father as physicalized ruler in Greece. The two figures had to be dated separately, each by its own clock.

What Father Sky, cosmic principle, is

Father Sky, cosmic principle, has no body. So what is his part in the world? We looked first at what the myths give him to do.

In the myths the sky gives rain and light, and the earth gives birth from her own matter. In the Vedas of India, Dyaus Pita and Prithvi Mata, heaven and earth, are called the two parents of all beings. In Hesiod, Gaia bears the Titans to Ouranos, and from the Titans come Zeus and his household.

Read closely, the two parents give different things. Mother Earth gives the substance, the matter from which a body is made. Father Sky gives the form, the pattern that shapes this substance into a living being: a tree, an animal, a person.

Philosophy kept this division. Aristotle, in Greece about 2.3 KY (thousands of years) ago, wrote in his book on the generation of animals that the mother gives the matter and the father gives the form. The Latin word for matter, materia, is traced to mater, mother. In India the school of philosophy called Samkhya, over 2 KY old, kept the pair as Purusha, conscious spirit, and Prakriti, nature, from which all things unfold; the world unfolds when nature stands in the presence of spirit. In China the Book of Changes, the Yijing, about 3 KY old, opens with two signs, heaven and earth. Its oldest commentary says that all things owe their beginning to heaven and their birth to earth. The Chinese of today still say tian di, heaven and earth, for the whole world.

In biology the same question has its own name, morphogenesis: how a growing body takes its form. A body is built of matter, and it grows into the form of its kind, the same in every generation. The myths gave this part to Father Sky, cosmic principle, and our own research looks for the giver of this form in the resonance of DNA.

How old is Father Sky, cosmic principle

How old is Father Sky, cosmic principle? We dated him by the partings of peoples. A figure kept on both sides of an old parting is older than the parting, unless it was invented again or carried across later.

The first test was the parting between Asia and the Americas. On the Asian side the pair stands in the Vedas of India, Dyaus Pita beside Prithvi Mata, and in China, where the Book of Changes, about 3 KY (thousands of years) old, says that all things owe their beginning to heaven and their birth to earth. On the American side, the Navajo of today's Arizona and New Mexico make healing paintings of coloured sand in which Father Sky lies beside Mother Earth. His body carries the stars, the Milky Way, the sun and the moon, and from her body grow corn, beans, squash and tobacco. Their neighbours the Zuni tell that at the beginning came Sky Father and Earth Mother, and that all beings were born from her womb. The ancestors of all American Indians parted from the peoples of East Asia about 20 to 25 KY ago, as the comparison of their genomes shows.

A picture of sky and earth as father and mother could come to any people on its own. Then every people would have it. The second test, on the older partings, showed a different map.

The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians parted from the other peoples of Eurasia about 50 KY ago, and the peoples of Africa south of the Sahara hold the oldest partings of all. In Australia the sky is home to great beings such as Baiame, the physicalized teacher, and we found no pair of sky father and earth mother. In Africa the pair is rare. The Krachi of today's Ghana and Togo tell that the sky god Wulbari once lay close upon the earth and rose high when a woman's pestle kept striking him. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the god Obatala and the goddess Odudua were once called heaven and earth, husband and wife. The scholar of myth Michael Witzel drew the same line from the whole record of the world's myths: the sky and the earth as father and mother belong to the myths of Eurasia, the Americas and Polynesia, and are mostly absent in Africa, Australia and New Guinea. He placed the origin of this family of myths about 40 KY ago.

So Father Sky, cosmic principle, is at least 20 KY old, and most likely he appeared after the ancestors of the Australians parted, about 50 KY ago.

The physicalized teacher

Up to here we had two figures: Father Sky, cosmic principle, with no body, and the physicalized ruler, who rules in a body and founds royal lines, and whose rule becomes visible with the first kings. That left a question open. Did beings from the sky come in bodies only as rulers, or had they come in some other role as well, among peoples who never had kings? We looked for them among such peoples, and found a third figure. Australia showed it to us most clearly.

Among the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri peoples of southeastern Australia, inland from today's Sydney, the sky being Baiame came down to the earth and walked it in the shape of a great man. Places along the rivers are still pointed out as his footprints, and in a rock shelter at Milbrodale, in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney, a painting in the country of the Wonnarua people shows him as a larger-than-life human figure with both arms outstretched. While he was on the earth he gave the people their law, whom they may marry and how they must live, and he founded the bora, the initiation in which boys become men. He has a wife and a son, Daramulan; in many groups the boys at the bora hear Daramulan's voice in the roar of the bullroarer, a flat piece of wood whirled on a string. Then Baiame went back to the sky, where, in some accounts, he sits on a throne of crystal, and the healers of these peoples say that their quartz crystals, the source of their power, come from him.

Baiame is a physicalized teacher: a being in a physical body who comes down, teaches, gives the law, and goes back, ruling no one and founding no royal line. In 1904 the ethnographer Alfred Howitt wrote about Baiame and about Bunjil, the sky being of the Kulin peoples in the far south of Australia, around today's city of Melbourne, and called them the All-Fathers of southeastern Australia.

How old is Baiame? The ancestors of the Aborigines parted from the rest of humanity about 50 KY (thousands of years) ago, and have lived in Australia, apart from it, for most of the time since. The age of the story itself cannot be measured, but it may reach far back into those tens of thousands of years.

Then we left Australia and looked for the same figure elsewhere. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, in southern Iraq, at Eridu, as an earlier section told, Oannes came up out of the Persian Gulf by day to teach and went back into the sea at night. And across the Pacific Ocean, in the Andes of South America, the creator Viracocha walked the land as a man, taught the people, and then left across the sea to the west. So there were many physicalized teachers, in Australia, in the Near East and in South America: extraterrestrials who came down in bodies, taught, and went back.

The physicalized ruler and the first kings

When did the physicalized ruler rule? Among different peoples he carries different names: Zeus, Odin, Enlil of the Sumerians, Horus of the Egyptians. The myths answer through kings. In them he gives kingship to men, and royal lines descend from him: the kings of the Anglo-Saxons traced themselves to Woden, the kings of Sweden to Freyr, the kings of Sparta and of Macedonia to Zeus. A ruler over kings can be remembered in this form only from the time when there were kings. So we dated the form that the myths remember, by the first kings that archaeology finds.

In southern Iraq the Sumerians kept a list of their kings, written about 4 KY (thousands of years) ago. It opens: after kingship came down from heaven, kingship was in Eridu. Eridu was the oldest city of the Sumerians, founded about 7.5 KY ago, the city of the teacher who came from the waters. By the list, the first two kings of Eridu ruled 28,800 and 36,000 years, far beyond any human life. The Sumerians called their "gods" the Anunnaki, the children of An, the sky. Archaeology dates the kings themselves. The city of Uruk grew between about 6 and 5 KY ago into the largest town of its time, and about 5.2 KY ago its scribes made the oldest writing known, at first to count grain, sheep and workers. So in Iraq the kings stand by about 5 KY ago, and they held their kingship as a gift from the sky.

In Egypt the first king of a united land, Narmer, ruled about 5.1 KY ago. On a slate palette found at Hierakonpolis in 1898 he strikes an enemy, while a falcon, the bird of Horus, holds the conquered land by a rope. From then on each king bore, as the first of his titles, the name of Horus, and was held to be Horus living on earth. The Egyptians drew their "gods" with human bodies and the heads of animals: Horus with the head of a falcon, Anubis with the head of a jackal, Sekhmet with the head of a lioness. On temple walls they drew the "gods" larger than people. The pictures came first. Masks of these heads, worn by priests in the rites, came much later, and a clay mask of Anubis has survived. So in Egypt the king stands as the living Horus by about 5.1 KY ago, under rulers who were drawn as beings unlike people.

The name of Zeus was first spoken on the steppe north of the Caucasus, in today's southern Russia, about 6.5 KY ago. There, at Maikop, about 5.5 KY ago, a chief was buried under a canopy on rods of silver and gold, among bulls of gold and silver, in one of the richest graves of its age in all of Europe. So rich rulers stood near the homeland of the name of Zeus at the same time as the first kings of the south.

So the first states left the first records of their rulers, and the two oldest records agree. The Sumerian list puts kings from heaven, with reigns of tens of thousands of years, before the kings of men. The Egyptian lists do the same: a list of kings on papyrus, now kept in Turin and about 3.2 KY old, and the history written by the priest Manetho about 2.3 KY ago both place dynasties of "gods" on the throne of Egypt before the first human king. The peoples of the first states thus described their first rulers as beings from the sky, unlike people in look, living far longer than people, who handed kingship down to human kings. Read as they were written, these are records of extraterrestrials ruling people.

The esoteric tradition read them the same way. Helena Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine of 1888, wrote of divine dynasties: beings from other worlds who took bodies, ruled early humanity as kings and taught it the arts, and she drew on the same Egyptian lists of reigning "gods". The channeled sources of our own time say it plainly. Ra, the source of the Law of One, channeled in America between 1981 and 1984, bears the name of the Egyptian sun god and says that it came to Egypt, walked among the Egyptians in bodies, and withdrew after a short time, and that its teaching was soon turned to the service of power. Bashar, the extraterrestrial channeled by Darryl Anka, describes the Anunnaki as extraterrestrials much taller than people, who lived for thousands of years, and whose children with women became the demigods of the legends. A being channeled by James E. Charles in 2019, speaking for the Anunnaki, says they made themselves look greater than they were, to be seen as greater beings. And asked whether Zeus and Athena existed, a channeled answer came that they existed and were not gods but extraterrestrials, a community of several species living their own lives on Earth.

In this book we bring together archaeology, genetics, anthropology and the esoteric sciences, and we stay faithful to each of them. In the earlier volumes this way of working led us to Lemuria and Atlantis in our own DNA: the Denisovans as Lemurians, and Atlantis as a civilization open to many settlements of extraterrestrials. Here we come closer to our own time, to the written record, and we keep to the same common sense.

That common sense has more to draw on than archaeology. Ufology and the reports of contactees show that extraterrestrials visit the Earth today, and people taken aboard their craft have spoken with them face to face. In telepathic contacts and channelings the extraterrestrials say that they have always been here, cultivating humanity and helping it rise after the fall of Atlantis and the long cold of the Ice Age. Seen with all of this in view, the first states of Iraq and Egypt, about 5.5 KY ago, are the first successful attempt of the extraterrestrials to lift humanity to a new order of society and a new scale of production.

The male lines

Between the first farmers and the first states, the order of human society turned over. Did that turn leave a mark in our genes? To see the turn, we first looked at what came before it.

Our species is about 300 KY (thousands of years) old: the oldest skulls of our kind, from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, are about that age. For nearly all of that time people lived in small bands that gathered, hunted and moved with the seasons. The hunter-gatherers known to anthropology live this way still, and they share their food, refuse chiefs and laugh down any man who tries to command. Among the Agta of the Philippines and the Mbendjele of the Congo, a study of 2015 found that women and men decide on an equal footing where the band will live. The genes keep the memory of that long age as well: for most of human history the male lines were as many and as varied as the female lines, a sign that men and women had children in balance.

The first farmers kept this order. David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropologist and an archaeologist, gathered the evidence in The Dawn of Everything, in 2021. At Catalhoyuk in today's Turkey, a town of about 9 KY ago, the bones of men and women show the same food and the same work, and the town has no palace and no house of a ruler. Its best-known figure is a seated woman of clay, a big cat at each side of her. Graeber and Wengrow describe the first farming as a science of women: a long, patient, playful knowledge of seeds and plants, carried from mother to daughter. The great Trypillia towns of today's Ukraine, about 6 KY ago, held thousands of houses arranged in rings around open squares, with halls for assembly and no palace at all. On Crete the Minoans, until about 3.5 KY ago, filled their palaces with images of women and goddesses and left no image of a male king, and Graeber and Wengrow suggest that women governed there. Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist from Lithuania who worked in Los Angeles, called the farming world of the Balkans and the Danube Old Europe: villages without defensive walls, graves with few weapons, shrines full of figures of women.

We propose that this was the human way for most of the 300 KY of our species: bands and towns where mothers stood at the center, where no man ruled the others, and where the teachers who came down from the sky taught and went away again.

Then the order turned over, and the turn was violent. At Talheim in today's Germany, about 7 KY ago, thirty-four people, men, women and children of one village, were killed with axes and thrown into one pit. From the steppe north of the Caucasus came riders, men buried under great mounds, the kurgans, some with daggers and maces beside them. About 5 KY ago this movement of people reached the heart of Europe, and the ancient genomes show it as a flood. In Spain, about 4.5 KY ago, men with ancestry from the steppe arrived, and within a few centuries nearly all the male lines of Spain were theirs, while most of the ancestry of the women stayed local. Most men of the old villages left no male line. Their wives and daughters bore children to the newcomers.

What Spain shows in one land, the Y chromosome shows for the world. The Y chromosome passes from father to son alone, so it records the male lines. In 2015 Monika Karmin and her colleagues compared the Y chromosomes of 456 men from around the world, in the journal Genome Research. Between about 8 and 4 KY ago the number of men who left descendants fell sharply in Africa, Europe and Asia, while the female lines went on as before. At the lowest point the effective number of women was up to seventeen times that of men. A team at Stanford University, Tian Chen Zeng, Alan Aw and Marcus Feldman, explained it in 2018: clans of men, who traced descent through fathers, fought each other, and a clan that lost a war lost its male line forever. On three continents at once, the human race passed through a narrow gate of war, and only a few lines of men came out the other side.

The channeled sources say where this order came from. Bashar, the extraterrestrial channeled by Darryl Anka, describes an ancient government in the systems of Orion, very oppressive, seated on a world he calls Huva, which through a long struggle turned from darkness to light. The souls of that conflict, he says, took incarnations in our solar system to work it through: first on a planet now broken into the asteroid belt, then on Mars, and about 6 KY ago the incarnation shifted to Earth, into the land now called the Middle East. There it brought the old Orion energy of oppression, which still plays out in our wars. Ra, the source of the Law of One, describes the Orion group working on Earth by planting the idea of an elite: those who rule and those who are ruled. Bashar's Orion souls came to the Middle East, born in human bodies, in the very time when the male lines of three continents passed through their narrow gate. That gate is the likely mark of the Orion culture arriving on Earth.

We still live in the order that came through that gate. Rule from above, armies, wars between peoples, and the power of men over women all date from it. Before it lay most of human history.

Where Father Sky is, and where he is absent

Where is Father Sky, cosmic principle, found, and what does his map follow? When we dated him, we found him absent in Australia and rare in Africa. Here we followed him across the whole world, one land at a time.

In Europe he stands in Greece, as Ouranos lying over Gaia. In India he is Dyaus Pita beside Prithvi Mata. In China heaven and earth, tian and di, are the two to which all things owe their beginning and their birth. On the steppe and in Siberia, the Mongols and the Turkic peoples pray to Tengri, the eternal blue sky, and honour the earth beside him, Etugen. In North America the Navajo and the Zuni know Father Sky and Mother Earth. Far out in the Pacific Ocean, in Polynesia, the Maori of New Zealand tell of Rangi the sky and Papa the earth, who lay locked together until their son pushed them apart.

Then the map goes blank. In Australia the sky holds great beings such as Baiame, and the pair is missing. In New Guinea, the great island just north of Australia, it is missing as well. In Africa south of the Sahara it is rare: among the Yoruba of Nigeria an old tradition calls two of their gods heaven and earth, husband and wife, and most African peoples tell their beginnings in other ways.

Could the map follow farming, the life of people who wait for the rain to fall on their fields? The peoples answer otherwise. The herders and hunters of the steppe and Siberia have the pair, while the hunters of Africa and Australia lack it. The people of New Guinea have farmed for at least 7 KY (thousands of years), and perhaps 10 KY, among the oldest farmers on Earth, and they lack it too. The map follows a family of peoples, and their way of life plays no part in it.

It follows one great branch of humanity: the peoples who spread through Europe and Asia after the ancestors of the Australians parted from them, about 50 KY ago, and who carried the pair with them into the Americas and across the Pacific.

And the pair is more than a picture of rain falling on soil. As we found when we asked what he is, the sky gives the form and the earth gives the substance: spirit shaping matter, the father giving the pattern by which the matter of the mother grows into a living body. It looks like this understanding of spirit and matter was given to one branch of humanity after about 50 KY ago, and that branch carried it to every land it reached.

Why the turn came

Set side by side, our findings make one picture. Father Sky, cosmic principle, is old, most likely between 20 and 50 KY (thousands of years), and the understanding of spirit and matter that he stands for seems to have been given to one branch of humanity. The physicalized teachers came down and taught among people long before any king, from Australia to the Near East and South America. The physicalized rulers become visible with the first states, about 5.5 KY ago. In the same thousands of years the world centered on mothers gave way to the rule of men, and the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, keeps the mark of it: on three continents the number of men who left descendants fell sharply, while the lines of the women went on as before. It was a narrow gate of war, and only a few male lines passed through it. Why did the turn come so late, after 300 KY of our species, and why through war?

Let's look at the climate. In the 300 KY of our species the Earth had only four warm periods between the long glaciations: about 330 KY ago, about 240 KY ago, about 130 KY ago, and the present one, in which we live, which began about 11.7 KY ago. The earlier warm periods lasted from about 5 to about 30 KY each, depending on how their ends are drawn, so ours is already well inside their range, and its end can come at any time. In the first three, humanity had too little time to grow. It stayed kind and centered on mothers, and it stayed without writing, without technology, and without developed telepathy: a pleasant stagnation, still a stagnation.

The missing telepathy had its cause. When the Atlanteans made the forerunners of humans, they took telepathy and the other psychic abilities away from them, and so lowered them to the state of workers, since workers with open psychic senses would have been unable to work. And the Earth of those 300 KY was a dreary place. Its climate was poor, a comfortable world like the cities of the Atlanteans, with their artificial climate, was beyond reach, and no other civilization wished to live here. Only humans and parahumans could live in it.

For a civilization to hatch, a critical mass of telepaths seems to be needed, and a small and scattered humanity could hardly reach it. The Orion system came to help. It develops competition and struggle within a species. It uses hierarchy to drive production and technology. And it speeds up evolution through heightened competition and through rewarding the winners. In the present warm period, for the first time in four, humanity broke through: it built cities, learned to write, and filled the whole planet. The myths remember the rulers of that turn as Zeus and Odin, and its price is the order that came through the narrow gate: domination, armies and war.

The aim of the turn most likely reaches further. Now the conditions of life on Earth can be raised so that higher forms of life can live here, among them humans with awakened telepathy. Then the Earth can become a member of the galactic community, a planet where beings such as the Pleiadians can land and feel at ease.

Thor among the neighbours

Where does the world of Zeus and Odin end? Let's start walking outward from Scandinavia and see.

The nearest neighbours of the Norse speak languages of another family entirely. In the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland, and on the Kola Peninsula of Russia, live the Sami, the reindeer herders of the Arctic. Next to them are the Finns of Finland and, across the gulf, the Estonians. Their languages are related to Hungarian, and are no kin of Norse or Greek. So here, surely, the company should stop.

We look at the old Sami religion, as missionaries and scholars recorded it from the seventeenth century on, and at the drums the Sami priests used, painted with figures of their gods. And there is a thunder god on the drums, holding a hammer, sometimes two. His name is Horagalles. We look up the name, and stop. Horagalles comes from the Norse Thor karl: old man Thor, Thor-man. The Sami took the thunderer from their Norse neighbours, name and hammer together.

The Finns have a thunder god too: Ukko, the old man of the sky, who strikes with a hammer or an axe. When Finnish farmers turned up polished stone axes of the ancient peoples in their fields, they called them Ukko's hammers. Ukko's name is Finnish. But the hammer is Thor's.

And then a smaller find, which surprises us more. The Finnish word for sky, for heaven, is taivas. Linguists trace it to the Baltic neighbours of the Finns, the ancestors of today's Lithuanians and Latvians, and to their word for god, dievas. It is the name of the sky father, Dyaus, Zeus, Dievas, carried into Finnish as the very word for the sky.

So the border here leaks. The thunderer crossed it, once with his Norse name and his hammer, once with only the hammer. The name of the sky father crossed it too, and became the word for heaven. And each borrowed thing arrived in a foreign shape, so we can see that it came from outside, and from which side.

What stayed behind? Odin himself, and the family of gods with its quarrels and its kings. Among the Sami and the Finns we find no ruling household of gods to match the Aesir, and no kings tracing their line to Odin.

That gives us something to follow. At this border the thunderer and the sky travelled easily, and the ruling family stayed home. If we walk along the other edges of this world, perhaps we will see the same thing again, or something quite different.

The storm god of the south. APPROVED 2026-09-22; closing lines changed the same day at Max's request (the brave question replaced by pondering)

Now we turn south, toward the lands of the oldest cities and the oldest writing: today's Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq and Egypt. The peoples there spoke other languages altogether. The Canaanites of the coast of today's Lebanon and Syria, the Hebrews, the ancestors of the Jews, and later the Arabs all belong to the Semitic family; the Egyptians to a family related to it. Here, if anywhere, Zeus and Odin should be strangers.

We begin in the north of Syria, at Ugarit, an ancient port near today's city of Latakia. In 1928 a farmer's plough broke into a tomb there, and the excavations that followed turned up a library of clay tablets about 3.3 KY (thousands of years) old. We read the stories on them, and the first one stops us. The storm god Baal, the rider of the clouds, armed with a mace and a spear of lightning, fights the god of the sea, and with him a seven-headed serpent called Lotan.

A storm god with lightning against a many-headed serpent. That is Thor against the world serpent and Zeus against Typhon, in a Semitic language.

We go on looking, and it keeps happening. In the Hebrew Bible, a psalm praises God for crushing the heads of Leviathan, the sea serpent, and the prophet Isaiah promises that God will punish Leviathan, the twisting serpent, with his great sword. In Egypt, every night the sun god Ra sails through the underworld, and every night the great serpent Apep rises to swallow the sun, and the god Set spears it from the bow of the boat. And among the Hittites of central Turkey, a story tells how the storm god fought the serpent Illuyanka, lost the first battle, and won the second after the serpent was made drunk at a feast.

So the storm god against the serpent fills the whole Near East, under names that owe nothing to Zeus: Baal, Set, the God of the Hebrews, the Hittite storm god. This story crosses the border easily, the way the thunderer crossed into the north. It is no proof of our company.

Then we look for what stayed behind in the north: the ruling family of gods, and kings born of them. And here we find something new. The Near East has them too, and early. In Egypt the gods form a family of nine, the Ennead, with its quarrels and its inheritance, and every pharaoh is called the son of Ra. At Ugarit the gods sit in council around their father El. And in the land of the Sumerians, in today's southern Iraq, the gods are the Anunnaki, a whole ruling household, and kingship itself, the Sumerians write, came down from heaven.

Wait. In the north the ruling family stayed home. Here in the south there is a ruling family of gods of its own, with its own names, written down from about 5 KY ago, as early as the steppe peoples began to spread. Two households of gods, then, one in the cities of the south and one on the steppe.

The first city

How far back does the household of gods of the south reach, and where did its people say their kings came from? The Sumerians answered the second question themselves, and named the place.

The Sumerian King List, a roll of kings written on clay about 4 KY (thousands of years) ago, opens with one line: after kingship came down from heaven, kingship was in Eridu. Eridu is a mound of ruins in the desert of southern Iraq, today called Abu Shahrain, south of the city of Nasiriyah. In the Sumerians' time it stood near the edge of the sea and the marshes. It was the city of Enki, god of the fresh waters and of wisdom.

We look for Eridu's past in the ground. Between 1946 and 1949 the Iraqi archaeologist Fuad Safar and the British archaeologist Seton Lloyd dug into the mound, down through the temple of Enki. What they found was one temple built on top of another, eighteen times, each new one raised on the ruins of the one before, always on the same spot. The lowest, a small room of mud brick with an altar, goes back to about 7.3 KY ago. And in the temple, in layer after layer, lay offerings of fish.

So the holy place of Eridu was kept on one spot for some two thousand years, and fed with fish.

This land also remembers a teacher who came out of the water. As the section The gifts told, Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing for the Greeks about 2.3 KY ago, described a being called Oannes, with the body of a fish and the head and feet of a man, who came up out of the Persian Gulf, on whose shore Eridu stood. By day he spoke with people and taught them; each night he went back into the sea.

So in Eridu two things lie side by side: offerings of fish in the oldest temple, and the memory of a teacher who came from the waters.

The serpent, the myth of all humanity

We held the serpent back until the story of Father Sky and the physicalized ruler was told, and now it matters more. Father Sky, cosmic principle, turned out to belong to one branch of humanity, and the map of his myth has wide blank lands. Is any myth found everywhere, on every side of every parting? One is: the great serpent.

Snakes appear in the tales of every people, and most of those tales differ as much as the peoples themselves. What repeats is one figure, set at the beginning of the world: a great serpent who keeps the waters, who brings the rain or holds it back, who carves the rivers as it moves across the land, and who often shows itself as the rainbow. We call it the foundational serpent. We followed it in the order in which the peoples parted, from the oldest parting to the youngest.

The oldest parting is that of the San, the hunters of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa: their ancestors parted from the rest of humanity more than 200 KY (thousands of years) ago. The San of the Tsodilo Hills, in today's Botswana, tell that humanity descends from the python, and that the python, circling the hills in search of water, cut the dry streambeds around them.

The next is the parting of those who left Africa, about 60 to 70 KY ago, from those who stayed. Among those who stayed, the Fon of Benin, on the west coast of Africa, tell of Aido-Hwedo, the rainbow serpent. At the making of the world he carried the creator in his mouth, and where they rested, mountains rose; now he lies coiled beneath the earth and holds it up.

Among those who left, the ancestors of the Aborigines of Australia parted from the others about 50 KY ago. The Aborigines tell of the Rainbow Serpent, who travelled across the land at the beginning and carved the riverbeds and the water holes, and in Arnhem Land, in the far north of Australia, they have painted him on the rocks for thousands of years.

Here the rainbow speaks. The Fon and the Aborigines live on opposite sides of the Earth, and their ancestors parted some 60 KY ago. Both tell of a rainbow serpent at the beginning of the world, bound to water, lying under the earth or travelling across it and shaping it. The arc of a rainbow after rain could suggest a serpent to anyone, but both peoples put the same serpent in the same place, at the making of the world and in charge of its waters. That is one figure, kept on both sides of the parting.

In Asia the peoples who stayed on the mainland kept it too. In India the serpent Vritra lies on the mountains and holds back the rivers until they are freed. In China the dragon, a long serpent, lives in the rivers and the sea and brings the rain.

The youngest parting is that of the American Indians, whose ancestors parted from the peoples of East Asia 20 to 25 KY ago. Around the Great Lakes of North America, between today's United States and Canada, the peoples tell of a great horned serpent who lives beneath the waters of the lakes.

So the foundational serpent stands on every side of every parting we know, from the San to the American Indians. A figure kept on all these sides is older than all these partings, older than 200 KY, and most likely as old as our species.

On top of this oldest layer lies a later one. In the myths of Europe, Asia and the Americas the serpent meets a god of thunder who strikes it: Thor fishes the world serpent from the sea and strikes its head with his hammer, Indra splits Vritra open and frees the rivers, Baal of ancient Syria defeats the sea serpent Lotan, and around the Great Lakes the thunderbird strikes the horned serpent with lightning. This fight is missing in Africa and in Australia, and its map is the map of Father Sky. It looks like the serpent was there first, among all of humanity, and the branch that came to know Father Sky later set the thunderer against it. So the two most fundamental myths of humanity seem to be the serpent and Father Sky: the serpent from before every parting, and Father Sky from one great branch, after about 50 KY ago.

The two faces of the serpent

What kind of being is the foundational serpent, a friend of people or their enemy? We went back to the oldest stories and listened. They were written down only in the last two or three centuries, by travellers and scholars, but they come from peoples who stand on the far sides of the oldest partings, and what they tell is far older than the writing.

In Africa the San speak of the python with respect, as an ancestor of humanity. In Australia the Rainbow Serpent gives the rain, fills the water holes and keeps the land fertile, and in many places it also gave the law. Yet the same serpent drowns or swallows those who break that law, and in Arnhem Land, in the far north, people keep away from certain deep pools where it lives. In these oldest stories the serpent is a maker and a giver of life, powerful enough to be feared, and the Aborigines hold the two together as one.

Then a god arose to fight the serpent. The scholar of myth Michael Witzel found that the story of a god or hero who kills a dragon belongs to a later family of myths, shared by Eurasia, the Americas and Polynesia, and absent in the older myths of Africa and Australia. In its oldest form the fight is between the storm and the serpent, the sky and the water. Around the Great Lakes of North America the thunderbird strikes the horned serpent with lightning, and since the ancestors of the American Indians carried this story with them out of Asia, it is older than 20 KY. Kings play no part in it.

In the Old World the fight changed its mood in the age of the first kings and states. The fighter became a king of the gods, who won his kingship by killing the serpent. In Babylon, in today's Iraq, the god Marduk went out against Tiamat, the mother of the deep waters, who had brought forth serpents and dragons; the gods made him their king, and from her body he made the sky and the earth. On the coast of today's Syria the storm god Baal won his throne by defeating the sea and Lotan, its serpent. In Greece Zeus secured his rule over the world when he struck down the serpent Typhon. In the Vedas of India Indra, the king of the gods, kills the serpent Vritra, who holds back the rivers, so the waters can run. Yet the older face lives on beside the new one: all over India people still honour the nagas, the serpent beings of the waters, as givers of rain, and bring them milk and flowers on one day each year. In Egypt both faces appear in a single story. Each night the sun god sailed through the underworld, and the serpent Apep rose to swallow him, while another great serpent, Mehen, coiled around the sun god to protect him, and the cobra Wadjet rose on the crown of every pharaoh as the guardian of the king.

The royal serpent fighter came with the same turn that we found in the genes. There, the victors of the wars killed the defeated men or kept them from fathering children, and the line from father to son, carried on the Y chromosome, narrowed to a few lines that came from the victors. Through most of human history the world was centered on mothers, and the serpent stood beside the mother. In Old Europe, the farming world of the Balkans and the Danube from about 9 KY ago, Marija Gimbutas found the serpent painted and modelled again and again on the vessels and the figures of the goddess. From about 6 KY ago the order turned over, and the rule of men in armed clans spread across three continents. Bashar places the coming of the Orion culture of oppression into the Middle East at that same time. The old world held out longest on the island of Crete, where the Minoans, as late as 3.6 KY ago, still made a goddess of glazed clay who holds a snake raised high in each hand. In the myths the turn has the shape of a killing: the king of the gods slays the serpent, and in Babylon the serpent he slays is Tiamat, the mother of all. Most likely the Orion culture that brought the rule of men also turned the serpent of the mothers into the enemy, and gave the throne to the hero who kills it.

The Bible carries this later story in its own way, and with a great change. Its God is the one Creator of all, and nothing in creation can stand beside him as a maker. So in the first chapter of Genesis the great sea monsters are his creatures, made on the fifth day, and the waters obey his word. The older battle still sounds in a few lines of poetry. A psalm calls God the King of old, who divided the sea by his power and broke the heads of Leviathan in the waters, and the prophet Isaiah foretells the day when the Lord will slay Leviathan, the twisting serpent. Leviathan is the same name as Lotan, the serpent of Baal's battle, known from the clay tablets of Ugarit. In the garden of Eden the serpent is the most cunning of the creatures, and the tradition later saw in it the adversary, as the last book of the Bible names the ancient serpent the devil. And the other face of the serpent is there too. In the desert Moses raised a serpent of bronze, and whoever had been bitten and looked at it lived, and in the Gospel of John Jesus compares his own lifting up on the cross to that serpent lifted up by Moses.

Others have offered explanations for these two faces, and we weighed each on its own terms.

The first explanation is instinct. To see a snake, the eye and the brain must catch its shape and its movement in an instant, and anyone who has walked a path in the hills knows the jolt at a stick or a rope lying across the way. The fear comes before any thought, even in people who have hardly ever met a snake. The anthropologist Lynne Isbell argues that our primate ancestors lived for millions of years under the threat of snakes, so the eyes and brains that spotted them fastest survived, and the image was passed down through the generations. This explains why the serpent stands so large in human consciousness. Yet spiders are feared almost as deeply, and they appear in some myths, as Anansi the trickster of West Africa or Spider Grandmother of the Hopi in North America, while they hold no such place at the beginning of the world for all of humanity. The instinct leaves open why the serpent, and not the spider, became the ancestor, the maker of rivers and the giver of rain.

The second explanation is the real snake, as people who live among snakes know it. They see that its bite can kill, and medicine has since found that its venom can also heal: a medicine for high blood pressure, used all over the world, was made from the venom of a Brazilian viper. They find its old skin lying whole by the path, and the snake itself fresh and bright, as if born again. And they meet snakes most often by the water, where snakes hunt frogs and fish. From this close knowledge come the serpent that heals, the serpent of renewal and the serpent of the waters. It leaves the place of the serpent at the making of the world, and the rainbow: why peoples in Africa, in Australia and in South America, where many peoples of the Amazon tell that the rainbow is a great serpent, all see the serpent in the rainbow, though oceans and tens of thousands of years lie between them.

The serpent the seers see

Why is the serpent the same everywhere, at the beginning of the world, shining as the rainbow, while its meanings differ so widely? Every people has had its shamans and healers, who see what others cannot, and many of them have spoken of the serpent.

Among the Aborigines of Australia, the healers, called clever men, say that their power comes from the Rainbow Serpent. The San of southern Africa painted serpents on the rocks beside the pictures of their trance dances. In the Amazon the shamans who drink ayahuasca see great luminous serpents covered with geometric patterns, and the Shipibo of Peru paint those patterns on their cloth and their pottery, saying that the patterns come from the skin of the great cosmic anaconda. In 2012 a man who had taken DMT wrote on an internet forum that he met a huge feathered serpent in all the colors of the rainbow, which spoke to him through colors, sounds and movements in harmony, and he understood its message as hope. In 2018 a man wrote on a German-language forum that a rainbow serpent appeared to him in a psychedelic vision and told him to copy its movements. When he moved like a serpent, it showed him the forming of the universe, the beginning of life and the division of the first living cell. The anthropologist Jeremy Narby, who lived among the peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, wrote a book about these serpents, The Cosmic Serpent.

I have seen this serpent myself, many times, in astral travel. The space around it is dark, and the serpent itself is dark and solid. What one sees most are the lines on its surface: thin geometric lines, fluorescent, in many colours, glowing like thin neon tubes. Their many colours are the rainbow of this serpent. The serpent twists around itself in a spiral, like the coiled cord of an old telephone receiver. I have never seen its head or its tail: it runs on, continuous and enormous. The patterns of lines differ from one time to another, and the body under them is always perfectly smooth.

The anthropologist Jeremy Narby, who lived among the peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, took the serpents of their visions for DNA, the double helix coiled inside every cell. I have seen this serpent and asked myself what it is for many years, and I read his book long ago. So for many years I have looked at the structures of the cell with that question in mind. As a molecular geneticist I know the structures inside the cell and how they look, and I am confident that nothing inside the cell looks like this serpent. The cell is full of helices: the DNA itself, the coils of the proteins, the fibres in which DNA is wound with its proteins. But we know these structures atom by atom, from samples frozen under the electron microscope and from crystals, and none of them is smooth. Chemical groups stick out from them on every side, water clings to them, and their surface is rough and irregular, like a branch in a wet forest hung with moss. The serpent of the seers looks like a living snake with smooth skin, while a strand of DNA is more like a twist of bread soaked in soup: swollen, ragged and wet. And nothing in the cell carries glowing lines. The serpent of the seers is something else.

I have long taken this serpent to lie at the foundation of the world we live in, most likely in another dimension. I see our world as a matrix, as in the film The Matrix: a world that has been constructed. The serpent lies at the base of that construction, in the way the matrix is built. It is like the service floor of a building, the level with all the pipes: below the rooms, unseen by those who live in them, and carrying everything above. That would explain why the seers place the serpent at the beginning of the world. Its rainbow is the many colours of the lines that glow on it, which every seer could see.

Other traditions have described how the matrix is built in their own ways, and I see the serpent as partly related to them. One is the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, which builds its sixty-four figures from broken and unbroken lines. Another is the tree of the Kabbalah, with its ten spheres, the sephirot, joined by paths.

What each seer saw, he then had to tell his people in their own words. It looks like the serpent is one because the seers of every people looked at the same thing, and its meanings are many because each people explained it in its own way.

One image, several serpents

Was every serpent the seers spoke of this same serpent of the foundation? For the seers, looking at faraway things was ordinary. Terence McKenna, the speaker and researcher of psychedelic visionary plants, told in a talk of 1989 of an ayahuasca shaman who asked a visitor where he came from. When he said San Francisco, the shaman answered that he knew it: he went there on ayahuasca, and he had seen its hills and its two bridges. McKenna also said that a shaman can see inside someone's body because he looks from a higher dimension. Such a shaman could look at California while staying at home, and in the same way he could look into the world inside a living body.

I travel this way too, into the world where DNA lives, and look at it, because that is my work. It is the very place where discoveries about the structure of DNA and chromatin are waiting. For many years I have lived in that world, whose sizes run from nanometres to micrometres (millionths and thousandths of a millimetre). All of biology is built of polymers, long chains of repeated links: the proteins are polymers, and DNA is a polymer. A polymer looks very much like a serpent. How else could a seer of an ancient people tell what he saw in the world of DNA? Naturally he would speak of serpents.

The same is true of kundalini, which the yoga of India calls the serpent energy of the spine. Clairvoyants see it well. One stream of energy rises from the earth to the sky, another descends from the sky to the earth, and they meet in the spine. Many healers see these streams. They belong to fields and structures that stay invisible to the eye and are hard to measure with instruments, and the seers see them clearly.

So one image of the serpent names several things: the service floor of the matrix, the long molecules of life, and the streams of kundalini in the spine. Kundalini is the size of the spine, DNA is measured in nanometres (millionths of a millimetre), and they are different things. It looks like the seers reach for the serpent in each of these worlds because the serpent is one of the fundamental forms in the making of life.

The builder serpents

Who built the world? Many peoples have answered with a serpent.

In Egypt, in the Book of the Dead, written down about 3.5 KY ago, the creator Atum says that at the end of time the world will return to the waters of the beginning, and he will remain there with Osiris, in the form of a serpent. The Orphics, a mystery school of the Greeks, told that in the beginning was Chronos, Time, a winged serpent with the heads of a bull and a lion, and from him came the egg from which the world hatched. In India the god Vishnu rests between the ages of the world on the coils of the serpent Shesha, also called Ananta, the endless, and when Vishnu wakes, the world is made anew. In China the first ancestors, Fuxi and Nuwa, appear on tomb paintings about 2 KY old with human heads and serpent bodies twined together. He holds a square and she holds a compass, the tools of builders who measure out the world. Nuwa shaped the first people from clay, and Fuxi is said to have made the eight trigrams, the figures of three lines from which the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, is built.

The serpent also taught. In Mexico the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, was remembered as the one who gave people maize, the calendar and the arts. In India the Nagas, serpent beings of the waters and of the world below, keep treasures and wisdom, and the Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna was said to have received teachings from them. In the Bible the serpent of Eden offers the first people the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Greeks gave the builder of the world a name, the demiurge, the craftsman. About 2.4 KY ago Plato, in his dialogue Timaeus, described the demiurge as a good craftsman who looked to the eternal forms and built the world after them, out of geometry: out of triangles and the regular solids. About 1.8 KY ago the Gnostics, early Christian seekers of inner knowledge, turned this picture over. In their Secret Book of John the world was built by a lesser power, Yaldabaoth, blind to the true God above him, who declared himself the only god. He appears as a serpent with the face of a lion, and with his rulers, the archons, he holds people inside the physical world as in a prison, much like the matrix of the film. Some of the Gnostics, the Ophites, honored the serpent of Eden as the messenger of the true God, who brought people knowledge against the will of the builder.

Our reptile kin and the reptiloids

Why would the builder of the world look like a reptile? Our own kinship with the reptiles is close.

About 320 million years ago the first animals that laid their eggs on dry land, the pre-reptiles, divided into two lines. One line led to the reptiles, among them the lizards and the snakes, and later to the birds; the other line led to the mammals and to us. So the snakes and the other reptiles are our cousins, and we share with them much of our biology: the backbone and the plan of the skeleton, the basic plan of the brain, and a great many genes. The snakes arose in the age of the dinosaurs, from a line of lizards that over time lost their legs and grew long. The mammals added hair, milk and, in most of them, live birth.

The two ages overlapped for a long time. From about 230 to 66 million years ago the great reptiles, the dinosaurs, ruled the land, and the mammals lived beside them all that time as small animals. After the dinosaurs died out, the age of the mammals began.

I am sure that humans came to Earth already formed, from the galaxy. While the animal world evolved on the planet, humans of Lyran descent, from the stars of Lyra, were planted here again and again. In the teaching of Theosophy, humanity unfolds in great successive root races, and each had one thing to develop: the Lemurians built the body, the Atlanteans built the feelings, and we build the intellect. Reptiles have their emotions too, and in us something more was developed.

Then there are the reptiloids. In ufology and in the accounts of contactees, human-shaped reptilian beings appear again and again. These accounts describe them as part of the program of hybridization, the crossing of human and other lines, and as one of the political forces around the Earth. They are said to have lived on the planet long before us and to live now in parallel dimensions. The same accounts say that the hybridization program is supervised by other beings, the mantis beings, tall and shaped like the praying mantis.

The maker of the world

Could a serpent have built the physical world? To build the physical world, the builder has to stand far above it, as a consciousness on the level of a creator, and such a consciousness is most likely bodiless. So the serpent as the maker of the physical matrix is a stretch. Perhaps the image comes from what the seers saw: the rainbow serpent at the foundation of the matrix. A seer who saw the serpent lying at the very base of the world could well take it for the one who made the world.

In many other traditions the maker of the world takes other forms. For some peoples the maker creates by the word. In Egypt, at Memphis, the maker was the "god" Ptah, shown as a man wrapped tightly like a mummy, with a close cap on his head; he made the world by thinking it in his heart and speaking it with his tongue. The God of the Bible is shapeless and beyond any image, and he makes the world by his word. For others the world is made from the body of a giant in human shape. In China the first being, Pangu, is a giant man who grew inside a dark egg, split it into sky and earth, and held them apart for eighteen thousand years; when he died, his breath became the wind, his eyes the sun and the moon, and his blood the rivers. The Norse made the world from the body of Ymir, the first giant, a huge being in human shape born from melting ice. In India the Rig Veda makes the world from the body of Purusha, the cosmic man, a giant in human shape with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet. For others still the maker works through animals. Across Siberia and North America the world begins with a real animal of the water, a loon, which is a diving bird, or a duck, or a muskrat, which is a water rodent. It dives to the bottom of the first waters and brings up a little mud, which grows into the earth; in many versions a higher maker sends it down. Among the Hopi the world was made and peopled by Spider Grandmother together with Tawa, the Sun god; she appears as a spider and also as an old woman. Among the peoples of the northwest coast of America the maker is Raven, a raven who can also take human shape; he stole the light and brought it into the world. And for some the makers are the sky and the earth themselves, as a pair of parents. Among the Maori of New Zealand, the world began when the children of the Sky Father, Rangi, and the Earth Mother, Papa, pushed their parents apart and let the light in between them.

The light-bearer

Why are the demiurge and Lucifer so often seen as a serpent? We begin with what the serpent does in the stories of the making of the world. It rarely shapes the world with its own hands. It gives the world its ground, its edge, its substance and its time. In Babylon the "god" Marduk cut the serpent mother Tiamat in two and made the sky and the earth from her body: the serpent gave the substance, and the hero gave the form. In Egypt the coiled serpent Mehen guarded the sun on its journey through the night, and on a shrine of Tutankhamun, about 3.3 KY old, appears the ouroboros, the serpent that rings the world and holds its own tail in its mouth. The Norse saw the Midgard serpent lying around the whole earth in the ocean. Vishnu rests on the endless serpent, and for the Orphics Time itself was a serpent. Among all of them, the one serpent who works as the craftsman of the world is Yaldabaoth of the Gnostics.

How did people come to see the serpent as an enemy? Perhaps the answer lies in the way of life of those who looked at it. In the age of the first kings, a new way of life was replacing an old one. In the older world of the mothers the serpent was honored as a keeper of the earth, of the waters and of birth, as the goddess of Crete shows, holding a snake in each hand. The new world was ruled by kings, built on hierarchy and on war, and it looked up to a king of the "gods" in the sky. In its stories that king wins his rule by killing the serpent: Zeus strikes down Typhon, Baal defeats Lotan, Indra kills Vritra. Why the hero has to kill the serpent, we still do not know. It looks like the killing marks the new order overcoming the old, and so the serpent of the mothers became the enemy. The Bible keeps this layer in Leviathan, the serpent of the sea whom God crushes.

Where did the Jewish picture of the serpent come from? It grew from older roots, and at first the serpent and the Devil were separate figures. In Mesopotamia, in the epic of Gilgamesh, written down more than 3 KY ago, the hero finds the plant of life at the bottom of the sea, and while he bathes, a serpent steals it, sheds its skin and is renewed: the serpent takes from humanity the gift of renewed life. Leviathan, the great serpent of the sea in the Bible, comes from the Canaanites, whose texts, about 3.3 KY old, tell of Baal and the serpent Lotan. In the story of Eden, in the Hebrew Bible, the serpent is a clever creature of God's making, and Satan appears elsewhere, as the accuser in the court of God, a servant who tests people, as in the book of Job.

Seen with the eyes of a historian, the change came from a hard question. After the exile in Babylon, about 2.5 KY ago, the Jews held firmly to one God, and one God had to answer for everything, evil included. In the book of Isaiah, God says: I make peace and I create evil. So the writers began to move evil away from God. In the second book of Samuel, God himself moves King David to count the people, which is a sin. In the book of Chronicles, written later about the same event, it is Satan who moves him.

Why would the Jewish writers take anything from the Persians? The Persian kings had freed them from Babylon and let them rebuild their temple, and for two centuries the Jews lived under their rule. The prophet whom scholars call Second Isaiah, who wrote during the exile, even called the Persian king Cyrus God's anointed one. So perhaps the teaching of their liberators carried respect. That teaching, of the prophet Zarathustra, saw the world as a battle between two spirits: the good spirit, Ahura Mazda, and the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, also called Ahriman. In a later Persian text, Ahriman bursts into the good creation like a snake. At the end of time the good spirit wins, and the dead rise to be judged. This teaching answered the hard question: evil had its own author, and the good God was freed from it.

The ones who made the change were, it seems, the priests and scribes of the return from Babylon. The best known of them is Ezra the scribe, who came back about 2.45 KY ago with the authority of the Persian king and, tradition says, edited and published the Law of Moses. Jewish tradition also names him, together with Nehemiah, as a writer of Chronicles, the book in which Satan takes God's place in the story of David. These writers took the shape of the Persian teaching and changed its center. They kept one God above all, and they gave the part of the evil adversary to Satan, who until then had been a servant in God's court. Why would they want their God to be good above all? A people chooses its God among many, and a good God, who protects his people and keeps his promises, is more attractive than the stern "gods" of the neighbors. It looks like the writers wanted their God to win that comparison. The price was his power. A God who has an opponent shares the world with another power, so the writers kept his goodness and gave up part of his might, and they eased the loss with a promise: the opponent will be defeated at the end.

Many older teachings held that the One contains everything, the light and the dark together. Heraclitus, the Greek thinker of about 2.5 KY ago, wrote that God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace. In India, Shiva both creates and destroys, and in China the Tao holds the yin and the yang. Even the God of Isaiah says: I make peace and I create evil. I think the distortion came in three steps. First the creator was made human, pictured as a king or a father, in the image of the rulers of the first states. Then the Persians split him in two, a good spirit and an evil one, and the Jewish writers took the split and placed it under one God. Last, the good God was separated from everything else, from the dark and from the world itself. The trade worked: the faith became a social construct that helped its peoples spread over half the world and build empires.

How did the serpent of Eden become Satan? The pieces came together in the Greek age. After Alexander, about 2.3 KY ago, Greek kings ruled the land of the Jews, and about 2.2 KY ago one of them, Antiochus, defiled the temple and killed those who kept the Law. The writers now needed an enemy great enough to explain such suffering: a rebel who rules the world for a time and whom God will destroy at the end. The older figures of evil gathered around this enemy. The Book of Enoch, from these centuries, told of fallen angels, the Watchers, and a later part of it says that one of them led Eve astray, so a fallen angel came to stand behind the serpent of Eden. Leviathan, the serpent of the sea, was already promised in the book of Isaiah to be killed by God on the last day. About 2 KY ago the Wisdom of Solomon says that death entered the world through the envy of the Devil. The Life of Adam and Eve, a Jewish book of about the same time, tells that Satan was cast out of heaven for refusing to honor Adam, and then spoke to Eve through the serpent. About 1.9 KY ago the book of Revelation joins all the threads: the great dragon, the ancient serpent, called the Devil and Satan, is thrown down from heaven.

Where does the Jewish story end and the Christian one begin? The Christians began about 30 AD as a Jewish movement around Jesus, and they took over the picture of the enemy that had grown in the Greek age. Their own ideas came step by step. About 55 AD Paul, the first Christian writer, taught in his letters that sin and death entered the world through one man, Adam, and that in Christ all will be made alive. In the passages on Adam, Paul does not mention the serpent; elsewhere he mentions it once, as the deceiver of Eve (2 Corinthians 11:3). In the Gospel of Luke, written about 85 AD, Jesus says: I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. About 90 AD the Letter to the Hebrews and the First Letter of John say that Christ came to destroy the Devil and his works, and about 95 AD the book of Revelation names the ancient serpent the Devil and Satan. In the same years the paths parted. The rabbis, the teachers who led Judaism after the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 AD, moved evil inward. They spoke of the evil inclination in every human heart, and Satan became again a servant of God who tests people. The Christians kept the great enemy and made him central, because their faith needed him: a savior needs a power to save humanity from.

At first the Christians were one small faith among many in the Mediterranean world, beside the cults of Isis, of Mithras and of Asclepius the healer, whose sacred serpents lived in his temples. For long stretches the Roman state persecuted them. In these centuries the young Church defined itself against its rivals, the serpent cults among them, and against the Gnostics, who honored the serpent of Eden. About 200 AD Christian teachers, among them Tertullian and Origen, taught that the Devil was once the brightest of the angels and fell through pride, and tradition came to call him Lucifer. Then the sect rose to power. In 313 AD the emperor Constantine made the faith lawful. In 325 AD he gathered the bishops at Nicaea to fix one creed, and in 380 AD the emperor Theodosius made it the religion of the empire. Within about 12 years the old temples were closed by law, and some healing temples of Asclepius had been destroyed even earlier. Perhaps for an empire one faith, with one creed and one enemy, was a bond of unity, and those who taught otherwise could now be named servants of the Devil. About 400 AD Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, taught that the sin of Eden passes to every human being at birth, and his teaching of original sin shaped the whole Western Church.

From inside this faith the reading is consistent: the serpent's gift brought death, and Christ brings life. The serpent's other old meanings lived on outside the Church.

About 150 AD, when the Christians were still a small faith, another group of teachers, the Gnostics, told the story of the world in their own way. Their name comes from gnosis, knowledge, because they taught that a soul is saved by knowing. At the heart of their teaching stands the demiurge. Plato had used this word for the good builder of the world, and the Gnostics kept the word and changed its meaning. For them the true God is pure light, far above our world, and the demiurge is a lesser power, born by mistake, who built the visible world. He is blind to the true God above him and sure that he is the only god. The demiurge, with his helpers who rule the planets, holds human souls inside bodies and inside the world, as in a prison. Each soul is a spark of the true light, and it goes free by remembering where it came from. Perhaps for people who lived under the hard rule of Rome, it made sense that the builder of the world was a jailer.

So in Gnostic teaching there are two serpents. The first is the demiurge himself, named Yaldabaoth: in their books he has the body of a serpent and the face of a lion. The second is the serpent of Eden, which some Gnostic books call the Instructor. The Ophites, a Gnostic school, honored it as the messenger of the true God, who offered humanity the knowledge that frees it, against the will of the demiurge who forbade it. The serpent that holds the soul in prison and the serpent that shows it the way out stand side by side.

The idea of the demiurge spread far beyond the small circles of the Gnostics, through two movements that grew large, and both of them set Jesus against the maker of the world. Marcion, a Christian teacher who broke away from the main Christian Church about 144 AD, taught that the god of the old law, who made the world and punishes, is a lesser god, and that Jesus came from the true God above him, a stranger to this world, to free humanity from its maker. By about 180 AD Marcion's church stood in almost every province where the main Christian Church stood, and in parts of Syria it was the larger of the two. About 240 AD the prophet Mani in Persia, who called himself an apostle of Jesus Christ, founded Manichaeism. In his teaching, particles of light lie trapped in the darkness of matter, the prison of the demiurge in another form, and Jesus came to Adam in paradise to wake him with knowledge, the very part the Gnostics gave to the serpent. Manichaeism became a world religion, reaching from North Africa to China. Historians trace a line from it, though its links are debated: the Paulicians in Armenia about 650 AD, the Bogomils in the Balkans about 950 AD, and the Cathars in southern France about 1150 AD, all of whom taught that the visible world was made by a lesser or an evil power.

The main Christian Church drove these teachings out. The books of the Gnostics were lost until a jar of them was found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, and the Cathars were destroyed in a crusade in the 1200s. Yet the Gnostic reading passed on, into the Rosicrucians and into the inner circles of the Masons, and the serpent that holds its own tail appears among their emblems. In these secret orders the Gnostic reversal became central. They turned the open Christianity upside down: the serpent of Eden and Lucifer became the bringers of truth, and the god of the open Church became the demiurge who keeps humanity in ignorance. The Gnostics also stayed alive inside the Church itself, in hidden circles, and through the secret societies they have great influence. In such societies loyalty is sworn, and it looks like the serpent or the dragon stands at the place of that loyalty. In their darkest branches this reversal grew into the honoring of the reptilian masters and into Satanism.

In the 1800s the Theosophists brought into the open much of what the secret orders had kept hidden. They lived in the age of Darwin, of evolution and of revolt against the authority of the Church, and they valued mind, knowledge and progress. They drew on the Gnostics and on the books of India, and they saw the fallen angel in their own image, as the bringer of mind. In The Secret Doctrine, in 1888, Helena Blavatsky told that the fallen angels were the Sons of Mind, who came down into the Lemurians, the third root race, to light the mind in them, a descent made by choice. Later Theosophists said these beings came from Venus. Rudolf Steiner, who began as a Theosophist, saw two sides of the same power. He taught that the Luciferic beings gave humanity freedom and passions, and also pride, illusion and the wish to flee the earth, while Ahriman, the Persian spirit of evil whose name he took up again, binds the soul to matter, and Christ holds the balance between them.

The serpents who speak

What do people meet when they meet the serpent? Many have heard it speak. In the Bible the serpent of Eden speaks to Eve. In an Egyptian tale written down about 3.9 KY ago, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a sailor cast up on a magic island meets a huge serpent overlaid with gold, with a beard, who speaks to him kindly, tells him his fate and foretells his rescue, and all of it comes true. More often the serpent is the doorway through which a message comes. In the healing temples of Asclepius the sick slept in the sacred hall, and the god's serpents came to them in their dreams and healed them. Among the Maya, a stone lintel at Yaxchilan, carved about 1.3 KY ago, shows a queen in a rite of bloodletting: a great serpent rises before her, and from its open jaws an ancestor appears to speak.

Such meetings go on today. In 1961 the American anthropologist Michael Harner drank ayahuasca among the Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon. He met giant reptilian beings, like dragons, who spoke to him in what he called a thought language. They told him that they had come from space long ago, fleeing an enemy, that they had created life on Earth to hide within it, and that they were the true masters of humanity. When he told this to an old blind shaman of the village, the shaman smiled and said: they are always saying that, but they are only the masters of the outer darkness. Perhaps the beings were right that they created life on Earth, as one of many makers of the world, and the shaman was right that they are far from its only masters. In 1985 the anthropologist Jeremy Narby, whom we met earlier, drank ayahuasca with the Ashaninca of Peru, and two gigantic boa constrictors spoke to him without words and told him that he was only a human being. In a collection of ayahuasca experiences edited by the psychologist Ralph Metzner in 1999, a woman tells of a sacred boa that rose out of diamond-shaped patterns and taught her about the spiral energy, kundalini, and the soul's way to God. A man at a shamanic workshop in Spain told how, on ayahuasca, a serpent spoke to him again and again. It said that it was preparing his mind and told him to stay calm. It named the tree around which it was coiled as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then it led him through visions of an abyss. In the 1990s the psychiatrist Rick Strassman gave DMT to volunteers in a hospital in New Mexico. Many of them met beings, some in the form of reptiles or of praying mantises, who communicated with them by gestures and telepathy, and who sometimes examined them in what looked like a technologically advanced setting. The psychologist Benny Shanon, who gathered the visions of many ayahuasca drinkers, found serpents among the most common things people see, together with large cats, birds and palaces. A study of 2022, led by David Lawrence with Robin Carhart-Harris and Roland Griffiths, read nearly 3,800 reports of experiences with DMT, the substance that is also in ayahuasca. Three in a hundred of the beings met were reptilian or serpent-like, and two in a hundred were insect-like. Three quarters of all the beings communicated, and almost half of the people came back with a message, a task or an insight.

Do these beings come from the mind of the one who sees them, or on their own? The meetings often point to their independence. The beings of the ayahuasca world come to foreigners who knew nothing of them. Sometimes the mere presence of the ayahuasqueros, the healers who serve the brew, is enough for them to come, and sometimes it seems that the brew itself tunes the drinker to them, so that the beings come with it. And some come to people who have never taken the brew. In 2021 a woman who said she had never taken ayahuasca wrote on an internet forum of visions that kept returning, of a Chinese dragon with a long serpent body, who taught by telepathy about geometry, about light, about the nature of consciousness, and about the illusory nature of the physical world; the teaching arrived as the person's own thoughts. It looks like they are fairly independent of the culture and of the receiver. They come when they wish, and they are as real as spiritual beings can be.

I have seen such a world myself. In astral travel I came to a hell world. It was somewhat like a cartoon, and its inhabitants were devils with reptilian looks, yet it was quite harmonious, more like another reality than a place of torment, though it had the recognizable features of hell. While I was there, I asked myself: if an angel came into this world, would he look like an angel or like a demon? It became very clear that here he would look like a demon. From this I concluded that the different worlds are transformations of one another, like filters, like a prism that turns the same light into other colors, a mathematical transformation of our world. The beings of that world probably look normal to themselves, and to them we look strange.

The reptile in us

Is there a reptile in us? The channelings often speak of Draconian bloodlines among people, and I often meet the Draconian mindset. It is quite common, and psychology knows it as narcissism. Such a person is very self-centered and believes that he creates his own reality, so he keeps pressing on the outside world with an extreme will. The same power to bend reality was seen in Steve Jobs, and the people around him called it his reality distortion field. Its good side is that such a person is so centered on himself that he is impossible to offend.

The Draconian mindset produces a typical distortion, and it comes in two steps. In the first step the dragon person believes that the whole world is his dream, his own illusion. So he unites with the whole world, his ego expands to fill it, and he sets out to transform that illusion by his will. The world, for him, is created from the inside out. In the second step the ego returns to itself. At some point he wakes up to the reality of being separate, and his ego is so strong that he divides himself from the world again and fights it. The unity through the ego expanded to the whole world collapses, and the ego falls back into the body. Then the cycle can begin again: the whole world as his own self, and then his own self against the whole world.

It would be very interesting to obtain the full genome sequences of families who trace their descent to Draconian bloodlines, and to search them for reptilian markers: stretches of DNA that are present in reptiles and absent in the general human population. Such a search would test directly whether these bloodlines carry in their genome what they claim in their stories.

Is there something in the reptile's way of life that fits this mind? The reptiles and we come from a common ancestor, so they are our siblings, older siblings, whose age came first: the great reptiles ruled the Earth long before the mammals rose to rule it. The same order holds in the galaxy. The reptilian races were the first in our galaxy, the Lyrans came after them a long time ago, and the humans appeared later. And the reptiles live differently from us. Most reptiles live alone, and most snakes lay their eggs and leave them, so the young hatch and go their own way. In most mammals the young grow inside the mother's body, and she feeds them first through her blood and then with her milk. So a mammal mother shapes her young far more than a mother who lays an egg. Through the long months of growth she gives it her nourishment, and she gives it her bioenergy as well. In my many conversations with reptilian beings through channeling, the difference looked like a matter of style, a different way of living and of raising the young.

The reptile among the rulers

How could a serpent rule through people? In the West the answer most often given runs through secret orders. The Christian Church taught the many that the serpent is the Devil. In hidden circles inside and beside the Church, the old Gnostic reading lived on, turned the other way: the serpent of Eden as the giver of knowledge, and Lucifer as the bearer of light. This knowledge was kept for the few. So there were two teachings, a religion for the masses and a secret knowledge for those who rule.

I think that rulers initiated into this secret knowledge honored Lucifer in their rites, and through these rites they met the reptiloids. Here two kinds must be told apart. The first are visitors: reptilian beings from another dimension who take on a body, come, give their orders and leave. They need not hide their reptilian nature, and many contactees, among them people I have interviewed, describe meeting beings with a human-like body, upright on two legs, and reptilian features: scaled skin, eyes with slit pupils, a lizard-like face. This may also be why the reptilian Satan grew so strong in people's minds. People meet these beings, in the body or in the astral, they map them onto the Satan and the devils they were taught about, and each meeting makes the old story stronger. The second kind are bloodlines born here on Earth. Many ruling families have claimed Draconian or reptilian descent, but genetics has no markers for this yet, so for now these claims remain beyond what we can test. If the visitors give orders to the initiated rulers, then the reptilian Satan of the Church and the reptilian master of the secret orders are one figure seen from two sides, and the secret societies are where they meet.

Yet half of humanity lived outside the Christian world, and in China mystics of this kind were rare. If the reptiloids rule there too, they rule another way. In the East the serpent lives in the open: it sits on the throne.

In China the emperor was the Son of Heaven and sat on the Dragon Throne. The dragon was his emblem: his face was called the dragon face, and in later dynasties the robes with five-clawed dragons were his alone. Liu Bang, who founded the Han dynasty about 2.2 KY ago, was said to have been conceived when a dragon came down upon his mother, and the first ancestors, Fuxi and Nuwa, had the bodies of serpents. Even the hidden arts of rule speak in the language of the dragon. Han Feizi, the teacher of the Legalists, wrote about 2.25 KY ago that a dragon can be tamed and even ridden, but under its throat lie scales that grow the wrong way, and whoever touches them dies; the ruler of men, he said, has such scales too. Beside the dragon on the throne stood a secular ruling layer, the scholar-officials. From about 1.4 KY ago they were chosen by examinations in the classics, a closed class that held the knowledge of writing, law and government and served the dragon. Below them, in the hidden world, the dragon appears again. The Triads, the secret brotherhoods that grew out of the Heaven and Earth Society, call their leader the Dragon Head, and the main surviving lineage of Quanzhen Taoism, a school of inner alchemy whose masters pass their secret practices from teacher to student, is called the Dragon Gate. The open dragon belonged to the emperor, and anyone else who used it could be punished, so perhaps the secret circles carried it quietly. The Buddhist master Hsuan Hua told that in northeast China, in the years before 1950, ten dragons in human form came to him, asking to become his disciples. When he asked them to end a drought with rain, they answered that they needed permission from the Jade Emperor, the ruler of heaven. He told them to ask, and the next day rain fell. If the reptilian visitors govern in China too, these are their paths: the emperor, the son of Heaven and of the dragon; the officials who carried his word to the whole land; and the brotherhoods with a Dragon Head at their top. A visitor with a lizard-like face who came to such a ruler would be received as a heavenly dragon, a messenger from above, and his orders would pass down through the officials. It looks like where the West saw the reptilian master as Satan, China saw him as the dragon, the giver of rain and of rule.

In India the serpent beings have a name of their own, the Nagas. They are beings of another world, below the earth and the waters, often pictured with a human body and the hood of a cobra, and they keep treasures and hidden knowledge. Buddhist tradition tells that the teacher Nagarjuna, about 1.8 KY ago, went down to the realm of the Nagas and brought back scriptures of wisdom, which they had kept until humans were ready for them. Royal houses traced their descent to the Nagas. Several dynasties of India called themselves Naga lines, and the old chronicle of Kashmir tells that the valley was the land of the Nagas before people lived in it. Further east, in the lands of Indian culture, the kings of the Khmer told that their line began with the marriage of a prince from India and a Naga princess, the daughter of the serpent king. A Chinese visitor to Angkor, about 730 years ago, reported that the king went up each night to a golden tower to lie with a Naga woman, the spirit of the land, on whom the life of the kingdom depended. Here the path of the reptilian visitors is told almost openly: beings from another world come to the king, unite with his line, give hidden knowledge and return to their own realm.

The ruling class of India carried the serpent in its own descent. The warrior kings, the Kshatriyas, sorted their royal lines by origin: lines of the Sun, lines of the Moon, lines born of Fire, and lines of the Serpent, the Naga lines. Kings of the Serpent line ruled in many places: the Karkota kings of Kashmir about 1.3 KY ago, and the Nagvanshi kings of Chota Nagpur in the east, who traced their house to a Naga and honored the cobra in their emblem into the twentieth century. Above the open court stood a hidden one. Many kings received a secret tantric initiation from their royal guru, a rite known only to the king and a few priests. In Nepal the kings kept a secret goddess, Taleju, whose shrine only the king and his initiated priests could enter, and among the Khmer, in 802 AD according to an inscription of 1053 AD, a Brahmin performed a secret rite that made King Jayavarman the Second a universal ruler. If the reptilian visitors govern India, here is their path: through the lines that claim serpent blood, and through the secret rite between the king and his guru, hidden from the open temple.

It looks like the reptilian master finds a different door in each civilization. In the West he hides inside religion turned upside down, in the secret orders behind the Church. In China he sits openly on the throne as the dragon and his word runs down through the officials and the brotherhoods. In India he lives in the blood of the royal lines of the serpent and in the secret rite between the king and his guru.

The mirror

Why does each people see a different face at the top of the world? In India the world is a dream: Vishnu lies on the coils of the endless serpent and dreams it, and the play of illusion, maya, is the stuff of all we see. A dream reflects its dreamer, and many thinkers have said the same of the gods. Xenophanes, the Greek thinker of about 2.5 KY ago, wrote that if cattle, horses and lions had hands, they would draw their gods as cattle, horses and lions; the Ethiopians make their gods dark and snub-nosed, and the Thracians make theirs blue-eyed and red-haired. Spinoza wrote that if a triangle could speak, it would say that God is eminently triangular. Feuerbach, in 1841, called God the outward image of human nature. And Voltaire turned the words of the Bible around: if God made us in his own image, we have returned the favor.

The same holds today. A hierarchical person sees a hierarchical God, and an anti-heroic person an anti-heroic God. People obsessed with sin see God as a judge. The hippies saw God as a loving universe, and the modern materialist sees him as a rational human, or as a programmer who runs the world as a simulation. Meister Eckhart, the German mystic of about 700 years ago, gave the deepest form of this: the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Is there one image of the Devil shared by all peoples? Here the variety is enormous. In Egypt the enemy of order was Apep, a giant serpent of chaos who attacked the boat of the sun every night. Beside him stood Set, a god with a human body and the head of a strange animal, with a long curved snout and tall square-tipped ears, the lord of storms and of the desert, who was a troublemaker and yet each night defended the sun against Apep. In Persia the evil one was Ahriman, a spirit of darkness and lies with no fixed body, who once burst into creation like a snake. The Buddha was tempted by Mara, a heavenly king who rode on an elephant at the head of an army of monsters and sent his beautiful daughters to seduce him. In Islam the tempter is Iblis, a being made of smokeless fire, unseen, who whispers into human hearts and who refused to bow to Adam. The Norse had Loki, a handsome trickster among the gods who could change into a salmon, a mare or a fly, and who fathered the serpent that lies around the world. In India the dark Kali, a goddess with black skin, many arms and a garland of skulls, who destroys demons, is honored as a mother and stands far from a devil. A serpent, a god with an animal's head, a spirit without a body, a king with an army, a being of fire, a shape-shifter: each people drew its own figure of evil, and the same is true of the images of the Most High. Both are made by cultures, and each carries the face of those who made it. The highest itself is undivided: one unity, one bliss, where good and evil are still one. People look up at this undivided whole and try to divide it, and every image they draw belongs to a much lower level, so it fails to show the highest. Many traditions knew this. The Bible forbids making any image of God. For centuries early Buddhist art showed the Buddha only by his footprints or by an empty throne. The mystics of the way of negation, among them Pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides, said that the highest can be described only by what it is not. And in India the teachers of Vedanta set Brahman without qualities, beyond any form, above Brahman with qualities, the God people can picture and worship.

Below the undivided lies a great variety of beings, and with them the mirror works differently. Not everyone carries a serpent inside, yet many meet serpents, and the images come unprompted: a person arrives with one picture in mind and is shown another. These beings have their own will, their own ideas and their own habits. Possession shows this most clearly. In my many years of research on channeling I observed two possessions, both benign. In each, a completely different being entered a person's body and later left it. The difference was unmistakable: almost everything was new, the language, the manner, the whole personality, and only a small trace of the person remained. The serpents and reptilian messengers of the ayahuasca world are beings of this kind, with a will of their own, and in that world they are simply part of the landscape, as natural there as birds in a forest.

The form of a being also depends on the world it enters. In the hell world I saw, an angel would have looked like a demon. So the look of a being tells us about the world where we meet it, as well as about the being itself.

There is no being at the top. What people call the Most High is undivided consciousness, and as one comes near it, every form and every rank dissolves; hierarchy belongs to the lower levels. Our world is a collective creation, the work of many makers, and the makers stand on those lower levels. Some of them may be reptilian, and others come in other forms.

Why, then, is the demiurge so often a reptile? People meet visitors of many shapes, insect-like ones and others among them. The most common look human, and the second most common look reptilian, and both are good candidates for the makers of the world. When people meet strangers from beyond, they judge them by likeness. The human-looking ones were perceived as gods and angels. The reptilian-looking ones, foreign and unlike us, became demons, even though many of them are kind. There is no fairness in this, only the natural reaction of people to what is foreign. The demiurge of Plato, the good craftsman, has no reptilian shape at all. The demiurge takes the serpent's form exactly where he is seen as evil, as the jailer of souls among the Gnostics. So the demonic demiurge who traps souls drifts toward the reptilian shape by itself, and Lucifer, once he became the Devil, followed the same path. This was not a single event. Through the whole history of humanity the hybridization program went on, the visitors kept coming, and people kept traveling in the astral. Each new meeting with a reptilian stranger passed through the same reaction, so the demiurge and Lucifer drifted toward the reptilian shape again and again, over the centuries.

The drift can be seen in Christian art. For the first centuries the Christians hardly pictured the Devil at all. One of the earliest images, a mosaic in Ravenna in Italy from about 520 AD, shows him as an angel in blue, standing at the left hand of Christ, as beautiful as the angel in red at his right. From about 1000 AD on, slowly, the devils in the churches grew horns, claws and tails. In the later 1200s the great mosaic in the Baptistery of Florence showed Satan as a horned monster devouring sinners, with serpents coming out of his ears. Later painters gave the devils scaly skin and the wings of bats, and the Devil became the reptilian beast that most people still picture.

So whoever seeks the true image of Satan or of the Most High, and stays true to the task, comes at last to undivided consciousness. There the seeker loses himself, and the image is lost with him, because nothing there can be formed into an image. If he comes back with an image, it is his own reflection or his own creation, or else a being of a lower level that stands in for the Most High. And on the way something else happens. Whoever tries to grasp the Most High finds that it has a dark side too, and whoever hunts down the worst evil finds that it has a bright side, as Lucifer brings knowledge. Long before the seeker reaches the undivided consciousness, the highest good and the deepest evil merge into one.