John Frum (or Jon Frum; John From) is a figure associated with cargo cults on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. He is depicted as an American World War II serviceman, who will bring wealth and prosperity to the people if they follow him. He is sometimes portrayed as black, sometimes as white; from David Attenborough's report of an encounter: "'E look like you. 'E got white face. 'E tall man. 'E live 'long South America."[1]
The religion arose in the 1930s, when Vanuatu was known as the New Hebrides. It is not known whether it arose spontaneously or was deliberately created; nor is it clear whether an individual named "John Frum" existed. The name is sometimes considered a corruption of "John from (America)", which the natives heard from US GIs during World War II.[2][1] The surname Frum is rare in the English-speaking world; it does not appear at all in either the 1851 or 1901 censuses of the United Kingdom,[3] although there may have been a John "Frumm" or "Frumme" or "Fromme," which are common German/Jewish family names.
Some people living around Sulphur Bay on Tanna revere a god named Kerapenmun associated with the extinct volcano Mount Tukosmeru; the attributes of this god influenced the development of the John Frum movement. A native named Manehivi, under the alias of Jon Frum, began the cult by appearing among people and making promises of houses, clothes, food, and transport.[4] He promised the dawn of a new age, in which all white people, including missionaries, would leave the New Hebrides (as they were then known), and that the native Melanesians would gain access to the material wealth which white people enjoyed. For this to happen, the people of Tanna should reject all aspects of European society (money, Western education, Christianity, work on copra plantations) and return to traditional kastom (a word for native Tannese customs.)
In 1941, followers of John Frum rid themselves of their money in a frenzy of spending, left the missionary churches, schools, villages and plantations, and moved further inland to celebrate traditional custom through feasts, dances and rituals. The movement gained traction in the 1940s when some 300,000 American troops established themselves in Vanuatu. The islanders were impressed both by the egalitarianism of the Americans and their obvious wealth and power. This led them to conflate perceived benefactors such as Uncle Sam, Santa Claus and John the Baptist into a mythic figure who would empower the island peoples by giving them cargo wealth. Followers of John Frum built symbolic landing strips to encourage American aeroplanes to land and bring them "cargo". In 1957, a leader of the John Frum movement, Nakomaha, created the "Tanna Army", a non-violent, ritualistic organisation which organised military-style parades, their faces painted in ritual colours, and wearing white t-shirts with the letters "T-A USA" (Tanna Army USA). This parade still takes place every year on February 15.
The power of John Frum appeared to be confirmed by the post-war influx of tourists to the region, who brought with them a degree of material prosperity to the islands. The cult is still active today. The followers believe that John Frum will come back on a February 15 (the year of his return is not known), a date which is observed as "John Frum Day" in Vanuatu.
In the late 1970s, John Frum followers opposed the imminent creation of an independent, united nation of Vanuatu. They objected to a centralised government which they feared would favour Western "modernity" and Christianity, felt to be detrimental to local customs.
The John Frum movement has its own political party, led by Song Keaspai. On John Frum Day in February 2007, the John Frum Movement celebrated its 50th anniversary. Chief Isaac Wan, its leader, remains strong in his belief in John Frum. He was quoted by the BBC as saying that John Frum was "our God, our Jesus," and would eventually return. [5]
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is also worshipped in Vanuatu by cargo cult followers, the Prince Philip Movement, following a royal visit to the area in 1974.[1] He is now regarded as the head of the cargo suppliers. His wife, the Queen, was perhaps not deified because she is female.
Heaven can wait
The South Pacific nation of Vanuatu has produced dozens of prophets over the last century. The latest has called his followers to a shoulder of an active volcano, where they are praying for spontaneous circumcisions and other assorted miracles.
I met the doctor just as the sun was sinking beyond the pool bar at Iririki Island Resort. I wanted to know about the cargo cult. The doctor told me to forget about the cult. He had a better story, and he would share it with me if I bought him dinner.
The doctor's name was Don Fockler. He looked like he had fallen off one of the yachts the South Pacific trades blew in to Port Vila. He had the Tevas, the crow's feet and the easy slouch of a man who had lived roughly and was pleased about it. He could have done with a shave. He was on his way back home to Vancouver Island.
Fockler polished off a Fiji Bitter and told me how he came to meet the prophet.
Six months before, he had signed up with a Canadian aid group that dropped Canadian doctors, one at a time, on a volcanic lump 250 kilometres south of Port Vila. Tanna Island was not like the capitol of Vanuatu, he said. There were no swimming pools, cold beer and duty-free shopping. Tanna was on the very edge of things. A week after Fockler arrived he received a scribbled note summoning him to a village on the far side of the island. The request was vague but it seemed to have originated from the national police, who had sailed their only frigate down from Port Vila to investigate rumours about a mysterious prophet.
The prophet went by the name of Fred. Word was that Fred had led hundreds of followers to a makeshift camp on the shoulder of Tanna's volcano. They were waiting to be carried to heaven. Or something.
"Rumour had it that Fred had gone off the deep end,” said Fockler. "He was having all kinds of visions, and apparently he was up to no good."
"What kind of no good?" I said.
"I don't know, ritual child abuse, or something like that. There were all kinds of stories, but the police never actually found any evidence.”
Which is why they called in the doctor. Fockler didn't realize it at the time, but the police were looking for a means of getting the prophet the hell off Tanna. Befuddled but curious, he loaded two of his kids and a bag full of anti-psychotic drugs into the hospital truck and drove across the island. The police weren't there, but the hospital's matron was, with a new accusation. He said the prophet had leprosy. If so, Fred would have to be removed and quarantined in order to save his neighbours from the horrific flesh-wasting disease.
Fockler was met near the base of the volcano by a gauntlet of three hundred of Fred's stone-faced followers, all men. They knew why the doctor was there, and they were not pleased. Fockler wished he had not brought his kids. He used a translator to negotiate with the villagers, who reluctantly permitted him to pass. Such was the authority a foreign doctor wielded on Tanna.
Fockler had barely begun to trek up the mountain when he came face to face with Fred himself. The prophet was a big man with messy hair. It was clear that he had indeed suffered from leprosy. His eyebrows and hands were slightly misshapen. But the condition was clearly inactive and not contagious. The doctor and the prophet sat down together by the trail. Fockler pretended to examine Fred's skin, while actually conducting a quickie mental status assessment:
"I asked him if he saw visions, you know, or heard any messages, and he said 'I can't tell you that, that's the source of my power.' Well, that pretty much shut down my psychological assessment."
Fockler must have heard the stories. He must have been told about Fred's claim to have pulled a Moses and drained the lake at the base of the volcano. About the hundreds of people who had abandoned their home villages and their gardens to join the prophet. About the squalor at the mountain squat. And in those moments, the doctor must also have realized that he wielded tremendous power in his diagnosis.
Should Fred stay or should he go? The doctor closed his medical case and marched back down the mountain with his children. When he reached Sulphur Bay the crowd of three hundred men was still there, waiting for his decision.
Fockler decided it was not his job to do the police's dirty work—or to play God. And besides, Fred didn't seem overtly psychotic. He told the men he was not going to take Fred away. He would let them keep their prophet. The men cheered, the police sailed their frigate back to Port Vila and Fred was left to count his visions.
Fockler looked at me and grinned.
"Now what about my dinner?" he said.
White men have been trying to play God in Melanesia (the name given to that part of the South Pacific inhabited by black-skinned people--hence the Latin, mela ) for nearly two centuries. By that I mean they have been alternately bombing, kidnapping and evangelizing the islanders. Especially evangelizing. The travel writer Paul Theroux once observed that rumours of cannibalism were like catnip to missionaries. It certainly seemed to be true in Melanesia.
Dozens of nineteenth-century missionaries perished in the archipelago. Among them were a hardy pair of Nova Scotian Presbyterians. The Rev. G.N. Gordon and his wife settled on Erromanga, a day's paddle from Tanna. The Gordons were popular until an outbreak of measles spread across the island. The locals blamed the new God, and then they ate the Gordons.
My great grandfather cruised through Melanesia on an Anglican mission ship in 1892. I was following his route though the islands, driven by reports that there were still some shores where the old spirits and traditions--all the things that islanders call kastom --still prevailed. I liked that idea. It made me feel as though the world was not so small.
Tanna was on the top of my list. It had a reputation for being a kind of psycho-spiritual Disneyland, a place where mainline churches, holy-rolling fundamentalist preachers, pagan priests and witch-doctors were still wrestling for souls. But what made Tanna the anthropologists' favorite was its cargo cult. Thousands of Tannese worshipped a spirit whose sole purpose seemed to be to quash Christianity.
The cult was born in 1941, when Vanuatu was still the New Hebrides, a colony jointly administered by Britain and France. A mysterious stranger was said to have summoned Tanna's chiefs to a secret meeting. He said they should turn their backs on the Presbyterian missionaries who had banned their traditional dances. They should revive their old rainmaking magic and circumcision ceremonies. They should again prepare the narcotic drink, kava, from the roots of a local shrub, and they should guzzle it until the air was full of messages. The prophet promised that if they did all these things, he would return on a great white ship loaded with cargo from America. The man's name was John Frum.
Rumours flew: Some islanders said that John Frum was the King of America, or perhaps the son of God. Others insisted that thousands of his soldiers were inside the volcano, waiting for the right moment to charge out of the bubbling caldera and chase the British and French away. Colonial administrators were terrified the cult would lead to all-out rebellion. More than 140 of Frum's followers were arrested and sent to jail in Port Vila.
Then Frum's prophesies began to come true.
The American navy arrived in Port Vila shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Most of Tanna's men went to work for them. U.S. soldiers were spectacularly generous, handing out pots, pans, cigarettes and tinned meat. It was the cargo windfall the Frummers had waited for.
One G.I. reportedly gave them a U.S. flag to fly above their village. He told them America would always be there to protect them from their colonial masters. For years the Frummers commemorated the bond every February 15, when faithful donned U.S. Army surplus gear and marched in formation around the village of Sulphur Bay armed with homemade wooden rifles.
It was not hard to track down John Frum's followers. I caught a cargo boat south to Tanna, then hopped a ride across the island in the back of a pickup truck. A week after my dinner with Fockler I marched into the village of the cult's supposed leader.
Isag Wan was a grizzled, bone-thin septuagenarian who was forever kicking at the mongrels that followed him through his hamlet of thatch huts. He wore a khaki jacket with "U.S. Army" stamped on the breast. I handed him a bag of rice and some tinned meat. The chief responded by handing me a half-coconut shell cup full of kava.
This was not as pleasant a welcome as it might sound, because the Tannese employ a distressingly rustic method of brewing their sacred drink. They feed the shrub's roots to young boys, who chew and chew, then regurgitate the pulpy remains onto a hankie. Water is poured over the fibre, and the drippings collected in a coconut shell below.
The chief downed his cup in one gulp, then spat a bouquet of spray towards the forest, grunting a quiet incantation. Then it was my turn. As I drank, the phlegmish lad who had chewed my kava cleared his sinuses loudly. The kava tasted like dishwater and behaved like dental anaesthetic. My tongue went numb. After two more shells the night air began to feel like strands of gauze wrapping around me. It was exquisitely calm. Dogs and pigs wrestled in the shadows. I slept deeply on a bed of grass mats.
In the morning the chief woke me so we could stand at attention together as the U.S. flag was raised above the village. It was Friday, he said. John Frum's day. That night the people gathered beneath the flagpole. They played guitars, danced and sang songs about John Frum. Some of them pulled grass skirts up over their shorts. The cult did not feel like a cult. The night was cheery and playful, like a high-school sock-hop. Nobody seemed to know--or particularly care--if John Frum would ever be conjured from across the sea.
When I cornered Isag Wan to ask him about Frum, he was much keener to rant about the prophet, Fred.
"Fred is not a real prophet," the chief told me. (Actually, he said "Fred hemi no stap wan prophet," using bislama, a pidgin which employs English words and island grammar.) "I know where Fred's power comes from. He is using the power of the black sea snake to trick us all.”
It would be impossible for me to catalogue all the chief's accusations about Fred. But these were his key points: Fred had used some kind of magic involving the killing of 19 pigs to drain the lake at the bottom of the volcano Yasur. The resulting flood washed away several houses in Sulphur Bay. Fred had promised to turn all the old men of Sulphur Bay into children again, but that was a lie because the old men were clearly still old men. Fred also promised that if all the people followed him to the shoulder of the volcano, Jesus would come and take them all to heaven. That hadn't happened yet, either.
Fred had eclipsed John Frum as the overriding concern on the island. Everyone had a rumour to pass on: Some accused Fred of cursing people. Others said that Fred was a pervert: according to one story, Fred enjoyed sitting in a pit above which were placed two thin boards. Women were forced to step across those boards so Fred could peer up their skirts. One Mormon missionary told me that Fred had thrown babies into the volcano.
Those were rumours. What seemed more alarming to me was the effect the prophet was having on human geography. Families from all over Tanna had abandoned their gardens and their pigs in order to join Fred on the volcano. Land was going fallow. Pigs were disappearing. Things were falling apart. Meanwhile, while Fred's followers waited for their ride to heaven, they pilfered the gardens of the villages at the base of their mountain. It was rumoured that a handful of old folks and children had already died up at Fred's camp. People said the Canadian doctor could have put a stop to this. But he did not.
Of course I needed to meet Fred. The best way to reach his camp was a trail from Port Resolution, on the far side of the volcano.
I left Sulphur Bay on foot. I walked to the base of the volcano. There was a mile-wide plain of ash and scoured earth where once had been a lake. Yasur rose in the middle of it all like a great Saharan dune.
A Land Cruiser rumbled towards me across the plain. I hailed it and got in. We were half-way across the ash plain when a deafening explosion shattered the afternoon. A salvo of rocks flew out of the mountaintop like pebbles thrown up by some giant hand. The mountain belched a black mushroom of smoke, then fell quiet again. The driver swerved for a moment, then we continued on our way.
Port Resolution was a postcard. The bay glowed electric blue. Men threw nets from outrigger canoes. Steam curled from the forested eastern foothills of the volcano. The bay had not always enjoyed a reputation for friendliness. Of his reception in 1774, Captain James Cook wrote: "One fellow shewed us his back side in such a manner that it was not necessary to have an interpreter to explain his meaning."
I found the chief of Port Resolution lying on a grass mat on the floor of his hut, clutching his abdomen. The chief had been sick for months. His family was sure it was Fred who had caused the malady.
The people were scared of Fred. It took me three days to convince anyone to lead me to the prophet's camp. When I did find a volunteer, he took me only as far as the base of the mountain, then he complained that just looking at Fred would make him sick. He drew a map in the dirt and I carried on alone.
I followed a well-trodden footpath up the mountain. Coconut palms gave way to jungle, which gave way to a broken landscape of stumps, cracked coconut palms and clinging brambles. I heard screams and hoots in the forest. Children with machetes hacked branches from breadfruit trees. I saw adults, too, all coming down from the mountain with empty baskets and water jugs. One old man grabbed me by the shirtsleeve and pulled me close. "Go on," he hissed in my ear. "He is waiting for you."
I followed the path through a great maze of vines and spiraling banyan roots, up a series of cliffs and onto a ridge pock-marked with vents, which steamed and oozed iron-red mud.
The rain hit just as I entered the camp. It was squalid. Hundreds of grass huts jostled for space between a series of mud ravines. Children shrieked and rolled in the muck. Sores glistened on their ankles and on their heads. There was a dirt parade ground too, with a bamboo pole planted dead centre. Dangling limply from it was the U.S. flag.
A man stepped forward.
"Fred?" I asked.
"No, I'm Alfred. Come with me."
I followed him towards a broad, open-air shelter. Trailing behind us was what appeared to be the village idiot: a quiet fellow with an abnormally large head. He made me nervous. He walked so close I could see the patches of hair missing between his dreadlocks, and the tears that streamed constantly from his left eye. He wore an untidy beard and a filthy ski parka. But it was the man's head that captivated me. It was as though it had been fashioned from rubber and then squeezed at the temples, or melted, so that his forehead seemed on the verge of collapsing around his eyes. He had no eyebrows. Of course. Leprosy. This was Fred.
We sat down and I explained that had come to help Fred share his story with the world. It was almost true.
Fred did not speak like a prophet. He mumbled in his own language like a drunken teenager. He explained that all the rumours about him were untrue. He had not been playing with black magic and curses. He had simply been passing on God's messages. As Fred dabbed at his weeping eye with a rag, Alfred translated for me:
It had started on the ocean. Fred had worked for years as a deck hand on a Taiwanese fishing trawler. One day he saw lights in the sky. They shot straight at him. Fred wasn't afraid when the lights came. He just closed his eyes and went to sleep. That's when he heard the voice. It reassured him. It gave him clues about the future. Fred knew the voice was God talking to him. The voice told him he should return to Tanna and share the messages with his neighbours.
When Fred got back to Tanna the first thing the voice said to him was that the water in the lake beside the volcano was polluted. Fred prayed for the water to drain. It did. People began to believe in him. The next year Fred predicted the bombing of the World Trade Centre towers in New York. When that prophesy came true, Fred's followers staged a sympathetic parade in Port Vila. An appreciative American yachtie gave Fred the Stars and Stripes. That gave Fred extra cred with the John Frummers.
"Any more miracles?" I asked.
Fred gave a long reply. Alfred gave me the Reader's Digest version:
"Before Fred came back, the volcano used to explode and kill many people. But Fred asked God to make it stop. It did. Oh, and the hurricanes. There will be no hurricanes on Tanna for five years."
"So what are you doing up here on the mountain?"
"God told Fred to bring the people together in Unity," said Alfred. "All the churches, John Frum people and kastom people must come together—one people in Unity. So we sing John Frum songs on Wednesday, and on Sunday we go to church."
The rest of the days, I thought, his hungry followers steal food from surrounding villages.
"How long will you stay up here?"
Alfred jumped in, excitedly: "Fred had a vision about that, too. He saw that twelve virgin boys would be circumcised. Only then will God tell us what we should do next."
"I thought all boys on Tanna were circumcised."
"Yes, but these boys would be circumcised by God," said Alfred, quite excited now. "The miracle has already begun. The first boy has been cut. Nobody touched him. His parents simply found him circumcised one morning last week."
"Can I see it?"
"Of course not. But you come back tomorrow. Tomorrow we bring John Frum together with Jesus."
Fred offered me his hand, which was as limp and cold as an oyster, then he wandered off to gaze at the clouds. Before I left, Alfred made me promise to return with my camera so the world would have proof of Unity.
The next morning Fred preached to a rapt crowd of four hundred. I couldn't understand any of it, other than the words, "New Jerusalem," which he shouted over and over. Encouraged by Alfred, I climbed through the brambles at the edge of the clearing and took photos. That's when I learned there was no toilet in New Jerusalem.
Fred's followers wore rags. But today he was flanked by two men in white shirts and neckties. They were ministers of the Presbyterian Church. One told me he was delighted with Fred's teaching: Half a century after the John Frummers had tossed the Presbyterians out of Sulphur Bay, Fred was bringing the people and the church back together. The minister wasn't bothered by Fred's messianic side, nor by the prophet's accommodating stand towards magic, spirit worship and John Frum.
"I thought the church was opposed to kastom," I said. He laughed and slapped me on the back.
"The bible tells us that one day the world will become paradise. But kastom tells us that one day Tanna will become paradise, like a new Jerusalem. Tanna people know we have two choices. We pray for both of them."
"But is your saviour Jesus or John Frum? You have to choose, don't you?"
"My friend, we know God will give the answer, and it will be one of them."
The logic was mind-boggling. The English anthropologist, Ben Burt, once told me that what impressed him most about Melanesians was their capacity to hold onto apparently conflicting belief systems at the same time. Island Christians thought nothing of sneaking off after church in order to offer sacrifices to their ancestors. It was not a sign of intellectual weakness, Burt told me. In fact it required a sophisticated mind to perform such spiritual acrobatics.
All I knew was that the Tannese seamed capable of believing in just about anything. If you wanted to be a messiah, there was no better place in the world to do it than Tanna.
By midday the crowd had changed out of their rags. The men came first, banana leaves tied around their heads and bare chests shining in the sun. Women followed. Their faces were painted yellow and orange like hornets. They wore feathers in their hair, and grass skirts dyed with rainbow checkers. Wreaths of Christmas tinsel dangled from their necks. Their dance was not like the cheery campfire rhumba Isaak Wan had shown me. It was like a war. The men stamped the earth, grunted and exhaled simultaneously in great stormy whooshes. The women gathered around them in loose whorls, wailing and waving tree branches at the Stars and Stripes. They charged the flag, jumped back again and raced in circles until the plaza became a maelstrom of dust and leaping bodies.
I climbed to the roof of a hut and pulled out my camera. There was Fred, sitting alone on a footstool, watching the dance with one eye and me with the other. He nodded when I pointed my camera at him. I raised the camera to my eye, and the frame was filled with dust and shining skin. I stood up, straddling the gable of the hut, raising my arms above my head, motioning for the crowd to move closer together. The crowd responded.
“Closer!” I shouted when the dance ended. The crowd moved closer. Adrenaline rushed through my veins.
"Raise your arms to the sky," I shouted. "Not Fred, just the rest of you!" They did as they were told, sweat-drenched men, dust-caked women, naked children, hundreds of them. Even the Presbyterian pastors stretched their arms in the air. It felt quite wonderful to see them obey.
I looked down at the prophet, standing serene among his followers. The doctor had been wrong about him. Fred was clearly nuts. His stairway to heaven was as likely to materialize as John Frum himself. His New Jerusalem was an environmental and social disaster. Fred's followers were sickly and thin. They could not stay on the mountain forever, raiding neighbours' gardens and cutting down the forest.
I gazed down upon them all. Yes, I thought, it would be easy to play God here, or play with God, as my great grandfather had tried to do so many years ago. But when the dancers lowered their hands I didn't shout for them to abandon Fred to his visions. I did not order them to run back to their villages and their gardens, though in the moment I felt strangely sure they would obey. I took my photos and slid back down that thatch roof. I shook two hundred hands and retreated, strangely humbled. Not because I was a convert to Unity. Not because I held up any hope for more spontaneous circumcisions. Not because playing God has fallen out of fashion among western voyagers. But because, past the tree ferns and trembling banyans, the volcano had continued to whistle and steam, and yet the thump and rush of the dancers were forceful enough to obscure the eruption, forceful enough to remind me that the world was not yet so small.
And quite simply, I liked that idea.
syphillis ()
edited on: Feb 1 2008, 06:10
thanks xyco i will tell you my opinion in 2012!
KristBaum ()
Feb 1 2008, 06:44
:D
xyco ()
Jun 2 2009, 09:17
TOURISM AND TERRORISM
TWO COMMENTS FROM EITHER SIDE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
1.
from
OVERCOMING TOURISM
by
Hakim Bey
published (Dissident edition) 1999
The tourist and the terrorist - those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction - suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes as they in their inauthenticity approach it. ... To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the quintessence of Commodity Fetishism. It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of goods that never arrive, because they have been exalted beyond the stench of mortality - or morality.
You buy tourism and you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reaity, is a form of Gnosis, of body-hatred . The ultimate tourist "trip" will take place in Cyberspace...
Metamorphoto by Anthony Weir
Overcoming Tourism and many other works by Hakim Bey can be downloaded
from an H. B. website.
In his other persona of Peter Lamborn Wilson, he writes:
"In America and Europe "activism" has retreated - to such an extent that people equate an appearance on the World Wide Web with political action - just as the activists of the 1960s were seduced by their "fifteen seconds of fame" on television. Out of 600 channels - the bright promise of the near future - surely one or two can be devoted to "revolution", and a few more to "alternate life-styles".
The old Internet of techno-anarchy and "free information" will become just another channel of WWWTV, a kind of slum where the poor old original hackers can still congregate and fritter away the empty hours, while the great virtual city of Cyberspace grows up around them, dwarfing their pitiful huts and making a mockery of their "culture".
The anthropologists are probably already lining up for grants to study this quaint survival: affairs move quickly when both space and time have been abolished."
_________________
from Escape from The Nineteenth Century, Autonomedia, N.Y., 1998,
pp.132-133.
2.
THE WAR AGAINST TOURISM
by
Anthony Weir
The bomb attack on a night-club in Bali in October 2002 was the first signal to the Western world of a huge resentment against the tourist industry, which, like the British Empire which paved the way, operates on a network of collaboration with the local rich and powerful, to the increasing impoverishment of the poor. But whereas the British Empire also produced networks of missionaries attempting to ameliorate its arrogant exploitation, tourism (following in the footsteps of the anthropologists) is the "soft side" of the global exploitation of (mainly) the great extraction companies which have removed most of the rain forests of Indonesia and other parts of the world, and committed secret genocides against the peoples who lived in them and around them.
The tourist industry destroys the 'exotic' not just by marketing it, but by imposing its own environment upon it. The tourist industry builds horrible and expensive hotels - from which locals are excluded by one means or another. These hotels often include hideous, vulgar, noisy and essentially unwholesome night clubs where the tourists claim to "enjoy themselves" by drinking themselves stupid or buying sexual enticement. Night-clubs are great money-spinners, and so they proliferate more successfully than the hotels which actually have to provide services.
These cancers on indigenous cultures fly in almost all the food and drink which the tourists fly in to consume. They encourage prostitution, and inevitably attack local societies by promoting the unsightly, alcoholic Anglo-Saxon culture of false bonhomie - which, incidentally, has devastated more than one quiet and beautiful island of the Mediterranean. What white Australians did to the Aboriginal peoples - most of whom now have even lost their languages - they are doing rather more subtly to the peoples of Indonesia. The poor of Nepal have not benefited from the Coca-Cola trail up the high Himalayas - which is why a Marxist rebellion continues there. The forests of Nepal have largely disappeared, thus causing terrible erosion - and famine. The sex-tourism in Thailand and Cambodia is a scandal that the West has done very little to discourage. AIDS has been spread in Asia almost entirely by tourists.
Though modern tourism is a terrorism of 'globalisation', it is heir to (and has ineluctably influenced) the ancient tradition of pilgrimage to shrines all over the world, around which whole service-industries grew from early times: hostels, hospitals, food-booths and funerals - as well as the sale of amulets and souvenirs. Most of these old places of pilgrimage, like most places on mainland Europe and North America, can withstand huge influxes of modern visitors - because they are already 'globalised'. It is the traditional societies which are prey to the proxy-terrorism of tourism - as to the other aspects of 'globalisation': notably the removal of cultural and bio- diversity except where they can be tamed and commodified. The destructive compartmentalisation of Northern/Western life into work and leisure, for example, (or working mothers and Filipina baby-sitters and nannies) requires much labour and total socio-cultural disruption among the poor to serve the alcohol-laced, fashion-led leisure of the rich. Rural economies collapse and people flood into the tourist areas. In Europe, Spain has suffered grievously from this, especially its fragile islands. (See Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis.) And, as for the Greek islands, one need only read Durrell's Prospero's Cell to understand what crimes against nature and humanity have been committed in Corfu in order to provide vulgarity for the vulgar.
The quiet and varied Hindu culture of Bali has been seriously eroded, leading to a vacuum which is all too quickly filled by intolerant forms of Islam, one of whose cornerstones has become a hatred of alcohol and its accompanying public misbehaviour, which in the West has taken many centuries to be controlled. Alcohol has (with church-bells and the sign of the cross) for long been for Muslims (and most non-Christians) the paramount symbol of the now-paramount West, but only recently has it become a nexus of anti-Western resentment. (Needless to say, the car-bomb on Bali - far from liberating people already drawn into the supply-and-demand culture of 'globalisation' - further threatens Balinese society.)
As long as Muslims - many of whom live in artificial states created by the French and the British - feel that they and their culture have been trashed by triumphalist, alcohol-fired (or -swamped) Western (or, rather, Northern) capitalism and its championing of a particularly aggressive form of Zionism in Israel, there will be more and increasingly-violent reaction. Even were al-Qaeda to be disabled, other groups would form. But al-Qaeda is growing in support as a result of the 'War on Terror' and a perceived American ignorant arrogance.
The Bali bomb may have been only the first shot in a desperate war against the world-trashing - but essentially fragile - tourist industry. If so, tourism, depending as much on the silence and subjection of the local poor as on the enthusiastic collaboration of the rich, will largely disappear from many countries. The means of discouragement may not be pleasant, but, as al-Qaeda and Hamas (and the Irish Fenians before them) have shown, violence is the only weapon available to the humiliated. Despite our much-vaunted 'Western Liberal Values' we go on humiliating people as much as we ever did.
From Timaeus by Plato - the text records a conversation that took place between a Greek named Solon and an Egyptian priest possibly named Sonchis. The Egyptian tells how the movement of bodies in the heavens leads to the destruction of the earth at long intervals and how all knowledge is lost at these times.
The chief city in this district is Sais - the home of King Amasis - the founder of which, as they say, was a goddess whose Egyptian name is Neith, and in Greek, as they assert, Athena. These people profess to be great lovers of Athens and in a measure akin to our people here.
And Solon said that when he travelled there he was held in great esteem amongst them; moreover, when he was questioning such of their priests as were most versed in ancient lore about their ancient history, he discovered that neither he himself, nor any other Greek, knew anything at all, one might say, about such matters.
And, on one occasion, when he wished to draw them on to discourse on ancient history, he attempted to tell them the most ancient of our traditions, concerning Phoroneus, who was said to he the first man and Niohe; and he went on to tell the legend about Deucalion and Pyrra after the flood and how they survived it, and to give the genealogy of their descendants; and by recounting the number of years occupied by the events mentioned he tried to calculate the periods of time.
Whereupon one of the priests, a prodigiously old man, said: "Oh Solon. Solon. You Greeks are always children - there is not such a thing as an old Greek."
And on hearing this he asked: "What mean you by this saying?"
And the priest replied: "You are young in soul, every one of you. For therein you possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age. And this is the cause thereof: There have been, and there will be, many and diverse destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as ours, how once upon a time. Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father burnt up all that was upon the earth, and himself perished by a thunderbolt - that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shift of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.
At such times all they that dwell on the mountains, and in high and dry places, suffer destruction more than those who dwell near to rivers or the sea; and in our case the Nile, our saviour in other ways, saves us also at such times from this calamity by rising high.
And when, on the other hand, the Gods purge the earth with a flood of waters, all the herdsmen and shepherds that are in the mountains are saved, but those in the cities of your land are swept into die sea by the streams; whereas in our country neither then nor at any other time does the water pour down over our fields from above, on the contrary it all tends naturally to swell up from below.
Hence it is, for these reasons, that what is here preserved is reckoned to be the most ancient; the truth being that in every place where there is no excessive heat or cold to prevent it, there always exists some human stock, now more, now less in number. And if any event has occurred that is noble or great or in any way conspicuous, whether it be in your country or in ours or in some other place of which we know by report, all such events are recorded from of old and preserved here in our temples; whereas your people and the others are but newly equipped, every time, with letters and all such arts as civilised States require; and when, after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people, it leaves none of you but the unlettered and the uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own. Certainly the genealogies which you related just now, Solon, concerning the peoples of your country, are little better than children's tales; for, in the first place, you remember but one deluge, though many had occurred previously; and next, you are ignorant of the fact that the noblest and most perfect race amongst men were born in the land where you now dwell, and from them both you yourself are sprung and the whole of your existing city, out of some little seed that chanced to be left over; but this has escaped your notice because for many generations the survivors died with no power to express themselves in writing. For verily at one time, Solon, before the greatest destruction by water, what is now the Athenian state was the bravest in war and supremely well organized also in other respects. It is said that it possessed the most splendid works of art, and the noblest polity of any nation under heaven of which we have heard tell."
Upon hearing this, Solon said that he marvelled, and with the utmost eagerness requested the priest to recount for him in order and exactly all the facts about those citizens of old. The priest then said: "I begrudge you not the story. Solon; nay, I will tell it, both for your own sake and that of your city, and most of all for the sake of the Goddess who has adopted for her own both your land and this of ours, and has nurtured and trained them - yours first by the space of a thousand years, when she had received the seed of you from Ge and Hephaestus, and after that ours. And the duration of our civilisation as set down in our sacred writings is 8,000 years. Of the citizens, then, who lived 9,000 years ago, I will declare to you briefly certain of their laws and the noblest of the deeds they performed; the full account in precise order and detail we shall go through later, at our leisure, taking the actual writings."
Babel Fish Translation
xyco ()
Jun 16 2009, 13:42
http://www.crystalinks.com/sumergods.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/dilmun.html
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Jun 16 2009, 19:33
Mayan End Times Prophecy 12-21-2012
"The Hopi and Mayan elders do not prophesy that everything will come to an end. Rather, this is a time of transition from one World Age into another. The message they give concerns our making a choice of how we enter the future ahead. Our moving through with either resistance or acceptance will determine whether the transition will happen with cataclysmic changes or gradual peace and tranquility. The same theme can be found reflected in the prophecies of many other Native American visionaries from Black Elk to Sun Bear." - Joseph Robert Jochmans
Map of Mayan Civilization centres
Cusp Of Great Cycle
We are living today in the cusp of the Mayan end times, the end of a galactic day or time period spanning thousands of years. One galactic day of 25,625 years is divided into five cycles of 5,125 years.
The Great Cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar ends on the winter solstice of 2012 A.D. Following Mayan concepts of cyclic time and World Age transitions, this is as much about beginnings as endings. In fact, it was considered by the ancient Mayans to signify the creation of a new World Age. We are almost at the end of the fifth and final 5,125 year cycle!
Mayan Prophecy 2012: Entering Our Galactic Day
Many of us are aware of the Mayan calendar but not many people truly understand what it means and how it works. Yes the calendar does end on December 21, 2012, but what does that mean? How does it come to that? What is their calendar based off of?
The Mayans had a very precise understanding of our solar system's cycles and believed that these cycles coincided with our spiritual and collective consciousness. The most significant of which has much to do with the 2012 prophecies. In the following writing, we will walk through the main details of their prophecies surrounding the 2012 transition. How the transition takes place (from an astronomical perspective), what it means for us, and when the cycles take place. We'll start with the basic prophecies and later move deeper into the explanation of the cycles.
The Mayans prophesied that from 1999 we have 13 years to realize the changes in our conscious attitude to stray from the path of self-destruction and instead move onto a path that opens our consciousness to integrate us with all that exists.
The Mayans knew that our Sun, or Kinich-Ahau, every so often synchronized with the enormous central galaxy. And from this central galaxy received a 'spark' of light which causes the Sun to shine more intensely producing what our scientists call 'solar flares' as well as changes in the Sun's magnetic field. The Mayans say that this happens every 5,125 years. But also that this causes a displacement in the earths rotation, and because of this movement great catastrophes would be produced.
The Mayans believed the universal processes, like the 'breathing' of the galaxy, are cycles that never change. What changes is the consciousness of man that passes through it. Always in a process toward more perfection. Based on their observations, the Mayans predicted that from the initial date of the start of their civilization, 4 Ahau, 8 Cumku which is 3113 B.C., after one cycle being completed 5,125 years in their future, December 21st, 2012. The Sun, having received a powerful ray of synchronizing light from the center of the galaxy, would change its polarity which would produce a great cosmic event that would propel human kind to be ready to cross into a new era, The Golden Age. It is after this, that the Mayans say we will be ready to go through the door that was left by them, transforming our civilization based on fear to a vibration much higher in harmony.
Only from our individual efforts could we avoid the path to great cataclysm that our planet will suffer to start a new era, the sixth cycle of the Sun. The Mayan civilization was in the fifth cycle of the Sun, and there were four other great civilizations before them that were destroyed by great natural disasters. They believed that each cycle was just one stage in the collective consciousness of humanity.
In the last cataclysm of the Mayans, the civilization was destroyed by a great flood that left little survivors of which were their descendants. They believed that having known the end of their cycle, mankind would prepare for what is to come in the future and it is because of this that they would have preserved the dominant species; the human race. They say that coming changes will permit us to make a quantum leap forward in the evolution of our consciousness to create a new civilization that would manifest great harmony and compassion to all humankind.
Their first prophecy talks about 'The Time of No-Time'. A period of 20 years, which they call a Katún. The last 20 years of the Sun's cycle of 5,125 years. This cycle is from 1992 - 2012. I'll explain this in greater detail later. They predicted that during these times, solar winds would become more intense and could be seen on the Sun. This would be a time of great realization and great change for mankind. And it would be our own lack of preservation and contamination of the planet that would contribute to these changes. According to the Mayans, these changes would happen so that mankind comprehends how the universe works so we could advance to superior levels, leaving behind superficial materialism and liberating ourselves from suffering.
The Mayans say, that seven years after the start of Katún, which is to say 1999, we would enter a time of darkness which would force us to confront our own conduct. The say that this is the time when mankind will enter 'The Sacred Hall of Mirrors'. Where we will look at ourselves and analyze our behaviors with ourselves, with others, with nature and with the planet in which we live. A time in which all of humanity, by individual conscious decisions, decides to change and eliminate fear and lack of respect from all of our relationships. The Mayans prophesied that the start of this period would be marked by a solar eclipse on August 11, 1999, known to them as 13 Ahau, 8 Cauac. And would coincide with an unprecedented planetary alignment, the 'Grand Cross' alignment. This would be the last 13 years of the Katón period. The last opportunity for our civilization to realize the changes that are coming at the moment of our spiritual regeneration.
For the Mayans, everything is numbers and the time of the 13 sacred numbers started in August 1999. They predicted that along with the eclipse, the forces of nature would act like a catalyst of changes so accelerated and with such magnitude that mankind would be powerless against them. Also, that our technologies in which we rely on so much would begin to fail us. We would no longer be able to learn from our civilization in the way that we are organized as a society. They said that our internal, spiritual development would require a better place along with a better way to interact with more respect and compassion.
The first prophecies were attained by their study of our Sun. The Mayans discovered that the entire solar system moved. That even our universe has its own cycles. Repetitive periods which begin and end like our day and night. These discoveries lead to the understanding that our solar system rotates on an ellipse that brings our solar system closer and further from the center of the galaxy. In other words, according to the Mayans, our Sun and all of its planets rotate in cycles in relation to the center of the galaxy or Hunab-Kú, the central light of the galaxy. It takes 25,625 years for our solar system to make one cycle on this ellipse. One complete cycle is called a galactic day. The cycle is divided into two halves similar to our day and night. The half closest to the central light, is our solar system's 'day' and the half furthest away is its 'night'. Each day and each night lasts 12,800 years. Which is to say, the central galaxy is the Sun for our entire solar system.
The Mayans discovered that every grand cycle has its minor cycles, that carry the same characteristics. One galactic day of 25,625 years is divided into five cycles of 5,125 years. The first cycle is the galactic morning. When our solar system is just coming out of the darkness to enter the light. The second cycle is the mid-day. When our solar system is closest to the central light. The third cycle is the afternoon. When our solar system begins to come out of the light. The fourth cycle is the late-night. When our solar system has entered its furthest cycle from the central light. And the fifth and last cycle is night before dawn. When are solar system is in its last cycle of darkness before starting again. This is the cycle we are currently coming out of.
The Mayan prophecy tells us that in 1999, our solar system began to leave the end of the fifth cycle which started in 3113 B.C. and that we find ourselves in the morning of our galactic day, exiting darkness and on the verge of being in plain day of our central galaxy in 2012. They say that at the beginning and end of these cycles, which is to say, every 5,125 years, the central sun or light of the galaxy emits a ray of light so intense and so brilliant that it illuminates the entire universe. It is from this burst of light that all of the Suns and planets sync. The Mayans compare this burst to the pulse of the universe, beating once every 5,125 years. It is these pulses that mark the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Each pulse lasting 20 years, a Katún.
So we come back to what they call 'The Time of No Time'. It is an evolutionary period, short but intense, inside the grand cycles where great changes take place to thrust us into a new age of evolution as individuals and as mankind.
As individuals we will have to make decisions that will affect us all. If we continue on this negative path of hate, an eye for an eye, destruction of nature, of fear and egoism, we will enter straight into the time of destruction and chaos, and we will disappear as the dominant race of this planet. If we become conscious and realize that we all form part of a great organism, and that we should respect one another and be grateful to our planet, then we will move directly into positive growth, our Golden Age. Our planet, the Sun and the Galaxy are awaiting our decision. It is up to us what will happen in this time of change. Whether we go through a time of suffering and destruction or we find ourselves united in one positive consciousness moving closer to our next stage.
Please notice the events of our planet as evidence that the Mayan prophecies are worth listening to and learning from. Share this information and help us all move toward a better future, where we can thrive in a new era of positivity. It has never been so important.
www.december212012.com/articles/mayan/7.shtml
What is so special about the Mayan Calendar?
"The person with no previous exposure to the Mayan Calendar will usually initially be surprised by the fact that some people today take such an interest in an ancient calendar. After all, human history has seen a high number of different calendars. Is not then the Mayan calendar just a very specialized subject of interest only to specialists or history buffs? “Why would the world today need another calendar than the Gregorian or Muslim that are currently in use, and why should this be the Mayan calendar?” some may ask.
By Carl Johan Calleman
Well, to begin with most people probably have a much too limited view of the importance of the Mayan civilization, and Native American traditions generally. In fact, at their height in the 5th to 9th centuries AD, the Mayan cities would be among the largest in the world and developed the most advanced mathematics and astronomy of their day. And so, even if the Native American civilizations hardly survived the later contact with the Europeans they were and are the carriers of a significant and irreplaceable part of the global human consciousness.
When we talk about the Mayan Calendar something profoundly different is also meant than just a system to mark off the passage of time. The Mayan Calendar is above all a prophetic calendar that may help us understand the past and foresee the future. It is a calendar of the Ages that describes how the progression of Heavens and Underworlds condition the human consciousness and thus the frames for our thoughts and actions within a given Age. The Mayan Calendar provides an exact schedule for the Cosmic Plan and the unfolding of all things that come into existence. There is now ample empirical evidence for this, something that shines new light on the age old questions of mankind. Things do exist for a reason. The reason is that they fit into the divine cosmic plan. For those that seriously engage in a study of the Mayan Calendar this soon becomes evident and the former materialist world view loses all relevance. The Mayan Calendar is a gateway to the worlds of consciousness which the majority of humanity has been blinded to through the use of false or delusory calendars.
Since everything that exists is an aspect of consciousness, and the Mayan Calendar describes the evolution of consciousness in all of its aspects, no stone is left unturned for the serious student of the Mayan Calendar. All of science is affected, all of religion is affected, all of life is affected. We are here for a reason. Time is no longer equated with money, but with spirit. Time is inspiration!
2012 in brief
The Mayan civilization of Central America was and is the most advanced in relation to time-science knowledge. Their main calendar is the most accurate on the planet. It has never erred. The Mayan fifth world finished in 1987. The sixth world starts in 2012. So we are currently "between worlds"
1. Humanity and Planet Earth are currently going through a huge change or shift in consciousness and reality perception.
2. The Mayan civilization of Central America was and is the most advanced in relation to time-science knowledge. Their main calendar is the most accurate on the planet. It has never erred. They actually have 22 calendars in total, covering the many timing cycles in the Universe and Solar System. Some of these calendars are yet to be revealed.
3. The Mayan fifth world finished in 1987. The sixth world starts in 2012. So we are currently "between worlds". This time is called the "Apocalypse" or revealing. This means the real truth will be revealed. It is also the time for us to work through "our stuff" individually and collectively.
4. The Mayan sixth world is actually blank. This means it is up to us, as co-creators, to start creating the new world and civilization we want now.
5. The Mayans also say that by 2012
we will have gone beyond technology as we know it. we will have gone beyond time and money. we will have entered the fifth dimension after passing through the fourth dimension Planet Earth and the Solar System will come into galactic synchronization with the rest of the Universe. Our DNA will be "upgraded" (or reprogrammed) from the centre of our galaxy. (Hunab Ku) Everybody on this planet is mutating. Some are more conscious of it than others. But everyone is doing it.
6. In 2012 the plane of our Solar System will line up exactly with the plane of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. This cycle has taken 26,000 years to complete. Virgil Armstrong also says that two other galaxies will line up with ours at the same time. A cosmic event!
7. Time is speeding up (or collapsing). For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second, The military have used this as a very reliable reference. However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising. It is now over 12 cycles per second! This means there is the equivalent of less than 16 hours per day instead of the old 24 hours.
8. During the Apocalypse or the time "between worlds" many people will be going through many personal changes. The changes will be many and varied. It is all part of what we came here to learn or experience. Examples of change could be- relationships coming to an end, change of residence or location, change of job or work, shift in attitude or thinking etc."
What is so special about the Mayan Calendar? http://enlightenment.en.funpic.de/index.php
Pacal Votan's prophetic call is alerting present-day humanity that our biological process is transforming, approaching the culmination of a 26,000 year evolutionary program. Bringing the return of universal telepathy, heightened sense capacity, and self-reflective consciousness, this is a return to the sacred domain of our inner technology.
This grand cycle of evolution will culminate winter solstice, December 21, 2012 AD.
This time we are now in has been called "The Time of Trial on Earth," "Judgement Day," "The Time of Great Purification," "The End of this Creation," "The Quickening," "The End of Time as We Know It," "The Shift of the Ages." It is foretold that the completion of the Precession brings regeneration of Earth, offering awakening to all open, willing hearts. Many peoples spoke of these last days of the Great Cycle, including the: Maya, Hopi, Egyptians, Kabbalists, Essenes, Qero elders of Peru, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, Iroquois confederacy, Dogon Tribe, and Aborigines.
Mayan Prophecies and Calendar
"The Gregorian calendar is not in harmony with the forces of nature. The original Egyptian calendar was. But the Egyptian calendar was later modified by the Greeks/Spartan and then the Romans etc. 30 yrs after the birth of Christ, the calendar was off by 12 days. They had a council to bring it back (Julian). In 1582 it was again out of line and Pope Gregory brought in the best astronomers to align it once again. It still suffer changes. The Russian Orthodox did not accept this calendar until much later.
The Mayan calendar will need to be adjusted by one day in 380,000 years.
The Aztecs use different glyphs and is basically the same as the Mayan only slightly less evolved. Their glyphs are better in their representations of the energies though.
The Earth changes will continue until 2012. The Elders say that the process can be easy and aligned or can be catastrophic. Human energy will decide this.
Time and the calendar begin on the equinox of 3/21.
There had been a cycle of darkness that lasted 468 years (9 X 52) and ended on 3/30/1993.
We are now in a transition period called the 'Cycle of the merge of the dark and the light.' During this time humanity is going through great transition.
The cycle of light will come in full force on 12/21/2012.
This is considered the cycle of 13 lights and 13 heavens.
Many cycles begin on that same date.
Mother Earth as a living entity will transcend to another level or frequency or consciousness and a new and special era will begin.
The preparation for this is now in the womb of the Earth so to speak and the process of change is bringing transcendental manifestations.
This new era will be very positive. "Let all beings rise. Let not one or two stay behind".
The times are here for total brotherhood.
The spirit beings, different philosophies, different races must begin to weave together all knowledge to create the tapestry of harmony and balance. We are all seeing the evidence of this shift in human consciousness now. ...
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered or plumed serpent, represents kundalini which is the movement of energy from the Earth to the base of the spine then up the spine. This serpent/fire represents transcendence.
Quetzalcoatl, "The whole American continent is represented by an eagle or condor. It (America) has been called to take the torch for these times. One wing represents the physical and the other the material. The spiritual wing must continue to lift. When balance comes of both wings, then America will come unto it's own bringing the spiritual and material resources together."
Mayan Prophecies and Calendar http://www.crystalinks.com/mayanprophecies.html
Madrid Codex: (75-76)
WHAT HAVE THE HOPIS, MAYANS, AND OTHER NATIVE AMERICAN PEOPLES FORESEEN ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 2000?
Both the Hopis and Mayans recognize that we are approaching the end of a World Age. But the former, however, offer no time limits, while the latter have a calendar system whose grand Thirteen Baktun cycle will end either on December 24, 2011 or June 6, 2012 (depending on your method of calculation). In both cases, however, the Hopi and Mayan elders do not prophesy that everything will come to an end. Rather, this is a time of transition from one World Age into another. The message they give concerns our making a choice of how we enter the future ahead. Our moving through with either resistance or acceptance will determine whether the transition will happen with cataclysmic changes or gradual peace and tranquility. The same theme can be found reflected in the prophecies of many other Native American visionaries from Black Elk to Sun Bear.
This concept that we can make choices concerning our future destinies is one found not only in Native American prophecies but is really an essential ingredient in all true prophetic pronouncements. True prophecy is meant to be a reflection on the hidden natures and motivations of human behavior, both individually and collectively, as well as the future options based on the human ability to make a choice. True prophecy is thus more than merely a forecast. Its purpose is to provide the lesson that is to be learned from a potential future prognostication so that, if possible, the lesson is accepted and processed beforehand. Thus the course of the future can actually be changed, and a different pathway of prophesied events can be manifested into reality.
In this context, the period of time between now and the year 2012, with 2000 as the benchmark, appears to be shaping up into a decisive time period when important choices will be made and when any number of timelines for the future are possible. True prophecy is our guide to determine what those different timelines are and how we can make the right choices.
TOP 10 PROPHECIES FOR THE YEAR 2000 by Joseph Robert Jochmans
Aligning With the Spirit of the Maya Calendar End-Date 2012 by Dwayne Edward Rourke January 1, 2000
A great turning of the Gregorian calendar wheel has brought us to the threshold of a new millennium. Throughout the planet, people are filled with the sort of expectancy, excitement and anxiety such a threshold evokes. However, if any of us are looking to the calendar itself for guidance as to how to align with the spirit of this new time, we will likely be disappointed. Very little is provided there, other than a rather utilitarian segmentation of time into years, months and days. In contrast, the workings of a sacred calendar such as that found throughout Mesoamerica and especially in those areas inhabited by traditional Mayan people, provide a wealth of symbolism able to empower its adherents with insight and energy.
Clearly, all calendars throughout the world are arbitrary man-made constructions. Generally, they are based on alignment with particular celestial phenomena such as the solar or lunar year. Mayan calendars are no exception and currently the Mayan calendar tradition calls attention to the day we call December 21 , 2012. The Maya have been aware for hundreds of years that on that Winter solstice day, a unique astronomical event will occur: a very rare conjunction of the Sun with the ecliptic of the Milky Way galaxy....
In the direction EAST, universally acknowledged as the place of new beginnings, the Maya place the hieroglyph CHICCHAN (pronunciation: cheek'chan). CHICCHAN is the serpent mind, the mind that is constantly renewed and regenerated, through a process of shedding what no longer serves us. The physical body itself can be seen as an evolutionary skin periodically released, as one life ends and another begins. It is a body fueled ultimately by a form of solar energy the Maya call kultunlilni. Kultunlilni is the vital life force empowering all human growth and development. This crucial life-force is the same as what is known in Hindu cosmology as the serpent power: kundalini. Kundalini is the great evolutionary force making of each body and its occupant, a potentially powerful source of solar wisdom. Important for us to remember, however, is that this primary, very intimate and very powerful source of wisdom is only accessible to the extent that we are able to hear what our bodies, as carriers of its sacred gift, are actually telling us. Inevitably in this process, we turn to those with whom we feel a strong attraction or affinity. "
Aligning With the Spirit of the Maya Calendar End-Date 2012 http://www.dwayneedwardrourke.com/Pages/Mill2012.htm
What is the Millennium all about?
Consensus indicates that we are coming out of what the Indian tradition names Kali Yuga (this is the age of darkness/ignorance) and are on the verge of entering the Satya Yuga (the age of truth) when all falsehood will expose itself and drop away. The Yuga which links these two Yugas is named Krita Yuga ( Age of transition.)
From the Western Astrological perspective this seems to correspond with the understanding that we are transiting from the Piscean Age to the Age of Aquarius. The onset of the Aquarian Age speaks to us of spiritual awakenings, of the perfection of each human being, through an awareness of our own spiritual self. The time of rebirth and great spiritual development on earth. All this heralding a time of much greater joy and positivity.
Yet in the Christian tradition the generally accepted idea is that the Millennium starts around the year 2000. Websters 9th Collegiate Dictionary, USA, 1983 gives a definition as follows:- “The 1000 years mentioned in the Book of Revelation, chapter 20 during which Holiness is to prevail. A period of great happiness or human perfection”.
In the Islamic tradition there are many instances where the Holy Koran and the Hadith mention a future time of judgement & resurrection, known as the Qiyamah time. In the traditions of the prophet this time is indicated as coming some time after 1400 years (of the Hijri calendar), which again seems to coincide with the coming Millennium & twenty first century.
For Buddhists there is some expectation that the Wheel of Dharma, the metaphorical wheel of time is set to turn for the first time in 2500 years since Lord Buddha’s advent. Gautama Buddha apparently taught that each revolution of the wheel signalled a new beginning, or rebirth for humanity.
From the Book of Prophecies of the Knight John of Jerusalem (11th Century) comes the following: “The millennium that comes after this millennium will change into a light time. People will love and share and dream, and dreams will come true.” Further it adds: “People will be one big body of which every person is a tiny part. Together they’ll be the heart and they’ll speak one language.” “Men will have reached heaven” “Men will know the Spirit of all things” “People will receive a second birth and the Spirit will come into them.”
Ancient Sibylline Oracles of the Roman era perhaps also add to the collective vision of what the future may hold...for example “Vice shall leave the earth and be sunk in the divine ocean”
William Blake (1757-1827) speaks of the Judaic tradition in his work: ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. V14 as follows: The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed (overthrown) in fire at the end of six thousand years is true,....For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave guard at(the) tree of life: and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed (overthrown) and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has so closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
So what does the past say about the present? Well in short-many things. What is intriguing is the faint echo from the past which informs us of a hitherto unsuspected phenomenon, namely the coming of a feminine spiritual personality, a Mother, who will facilitate a collective rebirth. Here are some selected references which allude to this happening!
Predictions about the Spiritual Mother
In a book published in 1887 titled “The Mystery of the Ages” by Marie, Countess of Caithness (Page 316-317) the following prediction appears:- “It was generally considered, at the turn of the next century, that the next Divine incarnation was about to come to earth and would be female, the advent of Divine Wisdom, or Theo-Sophia, and that the present age would be the age of making known all that which has been kept secret from the beginning.”
This is an extract from the Nadigranth compiled by Mr Shantaram Athvale. The Nadigranth was originally written in Sanskrit 2000 years back by the ancient astrologer Bhrigumuni and later updated & translated into Marathi and titled the Kak Nadi by Kakayyar Bhujander who was a great astrologer and seeker who lived nearly 300 years ago in India. In this particular extract Shantaram Athvale refers to the writings from Kak Nadi written by Kakayyar Bhujander:
“While Jupiter is in Pisces a great Yogi will incarnate on the Earth. By 1970 it will have become quite evident to many people that a new era will have started. Human life will undergo a complete revolution. This Yogi will be the Incarnation of Parabrahma and will have all the divine powers.
By the new method of yoga devised by the great Yogi, human beings will be able to attain the joy of Moksha within one lifetime. While living ordinary lives people will achieve Yoga – Union with God. In the end all the nations of the world will come together with the feeling of oneness. There will be a great international conference in a big city of the world. The whole of the humanity will understand the importance of prayer and all the nations will unite together.
Due to new scientific discoveries science and religions would become one. With the help of science the existence of God and the Soul could be proved. The veil of ignorance and Maya would be drawn aside and Brahmananda, Moksha which could previously only be attained by yogis as a result of very hard work and severe penance would become easily available to many human beings.”
William Blake (28 Nov 1757-12 Aug 1827) gives us this prophetic poem titled “To Morning.” Seemingly it is an invocation to what he perceived as the feminine aspect of the Divine, whom would facilitate the dawning of a new age and the unlocking of Heaven on Earth.
“O Holy Virgin, Clad in purest white Unlock heaven’s golden gates and issue forth Awake the dawn that sleeps, that sleeps in heaven Let light rise from the chambers of the East”
C.S Lewis (1898-1963) in his book the Great Divorce describes some kind of approaching procession of great joyousness. “If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after this a lady in whose honour this was being done” and “Every young man or boy that met her became her son” further “Every girl that met her became her daughter” and “There are those that steal other peoples children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.” and also...”Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things in the universe to life.”
The R.S.V. Christian Bible, Revelation, chapter 12, verse 1, tells us prophetically of a marvellous event to come, of a sign, of a woman. “And a great portent appeared in heaven a woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”
In the Prophecies of John of Jerusalem an 11th century knight we read the following regarding ‘the Mother’ and the coming Millennium time. “She will be a great Master of the future times.....” “She will be the Mother of the Millennium that comes after the Millennium.” “After the days of the devil She will make the softness of a Mother flow. g) In the Christian Gnostic Gospel of Thomas this mysterious divine feminine power is alluded to in verse 101 as:- “My mother gave me birth My true Mother gave me Life”
The Essene Gospel of Peace, Book 1 (Page 7), speaks of this feminine aspect of the divine as being an inner life force, as something to be realised. “Your Mother is in you, and you in her, She gives you life.”
In ancient writings of the Bible and also Gnostic records...the energy now known to many today as Kundalini energy is called by various names such as: Sophia, Life, Mother of the living or Wisdom. This force called Wisdom is likened to a feminine energy, and even a feminine personality ........ named as She and Her. In these writings the words; She...Her ...Wisdom & Holy Spirit are used interchangeably to refer to this feminine aspect of the Divine. Also later known in Christian texts as the Holy Ghost, Comforter, Counsellor and Redeemer.
From the ancient Wisdom of Solomon written some 2500 years back we read: Chapter 6, Verse, 12-17: 6.12-”Wisdom is radiant and unfading and she is easily discerned (recognised) by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. 6.13-She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. ..... and 6.16-She goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought.
7. 22-24-For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, dynamic (keen), irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits .........................that are intelligent and pure and most subtle.
7.24-For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness.... she pervades and penetrates all things. . 7.25-For she is a breath (wind) of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
7.26-For she is a reflection of eternal light, and a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.
7.27-Though she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets:
7.28-For God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with wisdom.
7.29-For she is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior,....
8.1-She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.
8. 4-For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,
8.5-If riches are a desirable possession in life what is richer than wisdom, who effects all things?
8.6-And if understanding is effective, who more than she who is the fashioner of what exists?
8.8-And if any one longs for wide experience, she knows the things of old, and infers the things to come; she understands turns of speech and solutions to (life’s) riddles she has foreknowledge of signs and wonders and the outcomes of seasons and times.
8.16-When I enter my house, (the body/ temple) I shall find rest with her, for companionship with her has no bitterness, and life with her has no pain, but (is)gladness and joy.
8. 17-18-For in kinship with wisdom there is immortality and in friendship with her....pure delight and in labour’s of her hands, unfailing wealth, and in experience of her company, understanding and renown in sharing her words.
9.11-For she knows and understands all things,.....
And what of Sophia, of Wisdom, of the Holy Spirit, Comforter, Counsellor, Redeemer? Well people say She is here, residing within each and everyone of us as a sleeping potential, an inner life force, known widely as the Kundalini energy. This unique energy resides in the sacrum (sacred) bone. It is said that She can be awakened if one truly desires it so. It sounds like a dream but that’s what this music seeks to proclaim and celebrate. Further it is said that the one who resurrects this inner Divine Life Force, en-masse, is the Divine Mother, Goddess, Holy Spirit, who is verily a Comforter, Counsellor, Redeemer.
This inner living resurrection can be enjoyed every day, and each second by those who experience it. What’s more, it is celebrated globally on the anniversary of the opening of the Sahasrara. The Sahasrara is the universal energy centre located at the crown of the head, at the fontanelle, the seventh chakra or highest centre of consciousness, known otherwise as the thousand petalled lotus. It is through this last centre that one is able to connect with the all pervading universal divine “that is”. On the day it was opened on a cosmic level it is said that the whole atmosphere was filled with tremendous chaitanya (divine life force energy-vibrations) and there was tremendous light in the sky, and the whole thing came on the Earth. Since that day, thousands upon thousands of seekers from every nation have crossed paths with the one who ‘delivers the goods’. For as the Ancient Wisdom of Solomon promises: Verse 6. 12 – “Wisdom is radiant and unfading and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.” “She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.” and “...she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought. Hence the song lyrics: “She was also in your City. Haven’t you heard?”
Every year since 1970, the moment when the last centre in our evolutionary assent was opened, great celebrations have been taking place with people gathering from every nation & religious tradition somewhere on the world stage. And the day of commemoration – May 5th. Hence, it was a big surprise to find some predictions regarding this particular day, May 5th, for the year 2000, the so called Millennium year.
The Fernbank Science Centre Planetarium of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA have carried out various assessments and concluded that there will be a line-up of planets (heavenly bodies) in the next Millennium. Such line-ups may have only the subtlest of effects upon our lives, so no armageddon type scenarios, please. In short various planets; Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and the Sun and the new Moon will come into alignment with Earth, in a most unique conjunction or union. Momentarily being connected along invisible gravitational lines of energy. Like a cosmic string of pearls. Perhaps this will be a particularly auspicious day. And when? On the precise date of May 5th, 2000. This is mentioned only to spark curiosity, to lead the attention onward, to activate the seeking and questing faculty, to stimulate the desire to know, feel and experience the eternal. Everyone can do it..... if they wish!
All this excitement about the so called Millennium may lead us in the wrong directions. The Millennium isn’t a one moment event, if anything it more clearly represents a dawning. As a seed sprouts and promises new growth, so we might look upon the idea of the Millennium. After all, this time business is in essence just a man made concept, and perhaps not too much should be made of it. In any event it is commonly debated that the Julian (Christian calendar) is only accurate to about plus or minus seven years. (So the Millennium could really be anywhere between 1993-2007).
Hence, some say, it is best to stay in the present and tap into that inner state beyond time, the fifth dimension, accessible by achieving a state of ‘thoughtless awareness’ at the Sahasrara chakra.....otherwise known as the Turiya State or Eternity.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 makes the following plea:- “Oh! Mother, let my mind awake slowly on the Sacred Shore of the sea, where great souls of the world have come together to offer their pranams. Here with outstretched hands we bow-down to the Divine in human form. In bounteous poetry and in great joy we adore thee. Behold here oh seeker! The mountain of meditation with rivers resounding and dancing to the solemn music of heaven. Adore here your Sacred Mother Earth where great souls have come together on the seashore to offer their pranams. Come oh! Aryans, come non Aryans, come Hindus and Muslims. Come come oh Englishmen, come Christians, come oh Brahmins purify your heart, hold the hands of the down-trodden and out-castes. Remove all ills and disrespect. Come quickly for the coronation (anointing) of the Mother,” Blossom Time is indeed here! This is the season!
— Geoffrey Godfrey
Knowledge of Reality Magazine 1996-2006
QUOTES OF SHRI MATAJI
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
"But today it is the day I declare I am the One who have to save the humanity. I declare I am the One who is Adi Shakti, who is the Mother of all Mothers, who is the Primordial Mother, the Shakti (Divine Primordial Power) of the Desire of God, who has incarnated on this Earth to give meaning to itself, to this Creation, to human beings, and I am sure that through My Love and Patience and My Powers I am going to achieve it.
I was the One who was born again and again. But now I have come in My complete Form and with complete Powers. I have come on this Earth not only for salvation of human beings, not only for their emancipation, but for granting them the Kingdom of Heaven, the Joy, the Bliss that your Father wants to bestow upon you."
Shri Puratana Devi (Purantana: Primordial or Ancient)
On July 26, 1995, the Great Primordial Goddess revealed that the Miracle Photo was genuine. Implying that over the duration of 21 full moons all the Messengers of God Almighty had given enough evidence necessary for the Believers on Earth to surrender to the Divine Message to humanity the Great Primordial Mother ended Her Revelations with these parting words: "We Have Done Our Job Here." Thus 1995 fits perfectly with the ancient Mayan prophecy that "a calendar cycle of twice the Kal-tun of 260 years had to go by in order for the Solar culture to flourish again for the benefit of all humanity." The actual prophecy reads;
“In the year 1475, before the arrival of the Spanish, The Supreme Maya Council revealed the long-held vision of an ancient Solar Grandmother named X'Nuuk'K'in, that a calendar cycle of twice the Kal-tun of 260 years had to go by in oder for the Solar culture to flourish again for the benefit of all humanity. In the spring of 1995, this 520 year period will be completed. Thus, 1995 is a decisive year and the human race will have to enter the path of the cosmic light if it is to remain a thinking species. Humans will have to seek the path of initiation on Earth and in Heaven. Through Solar Initiation they will be able to see the luminosity of the Great Spirit...through Solar Initiation, the sleeping body of humankind can be awakened." Hunab K'u (Creator) will flash like lightening that will pierce through the shadows that envelop the human race. Let us prepare to receive the light of knowledge" (paraphrased Mayan prophesy)
www.nativenet.uthscsa.edu/
Temple of Kukulkan
Temple of Kukulkan (Serpent)
"Quetzalcoatl taught the ancients all the necessary skills to advance
their civilization, from mathematics and science to agriculture and
astronomy, as well as the famous Mayan calendrical formulae which
predicts the end of the world to be December 21st 2012. He taught the
people to live in peace and then moved on disappearing across the
sea, but he promised he would someday return. Unfortunately for the
ancient inhabitants of Mexico they mistook the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadors and Cortez in 1519 as Quetzalcaotl's return, bringing
about their tragic doom. Accepting them with open arms and treating
them with utmost reverence the ancient people expected their newly
arrived god to bestow great benevolence upon them. Instead the
Spanish invaders brought nothing but greed and brutality for their
trusting hosts.
The name Quetzalcoatl (ket-tsul'kwot-ul) means "plumed or feathered
serpent". We must certainly then mention the great ancient city of
Chichen Itza on Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. There, twice a year, an
amazing spectacle related to the feathered serpent god takes place:
"The Temple of Kukulkan (the Feathered Serpent God, also known as
Quetzalcoatl) is the largest and most important ceremonial structure
at Chichen Itza. This ninety-foot tall pyramid was built during the
eleventh to thirteenth centuries directly upon the multiple
foundations of previous temples. The pyramid is a store-house of
information on the Mayan calendar. ... The northern stairway was the
principal sacred path leading to the summit. At sunset on the vernal
and autumnal equinoxes, an interplay between the sun's light and the
edges of the stepped terraces on the pyramid creates a fascinating -
and very brief - shadow display upon the sides of the northern
stairway. A serrated line of seven interlocking triangles (chakras) gives the
impression of a long tail leading downward to the stone head of the
serpent Kukulkan (Kundalini), at the base of the stairway." (Linda Casselman)
So then, on these two very important dates, the vernal and autumnal
equinoxes, it appears that Quetzalcoatl is indeed present among his
people as the shadow of the serpent moves along the steps of the
Pyramid of Kulkulkan.
"This Power is placed in the triangular bone which is called as sacrum, which means Greeks knew about this centre. They very well knew about it, that’s why they called it sacred, sacrum. In many countries there has been a manifestation that they know about this particular Power.
I happened to go to Colombia where I collected an authentic antique copy of the antique necklace. The necklace had at its bottom a Kundalini and even the earrings had the Kundalini, but, surprisingly, it was from the Indians of America, though it is now kept in the museum in Colombia. It was in America that people knew about Kundalini, definitely absolutely in three and a half coil they had done this pattern very well. Is very surprising that it was done even before Columbus came here."
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi Philadelphia, USA — Oct 15, 1993
Serpent Mound and associated constellations-Draco and the Little Dipper. Aerial photo Great Serpent Mound
A most fascinating ancient Native American archaeological site found in Ohio,
USA, called the "Great Serpent Mound", features an undulating snake's body, its
coiled tail reminiscent of the Kundalini lying dormant in the sacrum. In its
mouth appears an egg, symbol of the potential actualization of Second Birth.
Is it possible, then, that the ancient Native American Peoples were worshiping
the Divine Feminine and were deeply aware of the symbolic, spiritual
significance of the Serpent Power and the Primordial Egg?
Although scholars are uncertain as to the precise significance of this Great
Serpent Mound, it is, however, highly likely that this site was revered by
American Indians as the sacred representation of Kundalini awakening (Second
Birth).
Other sources offer added information on the Great Serpent Mound:
"The Great Serpent Mound, in Adams County, Ohio, USA, is considered to be the
world's largest serpent effigy. The mound is a quarter of a mile long and five
feet high, and it was originally much higher."[1]
"The Great Serpent Mound continues to wind its quarter-mile length along an Ohio
hilltop...By the end of the nineteenth century, archaeologists were able to show
that the mounds had in fact been built by Native American civilizations many
centuries before-a-long-lost-civilization such as Greece, Persia, Holy Land or
mythical island of Atlantis."[2]
"...the two structures [Stonehenge and the Great Serpent Mound in the USA] share
the same timeline. From carbon dating in and around Stonehenge, the Council for
British Archaeology (CBA) gives an early date for the core of Stonehenge at
3,000 B.C.E. or 5,000 years ago. The design of Serpent Mound was conceived about
5,000 years ago as well-and is therefore among the oldest of earth and stone
works in North America--or in fact the world. In this, Stonehenge and Serpent
Mound are coeval. That time period is referred to in North American archaeology
as being of the "Archaic Period" (approximately 6000 B.C.E. to 1000 B.C.E.)
www.greatserpentmound.info/stonehenge.html
References
[1]Calloway, Colin G.Indians of the Northeast / Colin G.Calloway - The First
Americans series.New York, NY,USA. Facts on File,Inc. Copyright,1991.ISBN:
0-8160-2389-1. pp. 15,16
[2]Wood, Marion. The World of Native Americans, First Edition. New York,
NY10010,156 Fifth Ave. Peter Bedwick Books.1997. ISBN: 0750022760(hc.) pp.10,11
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
"It is important to understand about your own Kundalini, as Self realisation is Self knowledge and the one who gives Self knowledge is your own Kundalini because when she rises , she points out what are the problems on your Chakras. Now we say that it is pure desire. It is your chaste desire. It has no lust or greed in it. That power is your Mother and She Is settled down in the triangular bone. She knows everything about you just as a tape recorder. She is absolute knowledge. Because She is so pure that whatever Chakra She touches, She knows what is wrong with that Chakra before hand; so She is quite prepared and She adjusts herself fully so that you do not get a problem by the awakening. If any Chakra is constricted , She waits and goes on slowly opening that Chakra.
The Kundalini is the primordial power and is reflected in you. In a human being, it is like many strands of energy, like rope. This energy is all twisted together to form that Kundalini. In a human being the strands are 3 x 7 = 21 Nadis raised to the power of 108. When your kundalini rises, one or two strands out of this come up and pierce the fontanelle bone. It has to pass through the innermost nadi known as Brahma Nadi. It is a spiral movement throughout. The kundalini is spiral and nadis are also like a spiral. The outer most nadi is the right side Nadi, “Pingala Nadi”. The second innermost is Ida Nadi. She starts sending these threads through Brahma Nadi; by that they relax the centre. By relaxing of Centre, the sympathetic nervous system also starts relaxing, your pupils start dilating and when it has pierced the Agnya, then the eyes will be completely dilated and shining. Then She enters into Sahasrara.
It is absolutely the pure light of knowledge of love, compassion and attention. All these things are in that energy. We know of many energies like electrical, light energy etc. These energies cannot think. They cannot adjust and work on their own.
They have to be handled by us. But this energy itself is the living energy and knows how to handle itself. It thinks. If you see a seed being sprouted, you will find at the tip of the seed, there is a small little cell which knows how to go around the soft places, how to encircle the stones and how to find its way towards the source. That cell has got a little Kundalini in it. But within you a tremendous force of Kundalini exists. When a realised soul says that he should have more compassion, as my compassion, is not alright; my concern about others, my generosity is not alright, I have exploited other’s love. Then this energy starts moving, giving you that greater dimension of love and compassion. If you do not want to grow in your awareness then She does not supply the energy which is stored in you.
The Kundalini is there to nourish you, look after you and make you grow by giving you a higher, wider and deeper personality. All her power is nothing but love. She gives the power to forgive. Even when you think, the energy for thinking comes from Kundalini because you are asking her help.
The power of Kundalini is absolute purity, auspiciousness, holiness, chastity, self respect, pure love, detachment, concern, enlightened attention to give you Joy. As a mother will try whatever is possible to give Joy to her child, in the same way, this Kundalini has only one power and that is how to give Joy to her own Children. When we talk in the light of Kundalini, we have to understand that this light spreads in your life, outside your life and expresses itself in a very beautiful manner.
When you worship Adi Kundalini, the reflection in you, which is your Kundalini, is very happy. Also the deities feel happy.
The power of Kundalini which is your own Mother has to rise and manifest itself, because of your Pure Desire. In your introspection, pujas and in your Meditation, you should see for yourself, why are you in Meditation. It is for Pure Desire of compassion and love to be awakened within us. The growth has started and you will find that this shell which is human conditioning and ego will just break open. It is in the triangular bone, which comes up, manifests and can save the whole world. Just see the magnificence, the expansion, the greatness of this Kundalini which was within you and which came up in its full strength and has shown tremendous things.
The joy we feel during music recitals is because Kundalini is dancing. She gets happy because you ask for nothing but enjoyment of collectivity.
You are yourself fully connected when you are absolutely detached and your
xyco ()
edited on: Jun 19 2009, 13:55
Crop circle found in Wiltshire
A huge intricate crop circle sculpted in a sea of barley has appeared near an ancient British burial mound in Wiltshire.
Published: 1:57PM BST 29 May 2009
The formation, measuring approximately 350ft (100 metres), seems to depict a Yin Yang pattern and appeared on May 25 beneath Windmill Hill, near Devizes.
It was captured on camera at an area close to the great man-made mound of Silbury Hill, Wiltshire.
As many other crop circles previously spotted in the area, it seems to follow the Yin and Yang theme.
The green and then golden fields of the world's crop circle capital of Wiltshire have spawned an array of patterns in the past that have fascinated those who seek them out.
Enthusiasts and experienced crop pattern hunters have often spotted formations appearing close to these sacred sites.
The crop circle season extends from April to harvesting in September, and is believed to be worth millions of pounds to the local economy.
Windmill Hill is thought to date to the Early Neolithic period some 5000 years ago, 3700 BC and was constructed as a causeway enclosure. It is the largest known of its kind measuring 21 acres (8.5ha).
It consists of three rings of concentric ditches, which were probably dug out in the same manner as the deep Avebury ditch, using antlers and oxen shoulder blades.
It was a major task taking many man-hours over many years.
It is thought that the camp was at its most important as a farming community during a relatively peaceful and prosperous time of approximately 3000- 3500 years until the advent of the Romans when their presence is evidenced by traces of a villa found on the western slopes of the mound.
It's a dark road
And a dark way that leads to my house
And the word says
You're never gonna find me there oh no
I've got an open door
It didn't get there by itself
It didn't get there by itself
There's a feelin
But you're not feelin' it at all
There's a meaning
But you're not listening any more
I look at that open road
I'm gonna walk there by myself
And if you catch me
I might try to run away
You know I can't be here too long
And if you let me
I might try to make you stay
Seems you never realise a good thing
Till it's gone..
Maybe im still searchin
But I dont know what it means
All the fires of destruction are still
Burnin' in my dreams
There's no water that can wash away
This longin' to come clean
Hey yea yea....
I cant find the joy within my soul
It's just sadness takin hold
I wanna come in from the cold
And make myself renewed again
It takes strength to live this way
The same old madness every day
I wanna kick these blues away
I wanna learn to live again...
It's a dark road
And a dark way that leads to my house
And the word says
You're never gonna find me there oh no
I've got an open door
It didn't get there by itself
It didn't get there by itself
Lost
This is the sound of the planes in the night
Coming out of the darkness
And into the light
Shining alarmingly
Curiously bright
This is the sound of those murderous drums
The marching of footsteps
The twisting of thumbs
Over and over
Again here it comes
We're lost
(baby come again don't let me fall)
We're lost
(baby come again despite it all)
Were lost
(baby come)
(baby come)
Tell me the story
'bout when you were young
I want to hear it again
Leave in the part
Where the hero gets stung
I want to savour it
I want to play it again
This is the sound of a baby's first breath
The dying of footsteps
The touching of flesh
To hold in your memory
To keep by your chest
We're lost
So lost
Lost
Big Sky
Big sky
I'm gonna hurt you
Big sky
You'll remember this
Big sky
Up above the rain
How can I ever put a stop to it?
Look you in the face again
Big sky
I'll never let you go
Big sky
Baby I told you so
Big sky
Look at this swollen pride
I got so busy lookin' out for you
When were you by my side?
When I'm breathin'
When I'm sleepin'
I can't think of nothing else
All my longing'
All my waiting'
All my wailin'
All my standin' on the shelf
How am I ever gonna get through this
Back to myself again?
Big sky
I never knew you
Big sky
Let me down again
Big sky
I'm givin' you the blame
How did I ever get stuck in this?
Give me some grace again
Won't you say it isn't so?
Watch me fallin'
See me fallin'
I slipped through
The vortex of the sky
Darkness and light
Is what's inside
Darkness and light
Is what's inside
Love is Blind
Oh... sugar
When ya gonna come?
I spend my life gettin older
But you still got me on the run
When ya gonna come?
Oh. . sweetness
When will you mine?
I spend my days getting' colder
But I still want you all the time
Oh the grass is growin greener
On the other side
Nothing else has meaning
When I got you on my mind
I so wanna see you
Don't they say that love is blind?
Oh love is blind
Love is blind
I got so much trouble gettin into this
Can't decide if its hell or bliss
Sometimes I feel like I dont exist
Cut my veins and slit my wrists
Goodbye
Goodbye
That's all she wrote
As she tied that knot around her throat
Wipe my eyes
Dry my tears
Wait for you for a thousand years
Oh lover
Make me yours again
Even though your thrill is gone
All my fellins still remain
Even though your thrill is gone
I'm gonna love you just the same
Can't you see that i'm addicted
To the notion of a someone
Who could take me from this wretched state
Save me from the bitterness and hatred of humanity
Its so screwed up
Tired of bein' down on luck
Tired of bein' beaten up
Tired of bein' so screwed up
Tired of all this desperation
Tired of all this mad frustration
Tired of all the aggravation
Sick and tired of devastation
Give it some consideration
(a.lennox-songs of mass destruction)
xyco ()
Nov 6 2009, 17:54
Love me, love me, love me, say you do
Let me fly away with you
For my love is like the wind, and wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
Give me more than one caress, satisfy this hungriness
Let the wind blow through your heart
For wild is the wind, wild is the wind
[CHORUS]
You touch me,
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins
You're spring to me, all things to me
Don't you know, you're life itself!
Like the leaf clings to the tree,
Oh, my darling, cling to me
For we're like creatures of the wind, and wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
[CHORUS]
Like the leaf clings to the tree,
Oh, my darling, cling to me
For we're like creatures in the wind, and wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
xyco ()
edited on: Nov 15 2009, 01:01
Ziggurats and the Greatest of them - Sumerian Ziggurat of Ur
A ziggurat “to build on a raised area” is a temple tower of the ancient Mesopotamian valley and Iran, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories. Ziggurats were a form of temple common to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia.The earliest examples of the ziggurat date from the end of the third millennium BCE and the latest date from the 6th century BCE.
Built in receding tiers upon a rectangular, oval, or square platform, the ziggurat was a pyramidal structure. Sun-baked bricks made up the core of the ziggurat with facings of fired bricks on the outside. The facings were often glazed in different colors and may have had astrological significance. The number of tiers ranged from two to seven, with a shrine or temple at the summit. Access to the shrine was provided by a series of ramps on one side of the ziggurat or by a spiral ramp from base to summit.
Notable examples of this structure include the Great Ziggurat of Ur and Khorsabad in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian ziggurats were not places for public worship or ceremonies. They were believed to be dwelling places for the gods. Through the ziggurat the gods could be close to mankind and each city had its own patron god. Only priests were permitted inside the ziggurat and it was their responsibility to care for the gods and attend to their needs. As a result the priests were very powerful members of Sumerian society.
Ziggurats and the Greatest of them - Sumerian Ziggurat of Ur
There are 32 known ziggurats near Mesopotamia. Four of them are in Iran, and the rest are mostly in Iraq. The most recent to be discovered was Sialk, in central Iran. The Sialk, in Kashan, Iran, is the oldest known zigurrat, dating to the early 3rd millennium BCE. One of the best preserved ziggurats is Choqa Zanbil in western Iran, which has survived despite the devastating eight year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s in which many archeological sites were destroyed.
Ziggurat designs ranged from simple bases upon which a temple sat, to marvels of mathematics and construction which spanned several terraced stories and were topped with a temple.
An example of a simple ziggurat is the White Temple of Uruk, in ancient Sumer. The ziggurat itself is the base on which the White Temple is set. Its purpose is to get the temple closer to the heavens, and provide access from the ground to it via steps.An example of an extensive and massive ziggurat is the Marduk ziggurat, or Etemenanki, of ancient Babylon.
Unfortunately, not much of even the base is left of this massive structure, yet archeological findings and historical accounts put this tower at seven multicolored tiers, topped with a temple of exquisite proportions. The temple is thought to have been painted and maintained an indigo color, matching the tops of the tiers. It is known that there were three staircases leading to the temple, two of which (side flanked) were thought to have only ascended half the ziggurat’s height.
Etemenanki, the name for the structure, is Sumerian and means “The Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” Most likely being built by Hammurabi, the ziggurat’s core was found to have contained the remains of earlier ziggurats and structures. The final stage consisted of a 15 meter hardened brick encasement constructed by King Nebuchadnezzar.
Ziggurats and the Greatest of them - Sumerian Ziggurat of Ur
It has been suggested that the ziggurat was a symbolic representation of the primeval mound upon which the universe was thought to have been created. The ziggurat may have been built as a bridge between heaven and earth. The temples of the Sumerians were believed to be a cosmic axis, a vertical bond between heaven and earth, and the earth and the underworld, and a horizontal bond between the lands. Built on seven levels the ziggurat represented seven heavens and planes of existence, the seven planets and the seven metals associated with them and their corresponding colors.
Joseph Campbell in his Masks of God books says that there is archaelogical evidence supporting a direct link between Mesopotamian ziggurats and the pyramids of Egypt. Campbell also states that from Egypt, the Mesopotamian culture was passed on almost simultaneously on two separate fronts to Crete and India. From India it reached China and from there it crossed the ocean to the pre-columbian societies of Central and South America, which could explain the similarities between ziggurats and Mayan pyramids.
Campbell further explores the geometry of the ziggurat and its philosophical and spiritual repercussions. According to Campbell, ziggurats first appeared during a sudden scientific and philosophical golden age where such other discoveries were made such as the invention of the wheel, the discovery of the calendar and astronomy, as well as the invention of the written word. For Campbell these are all related.
The Earth needs 365 days to make a single revolution around the Sun, which is also an approximation of the number of degrees in a circle. Ziggurats, like all pyramidal structures, have a square base which could be encompassed within a circular area. The square base theoretically represents the additional five days. The five days can be seen in the four points of the square as well as the fifth point in the middle, which is the point of the square’s equilibrium as well as the point of equilibrium of whatever circle that encompasses it.
The fifth point represents the bridge to heaven represented by the circle, a universally considered symbol for infinity and perfection, and the terrestrial world in turn represented by the square. The highest point of a pyramid is a projection of the square’s center point. This can be interpreted as the earth’s highest point being heaven’s lowest.
There are examples of the philosophies surrounding the ziggurat in all major ancient civilizations of the world, which Campbell has affirmed is no accident. Examples can be observed in the seven leveled Chakra system of India as well as the dualistic Yin-Yang of China.
World-Wide Migrations of the Gutians
According to linguistics and internal evidence of the Avesta, the Irano-Aryan language family originated high in the splendid Hind Kush or "Indian Kushana" mountains of Afghanistan. Historical data indicates that one of these Proto-Iranic-speaking tribes was denominated 'Gut' or 'Got'. This ancient Iranic root denominated "warrior", as the erudite Waddell notes, "the affixed title of Gut or "Goth" or 'Warrior'" (Waddell 1929, p.114) One branch of this legendary Gut or warrior tribe migrated to India, where they eventually became the renowned Jats.
Another branch migrated to Europe, where they became variously known as Goths, Gaetonnes, and Getae, inaugurating the well-known Gothic phase of architecture and giving their name to several places such as Jutland and Gotland. Yet another branch migrated to Sumeria, establishing one of the greatest empires in Sumerian history. Denominated Gutian, this branch drove back the barbaric Semitic Akkadian invaders and inaugurated the famous Neo-Sumerian renaissance. A researcher summarizes the history of the Gutians thus: "The Guti/Qutils of central and southern Kurdistan, after gradually unifying the smaller mountain principalities, became strong enough in 2250 BC to actually annex Sumeria and the rest of lowland Mesopotamia. A Guti/Qutil dynasty ruled Sumeria for 130 years until 2120 BC." (Izady 1993)
Fig.1: Guto-Sumerian Ziggurat: Splendours of Sumeria as depicted in artistic rendition by Dawn Razor. Note the striking resemblance to mountains. The Gutians erected ziggurats in memory of their homeland in the Hind Kush mountains of Iran. Massive Gutian ziggurats contrasted with smaller structures of the Ugro-Altaic Sumerians (see below).
Ethnic History of Sumer
The dolichocephalic (long-headed) Iranic Gutians entered Sumeria as the last in a succession of conquering races. The sequence of ethnic groups in generally accepted to have been as follows:
1. Negro-Dravidians, also called Ubaidians or Proto-Euphrateans, were the earliest inhabitants. Remnants of this people survived for long in Elam.
2. Sumerians, members of the round-headed Turanoid race, succeeded the Ubaidians. Their origin was generally sought in the Altaic regions: "Even King, in his History of Sumer and Akkad, looked, as we have seen, toward Turkestan for the beginnings of Sumerian culture." (Luckenbill 1923, p.7) Regarding the close, yet not conclusive, relation between Sumerian and Ugric, Coon notes:
"The supposed kinship between Sumerian and Finno-Ugrian cannot easily be evaluated, owing largely to the gap of over three millennia between the known forms of each. Both groups are agglutinative, but the grammatical structure of Sumerian also has verbal prefixes, often with personal tone, unknown in modern Finnic or Ugric." (Coon 1939, Ch.VI, sect.1: Race, Languages, and European Peoples)
3. Barbaric Akkadian Semites, related to the Sabaeans, overthrew the Sumerians.
4. The Gutians in turn overthrew the Semitic Akkadian tyranny, inaugurating the Neo-Sumerian renaissance which continued long into the subsequent Ur III dynasty.
Fig.2: Map of Gutium, courtesy Gary Fletcher
Kurdistan as Gutium
One of the clearest indicators that the powerful Gutians of Gutium were members of the Irano-Afghan race is provided by the geographical location of ancient Gutium, which lies within the modern orbit of the distribution of Irano-Aryan languages. In fact, ancient Gutium appears to have been merely another name for modern Kurdistan, a region inhabited by the Iranic-speaking Kurds today. In this regard, the great savant Archibald H. Sayce holds that the name of Kurdistan represents a mere derivation of 'Gutium':
"Who "Tidal king of Goyyim" may have been we cannot tell. Sir Henry Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia." (Sayce 1895, Ch.3)
The astute Jensen goes one step further, and identifies the Gutians as ancestors of the modern Kurds:
"The thirty million Kurds of the Middle East have lived in Kurdistan before record of modern history was kept. The very first mention of the Kurds in history was about 3,000 BC, under the name Gutium, as they fought the Summerians (Spieser). Later around 800 BC, the Indo-European Median tribes settled in the Zagros mountain region and coalesced with the Gutiums, and thus the modern Kurds speak from as Aryan language (Morris). The Kurds are mentioned by Xenaphon, a Greek mercenary, as he retreated from Persia with ten thousand men in 401 BC, he says of the Kurds, "These people, lived in the mountains and were very war-like and not subject to the Persian king. Indeed once a royal army of 120,000 thousand had once invaded their country, and not a man of them came back..(Morris)." (Jensen 1996)
Ancient Gutium was located within the modern Kurdistan, as Easton notes:
" Shoa Opulent, the mountain district lying to the north-east of Babylonia, anciently the land of the Guti, or Kuti, the modern Kurdistan. The plain lying between these mountains and the Tigris was called su-Edina, i.e., "the border of the plain." This name was sometimes shortened into Suti and Su, and has been regarded as = Shoa (Eze 23:23). Some think it denotes a place in Babylon. (See PEKOD.)" (Easton 1897, entry "Shoa")
In this regard, Elphinston notes,
"Sumerian inscriptions of 2000 BC, as well as early Assyrian inscriptions of a thousand years later, indicate the existence of a people named Kardaka, Kurtie or Guti in the neighbourhood of Lake Van. These are claimed by some authorities to be the ancestors of the modern Kurds, but it is not until Grecian times that certain identification is possible. Herodotus mentions the inhabitants of what is now Bohtan, and Xenophon refers to the Garduchi, possibly an earlier form of the modern name. Strabo speaks of the country of Courdueni where Bait Kardu is located by Aramaic sources. The modern form 'Kurdu' first appears in Arabic writings of the ninth century AD with the plural form 'Akrad'." (Elphinstone 1946, p.92)
In a similar vein, Edmonds notes, "However that may be, nationalists feel that they can claim to represent the Median as distinct from the Persian element in the great Iranian immigration about the beginning of the first millenium BC. Some go further to claim descent from the earlier autochthonous stocks like the Guti and the Lullubi, on whom the Medes imposed their language and religion." (Edmonds 1971, p.88)
The Gutians were also evidently kin of the Kassites, as Saba Dara notes, "The Babylonian army was eventually defeated by a combined force of Gutium and their kinsmen, the Kashshu (Kas-Pi) or Kassites." (Dara 2000) The Kassites have long been identified as Iranoid.
Moreover, in an entire book, scholar Hennerbichler links the Kurds with the Gutians (Hennerbichler 2004, p.183-184)
Kurd name derived from Guti
Not only was Gutium located within the modern Kurdistan. The very name 'Kurd' itself has been viewed by scholars as being merely a corruption of the ancient Iranic word 'Guti'. Thus, Prof. Howorth concurs with the derivation of Kurdistan from Gutium, and identifies the ancient Babylonian term for Kurds, 'Khuradi' or 'Quradu,' with 'Guti':
"The land of Guti answers in substance, and perhaps also in name, to the modern Kurdistan. According to Sayce the name Kurd is derived from the Babylonian quradu, 'a warrior,' a word which was borrowed by the people of Van. In the forms of 'khuradi' and 'quradu' it is given as the equivalent of 'gut' in an inscription published by Rawlinson. 'Gut' or 'Guti,' we are told, means a 'bull' in the primitive language of Chaldea, and the name Gutium, used by this early people, was borrowed from a Semitic language (probably Babylonian) which possessed the case-ending in 'um.' " (Howorth 1901, ftn. p.32)
Honigman likewise derives the name 'Kurd' from the word 'Guti':
"The Kurds are a native, non-Arab people who have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years. Their name derives from the ancient Guti (Guti-Gurti-Kurdi), conquerors of Babylon. They were the non-Semitic Hurrians of Mesopotamia and the Medes of Persian history. Their home covers mountainous regions now part of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other countries as well. But the heartland of ancient Gutium, the domain of later autonomous Kurdish mirs, had been in what is now-- thanks to the British-- Arab Iraq." (Honigman 2003)
Telek agrees:
"Wenigstens zwei Herkunftslinien" lassen sich erkennen, "die mit allen ihren Zweigen im heutigen Kerngebiet der Kurden zusammenlaufen. Schon seit dem ausgehenden 3. Jahrtausend v. Christi gaben naemlich die Sumerer, Babylonier und etwas spaeter auch die Assyrer bereinstimmende Nachrichten von Voelkern im zentralen und noerdlichen Zagrosgebirge, die als "Guti", "Qurti", "Kurtie" oder aehnlich bezeichnet werden und deren Gebiet man "Gutium" oder "Kardaka" nannte. Eine zweite Linie aus dem Gebiet des noerdlichen Zagros und des Taurus fuehrt von diesem "Kardaka" der Sumerer, den armenischen "Beth-Kurdu", den "Khaldern" des ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr. und den durch Xenophons Bericht "Anabasis" beruehmt gewordenen "Karduchen" und ihrem Land zum heutigen armenischen "Kordukh", womit dort die Kurden bezeichnet werden." (Deschner: Die Kurden- Das Betrogene Volk", Ullstein Frankfurt/Main; Berlin 1991,S.64)" (Telek 2003, p.7)
A brief translation of this passage would be:
"At least two lines of descent are observable, which meet with all their branches in the present core region of the Kurds. Already since the 3rd millenium BC the Sumerians, Babylonians and, somewhat later, the Assyrians as well, provided mutually concordant reports of peoples in the central and northern Zagros mountains who were known as 'Guti,' 'Qurti,' 'Kurtie' or something similar and whose region was known as 'Gutium' or 'Kardaka'. A second line led from the region of the northern Zagros and the Taurus from these 'Kardaka' of the Sumerians, the Armenian 'Beth-Kurdu', the Khaldians of the first millenium BC and the through Xenophon's report 'Anabasis' famous 'Karduches' and their land to the modern Armenian 'Kordukh,' as the Kurds as known there." (transl. of Telek 2003, p.7)
Mazouri concurs with the identification of Kurds and Gutians:
"Now historically, Kirkuk has been a Kurdish city. It is a part of Zagros highlands which is the original dwelling of the ancient Kurds who were the native inhabitants of the area long before the migration of the other races and tribes. In an article published in Kurdistan Times in its issue of winter 1990, Mr. Mustafa Qaradaghi states that Gutium or Guti, the ancient Kurds who spoke a branch of Hurrian language, which was also spoken by their kin of Lulu, Kassite, and Mittani. Their capital city was in and around the town of Kirkuk, named Arrapha." (Mazouri 2002)
Furthermore, the denomination Gutian included the Iranic Medes as well: "To their very end in the 6th century BC, on the other hand, the Babylonians loosely (and apparently pejoratively) called {al-}most every body who lived in the Zagros-Taurus system a "Guti", including the Medes!" (Izady 1993)
It is thus clear: an overwhelming majority of scholars from different fields of history, anthropology, ethnography and linguistics identify the modern Kurds as descendants of the ancient Gutians of Sumer.
Toponyms
Abundant evidence supporting the connection between Kurds and Gutians is further provided by toponyms in Kurdistan. In fact, the place-name Mt. Judi and the Kurdish clan of Judikanlu are fossil remnants of the awesome name left behind by the 'Guti', as a researcher notes, "For about two centuries (circa 2,200 to 2,000 BC) the Gutis gained the upper military hand over the Mesopotamian (primarily, Sumerian) states. In an impressive show of force, they succeeded to annex Sumeria to their domain. Apparently they also founded a separate Guti dynasty that ruled from Sumeria for over a century, until they were evicted. In fact, the Biblical- and modern Mt. Judi (between Zakho and Sirnak in north-central Kurdistan) and the Kurdish clan of Judikanlu preserve variant forms of the old name, 'Guti.' " (Izady 1995)
Fig.3: Rendition of the Eanna of Uruk. Pre-Gutian Sumerian architecture favoured gentle curves with slight elevations
Image courtesy Gary Fletcher:
Jats & Gutians
Having established the Gutian-Kurd connection, it remains to prove the Jat-Gutian linkage. Just as Kurdish scholars and historians proudly document their descent from the ancient Gutians, so Jat scholars take pride in their prestigious connection with the heroic Gutians. Thus, eminent Jat historian Dahiya notes the relations between the Jats and the Gutians:
" 11. We may mention that there is evidence to show that the Mauryas were from the ancient Maṇda empire. Much earlier, we find them named as Muru or Mor by the Egyptians and the scriptures. There, these Mores were called Amuru and Amor or Amorites. CAH mentions that the initial vowel, 'a', is added to make pronunciation easier for the Semites, (vol.III, p.194). Thus, the initial vowel 'a' has to be ignored in order to find the correct name of these people and this clearly remains as Mur/Mor. This is the same as the Moor of Europe and the Mor clan of the Jats in India. When they attacked the king of the 11th dynasty of Egypt, they are expressly mentioned as the people from "the land of Djati." We have shown that this land of Djati is the same as the land of the Guti and clearly means the land of the Jats. Thus the { p.132 } Mor/Mur are expressly mentioned as the Jats in the 21st century BC. Naturally, when these people and their brothers from other areas in Central Asia came to India and established the Maurian empire, they did not feel at home and have been called a hot house in India as mentioned above." (Dehiya 1979, p.131-2)
The famed Jat scholar then continues,
"The Chinese were right in stating that the Hiung-nu were a part of the Yue-Che (reads as Guti ) people, and these Guti people had two divisions, the Ta-Yue-Che and the Siao-Yue-Che, exactly corresponding to the Massagetae and Thyssagetae of Herodotus (a classical Greek writer of fifth century BC), meaning the "Great-Jats" and the "Little-Jats" respectively. Almost every tribe of ancient Middle East (West Asia) and Central Asia, is represented among the present day Jats in India." (Dahiya 1980, p.23ff, cited in Dhillon 1994, p.10)
Hewitt also notes the connection between Jats and Goths:
"The Jats ... trace their descent to the land of Ghazni and Kandahar, watered by the mother-river of the Kushika race, the sacred Haetuman.t or Helmand. Their name connects them with the Getae of Thrace, and thence with the Gattons, said by Pytheas to live on the southern shores of the Baltic, the Gaettones placed by Ptolemy and Tacitus on the Vistula in the country of the Lithuanians, and the Goths of Gothland = Sweden. This Scandinavian descent is confirmed by their system of land-tenure, for the chief tenure of the Muttra district is that called Bhagadura, in which the members of the village brotherhood each hold as their family property a separate and defined area among the village lands, according to the customs of the Bratovos of the Balkan peninsula and the Hof-bauers of North-West {p.482} Germany .. The Getae of the Balkans are said by Herod to be the bravest and most just of the Thracians." (Hewitt 1894, p.481-482)
Fig.4: Female Head from Uruk, at Iraq Museum, Baghdad.
Note the joined eye-brows at the top of the head. Joined eye-brows commonly occur in the Iranoid race, from the Jats to the Kurds.
Jat-Kurd Relations: Judikan Kurds descendants of Gutians
Prof. Izady holds that the Judikan clan of Kurds are to be specifically identified as the descendants of the Gutians:
"12. In the 20th century, many hypotheses have been advanced to connect the name Kurd to that of the ancient Hurrian Guti (Hallo, 1971) { 1971 "Gutium", William W. Hallo, RLA iii: 708b-720a.} or the "Kardukhoi" of the Greek historian Xenophon (Cawkwell, 1979), none of which can any longer be maintained in light of discovery of the aformentioned Assyrian stele. The name Guti, at any rate, survives today clearly in the name of the Kurdish clan of Judikan, inhabiting the heartland of the ancient Gutis in southeatern Kurdistan. The "Kardukhoi" who come to subsequently be known as the Gordyene to the classical authors, are none other than the predecessors of modern Girdi clan of Kurds who still reside exactly where the ancient Kardukhoi/Godyene were found. The name "Kurti/Kurd" seem likely to be of Aryan origin *one of the first, in fact, in Kurdistan* instead of the far more common Hurrian clan names encountered at all periods until today and including the Khardukhoi and Guti." (Izady 1993)
The name Judikan is clearly merely a variant of "Jat", further cementing the thesis of a close relationship between the Jats and Kurds.
Prominence of the Irano-Afghan Race in Mesopotamia since Sumerian Times
The Iranic or Irano-Afghan race has dominated the plains of Mesopotamia since Sumerian times, as the learned American anthropologist Prof. C. S. Coon notes,
"The Irano-Afghan race, prominent since Sumerian times in Mesopotamia, is the chief population element in the entire highland territory from the western border of Iran to northern India. " (Coon 1939, "The Mediterranean World: (4) - The Irano-Afghan Race", p.415)
Indeed, Iranic populations appear to have entered the ruling caste of Sumer even prior to the Gutian invasion. Thus, Izady notes, "A startling fact came to light when the Sumeralogist S.N. Kramer's translated a Sumerian tablet revealing that Enmerkar himself a brother of the king of Aratta, and therefore, presumably a native of the Kurdish mountains (Kramer, "Ancient Sumer and Iran: Gleanings from Sumerian Literature," Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 1, 1987)." (Izady 1995) Needless to say, Aratta is the Avestan Aratta, the Arachosia of the Greek invaders, a nation located in eastern Iran. The Aroras of Punjab are widely thought to be a branch of the primordial Arattas or Arachosians.
Red-haired Gutians
Iranics have a high incidence of rufism (red hair), with dark maroon red color being relatively common. The modern Iranic custom of applying henna to redden the hair is in concious emulation of a red-haired ideal, and hearkens back to Scythic customs. This is in contrast to the Nordics, who emulate a blonde ideal. Rufism would thus appear to be one of the traits of the Irano-Afghan race. If the Gutians were Iranic, they should have exhibited rufism, along with minor incidences of blondism. Strikingly, Babylonian linguists have uncovered evidence that the Gutians did indeed have fair har:
"We ought to add that Oppert has an entirely different theory about these Guti. He distincly claims, and quite recently, to have found tablets relating to the sale of slaves of the blond race of the Guti 73 He apparently places the Guti on the Oxus and connects them with the Germanic Goths !" [ 73. See Comptes Rendus, 1895, p.383. ] (Howorth 1901, p.32)
The Subarians and Gutians were also referred to as "namrum", a term generally identified by Sumerologists with "fair-complexioned." Refuting the view that namrum did not denote skin colour, Gelb notes, "For this interpretation of namrum I can find no evidence in Akkadian literature ... It would seem that Speiser's and Ungnad's reaction against the normal interpretation of namrum as 'light (-colored)' was caused by their assumption that Hurrians or Subarians belonged to the Armenoid race, which according to them could hardly be called light-colored." (Gelb 1944, p.43, n.138) Gelb further notes "the fact that Subarian slaves were called 'light', in the sense of 'light-colored'." (Gelb 1944, p.88)
Both Gelb and Kraus (P.Kraus, MVAeG, 36.1 (1932) 59f.) transcribe a passage [rešamtam] na-wi-ir-tam ša in-ki [maḥ]-ra-at (VAS XVI 65.12f.). "a light (-coloured) slave girl who is pleasing to your eye." (Gelb 1944, ibid.)
Further, the learned Woolley confirms that the Gutians were fair-haired: "In the Zagros hills and across the plains to the Tigris, there lived a ... fair-haired ... people akin to the Guti (the Goths) who ... remained in what was afterwards Assyria, the neighbour land to Akkad" (Woolley 1929, p.5, cited in Hoeh 1967, Vol. 2, Ch.1)
In this regard, Lapouge notes (cited by Closson):
"Toward the end of the neolithic there appear in Belgium, England, Italy, Poland and southern Russia brachycephalics of various types who, Lapouge holds, were driven from the central region by the advance of Homo Europaeus that we have just described. The more primitive form of Homo Europaeus - the Finno-Ugrians - were at the same time crowded toward Russia, where their crania are found principally in the small dolmens and kurgans. These people penetrated into Asia by a route south fo the Black Sea; the philologists regard the most ancient language of Babylonia, the Akkadian or Sumerian, as belonging to the Finno-Ugrian group and some ancient Chaldean crania bear out this hypothesis. The Guti of western Persia are described in texts as early as 2000 BC as blond or at least as light (namrutim). The Amorites were probably of this race; the Egyptian monuments show them as blond, tall, dolichocephalic and with prominent aquiline noses; they interred their dead in dolmens of which there are over 700 in the country of Moab." (Closson 1899, p.74)
Fig.5: Ceremonial figure from Tell Asmos. Note the lapis lazuli stones set as blue eyes. Blue eyes are often found in members of the Nordic-Iranian race. Sumerians imported lapis lazuli from northern Afghanistan.
Goths & Gutians
So self-evident are the connections between the Goths and Gutians that the very person who discovered the existence of the Gutian Dynasty, Prof. Scheil, noted this remarkable fact:
"This national or tribal name of Guti, the name of "The Guti Troops (who) carried off the royalty" of the Mesopotamian empire by their conquest of Erech the imperial capital about 2495 BC, was recognized as obviously suggesting 'Goths' by Prof. Scheil, when he announced in 1911 his discovery of the Guti Dynasty in Mesopotamia, and at the same time remarked that "nothing yet proves that they were the ancestors of the Goths. (Academie des Inscript. et Belles Lettres, Comptes Rendus, Paris, , 1911, p.327)" (Waddell 1929, p.358)
The learned Prof. Oppert has also identified the Gutians with the Goths:
"While Prof. Hilprecht has classed them with the Semites, Oppert has suggested, not without some show of reason, that the name "Guti' has an Aryan sound, like Gothi, the Goths, and therefore that the tribe itself may have been of this blood. * [ * ftn. Revue Archaeologique, 1893, p.363] (Brinton 1895, p.94)
Prof. Waddell agrees, and furthermore, identifies the Gutians as members of the dolichocephalic Nordic race:
"The 'Sumerian' ruling people were of the same racial physical type, with the same culture, traditions, religion, writing and language as the Early Aryans, who were of the Aryan, Gothic or Nordic race, and they were identical with the leading stock of the latter. And (p.468) the Early Sumerian kings sometimes called themselves in their monuments in Mesopotamia and in their Indus Colony Gut or Got; whilst one of the leading Sumerian dynasties in Mesopotamia called themselves Guti, Goti or "Goths"." (Waddell 1929, p.467-468)
When one considers that the Iranians are often classed together with Nordics into the "Nordic-Iranian" racial grouping, it becomes clear that the Gutians were of Nordic-Iranian affinities.
Tokharians & Gutians
Eminent scholars have also connected the Tocharians of Sinkiang with the Gutians:
"Not long ago, the British scholar W. N. Henning suggested that the Tocharians be identified with the Gutians, who are mentioned in Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions (in Akkadian, a Semitic language) dating from the end of the third millennium B.C., when King Sargon was building the first great Mesopotamian Empire. If Henning's views are correct, the Tocharians would be the first Indo-Europeans to appear in the recorded history of the ancient Near East. Lexical affinities of Tocharian with Italo-Celtic give evidence that the speakers of the two language families had associated in the Indo-European homeland before the Tocharians began their migration eastward." (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1990)
The descendants of the ancient Tokharians are often identified with the modern Thakurs, a caste of Rajputs who boast of their Scythic ancestry and descent from the heroic Tokharii. Baghdad Caliphate chroniclers refer to a state of Tukharistan in the present-day Afghanistan, indicating the survival of the Tokharians in the Kushana mountains. The Tokharians are universally accepted as having spoken an Indo-European language.Tirigan - the last Gutian King with an Indo-European name
As a testimony to their pride in their Iranic descent, the mighty Gutian kings employed Iranic names. For instance, the name of the last Gutian king was Tirigan. Now, 'Tirigan' is clearly an Iranian and Indo-European word, as Waddell notes:
" In the Runes, significantly, this archaic arrow-head form survived (see Plate II, col.18), and the letter is therein called Tyr, which evidently preserves its Sumerian name of Til - l and r being always freely interchangeable dialectically as we have seen. Moreover, Tyr is the Gothic god of the Arrow or god of War, whose name survives in our Tues-day or Tys-day, just as Thurs-day derives from Thor. And Tir is the common Indo-Persian word for 'arrow'." (Waddell 1927, p.47)
Thus, the Gutian kings proudly preserved the memory of their Iranic descent by adopting Iranic names down to the very last monarch.
Guto-Sumerian Renaissance: Neo-Sumerian Revival
The Gutians overthrew the Akkadian dynasty, liberating the Sumerians from the Semitic yoke. The attempt by the fanatical Akkadian rulers to suppress the Sumerian language were rolled back, and a Sumerian renaissance occurred under benevolent Gutian rule. Describing the Sumerian revival under the Gutians, Badawy notes, "The Akkadian dynasty (2350-2150 BC) marked a decisive phase in the Semitization of Mesopotamia, a process which went on in spite of the renascence of Sumerian under the Gutians (2000 BC)." (Badawy 1963, p.200) The Semitists have for long been trying to prove that the Gutian Age was a "Dark Age", in order that they can glorify the Akkadian Age. However, these claims fly in the face of all evidence that the reverse was in fact the case.
Further elucidating the Gutic-Sumerian Renaissance, Sumerologist Kramer notes, "Ur-Bau [founder of the Lagash dynasty of ensis under the Gutians] had three sons-in-law: Gudea, Urgar and Namhani (also written Nammahin), each of whom became ensi of Lagash. Gudea's {p.67} rather immobile face and expressionless features have become familiar to the modern student from the numerous statues of him that have been recovered. Some of these carry long inscriptions recording his religious activities in connection with the building and rebuilding of Lagash's more important temples. From them we learn that, in spite of Gutian domination {?!}, Gudea had trade contacts with practically the entire 'civilized' world of those days ... Gudea's 2 clay-cylinders unearthed at Lagash more than 75 years ago are inscribed with the longest known Sumerian literary work, close to 1400 lines of a narrative composition, ritualistic and hymnal, commemorating his rebuilding of Lagash's main temple, the Eninna. Gudea even reports one important military victory - that over the state Anshan, Elam's neighbour to the South. He also speaks of fashioning a number of cultic and symbolic weapons such as the sharur and maces with 50 heads. This may indicate considerable military activity on his part, although perhaps only as a vassal of the Gutians. Gudea, like his father-in-law, Ur-bau, also controlled the city of Ur, where three of his inscriptions have been unearthed." (Kramer 1963, p.66-67)
Fig.6: Sumerian Ziggurat Artistic reconstruction by Dawn Razor. Contrast the mountain-like structure with the smaller Sumerian shrines.
South African historian Arthur Kemp dismisses the claims of the dogmatic Semitists that the Gutians were illiterate barbarians. On the contrary, he points out that Sumerian civilization reached its height under the Gutians:
"CIVILIZATION OF SUMER PEAKS - AFTER THE FIRST INDO-EUROPEAN GUTIAN INVASION
The Kingdom of Sumer and Akkad then fell before the first, and by all accounts ferocious, Indo-European invasion - that of the Celts. Known as Gutians in the Middle East, they fell upon the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad less than 100 years after it was established, around the year 2200 BC.
The Gutians sacked and destroyed the mixed Semitic/Mediterranean Sumer and Akkadian civilization and established their own rule and civilization in the region. Soon they had provinces extending right to the Mediterranean Sea itself.
The Gutian invasion sparked a surge in the Sumerian civilization - it was after the Indo-European invasion that Sumerian civilization was to reach some of its greatest heights. These included:
* the very first written law code in the world, which is still existent and dates from 2095 BC;
* the construction of the great Sumerian pyramids, called Ziggurats (the most famous of which is the Ziggurat at the Sumerian city of Ur, built in 2100 BC) which served as temples and community centers, many of which are still standing today; and
* a complex system of canals, weirs and water routes by which the agricultural settlements alongside the rivers were kept irrigated.
After a few generations the Gutians themselves became submerged into the wider population of Sumer, whose great cities and wealth had acted as a magnet for all the surrounding Semitic tribes. Slowly but surely increasing numbers of Semites, as traders, laborers or slaves, were drawn to Sumer, creating over time a mixture of Old European, Semitic and Indo-European peoples. This shows up very clearly in their grave sites and art forms in the wide range of racial features on display." (Kemp 1999, Ch.8)
The primary reason for the construction of huge ziggurats is self-evident: by conquering vast areas into the Sumerian Empire, the Gutians enlarged the economy, increasing the Gross National Product, thereby enabling the construction of much larger edifices and monuments for the glorification of the nation.
Gudea - Patron of Neo-Sumerian Renaissance
Gudea (ca 2142-2122 BC), ensi of Lagash, inaugurated the Sumerian renaissance and ruled Ur on behalf of the Gutian kings. His name itself indicates he was a Gutian. Such a view is not far-fetched, for personal names often indicate the provenance of its bearer. Thus, the personal name Francais is common amongst French-men, while Scott is popular amongst Scotsmen, and von Dachau in Germany indicate ancestry from Dachau. Thus, Gudea can be identified as a Gutian based on his name. Moreover, if he was not a Gutian, it defies comprehension as to why a Sumerian viceroy should choose a name which would lead to him being later on confused with the Gutian invaders. The most logical conclusion is that Gudea himself was likely a Gutian.
Describing Gudea's achievements, a standard history work notes, "During this period when the North was being ruled by the Gutians, Lagash flourished, particularly during the reign of Gudea, who is well-known today through the many statues of him." (Coles 1969, Vol.1, p. 20)
Prof. Cyrus Gordon notes further achievements of ancient Sumer: "The greatness of Sumer can be measured in other spheres, too. Its sexagesimal system has reached us via the exact sciences. Our astronomers still divide the circle into 360 degrees with each degree divisible into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. The division of the hour into 60 minutes of 60 seconds each is also a legacy of Sumer. Whenever we look at a clock, we are rerninded of our debt to Sumer." (Gordon 1962, p.49)
Fig.7: Ziggurat of Ur. Arthur Kemp describes this image thus: "The main ziggurat at Ur, Mesopotamia, built circa 2,100 BC, shortly after the first major Indo-European invasion. The building was created in the shape of a step pyramid."
Gudea was also father of the ziggurat, with the plan for the ziggurat being revealed to him in a dream:
"His [Gudea's] most remarkable building was a great tower-temple of seven stages erected for his city-god Nimirrud (ie. as we have seen the deified second Sumerian king 'Michael' or 'Cain' and the Nimi of the Indian lists), the plan of which - the origin of the later fashionable 'Ziggurat' temple-towers 1 - was, he says, revealed to him in a dream. [ 1. Earlier small temple-towers of the pre-Sargonic period are found at Nippur and elsewhere. ] " (Waddell 1929, p.379)
Semitic-Sumerian Conflict
Indeed, the Gutians appear to have been initially hailed by the Sumerians as deliverers from the Semitic Akkadian oppressors. The reason given for the Gutian attack on the Akkadians by the Sumerians is the destruction of the main Sumerian religious shrines by the fanatical Akkadian ruler Naram-Sin. The work 'The Curse of Agade,' composed by a Sumerian, indicates the revulsion which the Sumerians felt at this senseless act of Akkadian destructiveness:
"In searching for the causes behind the humiliating and disastrous Gutian invasion, the author comes upon what he thinks is undoubtedly the true answer and informs us of an outrage committed by Naram-Sin, unknown as yet from any other source. According to our author [ of 'The Curse of Agade' ], Naram-Sin had sacked Nippur and committed all sorts of desecrating and defiling acts against Enlil's sanctuary, and Enlil had therefore turned to the Gutians and brought them down from their mountain abode to de - {p.63} stroy Agade and avenge his beloved temple. Moreover eight of the more important deities of the Sumerian pantheon, in order to soothe the spirit of their ruler Enlil, laid a curse upon Agade that it should remain forever desolate and uninhabited. And this, added the author at the end of his work, was indeed the case: Agade had remained desolate and uninhabited." (Kramer 1963, p.62-63)
The destruction of Akkad or Agade by the Gutians was thus viewed through Sumerian eyes as rightful vengeance against those who destroyed the Gods' shrines and temples, and those taking this revenge as rightful liberators of the oppressed Sumerians. Indeed, the conflict between Sumerians and Semites "may explain in part the desecration and destruction of the Ekur at Nippur by Naram-Sin, as described with such bitterness and chagrin by the author of 'The Curse of Agade.' " (Kramer, p.288)
Describing the conflict between Semites and Sumerians, Luckenbill notes, "However, the point that Meyer set out to prove remains unshaken, to wit, that for a thousand years of history, roughly from 3000 to 2000 BC, the Sumerians occupied the southern part of Babylonia (Sumer) and engaged in an almost continuous and losing struggle with their Semitic neighbors immediately to the north. The earlier rivals of the Sumerians were the Akkadians, but they finally went down before another group of Semites, namely the West Semitic Amorites." (Luckenbill 1923, p.3) However, the foreign descent of the Gutians was never forgotten, and the founders of the Ur III dynasty emphasised this fact when expelling the Gutian rulers. Yet, the Neo-Sumerian renaissance was inaugurated by these very Gutian kings.
Zubari Kurds as Descendants of Subareans
The descendants of the historic Subareans are stated by Prof. Izady to be found amongst the Zubari Kurds, who still inhabit the same geographical region as the ancient Subareans:
"The kingdom of Mushku is now believed to have brought about the final downfall of the Hittites in Anatolia. Their name survives in the city of Mush/Mus in north-central Kurdistan of Turkey. The Subaru who operated from the areas north of modern Arbil in central Kurdistan have left their name in the populous and historic Kurdish tribal confederacy of Zubari, who still inhabit the areas north of Arbil." (Izady 1993)
The Enc. Iranica, quoting from Simo Parpola, Neo-Assyrian Toponyms, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 6, Kevelaer, 1970, notes: "Any hostile group could be called Gutian. The Assyrian royal annals use the word Gutians when they refer to Iranian populations otherwise known as the Mannaeans or the Medes (Parpola, p. 138)." (Encyclopedia Iranica; Gutians) Thus, the term "Gutian" referred to Iranic populations in general, and apparently included the Medes as well.
Gutians and the Khatti
The learned Prof. Waddell has uncovered links between the Gutians and the Khatti :
"We now see how throughout the Kha series of words in Sumerian, as in the later Akkad and Aryan languages, the initial K tends to drop out, leaving the H as the initial of the word. Thus the old tribal name of the Goths spelt by the Sumerians and "Hitt-ites" as Khat-ti or Khad-ti, the "Catti' of the pre-Roman Briton coins 3 (and also spelt Kud-ti and Guti ), became by the dropping out of its initial K, "Hatti", the source of the modern name "Hitt-ite." And by the further dropping out of the H - a change also occasionally occurring in Sumerian, Egyptian and modern Aryan dialects, eg. in cockneyisms - it became Atti and Att on the ancient Briton coins.4 [ 3. see WPOB {Waddell, Phoenician Origin of Britons}, 6f.; 200f. 4. Ib. 6f.; 200 f. ]" (Waddell 1927, p.33)
The Irano-Afghan racial background of the Guti is not masked by their language, which could well have been Semitic or related to the Transcaucasian languages:
"Winkler believes that the Guti had a tongue of their own, but wrote in Semitic. Geschichte Babyloniens, p.82. Hilprecht gives reasons for holding that Semitic was the native language of both Guti and Lulubi. Old Babylonian Inscriptions, pp.12-14 (Philadelphia, 1894)." (Brinton 1895, ftn. p.94)
Prof. Derakshani on Gutium
Prof. Derakshani, in a paper published in a prestigious Iranian journal, summarises the history of the Gutians thus:
"4.7.6. Gutium (Qutium), situated in Western Iran, is mentioned already in the presargonic period in a document (ca. 2500 B.C.). The fact that the Guti belonged to the proto-Iranians, is confirmed by their language, which is attested mainly by personal names. According to them the Guti spoke an Indo-European language, which was close to the Tokharian.[158] The relation between the Tokharian and the Aryan is corroborated by linguistic remnants in Tokharian and the grammatical parallels between both languages, while it is also related with Hittite, Greek, Latin and Armenian as well as Baltic and Slavic (see Aryans footnote 854-856). In later periods we come across the Tokharian speaking people, that is the Tokharians, probably calling themselves Tugri, near the border of China, and among the Yhe-chih, which, according to the normal phonetic change in Chinese (after gu ~ yh, ti ~ chi), represent the Guti.[159] So the Guti and the Tukri (see below 4.7.7) of the 3rd millennium B.C., or at least a part of them, should have migrated already early from Western Iran towards the east and settled at the borders of China. A connection between the tribe name Kuch (KaÇ) and kafi 'mountainous people' has been already considered.[160] It is indeed possible to imagine that the Kuchi and Guti derive from the Aryan word-stem for mountain: from the Indo- European roots *keu-, *skeu- 'prolonged' and *keu- 'bend' has developed the IE *keu-k- and *keup- 'vault upwards,' 'hill,' from which then the OI kuchati- curves, kuca- womans breast, Av. kaofa-, OP kaufa-, MP kwf, Pahl. kÇf, NP kÇh mountain, kÇin, hunchbacked, Russ. kucha 'pile,' OHG hof 'yard, good' (originally from the location on the high ground, hill)[161], furthermore the OI notha- 'swelling, rise' are developed, while the MIA NÇpha- swelling could be a contamination of Notha- and Aryan *kaupha-, cf. OIA *kopha- 'hill, mountain' (= Av. kaofa ).[162] So Guti and Quti as well as Kuchi etc. could have belonged to the same root and originally meant mountainous people, which points to their homeland in the mountainous area of the Zagros (cf. the tribe Kuch of the traditional history of Iran[163]). Thus, NP qu... 'ram' means originally animal of the mountain, like Gr. [...] 'billy goat' and Lat. aries 'ram,' which might have meant originally 'animal of the rise (ari-)' (see above 4.2).
{ [158] HENNING 1978, 'The First Indo-Europeans in History,' ULMEN (ed.) 1978, Society and History, Essays in Honour of Karl August Wittfogel: 215-230; for the Indo-European origin of the Gutians cf. also CHRISTIAN 1928, Das erste Auftreten der Indogermanen in Vorderasien, MAGW { Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft Wien } 58: 210-229; SPEISER 1930, Mesopotamian Origins: 101.
[159] HENNING 1978: 221-225; cf. there (p. 222) Yhe-chih in the Middle Chinese (600 B.C.) form ng-wyt-tai* < Old Chinese ng-w|t-p-*(g); see also NARAIN 1987: 8 and passim. { Narain 1987: On the "First" Indo-Europeans: The Tokharian-Yuezhi and their Chinese homeland, Papers on Inner Asia 2, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.}
[160] Borhoen: 1722b + n. 3; DEHKHODA 1967, Loghatnameh 40: 307a; HAUSSIG (Hrsg.) 1986, Woerterbuch der Mythologie IV: 492.
[161] POKORNY 1959: 587-591. { 1959 Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch, 2 Bde., 2. Aufl. 1989, Rieden b. Fuessen. }
[162] KEWA III: 379; IAL, 3521. 12634. }"
(Derakhshani 2001, 4.7.6)
Linguistic Influence on Sumerian
The century-long rule of the Gutians over Sumeria left Indo-European linguistic imprints on the Sumerian language, although the Gutians adopted the Sumerian language of their subjects. Thus, Prof. Cyrus Gordon has noted the "fossil" of Indo-European influence on the Sumerian and Akkadian languages:
As we noted above, Sargon's merchants in Asia Minor summoned him to reassert his power there. This implication that his Akkadian Dynasty had connections in Asia Minor from the start is confirmed linguistically. The Akkadian language, though Semitic, has some Indo-European words imbedded in it, from the very beginnings of recorded Akkadian literature. Whereas other Semitic languages express "in" by the prefix ba-, and "to, for" by the prefix la-, Akkadian is the only Semitic language to express them by in(a) and ana respectively. Akkadian in(a) cannot be dissociated from Greek en or Latin and
{p. 53} English in with the same meaning ("in"). Akkadian ana shares some meanings with Greek atta. Akkadian magal "greatly" is related to Greek megal-os "great-ly." Sometimes the Sumerian anticipates the Akkadian tie-in with Indo-European; thus Sumerian a-gar and Akkadian ugaru, meaning "field," cannot be separated from Indo-European angr-os (Greek), ager (Latin) and Acker (German) "field."
The basic Indo-European vocabulary in Akkadian is due to a process called linguistic alliance. This means only that when two different linguistic groups of people live together, their languages will interpenetrate each other. The above words, embedded in Akkadian and so attested from the first appearance of Akkadian texts, confirm the tradition of the "King of Battle Epic" that Sargon's Akkadian Dynasty had Anatolian connections from the beginning. Since the Akkadian records start around the middle of the third millennium B.C., the formation of the Akkadian language in linguistic alliance with Indo-Europeans in Anatolia must have taken place still earlier." (Gordon 1962, p.52-53)
One way this can be consistently explained is by regarding these as fossils of Gutian rule, the impact of Iranic speakers on Sumerian, unless these are due to influence from Aratta or Anatolia. As a further example, the Gutians used the title of "Shar", a term clearly related to the Old Iranic "Shah". If this term occurs in the Avesta, then this would be clear proof of the Iranic origin of "Shar".
Note on Opponents of the Gutian descent of Gutian Kurds
The concept of the Gutians being barbaric invaders has led to unnecessary consternation on the part of certain modern self-hating Kurds, who hence attempt to disown any connection with the ancient and glorious Gutians. This has been the sad result of relentless Zionist and Semitist propaganda. Thus, one such self-hating Kurd, describing the Gutians as a "non-entity", rants: "No one knows precisely who these Gutis were nor what of their achievements. If the Gutis are such an enigma and culturally such non-entity, why would Kurds want them as their ancestors; why do they point to these Gutis as the defining source to document for their long history?" (Izady 1995) What the author lacks in terms of historical knowledge, he simply makes up for by vehemance and invective.
Adopting the Zionist-Semitist propaganda that the Akkadians were "civilizers", while the Gutians "destroyed Sumeria", the author continues: "In fact, we would never have heard of Gutis either, were it not for their 125-year-long occupation of Sumeria, which in fact forever destroyed Sumeria and the Sumerian society. The rising star of the Semites in Mesopotamia shone brightest under king Sargon I of Agade (Akkadia). Sargon got rid of Sumeria and the "real" Gutis with it some 3,800 years ago." (Izady 1995) Apparently these anti-Kurd authors have not heard of Gudea, and are totally ignorant of the Neo-Sumerian renaissance depicted above.
Continuing his invective, the narrow-minded author notes, "Kurds have been given the one-fits-all Gutis by their intellectuals as a poor excuse for history. In the company of the Gutis, Kurds have become the object of ridicule among those with some knowledge of the real history. In all honesty, how serious would we take a group's claim to antiquity if all they could produce to prove past greatness were a connection to the Philistines? Gutis, great ancestors?!" (Izady 1995) Exclamation marks and polemic serve to inflate the works of these anti-Kurdish "intellectuals".
Needless to say, the views of these self-hating Kurds are against all the facts of scientific inquiry and reason. Strangely, they accept without question the ancient descent of other peoples, such as Greeks and Jews. Indeed, it is the dogma of the Eurocentric school of history that only the Jews and Greeks are direct descendants of ancient peoples, all other peoples have no history. It is not only the Kurds whose history they attempt to deny.
Opposition to the concept of any relationship between the Gutians, Jats and Kurds will continue to come from the followign quarters: the self-hating Kurdish school of history, the dogmatic Zionist-Semitist, the Europeanist Greco-centric and the internationalist Communist schools of historians. The concept of the Kurds being descended from the Gutians has more historical evidence in favour of it than the putative descent of the "Chosen People" from the Israelites, or the modern Greeks from the ancient Hellenes. Much of this has been presented in the present article.
Acknowledgements
Author would like to thank Profs. Shireen Moosvi, Irfan Habib, Arthur Kemp, Clyde A. Winters, Karl Earlson and U. Abbas for assistance.
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37. Waddell 1929: "The Makers of Civilization in Race and History", by L.A. Waddell, Luzac & Co. 1929, reprint S.Chand & Company, P.O.Box No. 5733, Ram Nagar, 7361, New Delhi-110055, 1986, Rs.400, schand@vsnl.com, http://www.schandgroup.com.
38. Woolley 1929: "The Sumerians," by Charles Leonard Woolley. W. W. Norton, New York, 1929, 1965 reprint; Barnes & Noble 1995 reprint, isbn 1-56619-666-3 hc.
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