QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 166: The Anunnaki & Ancient Astronaut Theory (Sample)
Episode Date: April 6, 2022Mesopotamian gods? Or ancient alien astronauts? We explore the "Anunnaki", a term familiar to anyone who has watched the History Channel, Gaia TV, or Ancient Aliens. But the tradition of this so-calle...d "ancient astronaut theory" was actually popularized in the late 60s by a Swiss hotel manager turned best-selling author. From there, it flourished into a hugely popular belief system and industry. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Episode music by Matthew Delatorre. Editing by Corey Klotz. Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
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What's up QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry, boy.
Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 166 of the Q&ONANANANANANANAS podcast,
the Anunnaki episode.
As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're continuing our exploration of so-called.
called Ancient Astronaut Theory, which grew in popularity in the late 1960s and has
mushroomed into a lucrative open source intellectual property in top Western markets.
Specifically, we're going to be focusing on the term Anunnaki, which was cribbed from
ancient Mesopotamian myths to sell a new theory of archaeology and an alternate history
of science, one based in the idea that extraterrestrials visited Earth long ago and are responsible
for our most impressive scientific discoveries, monuments, and maybe even our
DNA. This story begins both five millennia ago in the Fertile Crescent, or 50 years ago in
West Germany, depending on your perspective.
The Enunaki. Around 5,000 years ago, a group of people known as the Sumerians divided themselves
into several city-states in the region of Mesopotamia, which roughly encompasses modern-day
Iraq and part of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Kuwait. There in the Fertile Crescent, along the Euphrates
and Tigris rivers, they built pyramid-like temples to their gods called ziggurats and complex
irrigation canals that allowed them to farm the land efficiently. The largest of the Sumerian
city states, Uruk, was estimated to house between 40 and 80,000 people at its peak in 2800 BC,
making it the largest urban center in the world. Historians are constantly squabbling about the history
of Mesopotamia, mostly because it's difficult to study it before the invention of
cuneiform records, which the city-state of Uruk had a crucial role in development.
in around 3,200 BC.
The Samarians were polytheists and created a pantheon of gods tied to an elaborate set of myths.
These beliefs persisted and evolved so that to explain the modern term Anunaki,
one must study the myths of several intermingled ancient Mesopotamian cultures
that dominated the region along the centuries, like that of the Acadians, Assyrians,
Armenians, and Babylonians.
All right, so you got to learn actual ancient history.
It's just not pilled shit.
I mean, it's about them being pilled. We are studying them being pilled. We're just not
studying the myths as if they were real. Yes, which is what I will get into in my section,
which is brain breaking. Don't be time for that. This is a tiny moment of actual history
before we absolutely slide down the slope at full speed into a... Can we stay in the actual
history? I feel... Sunny Bono ourselves. I feel warm. I feel protected. I feel safe. Death
Death awaits us all at the bottom of the slope, Jake.
So let's dig into it.
On, that's A.N. was the Sumerian god of the sky, and he consorted with the goddess of the earth.
Key, spelled K.I.
They had several kids, all gods, who were named Enl, Enki, Ninersag, Nana, Utu, and Inana.
The concept of the Anunaki basically emerged in Samaria to refer to this group of gods,
but they called them the Anuna or Anna.
I say basically because they're really only referenced in literary texts of the period,
and there also seems to be disagreement among Samarian primary sources
about how many gods were part of the group and what exactly their divine function was.
At first a local pantheon, this particular set of gods only became popular on a regional basis later
when empire started forming in Mesopotamia.
One major shift in the popular use of the term Anunaki appears to have occurred in late Samarian times,
to then be enshrined more permanently in myth by the Acadians.
Essentially, the Anunaki went from being considered celestial beings of great power,
descendants of the sky god on,
to representing deities of the underworld in broader Mesopotamian culture.
So basically, they broke bad.
Which is, yeah, it is interesting because this plays into how conspiracy theorists sort of view them today.
A crucial myth related to the Anunaki is the Samarian story about goddess Inana.
the queen of heaven, and her descent into the underworld, which they describe as a, quote,
shadowy version of life on earth, which is ruled by her sister, Eresh Kigal.
To allow Inani access to the underworld, Erish Kigal ordered each of the seven, quote-unakki,
to strip her sister of a piece of clothing or jewelry, symbolizing her great powers,
until she ended up standing before her sister naked.
According to this story, here's what happened next.
After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away.
Then she made her sister, Erychigal, rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne.
The Anunaki, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her.
They looked at her.
It was the look of death.
They spoke to her.
It was the speech of anger.
They shouted at her.
It was the shout of heavy guilt.
The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse, and the corpse was hung on a hook.
So just normal fun stuff about how essentially God got turned into a corpse in hell by her own sister.
They're always doing this shit, though, right?
They're always, they always, they always have a brother.
Right.
Or sister that, you know, yeah, who did something wrong or, you know, they ate the wrong piece of fruit or whatever.
Something.
And like they're roasted in the flames of eternity.
Like it's not just, you know, I mean, sometimes they're exile, but then the exiled.
but then the exile becomes another god.
I mean, it's always complicated with these gods.
In this version of the myth,
while Inana was a corpse, all sex on earth ceased.
The queen of heaven was eventually resurrected and restored,
and humans as a result were able to fuck again.
It seems like that would be a famous period in history.
It was like, remember that few months when like nobody was fucking?
What was going on there?
Insane.
Yeah, I know.
Like the myths even, they kind of say stuff like,
everybody slept in their own bed, like, which sucks.
dude so clearly the Mesopotamians were you know fucking a lot and they were like
this is this is horrible we need to liberate the Queen of Heaven from her sister
so we can get bawling again and yeah I also it's kind of annoying because it makes the
Anunaki seem like people who don't want you to bust in their version of this
mythical story the Akkadians renamed Inana Ishtar and abandoned the term
Anuna or Anna in favor of Anunaki when referring to the seven gods of the
underworld that judge the queen of heaven but
before stripping her of her clothes in power.
To complicate things, early Babylonians introduced a whole new set of gods they called the Igigi,
which for a while was a term used interchangeably with Anunaki.
But Igigi came to represent the heavenly gods, whereas Anunaki grew to be a reference to those of the underworld.
Having said that, even among Babylonians, definitions of the Anunaki varied wildly.
One of their epic poems appeared to describe 600 Anunaki belonging to the underworld and 300 to heaven, for example.
By the time the term Anunaki is used in the standard Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, around 1,200
BC, they are more or less understood to be a group of gods residing in the nether world, acting
as judges.
Religious beliefs in Mesopotamia continue to syncretize from there onwards, and the Neo-Assyrians
added all kinds of weird subplots, changed the gods names, sent all the characters
to war, you know, all the plot points you'd expect from an exhausted writer's room asked
to work with quite dated material at this point.
So, it seems like these shifting references to the Anunaki in ancient religious myths is a story spanning thousands of years of human history that paints a fascinating picture of mankind's perennial longing for a world beyond the physical.
Or what if it were something cooler?
Fellas, join me in a little thought experiment.
All right.
What if instead of religious myths, these inconsistent and evolving ideas about the Anunaki were actually firsthand accounts left by ancient civilizations who'd been envisioned.
visited by extraterrestrials with advanced technology?
What if these foolish, primitive people
took one look at the cool spaceships and aliens and astronaut suits
and decided that they were gods?
You are totally on board unless it involves getting in bed with the Swiss.
That is the one thing I cannot stand.
Enter Swiss hotel manager, Eric von Denneken.
And yes, this is basically about how the Swiss are responsible for all of this,
which I think are people,
deserve a moment in the spotlight. The last one I think was the
order of the solar temple. I think you guys deserve a good beating.
You stripped of your clothes, hung up on a hook, in the underworld, judged by the gods.
Turned to a corpse? Turned to a corpse. I don't like that. In the mid-60s,
Von Denikin would wait for his hotel guest to be asleep so he could hole up in his office
and write about how extraterrestrial astronauts had visited ancient human civilizations.
In 1964, he had published a piece in the German-Canadian periodical Der Nord Western,
entitled, Did Our Ancestors Have a Visit from Space?
But what he was now working on late into the night was a full-fledged book.
He called it Memories of the Future.
After being turned down by several publishers,
the book was picked up by a Berlin publishing house
after von Dennecken got one of his hotel guests to vouch for him with them.
Their agreement included the condition that his book be thoroughly rewritten
by a professional editor called Uttz Uttermann.
Now Udermann had in the early 40s written for a German newspaper
called the Volkish Observer,
which was at the time owned by Adolf Hitler.
He was also a best-selling Nazi author.
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Thank you.
Thanks.
I love you.
Jake loves you.