Future History of Light: The Fall from Heaven, Unveiled

We’ve been trying to get to the core of the Lucifer archetype, which begins with Milton’s epic poetry and brings us back to the poems and dramas the Greeks wrote of the Titan Prometheus. Both stories have to do with a Fall, in Milton’s case Lucifer’s Fall from Heaven leading to the Fall of Man told in The Bible. 

These in turn are reflected in the Prometheus stories, with his daughter-in-law Pandora unwittingly unleashing evil on the world by opening a jar filled with evil spirits given to her as a trick. 

How strange that both traditions would feature stories that have a great deal in common. In both stories, the “first woman” is somehow blamed for the fall from grace but was tricked by a powerful being. 

In both stories, there is a warning by a supreme being: Adam and Eve are warned by Yahweh not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and Prometheus (who I believe was the quite-Luciferian supreme being of a pre/proto-Greek people) warns his brother and his wife not to accept a gift from Zeus, who as we’ve seen is an asshole.

Which leads me to believe there’s a common source for both stories. The question is why this all seems to resonate with so much happening in the world today.

THE SUMERIANS

Tracing the Prometheus archetype back I ended up at the beginning; at Sumer. It became obvious that Prometheus had a direct and powerful antecedent in a mysterious and secretive god who was, quite significantly, not only associated with light and fire, but also with the intellect. And he was also associated with metalworking and mining, a very important clue in the unraveling of this mystery.

What’s more, I soon came to believe- rather strongly- that the Fall was based on a very, very real event. An event that rocked the ancient world to its foundations and became the stuff of legend for thousands of years thereafter.

I believe that this event that represented a trauma in which an entire people felt utterly cut off from their gods, an act for which, given their powerful religious traditions, they naturally would blame themselves. 

An event that wasn’t just a political or social disaster, but a cosmic one. 

This was a trauma that would depose many highly-placed officials, giving us an extremely-compelling precedent for the fall of the rebel Watchers. Accounts of the time prove this Fall would send some of those men and women into the wilderness, just as Adam and Eve were. 

And perhaps most significantly, I believe that the Serpent in the Garden and Prometheus are both based on opposing figures in the same drama.

This is very much a work in progress. In fact, this demands to be presented as a book. But this is too important to sit on. I feel like it’s going to explode beneath me if I don’t take the lid off this cauldron right now.

BRAGGING RIGHTS

The Sumerians may not have been the world’s first highly advanced civilization, but they seem to be the first one we have dependable records of. It may well be that they were preceded by an even more advanced civilization that’s been lost to history, in fact that would plug a lot of holes in the stories I’m looking at.

What continues to boggle my mind is how long the Sumerians remained hidden from history itself; they were only discovered in the mid-19th Century. Which opens the door for further discoveries down the road. 

But for now, let’s stick with what we know about the Sumerians:

They were the first to engage in large-scale irrigation agriculture; the first to live in populous urban settings that we call city-states; the first to develop stratified societies with specialized occupations; the first to organize and maintain standing armies; the first to develop mathematics and writing; the first to propagate laws and formulate the concept of property.

What the Sumerians were most of all were an extraordinarily religious people, maybe the most religiously-obsessed people in history.

I would argue that that Sumerian religion continues to influence culture today, maybe in a way we haven’t seen since ancient times.

You can trace many of our superhero and sci-fi tropes back to Sumerian myths, and then of course you also have the millions of people who’ve read Zechariah Sitchin or watched Ancient Aliens. Not to mention the effect Sitchin’s work has had on conspiracy theory through the books of David Icke and others.

As we’ve seen with other cultures, a sky god emerged from the pack and became the top dog in Sumer. And like the rest of them, he was kind of a dick:

Sometime around 2500 BCE, Enlil became the greatest of the gods, the god who punished people and watched over their safety and well-being…Enlil was a god who dwelled somewhere. He was a god of place, and that place was Nippur…

Nippur is crucial to our story. Remember it.

Now this is important– each Sumerian city-state was ruled by a king or Lugal (literally meaning “giant”), who eventually became the religious leader in this ancient theocracy. Some Lugals would become gods (or “half-gods”) themselves. 

Each city was ‘ruled’ by a different deity (god) who was worshipped in a large temple in the city centre.

A ruler was called an en and was often deified (made into a god). Each city had a governor (ensi) or a king (lugal) who often had religious duties, particularly to build and maintain temples.

The wife of the king was called a lady or queen (nin). The queen might be in charge of important projects such as managing the affairs of a temple goddess.

The city leaders had a duty to please the town’s patron deity. Pleasing the god of the city ensured the goodwill of that god or goddess as well as the goodwill of the other deities in the council of gods.

Sumerians were totally dependent on the State and the Temple. It was a kind of theocratic communism, albeit one which seemed to be highly stratified between social and ethnic classes. But everything, and I mean everything, revolved around the gods and their functionaries.

Early Sumerian society was highly collectivized, with the temples of the city god and subordinate deities assuming a central role. “Each temple owned lands which formed the estate of its divine owners. Each citizen belonged to one of the temples, and the whole of a temple community – the officials and priests, herdsmen and fishermen, gardeners, craftsmen, stonecutters, merchants, and even slaves – was referred to as ‘the people of the god.

Because of the desert climate, gardens were highly prized by the Sumerians, and by the empires which followed them. Gardens were identified with the gods, places where people would encounter the gods. How literally you want to take that is up to you. 

This is an extremely important detail here– make note of this particular aspect of Sumerian religion: 

The most important festival for ancient Sumerians was New Year’s Day. On this day, the king had to symbolically marry a priestess who represented the goddess Inanna.

Sumer’s vulnerability lay in its disunity. The city-states often warred over resources and trade. Because of this a strongman, a Lugal- a Titan, if you will- stepped into the power vacuum and attempted to create a united Sumerian Empire.

Lugalzagesi conquered the Sumerian cities of Ur, Larsa, Girsu, Lagash, and possibly others, and eventually brought all the other cities of Sumer under his control.

Lugalzagesi’s efforts at unification sometimes carried a heavy price… his soldiers sacked (opposing cities) with a ferocity that shocked the Sumerians. This kind of brutality was seldom seen in Sumerian warfare…The violent sacking of the city and the sacrilegious looting of the temples has always condemned Lugalzagesi in the judgment of history.

This may in fact not be historically accurate, however, given what would soon happen to Lugalzagesi himself. This may in fact have been war propaganda, written by a powerful enemy. In any event, this fact will be a major clue in unraveling the Prometheus mystery and its connection to all of this:

At some point during his reign Lugalzagesi made Uruk his capital city. It’s often stated that he conquered the city, but this is unlikely.

As it happens, Lugalzagesi would soon meet his match: 

Sargon of Akkad reigned in Mesopotamia from 2334 to 2279 BCE, He was born an illegitimate son of a “changeling”, which could refer to a temple priestess of the goddess Innana (whose clergy were androgynous) and, according to the Sargon Legend never knew his father.

His mother could not reveal her pregnancy or keep the child, and so he was set adrift by her in a basket on the Euphrates River where he was later found by a man named Akki who was a gardener for Ur-Zababa, the King of the Sumerian city of Kish.

Yeah, that’s Moses’ story too. But Biblical borrowing is what this story is all about.

In any event, Sargon’s empire would stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Iraq and the Levant, strangely enough.

(Sargon) came to be considered the greatest man who had ever lived, celebrated in glorious tales down through the Persian Empire…historian Paul Kriwaczek sums up the impact Sargon had on later generations in Mesopotamia, writing, “for at least 1,500 years after his death, Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, was regarded as a semi-sacred figure, the patron saint of all subsequent empires in the Mesopotamian realm”

Let’s back it up a bit: Sargon caught the eye of Ur-Zababa, who made the young gardener his cup-bearer, which is essentially the king’s right-hand man. What should be noted is that not only was Sargon just a gardener, he wasn’t even Sumerian- he was Akkadian, kind of second-class citizens in the city-states.

In any event, Zababa chose poorly. Sargon began to accumulate power for himself and chose Lugalzagesi’s blitzkrieg to make his move. Zababa doesn’t seem like much of a Lugal- it’s said he “sprinkled his legs” when he heard Zagesi’s army approach:

(Zababa) had grown suspicious of Sargon and..decided to send him to Lugalzagesi ostensibly with an offer for peace. Whether Ur-Zababa actually included in the message anything about terms and conditions is not known; what is known is that message asked Lugalzagesi to kill Sargon upon receiving it. For whatever reason, Lugalzagesi refused to comply and instead invited Sargon to join him. Together, they marched on Kish and took the city easily. Ur-Zababa escaped and went into hiding.

Remember this story. Zagesi chose to spare Sargon’s life and make him a brother-in-arms. He’d live to regret the decision. It’s unclear why exactly the two fell out, but make note of the first possibility here: 

It is possible that (Sargon) had an affair with Lugalzagesi’s wife at this point or that he was sent on a mission which he turned into the first engagement of his own conquest of the region. Whatever happened between him and Lugalzagesi, they were as quickly antagonists as they had been allies.

Now, pay close attention to what happened next- the devil, as always, is in the details:

Lugalzagesi marched his army from Kish to meet Sargon in battle and was defeated. Sargon then put him in chains, tied a rope around his neck, and took him to the city of Nippur, sacred to the god Enlil upon whom Lugalzagesi had relied, and forced him to march in humiliation through the Enlil’s gate.

A Lugal- a giant– bound in chains to appease a sky god: why does that sound so familiar? 

Oh yeah, because that’s Prometheus’ story as well. The symbolism doesn’t stop there, as we’ll see. Remember too that Nippur is believed to be the original Garden of Eden…

One curious detail you see in the biographies is Sargon’s alliance with Inanna, which Sargon’s poet/propagandist daughter, Enheduanna, was keen to make famous. Somehow, Sargon’s alliance with this goddess was the key to his military victories.

Is this in fact a reference to Sargon’s relationship with Lugalzagesi’s wife- who was regarded as the physical incarnation of Inanna by the Sumerians?

If Sargon did in fact form some kind of pact with Zagesi’s wife- romantic or political- it would go a long way to explaining why these allies became enemies and how a gardener turned cup-bearer was able to defeat the more experienced warrior, Lugalzagesi.

There was a spy in the House of Love, as it were.

Whatever the cause, the Sumerian Dynasty fell, and fell hard, to Sargon’s Akkadians. This was not only a political disaster, it was a crime against the order of things. 

“In this kingdom, the Sumerians rapidly found themselves living as foreigners in their own cities…When Sargon took over a city, it became an Akkadian stronghold, staffed with Akkadian officials and garrisoned with Akkadian troops”

Foremost Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer believed that the fall of the Sumerian Dynasty to Sargon inspired the Lamentation poetry, which later calamities inspired as well. To get a sense of how the Sumerians reacted to these military defeats (hint: dramatically), read this from the Lamentation for the Destruction of Ur, which lays the blame for the people’s misery at the feet of the sky god Enlil:

Enlil called the storm. The people mourn. Winds of abundance he took from the land. The people mourn. Good winds he took away from Sumer. The people mourn. Deputed evil winds. The people mourn. Entrusted them to Kingaluda, tender of storms. He called the storm that annihilates the land. The people mourn. He called disastrous winds. The people mourn. Enlil — choosing Gibil as his helper —called the (great) hurricane of heaven. The people mourn.

Make note of Gibil in his role as Enlil’s helper (other translations seem to imply that Enlil drafting Gibil to his cause was especially wounding )– that will be an important detail when we look at Prometheus again.

But what is unmistakable is that Sargon was the Devil as far as the ruling Sumerians were concerned and they did not take their fall from power lying down.

Directly after his rise to power, however, the city-states and their ruling elite hardly accepted Sargon with grace and submission; they rebelled against their new ruler, and forced him to prove his legitimacy as king through military might.

Sargon made a habit of tearing down a city’s walls when he defeated their rebellion. That little detail showed up in a Bible story or two, if memory serves…

“Sargon, king of Akkad, was victorious over Ur in battle, conquered the city and destroyed its walls. He conquered Eninmar, destroyed its walls, and conquered its districts and Lagash as far as the sea [Persian Gulf].  

Now, remember those confusing stories in Enoch of the war between the Watchers and the other Watchers? And that the defeated Watchers were somehow associated with those historical “firsts” that historians would later ascribe to the Sumerians?

Well, remember that Sumer meant “Land of the Watchers.” And civil war was an fact of life throughout Sargon’s reign:

Afterward in his [Sargon’s] old age all the lands revolted against him, and they besieged him in Akkad; and Sargon went onward to battle and defeated them; he accomplished their overthrow, and their widespreading host he destroyed.

But because of the evil which he had committed, the great lord Marduk was angry, and he destroyed his people by famine. From the rising of the sun unto the setting of the sun they opposed him and gave him no rest. —The Chronicle of Early Kings

Sargon’s empire was short-lived, actually did suffer a famine and gave way to an invasion from the east. This in turn would open the door for the Sumerians to return, many presumably from exile, and re-establish the Sumerian Empire for a few more centuries, giving us the Epic of Gilgamesh, significantly.

I will argue in a future post that you can find references to the political struggles taking place in Sumer in Greek myth, particularly- but not exclusively- in that of Prometheus.

Where it doesn’t friggin’ belong.

THE FALL

It’s been pretty well-established by now that the Bible is based on Sumerian antecedents. Reading through the story of Sargon and the Sumerians, I’m willing to bet we’re looking at more than the usual suspects you might see on other websites, the excerpts from the Atrahasis and the Enuma Elish and so on.

I think Sargon’s reign of terror inspired a whole host of Bible stories (besides the obvious Moses thing), not the least of which is the Fall of Man. 

I believe the Fall of Man is based on an as-yet undiscovered (or unpublished) Sumerian allegory that retold the story of Sargon and Lugalzagesi, and most importantly Lugalzagesi’s wife.

Let’s go through the bullet points here first.

• Adam and Eve and the Creation myth are inarguably based on Sumerian antecedents. 
• The Garden of Eden is believed to be based on Nippur, holy city of Enlil.
• Sargon began his career not as a soldier but as a gardener. Ergo, Sargon is the Serpent in the Garden of the Gods.
• Historians believe that Sargon had some kind of relationship with Lugalzagesi’s wife. She may in fact be the “Inanna” that we heard so much about.
• When Sargon defeated Lugalzagesi, he paraded him in front of Enlil’s Gate, in chains, and quite possibly naked. 
• The Sumerians who were defeated by Sargon took to the mountains- the wilderness- to wage a guerilla war on his army.
• Without the extensive agricultural infrastructure of Sumer to rely on, the rebels would have to fend for themselves, perhaps even making their own clothes.
• Nippur would have been protected by a formidable army, which the Bible story calls the Cherubim.

Readers are probably familiar with the parallels between Genesis and the Sumerian accounts of the Creation of Man, so I won’t go into those here. But I should remind you of the fact that Eden is a Sumerian word that refers to a sacred plain.

More importantly, the Garden of Eden is said to come from Sumerian stories of the Garden of the Gods, the exact location of which is, again, crucial to the story we’re decoding here: 

The myth of Enlil and Ninlil opens with a description of the city of Nippur, its walls, river, canals and well, portrayed as the home of the gods and, according to Kramer “that seems to be conceived as having existed before the creation of man.” Andrew R. George suggests “Nippur was a city inhabited by gods not men, and this would suggest that it had existed from the very beginning.

George also noted that a ritual garden was re-created in the “Grand Garden of Nippur, most probably a sacred garden in the E-kur (or Dur-an-ki) temple complex, is described in a cult-song of Enlil as a “garden of heavenly joy”.

Now if we accept Sargon as the Serpent in the Garden, not a stretch or a leap by any standard, then the theories among some historians that he had a relationship with Lugalzagesi’s wife (the Queen, or First among Women) make perfect sense in the context of the Serpent’s seduction of the First Woman, which many commenters have seen as having sexual connotations: 

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

“You shall be as gods.” One can imagine Sargon saying EXACTLY such a thing to Zagesi’s wife in his quest to enlist her to his cause, to his empire-building crusade. And here is the cut that so wounded the Sumerians- the cosmic order was challenged by the upstart and nothing was ever the same. 

This next passage is curious: aprons were used in ceremonial garb throughout ancient history, particularly in Mesopotamia. So the fruit of the Tree seems to have a ritual connotation here that many commenters seem to overlook: 

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

Interesting. Now remember that Sargon and Lugalzagesi were once allies, so their eating of the forbidden fruit at his behest makes sense– it represents an agreement of some kind perhaps, or perhaps even a more interesting kind of relationship. But as history records it all ends up with Adam being called out by God, and his nakedness exposed: 

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.  And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?  

Seeing as Sargon seemed to be a total bastard, it makes sense that he’d strip his enemy naked before slipping a dog collar on him and parading him in front of Enlil (Yahweh) at Nippur (Eden). But maybe Zagesi’s wife’s alliance with the Akkadian despot didn’t go so well for her either. Maybe the Queen had second thoughts after seeing Sargon reduce her country to rubble. This next passage may well speak to that. 

And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

One thing is clear, by the time Genesis was written, Sargon’s dynasty was long gone, beaten into the dust by a host of enemies.

But the spell was broken: no longer could the Sumerians see themselves as a blessed people living in complete communion with the gods. 

They fell, from power and from grace.

We have a whole corpus of literature which speaks to this new reality. And for the rebels fighting against Sargon in the outskirts of the Empire, life would be especially difficult.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life..

And just as the rebels were prevented from re-entering their palaces by Sargon’s armies, so too were their apparent stand-ins in Genesis:

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Needless to say, the Cherubim originate in Sumer as well.

The Inanna link here is crucial. Sargon’s daughter wrote a lot of propaganda in Inanna’s voice, threatening death and destruction against the rebels, many of whom were garrisoned in the mountains to the north of Sumer. Here’s a sample:

“How can it be that the mountain did not fear me in heaven and on earth, that the mountain did not fear me, Inana, in heaven and on earth, that the mountain range of Ebih, the mountain, did not fear me in heaven and on earth? Because it showed me no respect, because it did not put its nose to the ground, because it did not rub its lips in the dust, may I fill my hand with the soaring mountain range and hand it over to my terror.”

Why is this important? Well, in the context of the Garden of Eden story we should make note of the very common Sumerian icon of Inanna and her consort Tammuz sitting around a date palm (read: fruit tree), which is guarded by a snake.

Gee, kind of a clue there, don’t you think?

UPDATE: This icon may be the key in unlocking the mystery here. It represents Tammuz’s role as the bridegroom of Inanna, and refers to a harvest festival that was held in Lugalzagesi’s city, Uruk.  

So the man, woman, tree, fruit and snake all specifically point to a well-known Sumerian icon that points us directly and specifically to Zagesi (via Uruk) and his enemy (via Inanna). It’s beyond coincidence that all of this just appears at random.

Sargon’s alliance with “Inanna” didn’t do the goddess’ reputation any favors when the Sumerians finally regained power. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna propositions the Sumerian King in this famous exchange:

“Come here, Gilgamesh,” Ishtar said, “marry me, and give me your luscious fruits, be my husband, be my sweet man. I will give you abundance beyond your dreams: […] When you enter my temple and its cedar fragrance, high priests will bow down and kiss your feet, kings and princes will kneel before you, bringing you tribute from east and west. And I will bless everything that you own, […] These are the least of the gifts I will shower upon you. Come here. Be my sweet man.”

Gilgamesh said, “Your price is too high, such riches are beyond my means. Tell me, how could I ever repay you, even if I gave you jewels, perfumes, rich robes? And what will happen to me when your heart turns elsewhere and your lust burns out? […]“Which of your husbands did you love forever?Which could satisfy your endless desires?

What is doubly fascinating is that Gilgamesh then elaborates, and may in fact not only give us the needed link to the Garden of Eden mystery here but may in fact reveal Sargon’s real name.

Remember that Sargon, once a gardener, presented himself as Inanna’s servant while conquering the previous Sumerian Dynasty, and that his mother was said to be a priestess of the goddess: 

Then you loved Ishullanu, the palm-gardener of your father/Who brought you baskets of dates everyday/You raised your eyes and looked at him/And you went and said to him:“O my Ishullanu, let me tast of your vigour!/Put forth that which you have,Into my own, O Ishullanu!”/But Ishullanu said to you:“What are you asking of me?/Has not my mother baked, have I not eaten/That I should partake of food with such strong odour, with such foul stench?/He brightened your table every day/You raised your eyes and looked at him, and as he was not willing to be yours/You struck him and turned him into a mole (or a frog)/If you loved me, would you treat me the same as them?

Gilgamesh’s rejection is unmistakably inspired by Sargon’s alliance with Inanna, the question is whether the Ishullanu story is similarly inspired. It’s an important detail given the fact that, like the Serpent, Inshullanu was transformed physically.

One thing to keep in mind here is that the somewhat haphazard rewriting of pagan stories into Bible tales has been noted by scholars, though there may be more of a method behind the mangling than they’re able to see:

“The titles and attributes of many other Near Eastern deities were successively awarded to Yahweh Elohim…Prophets and Psalmists were as careless about the pagan origins of the religious imagery they borrowed, as priests were about the adaptation of heathen sacrifical rites to God’s service. The crucial question was: in whose honour these prophecies and hymns should now be sung, or these rites enacted.”  —Robert Graves, Raphael Patai–Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

That being said, I believe that my interpretation of the Fall of Man myth is the simplest, clearest and most direct. I would argue it’s also the most complete.

I know there’ve been a lot of interpretations involving Enki and Adapa and so on, and I think they’re important in the cultural context of the stories being told, but in my view the Fall of Man is the Fall of the Sumerian Dynasty to the Akkadians. 

And this provides with all kinds of implications for our Lucifer search, particularly through the parallel Fall myth of Pandora, which swims in strangely Sumerian waters as well.

Let me just sum this up:

• The Fall is the Fall of the Sumerian Dynasty, the “First Among Men.”
• The Garden of Eden is Nippur, the Garden of the Gods.
• Yahweh is Enlil, the Sumerian Sky God and patron of Nippur.
• The Serpent in the Garden is Sargon, the gardener and betrayer of Sumer.
• Adam represents Lugalzagesi and the Sumerian ruling class.
• Eve represents Zagesi’s wife, who was probably Sargon’s Inanna.
• The Forbidden Fruit in this particular story represents Sargon’s alliance with her, which in turn is a reflection of the well-known symbolism of Tammuz and Inanna and the date-palm, sacred to Lugalzagesi’s Uruk.
• Yahweh calling out the naked Adam represents Zagesi frogmarched at Nippur.
• Yahweh’s curse on the Serpent represents the fall of the Akkadian Dynasty.
• Adam and Eve’s banishment is the exile of the Sumerian ruling class.
• The Cherubim represent Sargon’s armies, guarding the Sumerian palaces.
• The entire story probably comes, almost in toto, from a satirical/political Sumerian text, probably dating from Ur III.
• Details from the Fall wind up in several other Bible stories, as well as the Fall of the Watchers.

Now, doesn’t this make a lot more sense than some business about Venus’s position in the morning sky or something?

Further, I believe that Lugalgazesi the Giant ultimately became Prometheus the Titan when a band of Sumerian rebels headed north for the Caucasus Mountains in search of gold to help finance their campaign to regain their homeland. And the stories of the Titans cast into Tartarus are derived from these exiles exploring gold mines that were already ancient when Sargon was still a gardener. 

Ergo, the Fall of the Sumerian Dynasty may not only have inspired the Fall of Man mythos it also inspired the Fall of Lucifer and his angels.

There are several reasons I believe this, one of which is that Prometheus himself seems to be a straight-up adaption of the mysterious Sumerian god Gibil, god of fire and patron of miners and metalworkers. 

And oh yeah, masons.

Gibil’s symbol? The torch, of course.

Gibil was also known as Girra, or “The Shining One.” That’s the same name as Helel, the name cited as Lucifer in some translations of Isaiah.

I believe that Gibil would become a secret god, a secret supreme god to these rebels, a status made evident in the Prometheus myths. I also believe that because he’s said to have a mind “so vast that all the gods, all of them, cannot fathom it” in the Enuma Elish.

That sounds like esoteric knowledge to me.

I believe Gibil would later come to be known as Iblis, the flame-born fallen one in the Koran. And most probably the Melek Taus of the Yazidi (Girra’s temple was called the é-me-lám-huš, which is certainly etymologically related). Gibil would even show up in a memorable incantation in the legendary Simon Necronomicon. 

But strangely, such an important god seems to have left a meager footprint in the records we have today.

That is to say the records that have been made available to the public. There might be an entire corpus of Gibil literature we haven’t seen yet. I know there’s at least one Sumerian magical text that is not available on the web that he’s called to in.

I also believe some of the Sumerian rebels eventually migrated to Greece and that they are in fact the true creators of the Greek Mystery religions, since the “Descent into the Underworld” myths that inform them also seem to originate in Sumer as well. These too may have been inspired in part by those ancient mines on the Black Sea.

Why? 

Because Hades, Lord of the Underworld, was also known as the “Lord of Riches.”