around the sun. A likely contender appears to be a
massive ‘Perturber’ among these distant comets.
Dr. Murray then predicted an approximate sky location for the
massive planet, or brown dwarf, based upon its perceived retrograde motion
around the sun. When I read his paper I was amazed. This position was somewhat
north of Sagittarius, in the small constellation of Delphinius. The planet
appeared to be acting in a very similar way to the orbit described by Zecharia
Sitchin for Nibiru.
It was moving the wrong way around the sun, compared to the other
planets. It was inclined to the plane of the planets by 30 degrees, as proposed
by Sitchin. And it was in the right part of the sky. To my mind, this ‘Dark
Star’ of Dr. Murray’s was Sitchin’s Nibiru. He had found physical evidence to
show that this fabled planet exists.
Myth and Reality
My
excitement was compounded by the fact that I had already independently proposed
that the way in which Nibiru was described in the myths correlated well with
our understanding of a brown dwarf, or failed star. In the Enuma Elish, the
Babylonian ‘god’ Marduk, whose 49th Name is Nibiru, was described using words
that have a strong cosmological flavour. 19 The description seemed to
tally with an extraordinary and massive planet which emitted fire and
lightning. In other words, it was a planet more massive than Jupiter with
certain stellar characteristics.
Its
dramatic incursion into the myth seems to indicate to us that Marduk had once
entered the solar system for the first time, blazing with fire and shining like
the sun. There is an even clearer reference to Marduk’s sun-like attributes in
these lines, and is quite literally called the "Son of the Sun":
“MARDUK, as Anu, his
father, called him from his birth; Who provides grazing and drinking places,
enriches their stalls,
Who with the flood-storm,
his weapon, vanquished the detractors,
And who the gods, his
fathers, rescued from distress. Truly, the Son of the Sun, most radiant of gods
is he. In his brilliant light may they walk forever!”
Tablet
VI Lines 124-9. 20
I
believe this designation as the ‘Son of the Sun’ is of great significance. If
the ‘Dark Star’, which seems to be synonymous with the Babylonian god Marduk in
the Babylonian creation myth exists, then our solar system is a long-standing
binary system, whose smallest ‘star’ is now old and cold. But at the time of
its dramatic entry into the sun’s domain, it was a radiant and powerful planet
whose stellar attributes are clearly described. The planet represented by
Marduk seemed to have once shined like a small star, becoming the ‘Son of the
Sun’.
Sumerologists
and skeptics in general argue that the Enuma Elish should not be interpreted in
terms of an astronomical framework, that the gods described in the Creation
Myth are not synonymous with stellar deities, whether in the form of planets,
stars, or constellations. They take issue with Zecharia Sitchin for making this
connection. 21 Yet, the Enuma Elish is packed full of cosmic
descriptions, in keeping with the advanced knowledge of astronomy of the
Babylonians.
This
is an old argument that has raged for many years. Although many of the gods of
the ancient pantheons are directly related to planets, the sun and the Moon,
scholars generally don’t interpret that as meaning that the ancients were
trying to tell us about the physical nature of the solar system: myths are
myths, nothing more.
Yet, we are becoming more aware of the remarkable astronomical
knowledge of ancient peoples, through the complex archeo-astronomical
alignments of many of the monuments dating back from megalithic times. 22,
23 The myths seem to be an excellent vehicle for the transmission of an
oral tradition about the astronomical knowledge that the ancient people all
round the world clearly exhibited. Such an argument lies at the heart of an
illuminating thesis by the scholars Georgio de Santillana and Hertha