Roots of War, Domination and Violence - I

Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.

How did domination and violence become part of human nature? Or, if it is not part of human nature, how did it become such a prominent feature of civilization? As the world political situation descends once again into a maelstrom of war and destruction, thoughtful people everywhere are asking themselves and each other these questions, even as activists and diplomats struggle to find means to end the mayhem. Media images crowd the mind: the grief-struck mother whose house has been bombed and whose children killed, asks "why - what did we do to them?" The military leader who ordered the high-tech precision bombing raids on civilian settlements, who says "we bombed because we had to - we had no choice". Of course, reasons are always given, -- there are "strategic purposes", the "defense of vital interests", the "nation's security", "securing our borders", "the other side started it." For everyone of these reasons, there are always sober, reasonable voices who point out these purposes and interests could perhaps better be served by non-violent means, and that the path of violence usually (always?) ends up doing more harm than good to those very interests. There is a sense of some compulsion, addictive almost, some other hidden element we can't quite discern that keeps pushing humanity into homicidal and suicidal madness. What is that hidden dynamic, that demonic obsession? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Can we ever overcome it? I wish to look at some legends and speculative histories for possible clues to this most agonizing dilemma. Before looking at some of the marginal, alternative, or even "far-fetched" opinions, let us review the more widely accepted beliefs and theories about the roots of war and violence.

Psychological Roots of Violence
At the most basic level of individual development, most people would agree that violence, like other forms of behavior, is learned by imitation. It is widely accepted from psychological studies of violent criminals that violence is learned behavior. Adults who abuse others, including their own children, are likely to have been abused themselves, and/or witnessed abuse in childhood. The cause of violence, in other words, is prior violence - and physical punishment only amplifies the disposition to further violence.

Similar trends can be observed at the level of society: wars lead to further wars, whether between street gangs, tribes or nation states. And violence spills over from the military to the civilian sectors of society: statistical studies have shown that the rate of violent crime in a society goes up in war time. It's almost as if violence were a kind of contagious virus, spreading like an epidemic from one area to another. Furthermore, the contagion is readily magnified in a society in which entertainment media are saturated with images and stories that glamorize violence as heroic, by framing it as punishment for crime or evil, or the necessary defeat of an "enemy". Violence in the media also desensitize the individual to the terrible human costs and consequences of violence, normalizing it and blunting our capacity for empathy.
In this chicken-and-egg kind of causal chain, we can ask, how and where does the initial infection, the initial impulse to violence, arise? Psychologists studying child development have identified one possible source in sibling rivalry, the competition between brothers and sisters for the attention and approval of the parents and other adults, especially when there is a perceived scarcity of loving connection. The competitive attitude may be maintained into adulthood and carried over into personal and work relationships with peers. The analogy then at the societal level is the theory that wars arise in competition over access to scarce resources, such as land or energy, - a view which we will discuss further below.

In the family crucible of child development, the experiences of sibling rivalry and violent abuse may be internalized: the person may develop a dual self-image - a good and bad self, or "top dog" and "under dog", as Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy called this constellation. Religious mythology as well as folk tales and fairy tales are filled with stories of rival brothers and sisters, playing out the many variations of this theme. In more extreme situations of childhood violence, there may be the development of multiple part-self fragments, some violent and dominant, some fearful victims, some detached and alienated. Externally perceived violence and conflict in childhood is internalized; then, in adulthood, these internalized images of "opponent" and "enemy" are projected outward, adding excess charges of rage, hatred and fear into interpersonal relations.

One of the most interesting of C.G. Jung's many interesting contributions to psychology in the 20th century, is his concept of the shadow, a complex of unacceptable thoughts, feelings and images, that seems to work against our own better interests, countering our higher values, -- a kind of "enemy within". This shadow complex may appear symbolically in a dream of a monster; or it may be projected outward on our fellow humans, whom we then regard as an "enemy", or "evil". Jung argued that for psychological health or wholeness, we need to integrate this shadow complex, reconcile with this inner enemy. If we don't integrate these hidden parts of the psyche we are liable to be surprised by sudden and violent eruptions of rage, panic and violence.

In my book The Unfolding Self (Metzner, 1998) I discuss this key integrative and healing process, as it may manifest in the course of psychotherapy or other growth processes, in the chapter on "Reconciling with the Inner Enemy". One of the central insights of depth psychology is that there are two main types of defenses that we use to avoid confronting the negative, anxiety-provoking thought-feeling impulses within ourselves, and they require different strategies to bring about integration and reconciliation. The defense of repression, dissociation and denial require that unconscious material be brought to here-now awareness, so it can be dealt with. The defense of projection, in which the other is blamed and seen as the enemy, or the "evil-doer", or the "bad guy", is much trickier to work with, since it requires the withdrawing of the blame-judgement projections, and accepting one's own negativity. The process is trickier because there is almost always a seed of truth in projections, some hook on which to hang the projected image. As long as the processes of shadow projection keep us externally focused, it is all too easy for intra-psychic conflict to erupt into interpersonal or inter-group enmity and conflict. In either case the processes of healing and reconciliation require skillful analytic detective work as well as empathy, for others and for oneself.

The shadow metaphor can be applied at the level of collective consciousness, where we are dealing with mass-mind images, complexes of unconscious personal material combined with the consciously propagated enemy images of religion and politics. The Christian devil, it could be said, is such a symbolic mass-mind enemy image that acquired a kind of autonomy and power over human beings, due to its being invested with belief over many centuries by many millions of the Christian faithful. In international relations, leaders deliberately use the language and imagery of "enemies", or "evil empires", to motivate the population into wars and genocidal violence, activating unconscious hate-filled shadow complexes.
In my own personal history, I was fortunate to learn an early lesson in the delusional aspects of war-time propaganda. With a German father and English mother, living in Berlin during World War II, the public atmosphere of school and media was filled with talk of "the English are our enemies", "we're going to drive them into the sea", and the like; while in the private sphere of our family and friends, there was, of course, no such conversation. When, in adolescence, I lived in an English boarding school, I saw that to the English children, the Germans, myself included, were the "enemy" or "bad guys". My child's mind thus absorbed the fact that "enemies" don't actually exist - we call another being "enemy", to serve as a target for our hatred and hostility. I shall always be grateful to my parents for providing me with this early understanding of the subjectivity of enemy-making.

Beyond the vagaries of child development, the field of perinatal and prenatal psychology, as it has developed in the past 20 years, offers a rich set of convincing observations on the roots of aggression and violence in the experience of the birth trauma and the details of fetal existence. Transpersonal psychiatric researcher Stanislav Grof, whose theories are based on observations in LSD psychotherapy and holotropic breathwork, has shown that the reliving of birth trauma is typically and spontaneously associated with a variety of experiences from the collective unconscious portraying scenes of unimaginable violence, terror and aggression (Grof, 1976).

In the work of Lloyd DeMause and his psychohistory associates, who bring psychoanalytic insights to scholarly studies of historical events, using fantasy analysis of public speeches and political cartoons, the connections between individual trauma and public violence has been made explicit. DeMause presents a vast body of evidence and historical documentation that the prenatal period (often further amplified and developed in the "family crucible" of early childhood) is rife with psychic dramas. If not worked through by the individual, these violent dramas of rage, sacrifice and humiliation may then be enacted on the world stage, by leaders carrying the projections of their followers (deMause, 1982). An example is the way Adolf Hitler used the image of the "Dolchstoss", the "dagger in the back", to symbolize the enormously burdensome and humiliating reparations that Germany was forced to pay by the winners in WW I; this image then provoked feelings of vengefulness and hatred in people, feelings that they knew from childhood experiences of abuse and injustice. DeMause concludes that wars are a kind of self-sacrificial blood-letting ritual that nations are drawn into, by leaders with unassimilated prenatal and childhood trauma. Such mass blood-letting rituals are designed to appease internalized authoritarian voices that demand dependence, sacrifice and obedience.

In considering the possible personal developmental origins of violence, terror and war, we are always still left with a nagging sense of incompleteness, a sense of deeper forces at work. Why do some individuals and some groups develop habits of domination and violence for dealing with differences with others, and why do others, exposed to similar perinatal and child-rearing practices, do not. Are there deeper forces, perhaps deeper unconscious genetic, familial, and ancestral patterns at work here?

Roots of War, Domination and Violence - II

Ancestral Roots in Tribal Competition

No one can deny that the collective human manifestations of war and violence have horrifyingly long historical and pre-historical antecedents in the age-old, long-continuing struggles between tribes and societies for territory and economic survival. Many believe that all war is basically war over resources: in historical times at first land for farming and the herding of animals; later, the extraction of valuable minerals and metals; still later, in the petroleum age, the biosphere's stored carbon deposits. Contemporary indications are that water may turn out to be the most bitterly fought over resource in the era of global fever-heat and climate-change into which we are moving.

The cut-throat competition of the haves and the have-nots seems to be a deeply ingrained factor in the consciousness of the human race. Just how deeply ingrained is a question of intense debate among anthropologists, historians and archaeologists. Can we transform territorial and economic competition into peaceful and cooperative co-existence? Have we ever? Is there any evidence that peaceful societies have ever existed, which would give us hope that it can be done?

Here the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas on the matricentric, peaceful, goddess-worshipping cultures of Old Europe, in the 8th to 6th millennia BCE, is of great importance (Gimbutas, 1991). Although her work is controversial because it goes far beyond the accepted academic paradigms in prehistory and archaeology, I am among those who find the massive accumulation of detailed evidence in her work to be convincing in a revelatory way. Around the 5th millenium BCE the people she calls Kurgans, with their sky and warrior gods, their horses, chariots and weapons, started emigrating from their homeland in Central Asia, presumably in reaction to spreading drought conditions (for which there is independent evidence). Gimbutas' work shows, convincingly to my mind, that the Kurgan peoples' practice of invading the rich farming communities along river valleys and taking what they wanted by force of arms, was not a form of culture that could have evolved naturally out of those peaceful, artistic cultures of Old Europe. It was imposed by violence and war at first, later by forced assimilation and intermarriage, giving rise to mixed cultures, in which there was a ruling class or caste of patriarchal warrior chiefs and kings. Remnants of the older cultural traditions were suppressed, but survived underground.

Hybrid mythologies wove together the histories and religious cosmologies of the two kinds of cultures. In Nordic-Germanic mythology as related in The Edda, the deities of the Old Europeans, called Vanir, were all associated with the land, fertility, peace and wealth, including mineral wealth. The sky and warrior deities, called Aesir, were originally the protector gods of nomadic herders, highly dependent on sun and weather changes (Metzner, 1994). The Edda poems say that war came to mankind by extension from the competitive feuding between the Aesir and Vanir deities. These myths are religious stories that tell the histories of the peoples involved. The invaders and conquerors tell their justification stories - "they stole from us", "they started the fighting", "our supreme god told us do this". The conquered also tell their stories - of resistance and retaliation, but also of peace-making and reconciliation rituals - like the Mysteries of Eleusis, and the story of the Mead of Inspiration. We shall return below to the hidden and eerie connections between religions and war.

Certainly it is not difficult to see how the attitude of conquering robbers and pirates, who take the resources they want from militarily less powerful populations, using violence or the threat of violence, can be seen in the history of colonialism, with its "conquistadors", and industrial capitalism, with its "robber barons" and "titans of industry"; and its further extension in the domineering financial and market manipulations of multinational corporations in our own time. Industrial corporations were originally created as legal mechanisms to organize and facilitate the production and distribution of goods and services in an economy. But they suffer from an inherent design flaw, namely that the explicit and exclusive purpose of their operations is the generating of profit. The purpose of a business, we are told in textbooks, is to make money; whereas actually the purpose should be (and was, originally) the production of shoes, bread and other "goods", and the provision of services, such as transportation or construction.

The exclusive focus on the bottom line of profitability has turned the corporations into rogue machine monsters, hierarchical systems of organized taking, called "capital accumulation". These machine monsters have escaped the control of their makers, and are systematically, at ever increasing speed, devouring all of the planet's biosphere elements, originally kept as "common wealth", but increasingly designated as "resources": these include land, water, forests, ocean fisheries, minerals and metals, carbon deposits and even the electro-magnetic spectrum, used for radio and other forms of communication. This catastrophic process is driving countless plant and animal species to irreversible extinction by habitat destruction, and represents an unprecedented degradation and deterioration of the wealth and health of the biosphere.

From this perspective, tribal and national warfare is the inevitable accompaniment to the organized taking, or theft, of raw materials or resources. Indo-European cattle herders with superior weapons found that it was temptingly easy to enlarge their herds of cattle (their "capital"), by raiding the herds of others and killing or enslaving their owners. English sailing ships exploring the Americas in search of gold, found a more profitable return on their backers' investments was to be had by resorting to piracy, and stealing from the Spanish who had already mined the gold with the slave labor of the Indians. European history, as told in textbooks, is a long and repetitive story of first, monarchies and later, nation states using military means to enlarge their territories, or to consolidate their hold on territories acquired by means of marriage contracts involving the heirs of hereditary rulers. In our time, the pattern continues, as the industrial capitalist system, with its relentless drive for profitability, constantly scours the globe for cheaper raw materials, as well as markets for its products, backed up by the military force of an ever-expanding empire striving for "full-spectrum" dominance. As Karl Marx and his successors pointed out, late-stage monopoly capitalism is necessarily accompanied by imperialism.

Violence, war or the threat of war, usually accompany the taking of resources owned or protected by others - just as theft is usually armed robbery. But the use of force or violence has fateful consequences: wars of aggression lead to wars of defense. As Andrew Bard Schmookler pointed out in his book The Parable of the Tribes (Schmookler, 1984), if you have a group of tribes living peaceably, and only one of them starts to arm itself and threaten or attack another, all of them have to resort to arms to defend themselves. Wars of aggression, or even the threat of violence, lead inevitably to further wars, just as violence between gangs leads to further retaliatory violence, and violence in the family begets further violence in the next generation.
Even more insidiously, the making and improvement of weaponry becomes an ever-growing pre-occupation of the rulers and ruling elites. The technologies of killing require the growth of specialized knowledge, the diversion of wealth into the production of the sharper swords, the faster firearms, the more powerful bombs, and the ever greater influence and power of the military castes in society. It was Dwight Eisenhower, the general who became President, who warned Americans, at the end of his term, of the threat to a free society posed by the enormous growth and "unwarranted influence" of the military-industrial complex. The mutuality of the relationship between capitalism and warfare was demonstrated both by the growth of the Nazi military machine in the 1930s, and by the success of the armaments industry in lifting America out of the Depression. In our time by far most profitable sector of the industrial economy is military and defense related, as the self-styled "superpower" rampages across the globe.

However, the success and profitability of the military comes at a huge price to society. In our time, in the United States, we have obscenely bloated military budgets, and a world-wide trade in arms that dwarfs the trade in all other products (with the possible exception of drugs), as declining proportions of the society's wealth are used for infrastructure, education, and healthcare for the poor. Other countries fall victim to this imbalance as well: the Russian economy imploded under the weight of its excessive military-industrial bureaucracy. We have countries like North Korea, where nuclear missile technology co-exists with mass starvation. On the other side of the equation - Germany and Japan, the defeated nations of WWII, which were forbidden to spend money on re-arming their military, made a much faster recovery in their economies than other European nations.

It should be recognized clearly: to maintain a military system does not actually contribute to the productive wealth of a society. True, military-industrial corporations generate profits for their investors, and employ a certain number of people, both in the fighting forces and the civilian sector. However, they don't contribute "goods and services" to the country's overall economy, the its infrastructure, the well-being of its people, the uplifting of the poor, or the improvement of its natural environment; nor do they contribute to the diversity and vibrancy of cultural life. The relationship of the military system to the larger socio-economic order is parasitical - resources are drained from the productive sectors of society, and the inequalities inherent in a capitalist society are exacerbated enormously.

As Mahatma Gandhi once famously prophesied, speaking in support of a political economy based on non-violence - "there should be enough to meet everyone's need, but not their greed".

But why exactly do some societies evolve a market system based on the profit motive, traditionally known as "greed", rather than on meeting all human needs and Earth's needs first? Is it not possible to imagine that groups (tribes, nations) inhabiting a particular area, and confronted with a situation of scarce resources, would choose to equitably share what they have, thus avoiding conflict? Certainly we know that this kind of sustainability with peaceful co-existence and the equitable meeting of human needs, as well as a respecting of ecosystem limits, has existed on a small scale, at various times in history and various locations on Earth. Why has it become so difficult, so politically "unrealistic", or "socialist", or "utopian", to even envision or propose such a system at the global level? Why has the founding vision of the United Nations, proclaimed at the end of the most destructive war the world has ever known, "to eliminate forever the scourge of war from human affairs", been so elusive to attain, despite the sincere and good efforts and skills of numerous peacemakers? Is there something else, are there deeper, more ancient behavior patterns at work, residues of our evolutionary species ancestry, that we can't discern?

Roots of War, Domination and Violence - III

Evolutionary Roots of Domination Behavior

I have suggested that the relation of a military war-system to the larger society of which it is a part, can be seen as analogous to the relationship of a parasite to its host, with the parasite increasing its strength while draining the resources and impairing the viability of the host. This is not to say that it must always be that way. A defensive military capability could be integrated into a society in a balanced way, and there are evolutionary models for that: in ant colonies, the soldier ants and worker ants each contribute their function to the overall maintenance of the society. On this analogy, the challenge for a mature human society would be to balance the expenditures on necessary defensive forces with expenditures on the environment, infrastructure, health care and other basic human needs.

The parasite analogy has also been applied on the global level by ecological thinkers, including James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia theory (Lovelock, 1991). In this view, the linked problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation can be seen as symptoms of a planetary disease, a parasitical infestation of the biosphere (Lovelock ironically labels it "disseminated primatemia"), that threatens the viability of numerous plant and animal species and the irreparable destruction of numerous habitats.

Not all parasite-host relationships end up with the death of one or the other. Evolution has countless models in which a parasitical relationship between species has been turned into a symbiotic mutuality. The global challenge, in this analogy, is for the human civilization, fractured and dysfunctional though it may be, instead of dominating and exploiting the biosphere, to become its stewards and preservers.
Turning now from the collective and global level the level of individual and group human behavior, we can ask - are there perhaps ancient genetic imprints left over from the evolutionary ancestry of homo sapiens, that mammal with three brain systems and an opposable thumb? Can domination and exploitation behavior be observed in the animal realm? Evolutionary biologists have shown that dominance hierarchies, where the males in a pack fight and compete for access to females and resources are common among mammalian and primate species, including our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees. The residues of that kind of behavior in human societies are ubiquitous - and can be observed in the authoritarian patriarchal structure of gangs, corporations and political parties. The concept of "alpha males" has entered into the common understanding of media discourse. Dominance hierarchies intersecting with sexist, racist, class, religious and nationalist attitudes of superiority are the focus of ongoing culture struggles and political reform movements throughout the world. It should be noted however, in defense of our common primate heritage, that one branch of the chimpanzee family, the West African bonobos, have developed a uniquely peaceful social system in which conflicts are resolved by cooperative sexual pleasuring, instead of aggressive fighting - surely a hopeful sign (De Waal and Lanting, 1997).

In attempting to understand the evolutionary roots of domination and violence, some have speculated about the possible residues in human genetic memory of the millions of years of competitive interaction between predators and prey. The ecologist Paul Shepard has argued that predator carnivores have evolved a different kind of consciousness, a different quality of attention, from the prey herbivores, related to their different lives of chasing or escaping (Shepard, 1978). Predator intelligence is searching, aggressive, tuned to stalking and hunting. Prey intelligence is cautious, expectant, ready for instant flight. Omnivore primates and hominids inherited both kinds of adaptation, both kinds of basic attitude. Is it possible that these different styles of awareness, these opposing modes of relating, form a kind of evolutionary template for the human behavior of aggressors (predators) and victims (prey)? Don't we still hunt, prey on and victimize our fellow humans for survival? Don't we still, in the paranoid mode, instinctive for those preyed upon, vigilantly watch for threats, prepared to flee or defend? At the collective, social level, mega corporations stalk and hunt for "opening of new markets", or for smaller corporations that may be "ripe for take-over".

In natural ecosystems, the relations between predators and prey species seem to maintain a kind of overall balance in the long run, although that balance is subject to disruption by climate and environment changes. Predation is a primary evolutionary adaptation of certain species, including the human. In the pre-historic transition known as the agricultural revolution, when hunting other (mostly smaller) animals gave way to herding, and the gathering of plants to growing and gardening. The domestication and slaughtering of animals for food can basically be understood as institutionalized predation. However, we also have the deep genetic memory of having been food for other large mammals. Some believe that the memory of having been a hunted prey, was what gave humans the determination to use their reasoning and technological capabilities to vault themselves to the top of the food chain - where all other animal beings, as well as plants, are seen as potential food sources, to be consumed and exploited.

We need to observe that the killing of the being of another animal species for food is a completely different kind of interaction, than intra-species killing for other motives. We do not judge the violence visited by the lion on the gazelle as evil, nor do we judge the animal killing of the slaughter-house as evil (although we may rightly decry certain methods of killing as "inhumane"). But when a criminal preys on a weaker female or child, raping and murdering, or kills another human being, our moral instincts as well as the ethical principles of all religions are violated. Civilization means having a system of enforceable laws to control such transgressions at the individual and small group level. No such controls exist, however, to curb predation by rogue kingdoms, nations and empires, - although many attempts have been made, through the ages, to establish supra-ordinate legal institutions by agreement, most recently the much-maligned United Nations. The historical record show that again and again, when war or "civil war" breaks out, the moral and legal codes that restrain greed and violence collapse, and the civilized order collapses into barbarism, where there is unrestricted violent predatory competition for resources and mass-murder of civilians.

Besides herding animals for food, humans have also herded medium-sized animals, including other humans, for the work-energy involved, as "energy-slaves", to use an expression coined by Buckminster Fuller. The origin of slavery is historically closely related and analogous to the domestication of animals: both involve the idea of treating another being as property - to be used for doing work. Wherever did humans get such an idea? Unlike killing an animal for food, this is not a phenomenon that prehistoric hominids could have observed in the animal kingdom. There are competitive and cooperative relationships, within and between species. But the practice of enslaving and using other beings for their mechanical or material value only, with no respect for their spiritual essence and autonomy, seems to be unique to humans (with the possible exception of some ants and other insects). Of course, not all use of domestic animals as beasts of burden or is necessarily exploitative and disrespectful - small scale traditional farming and herding comes to mind. And also, not all cultures practiced animal domestication as an adaptation: the indigenous peoples of the Americas chose to domesticate numerous species and varieties of edible plants, but very few animals - maybe the dog and the llama. The Plains Indians, while living in complete symbiotic interdependence with the giant herds of wild buffalo, never domesticated and corralled them.

In many ways, one could say that capitalism, as it has developed in the past 400 years, and particularly in its industrial corporate form, in the 19th and 20th centuries in the West, is an institutionalized system of slavery and predation: one sub-group of the human species, which itself is only one part of the immensely diverse Earth community of human and other life-forms, elects to survive and adapt by means of accumulation and domination - in other words, taking what they want, for themselves, using force. This self-selected elite group (or gang, or class) - let's call them the techno-industrial corporate humans - consider themselves superior to all other beings on Earth, including the vast majority of other humans, who are thought of as "lower classes", "inferior races", or simply - "the masses". The elites point to their technological accomplishments, which are indeed stupendous, as well as their economic success, as obvious signs of their general superiority. Other animals and some other human beings are treated as energy-slaves, to be used and exploited for their material bodies, or their work, in the "wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed", in Wendell Berry's eloquent phrase. In addition to some animals and some humans, plants, minerals and metals, and entire ecosystems, are regarded as "resources" to be exploited. Certain mineral and metal materials are built into machines, which can then substitute for human or animal labor, making the actual beings disposable, thus reducing labor costs for the corporation and increasing profits.

The social-cultural domination system we know as techno-industrial capitalism, involves structured mechanical transformations, using slave or machine labor, of Nature's biological, material and energetic resources into profitable commodities and waste, or cash and trash. Capitalism's psychological root motivation appears to be a kind of addictive fixation on the monetary value of products, called commodity fetishism, in Karl Marx's insightful phrase. At the level of economics. this dynamic translates as capital accumulation, driven to grow with relentless and ruthless momentum and ever-increasing concentration, from the local to the national to the global scale. At the level of politics, the capitalist project is dependent on domination by force, and thus increasingly pushes societies into authoritarian and dictatorial forms of social organization, i.e. fascism and imperialism.

From the point of view of the ecological web of life, it should be noted that this industrial project is a linear and irreversible transformation, completely unlike any of the cyclical transformations that we observe in the non-human natural world, where nothing is ever wasted or thrown away and everything is re-used and recycled. Nature's organic processes flow in self-organizing, self-maintaining, regenerative, inter-connected, multi-dimensional cycles of sacred beauty and infinitely mysterious complexity.

Defenders of the so-called "free-market" system of capitalist enterprise often like to think and say that not only has this system been successful, there are simply no viable alternatives. There are, however, other forms of social organization that have existed in the historical past and still exist, albeit on a small, community scale in various locales to this day. The two main alternative social orders to the capitalist system are the indigenous and the socialist. Though some indigenous societies did have priestly and monarchical power hierarchies, others evolved cooperative, non-dominator models of resource sharing and ecosystem preservation. And socialism, while it may never have existed in a fully realized form at the state level, at least presents the ideal of a social order in which the meeting of all human needs in the society is made the primary goal and value, rather than the accumulation of capital by the ruling elites.
Societies attempting to live by such human and environmental value systems are unlikely to find the capitalist systematic domination and predation agenda appealing, no matter how dressed up in the philosophical and religious ideology of the ruling elites. Obviously, slaves tend not like slavery, though they may indeed come to accept it in order to survive, and even to internalize it psychologically. Both a dominator complex and a victim complex may come to reside within the same individual, as psychiatrists know well. (This may be the dynamic behind so-called bi-polar disorders). To overcome internal resistance by the working classes, the ruling classes in modern nation states, convinced of the rightness and superiority of their way of life, have found it expedient to adopt the violent methods of their ancestor rulers to impose their domination and control agendas, internally against their own people as well as externally against others. Violent suppression of internal dissent and resistance by workers (or slaves in former times), coupled with imposed militaristic uniformity of expression and behavior is the political system we call fascism in modern times. Mussolini, credited with its invention, actually said that fascism should better be called "corporatism", pointing to the alliance between the military and the corporations in a fascist system. It is easy to see how the authoritarian command systems required in the military also suit capitalist corporations' push toward uniformity of consumer behavior.

Whereas fascism is the systemic political expression of domination within the nation state, its external expression externally in international relations is imperialism/ colonialism. Invasion, expropriation (plunder), colonization and war have been the dominators' modus operandi from the warrior-chieftains of ancient times, to the absolutist monarchies of medieval times and the globe-spanning corporate empires of the modern age. Basically, wars of aggression. invasion and plunder amount to criminal behaviors ("armed robbery", "assault and battery", "breaking and entering") at the level of international relations. Behaviors that are penalized as crimes at the level of a community, are considered appropriate political strategies, realpolitik, at the level of relations between nations. This obvious illogical inconsistency has humanly profoundly unjust and destructive consequences. And yet, as was pointed out by Marx over a hundred years ago, imperialism is the natural outgrowth of monopoly capitalism, with its relentless push toward ever expanding markets. The fact that aggressive imperialist agendas are often supported by resort to self-serving, quasi-religious ideologies, that bring irrational qualities of fanaticism and zealotry to such activities, as well as a kind of sacrificial cult of heroism and martyrdom, does not change the basic fact that war is the breakdown of civilization.

It is easy to understand how a society that is invaded and colonized by superior force of arms cannot preserve its existing social order. The peaceful Goddess-centered societies of Old Europe were no match for the armed, horse-mounted Kurgan warriors from Central Asia, just as the peaceful native peoples of the Caribbean were no match for the Spanish conquistadors with their swords and dogs and guns, and the indigenous Dravidians of India no match for the Aryans invading from the North.. Historical and present-day examples of imperialist wars of aggression and violent colonization, accompanied by massive killing, plunder, ethnic cleansing and environmental degradation, can be multiplied ad nauseam.

The building of nations and empires appears to be irrevocably connected not only with genocide against various external "others", but also with violence against internal groups as class warfare. The nagging question remains, how does it happen that societies, from ancient to modern times, have time and again failed to maintain a cooperative social order and have fallen victim to being taken over by tyrannical, war-like and imperialist elites, often with the complicity of priests, intellectuals and ideologues? We have examined the roots of dominator behavior in deep-seated psychological complexes, and in residues of ancient evolutionary patterns of competition and predation. We turn now to consider the possibility that there are hidden, forces, secret societies, active in human civilization that push societies repeatedly into divisive and destructive conflicts, deliberately practicing the strategy of "divide and conquer". Even more disturbing is the possibility that there may be supra-human "dark forces", "evil spirits", demonic deities or destructive archetypes, that manipulate human consciousness and historical events for their own domination agendas. It turns out that there is quite a vast body of historical, occult and religious mythological literature that deals with just this question.

A Dream Teaching on "Dark Forces"

Are there secret dominator forces and groups within human civilization? A huge body of literature on secret societies, as well as numerous ancient myths of dual deities suggest a positive answer to this disturbing but inevitable question. I will begin by relating the following extremely vivid dream, that I had a few years ago. While in the dream state I felt no fear, but thinking about it in retrospect, I found the implications terrifying. At the same time, I also felt it offered some insights into the questions of domination, war, violence and evil that I had been thinking about.

I find myself in a gathering of human-like beings that I understand to be a dark force council. There are no discernible facial or other bodily features: I am seeing only the upper torso and heads of about a dozen hooded figures, arranged as if around a table. No lower bodies or legs are visible, nor any differentiating individual features, such as male or female. The faces and torsos of these beings are uniformly shrouded in dark grey veils. For a moment I am questioning myself as to the reason for my presence in this group. Why was I invited, if I was invited? The beings did not seem to notice me or address any communications to me personally. They just emanated a very coherent set of thought-forms, whose meanings I seemed to be able to register telepathically.

The primary thought-form that I picked up was that the sole and exclusive focus of the beings in this council was to accumulate more power and more wealth. More wealth to get more power, more power to get more wealth. To this end they dedicated all of their will power and all their concentration. They prided themselves on their power of concentration, which did indeed seem formidable. There were no distractions and disruptions in the coherency of their mental energy-field.

On awakening, I remembered reading an interview with the CEO of Enron, prior to that corporation's crash into bankruptcy, and their officers' indictment on fraud charges. In the interview, the CEO said that they prided themselves on their "laser-like focus" on increasing earnings-per-share - and nothing else. I have come to think of the beings I saw in my dream vision as "dominator spirits". They apparently exist at the mental level of reality, not at the ordinary, material time-space level. But they can inspire and guide the ruling elites, whether monarchical and feudal, or military and corporate, with their single-minded focus on power and wealth. It is important to recognize that the intention to accumulate wealth and power in these ruling elites is only for their group, not the wealth and well-being of the whole society, or the general population.

Perhaps they are also the guiding spirits behind the various legendary occult secret societies and brotherhoods, such as the Illuminati, said to manipulate world events behind the scenes, through their direct influence on mass-mind images. In his book Secret Brotherhoods, the esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner has written about the malevolent influence of hidden forces in human history, particularly the modern era (Steiner, 1917/2004). William Bramley, in his book The Gods of Eden, has accumulated an impressive amount of documentary evidence for the existence and activities of such secret groups in world history (Bramley, 1989). I am not making absolutist claims here that all corporate leaders are criminal gangsters, or all political leaders would-be tyrants. There are many honest, sincere, intelligent people, working for peace, well-being and justice, at all levels of society. I'm thinking about what it would mean for the survival of our civilization, if such hidden power influences do in fact exist.

Reflecting on the dream vision, I was at first dismayed at the thought that in order to counter the onslaught of these dominator groups' destructive predatory assault on the rest of humanity and the entire biosphere one would have to match their truly formidable power of concentration, and what a challenge that would be. On further reflection, however, it became clear that the dominators have a much easier concentrative task, since they only have one goal to focus on. They literally don't care about any other values, such as respect for human rights and dignity, justice, equality, preserving the quality of the environment, and so forth. Those human beings and groups that wish to support the unfolding of life, human and non-human, in all its diversity, and the building of sustainable, cooperative societies, have a much greater variety and multiplicity of purposes, and therefore a much more difficult task of concentration. Therefore there is an unjustified element of arrogance in the dominators' claim to superior powers of concentration.

I also realized that the arrogant one-pointed concentration of the dominator spirits and their human vassals, may lead to their undoing. They may not perceive internal failings or external threats to their system of power, before it collapses. "Pride comes before destruction", according to the ancient Biblical proverb. Certainly the testimony of history is clear: no empire or tyranny in world history has failed to eventually collapse, either from internal weaknesses, or by external attack, or by exhausting their ecological habitat.

In some esoteric formulations, the forces or spirits that I'm calling dominator spirits, are called "dark force" or "counter-evolutionary". What does it mean to be working with a counter-evolutionary agenda? Evolution, as we know, involves organisms and species finding habitats or niches to exploit, in which they can unfold their potentials and use creative strategies to meet their survival needs. The dominator spirits and the human beings and groups guided by them, are takers, predators or plunderers, who use violence and warfare to get what they want. Going far beyond meeting their own survival needs, the augment their wealth basically by stealing from others and killing those who resist or obstruct them. Their goal is not the welfare of the whole community or society, but rather to accumulate wealth and power for their own elite family, clan or group.

When I was writing my book The Well of Remembrance (Metzner, 1994), I discovered historical literature pointing out that some of the oldest myths of the original Indo-Europeans, who were nomadic herders, are the myth of divinely inspired cattle raiding - myths that lived on in the American Old West, with its endless stories of ranchers and rustlers. Some historians trace the early beginnings of capital accumulation to the enclosures movement in 16th century England, when powerful landowners, supported by soldiers, put a fence around grazing land that had previously been considered the wealth of the commons, and started charging rent for its use (Snyder, 1990). Different groups of gangster capitalists ("robber barons") compete and fight with one another: Spanish ships that sailed to the New World, taking gold from the natives, could be assaulted on the high seas by pirates, who found it convenient to add to their hoard by stealing that of another pirate ship. In our time. mega-corporations aggressively expand their power and wealth by negotiated or "hostile take-over" of the production systems of smaller corporations - actions that are usually accompanied by the loss of thousands of working class jobs, a rise in investors' earnings, a conspicuous increase in the compensation of the CEO responsible for the take-over.

Imperialism and colonialism basically involve one state or nation taking the resource base of another, and imposing their rule on the subject population, exacting tribute or taxes. Genocide, from the perspective of the dominators, is a strategy for removing an entire population from a certain area, and replacing it with another population, which then takes over the existing resources. In our time, we have economic imperialism, dressed up in the camouflage terminology of "free trade", which takes the form of privatization - where large multi-national corporations take over the common wealth of a society or country, like its water, utilities, infrastructure, etc. Privatization of the Iraqi oil-fields is the basic motivation behind the aggressive invasion of that country by the American empire, as is well understood around the world. Increasingly, the enormous wealth accumulated by the huge corporations (especially those involved in oil, ore, minerals and other primary resources, as well as military contractors), enables them to pursue their own growth agenda, using shadowy, behind-the-scenes, extra-legal maneuvering to free them from democratic controls and accountability. Ensuring the malleability and compliance of national governments becomes, for these groups, just another "cost of doing business".

Dominators, and the institutions created by them, want to grow by accumulating and concentrating wealth quantitatively, rather than growing by fostering the creative and qualitative unfolding of diverse populations and their varying adaptations. In that sense, it is clear that capital accumulation, fascism, militarism and war are "counter-evolutionary" forces. Those who want to continue supporting diversity and evolutionary unfolding resist such authoritarian domination agendas, and may be moved to take up arms to fight against them. But violent resistance and armed struggle are doomed to ultimate failure, since violence only breeds further violence, and in the end everyone loses, civilization is destroyed and whole countries are made uninhabitable. The dominator spirits and their human intermediaries thrive on war and profit from it. Indeed, this is precisely the danger of which the American President Dwight Eisenhower spoke in his retirement speech, in 1960, when he warned of the "growing, unchecked influence of the military-industrial complex".

The foregoing reflections have led me to a view that recognizes two kinds of archetypal forces or spirits guiding and inspiring the lives of individuals and societies. One group are those who support the peaceful, creative unfolding of life's evolutionary potentials and the preservation of the planet's life-support system. The pursuit of knowledge and the development of technology is integrated is integrated with respect for all living beings, and reverence for the spiritual reality of the universe. The other kind are those who have chosen the adaptation of accumulating and taking from others, using violence and war, and can thus be aptly described as counter-evolutionary. This by no means a original conception, and I would like now to examine some mythic and legendary prototypes of this kind of dualistic heritage. World mythology is filled with stories of rival brother gods, such as the Egyptian Osiris and Seth, the Sumerian Enlil and Enki, or the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. Some myths tell of feuding groups of deities, such as the Aesir and Vanir of the Norse people, and of battles between "gods" and "titans" or "monsters", found on planet Earth in earlier times. In both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, we have the conception of devas and asuras, - the former beneficent light-beings, the latter violent dominators. Both are supra-human spirits, inhabiting their own worlds, which nevertheless intersect and interact in consciousness with the world of humans, in complex ways. The persistent legend of the high civilization of Atlantis, which is said to have collapsed in a catastrophic flood, about ten thousand years before our time, also has this theme of a struggle between highly advanced beings, some creative and constructive and another group on imperialistic and exploitative path. I wish now to examine some of these more esoteric and mythic accounts of the roots of war and domination. In our time, such myths have been given new formulations in the literature on UFOs and ETs, where the rival "gods" of ancient times are technologically highly advanced beings from extra-terrestrial civilizations who have been intervening in human affairs for a very long time.

The Buddhist Myths of Devas and Asuras

Buddhism is basically a non-theistic religion, in which the essential moral teachings involve not so much an appeal to a book of rules handed down by an omnipotent creator and his priesthood, but rather the exhortation to practice meditative yogic methods designed to raise consciousness. Moral and peaceful behavior would then follow naturally from the inner peace and equanimity of a person who is in touch with their true essential nature, their "Buddha nature". Unconsciousness or ignorance of your own spiritual essence, along with cravings and hatreds, are the "three poisons" at the core of all human life. They are symbolized by the three inter-linked animals at the hub of the great ever-cycling Wheel of Birth and Death.

Buddhism did adopt and adapt some of the key cosmological myths of their Vedic and Hindu religious ancestors, including the conceptions of devas and asuras. Devas are the "shining ones", light spirits, analogous to "angels" in Western religion. They guide and inspire humans in their artistic and creative endeavors, and reminding them of their spiritual essence. Asuras are violent and envious demons, armed with weapons, focused on materiality, who are forever competing with the devas and attacking all forms of life in general. Whereas in the Indian Vedic (and related Persian Zoroastrian) mythology the focus is on the competition and struggle between the light and dark, good and evil, deities, Buddhism developed a more sophisticated analysis expressed in the symbolism of the six worlds of existence (samsara), linked by the twelve-fold chain of interdependent causation.

The icon of the Wheel of Samsara, which could also be called the Wheel of Earthly Existence, portrayed in numerous temple paintings throughout the Buddhist world, is held in the grip of a gigantic demon, representing the ceaseless flow of time and entropy. At the hub of the churning wheel are the three "poisons" (unconsciousness, craving and hatred) and around the outside rim of the wheel are the twelve links of the chain of interdependent mutual causation. The six worlds of possible existence are arrayed around the wheel, turning ceaselessly in cycles of birth, death and rebirth. These worlds can be regarded as realms of consciousness and reality inhabited by various beings, both human and non-human. One of the six realms is specifically designated the human realm, and is considered the most favorable realm for humans - it has the greatest number of possibilities for enlightenment. But humans beings may be incarnated into any of the six realms, in any given life-time, according to their karma. And even within one life-time, we may regard them as temporary states of consciousness in which humans can find themselves. Our challenge is to recognize and identify the worlds we are inhabiting by raising consciousness and thus learn to gradually disengage from the thrall of the three poisons.

One of the six worlds is the world of animals: this does not mean that humans may reincarnate as animals, as some simplistic conceptions hold. It means rather that we, as humans, are living in the consciousness of the animal realm, along with the animal spirits, when we are focused exclusively on instinctual mammalian survival programs. There is also a realm of pretas - "hungry ghosts", with huge bellies and thin throats, forever craving and forever frustrated. This could be considered an apt symbolic portrayal of the realm of humans fixated in addictive and obsessive states of consciousness.

The realm inhabited by the devas is a heaven world of great natural and aesthetic beauty, peace and harmony. Heaven, in the Buddhist conception, is not only a realm we may enter into after we die. It is, like all states, a temporary state into which we come by good karma and spiritual disciplines. We are in the deva realm when we are in heavenly, blissful states of consciousness. There is a hell world, opposite on the Wheel of Samsara, which is marked by extreme pain, suffering and victimization. It may be a purely subjective state of illness or madness, or it may also be experienced in an environment of war, torture and violence. It too, like the heaven world, is impermanent. In Buddhism, heaven is not a promised after-life reward and hell is not a threatened punishment - both are realms of in-life consciousness we are in (sometimes for an entire lifetime) as a result of choices and consequences (the law of karma).

In the iconic images of the Wheel of Life found in Tibetan Buddhism, the deva deities are sitting peacefully in a garden setting, an ecological paradise, full of flowering plants peaceful lakes and musicians playing. The asura realm is located next to the deva realm on the Wheel, and the asuras are shown as horse-mounted, armed warriors, brandishing their weapons and howling with frightful noise. In an image eerily symbolic of our present ecological catastrophe, where industrial mega-corporations backed by military gangs are devouring the rainforests and other biosphere resources, the asuras are cutting down the fruit-laden giant tree that the deva gods are contemplating and enjoying. Opposite the asura realm on the Wheel, lies the realm of the addicted and frustrated pretas. This could also be regarded as a symbolic portrayal of the global situation, where massively armed and violent gangs amass huge illicit profits from trafficking in drugs which hold millions in addictive bondage. The asuras correspond most closely to what other writers call "dark force", counter-evolutionary, or dominator spirits.

In both the Hindu and Buddhist, as well as Zoroastrian, cosmology, both devas, the spirits of peace and sustainability, and asuras, the spirits of violence and domination, are present in human civilization and history in varying proportions. According to Indian traditions, there are cosmic cyclical ages, the yugas, extending over thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, in which either the peaceful devas or the violent asuras are more prominent. Modern researchers like John Major Jenkins, in his work Galactic Alignment (Jenkins, 2002), relate these ages to the 26,000 year cycle of precession. All sources, agree that the present age, the Kali yuga, is the climax or low point, of an age ruled by the war-like asuras. The fact that for most of recorded history, at least in the past 6,000 years, since the Kurgan intrusions into Old Europe, Western societies have been ruled by warrior-chiefs, autocratic monarchs and emperors, and in our time, military juntas, this conception has an undeniable plausibility.

As far as I know, the Buddhists, while recognizing the transience of all rulers and empires, do not have a cosmic time-table for the change-over from one age to another. They would say that, both for the individual and for societies, the balance of peaceful and violent forces is a matter of the choices made by human individuals, and the groups to which they belong. Undoubtedly, the certain knowledge of the transience of all phenomena, including political ones, would help one to maintain equanimity and dignity even in the face of the most outrageous violations of human decency and morality, and to continue to counter the virulent depredations of the asuras and their human incarnations. Whether the defense against armed predatory plunder will inevitably lead to continuing cycles of violence and vengeance, or whether war can be countered and contained by active, yet non-violent struggle for peace and sustainability, can be seen to be the central challenge of our planetary civilization.

The Legend of the Downfall of the Civilization of Atlantis
A vast literature exists, ranging from the scientific and scholarly, to the speculative and mediumistic, telling of a lost civilization on an island in the Atlantic, that was so completely destroyed, with all its records, in a cataclysmic flood, that it has been lost to historical memory. As a proto-historical legend, the story of Atlantis was first recorded in the 5th century BCE by the Athenian Plato, the god-father of Western philosophy, who heard the story from ancient Egyptian sources. In the 20th century, the Atlantis legend was revived in a major way by the gifted American psychic Edgar Cayce, who left a multitude of paranormally channeled readings concerning Atlantis (Hope, 1991).

According to Cayce and other psychic pre-historians, Atlantis was a civilization with a naval empire, whose ships dominated the globe, engaging (in its later stages) in plundering warfare with various societies, including the Athenian, as recorded by Plato. The empire was ruled by a theocratic priesthood of humans with highly advanced psychic abilities, vastly extended life-spans and extraordinarily advanced technology of genetic engineering. Later myths told of these beings as "gods", because of their apparent "immortality" (actually supra-human longevity), and seemingly supernatural capacities. Esoteric mystical schools of modern times call them high-level initiates and adepts at working with the energies of multiple dimensions of consciousness and reality. Their scientists apparently mastered technologies based on crystals and sound vibrations, both for building pyramids and military weaponry. According to Edgar Cayce, some of these high-level adepts had chosen a "dark force" path of sorcery and exploitation, using their super-human abilities to create animal-human hybrids for the purposes of work or sexual slavery. Others in the ruling priesthood adhered to a mystical path of oneness and respect for all beings, and attempted to counteract or ameliorate the depredations of the dark force dominators. In the modern UFO/ET literature, it is often proposed that the Atlanteans actually came to Earth from another star-system (Sirius being a favored candidate), for the purpose of establishing colonies.

In accounting for the downfall of this powerful global empire, there are several versions: one is a classic "punishment of the wicked" scenario, as in the Biblical legend of the Great Flood, in which the karmic consequences of the dark ones' activities came back to destroy them. Other writers point to the physical and geographical evidence that there actually were planet-wide catastrophes around the 11th and 10th millennium BCE - and suggest that the Atlantean technocrats were blind to the consequences of their physical interventions on the Earth's energy-systems. In either case, so the story goes, those of the ruling elites who could see the catastrophe coming, years ahead of time, sent out expeditions to establish settlements in different parts of the world, where the indigenous people were taught the rudiments of the Atlantean sacred science and structures (for example, pyramids) containing coded memories were built. This activity is then said to have led to the beginnings of the ancient Egyptian, Meso-American, Northwestern European and perhaps other civilizations.

One psychic pre-historian that I came to know, stated that a number of souls of the Atlantean scientists who had been involved in the hyper-development of the physical, biological, and psychical technologies of that empire, were now reincarnated, again as visionary scientists and engineers, to try to prevent the same or similar misuses occurring again. Undeniably, there are eerie parallels between the putative pre-collapse situation of Atlantis, and our own time, where the dominator forces of techno-industrial exploitation are pushing the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse, while scientific and environmental groups and their allies, struggle to build and maintain sustainable communities at a local and regional scale.

The Wars of the Gods in Norse Mythology

In the religious mythology of the Nordic-Germanic people, there is fascinating evidence for the interaction between the Indo-European Kurgan invaders and the Old European cultures. We find this in the myths of the prolonged warfare and eventual peacemaking between two families of deities, the Aesir and the Vanir. I have discussed these myths in my book The Well of Remembrance, basing my interpretation on the archaeo-mythological work of Marija Gimbutas (Metzner, 1994). She has proposed, on the basis of the archaeological record, that the invasions of the Indo-European nomadic herder tribes called Kurgans into the agrarian matricentric cultures of Old Europe, starting in the 5th millennium BCE, led to initial warfare, and eventual hybridizing of cultures and religious worldviews. In this kind of approach to the interpretation of mythology, ancient stories and epics are seen as recordings of even more ancient oral traditions concerning actual events in pre-historic times, overlaid of course with fantastic elaborations. Such a view of mythology is consistent with that of Robert Graves, Mircea Eliade, and Zachariah Sitchin, whose work on Sumerian myth we shall discuss further below.

In Nordic-Germanic myth, there are two families or clans of deities, the Aesir and the Vanir. The Aesir are primarily sky- and warrior-gods, including Odin, Tiwaz or Tyr, and Thor the Thunderer. The Vanir, including Nerthus, Njörd and the brother-sister pair Freyr and Freyja, are primarily earth- and nature-deities, associated with prosperity and peace. The two groups of gods are portrayed in the myths as warring rivals, although there are also myths of peacemaking attempts. Presumably these myths reflect the conflict, drawn out over many centuries, between the invading Indo-Germanic tribes from the East and the aboriginal populations of Old Europe who resisted the attempted assimilation. It seems probable that after the Indo-Germanic people had settled in Central Europe, the Vanir continued to be the gods of the farmers and fishermen, while the Aesir were worshipped by the military aristocracy, who had appropriated the land and established their domination.

In the Eddas, the mythic poems that are our prime source for the Nordic myths, it is the Aesirs envy of the wealth of the Vanir that leads to war between the rival gods, and "thus war came into the world". The archaeological evidence from the cultures of Old Europe shows that it was in fact the patriarchal Kurgan or Aryan invaders, with their sky- and battle-gods and gleaming weapons, who brought warfare to the peaceful agrarian societies, with their deities of fertility, abundance and peace. The new religion that the descendants of both peoples developed was a hybrid of Eurasian shamanic warrior cults and the earth-based fertility magic of the aboriginal inhabitants.

For the migrating Indo-Germanic people, the lands to the West were fabulously rich and fertile lands, where they could graze their herds and learn farming from the indigenous people. Both peoples had developed the arts of extracting metals such as copper, bronze, gold and iron from the earth, and gold was highly prized for its malleability in shaping shining ornaments. The wealth, both agrarian and mineral, of the peaceful cultures of Old Europe, personified in the figure of Gullveig, the "Golden Goddess", undoubtedly did arouse the greed and envy of the rapacious invaders. Gold seems to have been an obsession for the Indo-Europeans wherever they went, including the Spaniards and Portuguese who invaded the Americas - an obsession that has triggered more than one blood-drenched military adventure.
The characterization of the Aesir, as attacking and invading the lands of the Vanir out of rapacious envy for their wealth, parallels the imagery of the asuras, as "envious titans" attacking the fruit-laden tree of abundant life that the devas are peacefully enjoying. The idea that it is the "gods" who bring war into the world, and drag their human followers into their competitive struggle, is one we will encounter again in Zachariah Sitchin's work on Sumerian mythology.

The Anunaki - Extra-terrestrial Ruler "Gods" of Mesopotamian Mythology

The idea that the "gods" of ancient times and myths were actually human-like visitors from highly advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations, who established colonies on Earth, features in the work of several writers, most notably that of Israeli scholar Zachariah Sitchin, in his highly original analysis of ancient Sumerian texts and myths. The Sumerian civilization appeared, without any evidence of a gradual development, about 3500 years BCE, with agriculture, building, irrigation, mathematics, a highly sophisticated calendar and astronomy. So there is a real unresolved question among pre-historians and Sumerologists, as to the origin of this civilization. The Sumerians themselves, when asked by later historians where they obtained their knowledge, replied "from the Anunaki", which means "those who came down from above" - i.e. they were what we would call today ETs. A similar word occurs in the Biblical Book of Genesis: usually translated as "giants", the Hebrew word nephilim means "those who came down from above" (Sitchin, 1976, 1990).

Sitchin made an exhaustive many decades-long study of original texts in Sumerian and other Mesopotamian languages, including Hebrew, tracing and comparing stories of the families of "gods" in these various languages, but instead of interpreting the ancient myths symbolically, as fables, Sitchin decided to read them as records of actually observed events. He detailed his findings in six volumes of a series he calls The Earth Chronicles. The first of these, The Twelfth Planet, was published in the 1970s; Genesis Revisited, published twenty years later, compared the readings from Sumerian myth with the latest findings in astronomy and genetics. Biological anthropologist Arthur David Horn, in his book Humanity's Extra-Terrestrial Origins, examines the standard scientific theories of human evolution, with its puzzles and questions, and offers a sober-minded consideration of the alternatives suggested by Sitchin and other researchers, that visitors from other worlds (and other dimensions) have played a significant role in the evolution of human life and culture on planet Earth (Horn, 1994). I will try to summarize the rather huge amount of literature on this topic, particularly as it relates to the question of the origins of war and domination.

According to Sitchin's reading of Sumerian myth, the Anunaki came from the planet Nibiru, a large planet in the far outer reaches of our solar system (which is as yet undetected by astronomers, although some indirect evidence of such a planet is being recognized). Because of the extreme length of the planet's solar orbit, the Annunaki lived for thousands of years in Earth time, which accounts for the belief that they were "immortal". They possessed space-ships, some of them armed with weapons, reports of sightings of which can be found in abundance in ancient Middle-Eastern mythology, including the Bible (for example, Ezekiel's "chariots of fire") They arrived on Earth about 500,000 years ago, to set up mining colonies, building cities with pyramids. Needing workers for their gold mines, they genetically engineered a hybrid between an indigenous bi-pedal primate and Anunaki stock. This is the meaning behind the strange line in Genesis, "Let us create an Adamah ("earthling") in our own image and likeness". The line is strange because, in a text devoted to the activities of a solo creator god, there is suddenly a reference to a group.

The Anunaki responsible for this genetic breeding program were the god Enki (or Ea), and his consort Ninharsag. There are pictures inscribed on clay tablets of Enki holding a chemical flask, and his consort holding a baby on her lap. Enki was the first-born son of the supreme god Anu, and the first ruler of the Earth colony. He was a scientist whose relationship to his creations was that of a benevolent teacher. After some years, Enki's brother Enlil, who although younger, was the first son of Anu's official spouse, was sent to Earth to administer the colonies. There was sibling rivalry between the brother gods, and in general considerable competitive family-feuding among the Anunaki. (This is a feature of much ancient mythology that is hard to explain in symbolic terms, but makes eminent sense if the myths are actually histories). Where Enki was a benevolent teacher, Enlil carried out his assignment as a stern, demanding law-giver.

Since hybrids don't reproduce, the new earthlings still did not fully meet the labor shortages of the Anunaki. So Enki and Ninharsag proposed at the council of the gods, that they re-engineer the Adam to come in two sexes, and teach them to reproduce themselves. Enlil, who was by this time in charge of the plantation called EDIN, opposed this suggestion, and forbade his charges to partake of the knowledge tree, nor the life-tree (because then they "would be like gods"). The ET scientists first modified the gene stock to add the distaff side (taking a "rib from Adam's left side"), then secretly taught the man and woman reproductive sex. This was necessary because primates and other mammals reproduce instinctively, not consciously; hence the biblical equation of "knowing" with "sex". The Bible states that sexual knowledge was given to Adam and Eve by the Serpent. The allusion to the serpent might mean (a) that Enki and other Annunaki had some reptilian features; (b) that the myths called the one who taught sexual knowledge the serpent, because the serpent was Enki's emblem (appropriately, for a genetic engineer); (c) later redactors of the Book of Genesis wrote the role of Enki completely out of the Bible, and demonized him as a deceptive snake - a common practice in the writing of histories and myths. From henceforth there would be only one "god," not a family or a council, to be obeyed and served - particularly for the "people chosen" by that one god.

When Enlil found out what had happened, he was furious, cursed the female, the snake and the Earth, and expelled the pair from Eden, telling them that they would have to fend for themselves. No longer would they have the easy life on the garden plantation ("of every tree in the garden you may freely eat, except..." ). Thus, the "Fall from Eden" can be read as the first slave rebellion, assisted by a sympathetic insider among the rulers. The now paired humans had declared their autonomy and were forced into taking responsibility for their own survival. As the newly created humans multiplied, their females provided attractive sexual mates for male Anunaki - the offspring of these matings being the demi-gods and long-lived super-heroes of various mythologies. This racial inter-breeding is referred to in the infamous lines in the Book of Genesis, that evidently escaped the eyes of the redactors: "the sons of god found the daughters of men fair, and had children by them, giants upon the Earth, and mighty men of old." (Gen, 6:3)

From the mythology of the Sumerians as interpreted by Sitchin, we find that feuding between branches of the Anunaki families, together with their mixed ET-human descendants continued for thousands of years, with humans being drafted into military service for their rulers, who often fought pitched battles by land, sea and air (Sitchin, 1985). By time the Anunaki left, perhaps when the legendary flood wiped out the great cities they had established, humans had learned to colonize, dominate and enslave other populations, from the overlords who had genetically engineered and enslaved their ancestors in the first place. Here is the key to the understanding of the roots of domination: humans learned to dominate others from those who dominated them. In a similar way, we have seen in the 20th century, that the ruling elites in countries formerly colonized by European nations, proceeded to enslave and exploit the poorer working classes in their newly independent nations. And at the level of the family, as we have know, children who are abused and mistreated by adults, are likely to learn to abuse and mistreat those less powerful, when they grow up.

Considering later religious mythology, particularly in the West, I am suggesting the following extrapolations from Sitchin's work on Mesopotamian mythology (he makes some of these connections, but not others). The lineage that stems from the law-giver god Enlil includes the Egyptian deities Ra and Seth, the Hebrew Yahweh, the Vedic Indra and Vishnu, the Greek Zeus, the Norse Aesir, like Odin and Thor, the Islamic Allah, the Christian Father-God, Tezcatlipoca in Mexico, and others. They are patriarchal law-giver gods, who rule by command, sometimes with a "holy book" of rules, and emphasize fear and threat. They appear to have a war-like, violent or jealous disposition, like Yahweh, and the Buddhist Asuras.

The Enki lineage of creator gods, scientists and teachers, include the Egyptian gods Ptah, Thoth, Osiris, the Greek Hermes and Dionysus, the Indian Shiva, the Norse Vanir, like Freyja and Freyr (though Odin belongs in this camp also, as knowledge-seeking god of shamans), the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. They are benevolent and beneficent towards humans, supportive of diversity and creativity, and inclusive of the feminine goddesses - as portrayed in the myths of Isis and Osiris, of Shakti and Shiva, of Odin learning from Freyja, of Sophia among the Gnostics, Shekinah in the Jewish Kabbalah, of Demeter and the Mysteries of Eleusis. The Enki lineage of Serpent Wisdom is demonized in the Bible, as already mentioned, and becomes an underground cultural stream of "Mystery Religion", as well as hermetic alchemy and astrology in Western civilization.

The mythology of rival brother ET/gods is congruent with the evidence for two opposing forces or spirits guiding the human affairs at many levels. Seen more broadly, the descendants of the lineage of Enki as well as other deities (who may be ET races from other worlds) are creators, scientists and teachers, who operate to provide guidance and technical assistance for humans wanting to realize their evolutionary potential and spiritual essence. The Annunaki lineage, associated with Enlil, and perhaps also including other visitor races from other worlds, are law-giving, rule-making dominators who established colonies on Earth for their own agendas, and continue to seek to exploit the resources of the planet and dominate the beings who they consider their domesticated worker-slaves. They seek to dominate Earth beings using fear and threat, and the principle of "divide and conquer", and at times apparently instigate religious wars among humans to consolidate their control agendas. They apparently regard humans, similarly to the way breeders of domestic animals might look after their herd, wanting to protect their investment.

It is interesting that scholars and writers who work on compiling and analyzing the huge numbers and variety of UFO/ET contact experiences, such as Michael Salla and Arthur David Horn, have similarly distinguished different groups of ET visitors, with diverse agendas. Some seem to have a beneficent and helpful purpose, providing knowledge and guidance to those humans with whom they interact, though adhering to a non-interference ethic on the global level; others have a more exploitative and controlling agenda, like animal breeders checking on their stock; yet others are apparently even more intrusive, harvesting the human genome for their own off-world purposes (these may be the ET visitors involved in the abduction scenarios studied by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack and others); yet others may be neutral, though interested, observers, like anthropologists observing an alien culture.

For myself, I don't feel a need to have a position on the presence or absence of UFO/ETs in our world of Earth time and space. I find that to consider and reflect on the observations and stories reported by numerous credible witnesses and scientists inevitably leads to a valuable expansion of awareness. It is this kind of expanded and deepened awareness, and intelligent, critical reflection, not blind faith and hope for escape, nor the fearful clinging to authoritative opinions, that can ultimately have beneficial consequences for us all. Given that disclaimer, I can offer the following alternative and complementary interpretations of the nature of ET or alien visitors (based on reports by various and numerous observers):

There are, indeed, "more things in the heavens and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies'', as the Bard said. In the next and concluding section of this essay, we will examine the astonishing record of the work of G.I. Gurdjieff, in which we find the themes of humanity's persistent compulsive war-making, and historical yet esoteric interventions on Earth by higher-dimensional and extra-terrestrial beings, presented with fantastically elaborate complex detail and provocative insight.

Gurdjieff's Views on the Origins of War on Planet Earth

G. I. Gurdjieff, who was one of the most remarkable spiritual teachers of the 20th century, was born in the 1870s, in the Caucasus region near Kurdistan, of mixed Greek and Armenian ancestry. This region, at the gateway between Europe and Asia, was one where for hundreds of years, peoples of many different nationalities and languages migrated, co-existed and often fought. In his younger years he traveled extensively in Central Asia (including Tibet), and the Middle East (including Egypt); in his later years in Europe, especially France, and making several visits to America. Having experienced both Russian Revolutions, as well as both World Wars (he died in 1949), he certainly had ample opportunity to study the nature and origins of war and violence at first hand. His teaching of practices of self-remembering and harmonious development, sometimes referred to as a Fourth Way teaching, was unique and original, although several writers have identified elements of Islamic Sufism, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christianity, Western esoteric, gnostic and hermetic traditions, as well as Buddhism and very ancient Asian, including Zoroastrian mystical traditions. In his writings and recorded talks, he himself stated repeatedly that his study of the causes of the "processes of reciprocal destruction" was one of the chief preoccupations of his life.

When he was living and teaching in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century, his talks were recorded in P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Here, like the Buddhists, he emphasized the unconscious, sleep-like condition of ordinary human existence, captivated by external influences over which we had no control, and that we could only hope to awaken and free ourselves from these forces by deliberate and intentional practices of self-remembering, which is similar to the Buddhist emphasis on mindfulness. War, he said, was due to cosmic forces, or planetary influences. Just like when two people pass too near each other in the street causing momentary discomfort, two planets coming too near each in their orbits may result in tension, only momentary at the planetary scale - but on Earth, for a period of several years, "millions of sleeping men may start slaughtering other millions of sleeping men".

In his later years, when he was living and teaching in France, at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, he wrote his All and Everything - Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, he expounded a much more involved and elaborate esoteric, historic, mythic tale, with his characteristic and undoubtedly deliberate admixture of the fantastic, symbolic and obscure. His declared aim, in his writing, was not so much to inform or give opinions or theories, but to stimulate his readers to conscious intelligent thinking, and the development of what he called "objective conscience". With these reservations in mind, it is astonishing to note how much the stories that Gurdjieff unfolds, overlap with the esoteric histories that we have been discussing, and modern views from UFO/ET research.

To begin with, the whole first volume (1200 pages long) of All and Everything, - Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson - is cast as an elaborate travel narrative, told on a spaceship, by Beelzebub (the name of a deity from Babylonian mythology), to his grandson Hassein. Beelzebub describes six "descents" he has made to the planet Earth, at different time periods in history, to different continents and countries, including Atlantis, India, Tibet, and America; and describes at great length with many and elaborate complex details, using numerous neologisms seemingly pasted together from different languages, the characteristics, problems and possibilities of humans, or as he says, addressing Hassein, - "those three-brained beings that interest you so much." These six "descents" could be interpreted as meaning six human incarnations of a highly developed soul, on a quest for greater understanding of the human condition; or they could also be interpreted as actual descents in an actual space-ship, at different time periods, by visitors from another world, with a vastly advanced system of cosmic knowledge, making observations on planet Earth. In the course of the narrative, Beelzebub-Gurdjieff refers repeatedly to certain "messengers sent from above", human incarnations of very high beings, who established religious teachings on Earth, including Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and especially a certain "Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash", who taught on Earth during the ancient Sumero-Babylonian civilization (Shamash is also the name of a Sumerian deity). In addition to these, Beelzebub-Gurdjieff also refers, in his stories, to "Angels", "Archangels" and even a "High Commission" of "sacred beings", who are also engineers, physicists, or chemists, with whom he has conversations (i.e. or as we would say today, who he "channels"), and who have come to Earth at various times to address certain cosmic planetary problems that had arisen.

Chapter 43 of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, entitled "Beelzebub's Survey of the Process of the Periodic Reciprocal Destruction of Men", opens with a passionate query from Hassein, who in trying to understand why humans, with their long history on the planet, and the fact that they have developed many systems of knowledge, still resort to wars: "Don't they really ever see that these processes of theirs are the most terrible of all the horrors which can possibly exist in the whole of the Universe and don't they ever ponder on this matter, so that they might become aware of this horror, and find a means of eradicating it?" In response to this question, Beelzebub then launches into a long discussion about the many attempts and agreements made by groups and leaders in various societies, throughout history, to investigate this process and to find ways to eradicate it - referring to the League of Nations as one of the most recent ones. He says that such groups, though usually starting with good intentions, have always tended to disintegrate into increasing divisiveness, as various leaders and groups participating are taken over by egotism and greed, and end up instigating more war and destruction in order to profit from it for themselves and their group.
Beelzebub then discusses some groups of learned beings in ancient times in the regions of Kurdistan and Turkestan, who assembled a conference, which included representatives from six or seven Asiatic and Mediterranean religions and cultures, to address this problem of war. A "learned being" of that time had discovered and then taught, that there appeared to be some kind of natural planetary process, some kind of balancing process on a planetary scale, that constantly alternated periods of overpopulation of animals and humans, with periods of their destruction, regardless of what individuals wanted to do. Wars were totally unconscious, unintentional mass events, over which humans had no control. A key element in this situation was the human practice of dominating nature, that at times involved massive animal sacrifice, (and, one might add, human sacrifice, especially in ancient Meso-America). And Nature had to constantly adapt herself to these destructive practices of humans. This conference also eventually broke up, as the participants proved incapable of dealing with this terrible trap that they had discerned. And whereas the motto of the original peace-seeking society was "Earth free for All", after the break-up into different factions, the leading motto of some groups became "Earth only for Men". This is an interesting adumbration of the deep ecology critique of the Judaeo-Christian domination of nature ("thou shalt have dominion over the beasts").

The teachings of the "Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash", a "Messenger sent from Above" during the Sumero-Babylonian civilization, aimed toward enhancing the development of objective consciousness and conscience in humans, by cultivating the "sacred being-functions" of faith, hope and love. Since in most humans these functions had already degenerated and were present only in mechanical and emotional forms, only conscious faith, hope and love would suffice, and these were to be developed through "conscious labor and intentional suffering". (This was also the guiding precept of the "work" that Gurdjieff taught at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man). The human condition, in which the development of objective consciousness was blocked, and the sacred being-functions of conscious faith, hope and love had atrophied, was due to the consequences of the "accursed organ kundabuffer". This organ, according to Beelzebub-Gurdjieff, had been implanted in human beings at the base of the spine, a very long time ago, by a group of "Very High, Very Sacred" angelic scientists, acting on instructions "from Above". Although the organ kundabuffer was subsequently removed, by other scientist angels, its operation had become crystallized and passed on genetically through the generations, to the point where it became "second nature" in humans.

The maleficent residual consequences of this kundabuffer organ were that the psyche of humans is dominated by egotism, conceit, vanity, selfishness and the like, making it extremely difficult for them to develop objective consciousness and conscience, as well as making humans susceptible to being manipulated and exploited by leaders, warmongers and ideologues for self-serving and profiteering motives. Although Beelzebub-Gurdjieff clearly considers the action and residual consequences of this implanted organ an unmitigated disaster for humans, he does report the results of his investigations and "conversations" with high angelic and archangelic beings as to the origins and intentions behind this genetic implant. Its origin had to do with certain cosmic planetary processes.

It appears that in very ancient times, long before the existence of the continent and civilization of Atlantis, there was a collision of a comet with planet Earth, causing the Moon (and another, undetected fragment) to split off into a satellite orbit. This collision, Beelzebub avers, was due to "miscalculation" on the part of archangelic planetary engineers, monitoring the intersecting orbits of cosmic bodies. It led to a crisis, because in accord with the basic cosmic laws of reciprocal maintenance, certain kinds of radiations and vibrational energies had to be produced on Earth, in order to keep the Moon in a regular orbit around the Earth. These kinds of energies could be produced by life, including human life, either consciously and qualitatively (as was done in certain temples in Atlantis) or unconsciously and quantitatively, through massive die-offs of human and animal populations (as has occurred in various planet-wide catastrophes, including floods, earthquakes, plagues and wars). This perspective was the basis of Gurdjieff's original, provocative formulation in various talks and writings, that ordinary humans, with undeveloped consciousness, were machines for the transformation of substances that provided "food for the Moon".
At the time of the original collision and the resulting threat to the maintenance of cosmic harmony in our planetary neighborhood, "a Most High Commission consisting of Angels and Archangels, specialists in the work of World Creation and World Maintenance," had "come down" from the Central Sun, and decided that this special organ kundabuffer needed to be installed in human beings. This organ was designed to prevent humans from developing objective consciousness, because if they did they would see the "terror of their situation", namely that the prime purpose of their existence was "to maintain a detached fragment of the planet, and being convinced of their slavery to circumstances utterly foreign to them, they would be unwilling to continue their existence and would destroy themselves." So the kundabuffer that was installed had two functions: one, to cause human beings to "see reality upside down", and two, to engender in them sensations of pleasure and enjoyment. After the immediate planetary crisis had passed , a further delegation of archangelic engineers and scientists caused the implant to be removed, but its consequences, as mentioned above, became crystallized and have remained part of human genetic inheritance ever since.

Beelzebub-Gurdjieff does not further explain how exactly the functioning of the organ kundabuffer, originally designed to prevent a kind of suicidal traumatic reaction on the part of humans, then led to the maleficent congenital features we have been laboring under ever since. One could think of the connection this way: "seeing reality upside-down" refers to a kind of perceptual inversion, causing humans to fixate only on the physical plane as real, and ignore the greater realities accessible to objective consciousness, where they would have clearly seen their enslaved condition , i.e. the "terror of their situation." Furthermore, the enhanced organ capacities for pleasure and enjoyment perhaps provided a kind of tranquilizing balm, which then manifested as addictive overdevelopment of craving that we know as egotism, vanity, conceit, self-importance, greed and the like. Although the original planetary collision crisis which led to the implantation of this perceptual block has long passed, the need for human life on Earth to contribute certain energies for harmonious cosmic functioning remains - and if not provided by the intentional conscious work of humans, these energies are generated automatically by massive population increases and consequent massive die-offs due to natural catastrophes and war.

Gurdjieff, speaking as the space-travelling narrator Beelzebub, as well as quoting his spiritual ancestor the "Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash", provides two separate rather sobering and mysterious answers to the question of whether war can be eradicated and humans can be saved. At the end of the long chapter on "the processes of periodic reciprocal destruction", Beelzebub concludes that "if this property of terrestrial beings is to disappear from that unfortunate planet, then it will be with Time alone, thanks either to the guidance of a certain Being with very high Reason or to certain cosmic events."

At the very end of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, after 1200 pages of these extraordinary ruminations and explications, Hassein asks his teacher-grandfather again to state, in a summary way, from "your long-centuried impartial observations and studies of the psyche of the three-centered beings arising on the planet Earth… whether it is still possible by some means or other to save them and to direct them into the becoming path?" Beelzebub then, with great emphasis, replies: "The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ, an organ like kundabuffer, but this time of such properties that everyone of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests."

"Only such a sensation and such a cognizance", he continues, "can now destroy the egotism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed the whole of their Essence and also that tendency to hate others which flows from it - the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole of the Universe".

These two answers reflect a conviction that the underlying causes of war are cosmic-planetary in nature, of which humans are more or less completely unconscious, and over which they have very little or no control. It is possible, but difficult, for individuals to undergo transformations of their psyche, through "conscious labor and intentional suffering", and, one might add, through psychospiritual yogic and mystical practices, by which they can awaken to their spiritual essence and liberate themselves from the thralldom of unconsciousness. In my own comparative studies of transformative experiences, described in the book The Unfolding Self (Metzner, 1998), I found that the catalyst for the most profound life-changing and worldview-changing turning-points was coming close to confronting one's own mortality, either through near-death experiences (NDEs), or through the death of a loved one. The death-rebirth Mystery ritual celebrations of ancient times, as well as certain shamanic initiations may have provided this kind of awakening. Psychedelic experiences can provide this kind of insight and awakening, given the appropriate preparation and guidance.

While the individual awakening of consciousness is possible and is certainly our primary responsibility, the transformation of collective consciousness from the bondage created by unconscious cravings and hatreds, in a situation of rapidly deteriorating planetary environments and the slow-motion collapse of civilization, would seem to be a highly improbable, if not totally impossible challenge. It is in this sense that I would understand Gurdjieff-Beelzebub's seemingly bizarre and improbable prescription.

* * *
There are many themes in this story reminiscent of various Gnostic teachings, according to which Earth has been subject to mistakes and miscalculations on the part of a creator demiurge, and human incarnation is a kind of dungeon or exile. Gurdjieff's story also has parallels in Sumerian mythology, as interpreted by Sitchin, not surprising in that Gurdjieff himself implicitly refers to his spiritual ancestry in the Sumero-Babylonian civilization. The most striking parallel is in the teachings that humans have been intentionally and deliberately kept in a subservient, slave-like condition by their superiors, to provide certain kinds of energies (whether for mining work or planetary maintenance). The biggest difference though is that Sitchin's reading of the activities of the Annunaki and their Mesopotamian human underlings is purely concerned with the material level - the "gods" are nothing but long-lived ETs flying around in space-ships. Gurdjieff's cosmology, on the other hand, reflects the multidimensional nature of cosmic reality and human consciousness, and the "descent" of divine beings and human interactions with them are as much interdimensional as interplanetary events. Other writers on the role of extra-terrestrial interventions in human history and civilization, including William Bramley and Arthur David Horn, have also supposed that deliberate conditioning processes on the part of dominator elites have kept the human workers and slaves unconscious of their inherent but undeveloped spiritual essence and potential autonomy.

Of great interest for me personally, in the light of my research in the psychological aspects of the planetary ecological crisis, is the prescient foreshadowing in this story, of the manner in which the destructive industrial activities of humans, in the reckless pursuit of power and profit, leads to increasingly disastrous consequences for the natural balance of the Gaian biosphere. Indigenous elders, such as the Hopis in the American Southwest and many others, have been warning us in their prophecies for a long time that the balancing adaptations of Nature to the seemingly unconscious , yet also deliberate destructive and exploitative behavior of humans are manifesting, and will be manifesting, in potentially near-total collapse of our planetary civilization.
A distinctive feature of Gurdjieff's reading of the hidden historic and pre-historic antecedents of war, is that it goes d