WHEN THE GODS CAME DOWN

Subtitled "The Catastrophic Roots of Religion Revealed", this book slings out the religious baby with the mystic bathwater by incautiously proclaiming from the outset and at the top of its voice that all such ancient belief systems (without exception) actually derived from an asteroid and/or meteorite cult which the initiates of subsequent mystery cults have all conspired to conceal from public view. Whilst hazardously assuming all modern scientific theory to be correct and/or accurate in its perceptions and virtually all scholarly theory on ancient religion to be wrong, the author then proceeds to swallow a herd of camels instead of a mere gnat, his reinterpretation of myth going far beyond the merely idiosyncratic to the utterly bizarre - and in some cases wandering into the field of total absurdity itself. For example - notwithstanding the probably factual nature of the meteoric Ben-ben Stone as a metaphorical expression of karma and reincarnation in Egypt and the undoubted use of meteoric iron for sacred temple instruments extensively elsewhere too, we find in this book the bald statement that "Osiris must surely have been a meteorite". This is followed closely by the equally extraordinary statement that the metaphorical Geb, the Earth-god father of Osiris, was not just a single meteorite "but a whole flood of them". Ra himself is sweepingly demoted from being an universally acknowledged sun god and appears to suffer the same scattered fate - as do even the Elohim and 'the primordial Christ'. The ancient texts describing Heaven as the 'twin' of Earth, so we are told here, mean that Heaven and Earth must both have been planets. Hence 'Heaven falling to Earth' meant an exploded planet producing meteorites ......! The whole book continues in this same simplistic vein, piling the Pelion of far-fetched assumption continuously upon what it sees as the Ossa-fied remains of deliberate religious misinformation. The Old and New Testaments do not escape Alford's intellectual scalpel. He commences his analysis with the arresting statement, slicing unselfconsciously through all biblical tradition, that Adam must in fact have been created from the body of Eve. After progressing through many millennia of history, scattering similar bon mots en route, he then concludes by reinterpreting: "Is not My Word like a fire?" saith the Lord" (i.e. God) "and like a hammer that breaketh the Rock (sic) in pieces?" - as ".... the Lord was an exploded planet with the supernatural ability to strike again." Hence, the 'Second Coming of Christ' becomes in his view a comet or asteroid "... on a future collision course with the Earth." O ye gods and little fishes ..... Alford is not the Sherlock Holmes of esotericism that he evidently imagines himself to be. The author admits that his interpretations are derived from a literal (thus supposedly rational) interpretation of the translated ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Judaic and other texts from which he quotes very extensively indeed in attempted support of what could only be regarded as the sin of regrettably 'original prejudice', rather than the virtue of interestingly 'original insight'. Unfortunately, he gives no space to even remotely objective consideration of any other possibility, involving (for example) the known metaphysical considerations of the Ancients in dealing with the functional structures and dynamics of Universal Consciousness. He thus joins the herd of purely materialistically minded scholars and scientists (and catastrophe theorists) of our era who wilfully refuse to entertain the otherwise incontrovertibly confirmed idea that the Ancients had a clear and structured perception of the subjective world of Causality behind all objective (even cosmological) phenomena, but realised that only the use of sacred metaphor and allegory could satisfactorily engender an understanding of it. It is rare that one finds oneself in the position of being unable to say anything truly positive about a book under review. However, for all the background research into ancient texts, this book is a thoroughgoing disappointment and an unfortunate waste of a good opportunity to open up wider discussion on the mystic ideas behind the ancient religions of the Middle East.