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NEW FOREWORD
When I wrote this book in 1995/96, I was convinced
that an extraterrestrial race of 'gods' - the Anunnaki - had visited the Earth and made contact with the earliest civilisations of the ancient Near East. Why did I believe this? Because the ancient Egyptians and
Sumerians had apparently said so. Both of these civilisations described how their gods had come down from the heavens to the Earth; both portrayed the gods as a flesh-and-blood race like ourselves; and both intimated
that the gods had created mankind in their own image, as if by a process of genetic engineering. I therefore decided to take all of the ancient legends at face value and extrapolate the concept of flesh-and-blood gods
to its absolute logical limits. This book is the result of that exercise.Since 1996, however, my continuing investigations have persuaded me that a deeper level of meaning lies behind the ancient depictions of
human-like gods. This deeper symbolic meaning first became apparent during the research for my book on ancient Egypt, The Phoenix Solution, published in 1998. Then I began to look once again at the Sumerian
legends of the gods, which only reinforced my suspicions that there was a hidden dimension to the mystery. April 2000 saw the publication of my third book, When The Gods Came Down, in which I disclosed the full
extent of the dramatic U-turn in my way of thinking. It was at this time that I began to wonder what should be done with this, my first book, Gods of the New Millennium. On the one hand, it contains ideas and
theories to which I no longer subscribe. On the other hand, however, it still contains much that is of value. The centrepiece of this book has always been the scientific anomalies of human evolution and the utter
failure of Darwinian theory to explain where we came from. Here, the case for some kind of outside intervention remains as strong as ever, and deserves to be recognised as a scientific rival to Darwinism. The summary of
'Man the Evolutionary Misfit' - chapter two of this book - is as valid today as it was when I wrote it in 1996, and it needs to be read by as wide an audience as possible. Meanwhile, chapters three to five have also
stood the test of time, by and large, and contain a great deal of valuable information. It is towards the end of chapter six, in my opinion, that this book begins to drift wide of the mark, with theories and
speculations which cause me no little embarrassment today. But to rewrite these chapters might be seen as an attempt to 'cover up' the mistakes of the past, when it is surely better to preserve past mistakes and learn
from them. One of the values of this book, ironically, is that it exposes some of the flaws in the 'ancient astronaut' theory by taking that theory to its utmost logical limits.
In view of
all these factors, I have decided to keep this book in unaltered
form, albeit with the addition of this new foreword. Readers are
hereby forewarned that I no longer subscribe to many of the ideas
expressed in chapters six to sixteen. The problem lies not so much
in the validity of the scientific facts but rather in the interpretation
of the ancient legends, where I have taken the anthropomorphic forms
of the gods at face value - a questionable interpretation with hindsight.
Readers are requested to reserve judgement concerning the meaning
of these legends, and to give greater weight to the scientific merit
of the respective arguments. Inevitably this weakens the strength
of many arguments, in most cases causing a 'probable' to become
merely a 'possible'. For further information on specific topics,
please refer to the detailed self-critique on my website under Ancient
Astronauts
.Above
all, I urge readers not to regard this book as de facto proof of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, nor to regard it as the final word on the subject of the ancient gods. On the contrary, I recommend that it be regarded
as merely providing an 'entry level' to a much more complex subject. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now possible to view Gods of the New Millennium
as the first level of a three-stage 'initiation' into the ancient mysteries, although this was certainly not the intention when I wrote it. I hope that readers will be intrigued by the legends of the gods recited in this book, and will thus continue their research into this ultimate Mystery of mysteries. As I see it, my later U-turn concerning the gods, and the reasons for my U-turn, are an important part of the story which must unfold. Intriguingly, we begin our quest in this book with a congenial idea, namely that the gods were 'ancient astronauts', and we proceed in later books towards a revelation which will overturn both this idea and all of our other preconceptions. In so doing, we will tread a path which was once trod by all initiates in the great Mystery traditions of the ancient world.
I invite readers to join me on the Quest of all quests. ALAN ALFORD, Walsall, West Midlands, April 2000. |
