When the Gods Came Down: The Catastrophic Roots of Religion Revealed Book

Alan F Alford is relatively new in the field of what is sometimes called "cult archaeology"--those controversial rewritings of history by authors such as: Graham Hancock; Robert Bauval; and the originators of the genre in the UK, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Alford's first book, Gods of the New Millennium (1996) was a very thorough exposition of the "God was an astronaut" theory, based largely on the works of Zecharia Sitchin. His third book, When the Gods Came Down, abandons that theory for a new one: that all the major religions stem from a catastrophic meteorite strike on Earth: "the rocks which fell out of the Sky (meteorites) could only have come from an Earth-like 'mountain' which had disintegrated in the heavens ... the ex-planet of Heaven ... [which] had sown the seeds of life into the Earth ... became personified as God". Alford is nothing if not thorough in his comparisons between Sumerian, Egyptian and Biblical mythology. He berates scholars who have devoted their lives to study of the same material and missed the point: "It is almost as if everything that should have been taken literally was taken symbolically, and, vice versa, that everything which should have been taken symbolically was taken literally. It is incredible".The conclusions Alford draws about the gods, the Hebrew God and Jesus are obviously open to question. Perhaps this book's greatest value is in encouraging us to look more seriously at ancient mythologies, and in reminding us that we don't have all the answers about the past. --David V BarrettRead More