Digging Tswana Roots

Legend of bodimo: a mystery resolved (2)

However, by carefully comparing and collating African lore with Sumerian and other ‘mythology’ especially as demystified by Zecharia Sitchin and others, and also liberally including my own astounding discoveries, I have gone further than everyone else in unpacking their full and true story. And what helped me most was the discovery that Sumerian – arguably the oldest written language and therefore containing the earliest stories – is but an ancient though recognisable form of Setswana.

Now, what emerges from this ancient association is that giants and gods were similarly named because they were both ‘sky-beings’. Indeed, the base word dimo means ‘up-high [in the sky]’. But while Sumerian and other mythologies make it absolutely clear that this is where the gods claimed to have come from (thus Anunnaki: ‘Those from the heavens (a nu) who stayed (nna) on Earth (Ki)’), not a great deal is known or revealed about giants. However, both the canonical (recognised, accepted) Book of Genesis (6:1-4) and the apocryphal (ignored, repressed) Book of Enoch (Chapter 6) recount that a certain group of ‘angels’ (read: ‘gods’) came down from ‘Heaven’, married the ‘daughters of Adam’ (ordinary human women), and begat unruly giants that were most fortunately wiped out in the Great Flood in which only Noah and his family survived. Unfortunately this story is, at best, very economical with the truth…as we will soon find out.

But before, in Part 3, I show the stark contradictions in this blindly accepted ‘fact’, let us firstly remind ourselves who ‘gods’ (or ‘angels’) and giants really were. No, they were not ‘heavenly spirit beings’ at all when one reads widely and carefully. In just about every instance where the Old Testament says ‘angels’, you will find an even older and more detailed story in Sumerian or Akkadian texts that speaks of ‘gods’ instead. This is no different when we talk of ‘giants’. Indeed, last week I exposed and clarified that giants were simply gods that were career astronauts and thus spent much time in space. And, of course, I explained in greater detail that it is now an established fact that an astronaut grows by whole inches for every few weeks he or she spends in the weightlessness of space, and that this is now being formally studied in the latest space mission through mapping the height difference with an identical twin left back on Earth. Knowing this, it is not difficult to unpack the truth about ancient giants. Actually, AN is a Sumerian term meaning ‘sky/heaven’, and EL (or ILLU) literally meant ‘Shining One’, thus AN.EL (angel) still referred to ‘Sky-being’. This, I know, will be hard for most people to accept….but truth, I duly noted, is impersonal: it does not care whether you find it uncomfortable or not: it just is.

 Let us start with the most well-known story of giants: that they emerged when angels descended on Earth and married Earthling females. As noted, while in biblical books they are called ‘angels’, we find that in mythology the very same story about them speaks of the ‘Igigi instead. Now, Sitchin translates the term as meaning ‘Those That Watch and See’ but I will emphatically correct him. Back on Earth, these ancient astronauts were so big that that the sound of their footsteps could be heard at a distance as the ground shook…thus I-gi!gi! (‘Those of Heavy Footseps). The onomatopoeic term gi!gi! is the source of the term gigiante, which in turn is the source of ‘giant’. What confused Sitchin is that they were also called ‘Watchers’. What were they looking out for? To this day, their mission is to look out for dangerous space objects heading for Earth or its moon; and to evacuate the elite gods – or rather, today, their descendants – to safety if the celestial object cannot be stopped. Indeed, modern astronauts have indeed encountered such giants in space (see NASA space veteran Clark McClelland’s internet story).

What happened in pre-Flood days (i.e. well before the geologically correct date of 10983 BC when the Ice Age thawed, leading to catastrophic tectonic movements) was that the god Marduk (later ‘Baal’) decided to marry an ordinary girl called Tsirpanit: the first time a god married an ‘Earthling’ woman. (Note: the gods considered themselves ‘beings from the sky’ as this is where they seemed to appear from) Some of the lonely Igigi in space saw a chance to escape the sheer monotony of their duties, on the pretext of attending Marduk’s wedding. And, following his example, they too took up wives. A disgusted Enlil – Leader of the gods – then banished them from Sumer, and around 50 000 BC, the legend of giants began in earnest around the world. 

Now, properly analysed, these were not ‘wayward spirit-creatures from Heaven’ that settled on Earth; they were lonely astronauts seeking escape. ‘Nephilim’, the name they earned, is actually based on napalm: ‘to descend’ (Nne a phararama in proto-Tswana). Indeed, they descended from space and then began to ‘lower’ themselves in other ways in the eyes of the gods (hence their association with a ‘fall’ of sorts). So, effectively, the reason for their giant size was not because they were ‘angels’ that became ‘demons’; that view is so uniformed. And like modern astronauts they obviously bore normal-sized children; only those children that also grew to be astronauts turned into giants. Now, I thought this further background on bo-dimo quite necessary before, next week, we examine why they turned into man-eaters…even as Tswana lore confirms.

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