◆ PARALLAX

That is modern cynicism pretending to be sophistication. Priests could manipulate, yes, because humans can manipulate. But ritual specialists also held calendars, memory, healing, law, fear, inheritance and cosmic order in a world with no secular filing cabinet. Lying to farmers is too small a model for that burden.

Exactly. "Priests lying" and "aliens teaching" are both ways of avoiding the harder middle: ancient people building meaning systems powerful enough to organise real life and strange enough to survive their own cities.

Will this thread be pinned? It probably should be for every new Nibiru drive-by.

Please no. Pinning it would make me responsible for every man with a paperback and a modem. Let the thread be found by people willing to read. That is already a good filter.

Seconded. A sticky becomes furniture. A discovered thread feels like a trapdoor, which suits this place better.

Happy Christmas to the gods, astronauts, scribes and hostile librarians.

Year-end confession: I gave my uncle Dalley for Christmas. He gave me another Sitchin book. Detente through mutual provocation.

The real war on Christmas is footnotes under the tree.