L. A. Marzulli Blasts "Ancient Aliens" for Promoting Satanism

I know many of you are waiting for Cthulhu in World Mythology, and I know the publisher said it would be out today. No, I do not know why it is not yet available. I asked the publisher for information, but as of this writing I have not yet heard back. I will let you know as soon as I have more information.

Since it’s Halloween today, I thought I’d share a few links to some articles in my Library about horror and the supernatural.

• Voltaire on Vampires
• Defining a Zombie
• Dread of the Supernatural
• Werewolves, Vampires and Ghouls

And also, this old-but-good blog post on Satan, ancient aliens, and analingus.

You may remember that in my review of Monday’s Ancient Aliens I noted that there was little fallout from the show’s open advocacy of Satan worship. That changed yesterday with an angry blog post by none other than L. A. Marzulli, whom you will remember as the self-proclaimed explicator of Christian prophecy who offered ridiculous claims about the Nephilim, inter-dimensional demonic invasions, and the benefits of genocide at the Paradigm Symposium a couple of weeks ago. Marzulli describes himself as a Biblical literalist, but he also writes in his book The Cosmic Chess Match that while the Bible should be taken literally, it is (at his convenience) “in some places symbolic.”

Here we have a bizarre situation where a believer in demons masquerading as aliens is openly criticizing those who believe that aliens masquerade as demons. They all believe in the same literal interpretations of the same texts and yet are utterly at odds.

Marzulli begins by quoting David Childress, who was one of the most eager pundits to embrace Satanism on Monday. Childress said, “In a sense, Satan’s not such a bad guy.  You can’t have light without the dark.  You can’t have right without wrong.  And we have to learn these things for ourselves, and ultimately, through choice wrong and right, we grow and we become who we are and ultimately to be like our makers, to be gods ourselves.” As Marzulli notes, Childress is unconsciously repeating the serpent’s words in Genesis 3:5, when it tells Eve that to eat of the forbidden fruit is to “be like God, knowing good and evil.”

“…in my opinion,” Marzulli writes, “Prometheus Entertainment, the guys who produce the show, have an agenda and it was in full display in this episode.”

He is upset that Ancient Aliens is twisting the Bible to meet a preconceived idea—which is, of course, a bit humorous given his intent to twist the Bible into supporting the notion that the Sons of God from Genesis 6 added evil DNA to the human genome, as he told the Paradigm Symposium in identifying Peruvian elongated skulls as holding demonic DNA. Anyway, he now says:

They get it right when they point out that The Book of Revelation is the end of a cosmic war, but they fail to understand that it is not with ancient astronauts from other galaxies, it is between the rebel angels and the hosts of heaven.  They are shoe-horning their beloved ancient astronaut theory into the text and in my opinion it doesn’t fit.

Because the aliens are really fallen angels.

Marzulli has his own issues though, beyond the open embrace of Satanism. He is concerned that the Ancient Aliens isn’t giving viewers the truth about the Fallen Angels’ plan to thwart the holy bloodline of Jesus. Here’s Marzulli’s take: “In essence the fallen angels were trying to corrupt the human G-nome [sic] and thus thwart the messianic line, and the promise of one who would crush the serpent’s—Satan’s—head.” This is confusing, first because in mainstream Christianity Jesus is the son of God, not of Joseph, of the line of David, so I’m not sure what bloodline is supposed to be corrupted. Is Marzulli a believer in an alternative origin for Jesus? (Some believe that the one of the two conflicting genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 belongs instead to Mary, but this violates the principle of literalism since both assert they trace the line of Jesus through Joseph.)

It is also confusing because Genesis makes fairly plain that the offspring of the Sons of God were the heroes of old, not the special line of direct descent from Adam to Abraham to David. If this demon DNA causes sin but God saved only Noah for being righteous, how did this demonic DNA survive the Flood that ended all life outside the Ark? Was Noah’s wife a carrier? I do not recall reading that in Genesis.

(Obviously, this is a moot question since there is clearly no evidence that there ever was a Flood, let alone demon-hybrid humans with special sin-inducing semen.)

Marzulli, instead, is rejecting the Biblical redactors’ own view of the Flood, in which sin was inherent in the human condition, part and parcel of the Fall, and is instead embracing the revisionist view of the books of Enoch and Jubilees, in which the Flood was specifically caused by the demon seed of the Sons of God producing extra-evil super-sinners. In Genesis 6:6, for example, God regrets having created humans—he does not blame his Sons for corrupting them. It is only later, in apocalyptic Judaism, that evil begins to be personified and becomes attached to the semi-divine heroes and their fathers, the Sons of God, now seen as openly rebelling against Yahweh. In Enoch, for example, the angels specifically blame only the Nephilim when making the case for the Flood to God:

[The Watchers] have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept with the women, and have defiled themselves, and revealed to them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness. (1 Enoch 9:8-10)

God, accepting that “the souls of those who have died”—the good, normal humans—have petitioned for help, announces a Flood to “heal the earth which the angels have corrupted.” Specifically, God orders the Flood on order to “destroy…the children of the Watchers.” Notice that in this version God no longer regrets having made humans; he now is upset at the angels. Already, just a few centuries after the composition of Genesis, humans are no longer the cause of God’s wrath (as they had also been in the earlier Mesopotamian flood stories, though for being too noisy) but innocent bystanders being saved by death from the supernatural cause of sin.

What Marzulli is doing, though, is frankly bizarre. He seems to maintain that the Nephilim (the giants) somehow preserved their cursed DNA down to the present. He seems to be looking to quantify sin physically as demonic DNA, not unlike Trey Smith and his Nephilim: Origins of Genetic Evil video I reviewed on Monday. It seems weird to more or less displace the idea of sin from the personal to the impersonal, to make it a physical fact (your relative percentage of demon DNA) rather than a moral condition.

Marzulli finishes with a false dilemma that about sums up the entire problem with alternative history:

“So who are we to believe, the History Channels [sic] version or what the text actually states?”

Maybe the answer is that ancient texts can’t be read uncritically and require a deeper understanding of their context and origins to understand what they mean.