When the Gods Came Down: The Catastrophic Roots Fo Religion Revealed

I have yet to finish reading this book, but the current reports from NASA regarding the new geobiological evidence of life once existing on Mars (MSNBC; December 13, 2000), scientifically re-affirming the plausibility of the book's thesis, makes it impossible for me not to praise it now.Alan Alford has created an intellectual paradigm shift of such domino falling proportions that it will probably take a decade at the absolute least before WHEN THE GODS CAME DOWN becomes recognized or ignored for the incredible service to world culture it is. We can read all of the New Age literature so popular today in one or more of three contexts: the socio-economic, the neo-psychological reaction to technology and the information society, and one powerful other. That third one is simple: the unifying belief of every author, regrdless of specific message of the book, is that we are witnessing the dawning of a future world where all our existential questions of spirituality, communication and the multi-discplinary sciences meld into one unified linguistical system of an answer. Alan Alford reveals, perhaps unlike anyone since the 1830's supreme mindblower ANACALYPSIS by Godfrey Higgins, the psychological, cultural, anthropological, intellectual, scientific and spiritual reasons for the optimism and enthusiasm such an idea inevitably produces in the human heart. He reveals that that grand idea, generating such spiritual hopes for the future is the mental architecture and language upon which the past 6000-plus years of human civilization is already based.In his second book, THE PHOENIX SOLUTION, Alford took a radical approach to the decoding of Egyptian religion and mythology to reveal its scientific underpinnings unlike anyone before him. He all but repudiated his first book, intellectually pitting him against both the intelligentsia of modern Egyptology and the ancient astronaut theorists who so influenced him simultaneously. He said in THE PHOENIX SOLUTION that the foundation of Egyptological thought and religion lay in their scientific theory of the evolutionary growth process of our entire solar system. Much of the foundational myths, Gods and Goddesses, he showed, symbolize the theorized outer planets of eons past, and their process of raining meteoric bits of proto-life onto our Earth; effectively "seeding" our planet with the beginnings of new life unlike ever before. This foundational universe-view, not just world view, generated the entire religious philosophy, scientific study, cultural practices and art (from the agriculture to the architecture to the family to the royal political structure)of the culture for more than three thousand years. It was shared only amongst the highest initiates of the religious sub-culture/ruling elite. The myths told to the common people, encapsulating this principle within mythic/poetic stories, were therefore commonly intellectually and emotionally misinterpreted as actual human events. But perhaps because of

This is an absolutely fascinating book. I' ve read all three of Alford's book and I think his second one "The Phoenix Solution" is by far the best. I think that speaks alot for this book too. I don't know of any author that I've read in a long time that combines myth and science like Alan Alford does in this and in Phoenix. Having said that, I think Alford is one of the most under-rated authors on ancient Egypt. This book establishes, in my mind, Alfords place among people in the field of comparative religion with the likes Joseph Campbell and in the field of Egyptology like Budge - Very good reading. I'd like to see more from this author.