IGBO - THE KINGLESS GENERATION, THE WORLD’S OLDEST AND ONLY INDIGENOUS DEMOCRACY
An anonymous book in the Nag Hammadi Scriptures titled On the Origin of the World addressing issues regarding the creation of the world, the formation of humankind and the end of the Age, says -
There are four generations, three generations belong to the kings of the eighth heaven, and the fourth generation, which is the most exalted, is kingless and perfect. These people will enter the holy place of their Father and they will reside in rest … They are kings. They are the immortal within the mortal, and they will condemn the gods of chaos and their powers [by revealing the pattern of incorruptibility] (p. 219, emphases mine).
The above passage touches on vital phenomena that are central to the definition of Igbo cosmos and identity: the cosmic numbers: four (the small week) and eight (the great week), the concept of kinglessness ‘Igbo enwe eze’, the lust for knowledge and the incorruptibility of the god-man, as with the ozo titled men. We have a pet theory that the reason why an Igbo can never grovel and roll on the ground before a fellow human being, no matter how highly placed (as some other Nigerian tribes do) is that every Igbo man feels in his marrow that he is a king. The Nag Hammadi Scripture actually proves us right. The Igbo happen to be the only tribe in the world whose kinglessness is part of their identity, their genealogy, their cosmology and their philosophy. The Igbo have a curious religious practice of self-worship or self-deification, whereby an individual’s first god is himself and his very first shrine is a shrine constructed and dedicated to his personal spirit, his chi. He venerates this god (whose physical manifestation is himself) along with his ancestors. This personal shrine is the only one at which he performs rights of worship. He may visit some other shrines at some point or the other, but only to consult, never to worship, for the only god deserving of an Igbo man/woman’s veneration is the god that he himself is. This shrine is tended through such acts as libation, incantations, prayers and petitions and feeding with food, without which the individual would be expected to fail in his/her life’s endeavors. This is the highest expression of individuality and is viewed by us as a fundamental aspect of Igbo ontological belief in the god-man.
Man’s attainment of divinity, we believe, is the fundamental teaching of Christianity and Jesus Christ, namely: that God has become man; that man must see God in himself/herself; that man must regain perfection, Wisdom, immortality through the transformation of the self – what the Igbo call initiation. In fact the Chi Theology is ample proof that the Igbo see themselves as a nation of gods and goddesses, equivalent to what the Hindu refer to as the Bodhisattva. Both the Hindu and the Igbo believe in the god-man, an idea that found expression through the Egyptian Pharaohs and other so-called divine kings of the world. The Egyptians actually believed that the dead Pharaoh must get to the Panchean Duat to be united with the gods of West Africa. (See Catherine Acholonu: “Tilmun, the Duat and the Underground Abode of the Gods in West Africa”, published online at HYPERLINK "http://www.catherineacholonu.com/" \t "_blank" www.catherineacholonu.com.)
Nri religious Theology which is shared by all Igbo people says that -
Chukwu (Chi-ukwu) is the Great Creator of all beings, forces and things both visible and invisible. The Great Creator has four major aspects which are manifestations of his existence. First, Chukwu is Anyanwu, which symbolically means the sun. As the sun’s light is everywhere so Chukwu is everywhere; as the sun is powerful so Chukwu is all-powerful; as the sun is the light that reveals things so Chukwu is the source of all knowledge. Secondly Chukwu is Agbala (Ani/Ala) which is manifested in the fertility of the earth and beings that inhabit it. Thirdly Chukwu is chi which is manifested in the power and ability of living beings to procreate themselves from generation to generation. Fourthly, Chukwu is Okike, that is creation, and is manifested in the creation of everything visible and invisible, which is a never-ending process. Chukwu as Okike created the laws that govern the visible and invisible. (Onwuejeogwu, 1981, p. 31)
Eze Eri like all ozo titled men within the realm was a spiritual exemplar, the ‘sun-king’, prototype of the Greek ‘philosopher king’, not a ruler in a monarchical or political sense. He is a god among gods, because the Igbo cannot be ruled, they can only be guided along the path of god-becoming (the Bodhisattva). Defining “the Kingless Generation”, The Nag Hammadi says, “glorious and without number, they are designated the generation over whom no kingdoms exist. And all the beings of the realm with no kingdom over it … are designated the children of the un-conceived Father.” (p. 277)
The basic meaning of the kingless generation is Democracy. As demonstrated in the works of Chinua Achebe and Olaudah Equiano, the Igbo operate a home-grown and indigenous democracy. They have done so from times beyond memory. They did so before the coming of Eri. And even in Eri times, the various Igbo communities continued to observe the system of leadership by judges and senators called Ndi Ichie. (Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 1789)
We recall the man with two forehead concentric circles among the Igbo Ukwu sacred artifacts which we discussed earlier, and the definition of two concentric circles given in Nag Hammadi, whereby “the first (sphere)” is “the self-begotten Soul (un-conceived Father)”. It goes around “the second sphere, the Son – … the only-begotten soul”. (p. 642) The kingless generations are also called “the unshakable generation of the perfect human” in The Nag Hammadi. We call them the ‘no shaking’ people, borrowing the words of Enugu State politicians. Their origin is “immeasurable light, pure, holy, immaculate.” (Nag Hammadi, p. 109) They are from a realm about which it is said: “time was not allotted to it”, an “eternal day… with unlimited number of days” (Nag Hammadi p. 108, 336). There, in the immeasurable light of the Father, they lacked nothing, for the Father was “absolutely complete” in Himself. Thus the Father’s offspring are called “the Children of the Light”. The Nag Hammadi separates them from the ordinary humans created by the forces of darkness such as described in the Jewish Bible by a god who appeared from a realm where “Darkness covered the face of the Deep”, and who had to decree physical light, before “there was light”.
Startling parallels exist between this and Igbo folklore detailing a period which Adiele Afigbo calls the “Eternal Day”, the Age of Innocence and none-time, spent in a realm of Light and Eternal Glory, where the Igbo were sustained by God-substance and maintained unbroken communication with God their Father and never slept (perpetual consciousness). The Nag Hammadi says that this situation remained unbroken until Sophia a female angel gave birth to a being without the permission of God. This being, was godless and became jealous of the Son of God, the Immortal Human Being, Adam, and plotted to bring him down. He separated Adam from the eternal light and presence of God and gave him physical food to eat. Like the Igbo when Adam ate this food, he fell to the ground and slid into a deep sleep (he slept for the first time), the sleep of “ignorance”. Afigbo wrote that Igbo world started on a pedestal of high spirituality in which there was perpetual day, regular converse with their High God who fed them on ethereal food… All went well until one day a woman whose menstrual flows were on attempted to harvest the sky substance for food… The result was that Chineke (God) and the sky receded, plunging them into famine ... With the eating of material food came … the fall. Man slept for the first time and night (darkness) descended for the first time too… i.e. his consciousness fell. (Afigbo, Igbo History and Society, p. 465)
The similarities between these two stories are uncanny. The fact that Igbo accounts of their origins has the exact same details as the Nag Hammadi account of the origins of a kingless generation of sons of God, shows that these two accounts are speaking about the same group of people! This fact is critical to our thesis that the secret teachings of The Nag Hammadi scriptures which was hidden away in Egypt (Africa) by Jesus and his inner caucus disciples, and which is called the African Gospel , was directed at the Igbo and their Kwa brethren, the sons of God who are the hope of the earth! Neither is possible to gloss over the fact that in Igbo language, Adaa-m means ‘I have fallen’. Cleary there is a great mystery here. Between the Igbo who originally shared the consciousness of a God of Light, and the Israelites whose God moved about in waters that were covered by darkness, before creating physical light – Let there be Light! There is a discrepancy not just between those people who lay claim to being the chosen people of God and those who are convinced that they are a nation of Gods and Goddesses, a holy people, beings of Light whose true nature is the nature of the deity!
Afigbo divides Igbo History into two great epochs: “the epoch of the gods” or the “mythical Golden Age - what in the Christian Bible is called the Garden of Eden period” which was characterized by the reign of Eri, the sky being/ god-man who employed a native smith from Awka to dry up the waterlogged land before settling in it (p. 419, 417). There appears to be a mix-up in chronological time here because the coming of Eri was associated with the solving of problems associated with the Flood (11,000 B. C.), and the presence of the smith implied an already existing technology, perhaps early Bronze Age (9.000 B.C.) – the Kwa were bronze casters (a craft they share with Chaldeans). Therefore the coming of Eri could not have fallen within the period of non-time, but perhaps could be said to fall within the period immediately following it. This again would tend to suggest that Eri’s coming was in the immediate post-Diluvial period. Historians connect the coming of the Age of metal with the dawn of Agriculture. Like the Igbo, the San/Bushmen of Southern Africa narrate in their oral tradition that their ancestors lived in harmony with nature until the Bantu Zulu came to them with agriculture and metal working techniques. Martin Bernal (Black Athena) places “the expansion of Afro-Asiatic and African agriculture in the 9th and 8th millennium B.C.!” (p. 14). Bernal’s date is vital because Agriculture and metal working usually went together. This is the date which we have mentioned as the date of the dug-out canoe unearthed by German archaeologists in Yobe State, Nigeria. The natives, on the prompting of the archaeologists, replicated the canoe using hoes and machetes (Peter Breunig et.al., in Nigerian Heritage Journal, Vol. 4, 1995; “The Dufuna Dugout – Africa’s Oldest Boat”, Borno Museum Society Newsletter), demonstrating how the original makers of the canoe could have created it. Their task lasted a whooping eighty two man-hours, even though they only made a canoe half the length of the “prehistoric canoe at Dufuna”, and not so well finished, leaving the archaeologists to ponder whether it was not impossible to expect any one to make a similar canoe with stone implements.
The cosmologies of the Dogon people of Mali and Ivory Coast maintain that mankind had eight divine ancestors (saviors), the first being a smith brought also agriculture and taught civilization to mankind and pot-making. Potsherds found in the Sahara date to 9,000 B. C.! Certainly the facts suggest that the non-time period of Igbo oral tradition was before 9,000 B.C. What we can deduce from the foregoing is that even though Adam had experienced the Fall, the Igbo people of Nigeria had lived in a state of divine grace up to the time prior to the Deluge, i.e. 11,000 B.C. Change only came in the post Deluge period when Eri came to them in the forest and taught them to work metal.
But who was Eri? Who was this sky being who appeared among the forest people of Igbo land from no-where? In The Gram Code of African Adam (p. 301) we made reference to Edfu Pyramid records of a man called Khennu, who was the friend of the god Horus (Orisha) and his father Ra. Horus reigned around 9,000 B.C. in Egypt. Egyptian pyramid records describe the flight of the God Ra, the head of the Egyptian pantheon, to the far away West African land known as “the Land of Khennu” in “the district of UaUa”, to escape the conspiracies of his enemies. It was this period of hiding that gave Ra the name Atum, the Hidden One. Edfu records say “Ra went in his boat and his companions with him. He landed in the … Western District of the Throne Place of Horus”. The Throne Place of Horus is the Eastern and Western Horizon lands in the direction of the Southern Sea (the Atlantic Ocean), for Horus was called ‘Lord of the Horizon and the setting sun’. The Western district of the South-Atlantic Horizon is West Africa.
Eri was indeed none other than Ra, who was known in Babylon/Mesopotamia as Marduk. In reality Marduk was looking to build a secret human army with which to take over the rule of Gods and men. This is recorded copiously in Enuma Elish and in The Lost Book of Enki, (p. 203). Chronologically Marduk/Ra reigned in Egypt by 11,000 B.C., according to Egyptian records. His son Osiris ruled briefly, by 10,000 before his grand son Horus came into power after ousting his father’s antagonist Seth in the same millennium. By this time Ra and his grandson Horus were frequenting the Nigeria/Cameroon geographic environment.
In The Gram Code we demonstrated that Ra had built himself an underground kingdom within the bowels of the Cameroon mountain range which was known in Egypt as the Duat, which became the Heaven land of the great Pharaohs of Egypt who sought the Afterlife after death. We showed evidence that by 3,000 B.C. Gilgamesh visited this land in search of immortality. The term Eri was most likely a combination of the names Ra and Heru – the Egyptian vernacular name of Horus, for Heru means ‘Face’, just as its Igbo cognate Iru also means ‘Face’, and both must be cognates of the great god’s name ‘Ra’. There is a likely connection between the fact that Heru (Face) is the ancient name of the sun god (Robert Temple, 1987), which Ra represents and the fact that Eri was said to have made facial scarifications (ichi – an obvious sun symbol) on his son and daughter before sacrificing them to bring about the staples foods yam and cocoyam, palm and breadfruit trees. By this too, we know that Eri was most likely the Egyptian Sun god Ra. M.D.W Jeffreys, a British anthropologist conducted research in the 1930s in which he compared Igbo Ichi marks to the Winged Solar Disc of Egyptian gods Ra/Horus and came to the conclusion that the Igbo ichi mark was influenced by the Egyptian Winged Disc. He also noted the that Igbo word chi (sun, god) was a cognate of Egyptian word Shu (sun god), and that the Igbo word Anya-nwu (sun, Eye of the sun) as well as Adamawa word Anya-ra of the same meaning are both cognates of Egyptian word “Iwnw” (Sun/Ra) an ancient name for Heliopolis (Africa Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. xxi, Nr. 2, 1951, p. 58-59).
Elsewhere in this work we have drawn links between Ra and Rama of Hindu oral tradition, noting that it was most likely Ra’s son Osiris (Greek Dionysius) who took the Ra tradition to India because Egyptian and Greek mythologies insist that he undertook a civilizing tour to Asia where he founded kingdoms and instituted the worship of the Father-Mother God RA-MA. (George James, Stolen Legacy, 1989, 11) Thus one can argue that Osiris, the son of Ra was the carrier of Igbo thought across the continents. He was the instrument of Igbo civilizing influence to the rest of the world. Hindu records say that Rama ruled from the center of the world for 11,000 years. This is almost the length of Ra’s influence in Egypt from the time of his father to those of his children. The center of the word, as we have demonstrated elsewhere in this write up is Africa. Clearly Ra/Rama/Eri did bring what is called civilization to the ancient Igbo around 11,000 B.C. It would take another 7,000 years before the first human king would rule Egypt by 3,100 B.C. in the person of Menes/Mene. Eri instituted Nri kingdom and left a lineage of his children as priest-kings over it. By this time there was not yet a human king in Egypt. Eri’s friendship with the Awka black smith and the latter’s role in bringing about the spread of metal technology and agriculture led to the dawn of the Bantu colonization of most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Egyptian records say that Menes was a Black African from the unknown lands located south of Egypt. No one can say exactly where he came from, but from what we know about Ra’s Igbo connections, we can hazard the guess that he was most likely imposed by Ra from among his human friends in Igbo land. One cultural hint about the nationality of Menes was that the only full action image of him in existence portrays him with a fly-whisk on his waist – a identification mark of the Nwa-nshi and titled men of Igbo land.
There are four generations, three generations belong to the kings of the eighth heaven, and the fourth generation, which is the most exalted, is kingless and perfect. These people will enter the holy place of their Father and they will reside in rest … They are kings. They are the immortal within the mortal, and they will condemn the gods of chaos and their powers [by revealing the pattern of incorruptibility] (p. 219, emphases mine).
The above passage touches on vital phenomena that are central to the definition of Igbo cosmos and identity: the cosmic numbers: four (the small week) and eight (the great week), the concept of kinglessness ‘Igbo enwe eze’, the lust for knowledge and the incorruptibility of the god-man, as with the ozo titled men. We have a pet theory that the reason why an Igbo can never grovel and roll on the ground before a fellow human being, no matter how highly placed (as some other Nigerian tribes do) is that every Igbo man feels in his marrow that he is a king. The Nag Hammadi Scripture actually proves us right. The Igbo happen to be the only tribe in the world whose kinglessness is part of their identity, their genealogy, their cosmology and their philosophy. The Igbo have a curious religious practice of self-worship or self-deification, whereby an individual’s first god is himself and his very first shrine is a shrine constructed and dedicated to his personal spirit, his chi. He venerates this god (whose physical manifestation is himself) along with his ancestors. This personal shrine is the only one at which he performs rights of worship. He may visit some other shrines at some point or the other, but only to consult, never to worship, for the only god deserving of an Igbo man/woman’s veneration is the god that he himself is. This shrine is tended through such acts as libation, incantations, prayers and petitions and feeding with food, without which the individual would be expected to fail in his/her life’s endeavors. This is the highest expression of individuality and is viewed by us as a fundamental aspect of Igbo ontological belief in the god-man.
Man’s attainment of divinity, we believe, is the fundamental teaching of Christianity and Jesus Christ, namely: that God has become man; that man must see God in himself/herself; that man must regain perfection, Wisdom, immortality through the transformation of the self – what the Igbo call initiation. In fact the Chi Theology is ample proof that the Igbo see themselves as a nation of gods and goddesses, equivalent to what the Hindu refer to as the Bodhisattva. Both the Hindu and the Igbo believe in the god-man, an idea that found expression through the Egyptian Pharaohs and other so-called divine kings of the world. The Egyptians actually believed that the dead Pharaoh must get to the Panchean Duat to be united with the gods of West Africa. (See Catherine Acholonu: “Tilmun, the Duat and the Underground Abode of the Gods in West Africa”, published online at HYPERLINK "http://www.catherineacholonu.com/" \t "_blank" www.catherineacholonu.com.)
Nri religious Theology which is shared by all Igbo people says that -
Chukwu (Chi-ukwu) is the Great Creator of all beings, forces and things both visible and invisible. The Great Creator has four major aspects which are manifestations of his existence. First, Chukwu is Anyanwu, which symbolically means the sun. As the sun’s light is everywhere so Chukwu is everywhere; as the sun is powerful so Chukwu is all-powerful; as the sun is the light that reveals things so Chukwu is the source of all knowledge. Secondly Chukwu is Agbala (Ani/Ala) which is manifested in the fertility of the earth and beings that inhabit it. Thirdly Chukwu is chi which is manifested in the power and ability of living beings to procreate themselves from generation to generation. Fourthly, Chukwu is Okike, that is creation, and is manifested in the creation of everything visible and invisible, which is a never-ending process. Chukwu as Okike created the laws that govern the visible and invisible. (Onwuejeogwu, 1981, p. 31)
Eze Eri like all ozo titled men within the realm was a spiritual exemplar, the ‘sun-king’, prototype of the Greek ‘philosopher king’, not a ruler in a monarchical or political sense. He is a god among gods, because the Igbo cannot be ruled, they can only be guided along the path of god-becoming (the Bodhisattva). Defining “the Kingless Generation”, The Nag Hammadi says, “glorious and without number, they are designated the generation over whom no kingdoms exist. And all the beings of the realm with no kingdom over it … are designated the children of the un-conceived Father.” (p. 277)
The basic meaning of the kingless generation is Democracy. As demonstrated in the works of Chinua Achebe and Olaudah Equiano, the Igbo operate a home-grown and indigenous democracy. They have done so from times beyond memory. They did so before the coming of Eri. And even in Eri times, the various Igbo communities continued to observe the system of leadership by judges and senators called Ndi Ichie. (Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 1789)
We recall the man with two forehead concentric circles among the Igbo Ukwu sacred artifacts which we discussed earlier, and the definition of two concentric circles given in Nag Hammadi, whereby “the first (sphere)” is “the self-begotten Soul (un-conceived Father)”. It goes around “the second sphere, the Son – … the only-begotten soul”. (p. 642) The kingless generations are also called “the unshakable generation of the perfect human” in The Nag Hammadi. We call them the ‘no shaking’ people, borrowing the words of Enugu State politicians. Their origin is “immeasurable light, pure, holy, immaculate.” (Nag Hammadi, p. 109) They are from a realm about which it is said: “time was not allotted to it”, an “eternal day… with unlimited number of days” (Nag Hammadi p. 108, 336). There, in the immeasurable light of the Father, they lacked nothing, for the Father was “absolutely complete” in Himself. Thus the Father’s offspring are called “the Children of the Light”. The Nag Hammadi separates them from the ordinary humans created by the forces of darkness such as described in the Jewish Bible by a god who appeared from a realm where “Darkness covered the face of the Deep”, and who had to decree physical light, before “there was light”.
Startling parallels exist between this and Igbo folklore detailing a period which Adiele Afigbo calls the “Eternal Day”, the Age of Innocence and none-time, spent in a realm of Light and Eternal Glory, where the Igbo were sustained by God-substance and maintained unbroken communication with God their Father and never slept (perpetual consciousness). The Nag Hammadi says that this situation remained unbroken until Sophia a female angel gave birth to a being without the permission of God. This being, was godless and became jealous of the Son of God, the Immortal Human Being, Adam, and plotted to bring him down. He separated Adam from the eternal light and presence of God and gave him physical food to eat. Like the Igbo when Adam ate this food, he fell to the ground and slid into a deep sleep (he slept for the first time), the sleep of “ignorance”. Afigbo wrote that Igbo world started on a pedestal of high spirituality in which there was perpetual day, regular converse with their High God who fed them on ethereal food… All went well until one day a woman whose menstrual flows were on attempted to harvest the sky substance for food… The result was that Chineke (God) and the sky receded, plunging them into famine ... With the eating of material food came … the fall. Man slept for the first time and night (darkness) descended for the first time too… i.e. his consciousness fell. (Afigbo, Igbo History and Society, p. 465)
The similarities between these two stories are uncanny. The fact that Igbo accounts of their origins has the exact same details as the Nag Hammadi account of the origins of a kingless generation of sons of God, shows that these two accounts are speaking about the same group of people! This fact is critical to our thesis that the secret teachings of The Nag Hammadi scriptures which was hidden away in Egypt (Africa) by Jesus and his inner caucus disciples, and which is called the African Gospel , was directed at the Igbo and their Kwa brethren, the sons of God who are the hope of the earth! Neither is possible to gloss over the fact that in Igbo language, Adaa-m means ‘I have fallen’. Cleary there is a great mystery here. Between the Igbo who originally shared the consciousness of a God of Light, and the Israelites whose God moved about in waters that were covered by darkness, before creating physical light – Let there be Light! There is a discrepancy not just between those people who lay claim to being the chosen people of God and those who are convinced that they are a nation of Gods and Goddesses, a holy people, beings of Light whose true nature is the nature of the deity!
Afigbo divides Igbo History into two great epochs: “the epoch of the gods” or the “mythical Golden Age - what in the Christian Bible is called the Garden of Eden period” which was characterized by the reign of Eri, the sky being/ god-man who employed a native smith from Awka to dry up the waterlogged land before settling in it (p. 419, 417). There appears to be a mix-up in chronological time here because the coming of Eri was associated with the solving of problems associated with the Flood (11,000 B. C.), and the presence of the smith implied an already existing technology, perhaps early Bronze Age (9.000 B.C.) – the Kwa were bronze casters (a craft they share with Chaldeans). Therefore the coming of Eri could not have fallen within the period of non-time, but perhaps could be said to fall within the period immediately following it. This again would tend to suggest that Eri’s coming was in the immediate post-Diluvial period. Historians connect the coming of the Age of metal with the dawn of Agriculture. Like the Igbo, the San/Bushmen of Southern Africa narrate in their oral tradition that their ancestors lived in harmony with nature until the Bantu Zulu came to them with agriculture and metal working techniques. Martin Bernal (Black Athena) places “the expansion of Afro-Asiatic and African agriculture in the 9th and 8th millennium B.C.!” (p. 14). Bernal’s date is vital because Agriculture and metal working usually went together. This is the date which we have mentioned as the date of the dug-out canoe unearthed by German archaeologists in Yobe State, Nigeria. The natives, on the prompting of the archaeologists, replicated the canoe using hoes and machetes (Peter Breunig et.al., in Nigerian Heritage Journal, Vol. 4, 1995; “The Dufuna Dugout – Africa’s Oldest Boat”, Borno Museum Society Newsletter), demonstrating how the original makers of the canoe could have created it. Their task lasted a whooping eighty two man-hours, even though they only made a canoe half the length of the “prehistoric canoe at Dufuna”, and not so well finished, leaving the archaeologists to ponder whether it was not impossible to expect any one to make a similar canoe with stone implements.
The cosmologies of the Dogon people of Mali and Ivory Coast maintain that mankind had eight divine ancestors (saviors), the first being a smith brought also agriculture and taught civilization to mankind and pot-making. Potsherds found in the Sahara date to 9,000 B. C.! Certainly the facts suggest that the non-time period of Igbo oral tradition was before 9,000 B.C. What we can deduce from the foregoing is that even though Adam had experienced the Fall, the Igbo people of Nigeria had lived in a state of divine grace up to the time prior to the Deluge, i.e. 11,000 B.C. Change only came in the post Deluge period when Eri came to them in the forest and taught them to work metal.
But who was Eri? Who was this sky being who appeared among the forest people of Igbo land from no-where? In The Gram Code of African Adam (p. 301) we made reference to Edfu Pyramid records of a man called Khennu, who was the friend of the god Horus (Orisha) and his father Ra. Horus reigned around 9,000 B.C. in Egypt. Egyptian pyramid records describe the flight of the God Ra, the head of the Egyptian pantheon, to the far away West African land known as “the Land of Khennu” in “the district of UaUa”, to escape the conspiracies of his enemies. It was this period of hiding that gave Ra the name Atum, the Hidden One. Edfu records say “Ra went in his boat and his companions with him. He landed in the … Western District of the Throne Place of Horus”. The Throne Place of Horus is the Eastern and Western Horizon lands in the direction of the Southern Sea (the Atlantic Ocean), for Horus was called ‘Lord of the Horizon and the setting sun’. The Western district of the South-Atlantic Horizon is West Africa.
Eri was indeed none other than Ra, who was known in Babylon/Mesopotamia as Marduk. In reality Marduk was looking to build a secret human army with which to take over the rule of Gods and men. This is recorded copiously in Enuma Elish and in The Lost Book of Enki, (p. 203). Chronologically Marduk/Ra reigned in Egypt by 11,000 B.C., according to Egyptian records. His son Osiris ruled briefly, by 10,000 before his grand son Horus came into power after ousting his father’s antagonist Seth in the same millennium. By this time Ra and his grandson Horus were frequenting the Nigeria/Cameroon geographic environment.
In The Gram Code we demonstrated that Ra had built himself an underground kingdom within the bowels of the Cameroon mountain range which was known in Egypt as the Duat, which became the Heaven land of the great Pharaohs of Egypt who sought the Afterlife after death. We showed evidence that by 3,000 B.C. Gilgamesh visited this land in search of immortality. The term Eri was most likely a combination of the names Ra and Heru – the Egyptian vernacular name of Horus, for Heru means ‘Face’, just as its Igbo cognate Iru also means ‘Face’, and both must be cognates of the great god’s name ‘Ra’. There is a likely connection between the fact that Heru (Face) is the ancient name of the sun god (Robert Temple, 1987), which Ra represents and the fact that Eri was said to have made facial scarifications (ichi – an obvious sun symbol) on his son and daughter before sacrificing them to bring about the staples foods yam and cocoyam, palm and breadfruit trees. By this too, we know that Eri was most likely the Egyptian Sun god Ra. M.D.W Jeffreys, a British anthropologist conducted research in the 1930s in which he compared Igbo Ichi marks to the Winged Solar Disc of Egyptian gods Ra/Horus and came to the conclusion that the Igbo ichi mark was influenced by the Egyptian Winged Disc. He also noted the that Igbo word chi (sun, god) was a cognate of Egyptian word Shu (sun god), and that the Igbo word Anya-nwu (sun, Eye of the sun) as well as Adamawa word Anya-ra of the same meaning are both cognates of Egyptian word “Iwnw” (Sun/Ra) an ancient name for Heliopolis (Africa Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. xxi, Nr. 2, 1951, p. 58-59).
Elsewhere in this work we have drawn links between Ra and Rama of Hindu oral tradition, noting that it was most likely Ra’s son Osiris (Greek Dionysius) who took the Ra tradition to India because Egyptian and Greek mythologies insist that he undertook a civilizing tour to Asia where he founded kingdoms and instituted the worship of the Father-Mother God RA-MA. (George James, Stolen Legacy, 1989, 11) Thus one can argue that Osiris, the son of Ra was the carrier of Igbo thought across the continents. He was the instrument of Igbo civilizing influence to the rest of the world. Hindu records say that Rama ruled from the center of the world for 11,000 years. This is almost the length of Ra’s influence in Egypt from the time of his father to those of his children. The center of the word, as we have demonstrated elsewhere in this write up is Africa. Clearly Ra/Rama/Eri did bring what is called civilization to the ancient Igbo around 11,000 B.C. It would take another 7,000 years before the first human king would rule Egypt by 3,100 B.C. in the person of Menes/Mene. Eri instituted Nri kingdom and left a lineage of his children as priest-kings over it. By this time there was not yet a human king in Egypt. Eri’s friendship with the Awka black smith and the latter’s role in bringing about the spread of metal technology and agriculture led to the dawn of the Bantu colonization of most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Egyptian records say that Menes was a Black African from the unknown lands located south of Egypt. No one can say exactly where he came from, but from what we know about Ra’s Igbo connections, we can hazard the guess that he was most likely imposed by Ra from among his human friends in Igbo land. One cultural hint about the nationality of Menes was that the only full action image of him in existence portrays him with a fly-whisk on his waist – a identification mark of the Nwa-nshi and titled men of Igbo land.