Há muito tempo que a nossa memória mítica guarda lembranças de que, em algum lugar da terra, existe um ponto onde podemos transcender a morte e juntarmo-nos aos deuses. Em o caminho para o céu, Zecharia Sitchin fala das suas descobertas fascinantes sobre a história da terra e analisa com profundidade o nosso desejo de retornar ao divino. O autor combina o enigma das pirâmides com as lendas das tentativas do homem em ascender ao céu como um deus e conquistar a imortalidade. Ele investiga as vidas dos faraós do Egito, que nos ensinaram a percorrer a rota dos deuses em direção à “vida eterna”. Narra a epopeia de Gilgamesh, o rei sumério que viajou por países distantes na sua busca para “escalar o céu” e evitar um destino mortal. Encontramos ainda Alexandre, o grande, que acreditava ser filho de um deus, e Ponce de Leon, que vasculhou a flórida em busca da lendária fonte da juventude. Finalmente, o autor chama a atenção para o olhar da esfinge, o “guia sagrado”, e faz uma viagem impressionante por meio da busca original pela vida eterna. “uma pesquisa profunda e persuasiva. Sitchin nos apresenta a lógica e o pensamento acadêmico que nos faltavam. Ele aponta falhas em teorias já estabelecidas a respeito dos construtores das pirâmides e expõe alguns enganos da antiguidade.” – library journal.

Interesting book series ( )

Like Robert Temple's explosive The Sirius Mystery, Zecharia Sitchin's first book The Twelfth Planet was published in 1976. The premise of both books (that extraterrestrials presided over the beginning of civilization here on Earth) was fundamentally the same, but Temple and Sitchin came to significantly different conclusions about who and what the Anunnaki were. Scientifically, Sitchin was on much shakier ground; one has to admire his attention to detail, but many of the details are fanciful. An advanced extraterrestrial civilization evolving on a planet at the outer edge of our own solar system? That's the foundation on which Sitchin's entire hypothesis rested, and it's just as absurd now as it was four and a half decades ago.

The Stairway to Heaven addresses some of the mysteries that Temple wrote about but which Sitchin didn't get around to in his first book (such as the nature and purpose of the omphalos stones found at ancient oracle sites throughout Egypt, the Near East and Asia Minor), while skirting others (the legend of Oannes, which Sitchin referenced only once in The Twelfth Planet, apparently finding it of little interest; the legend is, of course, central to Temple's theory). In my opinion, the author is absolutely right about Baalbek: if not to withstand the weight of an aircraft, for what purpose could the massive stone platform possibly have been constructed? (And how was it constructed in the absence of modern technology?) Sitchin also does a fine job of explaining that there is essentially zero evidence to support the belief that the Pyramids of Giza were designed as tombs for pharaohs. Other points, like the oddly specific details about the lives of the alien "gods," appear to rely on his imaginative interpretation and imperfect understanding of Sumerian and Semitic linguistics. As another reviewer has noted, Sitchin's writing is uncharacteristically clunky here, resulting in a great many sentences like this one: "There seem to be more than just coincidences here; and the question that comes to mind is this: if at all these oracle centers an omphalos was enshrined--was the omphalos itself the very source of the oracles?" (My gripe is not with the question, but with the way it's phrased!)

Despite the major flaws in Zecharia Sitchin's theory, it's one of the few serious attempts to address the subject of Paleo-SETI, and as such is worthy of consideration. (The succinct and more reader-friendly Genesis Revisited is the best place for newcomers to start.) Also recommended: Robert Temple's aforementioned The Sirius Mystery, John Philip Cohane's Paradox: The Case for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Man, and Duncan Lunan's The Mysterious Signals from Outer Space. ( )

The quest for immortality has a place in the myths and legends in nearly all the cultures of the world, is this a natural human longing or is it the result of the “gods” living among men for millennia? Zecharia Sitchin looks to answer the question through Sumerian, Egyptian, Biblical, and extra-Biblical texts and Middle Eastern stories and legends from Gilgamesh to Alexander the Great in his book The Stairway to Heaven.

The search for Paradise where the Tree of Life—or the Fountain of Youth or any other means to bring eternal youth or life—across cultures begins Sitchin’s second book in his Earth Chronicles series. Then he turns to those who claimed immortal ancestors which lead to recounting the tale of Gilgamesh and the afterlife journey of the Pharaohs to their ancestor Ra. All this builds to why all these tales are similar in their descriptions of locations to find the place where immortality can be found, the answer Sitchin proposes is the post-Deluge location for the Annunaki spaceport on the central plain of the Sinai Peninsula. In setting out his theory, Sitchin details the monumental architecture around Egypt and the Levant that not even modern equipment can create and how archaeologists have misidentified through mistakes, or maybe outright fraud, on who built them amongst ancient human cultures when in fact they were built by the astronauts from Nibiru for their rocketships.

Following the post-Deluge founding of civilization at the end of The 12th Planet, Sitchin focused on how the Annunaki rebuilt their spacefaring abilities after the destruction of their Mission Control and Spaceport in Mesopotamia. To do this he highlights the near universal search for immortality by humans and how it alluded to the new Spaceport in the Sinai that lead to the “realm of the Gods”. Yet in doing this Sitchin reiterated the same thing over and over again for a good third of the book, bogging down the overall text and could have been condensed down but would have made this 308 page book much shorter. But Sitchin’s argument that the mathematical relationship between numerous ancient cities, monumental architecture, and high mountains across the Middle East as well as stretching towards Delphi in Greece towards the end is the most intriguing for any reader, even if you are skeptical on Sitchin’s theories.

The Stairway to Heaven is not as well written as its precursor or its successor—if my memory is correct—as Sitchin needed a transition book and needed to fill it out. While not as “good” as The 12th Planet, this book gives the reader information important in following up the previous book and “setting” the stage for The Wars of Gods and Men. ( )

The second volume in his Earth Chronicles, Sitchin lays it all out here. Nibiru, a planet with a 3,600 year orbit, is the home of an advanced race of beings that colonized the Earth. Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods? All alien masters who bred humans as chattel. Convincing? Not really, but there are snippets of wonderful information. Like all of his works, the bibliography is full of scholarly and conventional sources, but since the work lacks footnotes, you can hardly prove or disprove his assertions. Let us hope that one day there are footnoted editions. ( )