The "wars of the gods" are, in Billy Carson's reading of the ancient record, a chain of real physical conflicts that began among the stars of the Pleiades, scattered refugees to Sirius, Orion, Aldebaran and eventually Earth, and were fought again here with weapons the Mahabharata and the Sumerian tablets describe in detail. In this live talk he argues that the beings every culture later called gods were flesh-and-blood people from a warring civilisation, that they taught humanity to fight the same way, and that the only way out of the cycle is to study what happened and refuse to repeat it.
Carson is careful at the start to define his terms. When he says "gods" he means lowercase-g gods, people with technology, not the creator of the universe, which he says he believes in because physics shows "we are living in a creation." The talk uses a slideshow, so it reads as a tour through sources, and we have kept that order.
Why does Carson say the gods were not gods?
His opening argument is the cargo cult. When United States forces arrived at Pacific atolls to test nuclear weapons, islanders who had never seen aircraft or canned food treated the visitors as holy, built runways and rifles out of sticks after they left, and waited for the "sky gods" to return. Carson's claim is that "every religion that exists on this planet is nothing more than a cargo cult," the trace left when an advanced group engages a less advanced one. He develops the same example in Gods Among Us.
He adds a line from the Sumerian tablets that he returns to often: the Anunnaki say they will have to answer to "the creator of all" for what they did on Earth, which for Carson proves they knew they were not gods and had broken "a galactic law" against interfering with a less advanced species.
What does the Book of Enoch say about weapons?
Carson's bridge from "gods" to "wars" is the Book of Enoch, where the Watchers descend and teach men to make swords, shields and breastplates. He argues this is why the book was left out of the Western canon, surviving only in the Ethiopian Bible, and he offers his own retelling of Enoch's ascent: not a holy man whisked to heaven, but a man with an appointed time to board a craft, see the Earth from above, study architecture and mathematics with a "master," and return years later, having first arranged his estate with his sons. The text itself says only that Enoch "walked with God" and was taken; the craft and the curriculum are Carson's reading.
He also points to passages where these beings eat, drink, fight alongside humans and take human partners, which he reads as proof that they were physical people.
Why does the story start in the Pleiades?
The slideshow opens on the Pleiades, and Carson lists cultures that trace their origin there: the Hopi, Aboriginal Australians, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, who he says called the cluster Mul Mul and claimed kinship with its people, as well as Homer and the Book of Job. His question is how peoples separated by oceans arrived at the same star. His answer, drawn from sources he lists on screen (Burnham's Celestial Handbook, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, Star Lore of All Ages, Star Tales, The Age of Fable), is that the Pleiades were the site of a war, and the war produced refugees.
He makes a supporting point about the "seven sisters." Only six Pleiades are visible to the naked eye, yet the ancient accounts insist on seven and say one was lost, which Carson takes as evidence that someone knew a star had burned out before telescopes existed. Astronomers note that Pleione varies in brightness, which may explain the "lost Pleiad" story. Our explainer on the Pleiades and the Pleiadians covers both readings.
How does the Enuma Elish fit in?
In Carson's model the refugees spread to Sirius, Orion and Aldebaran, the three systems he says the Great Pyramid's shafts align with, and one group settled a planet orbiting a brown dwarf. That brown dwarf, with its planets, was gravitationally captured by our Sun, and one of its moons collided with Tiamat, the water world then orbiting where the asteroid belt is now. Earth, in this telling, is the surviving half of Tiamat.
He reads this out of the Enuma Elish and takes pains to state its provenance: recovered by Austen Henry Layard from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in 1849, published by George Smith in 1876, and therefore translated long before Zecharia Sitchin was born. "Anyone who tells you I'm regurgitating Sitchin," he says, "has been mind-pimped." He adds that the long-missing Tablet V has since been recovered and sits in the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraq.
Mainstream Assyriology reads the Enuma Elish as a theological poem elevating Marduk, composed in the Old Babylonian or Kassite period, and treats Tiamat as a personified sea, not a planet. Carson's planetary reading follows Sitchin's, whatever the tablets' earlier provenance.
Who was Marduk and what did he change?
Carson spends several minutes on Marduk, whom he identifies with Amun-Ra. In his account Marduk rewrote the Enuma Elish so that the invading planet, Nibiru, carried his own name; demanded monotheistic worship ("I am a jealous god"); recruited the pharaoh Akhenaten to spread the sun-disc cult; and started two wars, one to seize kingship early and one to keep it. He claims the word "amen" was Marduk's instruction that every prayer end by thanking him, and he shows a search of the Jewish Virtual Library returning Marduk in the Torah and the Bible.
He then reads Deuteronomy 13:13-19 and Ezekiel 9:5-7, the commands to destroy an entire town for worshipping other gods and to kill everyone without the mark, and attributes both to Marduk speaking through a human prophet. For Carson these passages are the smoking gun that a warring being wrote himself into scripture. Scholars see the same verses as Iron Age Israelite law and prophecy with no Babylonian author, and the Marduk mentions in Jeremiah 50 are of a foreign god being mocked. Our profile of Marduk gives the Babylonian side.
What weapons does the Mahabharata describe?
The Indian epic gets a full section. Carson gives its scale, around 100,000 verses and 1.8 million words, roughly ten times the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and argues nobody writes two million words about something that never happened. He highlights the vimanas, flying vessels that in his reading could carry men "to any planet," powered by a ferrofluid vortex engine: a spinning torus of mercury at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, electrified under enormous pressure, producing an anti-gravity effect. He says plans for such craft survive and that governments draw on them.
Then he reaches the Brahmastra, which the Puranas describe as a weapon that cannot be stopped or recalled once released, with higher versions, the Brahmashirsha and the Brahmanda, that he equates with nuclear and thermonuclear bombs and "planet destroyers." He reminds viewers that Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," after the first atomic test, and he repeats the unsourced story that Oppenheimer, asked whether Trinity was the first atomic bomb, answered "in modern times." Carson's inference is that the physicists took their ideas from the epics. Our background piece on vimanas separates what the Sanskrit texts say from the twentieth-century Vaimanika Shastra.
Is there physical evidence of ancient wars?
Carson shows three sites. Uruk, where he says the city was "turned into glass" by heat above 3,000 degrees. Mohenjo-daro, where he claims bodies still lie in the streets holding hands, never scavenged because they remain radioactive, and buildings are vitrified. And the Giza Plateau, where he reads the desert itself as the scar of the "second pyramid war of Marduk."
He is right that the Indus Valley cities were remarkable: Mohenjo-daro had brick-lined sewers, private bathrooms, wells and the Great Bath before 2000 BCE. The vitrification and radiation claims, however, come from popular ancient-astronaut books and have not been confirmed by any excavation; the skeletons found there date to a late occupation and show no radiation. The Libyan desert glass found in Egypt is dated to about 29 million years ago and is generally attributed to an impact. We cover the archaeology in the Indus Valley civilisation explained.
What is the modern science Carson brings in?
Three items. First, the finding from Two Micron All Sky Survey data that the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is being absorbed by the Milky Way, to which Carson adds that our Sun sits at the intersection and so "we are not even from the Milky Way," a conclusion the study did not draw. Second, the existence of billions of free-floating "rogue planets," which makes the Enuma Elish's captured-planet story plausible to him. Third, a television clip about the dwarf planet 2012 VP113, found beyond Pluto on a 4,300-year orbit, which he takes as confirmation of an outer "second solar system" and of a brown dwarf companion to the Sun. The WISE survey searched for such a companion and found none; our explainer on Nibiru and Planet X traces where the claim stands.
What is Carson's conclusion?
He closes on the idea that the past is prologue. The refugees of a Pleiadian war brought a warring mentality to Earth, humanity inherited it, and most wars are still fought over religion and resources. His prescription is to face the trauma, do the "shadow work," forgive the ancestors and plan a different future. "Hundreds of thousands of dead planets," he says, belonged to civilisations that never got past their nuclear age.
Watch, read, listen
Watch the talk above or on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast page. The documentary version of the same material is Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed on 4BK TV, and the written companion is Billy's book "The Epic of Humanity." Browse the whole series on the Anunnaki and Sumer topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
What are the "wars of the gods"?
In Carson's usage, the conflicts between advanced beings recorded in the Mahabharata, the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis epic and parts of the Hebrew Bible, which he treats as history rather than myth. He argues one war began in the Pleiades and later wars were fought on Earth and, in his view, on Mars.
Did Zecharia Sitchin translate the Enuma Elish?
No, and Carson makes a point of saying so. The tablets were excavated in 1849 and first published in English by George Smith in 1876. Sitchin's contribution was the planetary interpretation, which Carson shares but which Assyriologists reject.
Was Mohenjo-daro destroyed by a nuclear weapon?
There is no archaeological evidence for it. The city declined around 1900 BCE, the skeletons found there date to a late phase and show no radiation, and no vitrified layer has been documented. The claim circulates from popular ancient-astronaut literature.
Is our solar system from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy?
The Sagittarius dwarf is being absorbed by the Milky Way, and its tidal streams do pass near the Sun's region. The claim that the Sun originated in it was floated in a 2003 press release and has not held up; the Sun's motion and chemistry match the Milky Way's disc.
What is a Brahmastra?
A celestial weapon in the Mahabharata and Puranas, granted by Brahma, described as unstoppable once released. Carson and other ancient-astronaut writers read it as a nuclear weapon; Sanskrit scholars read it as a mythic or spiritual weapon within the epic's conventions.
Sources mentioned
The Enuma Elish (Layard 1849, Smith 1876) and the Atrahasis epic; the Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita and Puranas; the Book of Enoch; Deuteronomy 13 and Ezekiel 9; Burnham's Celestial Handbook and Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning; the 2MASS Sagittarius dwarf study; the discovery of 2012 VP113; and Billy Carson's "The Epic of Humanity."
