Oannes, Enki, Nommo and Viracocha 

4/3/02 1:09:36 PM Pacific Standard Time

Dear Kent,

Further to your comments on the first page of your site dealing with the
alleged underwater Cuban city and the references to Oannes, et al., did
you know that there is an intriguing coincidence in the portrayals in
stone carvings of the Babylonian and Sumerian Oannes/Enki and that of
the Viracocha of Tiahuanco?  Although the Sumerian/Babylonian teachers
were said to be amphibious beings who were from the sea or the sky, the
stone carvings of them show them as a man dressed in a fish costume,
with the fish's head extending above the human head, as if he were
wearing a single-piece costume and then pushed the fish head up so that
his face could be exposed, with the "scales" of the fish body of the god
consisting of little fish heads.  Well, several carvings in and around
Tiahuanco portray Viracocha as wearing a long robe which is also made up
of fish heads in the same sort of scalar motif.  However, there is no
myth among the Andean civilizations of Viracocha being an amphibious
being.  On the contrary, and almost equally strangely, he is described
as being a tall, elderly, Caucasian who came to the Andes to comfort and
teach the inhabitants after they had suffered great physical cataclysms
which left their civilization in ruins and ignorance.  The myths of
Viracocha have a lot of parallels with myths of Queztalcoatl, another
Caucasian peacemaker and teacher in Mesoamerican myths.  Both of these
figures have a kind of Christ-like mythos, especially the Quezalcoatl
variant.  What is distinctive, however, is that the myths are quite
specific about these guys (and, in some versions, their original
disciples) being Caucasians, appearing in lands where Caucasians should
have been unknown (if one accepts conventional views of archeology).

Anyway, the visual similarities between the Oannes/Enki carvings and the
Viracocha carvings are truly striking.  Both are credited with teaching
the arts of civilized life to the inhabitants.  In the case of Sumer and
Babylonia, it was supposedly the start of civilization in that region;
in the case of Tiahuanco and Mesoamerica, it was the restarting of a
civilization lost to some enormous disaster.  The latter myth is
virtually ubiquitous in every Andean civilization, unlike the amphibian
myths of Mesopotamia and West Africa, which are less universal in their
dispersion around those regions.

One cannot help but feel that something extraordinary happened in some
distant time on both major land masses of the Earth to assist the
persons found living there either to initiate or reinitiate
civilization, and that this help came from persons or creatures who were
not of the civilizations which give us these myths today.  Whether they
were ETs or not remains to be demonstrated (and probably never will be,
given the temporal remove of these alleged events).

Unfortunately, our knowledge of these matters is so corrupted by the
distended and hodge podged manner in which it comes down to us, that it
can only tantalize and little more without the discovery of more data.
Still, the coincidences of visual presentation and content of the myths
is intriguing.

Best regards,