Anu
Encyclopedia
In Sumerian mythology, Anu (also An; (from Sumerian
Sumerian language
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism...

 *An 𒀭 = sky, heaven)) was a sky-god, the god
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

 of heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...

, lord of constellation
Constellation
In modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....

s, king of gods, Consort of Antu
Antu
In Akkadian mythology, Antu or Antum is a Babylonian goddess, derived from the older Sumerian Ki, though the cosmogony has been altered to suit a separate tradition. She was the first consort of Anu, and the pair were the parents of the Anunnaki and the Utukki...

, spirits and demon
Demon
call - 1347 531 7769 for more infoIn Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered an "unclean spirit" which may cause demonic possession, to be addressed with an act of exorcism...

s, and dwelt in the highest heavenly regions. It was believed that he had the power to judge those who had committed crimes, and that he had created the stars as soldiers to destroy the wicked. His attribute was the royal tiara
Tiara
A tiara is a form of crown. There are two possible types of crown that this word can refer to.Traditionally, the word "tiara" refers to a high crown, often with the shape of a cylinder narrowed at its top, made of fabric or leather, and richly ornamented. It was used by the kings and emperors of...

.

He was one of the oldest gods in the Sumerian pantheon
Sumerian religion
Sumerian religion refers to the mythology, pantheon, rites and cosmology of the Sumerian civilization. The Sumerian religion influenced Mesopotamian mythology as a whole, surviving in the mythologies and religions of the Hurrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other culture...

, and part of a triad including Enlil
Enlil
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.-Early life:Members...

, god of the air and Enki
Enki
Enki is a god in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Akkadian and Babylonian mythology. He was originally patron god of the city of Eridu, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites and Hurrians...

, god of water. He was called Anu by the Akkad
Akkad
The Akkadian Empire was an empire centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region in Mesopotamia....

ians. By virtue of being the first figure in a triad consisting of Anu, Enlil, and Enki (also known as Ea), Anu came to be regarded as the father and at first, king of the gods. Anu is so prominently associated with the E-anna temple in the city of Uruk
Uruk
Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.Uruk gave its name to the Uruk...

 (biblical Erech
Erech
Erech according to the Book of Genesis, was an ancient city in the land of Shinar, the second city built by king Nimrod....

) in southern Babylonia that there are good reasons for believing this place to have been the original seat of the Anu cult. If this is correct, then the goddess Inanna
Inanna
Inanna, also spelled Inana is the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare....

 (or Ishtar
Ishtar
Ishtar is the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex. She is the counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the cognate north-west Semitic goddess Astarte.-Characteristics:...

) of Uruk may at one time have been his consort.

Sumerian religion

Anu had several consorts, the foremost being Ki
Ki (goddess)
Cuneiform KI is the sign for "earth". It is also read as GI5, GUNNI "hearth", KARAŠ "encampment, army", KISLAḪ "threshing floor" or steath, and SUR7...

 (earth), Nammu
Nammu
In Sumerian mythology, Nammu was a primeval goddess, corresponding to Tiamat in Babylonian mythology....

, and Uras
Uras (mythology)
Uraš or Urash, in Sumerian mythology is a goddess of earth, and one of the consorts of the sky god Anu. She is the mother of the goddess Ninsun and a grandmother of hero Gilgamesh.- References :...

. By Ki he was the father of, among others, the Annuna gods. By Uras he was the father of Nin'insinna. According to legends, heaven and earth were once inseparable until An and Ki bore Enlil, god of the air, who cleaved heaven and earth in two. An and Ki were, in some texts, identified as brother and sister being the children of Anshar
Anshar
In Akkadian mythology, Anshar , which means "sky pivot" or "sky axle", is a sky god. He is the husband of his sister Kishar. They might both represent heaven and earth . Both are the second generation of gods; their parents being the serpents Lahmu and Lahamu and grandparents Tiamat and Apsu. In...

 and Kishar
Kishar
In the Akkadian epic Enuma Elish, Kishar is the daughter of Lahmu and Lahamu, the first children of Tiamat and Apsu. She is the female principle, sister and wife of Anshar, the male principle, and the mother of Anu...

. Ki later developed into the Akkadian goddess Antu.

Anu existed in Sumerian cosmogony as a dome that covered the flat earth; Outside of this dome was the primordial body of water known as Tiamat
Tiamat
In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû to produce younger gods. It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos, the first in which Tiamat is 'creatrix', through a "Sacred marriage" between salt and fresh water,...

 (not to be confused with the Subterranean "Apsû").

In Sumerian, the designation "An" was used interchangeably with "the heavens" so that in some cases it is doubtful whether, under the term, the god An or the heavens is being denoted. The Akkadians inherited An as the god of heavens from the Sumerian as Anu-, and in Akkadian cuneiform, the DINGIR
Dingir
Dingir is a cuneiform sign, most commonly the determinative for "deity" although it has related meanings as well. As a determinative, it is not pronounced, and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript "D" as in e.g. DInanna...

 character may refer either to Anum, or to the Akkadian word for god, ilu-, and consequently had two phonetic values, an and il. Hittite cuneiform
Hittite cuneiform
Hittite cuneiform is the implementation of cuneiform script used in writing the Hittite language. The surviving corpus of Hittite texts is preserved in cuneiform on clay tablets dates to the 2nd millennium BC ....

 as adapted from the Old Assyrian kept the an value but abandoned il.
Airzelhaa god of air and energy in this period before, rules the cosmos, and manifest to planet earth, moreover to the Sumerian, Airzelhaa is the enigma and transcendental omnipresence.Airzelhaa meaning, matter, air energy omniknowledg, Airzelhaa.

Assyro-Babylonian religion

The doctrine once established remained an inherent part of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion and led to the more or less complete disassociation of the three gods constituting the triad from their original local limitations. An intermediate step between Anu viewed as the local deity of Uruk
Uruk
Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.Uruk gave its name to the Uruk...

, Enlil
Enlil
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.-Early life:Members...

 as the god of Nippur
Nippur
Nippur was one of the most ancient of all the Sumerian cities. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god Enlil, the "Lord Wind," ruler of the cosmos subject to An alone...

, and Ea as the god of Eridu
Eridu
Eridu is an ancient Sumerian city in what is now Tell Abu Shahrain, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq. Eridu was considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, and is one of the oldest cities in the world...

 is represented by the prominence which each one of the centres associated with the three deities in question must have acquired, and which led to each one absorbing the qualities of other gods so as to give them a controlling position in an organized pantheon. For Nippur we have the direct evidence that its chief deity, En-lil, was once regarded as the head of the Sumerian pantheon
Pantheon (gods)
A pantheon is a set of all the gods of a particular polytheistic religion or mythology.Max Weber's 1922 opus, Economy and Society discusses the link between a...

. The sanctity and, therefore, the importance of Eridu remained a fixed tradition in the minds of the people to the latest days, and analogy therefore justifies the conclusion that Anu was likewise worshipped in a centre which had acquired great prominence.

The summing-up of divine powers manifested in the universe in a threefold division represents an outcome of speculation in the schools attached to the temples of Babylonia, but the selection of Anu, Enlil (and later Marduk
Marduk
Marduk was the Babylonian name of a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi , started to...

), and Ea for the three representatives of the three spheres recognized, is due to the importance which, for one reason or the other, the centres in which Anu, Enlil, and Ea were worshipped had acquired in the popular mind. Each of the three must have been regarded in his centre as the most important member in a larger or smaller group, so that their union in a triad marks also the combination of the three distinctive pantheons into a harmonious whole.

In the astral theology of Babylonia and Assyria, Anu, Enlil, and Ea became the three zones of the ecliptic
Ecliptic
The ecliptic is the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. In more accurate terms, it is the intersection of the celestial sphere with the ecliptic plane, which is the geometric plane containing the mean orbit of the Earth around the Sun...

, the northern, middle and southern zone respectively. The purely theoretical character of Anu is thus still further emphasized, and in the annals and votive inscriptions as well as in the incantations and hymns, he is rarely introduced as an active force to whom a personal appeal can be made. His name becomes little more than a synonym for the heavens in general and even his title as king or father of the gods has little of the personal element in it. A consort Antum (or as some scholars prefer to read, Anatum) is assigned to him, on the theory that every deity must have a female associate. But Anu spent so much time on the ground protecting the Sumerians he left her in Heaven and then met Innin, whom he renamed Innan, or, "Queen of Heaven". She was later known as Ishtar. Anu resided in her temple the most, and rarely went back up to Heaven. He is also inclued in the Epic of Gilgamsh, and is a major character in the clay tablets.

Pop Culture

A surprising number of conspiracy theorist make the claim that King Anu and the Anunnaki
Anunnaki
The Anunnaki are a group of Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian deities...

 are still around today and are in fact, a breed of shape changing reptilians that control world events by controlling the world elite. They can do this because, allegedly, all world leaders are a hybrid bloodline, a mix of Human and Anunnaki DNA, created at the rise of Babylon. Although proof is scarce and highly disputed this idea has a surprising number of supporters giving rise to a pop culture phenomenon in which it is believed Anu is the biblical manifestation of the snake in the garden of Eden and may also play God as a biblical doppelganger.

The general theory clams that hundreds of thousands of years ago Anu lead the Annunaki to earth and enslaved the original inhabitants of earth who were not human. They did this apparently by creating the human body, which is in fact, a biological prison for earths original inhabitants. Originally the Annunaki needed gold to survive and according to this theory earth is not just hollow
Hollow Earth
The Hollow Earth hypothesis proposes that the planet Earth is either entirely hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. The hypothesis has been shown to be wrong by observational evidence, as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation; the scientific community has...

, but also generates a massive amount of gold at it's core. The Human body was designed to retrieve and horde this gold so that the Annunaki could retrieve it during the rapture
Rapture
The rapture is a reference to the "being caught up" referred to in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, when the "dead in Christ" and "we who are alive and remain" will be caught up in the clouds to meet "the Lord"....

 by exchanging it for trips to heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...

. However according to this theory the Annunaki have suffered from a de-evolution process since they conquered earth, and gold is no longer good enough to keep them alive. Allegedly, they must now consume the blood of humans, preferably living virgin children, to keep themselves alive. To do this they have manipulated governments to turn a blind eye to some 3,000+ child abductions per year, by threatening governments with worldwide invasion if they don't comply.

Skeptics do not need to do much to discredit this theory, as sources are scarce and controversial at best. However the increasing number of believers in this theory, thanks to public speakers like David Icke
David Icke
David Vaughan Icke is an English writer and public speaker, best known for his views on what he calls "who and what is really controlling the world." Describing himself as the most controversial speaker in the world, he has written 18 books explaining his position, and has attracted a substantial...

 has sparked a somewhat pop culture status around the name Anu, leading some people to believe Anu is Lucifer, God or Lizard King of the Multiverse
Multiverse
The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise all of reality.Multiverse may also refer to:-In fiction:* Multiverse , the fictional multiverse used by DC Comics...

.

See also

  • Hurrian mythology
  • Jabru
    Jabru
    Jabru was the Elamite god of the underworld. He was the father of all Elamite gods.Jabru's Akkadian counterpart was Anu....

  • Melek Taus
    Melek Taus
    Melek Taus , the Peacock Angel, is the Yazidi name for the central figure of their faith.In the Yazidi belief system, God created the world and it is now in the care of a Heptad of seven Holy Beings, often known as Angels or heft sirr...

  • Mesopotamian mythology
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