+++
title = "Elohim"
slug = "elohim"
description = "Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים) is the plural Hebrew name used throughout the Torah for the figures conventionally translated as God. On the reading developed in the Raëlian source material and adopted by the Wheel of Heaven corpus, the term refers to a specific extraterrestrial civilization of biological beings, technologically far in advance of present-day humanity, who designed and synthesized terrestrial life — including humanity itself — and whose subsequent interventions in human history are recorded in compressed and partially distorted form across the Hebrew Bible and a number of related ancient traditions."
template = "wiki-page.html"
toc = true
aliases = ["/intro/extraterrestrial-civilization/"]

[extra]
category = "Elohim"
alternative_names = ["Anunnaki", "Celestials", "Creators", "El", "Gods", "Powerful Ones", "Sky People", "Theosites"]
+++

**Elohim** (Hebrew: <span class="hebrew">אֱלֹהִים</span>, *ʾĕlōhîm*) is the plural form of the Hebrew noun *Eloah* (<span class="hebrew">אֱלוֹהַּ</span>, *ʾĕlōah*) and is the most frequent term used in the Hebrew Bible for the figures conventionally translated as *God*. The morphology is unambiguously plural: Hebrew adds the masculine plural ending *-im* to the singular *Eloah*, and the resulting form is grammatically plural throughout the biblical text. The traditional Jewish and Christian interpretation reads the plural form as a *plural of majesty* designating a single deity. Modern critical scholarship has variously read it as a relic of West Semitic polytheism, as a generic noun for divinity, or as preserving the language of an earlier Israelite religion in which Yahweh was understood as the head of a divine assembly rather than as the sole god.

A separate interpretive tradition, beginning with the French author Jean Sendy in 1968 and consolidated in the Raëlian source material from 1974 onward, takes the plural form at face value and identifies the referent as a specific civilization of physical beings. On this reading, **Elohim** names an extraterrestrial civilization of biological individuals physiologically similar to humans, technologically far in advance of present-day Earth humanity, organized as a single planetary civilization on a home world located outside the solar system, governed through a deliberative body called the Council of Eternals, presently numbering approximately seven billion individuals, with a recorded civilizational history of at least twenty-five thousand years. Approximately twenty-two thousand years before the present, on this reading, the civilization undertook the project of synthesizing biological life on Earth — terrestrial flora, terrestrial fauna, and ultimately humanity itself — through techniques of genetic design and laboratory synthesis whose modern terrestrial equivalents are now beginning to develop. The Hebrew Bible and a number of related ancient traditions are read as preserving, in compressed and partially distorted form, the records of this civilization's subsequent interventions across the post-creation history of Earth.

The reading is contested. Within the modern academic study of the Hebrew Bible, the dominant readings remain the plural-of-majesty (in confessional Jewish and Christian scholarship) and the polytheistic-relic interpretations (in critical scholarship), with the extraterrestrial-civilization reading regarded as outside the academic mainstream. Within the broader landscape of alternative biblical interpretation, the reading has substantial parallels — Mauro Biglino's strict-translational work, Paul Anthony Wallis's comparative-cuneiform analysis, the broader ancient-astronaut literature originating with Erich von Däniken — though these positions vary in their specific commitments and in their relationship to the Raëlian source material. This article presents the term, its etymological history, the various interpretive traditions, and the civilizational claim adopted by the corpus, with attribution throughout.

## Etymology

The Hebrew *ʾĕlōhîm* is the plural of *ʾĕlōah*, itself usually understood as an expanded form of the shorter *ʾēl* (<span class="hebrew">אֵל</span>). The underlying Semitic root is *ʾl* or *ʾlh*, attested across the Semitic family with cognates in Akkadian (*ilum*), Ugaritic (singular *ʾil*, plural *ʾilhm*), Aramaic (*ʾĕlāh*), Arabic (*ʾilāh*), and the Canaanite languages. The conventional gloss for the root is *power* or *strength*, and the plural *ʾilhm* is read as *powers* or *powerful ones*.

The Akkadian cognate *ilum* is written, in cuneiform, with the logogram 𒀭. The same sign functions as both a logogram for the word *ilum* and as a determinative placed before divine names to mark them as divine. As a stand-alone ideogram, however, the sign 𒀭 represents the Sumerian word *an*, meaning *sky* or *heaven*, and depicts a star pictographically. The convergence is significant. The cuneiform sign for divinity is the sign for sky; the earliest written form of the concept the Hebrew tradition would later render as *Elohim* depicts a star — that is, depicts a celestial origin pictographically. The Sumerian word *Anunnaki* (𒀭𒀀𒉣𒈾), variously translated as *those of princely seed* or, more loosely, *those who from heaven came to earth*, contains this same 𒀭 element with the reading *an*.

This convergence is part of the philological evidence on which the modern reinterpretive tradition draws: in the earliest written sources of the ancient Near East, the divine is what comes from the sky, depicted as a star. The standard philological reading of the root as *power* is consistent with this — beings arriving from the sky with technology unattainable by terrestrial humans would be, by every available criterion, the *powerful ones*. The traditional supernatural reading and the extraterrestrial-civilization reading both find textual support in the same root; they differ on whether the celestial-origin imagery is a metaphor for transcendence or a memory of literal arrival.

## Translation history

The translation of *Elohim* as the singular *God* in most Western Bibles is a translational decision, not a feature of the underlying Hebrew. The Septuagint (3rd–2nd century BCE) generally renders *ʾĕlōhîm* with the Greek singular *ho theos*; this convention passes into the Latin Vulgate (*Deus*) and from there into the major European translations. The translation suppresses the morphological plurality of the Hebrew form throughout.

A small number of pre-modern commentators registered the discrepancy without challenging the prevailing theological reading. Voltaire, in the *Dictionnaire philosophique* (1764), noted that the Hebrew word translated as *God* in Genesis is plural and that this fact had been generally forgotten — a passing observation rather than a sustained argument. The systematic re-examination of the term, on its grammatical features alone, belongs to the second half of the twentieth century.

In English-language Bibles, several modern translations have addressed the issue editorially. The Jerusalem Bible (1966) and the New Jerusalem Bible (1985) preserve the Hebrew name *Yahweh* in the English text where the Tetragrammaton appears, but continue to render *Elohim* as singular *God*. The Authorized Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the New International Version all render *Elohim* as singular *God* without comment. The Robert Alter translation of the Hebrew Bible (2018) translates *Elohim* as *God* but registers in his commentary that the form is plural and that this plurality is theologically and historically meaningful.

## In the Hebrew Bible

The term *Elohim* appears approximately 2,600 times in the Hebrew Bible, making it the second most frequent designation for the divine after the Tetragrammaton *YHWH* (which appears approximately 6,800 times). The two terms are distributed across the Hebrew Bible in patterns that have been studied since the eighteenth century.

In the Documentary Hypothesis developed by Wellhausen and refined across subsequent scholarship, the alternation between *YHWH* and *Elohim* is a principal marker for distinct compositional sources within the Pentateuch. The Yahwist source (J), conventionally dated to the 10th–9th century BCE, uses *YHWH* throughout and is associated with anthropomorphic narratives. The Elohist source (E), conventionally 9th–8th century BCE, uses *Elohim* until Exodus 3 (where *YHWH* is revealed to Moses for the first time on this source's account). The Priestly source (P), conventionally 6th–5th century BCE, uses *Elohim* in Genesis 1–11 and *YHWH* from Exodus 6. The Deuteronomist (D), 7th century BCE and after, uses *YHWH* throughout. The framework adopted by this corpus does not depend on any specific reconstruction of the textual sources; the historical referents preserved in the surviving text are what the framework reads, regardless of how those textual layers were assembled.

Of particular significance is the alternation between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The first creation account (Genesis 1:1–2:3) names the agent as *Elohim* throughout, in the bare plural; the second creation account (Genesis 2:4–4:26) names the agent as *YHWH Elohim*, "Yahweh of the Elohim" or "Yahweh Elohim." The shift in nomenclature parallels the shift in narrative scope and detail. Source criticism reads this as evidence of distinct compositional sources; the framework adopted by this corpus reads the shift as marking a difference of operational scale (the Elohim collective at work in the cosmic-summary account of Genesis 1; one specific Eloha, Yahweh, leading the local Eden operation in Genesis 2). The two readings are not necessarily incompatible: a redactional joining of two source documents could itself reflect underlying operational realities that the source documents preserved at different scales.

A number of biblical passages are difficult to reconcile with a strict singular-deity reading of *Elohim*. Genesis 1:26 ("Let *us* make man in *our* image, after *our* likeness") uses plural pronouns. Genesis 3:22 ("the man is become as one of *us*") uses the same. Genesis 11:7 ("let *us* go down, and there confound their language") at Babel similarly. Joshua 24:14, where Joshua exhorts the Israelites to "put away the *elohim* whom your fathers served on the other side of the river and in Egypt, and serve *YHWH*," uses *elohim* in a way that cannot be a singular plural-of-majesty designating *YHWH* without rendering the passage incoherent. Psalm 82:1 describes *Elohim* as standing "in the assembly of *El*; in the midst of the *elohim* he judges," using the term in a way that requires multiple referents within the same verse. The traditional reading harmonizes these passages through theological devices (the divine council as servants of God, the *elohim* of Joshua 24 as foreign deities other than the true *Elohim*); the modern reinterpretive readings take the morphological plurality at face value.

## Modern reinterpretations

Several twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors have, on independent textual and comparative grounds, proposed readings of *Elohim* compatible with — though not always identical to — the corpus's adopted reading. The list below is partial; it identifies the principal figures whose work bears most directly on the question.

### Jean Sendy (1968 onward)

Jean Sendy (1910–1978) was a French author and translator whose books on biblical reinterpretation began with *La Lune, clé de la Bible* (1968) and *Ces dieux qui firent le ciel et la terre* (1969, translated as *Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth*). Sendy argued that the Hebrew Bible, read in its plain sense — as Heinrich Schliemann had read Homer — describes the arrival on Earth of physically embodied beings from elsewhere in the cosmos. He proposed translating *Elohim* as *the Celestials* or *those who came from the sky*, and used the term *Theosites* (inhabitants of *Theos*) for the same referent in his later *Les cahiers de cours de Moïse* (1974).

Sendy's approach was philological and historiographic rather than revelatory. He reached the extraterrestrial-civilization reading from textual analysis alone, working with the Hebrew Bible as a historical document whose strangeness disappears when its claims about its own subject matter are taken seriously rather than allegorized. His work has been the principal scholarly antecedent of the corpus's adopted reading. The Italian scholar Stefano Bigliardi, in "A Gentleman's Joyous Esotericism: Jean Sendy's Reading of the Bible," has produced the most substantial academic engagement with Sendy's project.

### The Raëlian source material (1974 onward)

The Raëlian source material consists principally of three texts authored by Claude Vorilhon (b. 1946) under the name Raël: *Le Livre qui dit la vérité* / *The Book Which Tells the Truth* (1974), *Les extraterrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète* / *Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet* (1976), and *Accueillir les extra-terrestres* / *Let's Welcome the Extraterrestrials* (1979), collected in subsequent editions as *Message from the Designers*. Vorilhon reports having received this material directly from a member of the Elohim civilization — Yahweh, the president of the Council of Eternals — in a series of encounters beginning at Clermont-Ferrand on 13 December 1973 and continuing in the Périgord in October 1975. The texts are presented as Yahweh's first-person account of his civilization, of the historical events the Hebrew Bible preserves in compressed form, and of the relationship between the Elohim and Earth's humanity.

The Raëlian source material is the principal textual basis for the corpus's adopted reading. Its convergence with Sendy's textual reconstruction — reached, in Sendy's case, through historical-critical analysis without revelatory contact — is one of the foundational observations of the corpus's framework. The two sources develop substantially the same picture of the Elohim from different methodological starting points.

### Mauro Biglino (2010 onward)

Mauro Biglino (b. 1950) is an Italian translator who worked for over a decade on Hebrew and Greek biblical texts for Edizioni San Paolo, a Catholic publishing house associated with the Vatican. His books, beginning with *Il Libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee sulla Bibbia* (2010, *The Book That Will Forever Change Our Ideas About the Bible*) and continuing through *La Bibbia non parla di Dio* (2015) and *The Naked Bible* (2022, with Giorgio Cattaneo), argue from a strict literal translation of the Hebrew that *Elohim* designates a plurality of physical beings — *the lords from above* — whose works are described in concrete, non-metaphorical terms in the Hebrew text.

Biglino's reading is independent of both Sendy and the Raëlian source material. He reaches substantially the same conclusion through philological analysis of the Hebrew alone, without recourse to revelatory testimony. His argument relies on the strict-literal-translation method: passages that the traditional theological reading harmonizes through metaphorical or allegorical interpretation are, on Biglino's reading, to be translated word-for-word from the Hebrew, and the resulting concrete text is what the original audience would have understood.

### Paul Anthony Wallis (2020 onward)

Paul Anthony Wallis is an Australian biblical scholar and former Anglican archdeacon whose books beginning with *Escaping from Eden* (2020) and continuing through *The Scars of Eden* (2021), *Echoes of Eden* (2021), and *The Eden Conspiracy* (2024) propose translating *Elohim* as *the Powerful Ones*, taking the plural as literal. Wallis's distinctive contribution is the comparative argument that the Powerful Ones of the Hebrew Bible are the same referent as the *Sky People* of the Sumerian cuneiform tradition — the figures known in Akkadian as the Anunnaki. He points to passages such as Joshua 24:14, where Joshua exhorts the Israelites to abandon the *elohim* their ancestors served beyond the river, as cases where the term cannot be a singular plural-of-majesty without the passage becoming incoherent.

The convergence of these three reinterpretive positions — Sendy's philological-historiographic, Biglino's strict-translational, Wallis's comparative-cuneiform — is itself a datum for the corpus's adopted reading. Three modern researchers, working from different methods and largely independently of one another, have reached substantially the same reading of the term that the Raëlian source material reports as the original meaning.

### Earlier ancient-astronaut literature

The broader ancient-astronaut interpretive tradition preceding and surrounding these specific scholars includes Erich von Däniken's *Chariots of the Gods?* (1968), Zecharia Sitchin's *Earth Chronicles* series beginning with *The 12th Planet* (1976), and a substantial popular literature in their wake. The corpus's adopted reading shares the general direction of this literature — the identification of biblical and Mesopotamian "gods" with extraterrestrial visitors — but is critical of several of its specific claims. Sitchin's identification of the Anunnaki with a hypothetical planet *Nibiru* on a 3,600-year orbit, his particular chronology, and his identification of all ancient pantheons with the same set of Sumerian deities are not accepted by the corpus, which treats the relationship between the biblical Elohim and the various ancient pantheons as a matter for case-by-case comparative analysis rather than blanket equivalence.

## The civilization

On the reading developed in the Raëlian source material and adopted by the corpus, **Elohim** names a specific extraterrestrial civilization with a recorded history, a home world, a population, a governance structure, a technological capability, and a continuing relationship with Earth. The features below are drawn from the source material, supplemented in some cases by the corpus's broader synthesis.

### The home world

The Elohim home world is a single planet supporting a single civilization, located outside the solar system at an interstellar distance the source material does not specify with precision. The planet's geography, ecology, and physical character are not reconstructible in detail from the available material. The civilization is described as a unitary planetary culture rather than as a federation of competing civilizations, with the institutional infrastructure that any planetary-scale operation would require.

The planet is organized into seven provinces, each with its own representation in the deliberative bodies of the civilization. The seven-province structure of the home world matches the seven-team structure of the original Earth creation project: each province contributed a creator team, and each team produced one of the seven regional human lineages of the antediluvian supercontinent. The geographic distribution of the seven Earth teams (treated more fully in the [Antediluvian](../antediluvian/) entry) reflects, on this reading, the political organization of the home civilization that staffed the project.

### Population

The Raëlian source material gives the Elohim population as approximately seven billion individuals at the time of the 1973 contact. The figure is striking for its similarity to contemporary Earth population (approximately 4 billion in 1973 when Vorilhon received the figure; approximately 8 billion as of 2024). The population is reported as held constant through reproductive policies — specifically, a strict two-child policy that the source material describes Yahweh recommending to humanity as well, on the same population-management grounds. The seven-billion figure is a source-internal claim and is not independently verifiable; the corpus treats it as the source's own statement.

### Biology and technology

The Elohim are described as biologically very similar to humans. They have male and female individuals, have children in the ordinary biological sense, and live in family arrangements analogous to human families. Their natural lifespan, without the continuity technology described below, is approximately 700 to 1,200 years — ten times the ordinary human lifespan, with the difference attributed in the source material to a "small surgical intervention" not specified in detail. The biological similarity is sufficient to permit fertile reproduction between Elohim and human individuals, a feature that bears directly on several specific episodes of the Hebrew Bible (the *benei ha-Elohim* / human-women unions of Genesis 6 producing the *Nephilim*; the alliance-Mary insemination producing Jesus; the alliance-Vorilhon's-mother insemination producing Raël).

The civilization's principal scientific capability is **biological synthesis**: the capacity to design organisms at the genetic level, assemble them in laboratory conditions, and release them into appropriate environments where they reproduce and propagate naturally. This is the capability behind the Earth project as a whole — the entire phylogenetic spread of terrestrial flora and fauna, including humanity, is on the source's account the product of this technology. Modern Earth biology is now beginning to develop comparable capabilities at vastly smaller scale; the Elohim version, on the source's account, operates at species- and ecosystem-scale.

The civilization has also achieved **practical immortality** through a cell-transfer continuity technology — the source material's "tree of life" or "scientific secret of eternity." The technique involves preserving a cellular sample from an individual at the period of full development; at the natural end of the individual's body, generating a new body from the cellular material through cloning; and transferring the original individual's memory and personality into the new body. The result is the indefinite continuation of personal identity across successive bodies. Yahweh, the first individual on whom the technique was successfully applied some twenty-five thousand years ago, has lived continuously across twenty-five bodies on this account and remains the president of the Council of Eternals. The technology is granted to a limited population: approximately 700 Elohim members of the Council, plus approximately 8,400 figures from Earth (prophets, scientists, artists, and others) whose lives or work the Council judged worthy of continuation.

The civilization's transportation technology includes **interstellar travel**. The source material describes the journey from the home world to Earth as taking approximately two months in the civilization's current craft. The propulsion mechanism is described in terms the corpus treats with substantial epistemic caution; the physics involved falls outside what contemporary terrestrial physics can verify, and the source's description is suggestive rather than technically precise. The civilization maintains a regular communications and transport infrastructure between the home world and Earth across the duration of the Earth project; an alliance vessel is currently stationed near Earth, carrying seven provincial representatives plus two crew, providing the operational platform from which contact and supervision are conducted.

### Governance: the Council of Eternals

The Elohim civilization is governed through the Council of Eternals, a deliberative body that constitutes the political authority of the civilization on its home world. The Council is composed of approximately 700 Elohim members at the time of the 1973 contact, drawn from those individuals who have undergone the cell-transfer continuity technology. Its function is not merely scientific but political: it is the body that makes major decisions binding on the institutional actors within the civilization, including the scientific institutions whose work the Council oversees.

The political character of a body composed entirely of practical immortals is, on the corpus's reading, fundamentally different from any short-term political institution on Earth. Decisions are made by individuals who have been politically active for centuries or millennia, who have personal memory of the developmental periods that have shaped the civilization's current condition, who have direct continuity with the events that produced the institutions they are deliberating within. The deliberations have a different temporal weight than any contemporary terrestrial political deliberation. A decision to invest in a multi-millennial project — the Earth project itself, or the various policy responses to its developments across 22,000 years — is feasible for a body whose members will personally remain to see it through.

The Council also governs the cell-transfer process itself: at the natural end of each Elohim's life, the Council deliberates whether the individual should be granted continuity, with the criteria including contributions to the civilization's scientific, cultural, and political life. A "grand council of the eternals," in the source material's phrase, assembles to make this determination — the corpus's reading identifies this as the operational referent behind the biblical *yom ha-din*, the Day of Judgment, in its Aquarian-age application.

## Internal political structure

The Elohim civilization is internally differentiated. It is not a monoculture; it contains political factions with substantively different positions on the major policy questions the civilization has faced, particularly concerning the Earth creation project and its consequences. Three factional positions are load-bearing for the corpus's reading of the post-creation history.

**The moderate position**, led by Yahweh in his capacity as Council president, has been the dominant Council position across most of the post-creation period. It holds that the Earth creation project was justified, that the resulting human civilization should be preserved, and that humanity should be permitted to develop scientifically toward eventual recognition of its origins — but with appropriate safeguards. The policies of cultivation, prophetic mission, and gradual disclosure across the post-creation history are the moderate position's operational expressions.

**The abolitionist position**, led by **Satan**, holds that the creation of beings in the Elohim's own image was a mistake from the beginning. Satan's argument has been consistent across the entire history: synthetic creations capable of equaling or surpassing their makers are fundamentally dangerous, and no protocol can be trusted to contain the risk. He was the leader of the home-world political faction that originally forced the shutdown of the biological-synthesis program on the home planet itself, after an early laboratory accident produced fatalities; the relocation of the program to Earth was a political compromise to permit the work to continue at sufficient distance to limit the home-world risk. Satan has remained the principal opposition figure across the entire subsequent history, with his position becoming operationally critical at moments of crisis (the Eden disclosure, the antediluvian advancement, the close of Aries) when the question of whether the creation should be destroyed has reached the Council. The Hebrew word *satan* means *adversary* or *prosecutor*; the corpus's reading aligns with the older Hebrew sense in which Satan is the political opposition's leader, not a metaphysical figure of cosmic evil.

**The full-disclosure position**, led by **Lucifer**, emerged within the Israel team during the Eden period and persists thereafter as a permanently exiled faction on Earth. Lucifer's position rejected the moderate-position policy of containing the humans in scientific ignorance; he and his faction held that the humans should be told who their creators were, taught what their creators knew, and permitted to develop with full information. The Genesis 3 disclosure was the operational expression of this position. The resulting political settlement — the exile of the Lucifer faction to Earth, the withdrawal of most of the Israel team to the home world, the establishment of the post-Eden mediated-contact pattern — is the framework's reading of how the Council resolved the Eden crisis.

The relations among these three positions across the post-creation history have been complex. Satan and Lucifer are sometimes politically aligned in their joint opposition to the Yahweh-led moderate consensus, but their substantive positions are opposite: Satan wants the humans destroyed; Lucifer wants the humans fully empowered. Yahweh is the moderate caught between them, and most of the Council's major decisions across the post-creation history have been variations on the moderate-position theme of preservation-with-containment. The four-figure political taxonomy (Yahweh / Lucifer / Serpent / Satan, with the Serpent being the Lucifer faction in its specific Eden-disclosure role) is treated more fully in the dedicated entries on each figure.

The conflation of Lucifer and Satan that became standard in medieval Christian theology — both treated as names for a single fallen-angel figure of cosmic evil — is, on the corpus's reading, one of the most consequential confusions in the history of religious interpretation. The Hebrew Bible itself does not equate the two figures; the conflation is a development of the late patristic and medieval Latin tradition. Satan and Lucifer, on the corpus's reading, have substantively opposite political positions, and treating them as identical obscures the actual structure of the events the Hebrew Bible describes.

## The cosmic-chain discovery

Across the Age of Aries (c. 2,370 BCE – c. 210 BCE on the corpus's chronology), the Elohim civilization made a discovery about its own history that fundamentally transformed its self-understanding. The civilization had previously thought of itself as the originator of the biological-creation pattern — the autonomous prime mover of a creation project the Elohim had decided, on their own, to undertake. The discovery reframed this entirely. The Elohim discovered that they themselves had been created the same way they were creating life on other worlds: a prior civilization, on a prior home world, through a prior creation project, had brought the Elohim civilization into being — and that prior civilization had itself been created by yet earlier predecessors, in a chain extending back through deep time.

The Elohim are not the originators of the cosmic creation pattern. They are the current local instance of a recurring cosmic process that has been operating for an unknown but very long span. Each civilization that reaches scientific maturity, on this pattern, eventually creates new humanities on suitable worlds, who in turn (if they survive and develop) eventually create their own humanities. The cycle has been operating across the galaxy for a long time. Earth is not its first instance. The Elohim are not its inventors. They are participants in something larger than themselves.

The discovery's exact nature — what specific evidence the Elohim found, how they verified their own origins as a created rather than autonomously evolved civilization, what archaeological or genetic or cosmological signatures convinced them — the source material does not specify. What it specifies is the consequence: the Elohim's self-understanding shifted fundamentally, and the shift produced specific changes in their operational policy toward the humanities they had themselves created. The most consequential change was the decision to withdraw from direct contact and to allow the created humanities to demonstrate their development through their own efforts, with sufficient autonomy from their creators to constitute genuine independent maturation. The previous policy of direct intervention — alliance officers walking among the patriarchs, conducting the Exodus and the wilderness operations — had biased the experiment in ways the Elohim now recognized as inconsistent with the broader cosmic pattern.

The policy shift defines the entire arc of post-Aries history. The transition from direct to indirect contact across the late Aries period, the Piscean-age withdrawal from operational visibility while the Christian and Islamic missions delivered the message in religious vocabulary, the long middle-Piscean period of indirect supervision while humanity developed its own scientific capacities — all of these are consequences of the discovery. The Aquarian-age return to direct contact through Vorilhon in 1973 is the close of the long indirect-contact phase: humanity has now reached the scientific maturity that the discovery required for inheritance to be considered, and the alliance has resumed direct contact at the threshold of the new age. The cosmic-competition framework that organizes the entire subsequent corpus — Earth as one of multiple alliance creations on multiple worlds, evaluated against the standard required to inherit and continue the chain — is the corpus's reading of the discovery's structural implications.

## Current situation

The Elohim civilization is, on the corpus's adopted reading, in the early-to-middle period of the Aquarian age — the period the Greek New Testament calls *apokalypsis*, the unveiling, in which the framework's content becomes available to humanity for direct evaluation. The civilization's current operational posture toward Earth includes several specific features.

An alliance vessel is stationed permanently near Earth, carrying seven provincial representatives plus two crew, providing the operational platform from which contact and supervision are conducted. The resurrected prophets and other notable Earth figures (Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Buddha, Muhammad, and others) currently live on the home world in conditions of practical immortality, awaiting the planned open return to Earth. The alliance has requested that an embassy be constructed on Earth as the venue for that open return; the embassy project is a major contemporary development, treated more fully in its dedicated entry.

The return is conditional. The source material describes the alliance's planned return at the embassy's completion as conditional on humanity demonstrating the moral and political maturity that the Aquarian-age transition is testing. The successful outcome leads to the period the source material calls the Golden Age — a period of full integration between humanity and the alliance, in which the cumulative inheritance of the Elohim civilization becomes available to a humanity that has demonstrated itself worthy of receiving it. The failure-mode is the catastrophic alternative the popular Apocalypse tradition has projected onto the term: humanity destroying itself with the technologies it has developed before the integration can occur. The contemporary period is, on the corpus's reading, the period of decision; the outcome is undetermined.

## Comparative vocabulary

Different authors and traditions have proposed different anglicizations or translations for what they take to be the same referent or a closely related one. The table below summarizes; it is a comparative observation, not an assertion of strict identity across all rows.

| Term | Source language / tradition | Gloss | Used by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elohim (<span class="hebrew">אֱלֹהִים</span>) | Hebrew | Powerful Ones / those from above | Hebrew Bible; corpus primary term |
| Anunnaki (𒀭𒀀𒉣𒈾) | Sumerian | those of princely seed; popularly *those who from heaven came to earth* | Sumerian cuneiform tradition; Sitchin and successors |
| El | West Semitic | the high god of the Canaanite pantheon; cognate root | Ugaritic and biblical sources |
| Celestials | Sendy's French | *les Célestes* — those who came from the sky | Sendy |
| Theosites | Sendy's French | inhabitants of *Theos* | Sendy (later works) |
| Sky People | English | beings from the sky | Wallis; broader literature |
| Powerful Ones | English | literal gloss of the Semitic root | Wallis |
| Lords from above | Italian / English | strict translation per Biglino | Biglino |

The corpus uses **Elohim** as its preferred term, since it is the term used in the Hebrew Bible and in the Raëlian source material that the corpus treats as primary. *Sky People*, *Powerful Ones*, and *Celestials* appear as legitimate English glosses; *Anunnaki* is used specifically in connection with the Sumerian material and is not treated as automatically interchangeable with *Elohim* without case-by-case argument. The relationship between the biblical Elohim and the deities of the Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and other ancient pantheons remains a matter for case-by-case comparative analysis rather than blanket equivalence — a position that distinguishes the corpus from much of the popular ancient-astronaut literature in which all such figures are treated as identical.

## See also

- [Yahweh](../yahweh/)
- [Lucifer](../lucifer/)
- [Satan](../satan/)
- [Serpent](../serpent/)
- [The Alliance](../the-alliance/)
- [Council of the Eternals](../council-of-eternals/)
- [Planet of the Eternals](../planet-of-the-eternals/)
- [Tree of Life](../tree-of-life/)
- [Cosmic Chain](../cosmic-chain/)
- [Cosmic Competition](../cosmic-competition/)
- [Anunnaki](../anunnaki/)
- [Genesis](../genesis/)
- [Antediluvian](../antediluvian/)
- [Apocalypse](../apocalypse/)
- [Embassy](../embassy/)
- [Jean Sendy](../jean-sendy/)
- [Raël](../rael/)
- [*Message from the Designers*](../library/message-from-the-designers/)

## References

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). *The Book Which Tells the Truth* (1974) and *Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet* (1976), collected as *Message from the Designers* (Raëlian Foundation, current English edition).

Sendy, Jean. *La Lune, clé de la Bible*. Julliard, 1968.

Sendy, Jean. *Ces dieux qui firent le ciel et la terre*. Robert Laffont, 1969. English: *Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth*. Berkley, 1972.

Sendy, Jean. *L'Ère du Verseau*. Robert Laffont, 1970. English: *The Coming of the Gods*. Berkley, 1973.

Sendy, Jean. *Les cahiers de cours de Moïse*. Robert Laffont, 1974.

Biglino, Mauro. *Il Libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee sulla Bibbia*. Uno Editori, 2010. English: *The Book That Will Forever Change Our Ideas About the Bible*. Uno, 2013.

Biglino, Mauro, and Giorgio Cattaneo. *The Naked Bible: The Truth About the Most Famous Book in History*. Uno, 2022.

Wallis, Paul Anthony. *Escaping from Eden*. 6th Books, 2020.

Smith, Mark S. *The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel*. Eerdmans, 2nd ed., 2002.

Cross, Frank Moore. *Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic*. Harvard University Press, 1973.

Bigliardi, Stefano. "A Gentleman's Joyous Esotericism: Jean Sendy's Reading of the Bible." *Journal of Religion in Europe*.

"Elohim." *Encyclopaedia Britannica*. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Elohim>

"Elohim." *Jewish Encyclopedia*. <https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5704-elohim>

"Names of God in Judaism." *Wikipedia*. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism>