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How the present time of troubles and tribulations will end—what the Future portends—requires entering the realm of Prophecy. Ours will not be a mélange of newfound pre- dictions whose main magnet is fear of doom and End, but a reliance upon unique ancient records that documented the Past, predicted the Future, and recorded previous Messianic expectations—prophesying the future in antiquity and, one believes, the Future that is to come. In all three apocalyptic instances—the two that had oc- curred, the one that is about to happen—the physical and spiritual relationship between Heaven and Earth was and re- mains pivotal for the events. The physical aspects were ex- pressed by the existence on Earth of actual sites that linked Earth with the heavens—sites that were deemed crucial, that were focuses of the events; the spiritual aspects have been expressed in what we call Religion. In all three instances, a changed relationship between Man and God was central, ex- cept that when, circa 2100 B.c.E., Mankind faced the first of these three epochal upheavals, the relationship was between men and gods, in the plural. Whether that relationship has re- ally changed, the reader will soon discover. The story of the gods, the Anunnaki (“Those who from heaven to Earth came”), as the Sumerians called them, be- gins with their coming to Earth from Nibiru in need of gold. The story of their planet was told in antiquity in the Epic of Creation, a long text on seven tablets; it is usually considered to be an allegorical myth, the product of primitive minds that spoke of planets as living gods combating each other. But as Ihave shown in my book The Twelfth Planet, the ancient text is in fact a sophisticated cosmogony that tells how a stray planet, passing by our solar system, collided with a planet called Tiamat; the collision resulted in the creation of Earth and its Moon, of the Asteroid Belt and comets, and in the capture of the invader itself in a great elliptical orbit that takes about 3,600 Earth-years to complete (Fig. 1). It was, Sumerian texts tell, 120 such orbits—432,000 Earth-years—prior to the Deluge (the “Great flood”) that the Anunnaki came to Earth. How and why they came, their first THE END OF DAYS