The following is an essay on some of the forgotten astronomy of our ancestors.
One of the more intriguing riddles of the past is Nibiru. Mentioned in several Babylonian texts, many people think it is a planet set to visit or collide with the earth in the near future. Although these claims have been well refuted by reputable scholars, they still contain great power; a Google search on “Nibiru Planet X Conspiracy” currently returns 3.4 million hits.
The tenacity of these fanciful ideas is partly caused by no one knowing what, exactly, Nibiru is. The documents refer to it in at least five different ways: the planet Jupiter, a ‘star,’ a ‘station,’ the planet Mercury on one occasion, and a ‘red’ object identified as Marduk-Jupiter on another.
I proposed a superficial solution to the Nibiru puzzle in a book titled Laughing at the Devil (LATD).1 That answer echoed one which had already been put forward—and dismissed—by others. Not realizing this, the topic was closed, because Nibiru was a miniscule (and unimportant) subject in my work.
But Nibiru kept reappearing, uneasily, in the back of my mind. Something important was missing, so I dove in one more time. After a lot of digging, a solution appeared that makes sense of all the Nibiru references, and I am happy to share my knowledge.