When someone in the village or the tribe had an important dream with strong medicine in it, the medicine doctor interpreted it as a guide for the people. The Urantia Book, published in 1955, which purports to restore lost knowledge and forgotten history, arrived in the night through a “sleeping subject,” with what a Native American person might call his dream visions, with an episode of Earth’s history referred to as the war in heaven in the Bible’s Book of Revelation (12:7). It is called the Planetary Rebellion in Paper 67 of The Urantia Book (The UB). The story, already known and recorded in other sources: Paradise Lost by John Milton; a 5th or 6th century poem by Eleazar Qualliri; Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, just to mention a few, has been forgotten by many, perhaps most people I meet.
The authors of The UB frame the legend in Paper 67.0 in this way: the “problems associated with human existence on Urantia are impossible of understanding without a knowledge of the occurrence and the consequences of the planetary rebellion.” For a planet so nearly completely unaware of even the paltry remaining knowledge of the rebellion, hearing this admonishment shocks us awake.
Ancient texts have named the “ruler of this world,” “one of Satan’s most venerable demons,” as Belial, the Prince of Darkness, (The Martyrdom of Isaiah, also appearing several times in the Bible). He is possibly the being named in The UB as Caligastia, prince of this world (I will refer to Belial as an alternate name of the Planetary Prince in the rest of this blog). For 300,000 years of the Prince’s rule that began 500,000 years ago, all seemed to be going well. We can hear the echoes in American Indian teachings, a memory of those they call, “the Star People,” or “the Star Nations.” In the Lakota tradition, the supernatural hero-being who gave them the Original Teachings is named Fallen Star. To the Anishinaabe, he is the Original man lowered to the Earth by Gichi Manidoo as if by a rope. This origin story perhaps confuses the Planetary Prince with the later appearing Adam.
Then about 200,000 years before the present, Caligastia (Belial) endorsed the Manifesto and the “Declaration of Liberty,” of his superior, Lucifer, the system ruler, and his assistant, Satan (53:3.1). Helpless Urantia, along with 36 other worlds in our system of Satania (53:7.1), was drawn into the rebellion. These evolutionary worlds were immediately cut off from the universe broadcasts of the system headquarters.
The UB tells us, “at the outbreak of the rebellion,” Dalamatia, the city of the prince and his staff of one hundred, “had a resident population of almost six thousand; this number includes the regular students” (66:7.20). The red race, along with the 6,000 citizens and visitors who usually numbered up to an additional 1,000, witnessed the visible outer effects of the war in heaven. Because it was not a battle fought with swords and chariots, not much could actually be seen outside of the council meetings. But it was felt, sometimes understood, and they grieved the defection of their “extraplanetary teachers” (66:4.2). That much they could clearly see. And it was not long before the remaining Dalamatians were defending their walls from invading “semi-savages.” Eventually, the students would have learned of the city’s loss of the tree of life which had sustained their teachers and they experienced the default of the Caligastia program of upliftment, the abrupt termination of lessons in animal husbandry, agriculture, crafts, pottery, religion, and more.
The groups being trained by the Prince’s staff of one hundred, divided into 10 councils, were Andonites, mostly primary Sangiks, the red, blue and yellow races, and some of the orange race who were present. (67:7.7) They had been recruited to receive instruction, had left their homes and families to dwell in Dalamatia. Very little is said about the response of these early humans to the outbreak of rebellion among their marvelous teachers. At the beginning of the conflict, loyalists led by the heroes, Van (of Belial’s or the Prince’s staff) and Amadon, his human assistant, moved out of the headquarters of the Prince to “an unwalled and poorly protected settlement a few miles east of Dalamatia,” taking with them the tree of life, (67:3.4) a tree they would preserve until the coming of Adam and Eve, the Material Son and Daughter assigned to uplift our planet.
The entire “college of revealed religion” followed Van and Amadon whereas only some members of the other nine councils stayed loyal, probably the result of the Lucifer Manifesto’s first war cry of the rebellion, “the Universal Father did not really exist. (53:3.2)” Those of the Prince’s staff immersed in earth’s religious traditions, and committed to the revelations of the universe’s creator and ruler undoubtedly found this a repugnant doctrine. Today we still deal with this heritage, the persistent teachings of atheism and assertion of the self first declared at the time of the rebellion against the rule of Michael the Creator and God the Father.
The UB’s concentration on the war between “superhuman personalities” (67:6.4) tends to eclipse the effect it had on the children of the Earth caught in the whirlwind. Four pages into The UB story, we read that the Caligastia (Belial) rebels found it “easy to win the support of the primitive-minded evolutionary mortals.” (67:4.6) The support was short lived. Before long, “the misled and mistaught tribes,” shouting their hair-raising war whoops, swept down on the Prince’s city and drove the remaining staff and their associates northward where they settled in the “land of Nod.” The primitive humans who invaded Dalamatia converted the Father's temple into a shrine dedicated to Nog, the false god of light and fire (67:5.5). We can imagine some idea of this evil apparition, by recalling to mind Tolkein’s vision of the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings.
With dismay, we view this picture of the world’s races: in disarray, set adrift in the cosmos, under the rule of a new dictator, Caligastia/Belial, “God of Urantia” (67:2.4) After the Rebellion of her high sons, midwayers, and angels, Urantia’s central locus of a world culture with its teachings of peace, good will, and cooperation among diverse peoples, had collapsed. Dalamatia was overrun by those who had not completely learned how to substitute ideals of peaceful co-existence for natural animal aggression. A new unrestrained freedom never before promulgated by the respected leaders of the Caligastia one hundred along with accompanying savage emotions were unleashed by the premature teachings of liberty, a rebellion fueled by the Lucifer doctrine of “self-assertion” and “personal liberty” (53:2.2; 53:3.6). The world’s capital was soon abandoned. Meanwhile, Van and his followers moved their headquarters an even greater distance from the scene of carnage, withdrawing to the highlands west of India (67:6.1).
With the loss of heroic superhuman direction, what were “the emissaries of uplift” (66:6.4), the student delegates of the red race to do? What message would they carry back to their tribes and families at home? Though we’ve never had any details of this prehistoric era, The UB tells us that some aspects of a regime of peaceful coexistence were achieved during the first 300,000 years. Within a one hundred mile perimeter of the city, beyond the forty-foot walls of Dalamatia, some farms had succeeded. There were mostly animal husbandry projects underway (66:7.11). We can be certain that with the eruption of rebellion, these communities could no longer confidently depend on former protections. Some may have held on for a while. Most fled to safety. One hundred and sixty two years after this great spiritual battle, the land on which Dalamatia stood sank beneath the sea.
Not surprisingly, after the fall of the Planetary Prince, and the resulting isolation of Urantia, warfare raged between the yellow and the red races. During the long period of warmer climate we call the Eemian Interglacial (130,000 to 110,000 years before the present), both Sangik groups pushed northeastward as the ice retreated. This is probably when the red Sangiks began to gather in their winter lodges, learning to weave their great storytelling skills, explaining and recording the tragic events, tales of the Prince and the wondrous city that was submerged by a tidal wave; stories that were told and retold then forgotten as eons passed.
Over the next 20,000 years during the Eemian, forests expanded, extending their reach into the lands above the Arctic Circle. The yellow Sangik peoples followed the red race into Siberia, as they battled each other in a competitive struggle for resources and territory. No one was studying to be a farmer any more. They chased each other across the tundra; nomadic hunting became the natural adaptation, a way to survive the rough and tough environment, the conflicts and raids by enemy tribes. When not hunting each other, they hunted wooly rhinoceros, reindeer, and wild horses.
Warfare with the yellow race and continued migrations eastward ultimately led to the forced departure of a group of Sangik peoples across the Bering Strait land bridge. They were headed into the unknown, the uninhabited Americas, a group mostly made up of the eleven tribes of the red race, “a little over seven thousand men, women and children (64:7.5).” But the brave pioneers included “three small groups of mixed ancestry, the largest of these being a combination of the orange and blue races.”
“One hundred thousand years ago the decimated tribes of the red race were fighting with their backs to the retreating ice of the last glacier, and when the land passage to the west, over the Bering isthmus, became passable, these tribes were not slow in forsaking the inhospitable shores of the Asiatic continent” (79:5.6).
Of the four colored races, remembered by American Indians today as red, yellow, black and white, it was prophesied they would, one day, come together again to live as a united people. The four are commemorated in the Pan-Indian teaching of the four-spoked medicine wheel, a widespread and universally recognized symbol among Native American peoples.
