Onagar: The First Truth Teacher of Mankind
Almost a million years before Abraham, before any temple, before any priest, an Andonite man on the north shore of the ancient Mediterranean lifted his face to the sky and named one God for all of mankind. His name was Onagar. He is the first proven religious teacher in the history of this world, and he is still alive today, seated as one of the four and twenty counselors of Urantia on Jerusem.
A Sunrise Almost a Million Years Ago
Picture a rocky shore on the north edge of the ancient Mediterranean, in the country we would now call the Caspian region. The world is colder than ours. The third glacier is grinding south across Europe. The seas are differently shaped. There are no cities. There is no writing. There are no temples and no priests, because there is not yet a single human being on the planet who has formulated the idea of one God.
A man steps out of a low stone shelter onto that shore in the half light before dawn. He is short by our standards, broad shouldered, swarthy, jet haired, with the strong wide bones of an arctic hunter. He looks more like a present day Inuit than like any modern European or Asian. He carries a flint tipped club. He has buried members of his own family with stones rolled across their bodies and has wondered, in a way no animal can wonder, what becomes of them in the dark.
The sun rises over the eastern hills. The man does not flinch from it. He does not bow to it either. He lifts his face to the brightening sky and addresses, in the simple language his people have built for themselves, the One who breathed life into men and into animals. He calls that One the Breath Giver. He asks for food, for protection from the ice, for safety from forest enemies, and for mercy in what comes after death. Then he turns back to the settlement and begins his day.
His name is Onagar. The Urantia Book records that he was born nine hundred and eighty three thousand three hundred and twenty three years before the year 1934, which makes him the first religious teacher in the recorded history of this world. He is still alive. He is one of the four and twenty counselors of Urantia, seated on Jerusem, the system capital of Satania. Most readers of the Urantia Book have never heard his name.
This article is for him.
Who Onagar Was
Onagar was an Andonite, a direct descendant of Andon and Fonta, the first two human beings on this planet. The Andonites were the original human race of Urantia. The revelators describe them in plain terms:
"Primitive man, the Andonites, had black eyes and a swarthy complexion, something of a cross between yellow and red. Melanin is a coloring substance which is found in the skins of all human beings. It is the original Andonic skin pigment. In general appearance and skin color these early Andonites more nearly resembled the present-day Eskimo than any other type of living human beings. They were the first creatures to use the skins of animals as a protection against cold; they had little more hair on their bodies than present-day humans." (63:4.1)
That is Onagar. Imagine him not as a romanticized cave dweller in a fur loincloth but as a serious, capable, broad faced human being with dark eyes, dark hair, a complexion between copper and bronze, and the bearing of a hunter who has lived through many hard winters.
By the time Onagar emerged, the Andonite line had been on Earth for almost twenty thousand years. The original clan of Andon and Fonta had multiplied, dispersed across the warm rivers of Europe and into central Asia, and then begun to fragment under tribal pressure. The Urantia Book is honest about what happened next:
"As the Andonic dispersion extended, the cultural and spiritual status of the clans retrogressed for nearly ten thousand years until the days of Onagar, who assumed the leadership of these tribes, brought peace among them, and for the first time, led all of them in the worship of the 'Breath Giver to men and animals.'" (63:6.1)
Note the chronology. For ten thousand years the Andonites slid backward. The fire that Andon had discovered, the language his children had built, the clannish loyalty that bound them together: all of it was eroding under the simple pressure of food competition and tribal feud. Into that long, slow regression Onagar was born. He did not inherit a religion. There was no religion to inherit. The man who would become the first religious teacher of mankind grew up surrounded by cousins who worshipped, when they worshipped at all, sun, fire, and the larger food animals on the cave wall.
The revelators call him "this master mind and spiritual leader of the pre-Planetary Prince days" (63:6.8). The actual phrase from Paper 45 is even more striking:
"Onagar, the master mind of the pre-Planetary Prince age, who directed his fellows in the worship of 'The Breath Giver.'" (45:4.3)
Master mind. That is the title given to him in the celestial roll call of the four and twenty counselors of Jerusem. Not prophet, not priest, not chief. Master mind.
Where Oban Was
Onagar did not wander as a freelance preacher. He built an institution. The Urantia Book gives us the location with surprising precision:
"Onagar maintained headquarters on the northern shores of the ancient Mediterranean in the region of the present Caspian Sea at a settlement called Oban, the tarrying place on the westward turning of the travel trail leading up northward from the Mesopotamian southland." (63:6.7)
The geography of a million years ago does not match the maps in our atlases. The body of water the revelators call "the ancient Mediterranean" extended much further east than the Mediterranean Sea does today and joined what is now the Caspian and parts of what is now central Asia in a connected inland system. Oban sat on the northern shore of that water, at the bend in the great north road leading up out of Mesopotamia. It was a crossroads, a natural place to gather travelers, a settlement where news and people moved in many directions.
Onagar built his work there for a reason. Religion that stays in one cave dies in one cave. By placing his headquarters at a junction of trails, he made it possible for his teachers to reach in every direction. The Urantia Book says exactly that:
"From Oban he sent out teachers to the remote settlements to spread his new doctrines of one Deity and his concept of the hereafter, which he called the Great Beyond. These emissaries of Onagar were the world's first missionaries; they were also the first human beings to cook meat, the first regularly to use fire in the preparation of food. They cooked flesh on the ends of sticks and also on hot stones; later on they roasted large pieces in the fire, but their descendants almost entirely reverted to the use of raw flesh." (63:6.7)
Read that twice. The world's first missionaries. The first human beings to cook meat. Cooking and monotheism walk out of Oban together, carried by the same emissaries on the same trade trails. Onagar did not separate the spiritual life from the practical life. The men who told a remote clan about the Breath Giver were the same men who showed them how to put flesh on a hot stone and survive a colder winter.
This is not fantasy. This is what a real, working civilization looks like at one million years before the present.
What Onagar Taught
Onagar's theology had three parts, and the Urantia Book preserves all three. He taught one Deity, he taught a hereafter, and he taught a way of asking.
The one Deity. Andon, the first man, had nearly become a fire worshipper because of the comfort of his own flint sparked discovery. Reason had drawn him toward the sun, but the sun was too remote and he failed to settle there. The Andonite tribes after him had drifted into a fear of the elements, into thunder dread and ice dread, and from there into the worship of large food animals whose outlines are still visible on cave walls in Europe. Onagar broke that pattern. He named one Source behind the breath in every chest, human and animal alike. He called that Source the Breath Giver. The phrase does not appear by accident. It is the same intuition the Hebrews would later capture in Genesis when they wrote that God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life. Onagar got there first by hundreds of thousands of years.
The hereafter. This is the second teaching, and it is just as remarkable. Andon and Fonta, when they buried their dead, had only the most fantastic notions of what happened afterward. The revelators describe their burial rite plainly:
"Their ideas of survival after death were very vague and indefinite, being largely derived from their fantastic and variegated dream life." (63:3.5)
Onagar took that vague intuition and gave it a name. He called the place beyond death the Great Beyond. He preached that the Breath Giver could "with mercy receive" his people into that place. That is the first teaching of personal survival in the history of this world. Not survival as a ghost, not survival as a distant ancestor in the cave wall, but survival in the keeping of the One who gave the breath in the first place.
The way of asking. The Urantia Book preserves the prayer Onagar taught his people. It is brief, practical, and astonishing:
"O Breath of Life, give us this day our daily food, deliver us from the curse of the ice, save us from our forest enemies, and with mercy receive us into the Great Beyond." (63:6.6)
Read that prayer with the Lord's Prayer in mind. Bread, deliverance, protection, mercy. The pattern Jesus would teach his disciples on a hillside in Galilee was already present, in primitive but recognizable form, in the mouth of an Andonite man at Oban almost a million years earlier. The Urantia revelators tell us that food was the dominant concern of Onagar's people, and the prayer reflects that. But the structure is the structure of all true prayer: dependence acknowledged, daily need named, evil resisted, hope stated.
Why This Matters
Modern scholarship places the origin of religion somewhere between the burial rituals of Neanderthal Europe roughly fifty thousand years ago and the Göbekli Tepe stones of eleven thousand years ago. The Urantia Book pushes the real date back by an order of magnitude. It says that the worship of one God on this planet is not a late invention of priestly literate cultures. It is older than the wheel, older than agriculture, older than the spoken tongues we recognize today. It is one million years old, and it begins with one man at Oban.
This matters for two reasons.
First, it inverts the standard story of religious evolution. The standard story says that early humans were animists who feared spirits in trees and stones, who slowly worked their way through polytheism to monotheism only in literate civilizations and under the pressure of ethical reflection. The Urantia Book says the opposite. Monotheism appears at the very dawn of religious teaching. It is not the late summit of a slow climb. It is the first peak. What followed Onagar was not progress but retreat, ten thousand year cycles of forgetting and recovery, with the original truth surviving only in fragments until the next great teacher recovered it.
Second, it gives the Andonite line a dignity that anthropology has refused to grant the early human family. The men and women of one million years ago, in the standard textbooks, are stone tool users at best and brute survivors at worst. The Urantia Book tells us they had a real and primitive religion, that they had a real and effective government, that they had a master mind among them whose tribal organization was not equaled in many millenniums afterward.
"Onagar was born 983,323 years ago (from A.D. 1934), and he lived to be sixty-nine years of age. The record of the achievements of this master mind and spiritual leader of the pre-Planetary Prince days is a thrilling recital of the organization of these primitive peoples into a real society. He instituted an efficient tribal government, the like of which was not attained by succeeding generations in many millenniums. Never again, until the arrival of the Planetary Prince, was there such a high spiritual civilization on earth. These simple people had a real though primitive religion, but it was subsequently lost to their deteriorating descendants." (63:6.8)
Sixty nine years. Long enough to build something. Too short, in the end, to keep it built.
There is one more line in this section, and it is the most beautiful one in the entire account:
"Although both Andon and Fonta had received Thought Adjusters, as had many of their descendants, it was not until the days of Onagar that the Adjusters and guardian seraphim came in great numbers to Urantia. This was, indeed, the golden age of primitive man." (63:6.9)
The indwelling spirit of God came to this planet in great numbers because one Andonite at Oban opened the door. The angels came because he asked.
What Happened to His Teaching
Religion of the Onagar pattern requires a continuous teaching tradition or it dies. He did not have writing. He did not have a priesthood that survived him. When Onagar died at sixty nine, his organization began to erode almost immediately. The Urantia Book is direct about this:
"These simple people had a real though primitive religion, but it was subsequently lost to their deteriorating descendants." (63:6.8)
The Planetary Prince Caligastia and his staff arrived shortly after. They built Dalamatia and worked for three hundred thousand years to teach a slowly improving civilization. Then the Lucifer rebellion came, Caligastia defaulted, and the spiritual progress of the planet was thrown back hard. Mansant, the second of the four and twenty counselors and the great teacher of the post Planetary Prince age, would later recover fragments of Onagar's monotheism under the name "The Great Light" and pass them on.
The line of true teachers runs unbroken through Urantia's history, but it runs underground for long stretches. From Onagar at one million years ago, to Mansant after the rebellion, to the seven racial teachers (Onamonalonton among the red, Singlangton among the yellow, Orlandof among the blue, and the rest), to Adam and Eve, to Enoch, to Melchizedek at Salem, to Moses, to Elijah, to John the Baptist, to Michael himself in the flesh: this is the Urantia Book's list of those who recovered, in their generation, what Onagar first taught at Oban. They are seated together now around a single throne on Jerusem.
His Current Status
Paper 45, section 4, describes the Urantia advisory council on Jerusem. Twenty four seats arranged around a central throne. The man in seat number one is Onagar. The Urantia Book opens its description of him with the formal celestial title:
"Onagar, the master mind of the pre-Planetary Prince age, who directed his fellows in the worship of 'The Breath Giver.'" (45:4.3)
He sits there now. He has been on Jerusem for nearly a million years. He has watched the Caligastia betrayal, the Adamic default, the Melchizedek emergency mission to Abraham, the bestowal of Michael in the flesh, the Pentecostal outpouring, and every age of recovery that has come after. He has watched his original teaching at Oban be forgotten, half remembered, partially recovered, perverted into idolatry, recovered again, perverted again, and finally lifted by Jesus into a form Onagar himself would recognize as his own work completed.
The four and twenty counselors are not honorary. The Urantia Book says they are the personal agents of Christ Michael on Jerusem with authority to represent him in many matters concerning the resurrection roll calls of Satania (45:4.1). When the trumpet sounds and the dispensational resurrection of an age occurs on a world of this system, Onagar is among those who execute it. The first religious teacher of this planet is, today, a working magistrate of the resurrection.
The book of Revelation captured a glimpse of him. John the Revelator, in a vision on Patmos, saw twenty four elders seated on twenty four thrones around the central throne, clothed in white. He did not know their names. One of those names was Onagar.
The Line of True Teachers
There is a thought that returns when you read these accounts honestly. From the moment a personality became conscious on this world, somebody has been pointing the others toward the One who breathed into them. Andon barely escaped fire worship and reasoned his way most of the distance. Onagar finished the journey, named the Breath Giver, taught the Great Beyond, organized the worship of one God, and sent missionaries to the remote settlements. Then his teaching fragmented. Then somebody else recovered a piece of it. Then it fragmented again. Then somebody else recovered another piece.
The line is unbroken because the Spirit of Truth, working through human personalities of various capacity, will not let it break. Across a million years and through every collapse of civilization this planet has suffered, somebody has always been at the door of dawn lifting their face to the sky and naming the One who gives the breath. Onagar was the first. He is not the last. He will not be the last while this world stands.
When the names of the Urantia Book accumulate, Onagar, Mansant, Onamonalonton, Singlangton, Orlandof, Porshunta, Fantad, Orvonon, Adam, Eve, Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Melchizedek, John the Baptist, Michael, you are reading a single roster. Different races. Different ages. One unbroken work.
The next time the sun comes up, remember that an Andonite man almost a million years ago lifted his face to it and addressed by its true name the Source behind it. He was answered. He still is.
His name is Onagar, and he is the first proven truth teacher of mankind.