Monday, January 29, 2018

Bahomet Pt III



 

Again we continue this stroll through this mix mash of medieval theology  which was itself a recovery of scraps of pagan theology itself. There is an organizing framework within that we may well never truly fully understand as so much was suppressed. A lot of that, quite rightly, but as usual the good went as well.

Still good stuff.  The whole antiquarian discipline has largely been forgotten and needs to be revived in academic circles as it does inform a deeper understanding of history as opposed to the perusal of offical memos.

Ample material here though as this represents a lifetime of collection.

The arms of the City of London


However, that same article goes on to state that:


Accounts differ regarding whether George was born in Cappadocia or Syria Palaestina, but agree that he was raised at least partly in Lydda in Palestine. His parents were Christian, of the nobility and of Greek heritage. His father Gerontius was a Roman army official from Cappadocia, and his mother Polychronia was from Lydda in the province of Syria Palaestina.

So strangely, like a child born of two natures, George’s ancestry hailed from two towns in two different countries with names that sounds and are spelled similar, and which are often confused with each other. But some writers have considered George to be from Cappadocia—that is, from Lydia, Anatolia, Phrygia, or Modern Turkey—with the alleged connection to the Palestinian town added later. I don’t really see much evidence against this notion. As it says in Wikipedia regarding George:

A titular church built in Lydda during the reign of Constantine the Great (reigned 306–37) was consecrated to ‘a man of the highest distinction,’ according to the church history of Eusebius; the name of the titulus (‘patron’) was not disclosed, but later he was asserted…to have been George.

By the time of the early Muslim conquests of the mostly Christian and Zoroastrian Middle East, a basilica in Lydda dedicated to Saint George existed. The church was destroyed by Muslims in 1010, but was later rebuilt and dedicated to Saint George by the Crusaders. In 1191 and during the conflict known as the Third Crusade (1189–92), the church was again destroyed by the forces of Saladin, Sultan of the Ayyubid dynasty (reigned 1171–93). A new church was erected in 1872 and is still standing.

One such scholar who thought he was from Cappadocia, and that the history had been misunderstood, was L.A. Waddell. According to him, George is the same as Adam, and King Arthur. (While I haven’t come across it in his book yet, we can safely presume that he thought the name “Turkey” ultimately stemmed from this character.) In The British Edda, Waddell presents texts he’s found and translated describing the figure he identifies as “Thor” having a battle with a “lion” called “Meide-Asa,” whom he connects with Medusa of Greek legends. (Note, again, the syllable med, or “Mete”). Waddell saw the Meide-Asa beast as representative of a tribe there in Cappadocia that had lions as their totem symbol. He writes:

[T]he Lion tribe in Asia Minor [was] flocking to Thor’s standard at Troy from so far afield as Vind in Eastern Phrygia, Aur-Vang, or ‘the Van Lake’ in Uri or Armenia, as far as Lofar in the anti-Taurus in Cilicia on the S.E. border of Cappadocia, also from Brimi’s Land to the north of Carchemish.

The name ‘Phrygia,’ I have shown in my Dictionary is a Sumerian word, from the Sumerian name Firig for Asia Minor, including also ‘the Western Lands’ generally. It means ‘Land of the Lions,’ from Firig or Pirig, ‘a lion,’ literally ‘Frightful, Fierce, or Ferocious,’ and it is the Sumerian source of these and their other derivative English words. The name was written by the picture of a Lion’s head; and the people of that land were called by the Sumerians Firig-su.

Regarding this Thor’s alleged title of George, Waddell writes:

Striking corroborative evidence for the historical authenticity of this Eddic tradition of the victory of Thor, Meide-Asa or Miod-Asa in Ancient Phrygia [exists], as George with his Red Cross is found in the stupendous rock-sculpture standing at the source of the Sangarios River in the heart of Phrygia, at the site of its prehistoric capital with mounds of ruins…. It is ‘the most beautiful of all Phrygian monuments,’ and is popularly called the ‘Tomb of Midas,’ see Fig. 39—although it is admittedly not a tomb. It covers the face of an immense cliff, and whilst its facade is characteristically Gothic, its chief ornament consists of nine enormous St George’s Crosses. These are arranged in the form shown in Fig. 40. Its inscription contains the name ‘Midas’ in letters supposed to be of about the ninth century B.C., but more probably of the twelfth or still earlier.

Interesting confirmation of these nine St George’s Crosses of Thor or Meidi-Asa of the Eddic lay in their victory over the Serpent cult of the Phrygians and Edenites and their identification of him as Midas I of Fig. 4o.—The Nine St. George’s Crosses on the Midas Monument…. Phrygia is found in the painting on an archaic Greek vase of about 500 B.C., see Fig. 41…. The number Nine, moreover, is significantly in Sumerian the mystic number of King Dar or Sagg (i.e., Thor or Sig) as the He-Goat…; and amongst the Greeks the number Nine was also the mystic number of Prometheus…, who, we have found, is identical with Thor as Bur-Mioth (‘Pro-metheus’) otherwise entitled Miot or Miod-Asa (Midas) or St. George of Cappadocia.




































Illustrations from The British Edda by L.A. Waddell. In fig. 41, the 9 crosses together form another symbol, the double-barred Cross of Lorraine






Once again, we have a connection here with Mete/Baphomet when Waddell says that Medusa is “also as Bur-Mioth (‘Pro-metheus’) otherwise entitled Miot.” In addition to connecting with her Gnostic title of Pronoia (‘forethought, providence,’ same meaning as Prometheus), “Bur-Mioth” brings to mind Behemoth, same as the Persian Bahumed, a.k.a. Bafomid, and thus, Baphomet, according to Hammer-Purgstall.

Also, it is hard not to notice the similarity with the stories of the Babylonian story of Marduk and Tiamat, which itself is very similar to my reconstruction of the Greek stories of Ouranos, Gaia and Chronos (built through the implications found in the myths of all three figure). Ouranos and Gaia were originally one hermaphroditic being, locked in perpetual sexual union, and pregnant. Chronos is the one who, in order to release himself from the prison of the womb, which was called Tartarus, had to cut his way out of the beast. In the process he castrated his father, and severed it into its male and female halves. The female fell down and became Earth, while the castrated male stayed up and became the sky.

As they were all three Titans, that means they were dragons, and Chronos, though a dragon himself, is the one famous for defeating the dragon, with the present cosmology we live in resulting from it. That would make him the “son of Heaven,” and could thus be taken as the progenitor of a race called “sons of Heaven,” or “sons of God.” This term is used in the Bible to refer to a race of angels called, in the extra-biblical Book of Enoch, the “Watchers,” or the Grigori, who fathered a race of semi-human giants called Nephilim.

Likewise, Marduk famously severed the beast Tiamat, cut her in half, and used her body to form the universe. Her name not only contains the syllable mat, indicating that she is the same as our Mete, but her name contains the same syllables as Waddell’s “Meide-Asa”—“Dea” and “Meid” if the “d” in that word is taken as interchangeable for “t” and all vowels considered interchangeable for each other: something that is done all the time when interpreting ancient writings.




Also, Waddell’s interpretation of his translated texts as describing St. George killing Medusa makes sense if we take seriously what J.M. Roberts said in A History of Europe, stating that “St. George only acquired his heroic repute as a dragon-killer in the twelfth century (possibly by confusion with the Greek hero, Perseus,” the one known for killing Medusa and for riding a white horse, like St. George. The fact that Perseus put the Gorgon’s head on his shield also reminds me of the story of the alleged hero Ottone Visconti taking the emblem of the biscione from the shield of the Saracen he defeated and putting it on his own. That story too, as I have proven, was projected erroneously back into the twelfth century. It is hard not to think that all of these coincidences somehow add up to something. In the Russian icon below, St. George looks red in skin color, just like the boy being swallowed by the biscione.



St. George of Lydda

However, he is more often depicted with green skin and conflated with the figure of the Green Man. 

We wrote in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled that this character was one:

…[W]hose foliage-sprouting face can be seen in gardens and greenery throughout Europe and the British Isles. Like the ritual phalli of Priapus, these fertility totems were omnipresent there at one time. They show the face of a man grimacing, seemingly almost under torture, as plants sprout from his face, and even from his nose and mouth. In a sense, it is reminiscent of the Gorgon head on the Aegis. He is frequently shown horned, and seems somewhat similar to the bearded faces of Bacchus or Dionysus that most of us have seen at one time decorating a garden gate. These Green Man masks are purported to ensure favorable circumstances to the crops nearby when given proper homage, just like the herms mentioned previously. The oldest known version has been found in France dated to 400 AD.

This “Green Man” is probably connected to several others in Celtic folklore. Most notably, the story of the “Green Man of Knowledge” is quite interesting. In this story, the title character, whose face is described as similar to that of the Green Man totem mask mentioned above, rules over a netherworld called “No Man’s Land,” which like the chaos that Lilith sprang from, doesn’t really exist. He is, as a title implies, as wise man, but he uses his wisdom for ill, to keep the land enchanted under his spell, and rules as a tyrant.



St. George defeating a cockatrice

Both St. George and the Green Man are connected by scholars, and by tradition, with the Islamic figure “Al-Khadir,” of whom we wrote in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled that:

His name… is usually taken to be a misspelling of al-akhdar, and he is known for wearing green clothing. Like Hermes, he is a psychopompus. He shows up suddenly when worthy people need guidance, and imparts wisdom (usually strange wisdom against common logic). He will steer you into unforeseen luck, or away from danger, as he wishes. He is known to appear to pilgrims on the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, where he “gives power” to the holy Black Stone on display in the shrine called the Kaaba. Like Mercury, he can appear and disappear quite suddenly because his movements are very quick. He is said to look like a young man, but with a white beard. He features in many stories having to do with the Fountain of Youth and immortality. He lives at the junction of two rivers.





Various images of Al-Khadir riding a fish

Al-Khadir is mentioned in The Koran as the “Servant of God” whom the deity granted divine wisdom to. Al-Khadir then met Moses at the crossing of two rivers, and taught him what he knew. He is also associated with the Prophet Elijah. According to a hadith, the spirit of Mohammed spends the month of Ramadan every year in Jerusalem with those of Al-Khadir and Elijah. Sufis also believe that Al-Khadir is the ruler of the rijalu’l-gyab (“the men of the unseen”), a panel of saints and angels who actually make some of the more important decisions regarding the fate of the universe and the things in it. This makes him part of the “Qutb,” the spiritual pole of the universe that holds everything up properly, and around which everything rotates.



The Green Man at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, 

built by descendants of exiled Templars 

But according to Wikipedia, George himself is an Islamic figure as well:  Saint George is described as a prophetic figure in Islamic sources. George is venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims because of his composite personality combining several Biblical, Quranic and other ancient mythical heroes. In some of he is identified with Elijah or Mar Elis, George or Mar Jirjus and in others as al-Khidr. The last epithet meaning the ‘green prophet,’ is common to both Christian and Muslim folk piety. Samuel Curtiss who visited an artificial cave dedicated to him where he is identified with Elijah, reports that childless Muslim women used to visit the shrine to pray for children. Per tradition, he was brought to his place of martyrdom in chains, thus priests of Church of St. George chain the sick especially the mentally ill to a chain for overnight or longer for healing. This is sought after by both Muslims and Christians. The same article quotes from Elizabeth Anne Finn’s Home in the Holy land (1866): St. George killed the dragon in this country; and the place is shown close to Beyroot. Many churches and convents are named after him. The church at Lydda is dedicated to St. George; so is a convent near Bethlehem, and another small one just opposite the Jaffa gate, and others beside. The Arabs believe that St. George can restore mad people to their senses, and to say a person has been sent to St. George’s is equivalent to saying he has been sent to a madhouse.The article cites J. E. Hanauer’s 1907 book Folklore of the Holy Land: Muslim, Christian and Jewish to say that Christians saw this same shrine as the tomb of George, and Jews saw it as the tomb of Elijah. Furthermore, the same article quotes G.A. Smith’s Historic Geography of the Holy Land thusly:The Mahommedans who usually identify St. George with the prophet Elijah, at Lydda confound his legend with one about Christ himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda. The notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief of George and the Dragon on the Lydda church. But Dajjal may be derived, by a very common confusion between n and l, from Dagon, whose name two neighbouring villages bear to this day, while one of the gates of Lydda used to be called the Gate of Dagon.Dagon, mentioned in the bible as the name of a Canaanite demon or “false god,” took the form of a half-man/half-fish just like Oannes. Thus he connects to Jonah/Jonas. Interestingly, around the same time in 2014 the terrorist group ISIS destroyed both an alleged tomb of St. George along with the supposed tombs of Jonah and Seth, both located in Mosul, Iraq.




Jonah

While comparing a prophet to a sea-monster may seem absurd, when it comes to Oannes, it is important to take seriously how he is remembered as a teacher.

An account from third century BC Babylonian writer Berossus regarding Oannes (who actually purported to quote the writings of this “Oannes” himself) was paraphrased first century BC Greek scholar Alexander Polyhistor, as quoted by Cory’s Ancient Fragments from 1876:

At Babylon there was (in these times) a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldea, and lived in a lawless manner like the beasts of the field.

In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythaean sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with feet also below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice, too, and language were articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

This being was accustomed to pass the day among men, but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize their lives. From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun had set this being Oannes retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep, for he was amphibious. . . .Dagon and Oannes are literally considered the same figure by scholars, and images of them are frequently labeled as one or the other interchangeably. But some are indistinguishable from images of Jonah, and I wouldn’t doubt at all if some images of these characters have been incorrectly labeled by historians at variance from the creators’ original intentions.

In my book The Merovingian Mythos, I speculated that the name of Iraq, thought by many scholars to come from the city of Uruk, called “Erech” in the Bible, might have been the world’s first city, mentioned in Genesis, that Cain allegedly built. It was the first of six, each named after one of his sons. (The connection between this and Gnostic creation stories, in which the Demiurge generates six sons occupying “aeons” or layers of the heavens, will become obvious to you as our study progresses.)

 
+
+Ophite diagram of the cosmos

I also pondered the possibility that this figure was also connected to Poseidon Erechtheus, a king of Athens who was also thought to be synonymous with the famous sea-god. The earliest texts also make no distinction between him and Ericthonius, later listed as his grandson. He was said to have been born from the womb of Gaia (Tartarus), who was impregnated when Athena wiped the semen of Hephaestus from her thigh with a piece of wool and then cast it to Earth. When he was born, Athena placed the baby in a box to keep his presence secret. In the later stories, where Erichthonios is distinct from King Erechtheus, it is said that the box was given to the king’s three daughters, one of whom was named “Pandrosus.” They were told to never open it, but eventually their curiosity got the best of them. Finding inside a baby whose lower body was that of a snake, they are said to have gone made and jumped from the Acropolis to their deaths. The creature later succeeded Erechtheus as king. Another king of Athens, Cercrops I, was said to have similar anguipede features. He purportedly taught the people of Athens the techniques of navigation.



Left: Cecrops I. Right: Erichthonius.

Returning to the subject of Enoch, I have mentioned elsewhere in this essay that I consider the biblical Seth to be an alternate identity of Cain, or perhaps literally a rebirthing of him (which you will understand as you read further). He too had a son named Enoch, and it was he who supposedly stands in the line of the biblical patriarchs, ancestor to their kings and priests, and thus supposedly an ancestor of Jesus Christ. He was the grandfather of Noah, and in The Book of Enoch, he purportedly warned Noah of what was coming after learning about it during a miraculous trip to Heaven that mirrors precisely that of his counterpart Hermes. This is hinted at in Genesis 5:21-24, where it says:And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.This is always taken by modern Christians and Jews to mean that he was translated to Heaven directly, and never died, just as the rapture is said to be. What, then, if he was taken into this City of Enoch, somehow? Could that possibly be the same as the cubic city of New Jerusalem that the righteous saved go to live at the End of Days according to the Revelation of St. John, including, presumably, those who are raptured like Enoch beforehand?It was said that Enoch lived 365 years and wrote 366 books. Hermes, according to ancient writer Manetho, wrote 365,000. The Gnostic Basilides said that there were 365 heavens, with the highest god occupying that upper layer. The name of Abraxas, in Greek, when interpreted numerically, adds up to 365 as well, as does Mithras.  Amazingly, Wikipedia tells us that in the country of Georgia, there are:Exactly 365 Orthodox churches… named after Saint George according to the number of days in a year. According to myth, Saint George was cut into 365 pieces after he fell in battle and every single piece was spread throughout the entire country.






Considering all of the evidence linking St. George to Lydia/Cappadocia/Phrygia, I would now like to submit for consideration some of the amazing coincidences I found between the European royal house of Ascania, from whence the previously mentioned Ottos called Margraves of Brandenberg, purportedly featured on the “OTTO” coins presented by Hammer-Purgstall. The name of the royal house was named, as Wikipedia puts it, after “Ascania (or Ascaria) Castle, known as Schloss Askanten in German,” which was itself located in and named after Aschersleben, now in Germany. It was founded in 1036 by a man named Esiko, grandson of Odo I, Margrave of the Saxon Ostmark. Odo was married to Hidda, sister of Gero, margrave of Geronis.

No link whatsoever is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, nor overtly in anything else I’ve found, to the region now occupied by Turkey. However, you will see that it is impossible for there not to be a link.


 

Tab. V, fig. 13-18. This “vase,” as Hammer-Purgstall calls it, appears to me to be the royal arms of the House of Ascania (see below)




As in turns out, there is a lake in Turkey that is incredibly historically significant, the name of which was always written in European languages just the same as that of this royal House of Ascania. Its name is said to be derived from the Assyrian Askuza, a name associated with the ancient people called the Scythians. On modern maps of Turkey, the lake is labeled “Isnik,” and the famous town located next to it is known to us as Nicea, where several ecumenical councils were held to decide on the tenets of Christian theology, and where the Byzantine Orthodox “Greek Empire” was based during the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople was occupied.[8] The name Iznik may even be connected with the victory goddess Nike, as well as Enoch, for, as one source wrote:


Nikaia (or Nicae) is located in the Turkish province of Bursa, on the southeastern edge of Lake Isknok (ancient Lake Ascania).


Apparently, this place may be the very source of the Phrygian race, for as we read in Paul and the Nations: The Old Testament and Jewish Background of Paul’s Mission to the Nations :

The earliest settlement of the Phrygians may be the Mygdones, the tribe of the eponymous Phrygian hero Mygdon, who traditionally lived around Lake Ascania, by Nicea.

Then in an essay found online called “From Macedonia to Anatolia: Some comments on the Phrygians and their migration,” by Manolis Manoledakis, the author writes:

The first mention of the Phrygians in Anatolia occurs in the Iliad, where they are described as coming from remote Ascania’ (mod. Isnik Golu) and the banks of the river Sangarius….

That’s the same River Sangarius associated with the Hydra or Cetus killed by Hercules. But moreover, it seemed impossible for this to be a coincidence when I discovered that the lance that Saint George used to kill the dragon, according to medieval romances, was named “Ascalon,” allegedly, according to Wikipedia, “after the Levantine city of Ashkelon, today in Israel.” Whatever the real source, it occurred to me that the name of King Arthur’s sword Excalibur is related as well.

I started to wonder if the Ashkenazai Jews, of whom so many conspiracy theories were written, might be from this area too, or somehow have a common provenance with both the royal house of Ascania in Germany and the Phrygian people of the Lake Iznik area in Turkey. I found nothing to preclude that, but no outright confirmation.


Wikipedia defines the Ashkenazai as:

…[A] Jewish diaspora population who coalesced as a distinct community in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium. The traditional diaspora language of Ashkenazi Jews is Yiddish (a Germanic language which incorporates several dialects), with Hebrew used only as a sacred language until relatively recently. Throughout their time in Europe, Ashkenazim have made many important contributions to philosophy, scholarship, literature, art, music and science.Ashkenazim originate from the Jews who settled along the Rhine River, in Western Germany and Northern France. There they became a distinct diaspora community with a unique way of life that adapted traditions from Babylon, The Land of Israel, and the Western Mediterranean to their new environment. 

The Ashkenazi religious rite developed in cities such as Mainz, Worms, and Troyes. The eminent French Rishon Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki (Rashi) would have a significant impact on the Jewish religion.As to where the Ashkenazai name came from, the same article states:The name Ashkenazi derives from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz, the first son of Gomer, son of Japhet, son of Noah, and a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). The name of Gomer has often been linked to the ethnonym Cimmerians. Biblical Ashkenaz is usually derived from Assyrian Aškūza (cuneiform Aškuzai/Iškuzai), a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates, whose name is usually associated with the name of the Scythians.



Here we are presented with the Scythians again. A scythe, of course, is an object synonymous with a sickle, the weapon of Chronos, but perhaps that’s just a coincidence.

The article continues:In Jeremiah 51:27, Ashkenaz figures as one of three kingdoms in the far north, the others being Minni and Ararat, perhaps corresponding to Urartu, called on by God to resist Babylon.In the Yoma tractate of the Babylonian Talmud the name Gomer is rendered as Germania, which elsewhere in rabbinical literature was identified with Germanikia in northwestern Syria, but later became associated with Germania. Ashkenaz is linked to Scandza/Scanzia, viewed as the cradle of Germanic tribes, as early as a 6th-century gloss to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius. In the 10th-century History of Armenia of Yovhannes Drasxanakertc’i (1.15) 

Ashkenaz was associated with Armenia, as it was occasionally in Jewish usage, where its denotation extended at times to Adiabene, Khazaria, Crimea and areas to the east. His contemporary Saadia Gaon identified Ashkenaz with the Saquliba or Slavic territories, and such usage covered also the lands of tribes neighboring the Slavs, and Eastern and Central Europe. In modern times, Samuel Krauss identified the Biblical Ashkenaz’ with Khazaria.Sometime in the early medieval period, the Jews of central and eastern Europe came to be called by this term. Conforming to the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain was denominated Sefarad (Obadiah 20), France was called Tsarefat (1 Kings 17:9), and Bohemia was called the Land of Canaan. By the high medieval period, Talmudic commentators like Rashi began to use Ashkenaz/Eretz Ashkenaz to designate Germany, earlier known as Loter, where, especially in the Rhineland communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the most important Jewish communities arose. Rashi uses leshon Ashkenaz (Ashkenazi language) to describe German speech, and Byzantium and Syrian Jewish letters referred to the Crusaders as Ashkenazim. Given the close links between the Jewish communities of France and Germany following the Carolingian unification, the term Ashkenazi came to refer to both the Jews of medieval Germany and France.

“Loter” sounds related to Lydia, and Mount Ararat is commonly identified as a mountain in the Lake Van region of Turkey. Flavius Josephus thought that the name Lydia came from Lud, the son of Shem, the later of whom is the namesake of the racial group “Semites,” containing both Jews and Arabs. According to Wikipedia, “The whole west of Asia Minor had Jewish colonies very early, and Christianity was also soon present there.”One of the key take-aways here is that these Ottos from the House of Ascania seem to be related to these tribes from Turkey, who themselves seem to stem from the earliest characters in The Book of Genesis, including the giant Gog-Magog. I would also assume that there is a relationship between the House of Ascania and the numerous Ottos from the House of Habsburg who occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor throughout the Middle Ages. So it is natural to wonder if there is also a relationship between the European Ottos and the royal dynasty that took over Turkey and, from there, formed an empire that threatened the autonomy of Europe: the Ottomans.Indeed, the Ottomans were named after their founder Osman, an Oghuz Turkish tribal leader. Osman is a Turkish form of the Arabic “Uthman,” the source of the Arabic “Osamah,” and even the European “Osmond.” Uthman, it seems to me, may also be related to “Uberto,” a name found frequently among the House of Visconti, and to “Uther,” a.k.a. “Arthur,” both meaning “bear.” The bear is the totem animal of the House of Ascania, with several of their scions boasting the title “the Bear” as part of their names.



Coins featuring Albert I, “the Bear,” Margrave of Brandenberg, circa 1100

This, I am sure, would all make sense if we could put it in the context of the work of Anatoly Fomenko. This Russian mathematician, working with a team of experts with the same background, has created a ground-breaking series of books titled History: Fiction or Science?https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=tracyrtwymanc-20&l=as2&o=1&a=2913621074 In it, they theorize that the chronology of history is greatly flawed. He says that most of what we think of as “ancient” history is fake. Basically, he claims that the stories that we have from the ancient world are really just garbled versions of things that happened in medieval Europe.

But more than that: he also says that the “Dark Ages” never happened, and that this explains why so many of the alleged literary works from the ancient world can be found now only in the form of translations that were made in the Renaissance, with the originals lost. He says that there was never such a long stretch of time in which the great cities of Rome and Athens collapsed into ruin, men forgot the basics of science, and everybody lost interest in art and literature. This, he says, is a fabrication meant to cover up the erroneous nature of ancient history, itself a result of mistakes made by a handful of people (central among them sixteenth century theologian and chronologist Joseph Scaliger), which were then covered up deliberately by academics with a vested interest in keeping this flawed understanding of chronology as the accepted version. Among his more radical claims, Fomenko says that Jesus was actually born in what we think of as the twelfth century.

Actually, says Fomenko, tons of these stories are about things that actually happened to the Ottomans, and that hundreds of Ottoman buildings were destroyed to make room for fake “ancient” ruins, when in face, he claims, the Ottoman buildings were the originals. What if, for example, what’s being called the Temple of Solomon is actually an Ottoman structure? Looking at the way “Otto Marchionis” is dressed on the coins presented by Hammer-Purgstall, and at his weapons, and at the turrets on the castles represented on these coins, which Hammer-Purgstall takes to be the Temple of Solomon, I must admit that it all does look quite Ottoman to me. Even the hooded people on the coins that Hammer-Purgstall takes to be female and representations of Mete look, to me, identical to the way in which some Ottoman kings dressed.


Coat of arms of antipope Benedict XIII




Templar seals: Left: Star and crescent. Right: Mosque on Temple Mount




Fomenko is not the first to theorize that the Dark Ages never happened. In 1986, the German Heribert Illig wrote about what is called the “Phantom Time Hypothesis,” evidence of which, he claimed, could be found when looking at the Gregorian calendar reform. Immanuel Velikovsky had suggested something similar in 1952’s Ages in Chaos. When we open yourself up to the possibility of rearranging the chronology of history, it then becomes possible to build an entirely Christ-centric view of history. This is what one of Fomenko’s predecessors and influencers, Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov, another mathematician, did before him when he wrote the potentially revolutionary but little-known book Christ.

Many have noted the similarity between the figure of Jesus and other gods of the ancient world, such as Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Mithras and Krishna. Often this is cited as evidence of the fraudulent nature of the Church, accused of ‘stealing’ the biographies of pagan gods. But in Fomenko’s world-view, it’s the other way around: all these other gods just represent Jesus, and they probably came about at around the same time. He writes:

If we step aside from Scaligerian chronology, we shall see that all of these parallels indicate the simultaneity of these cults, whose differences are merely a consequence of the ethnic distinctives of their localization. All of them probably hail back to the same common source—that is, they are a reflection of the life and deeds of Jesus Christ in the XII century A.D.While it would be impossible and inappropriate to, in the present volume, explain Fomenko’s entire world-view, or to examine everything presented by Hammer-Purgstall from this perspective, I mention it as something to keep in mind. Correlation does not equal causality, so I would submit that Fomenko’s view is useful for breaking down the mental barrier of accepted chronology, since in my 25 years of examining both history and mythology deeply, I have often found myself spinning in circles created by the numerous counter-claims of historians, and forced to question the assumptions of historians made on the basis of previously assumed facts that I can see with my own eyes are not true.

All this leaves us with is the humbling reality that the things we’ve been taught are things that nobody really knows for sure. Often, the best I can do as a researcher is to point out correlations and say “these things must be related somehow.” While I may, for practical purposes, explain that one thing came from another, I must admit that it can be impossible to tell sometimes what gave birth to what. I mean this in every conceivable sense. When the Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “hymen” is somehow unrelated to the identical name of the Greek god of marriage, using the sneering term “folk etymology” to denote the popular assumption of things seemingly obvious, I remember Fomenko’s theories, and tell myself not to get too hung up about it.This brave Russian mathematician faced the scorn of the academic community to claim that the Crusades happened directly after Christ’s death, or perhaps even began during his lifetime. He said that the stories of the Trojan War and the Quest for the Golden Fleece were, like the Grail romances, merely allegories for the Crusades.

While I haven’t read this in his work yet, I would assume that Jason, the hero who piloted the ship Argo in the Golden Fleece adventure, and the purported founder of the city of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is taken by Fomenko as another version of Jesus. In my view, Jason and Zeus are both recapitulations of Jesus, who in the Gnostic Christian world-view is an agent from beyond the created world sent to free those trapped in the prison of the Demiurge, as I mentioned previously. Zeus also shares aspects with Jehovah as presented from the Jewish perspective, but this becomes reconcilable if we allow a Trinitarian sort of solution. The idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Sophia, the Mother and Bride) all being a little bit separate, but also a little bit inside of each other, is really, quite frighteningly, the exact sort of beast we are dealing with here. (I will add more on this topic later on in this essay.)

There are many hints of this in Jason’s story. Jason’s father is Aeson, just another version of the same name. His partner in crime and first wife is Medea, a crafty witch, just like the relationship of Zeus to Metis (Hammer-Purgstall’s Mete), also described as a crafty witch. Among her tricks, she artificially extended Aeson’s life by draining some of his blood, infusing it with invigorating herbs, and pumping it back into him. She also claimed she could to turn another old man, Pelias, into a baby by chopping him up and boiling him in a cauldron with these herbs, after successfully turning a full-grown ram into a lamb using this process. But sneakily, she didn’t put the herbs in, and let the man die, resulting in her and Jason being driven into exile.The Fleece sought by Jason was a royal totem, consisting of the head, skin and wool of a magically golden ram mounted on a stick.

This brings to mind both the figure of the crucifix, and the Aegis of Zeus, his magical buckler, or shield, made from the skin of the goat Amalthea who raised him in exile, and whom he subsequently slew to make use of her body parts. This story, in turn, hints at the universe being formed from the body of Tiamat after it was cut up by Marduk, or from the beast that Chronos separated into Ouranos and Gaia. Of course, the goat/ram imagery also brings to mind the Templar Baphomet.Jason’s quest took him to Colchis, in modern Georgia. St. George is the patron saint of Georgia. Now you might think that Georgia was named after George, but according to academia, you’re just showing your peasant ignorance there, even though they don’t actually seem to know where the name came from. As Wikipedia puts it:

The country of Georgia, where devotions to the saint date back to the fourth century, is not technically named after the saint, but is a well-attested back-formation of the Greek name. However, a large number of towns and cities around the world are. Saint George is one of the patron Saints of Georgia; the name Georgia (Sakartvelo in Georgian) is an anglicisation of Gurj, ultimately derived from the Persian word gurj/gurjān (‘wolf’). Chronicles describing the land as Georgie or Georgia in French and English, date from the early Middle Ages, as written by the travellers John Mandeville and Jacques de Vitry ‘because of their special reverence for Saint George,’ but these accounts have been seen as folk etymology and are rejected by the scholarly community.

To take the Fleece from Colchis, Jason and Medea had to defeat a dragon, which they did by putting it to sleep with tricks. Before that, they had to defeat an army of sparoi (“Spartans,”) a word seemingly connected to Sfard (Sparda in Old Persian), which is the name that the “Lydians” referred to themselves with. These Spartans, like the other race of Spartans created by the hero Cadmus, sprang from the ground after Jason, forced under duress, sewed a ploughed field with the teeth of a dragon. Here again we have a hint about Chronos using his teeth to break himself out of the womb of Gaia, the Earth.Considering that Anatoly Fomenko sees both Jason’s quest and the Trojan War to be retellings of the Crusades, and that Troy was part of the same land called Lydia, I thought it was significant that there is a story of Hercules rescuing a Trojan princess named Hesione from a horned water-dragon. She had been chained to rocks by her father, King Laomedon, in an attempt to appease the monster, which had been sent by Poseidon to destroy the city. Hercules ended up being swallowed by the dragon, and then, as the Wikipedia article on Hesione puts it, he “he hacked at its innards for three days before it died,” eventually emerging from it just like Jonah from the whale.






Strangely medieval-looking Hercules rescuing Hesione



Another rendering of the same incident

Amazingly, about five minutes after I first began pondering the similarities of Jason and Jesus, a book that I rarely look at, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with 1000 Faces, literally leapt out of the bookshelf next to me. When I picked it up, it fell open to an illustration that shocked me, with the following mind-blowing caption:[This] view of the Return of Jason (from a vase in the Vatican Etruscan Collection) illustrates a reading of the legend not represented in any literary document.



Douris Cup from Vatican collection, featuring Jason

This is from an Etruscan krater called the “Douris Cup,” currently held by the Vatican. The woman standing over Jason, watching him either get swallowed by, or return from, the mouth of the dragon, is clearly Athena, with a warrior’s helmet, clutching her pet, the Owl of Minerva, and sporting her own trademark Aegis—said by some to be the same as that of Zeus—which is always shown augmented with the head of the Gorgon killed by Perseus. (This token was used by her to avert and reflect the Evil Eye of her enemies). Note that this is an Etruscan vase, just like those mentioned by Hammer-Purgstall, where he also mentioned the word “Lydia.” Wikipedia tells us:An Etruscan/Lydian association has long been a subject of conjecture. The Greek historian Herodotus stated that the Etruscans came from Lydia, repeated in Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid, and Etruscan-like language was found on the Lemnos stele from the Aegean Sea island of Lemnos. However, the decipherment of Lydian and its classification as an Anatolian language mean that Etruscan and Lydian were not even part of the same language family. Nevertheless, a recent genetic study of likely Etruscan descendants in Tuscany found strong similarities with individuals in western Anatolia, indicating that Etruscans may have lived in or near the region at one time.I cannot say for sure whether Jason—whose name is an anagram of Jonas—is coming or going from the belly of the beast in this instance. Neither did Joseph Campbell, from what I read, but the image in his book is still labeled “The Return of Jason.”

There are, of course, essentially identical images of Jonah/Jonas in the mouth of the whale, as I have shown. But it seems to me that Athena is here playing the role of Medea (who, like I said, seems to be a reimaging of Athena’s mother Metis. She’s immersing Jason in her “cauldron,” the gullet of the beast, from which, with her magical techniques, she can regenerate the human body. This seems just like the Cauldron of Rebirth (called the Pair Dadeni) of Welsh mythology, supposedly discovered by “the Irish king Matholwch,” is whose name we now know to see Metis, or Mete. Examining this myth, when I saw the word Dadeni, I immediately thought of Dagon (another name for Oannes, as I mentioned). How appropriate, then, that the Cauldron’s myth also contains a copy of the story of Samson, who, in the biblical Book of Judges, sacrificed himself by pulling down the pillars of the Temple of Dagon in which he was imprisoned. Likewise, the Pair Dadeni was destroyed from within by a man named Efnisien, who willingly died in the process.Among Hammer-Purgstall’s images, there is a picture of someone either pulling down pillars, or attempting to holding them up.




Tab. III, fig. 9

This brings us to a fascinating and utterly perfect nexus of symbolism and etymology, for in the midst of the constellation of the serpent Hydra, the Cetus, defeated by Hercules, is the constellation “Krater,” representing none other than the Greek vessel for serving wine, exactly the imagery of a snake-entwined vase found on Tab. V, fig. 19.According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “krater” may be part of the influence behind the word “Grail,” a term that originated in the mystical romances of the Holy Grail, where it was written in French as Sangreal, or in German as Sangraal. The syllable san is usually interpreted to mean “Holy.” As I mentioned in my book The Merovingian Mythos and the Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, the syllable gar meant “vessel” in many ancient languages. Astoundingly, in the very next paragraph after discussing the coin with the serpents guarding the vase, Hammer-Purgstall turns his attention to a coin engraved with the word “GRAL” written in code.

Relevantly, the royal family being referenced in the title of that book, called by some the “Grail family,” Meroveus was, according to the legend, the spawn of two fathers: one, the Frankish King Clodio, the other, a mysterious sea creature called “the Quinotaur.” This beast raped his mother, already pregnant, as she was swimming in the ocean, and managed to magically inject his own seed into the developing fetus, co-mingling his own inhuman blood with that of the Frankish kings. This is why Meroveus’ name bore within it the French word for “sea”, and why his descendants, the Merovingian kings, were believed to possess magical, super-human powers. As Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lindon states:

According to tradition Merovingian monarchs were occult adepts, initiates in arcane sciences, practitioners in esoteric arts – worthy rivals of Merlin, their fabulous near-contemporary. They were often called the sorcerer kings or thaumaturge kings. By virtue of some miraculous property in their blood, they could allegedly heal by the laying on of hands; and according to one account the tassels on the fringes of their robes were deemed to possess miraculous curative powers. They were said to be capable of clairvoyant or telepathic communication with beasts and with the natural world around them, and to wear powerful magical necklaces. They were said to possess an arcane spell that protected them and granted them phenomenal longevity—which history, incidentally, does not seem to confirm.

In the New Jerusalem, according to The Book of Revelation, there will be a Fountain of Life coming from the body of Jesus, which the righteous will drink from, thus gaining eternal life. In Christian iconography, we often see this represented by the Lamb of God standing on the altar near God’s throne, bleeding into a cup—the Holy Grail. This cup is often shown pouring from beneath the cup into the Rivers of Life, also mentioned in Revelation, that seem to run like a sewer system throughout the whole city, looking just like how the four Rivers of Paradise are shown flowing through the Garden of Eden in Christian religious imagery. I mean “sewer system” literally, for, when not shown coming as blood from the neck of the Lamb, the Rivers are sometimes shown coming from beneath the throne of the Lord. In color version of these pictures, the rivers are sometimes shown as brown, and running through pipes.



The Fountain of Life, from the Ghent Altarpiece



Fountain and rivers depicted as sewer system





An alternate depiction of the Fountain of Life: revelers bathe in Christ’s blood



According to Hammer Purgstall, one of his idols, Tab. I, fig. 13, sports an inscription that reads των υδατων χρυσος [ton ydaton chrysos], which he interprets as meaning “golden waters.” He adds: “What is to be understood by this golden water, or by this golden liquid, is reserved for discussion further on.” It obtained this quality because of the food and drink—nectar and ambrosia—eaten by the gods, which, in a previous book of mine (Clock Shavings), I argued was most likely the flesh and blood of those sacrificed to them.

I think it is noteworthy that the gods of Greece were said to have blood which was golden in color, called ichor, the possession of which was considered the cause of their immortality. When drained of it, they died. But in medical pathology, the same term, according to Dictionary.com, means “an acrid, watery discharge, as from an ulcer or wound.” Regarding this, Church Father Clement of Alexandria wrote that “the ichor of the poets is more repulsive than blood; for the putrefaction of blood is called ichor.” This makes sense once we realize that the gods of all traditions appear to be literally zombies rotting in the bowels of the Earth, using magical techniques involving the blood and flesh of humans to regenerate themselves.




Tab. I, fig. 13, Mysterium Baphometis

Unfortunately, when dealing with things supposedly ancient and supposedly sacred, we can’t seem to get away from the gore of dead and dismembered bodies, sexual depravity, and the unnatural abuse of bodily functions, along with the resulting byproducts. The Gnostics were accused of heresy for saying these things, and scorned for practicing them, but we seem to find it hidden within every religious tradition, but still hinted at by the myths and imagery in a way that is obvious once you understand the symbols. So what is Jason “returning” from in the picture provided by Joseph Campbell? Does the dragon represent the intestines, as Hammer-Purgstall tells us? Is this what the inscriptions were referring to that say “Return through the rectum is easy”?

There is a version of the Egyptian myth of the war between Horus and Set where instead of nephew and uncle (respectively, with Osiris and Horus’ father and Set’s brother), they are both brothers, and Isis is their mother. (These two versions would reconcile if Isis was recognized as being both the mother and the lover of all of them, which would match the proclivities of most of the goddesses of the ancient world.) Set tries to overcome Horus’ position as heir to the chief god by sodomizing and, thus, overcoming him as this was apparently how things worked in the divine legal system in which Thoth was the judge.

But it turned out that Set had been having sex with Horus’ thighs, not his buttocks, unbeknowst to him. Therefore the semen never went “inside” him. Meanwhile, their mother Isis had conspired to help Horus overcome Set. She jerked him off into a vase, them took the semen and used it to contaminate the lettuce that Set ended up eating (yes, just like the salad scene in Fight Club). Therefore Horus became the heir, while Set was impregnated. The progeny emerged from the top of his head as a golden solar disk, which Horus then took and used to crown himself as the king of the gods.

In the Egyptian the Ogdoad cosmology (which influenced Hermetic and Gnostic cosmology), Thoth reportedly gave birth to several of his children by laying eggs from his anus. This aspect of the myth must have influenced the Gnostics as well. Each one of those eight gods was, for them, one of the aeons of the planetary archons, which were all stacked inside of one another, imprisoning each other, with the Earth in the center.

Were the aeons then also perceived as each bowing down to the ones on top, forming a cosmic daisy-chain of sexual subjugation? This certainly seems implied by of Nut, the night’s sky (female Egyptian equivalent of the Greek male Ouranos) and her relationship with Shu, said to be the god of the air. She is shown arched naked over him, bending over, and he hold her body up over his head whilst simultaneously massaging her breasts and vagina. Reflexively, Ouranos is depicted in astrological emblems as the night’s sky, the “Zodiac Man,” also called the “Perfect Man” (reminiscent of the Gnostic savior Anthropos or “First Man”), shown bending over backwards with his pelvis sticking upwards, in a position of stress and pain known as “the Arch of Hysteria.”


Nut, Shu and Geb



Nut and Geb, with erect phallus instead of Shu

In the image below, from The Secret Teachings of the Ages by Masonic writer Manly P. Hall, Ouranos is shown in this position at the feet of Zeus, who can be identified by the figure emerging from his forehead. This could be Athena from the well-known Greek myth, mentioned earlier. But since she is not wearing any armor, or indeed, anything at all, I think she is more likely the “debauched woman” Mete, or Metis, a.k.a. Pronoia, “Dear Prudence,” finally “coming out” of the prison of her husband’s body.



Zeus, Ouranos, and Athena, from


The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall



The Zodiac Man, by Michael of Rhodes




Diagram of unknown origin



Perfect Man reborn from colorectal cloud, Paradox Emblematica, Dionysus A. Freher, 16th-17th century

This position is called “the Arch of Hysteria” is because this is exactly the way in which victims of clinical hysteria are often found to contort themselves. The position is technically known as “opisthotonos” by doctor. It is also associated with other ailments, such as meningitis and strychnine poisoning: anything that would cause “reduced brain function or injury to the nervous system.” (Meningitis, incidentally, is something associated anecdotally with chemtrails). We see something similar with the idol of Mete shown on Tab. I, fig. 3.



Tab. I, fig. 3 and 4, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

I couldn’t help but notice that this word contains “Opis”—reminiscent of Ops, another name for Rhea, the wife of Chronos, and “thoton”—reminiscent of “Thoth,” “Otto,” “Ottone,” “Othin,” (Odin), etc. Looking up the etymology involved here, we find that tonus means “tension,” and opisthen means “from behind.”

The one shown next to it, Tab I, fig. IV, is the one Hammer-Purgstall referred to as a “genuflecting idol” with a so-called “dog” positioned behind him. Is it not possible that both of these figures are actually being shown giving anal birth? Note also that the idol’s stomach appears to have a surgical wound on it that’s been stitched up, as if it has had a caesarian recently.









 
Asclepius performing a caesarian
 
Birth of the Anti-Christ by Caesarian
 
Birth of the Antichrist by Caesarian
 
Fragment from William Blake’s Jerusalem
The neck is decorated with images of an “annular eclipse,” which is when the Sun appears with a black dot in the center, surrounded by a white ring. “Ring” is actually the meaning and etymological root of the word “anus.” The name “Uranus” most likely contains this root for more than one reason. It is a reference to the Zodiac ring, but it’s also a symbol, I believe, of this god’s sexual subjugation underneath Zeus, as symbolize by image of the Zodiac Man doing the Arch of Hysteria pose in The Secret Teachings of All Ages.







 
Zodiac Man from Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
 
 
Zodiac Man=Uroboros. Note anal background.
 
Salvador Dali with model doing arch pose











Above: Stills from a Marilyn Manson video

In addition, the “genuflecting idol” is decorated with crescents, as can be found on other idols of Mete presented by Hammer-Purgstall. The conjunction of the Sun and Moon is a symbol of sexual alchemy, and really, sexual alchemy, as practiced by ceremonial magicians, so that is most likely the reason why these things are presented by Hammer Purgstall. These represent the crescent-shaped “shadow bands” that appear on the ground during a solar eclipse.

The inscription on the back of this idol, according to Hammer-Purgstall, reads:

She is exalted, Mete, Consivia (‘she who plants’), I and our race were seven. If you are from those who deny.

Another idol, the previously-mentioned Tab. I, fig. 13, inscribed with the message about “golden waters,” also sports another inscription that reads, according to Hammer-Purgstall:

And there were seven, you, if you are denying, one, Omnipotent Mete sprouting, a debauched woman, it springs up for our race through πρωκτον (prokton, Greek, “the rectum”).

The “seven” in the “race” are the seven immortal planetary Archons, and we are being told quite frankly that they are birthed anally. This is how those of their “race” are reproduced. Most likely, this is a variation on the process of producing a golem in the Jewish tradition. Or, quite possibly, this is the process of creating a golem, and what we are discovering here are the details of the process. According to the article “Modern Jewish History: The Golem,” by Alden Oreck, published on the Jewish Virtual Library

The word ‘golem’ appears only once in the Bible (Psalms139:16). In Hebrew, ‘golem’ stands for ‘shapeless mass.’ The Talmud uses the word as ‘unformed’ or ‘imperfect’ and according to Talmudic legend, Adam is called ‘golem,’ meaning ‘body without a soul’ (Sanhedrin 38b) for the first 12 hours of his existence.

Since God is quite specifically described in Genesis as forming him in “his own image” So God created man in his own image (1:27), and this type of language is used again in 5:3, when Adam begets “a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth,” it seems likely to me that both Adam and Seth actually were golems. Seth was most likely an artificial creation meant to host the soul of Cain, who had been banished to “Nod,” seemingly a netherworld that doesn’t really exist except in dreams, and which was overcome with the waters of the Abyss of chaos during the Flood. This would explain why Cain’s descendants—who, it is implied, died out with the Flood—have nearly identical names to the first few generations that came from Set. I think the hints in the story are implying that Cain’s soul was trapped in Nod, but that his parents used magic to tap into that soul, and that they were able to use it to animate the golem they had made—the real Pinocchio.



Sumerian depiction of Golem creation.L.A. Waddell labels this image “The Birth of Cain,” but I think it is more likely to be Seth.

Continuing with his description of the making of a golem, Alden Oreck writes:

According to one story, to make a golem come alive, one would shape it out of soil, and then walk or dance around it saying combination of letters from the alphabet and the secret name of God. To ‘kill’ the golem, its creators would walk in the opposite direction saying and making the order of the words backwards.

Other sources say once the golem had been physically made one needed to write the letters aleph, mem, tav, which is emet and means ‘truth,’ on the golem’s forehead and the golem would come alive. Erase the aleph and you are left with mem and tav, which is met, meaning ‘death.’



Drawing of a rabbi animating a golem

This word emet seems to have the same meaning as the Egyptian maat, “truth,” personified as the goddess Maat of the proper “world order,” the basis of sound governance. Is this not also the same, essentially, as the meaning of metis: “wisdom,” “prudence,” and “wise rule”? Note that emet is a literal anagram of “Mete,” and that Hammer-Purgstall found this name written on idols within messages that he thought were coded in the form of anagrams.

In Europe up until the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian boys and torturing them in bloodletting rituals around Passover/Easter. This was happening while Hammer-Purgstall was writing. As Alden Oreck writes:

Between 1805 and 1816 various cases of blood libel occurred in places within the Pale of Settlement, and the investigations always ended by exposing the lie on which they were based. In an attempt to stop their dissemination the minister of ecclesiastic affairs, A. Golitsyn, sent a circular to the heads of the guberniyas (provinces) throughout Russia on March 6, 1817, to this effect. Basing his instruction on the fact that both the Polish monarchs and the popes have invariably invalidated the libels, and that they had been frequently refuted by judicial inquiries, he stated in his circular that the czar directed ‘that henceforward the Jews shall not be charged with murdering Christian children, without evidence, and through prejudice alone that they allegedly require Christian blood.’ Nevertheless Alexander I (1801–25) gave instructions to revive the inquiry in the case of the murder of a Christian child in Velizh (near Vitebsk) where the assassins had not been found and local Jewish notables had been blamed for the crime. The trial lasted for about ten years. Although the Jews were finally exonerated, Nicholas I later refused to endorse the 1817 circular, giving as a reason that he considered that ‘there are among the Jews savage fanatics or sects requiring Christian blood for their ritual, and especially since to our sorrow such feaful and astonishing groups also exist among us Christians.’

Because of this ever-present suspicion against the Jews, according to legend, golems would be created around this time to protect the ghettos from rampaging Christian mobs anxious to lynch the suspects of the latest child disappearance in town. This, of course, is the same story fictionalized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was an artificial person, in that case, made from pieces of human cadavers, animated with electricity (like Mithras being brought to life by lightning). The roots of the word “frank” mean “truthful, honest” just like emet and maat mean “truth.” Its also the name of the Germanic people in Western Europe, the Franks, now known as “the French,” whose first king was Meroveus, the creature with two fathers, one of which was a water-dragon. Of course, “Stein” means “rock,” in German. So “Frankenstein” means “Rock of Truth,” or “Rock of Mete.” Here’s how the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it:

[A]llusive use for man-made monsters dates to 1838, from Baron Frankenstein, character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Commonly taken (mistakenly) as the proper name of the monster, not the creator, and thus franken—extended 1990s as a prefix to mean ‘non-natural.’ The German surname is probably literally ‘Franconian Mountain,’ stein being used especially for steep, rocky peaks, which in the Rhineland often were crowned with castles. The Shelleys might have passed one in their travels. The German surname also suggests ‘free stone.’

Prometheus means “foreknowledge” (containing, again, meth, that is, “Mete”), and meaning the same as the Greek Pronoia, as well as the English words “prudence” and “providence.”

 


Flyer from Kiev, 1915: “Christians, take care of your children! March 17 is Jewish Passover.”

Aleister Crowley is recording as having an intention to, through homosexual magic and alchemy, create a homunculus (another word for a golem) that would be born rectally from a male, and whose birth would herald the start of a new era. He called the anus the “Eye of Horus,” and the vagina the “mouth of Isis.” He is quoted as writing:

Oh, how superior is the Eye of Horus to the Mouth of Isis!… The ‘Child’ of such a love is a third person, a Holy Spirit, so to speak, partaking of both natures, yet boundless and impersonal because it is a bodiless creation of a wholly divine nature.

He was the first to coin the English word “Superman” in English. This came from Aleister Crowley’s novel Moonchild, which is about creating a child with divine parentage through sexual magic. Regarding this process, he had said:

…[T]he idea has been almost universal in one form or another; the wish has always been for a Messiah or Superman, and the method some attempt to produce man by artificial or at least abnormal means.

Note that the word “Superman” contains all of the letters of the word “sperm.”





Superman appears on Earth. Note cosmic egg/Sun behind him, and pose of Mulier (“The Wife”), a.k.a. “Sign of Baphomet” from Crowley’s AA order dedicated to anal sex rites



In the “Secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis” article on parareligion.ch, we read:

The name Baphomet is used to signify the Lion-Serpent or Semen. This is the Blood of the Phallus in which its life-force is concentrated. The Phallus is the Wonder-Tree (in Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass) and the semen is the sap that continues its existence from generation unto generation. Baphomet as the Semen is also the Holy Ghost, the continuity between the Father and the Son, and one part of the matter of the Sacrament.

Certainly, the acolytes of Aleister Crowley are taught that the way to creating a “servitor” (an artificial spirit created as a servant) is to make a sigil representing it and then “bring it to life” by applying fresh sperm to a physical representation of the image. Does it not seem likely that this is, along with the writing of the magic word emet or mete, might be the way to animate it?



From temple at Luxor, comes with inscription: “Water of Life and Good Fortune, rejuvenating thee like thy father Atum.”  L.A. Waddell takes “Atum” to be the same figure as Adam

So were Hammer-Purgstall’s idols actually meant to be golems? UCLA’s Medieval History expert Zrinka Stahuljak, in her book Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation, quotes Friedrich Nicholai from 1782 (Essays on accusations against the Templars, and the secret of this order, with a paper on the origin of Freemasonry) and writes that he claimed, according to sources he had read that:

[T]he name ‘Baphomet’ mentioned in the deposition… ‘was not the name of the idol, but rather a hieroglyph imprinted on it. The head … had been a symbol, the image of the eternal Father in a state of rest, as the ancient Gnostics represented him.’ Baphomet would thus have been a name for a Gnostic symbol.

This, then, may provide a total explanation for the inscriptions referring to “sprouting water,” what Hammer-Purgstall interprets as “sperma genethliakon (reproductive seed),” the source of the “genital wisdom” (Arabic, ma-ta na-sha) of Mete? In the Bible, “to know” is a euphemism of sex, and we still have the term “carnal knowledge” for this. It was the “fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge that they were forbidden to eat, because it made them as smart as the gods were.



God reposing on the seventh day, from the first Russian engraved Bible

One of the words found on the inscriptions means “sperm” directly in Arabic. I found this by typing out the letters from the inscribed word myself into a search engine. The letters are the equivalent of “MNSY.”


MNSY from Mysterium Baphometis




I have many pages of notes I have made about the etymology of this word and its associated syllables. They all have to do with wisdom and sperm. Even the word “mayonnaise,” and the city of Mahon in Spain that it’s said to be native to, are connected, and just think about the implication of that (but not while you’re eating a sandwich, please). The other amazing connections relate directly to the name of the Prophet Mohammed, and also that of the Prophet Mani, founder of the Gnostic movement of Manicheanism.



The Egyptian fertility god Min

Amazingly, Mohammed is said to have died and been buried with his penis remaining erect (a sign of poisoning, by the way). A glyph formed by his name creates an image that looks like a skeletal man lying on his back with his penis pointing up. This information can be found on a website called “Pengetahuan Agama Islam,” where the writer also points out that Mohammed’s name can also be viewed as forming a human body genuflecting in prayer (see both demonstrated on screenshots from that site featured below).




Note the symbol for the Multi-National Corps of Iraq, the name of which, in Arabic, in shortened into an acronym with the same letters as the Arabic word for sperm (MNSY). With the one on the right, it looks like the spear is going through the lion’s body. According to Hammer-Purgstall, the Ophites and Templars sacrificed lions because they saw them as symbols of Jaldabaoth, the Demiurge, whom Gnostics depicted as a serpent with the head of a lion. As for the spear with the palm branches coming out, it reminds me very much of a European heraldic device called the Alerion.



MNSY badges




Alerions

The Alerion is supposed to be a bird with no beak and only one eye. It is associated with the region of Lorraine in France, and with the royal house that famously ruled it, related directly to the Merovingians, Angevins and Plantagenets. The name “Alerion,” spelled properly in French, is, by design, an anagram of the proper French way of spelling “Lorraine” (Loraine). It is often featured alongside the Cross of Lorraine. In The Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, published in 1909, the author writes that:

[I]t is difficult to conjecture what may have been the origin of the bird in this debased form, unless its first beginnings may be taken as a result of the unthinking perpetuation of some crudely-drawn example.

But in Historic Devices, Badges, and War-cries, by Mrs. Bury Palliser from 1870, we are told that this symbol is traced to the mythos surrounding Godfrei de Bouillon, the first of the Christian “Latin Kings of Jerusalem” and one of the leaders of the first Crusade. Writes Palliser:

It is related of him, that he, ‘At one draught of his bow, shooting against David’s Tower in Jerusalem, broched three feetless birds, called Alerions, upon his arrow, and thereupon assumed in his shield, or, three Alerions argent on a bend gules, which the house of Lorraine, descending from his race, continue to this day;’ adding to it these words from Virgil, Dederitne viam casusve deusve, ‘Did chance or God direct way?’



Left: Godfrei de Bouillon. Right: His royal device, the alleged inspiration for the Alerion





Godfrei de Bouillon dying, from William of Tyre’s History. What is going on here?

To me, the Alerion is quite obviously a sanitized version of a winged fascinus, a phallus worn for good luck, or to protect against the evil eye, what Pliny the Elder called a medicus invidiae (“remedy for envy”). In Worship of the Generative Powers, Thomas Wright claims that these are all votives belonging to the cult of Priapus, stating:

The first of these is the figure of a double phallus. It is sculptured on the lintel of one of the vomitories, or issues, of the second range of seats of the Roman amphitheatre, near the entrance-gate which looks to the south. The double and the triple phallus are very common among the small Roman bronzes, which appear to have served as amulets and for other similar purposes. In the latter, one phallus usually serves as the body, and is furnished with legs, generally those of the goat; a second occupies the usual place of this organ; and a third appears in that of a tail.


 


Fascinum, most with wings


Only a few writers have commented on this obvious connection, as far as I can tell, and only in the form of hints. But more scholars have commented on the phallic appearance of another symbol associated with French royalty, and specifically the first dynasty, the Merovingians. I am speaking of the fleur-de-lys, which I think may derive from the fascinus as well. Purportedly, as I mentioned before, it was handed down from Heaven to Saint Clothilde, the wife of King Clovis I (who converted him to Catholicism), and became the national heraldic device from then on. In the context of all the myths we’ve examined, this would almost have to be interpreted as the severed penis of “Heaven” himself: Oannes/Uranus, the “Perfect Man.” (The Cathar heretics of France, by the way, called themselves “The Perfect Ones,” and the rite that made them “Perfect” was the consolamentum, which, as I allude to later in this essay, may have, in my opinion, been a castration rite.)



The Legend of the Fleur-de-Lys

Interestingly, France, and Lorraine in particular, is home to many places with names similar to Mete and its variations, including the town of Metz in Lorraine, spelled “Mettis” locally. It was known as Mediomatrici “in ancient times,” according to Wikipedia, a name which the same source says means “the people between the Matrona (Marne) and the Matra.” There’s also the Meurthe river, after which the department Meurthe-et-Moselle in Lorraine is named. Also, the town of Stenay, in the Meuse department, was once the capitol of the Merovingian kingdom, and used to be called “Satanicum.”



Left: Arms of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Right: A Merovingian coin inscribed with letters from which Hammer-Purgstall could surely form the name “Mete.”

One figure said to be personified by the fascinus was called Mutinus Titinus. Mutuniatis is a term for a well-endowed male, but let us also not again the presence of the syllable “Mut,” interchangeable with Mete in the present context. Like Baphomet’s head, the fascinus was considered capable of “saving” those who believed in its power. According to Wikipedia, scholars think that “Mutinus” comes from the Latin muto or mutto, which they say was a slang word for a penis and which, in other contexts, is defined as a “cognomen,” and as something like a surname, but also nickname.

But when I looked up muto and related words in my Latin dictionary, I also found it to be the root of the English “mutual” and “mutation,” because it means moving, shifting, changing, or exchanging one thing for another. When I read this, I immediately thought of the inscription on one of Hammer-Purgstall’s idols that I had translated to “revenue through easy return.” Also, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “mutton, ” from the Old French moton, has been used as slang that meant “food for lust, loose women, prostitutes” since the(1510s, which “led to extensive British slang uses down to the present day for woman variously regarded as seeking lovers or as lust objects.”

The phallic god’s second name, “Titinus,” is based on yet another old Roman slang word for a penis, “Titus.” This, in the present context, reminds me of the Titans of Greek mythology, the race “giants,” “dragons” and “monsters,” ruled by Ouranos and Gaia, then by Chronos and Rhea, before the overthrow of Chronos by Zeus. I also think about the fact that in Lydda (Lod), Israel, Eusebius reports that during the reign of Constantine the Great (the fourth century), a church was dedicated there to an ambiguous “man of the highest distinction,” designated there as the titulus, meaning patron. This man was later considered to be St. George. George’s father’s name, Gerontios, means “old man,” bringing to mind both Chronos in his role as “father time,” and also his even older father Ouranos, whom he castrated. According to The Birthday Book of Saints, “Riding Saint George”—that is, sexual intercourse with the woman on top—was long considered a certain way of begetting a bishop.”[9]



Woman riding a green penis-shaped dragon

The Wikipedia article for Mutinus Tintinus mentions that this figure, being a disembodies phallus, is comparable both to the fascinus, and also to Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. Like Meroveus of the French dynasty, he also had divine parentage, possibly even with dual human/divine insemination, just like his French counterpart. The Wikipedia page for Servius Tullius states:

Most Roman sources name Servius mother as Ocrisia, a young noblewoman taken at the Roman siege of Corniculum and brought to Rome, either pregnant by her husband, who was killed at the siege: or as a virgin. She was given to Tanaquil, wife of king Tarquinius, and though slave, was treated with the respect due her former status. In one variant, she became wife to a noble client of Tarquinius. In others, she served the domestic rites of the royal hearth as a Vestal Virgin, and on one such occasion, having damped the hearth flames with a sacrificial offering, she was penetrated by a disembodied phallus that rose from the hearth. According to Tanaquil, this was a divine manifestation, either of the household Lar or Vulcan himself. Thus Servius was divinely fathered and already destined for greatness, despite his mother’s servile status; for the time being, Tanaquil and Ocrisia kept this a secret.

Interestingly, in the non-canonical Protovangelium of James, it says that Mary, the mother of Jesus, been given over by her parents at age three to temple priests, just as Ocrisia had been forced to serve the priesthood. The author Mark Gibbs, in his book The Virgin and the Priest, points out that this would have been highly unusual for a female child. This sort of thing would only have happened with male children, who were sometimes given to the temple, essentially as slaves, as a form of ransom payment by the family. She would have been raised solely by men not related to her. When she was approaching age 12, the priests decided she could no longer stay there, but she went directly to the home of Zacharias, described as “high priest.” Shortly after that, she was engaged to Joseph, but before that was consummated, became “miraculously” pregnant. More on this in a bit.



A denarius issued by Quintus Titius allegedly featuring Mutunus Tutunus

In Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, he writes:

. . . [T]he celebrated bronze in the Vatican has the male organs of generation placed upon the head of a cock, the emblem of the sun, supported by the neck and shoulders of a man. In this composition they represented the generative power of the [Eros], the Osiris, Mithras, or Bacchus, whose centre is the sun. . . . The inscription on the pedestal [says] . . . The Saviour of the World . . . a title always venerable under whatever image it be presented [with].



Fascinus ejaculates into the Evil Eye

The fascinus is ejaculating into the Evil Eye in counter-attack. The eye’s poisonous effect is symbolized by the presence of the scorpion. In the rites of Mithras, the scorpion was associated with the grade of Perses, the Persian, which was dedicated to the Moon goddess. According to their mysteries, when Mithras slayed the Bull, its testicles were cut off by a scorpion and offered to the Moon, as she was the goddess considered to be in charge of sexual generation. The Moon was thought by the Romans to be the gate through which souls passed into physical incarnation, and also how they exited this realm.



Perseus, by Cellini

You realize, now, that a caduceus, which is now commonly used as a symbol of medicine (the “remedy,” with the etymology of “med” being related to metis), is really a winged fascinus entwined with snakes. In alchemy and other arcane traditions, a crucified snake or impaled serpent or Dragon is symbolic of poison used as an antidote, like the poison Zeus gave to Chronos, causing him to vomit up his children.



El Greco’s John the Apostle, showing John’s symbol, a serpent in a cup. The story, according to Our Christian Symbols by Friedrich Rest, is that “an attempt was made to poison John, but the attempt was unsuccessful because the poison vanished in the form of a serpent.” The image below is from the same book.


 


Bohemian coin featuring Christ crucified on obverse side, brazen serpent on cross from Numbers 21 8-9 on reverse. The latter healed the Israelites from the bites of “fiery serpents” when they gazed upon it. The former was compared to this in The Gospel of John 3:14-15: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.



It is also said to be symbolic of fixing the volatile. Consider the fact that the “Evil Eye” can caused someone to freeze, like the stare of the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, a dragon. This is what it means to “fascinate,” and what a fascinus is really supposed to do. It points the Evil Eye right back at the aggressor. Like a gargoyle used to scare away evil spirits, it takes a demon to slay a demon. This is what St. George and the Archangel Michael slaying Dragons is all about. They themselves were both viewed by Gnostics as symbols of the Demiurge.



Left: Gorgon head on Byzantine Gnostic amulet. Inscription reads: “Holy, holy, Lord of hosts, in the highest, Blessed!” Right: Medusa by Carvaggio



The caduceus between the legs of Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet is a bit more complicated though. I rather think that it represents a straw connected to his urethra, as used on the castrated priests/priestesses of the Roman cult of Cybele, to keep them from closing up. I also think it could be used to remove the “sprouting water,” as such transgendered people can still produce it. Levi himself wrote in Dogme et Rituel about Baphomet’s caduceus that “The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life.”

Add that to the alleged existence of a magical technology to engender children rectally, and you have the ability for a parthenogenic birth from the anus of a castrated man. The Ophites and Templars could have seen that as a “virgin birth,” and a miracle. It would explain the chicken symbolism seen on the emblem of Abraxas, on the “Savior of the World” at the Vatican, and on the arms of the House of Visconti-Sforza.

Even more horrific, one could conceivably conceive within one’s own anus, and thus create a child without a partner, just like Sophia/Mete is said to have done in Gnostic theology. (That pun about conception was meant to prove once again the connection in our minds and our language between knowledge or mental activity and sexual generation.) You might even be able to project your own soul into the child, thus escaping death and achieving “eternal life.” This self-impregnation, this parthenogenesis, could presumably be achieved either through masturbation or self-penetration, as long as there was a fertile receptacle, or some (perhaps supernatural) way of making it fertile. Is that what it means when, in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, it says that the Father of All knew himself to generate Barbelo (seemingly an aspect of Sophia)? In that text (as presented by Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism by Kurt Rudolf), we read:

He [the Father of All] knew his own image when he saw it in the pure water of light which surrounded him. And his thought (ennoia) accomplished a work, it revealed itself. It stood before him out of the glory of the light: this is the power which is before the all, which revealed itself, the perfect providence (pronoia) of the all, the light, the likeness of the light, the image of the invisible.

I think this—the Father’s self-knowing—is what is being illustrated in the image referred to by Eliphas Levi regarding what he called “The Great Kabbalistic Symbol of the Zohar” in his Magick: A History of Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, of which he writes:

That synthesis of the word, formulated by the human figure, ascended slowly and emerged from the water, like the sun in its rising. When the eyes appeared, light was made; when the mouth was manifested, there was the creation of spirits and the word passed into expression. The entire head was revealed, and this completed the first day of creation. The shoulders, the arms, the breasts arose, and thereupon work began. With one hand the Divine Image put back the sea, while with the other it raised up continents and mountains. The Image grew and grew; the generative organs appears, and all beings began to increase and multiply. The form stood at length erect, having one foot upon the earth and one upon the waters. Beholding itself at full length in the ocean of creation, it breathed on its own reflection and called its likeness into life. It said: Let us make man—and thus man was made. … Hereby is man but the shadow of a shadow, and yet he is the image of divine power. … Such is the sense in which he is depicted as a giant; and this is why Swedenborg, haunted in his dreams by reminiscences of the Kabalah, says the entire creation is only a titanic man….

But when you look at the image called “The Great Kabbalistic Symbol of the Zohar” (see below), it really doesn’t look like any shadow would. After all, how would the shadow of his legs be cast behind him like that? It really looks like he’s knowing his own shadow, in a biblical sense. Also, notice the surprised look on the top figure’s face, as though what he is doing is causing pain to himself that he didn’t expect.




Left: “The Great Kabbalistic Symbol of The Zohar.” Right: The Kabbalistic image “Zaur Anpin,” both from Magic: A History of its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, by Eliphas Levi. 



The story of creation in The Apocryphon of John continues thusly regarding Barbelo:

She is the perfect power Barbelo, the perfect aeon of glory… She is the first thought (ennoia), his (the Father’s ) image. She became a first ‘man,’ which is the virgin spirit (pneuma)… And Barbelo asked of him to give her a first knowledge; he granted it. When he granted it, the first knowledge was manifested…

Note that Barbelo is described as becoming “a first ‘man’”: like Adam? Adam, in the first description of the making of men in the first chapter (verses 26-27) of The Book of Genesis, is described as possessing both sexes within him. This was the creation of Adam as the “image” of God, who, again, seems to be consist of a multiplicity of beings, and presumably, like the image, possessing both sexes.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

It is only in the second creation of Adam, after God has already rested from the previous creation, that Adam is said to be formed from the dust of the ground, and Eve taken from his rib. This takes place starting at verse 4 of the second chapter of Genesis, and here there is no language implying the plurality of God. The Kabbalistic interpretation of this is that the first creation described is of another, more primary, cosmos, existing within and constituting the body of that first first man, whom they call “Adam Kadmon.”

Adam Kadmon is always portrayed as a Hermaphrodite, like God presumably is. Notice that in Genesis, this “man” is only declared to be made after the rest of the cosmos is done—as if each element of creation appeared as the corresponding part of Adam’s body rose from the depths of chaos. This is just like what The Zohar claims happened when “God” arose in this manner, as paraphrased in the passage from Eliphas Levi quoted above.

The cleaving apart of the hermaphroditic prime parents Ouranos and Gaia by Chronos seems to be represented holding his scythe in the image below, based on a bas relief at a church that Hammer-Purgstall included in Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum as Tab. III, fig. 4. This picture has no doubt naively taken by most who have seen it to merely represent the curse of death that Genesis says the eating of the “knowledge fruit” brought to Adam and Eve. But clearly, the genitals have been cut, and they are bending over in pain, while the man who did the cutting still holds the weapon, and one of the Titanic monsters born from out of them slithers nearby.















Tab. III, fig. 1 an 4, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum






Left: Eve tempted by fruit of “genital wisdom.” Right: Both prime parents indulge.



This leaves me to wonder if the notion of Adam and Eve having an instinct to cover their genital areas immediately after obtaining the result of their forbidden “knowledge” wasn’t at least as much about stopping the bleeding with a bandage as it was about covering the results of their act out of shame.[10] Genesis abruptly moves from their expulsion from Eden to the birth of their two sons, one of whom grows up to have an occupation associated with imagery now commonly applied to Christ, which the other focuses his expertise in the same area as Chronos, inventor of agriculture. “And Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2).

Thus the man with the scythe is Cain, that is, Chronos, who killed his brother, since his father was the also the son of his mother, Gaia. Thus, he is the “Son of the Widow” of the Freemasons, and likely equivalent to Horus in the Egyptian myths. His mother was the Earth, who cried out when the blood was spilled, because her own guts were being torn apart in the process also. Four fruits are shown on the tree on Tab. III, fig. 4, which we could take to stand for Cain, Abel, Seth, and perhaps a fourth progeny whose name is unknown or hidden in the Biblical text.

Returning to The Apocryphon of John, Kurt Rudolph summarizes the next stage of creation:

In the same fashion (prayer, assent, manifestation) other aeons also come into being: ‘incorruptibility,’ ‘eternal life’ (the formation of a second Ennoia has evidently dropped out of our text); altogether they form a bisexual ‘pentad of the aeons of the father’ or a ‘decad.’ Then a further action begins: Barbelo after ‘steadfast looking’ at the Father brings forth a ‘blessed spark of light,’ which is described as ‘only-begotten’ (monogenes), ‘divine self-begotten (autogenes),’ ‘first-born son of the all’ and is identified with the heavenly Christ (interpreted as ‘kindly’=chrestos).

So Jesus is autogenes—self conceived and, the way I read it, conceived within himself. Most would just chock up the oxymoronic nature of this statement only seeming nonsensical because we can’t understand God’s mysterious ways, and after all the Son is in the Father, while the Father is in the Son, right? Yes, and I refer you to the Great Kabbalistic Symbol of the Zohar as an illustration of how this was done, quite literally.

Am I somehow saying that Christ and the Virgin, the Mother of God, are in some way the same person? The Trinitarian doctrine says that there is one primary creative deity with three distinct personalities. This is commonly illustrated by the image you see below, where the only commonality between them is that they are all somehow God, while any sense of them being actually merged together is specifically denied:



But The Gospel of John couldn’t be more clear about the matter: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Therefore, a better illustration, also commonly used by mainstream Christian theologians today, can be found below:





This image demonstrates how to visualize that the Father and Son are within one another; that the Father and the Holy Spirit are within one another (as though married and joined physically); and that this latter statement also applies to the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Divine Sophia. The Holy Spirit Sophia is also thought of as the creative Logos, “the Word,” described in The Gospel of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.” (Thus again John affirms and clearly describes the Trinity relationship.) Also, theologians frequently agree with the idea that Sophia/the Holy Spirit is the same as the Shekinah, the Cloud of Glory of God’s manifestation, as described in the Old Testament, stated in Jewish theology to be God’s bride.





This is something taken quite literally by Kabbalists, who even say, as in The Zohar, that God has taken a concubine, equated with the dark demoness Lilith, who has alienated him from his wife, but that God will return to her at the End of Days and reconcile everything. We see this in Greek mythology, where Zeus takes a second wife, Hera, who is hostile towards all of the demigod children that he then breeds with a variety of human females. But we see from The Apocryphon of John that in the Gnostic view, these sexual identities of God’s various personalities, which they all calling different aeons, are not really distinct unless in the context of breeding. That is, Barbelo (Sophia) seems to be female by virtue of the fact that she gives birth to another aeon. Merely a few lines of text before that, she is described as a “first man,” like Adam.

But Jesus, whom both mainstream and non-mainstream Christians frequently identify as a “second Adam,” is, in Gnostic theology, both, seemingly, a son of Barbelo (the autogenes and chrestos described above), and also as her husband or mate. Now recall that in that Gnostic theology, the main fault with Sophia, the reason why she is presented as a fallen figure, was because she made a baby by herself, without her partner’s consent! In the passage below from The Apocryphon of John, that Christ figure is described as “the male virgin spirit.”

Our sister Sophia, who is an Aeon, thought a thought of herself. And through the thought of the spirit (pneuma) and the first knowledge she wanted to reveal the likeness (of her thought) out of herself, although the spirit had not consented or granted [it], nor again had her partner consented, the male virgin spirit. So she did not find one in harmony (symphonos) with her, when she was about to concede it without the consent of the spirit and the knowledge of her own partner, when she became strong (pregnant) in consequence of the passion that was in her. Her thought could not remain inactive, and [so] her work came forth: imperfect, hateful in appearance, since she had made it without her consort (syzygos). And it was not like the appearance of the mother, since it was of another form. But she looked upon it in her consideration that it was of the stamp of a different appearance, since it had the external (appearance) of a serpent and a lion; its [eyes] shone with fire. She cast it away from herself, out of those places, that none of the immortals might see it, since she had born it in ignorance. She bound it with a cloud of light, set a throne in the midst of the cloud, that none might see it except the holy spirit—whom they call ‘life’ (zoe), the mother of all—and gave him the name ‘Jaldabaoth.’ This is the first archon. He drew much power from the mother, removed himself from her, and turned himself away from the place in which he had been born. He took possession of another place. He made for himself an aeon flaming with shining fire, in which he now dwells.

The Demiurge thus involuntarily brought into being now begins to create his own world—again, by knowing himself! “He united himself with the unreason (aponoia) which is with him,” the text says. It continues:

But Jaldabaoth, Saklas, the many-formed, so that he can show himself with any face, gave to them (the planets) of the fire which belongs to him; but he did not give them of the pure light of the power which he had drawn from the mother. For this reason he ruled over them, because of the glory which was in him from the power [of the light] from the mother. For this reason he had himself called “God,” in that he resisted the nature (hypostasis) from which he had come into being. And he bound the seven powers with the principalities.

The seven powers, I think, are represented in the Mete casket image in the Duce de Blacas collection at the British Museum as the 7-pointed star on the bottom left, while the pentagram on the bottom right (an ancient hieroglyph that literally meant “shackle” and “prison” to the Sumerians) represents the shackles that bind them. The notion of all the Archons being chained together by the Demiurge is represented in Homer’s Iliad, where Zeus says to the other gods:

If you tied a chain of gold to the sky, and all of you, gods and goddesses, took hold, you could not drag Zeus the High Counsellor to earth with all your efforts. But if I determined to pull with a will, I could haul up land and sea, then loop the chain round a peak of Olympus, and leave them dangling in space. By that much am I greater than gods and men.

Many of the sons of the Demiurge have names corresponding to words used in the Old Testament for God (“Adonaios,” “Adonin,” like Adonai, and “Sabaoth”), demons or “false gods” (“Belias,” like “Belial” or “Baal”) and the names of Old Testament characters, such as Cain, who the text overtly describes as being “the sun.” There’s also a “Hermas,” corresponding to Hermes. But the syllable “Adon” has also been connected by some writers (such as L.A. Waddell) to Adam. Some even suggest that Adam is actually God himself, a notion implied in the Adam Kadmon concept.

Also implicit with this belief in, and interpretation of, the idea of Adam Kadmon, is the notion of God’s multiple personalities, and not just two sets of sex organs, for “male and female created he them.” In several of the lines in the Eden story in Genesis, God speaks to unnamed others. This fact has inexplicably been interpreted by mainstream theologians as God speaking to himself in the plural (and calling himself a name with a plural form: Elohim) for no particular reason.

The main concern of the Elohim at the end of the Garden tale is that Adam and Eve should not be allowed to eat from the “tree of life.” They had already transgressed and eaten from the “tree of knowledge” that was “in the midst of the garden.” In other words, Eve had already been persuaded by this mysterious serpent creature, which is so often depicted in religious artwork as wrapped around the tree of knowledge, to eat the fruit from the tree, because it would make her wise.

What if we interpreted the tree as the human body, and note that it was considered interchangeable with the cross of the crucifixion, symbolized by the letter Tau (T), then take into account what Hammer-Purgstall says about the letter Tau being a symbol for the phallus? These things, taken together, would indicate that Adam’s penis, with a mind of its own, persuaded Eve to eat of its produce. This somehow made her “wise,” and so she persuaded Adam to do the same. Then they realized they were “naked,” and that made the Elohim aware that they had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God then discovered their crime, and Adam blamed it on Eve.

In Gnostic cosmology, Jaldabaoth then seems to become the first male entity to voluntarily bring forth sons. Before that, Sophia-Barbelo, the “first man” and “virgin spirit,” couldn’t find a willing partner to breed with, so she did it with herself. This, I think, is how, in a Gnostic sense, she can still be described as a “Virgin” even after she conceived: because she didn’t unite with a separate entity in order to do it, but only with herself. That is why, thus impregnating herself, she could be thought of as the “first man.”

As we know so well now, in Greek creation myths, we are told that Ouranos, Chronos, and Zeus all wanted to avoid having offspring. In each case, they were thwarted by their female half, and by the children themselves. Zeus eventually changed his mind and wanted to beget offspring, esp. with human females, but it was his wife Hera who was always trying to kill them off. This is purportedly what led to him having to rebirth Dionysus from his “thigh” (regenerating him from his heart after the rest of him was torn apart in a plot devised by Hera).

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