TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
This gives us another date and that is 1237 AD for the Samalas Super volcano. The little ice age would then have lasted 600 years which is not likely. Other volcanoes also caused trouble, but we know a real comparable blew in Indonesia back in the nineteenth century and that this was close by Samalas.
Problem is that the comparable generated poor weather for a couple of years and that was it. Thus i do discount volcanoes on the Equator as been particularly problematic. Instead i give more credence to something on the Alaska pan handle for making real trouble, yet it is also short lived.
Whatever the true course, we have here an unusual movement down from the Plains to good land in Georgia. What it does prove though is just how possible this mobility was. After all we have Bronze Age Europeans and later operating from 2500 BC along the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and the whole Atlantic seaboard on the basis of multiple site. Actual overland movement was obviously no particular problem for even large settled communities.
Archaeological Site 9TW1 near Warner Robbins, GA ~ Proposed for inclusion in the new Ocmulgee National Park
Ocmulgee Bottoms before the
arrival of Hernando de Soto was clearly a verdant water-land of ethnic
Brunswick Stew and geologically more like the appearance of the South
Atlantic Coastal Marshes. Archaeologists found that this island in the
Ocmulgee Bottoms had been repeatedly occupied during the period between
1000 BC and 1800 AD, but its largest population occurred during the
coldest portions of the Little Ice Age . . . 1300 AD to 1600 AD. It was
during this time span that a non-Muskogean, non-Mayan people built
earthberm architecture identical to that erected on the Western Plains
in the 1700s by such peoples as the Kanza (Kaw), Quapaw, Mandan and
Arikara. Since we have documentation via 18th century maps that the
Kanza were in Georgia and Alabama, we can safely assume that these
people on the Ocmulgee were ancestors of the Kanza . . . a Siouan
people.
Who lived in Ocmulgee Bottoms?
It would be completely inaccurate to
label the whole Ocmulgee Bottoms with the name of any
federally-recognized tribe today . . . that includes the Creeks. Yes,
the minuscule number of those, who did survive the onslaught of European
diseases and English-sponsored slave raids did come together to form
the People of One Fire or Creek Confederacy, but prior to being
clustered into a “tribe” their ancestors represented many distinct
cultural traditions from across the Americas. I suspect that these
tribes came and went. Most of the Kanza went . . . eventually to the
Western Plains. The earliest detailed map of Ocmulgee Bottoms stated
that many branches of the Creek Confederacy relocated from the Ocmulgee
River to the Chattahoochee River in 1716, but some had returned. This architectural computer model will be converted into an animated film later in 2018.
Red and blue notes over Bullard topo map
During the 1990s, the LAMAR Institute
and Ocmulgee Archaeological Society carried out one of the most detailed
and comprehensively illustrated archaeological studies ever in the
Southeast here. There are numerous accurate topographic maps. The
professional work included analysis of the geological history (changing
channel locations) of the Ocmulgee River by a geology professor at
Mercer University in Macon. TheBullard Landing Archaeological Reportis
available online in a PDF format by clicking its name in this sentence
and also can be downloaded. I strongly urge readers to study it. This
is the type of comprehensive analysis that we would like to see in all
archaeological studies of Southeastern Native American heritage sites.
With such detailed information, it was
possible to create an accurate computer model by interpolating the
topographic and archaeological information with GIS mapping. Thus we
can be certain of a reasonable degree of accuracy in any virtual reality
animation.
Understanding the Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age was initiated by the
massive explosion of Samalas supervolcano in 1237 AD, followed by
several more major volcanic eruptions in Mexico, Central America, South
America, Iceland and Sicily. Both the Gulf Stream and the Jet Streams
shifted southward in North America and the North Atlantic Ocean. Around
1250 AD, torrential rains in Georgia caused catastrophic floods on the
Etowah, Ocmulgee and Savannah Rivers, which washed over entire towns.
Both Ichesi (Ocmulgee River) and Etula
(Etowah River) were turned into islands. The confrontation of a more
southerly Jet Stream with moisture flowing northward from the Gulf of
Mexico caused dense snow packs to form over the Georgia and Southern
Blue Ridge Mountains. This is why the traditional Creek name for the
Georgia Mountains is the Snowy Mountains. In December 1567, Spanish
Captain Juan Pardo found the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains so deeply
covered in snow that the trails were impassible.
Even as late as 1776, the Southeast’s
climate was very different than today. William Bartram stated that when
the snow melted on the Georgia Mountains, the province’s rivers would
swell across the landscape. The Okefenokee Swamp would triple in size
while the North Fork of the Satilla River functioned as an additional
outlet for the great Altamaha River. The Okeefenokee back then was a
lake with an island in it, similar in size and appearance to Lake
Okeechobee in southern Florida. That is why Colonial Period maps of
Southeast Georgia are so different than maps of the region today.
During the spring melt, Ocmulgee
Bottoms would have appeared to be a lake with marshes in it. This
probably the reason that the original name of the Ocmulgee River was
Ochesee Creek. In British English, a creek or then, crique, was a tidal
stream in marshes. Thus, it makes perfect sense that the builders of
this town in the Ocmulgee River would construct their lodges on mounds.
This architectural innovation raised houses and communal buildings
above most flood levels.
Kanza, Quapaw, Mandan, and Arikara had irregular, roundish plazas. Kanza and Quapaw houses were more square than Mandan houses.
The Town Plan and architecture
The town was built on a large island
formed by multiple channels of the Ocmulgee River. The relatively deep
water of these channels negated the need to build a timber palisade.
With so many allied towns in its vicinity, an attempt to use canoes to
attack the town would be suicidal. Apparently, the town was abandoned
after a large flood, which created new channels that cut across the
island. This is not known for certain since large scale cotton farming
in the 1800s caused massive amounts of Georgia Red Clay to flow down the
Ocmulgee during floods, which deposited a layer of clay over this
island at least three feet thick.
A common feature of the Mandan,
Arikara, Kanza, Quapaw and Osage villages was that there was a circular
bundle of timbers in the center of the town plaza. This feature was
found at the King Village Site on the Coosa River in Northwest Georgia,
but is not mentioned in the report on Bullard Landing. However, the
archaeological team at Bullard Landing did not excavate the plaza,
because the entire town site was covered in a 30-36 inch coat of red
clay. Extensive labor was required just to get down to the soil from
the 1700s.
The architecture of Bullard Landing
differs from most Kanza, Quapaw, Mandan and Arikara architecture in that
most of the buildings were constructed on mounds. The house mounds
were typically 1-2 feet tall. The public buildings were set on an
irregular natural terrace , plus were on top of mounds, running 3- 6.5
feet tall. It could be that older Mandan villages contained mounds as
the result of houses being built on top of demolished houses. However,
available references did not mention Mandan mounds.
The town in historical records
This town was apparently visited by the
Hernando de Soto Expedition in March 1540. De Soto visited two towns
on islands in the Ocmulgee Bottoms. One was occupied, palisaded and
friendly. The occupants had fled from the other town and it had no
timber palisade. There is a strong possibility that the Bullard Landing
town was the one with no timber palisade.
The five accounts of the De Soto
Expedition provide varying details for the portion of the journey along
the Ocmulgee River. The only version that contains any detail for the
part of the De Soto expedition in the area of the Bullard Landing town
is the account of De Soto’s personal secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel. He
states that . . . “They came to a village, which was on an island in
this river, where they captured some provisions and, as it was a
perilous place, before canoes should appear, they turned to go back the
way they came, but first they breakfasted on some fowl of the country,
which are called guanaxas and some strips of venison which they found
placed upon a framework of sticks, as for roasting on a gridiron.”
This is actually nonsense and only asks if you can stick together enough source to answer a directed question. what i want to see is the text to be processed and then see a finite list of say ten inferences from the text and relating to an external body of knowledge.
That is a far better definition of reading comprehension.
Been able to discover that there are four bobsey twins is hardly enough or comprehension that we can actually respect..
Deep neural network models score higher than humans in reading and comprehension test
"Update your AGI predictions"--- Prof. Roman Yampolskiy, PhD @romanyam
Microsoft and Alibaba have developed deep neural network models that scored higher than humans in a Stanford University reading and comprehension test, Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD).
Microsoft achieved 82.650 on the ExactMatch (EM) metric* on Jan. 3, and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. scored 82.440 on Jan. 5. The best human score so far is 82.304.
“SQuAD is a new reading comprehension dataset, consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage,” according to the Stanford NLP Group. “With 100,000+ question-answer pairs on 500+ articles, SQuAD is significantly larger than previous reading comprehension datasets.”
However, challenging the “comprehension” description, Gary Marcus, PhD, a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, notes in a tweet that “the SQUAD test shows that machines can highlight relevant passages in text, not that they understand those passages.”
“The Chinese e-commerce titan has joined the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. in a race to develop AI that can enrich social media feeds, target ads and services or even aid in autonomous driving, Bloomberg notes. “Beijing has endorsed the technology in a national-level plan that calls for the country to become the industry leader 2030.”
*”The ExactMatch metric measures the percentage of predictions that match any one of the ground truth answers exactly. The F1 score metric measures the average overlap between the prediction and ground truth answer.” – Pranav Rajpurkar et al., ArXiv
In the past Microsoft (and others) have trumpeted their own AI achievements when their work was actually rubbish. Remember their NN that detected a person’s age, it would fail to match the age for exactly the same image simply based on it’s scale, the number of pixels and therefore the relative noise levels. Like a lot of NNs actually they have deep problems around the presence or absence of noise and the output can end up on a completely different maxima in a way that a human brain would never do.
a) I wonder who would expect machines to perform with human cognitive robustness, when there is currently no learning model with the processing power of the human brain?
b) I also ponder why people think progress is not made, just because AGi is not yet here?
I do not trust the explanation given at all but it is a starting point. Yet we do live inside a bubble of dark matter and that dark matter behaves like a non compressible fluid that carries almost all the gravity. Thus it may be possible to detect stay behind bubbles as the visible matter is drawn down into the larger galaxy.
Those bubbles may well be restricted to stars alone and this appears possible as stars are short lived against the age of a galaxy. A better explanation for those streamers of stars though could well be a resonance wave passing through dark matter and triggering the star formation. That safely presumes the universe is completely flooded with Dark Matter which i find most plausible
At least we are starting to see fruitful speculation.
..
Dark Energy Survey spots remains of 11 galaxies devoured by the Milky Way
Data released from the Dark Energy Survey has revealed 11 new stellar streams, the leftovers from smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has collided with and devoured(Credit: Dark Energy Survey)
The first intriguing findings have been released from the Dark Energy Survey, a project that's studying the sky to find clues about the mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. And among the data is the discovery of 11 new stellar streams, the remains of smaller galaxies that our own Milky Way has torn to shreds.
In the late 1990s, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That goes against the previous prevailing ideas of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which stated that expansion should be slowing down thanks to gravity. Physicists coined the term "dark energy" to refer to the unknown force that seems to be driving the acceleration, and apparently contributes more than 68 percent of the total energy in the universe. While there is some argument that dark energy doesn't exist, it is currently the most accepted idea to explain these observations.
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) was launched in 2013 to try to learn more about the strange phenomenon, and the results from the first three years of that project were released to the public at the American Astronomical Society meeting last week. That data dump includes hundreds of terabytes of images snapped by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera that cover an eighth of the entire sky through about 40,000 photos, as well as catalogs describing hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies.
"There are all kinds of discoveries waiting to be found in the data," says Brian Yanny, a data management project scientist on DES. "While DES scientists are focused on using it to learn about dark energy, we wanted to enable astronomers to explore these images in new ways, to improve our understanding of the universe."
One of these new discoveries sheds some light on the violent history of the Milky Way. Galaxies collide fairly regularly, with the larger one usually tearing the smaller one to pieces and absorbing its stars and matter. But some of these stars become locked in orbit around the larger galaxy, forming what's known as a stellar stream.
Normally these stellar streams are hard to spot, since the stars that make them up are very spread out. Just 23 streams have been identified in the past, most of which surround the Milky Way, with a few more around our galactic neighbor, Andromeda. That makes the discovery of 11 more in the space of three years pretty impressive.
"It's exciting that we found so many stellar streams," says Alex Drlica-Wagner, an astrophysicist involved in the project. "We can use these streams to measure the amount, distribution and 'clumpiness' of dark matter in the Milky Way. Studies of stellar streams will help constrain the fundamental properties of dark matter."
Along with helping to pull back the curtain on the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, the study can help astronomers piece together the history of the Milky Way and other galaxies.
The Dark Energy Survey's observations are due to wrap up later this year, but we're likely to be hearing about discoveries pulled from its data for a long time yet.
Here it is. Mass production. Once we see a million cars on the road we will have real statistics to talk about and any remaining bugs worked out of the software. Definitely good for the urban environment were lapses of attention are quickly punished but where crashes are usually survivable.
Just as clearly this software is now enabling pilot-less air transport as well. Let me make this clear. The driver and the pilot is on the way to been fully replaced. They will still be there sitting in an office with the capacity to intervene as we do with drones. However the day of an on-board driver is quickly ending.
.
This will release an army of workers back into the economy.
GM hopes to put driverless Cruise AV on roads in 2019
https://newatlas.com/gm-dot-driverless-cruiseav/52973/? The Cruise AV has no manual driver controls, and relies entirely on cameras and sensors to drive itself without human input(Credit: General Motors)
Imagine hailing a ride through your ride-sharing app, and when it arrives to pick you up, there's nobody inside. Just four seats. No steering wheel, no pedals, and no human control whatsoever. Would you get inside? GM hopes that you will, and the company wants you to try it out next year with the Cruise AV.
General Motors has filed a petition with the US Department of Transportation asking to deploy the self-driving Cruise AV in 2019. The reportedly production-ready car has no pedals or steering wheel, or any sort of manual control mechanism. It's based on the Bolt EV, and is not to be confused with the Cruze compact car. The Cruise AV gets its name from Cruise Automation, the startup GM purchased in 2016 to accelerate software development for autonomous vehicle technology.
Equipped with a host of safety equipment, the Cruise AV can scan in both long and short range in a 360-degree view. The vehicle has five LiDAR sensors (Light Detection And Ranging), 16 video cameras, and 21 radar sensors. The laser measurements give precision information about fixed and moving objects, complemented by the radar emitters and receivers on board.
Meanwhile, cameras work with the LiDAR inputs to classify objects being tracked. This helps to identify vehicle types, pedestrians, roadway details, and signage. Longer-range sensors track oncoming vehicles moving at higher speeds to anticipate driving needs farther along, while the short-range detectors determine immediate requirements for the automated vehicle.
General Motors has outlined the Cruise AV in its Safety Report, issued along with the petition to the Department of Transportation to allow limited testing of the Cruise AV on public roads through GM's in-house ride sharing program in select cities around the United States.
In two days we will have the State of the Union Address. There is a high probability that Trump will choose that venue to announce at least some of what has been undertaken to stop cold what has been discovered to be a twenty year program to put the USA under a Fascist authoritarian government. This program was hatched around placing Obama in the presidency by the NWO and their allies within the US government. Obama had the first eight years and Clinton was expected to finish it.
I do want to say this is inspired by leftovers of Nazism and other allies of convenience. That may not be completely true, but all this is glued together by the perfect conspiracy of child pedophilia which has provided the necessary spine to this conspiracy. There are overwhelming details to add to all this, but most is too much to actually handle.
As i have posted earlier, the Marine Corp was provided with enabling orders, legal authorities and 10,000 sealed indictments whose existence can be readily confirmed. The task is otherwise simply too large for civilian authorities. February should see massive numbers of arrests.
At the same time, a number of public figures have been interviewed and let free to make their last arrangements. This has led to a record number of corporate resignations to block asset seizure which was reasonable. It is a form of catch and release. A large number face rendition to Gitmo to block USA legal redress and all the corruption there.
As also posted earlier, This is a full blown military intelligence operation and it encompasses cleaning up both the FBI and the CIA as well. I would not be surprised to see General Flynn heavily involved. The past administration worked long and hard to place their loyal operatives in positions of trust.
All this activity is also part of the cleanup taking place in Saudi Arabia. At this time, we believe the Princes were freed after been shaken down, but possibly rearrested and shipped to the USA for further questioning. We also understand the UK is acting on USA intelligence to take down their hidden pedophilia network. Add in the cooperation shown by Russia, China and others and the ground is established for a full global assault on the so called NWO.
All this is working under the cloak of full military security, so expect no leaks and chatter. Most of what we are picking up is coming directly from deliberate leaks through Q Anon which should really be described as warning orders to loyalists and from interpreting unusual activity that is mostly focused around intelligence gathering and establishing a larger foot print at Gitmo.. . .
Quite true but it actually avoids addressing the real problem. It is that the economy cannot absorb a huge number of untrained individuals who can not achieve self sufficiency quickly. At the same time, low wage accepting immigrants do prevent higher wages for current native employees.
Free trade correctly practiced is an excellent innovation and works wonderfully. Where it gets derailed is when an employee in Mexico is not paid American wages. This also sharply impacts Mexico`s tax base which finds it harder to raise educational standards.. Now this can be tolerated for a while of course as happened when Canada and the USA did their integration by adjusting the duty regime at ten percent per year. That proved to be an important innovation as it allowed capital to also adjust in the course of business.
Our core problem has been that capital has massively invested globally in order to build up for the first time serious off shore markets. This has allowed global wages to be established in the first place. This process is not complete and will continue for another generation as least.
All this has cut loose a lot of NAFTA workers who have had to adjust to lower wages. It really did not have to happen this way but it did. The real problem is that a flood of the untrained were also imported in order to suppress wages. Again there were serious issues of ill intent applied also working themselves out in Europe.
As far as NAFTA is concerned, it requires a controlled immigration as used in Canada and a massive reorganization of education in Mexico to match NAFTA standards. It may well mean making English language training mandatory to use as a second language.
Markets can then sort it all out pretty quickly.
No, Immigrants Are Not Stealing Our Jobs
Jobs might become less lucrative, but they aren’t stolen.
The continuing controversy over immigration, legal and illegal, smothers long-standing flattering descriptions of the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” Ditto for “melting pot” and e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). I enjoy asking people opposed to immigration when it was that immigrants began to undermine the US economy. Answers laced with smugness about immigrants “stealing our jobs” and racial or ethnic animus are common. Amusing to me was a relative who said that immigrants “went bad after our people arrived.”
It is good to recall that before 1882, US immigration policy was “Y’all Come.” That is, immigration was unencumbered but immigrants had to work to survive. Restrictions began in 1882 when the first of three Chinese exclusion acts became law. More general restrictions simmered in Congress mingled with presidential vetoes starting in the 1890s until finally becoming law in the 1920s.
So what is it about immigration? Why the outcry? Why does a nation of immigrants react so vehemently to whoever is the immigrant target group of the day/month/year? Working immigrants, legal or illegal, put into play two opposing forces on living standards of resident Americans.
"Stealing Our Jobs"
First, working immigrants represent wage competition for working Americans. These Americans obviously lose. Second, those who buy these immigrants’ services gain — that is, both employers of immigrants and buyers of what immigrants produce gain.
A simple numerical example shows that the second force outweighs the first, meaning that when immigrants allegedly “steal our jobs,” they increase the size of resident Americans’ economic pie! It’s when immigrants don’t work (no supposed job theft) that they lower overall living standards of resident Americans. Not quite what you hear coming from immigration’s opponents, is it?
Immigration is not an employment issue. Suppose that prior to immigration, American potato chip workers earned $12 per hour. An influx of immigrants reduces the potato chip workers’ wage to $8 per hour. American potato chip workers will fall into two categories. First will be those whose alternative earning capabilities are below $8 per hour. These Americans will stay put, employment-wise, losing the full difference between the pre and post-immigration wages ($12 minus $8 equals $4) per hour. Their jobs aren’t stolen, they’re just less lucrative. The second group will be those with alternative earning capabilities superior to the now lower potato chip wage ($8 per hour) but less than what they were earning prior to the immigration ($12 per hour). They also lose. But it will be less than those in the first group because they will be moving to their next best alternative job.
For both groups, immigration is not an employment issue. Members of the first group lose $4.00 per hour; those in the second group lose less than $4.00 per hour. Jobs are not stolen, they just become less lucrative. Immigration is not an employment issue.
Working Immigrants Are a Net Benefit
Does what is lost by American potato chip workers accrue to immigrants? To many, the answer is an emphatic “Yes.” After all, immigrants gain and their American competitors lose. What could be more obvious, they say? “Simple and obvious,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Immigrants get paid $8, not the difference between what their American competitors earn before and after the immigrants’ arrival.
Rather, working Immigrants re-slice the pie among Americans — from potato chip workers to potato chip employers and consumers. Equally important, these immigrants increase the size of the pie for resident Americans. Recall that those potato chip workers with alternative earning capabilities greater than $8 exited the industry. Assume these capabilities on average equal $10. That means when these folks had been producing potato chips, resident Americans gave up on average $10 per hour of other things that could have been produced. When immigrants earning $8 per hour are substituted for $10 per hour American workers, it means Americans have the potato chips and $2 more for other things.
Everything changes when immigrants are non-working. It’s just like hiring a professional roofer to fix your roof because he costs you less than fixing it yourself (including the cost of your time). The roofer is analogous to an immigrant coming to your household. In either scenario, your roof is repaired, but hiring the lower cost roofer means you have more of other things. Giving up less means having more. Lower potato chip prices also mean uses of chips that were not economic at their higher price become economic. This represents further increases in US living standards.
American potato chip employers and consumers get a larger piece of a larger pie while continuing American potato chip workers and those moving on to their next-best employment opportunity get a smaller piece from the larger pie. A rising economic tide needs not raise all economic ships.
Everything changes when immigrants are non-working. While immigrants may be better off living on the public dole, their American lunch is not free as far as their American “hosts” are concerned. Resident Americans foot the bill for this lunch. No additions to Americans’ consumption of other things. No utilizing potato chips for previously lower valued uses. Only higher taxes. So, the lesson of immigration is “Y’all come, but No Work, No Eat.” End of story.
It is not too hard to understand with Christian religion having what are a mass of pagan encrustations fomenting beneath the surface, why Protestantism took hold so easily It was clearly a purer imitation of Christ. Way more important to all this was that the printing press provided universal access to the canonical gospels.
Traditions sustained in the race of an illiterate population simply lost traction by been too wierd by half once that population could read the source material.
That same problem has allowed Islam to be sustained as well. The text remained opague to most with both illiteracy and language working against been understood..
Birth of Dionysus
Dionysus
is said to be the “first-born heir” of Zeus (although the same was also
said of Apollo). But having an heir was purportedly what he wanted to
avoid when he swallowed Metis. After all, as an immortal, he would have
to lose his immortality before Dionysus could inherit his throne, or at
least die the type of death that gods are occasionally described as
experiencing in Greek myths: 1) it involves being drained of ichor, and
2) it involves being locked in Tartarus, the womb of the Earth (where
all the gods came from) once again. However, all they seem to retain
some semblance of life down there and their return from there through
resurrection seems to be possible in the right circumstances.
This resurrection seems to involve “return through the rectum.”
Certainly this is what I see in the image of Dionysus coming from the
“thigh” of Zeus. Now, many scholars have noted similarities between
Dionysus and Jesus—far too many to enumerate here. Anatoly Fomenko, of
course, thinks that Dionysus was actually Jesus. So given everything
we’ve just reviewed, is it possible to identify the Virgin Mary with
Sophia-Barbelo, and to say that she generated her son, who is God, in
the same manner of autogenes? Is it possible that she was a
“virgin” because she was not exclusively a “she”? Does that explain why
the Catholic Church seems to venerate Mary almost as much as God and
Jesus himself: because she is the Holy Spirit, and they are all part of
the same triplicate beast, all joined together, stuck within each other?
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
Quite possibly, it seems, the answer is “it springs up through πρωκτον (prokton, Greek, ‘the rectum’).”
A
rosary, by the way, is said by the Church to symbolize Mary’s rose
garden specifically. The word “rosebud” is, as I mentioned in Genuflect ,
a term used in the modern pornography industry to refer to an anus that
has prolapsed and extended externally due to repeated abuse during sex
acts.
Perhaps this is what’s going on beneath the blanket draped over
Baphomet’s crotch, and may explain why he/she is called the “Goat with
1000 Young.” It could also explain the look on Baphomet’s face. Levi
futher writes of Baphomet in Dogme et Rituel that:
The beasts head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose
materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment
exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and
can only suffer when it materializes.
Golems, according to the Kabbalists, reportedly don’t have souls.
Perhaps that would be why, in the Ophite world-view, creating such
children is not a bad thing, since you are not entrapping souls in the
world. But, as Crowley’s writings would suggest rather, such creatures
can also be occupied by the geniuses of gods, enticed to come into human
form. Does this constitute bringing down the Archons from Heaven,
perhaps thus allowing you to destroy them? Is this was is symbolized by
the image on the Mete Coffer of Metis pulling the Sun and Moon down from the sky with the very chains that Zeus has used to bind them all?
Where Mete
she bound? In the gullet of Zeus, of course. As it was said that Zeus
used Metis as a chair-leg, forcing her to hold up his throne, does that
mean that she was performing the role of Atlas and is being shown
shrugging gleefully? As the seven “days” of creation in Genesis are really the seven aeons, does that mean that Mete is the seventh, upon which God—that is Jehovah, Jove, Jupiter, or Zeus—chose to rest?
Priapus with a caduceus
+Right,
the “Savior of the World.” Left, two Templar seals featuring Abraxasand
the words Templi Secretum (“Secret of the Temple”)
The Golden Dawn has a ritual attitude which they call “the Sign of
Theoricus,” named after one of their grades. The title of this grade is
derived from a Latin term pertaining to theorizing and consideration.
Aleister Crowley’s Astron Argentum order also used the same sign for
their grade 2°=9°, and in their literature they openly describe the
attitude as “the God Shu supporting the sky.” This grade is dedicated to
the element of air, and so the idea is that you are the pillar of air
supporting the roof of the Temple.
The Golden Dawn’s Sign of Theoricus involves mimicking Atlas holding up the Heavens
However,
the O.T.O. also has another, similar gesture, described as
“Isis in Welcome,” used during the “Babe of the Abyss” grade, in which
you form your body into the letter X, like how Saint Andrew was
crucified. It seems appropriate, then, that the “Isis in Welcome”
gesture is officially named the “Sign of Mulier,” after a
fourteenth-century Anglo-French word that translates to both “wife” and
“born in wedlock.” Dictionary.com says “A tone of contempt often
attaches to mulier and its derivatives. Wictionary.com says that mulier
means “woman” in Latin from mollior, meaning “softer, weaker”…
“comparative of mollis
(‘soft, tender’).” This brings to my mind the she-goat Amalthea who is
said to have nursed Zeus when he was a babe in exile, whom he afterwards
sacrificed, making a buckler out of her skin. Her name is translated as
“tender,” as this word originally meant “nurse” in English.
Sign of Mulier, “Attitude of Baphomet, Isis in Welcome”
These connections with the life of Zeus and his relationship with his
surrogate goat mother seem to go along with the fact that Crowley also
labeled the Sign of Mulier as the “Attitude of Baphomet.” In The Book of Thoth,
Crowley wrote “that Baphomet’s pictorial correspondence is most easily
seen in the figure of Zeus Arrhenothelus.” I could not find any other
examples of “Arrhenothelus” use anywhere, but I note that it is very
similar to “Arsenothelus,” a word meaning “hermaphrodite” that is used in Hammer-Purgstall’s Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum.
Crowley was clearly quite familiar with this text, but could have
easily misread this word, and those copying him would not have known any
better. Or it’s possible that it was typed incorrectly by a secretary,
and the typo has never been fixed.
What seems to be implied by Crowley’s use of this term—which I
believe he understood the meaning of, if not the correct spelling of
it—is that he thought Zeus, when combined with Metis either inside of
his stomach or supporting his throne from below, formed a hermaphroditic
being. Also note that the etymology of the English word “arse” is
traced, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, to the
Proto-Indo-European ors, meaning “buttock, backside,” which, that website claims, is the “source also of Greek orros,
[meaning] ‘tail, rump, base of the spine.’” The same site tells us that
“arsy-versy,” meaning “backside foremost,” goes all the way back to the
sixteenth century! So does this image below (of unknown provenance)
represent arsenothelus?
In
the trials of European witches, they often confessed that at their
Sabbats, the Devil would appear to them as a goat-headed figure like
Baphomet, and make them kiss his second face, located beneath his tail,
as a sign of respect. That face was frequently described as feminine in
appearance. My guess is that this is Mete,
and that, despite the claim on the idols that “return through the
rectum is easy,” it’s not easy enough, because she’s presumably still
being anally retained.
The Osculum Infame (‘Obscene Kiss’) of the Witches’ Sabbath
But perhaps in the form of her “son,” also of ambiguous sexual
identity, she has managed to send a piece of herself out as an envoy.
Perhaps that’s what the Greek story of Dionysus, and the Gnostic story
of Christ as her son, are implying.
Is it possible, then, that the reason why
effigies of the knights at Temple Church in London, and many other
burial grounds for Crusaders, are actually being shown as giving anal
birth to monstrous dragons? Could that explain why their legs are
twisted in that manner, and why they have those strange luck-dragon
creatures beneath their feet? Looking at the way Hammer-Purgstall drew
his own impressions of these same effigies (Tab. IV, fig. 7), one
looking like an aborted lion fetus, the other like a severed and
stomped-on human penis, I feel that this is a strong possibility, and
that he may have been hinting at this when choosing which features of
the dragons to emphasize in his reproduction. Many of the other images
presented by him fit this hypothesis as well.
Tab IV, fig. 7, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (right half)
Tab IV, fig. 7, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (left half)
Tab. I, fig. 15-16 (front and back, respectively)
Tab. III, fig. 2
Tab. II, fig. 4
Tab. III, fig. 8
Tab. IV, fig. 34 (top and bottom, respectively)
Tab. IV, fig. 10-12, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 17-18, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 22, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 23, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 24, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 12 (right half), Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. IV, fig. 29-30, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Tab. II, fig. 16, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. Hammer-Purgstall says the serpents are issuing forth from the “buttocks” of an enthroned Mete
As I briefly mentioned before, the key to understanding these
effigies lies in the hidden connections between the Knights Templar, the
“ancient” cult of Cybele, and the “ancient” cult of Mithras. I must say
that I did not really understand the significance of the symbols on
these coffers until a couple of years after publishing Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled.
This was because I hadn’t looked deeply enough into the cults of Cybele
and Mithras. I only knew that bull sacrifices ere associated with both
the cult of Cybele and the mysteries of Mithras. This should have been a
red flag for me, because a bull sacrifice was depicted on the side of
the allegedly Templar-originated “Mete coffer” I found at the British Museum.
However,
the truth is that I didn’t, at the time, realize the depth
of their commonalities, nor how their myths and symbol sets operated
together to tell the secret of Baphomet. Indeed, they also teach us how
to correctly interpret Greek and Roman, and Persian mythology. However,
it seems that nobody else has noticed these things before either.
Luckily, in writing my novel Genuflect, I ended up forcing myself to do
this, and that’s when all of these things opened up for me.
I started looking for connections between Mithras and Cybele. I found
quickly that a debate had been raging among scholars on the subject for
the last 250 years. They couldn’t agree on whether or not these two
cults, both of Eastern origin and active concurrently in the late Roman
Empire, were related at all. It was mostly modern scholars who were
claiming that they were not. I shall give you a history of the two
religions, based mostly on accepted theories and chronology (though I
don’t necessary wholly embrace these things in whole, as you will no
doubt ascertain through the course of this essay.
Cybele had been adopted into Hellenistic Greece from their western
Anatolian colonies as early as the sixth century BC. The Greeks
compounded her with Rhea, the wife of Chronos and mother of Zeus. The
aspect of her relationship with Attis, some historians said, was really
only fully adopted by the Western version of the cult after the Romans
absorbed it into their official religion in the second century BC.
(Attis, by the way, was said to be the father of King Lydus, after whom
the Lydians, in this legend, were purportedly named.)
But the Gallu of the temples of the Great Mother Goddess
Inanna in Sumer also practiced the same rite, and had a myth about the
son of the goddess, Baal, who was identical in many ways to Attis. Like
him, Baal was a victim who played essentially the same role with the
goddess Inanna (a.k.a. Ishtar). The anniversary of her murder of her own
son/husband, for the exact same reason that Cybele killed Attis (erotic
jealousy), was observed as a holiday of morning by her worshippers, as
it was with Cybele’s. Likewise, Baal’s resurrection was celebrated
joyously a few days afterwards. This took place during the Spring
Equinox, which was also their New Year’s Day, morphing eventually into
the European holiday of Easter, which was named after Ishtar/Inanna.
There
in Mesopotamia, her priests were called the Gallu, almost the exact
same word as the title of Cybele’s priests, the Galli. It’s derived from
the Sumerian word “gal,” meaning “cup” or “vagina.” The Gallu, just
like the Galli,
were also castrated and dressed as women. In both cults, the priests
were actually considered women from this point on, and addressed as
such.
Fragment from Tab. I, fig. 1, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. A disembodied phallus with testes has been smudged out by prudish Hammer-Purgstall for “decency.” Right: Phallus revealed by P. Gonzalez, who scannedour only copy of Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum from the original. This result was obtained by tracing “dotted lines” (his words) visible when the image is enlarged.
Tab. I, fig. 1 with phallus restored, from Thomas Wright’s Worship of the Generative Powers.
Mithras Leocephaline (“lion-headed”), with winged serpent draped
over his head, its his entering his mouth. Compare with Tab. I, fig. 1.
This Mithas Leocephaline would fit in with Hammer-Purgstall’s Mete idols easily
The Babylonian equinox rites also included the sacrifice of the
Celestial Bull, Gugalanna, just like Cybele was honored with the taurobolium,
a bull sacrifice in which her priests were completely drenched in the
blood of the victim. This was performed in Cybele’s specially-outfitted
slaughterhouse temples, known as metroons, after her title “Magna Mater” (“Great Mother”).
Mithraism, however, had been imported from Persia much later,
starting in the first century after Christ. There were many obvious
differences. Mithraism was an all-male cult that, at first blush, seems
to promote masculine attributes and shun everything feminine. It was
popular in the military, particularly among the foreign legions, and
indeed, that is where it had originally begun its spread throughout the
empire.
It took a couple of centuries for it to be anything more than a
barely tolerated subterranean mystery school (operating literally
underground, in caves on the frontiers, and in the basements of other
buildings in cities). But eventually, some of the emperors were
converted, and the cult, which had originally forbidden its members to
join any other religious groups, began to allow amalgamation with the
followers of “Sol Invictus” (“Invincible Sun”), a.k.a. Helios. This new
and improved Mithraism became the dominant religious force at the end of
the empire, until its rival, Christianity, with which it shared mutual
influence, eclipsed it altogether.
Early in the twentieth century, two authors—Franz Cumont and Jessie
Weston—separately published important works arguing that Mithraists had
also made formal pacts with Cybele worshippers. Cumont had stated it as
though it were established fact in his 1903 book The Mysteries of Mithra. There he had argued that:
…[I]n conciliating the priests of Magna Mater, the sectaries of
Mithra obtained the support of a powerful and officially recognized
clergy, and so shared in some measure in the protection afforded it by
the State.
He
also pointed out that the temples of both cults (mithraeums and
metroons) were often very close to one another. In Ostia in Italy, where
the oldest known mithraeum
has been found (along with dozens of others scattered throughout the
same town), the two temples were actually attached contiguously. Cumont
suggested that they may have shared ritual materials, and perhaps even
conducted joint rituals.
If the two cults did work together, it would actually put to rest one
of the points of argument between historians on the subject. Cumont had
claimed that both the Cybelists and the Mithraists practiced the rite
of taurobolium. This was the ceremony wherein the priest would
rip open the guts of the victim on a platform with a metal grate over it
so that the blood would pour down onto an initiate positioned below. It
was a form of sanguinary baptism, after which the recipient was said to
be renatus in aeternum “reborn for eternity”).
Modern
scholars, criticizing Cumont, argue that, although the central
myth of the cult is about Mithras hunting and killing a bull, a true
taurobolium would have been impossible to conduct inside of a tiny
underground mithraeum.
But they ignore the fact that Cumont had already addressed this issue.
He said the evidence suggested that Mithraists performed few if any of
their own sacrifices of.
Instead,
he thought that they most likely contracted this work out to a
professional victimarius (sacrificial butcher), which was a common
practice at the time. Any metroon would have been equipped for this, and
the Cybelists may have been the ones to fulfill this purpose. Cumont
also noted that mithraeums
were usually built directly upon a source of running water. He proposed
that the relatively sophisticated plumbing systems they usually sported
might have been useful to the Cybelists, and that access to these
things might have been traded to them by the Mithraists in exchange for
help with butchery.
It seems to me that Cybele’s anti-male transvestite priesthood and
the Mithraists’ aversion to femininity may have made them an odd yet
complimentary pair: they both were against traditional sexuality.
Furthermore the mythologies of both cult figures complemented each other
in the same way. I told you before that according to some sources,
Cybele wasn’t always just a woman. Prudentius, a Roman Christian poet,
writing in the fourth century, said in Peristephanon: 10.1071-3:
Both sexes are displeasing to Cybele’s holiness, so he keeps a middle gender between the two.
As I mentioned, initiates of Cybele’s priesthood went through an
orgiastic public ritual in which they were expected to go mad on drugs
and wine. They would then become possessed by the goddess, just like
Attis, so that they would be inspired to castrate themselves just like
he did. These priests were thereafter referred to as women, just like
the Gallu priests of Sumer before them, and just like a post-op transgender person would be in modern times. Like the Gallu,
they dressed in women’s clothes, spoke in affected effeminate voices,
and sang in an effeminate manner that was supposed to be pleasing to the
goddess.
Earlier, in the first century BC, another Roman poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus, had written in Carmina,
Poem 63 about how Attis castrated himself and thus became a priestess
of Cybele. From that point on, she was thereby immediately referred to
as feminine:
Over the vast main borne by swift-sailing ship, Attis, as with
hasty hurried foot he reached the Phrygian wood and gained the tree-girt
gloomy sanctuary of the Goddess, there roused by rabid rage and mind
astray, with sharp-edged flint downwards dashed his burden of virility.
Then as he felt his limbs were left without their manhood, and the fresh
spilt blood staining the soil, with bloodless hand she hastily took a
tambour light to hold, your tambourine, Cybele, your initiate rite, and
with feeble fingers beating the hollowed bullock’s back, she rose up
quivering…
Later, when her reason returned to her, she lamented the loss of her
penis and the fact that she was now a “slave” to the mother goddess:
Then when from quiet rest torn, her delirium over, Attis at once
recalled to mind her deed, and with lucid thought saw what she had lost,
and where she stood, with heaving heart she backwards traced her steps
to the landing-place. There, gazing over the vast main with tear-filled
eyes, with saddened voice in tristful soliloquy thus did she lament…
This all appears to be an echo of the earliest versions of the Cybele
myth, influenced more closely by the Phrygian version. In these, she
was called “Agditis,” and was said to have originated in the realm of
the gods. She had been formed when some of Zeus’ semen fell upon a rock
called “Agdo.” But the other gods found Agditis to be a freak, and so
they had her castrated, and cast her down to Earth. This, then, would
explain why Cybele was sometimes represented by a rock, particularly a meteorite—a “stone that fell from heaven.”
As the story continues, according to a Greek travelogue from
Pausanias in the second century AD, the goddess then became pregnant
with a boy, whom she abandoned at birth and left for dead. The boy was
born so beautiful that he was rescued by a she-goat that felt pity for
him. Eventually, when she found him again, his own mother fell in love
with him.
He was later engaged to a princess. But during the wedding,
Agditis/Cybele possessed his mind and inspired him to castrate himself,
resulting in his death. Afterwards, in regret, she “persuaded Zeus to
grant the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay” (according
to a travelogue of Phrygia written in the second century AD by the Greek
geographer Pausanias). This is the skeletal story, upon which a variety
of flourishes about the boy’s death, resurrection, and alleged “love”
for his mother were added.
Some
obvious parallels between this and the story of Mithras jump out right
away. Just as they say Agditis was born from a petra genetrix
(“fecund rock”), so too was Mithras. Votive depictions of the god’s
birth show him emerging as a fully-grown young man, with a torch in one
hand and a knife in the other, which he used to find his way and tear
himself out.
On
either side of the rock they always depicted the two Chiaramonti
(“Torchbearers”), two male youths who wore Phrygian hats just like
Mithras, and just Attis Cybele’s Galli priests. The Chiaramonti were
also often shown in that same peculiar cross-legged attitude; just like
how Attis and the Galli
were often shown, whether standing or laying; just like the effigies of
the cross-legged knights on the graves at Temple church. The names of
the two Chiaramonti were Cautes and Cautophanes. Each held a
torch, with one pointing it upwards, and the other pointing it
downwards, respectively. Seeing this reminded me again of Eliphas Levi’s
depiction of the Templar demon Baphomet, with one hand pointing up, and
the other pointing down, along with a torch burning between his goat
horns.
The ultimate provenance of Mithras is a mystery. It was a true
parthenogenesis, “fertilized by the heavenly father’s phallic
lightning,” as Barbara Walker wrote. He was truly the self-born,” like
the nameless figure identified by Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, where he said:
When you see him who was not born of woman, fall down upon your faces and worship him; that one is your Father.
Thus during the initiations, according to the one-surviving Mithras
Liturgy, inductees took an oath to the god which included the words:
I… who was born from the mortal womb of (his mother’s name) and
from the fluid of semen, and who, since he has been born again from you
today…resolves to worship you.
In the myth of Mithras, when the time came to have progeny of his
own, he chose to mate with a rock because he detested females. A writer
known as “Pseudo-Plutarch” wrote in De Fluviis 23.4 about a
certain mountain in Armenia called “Diorphos.” This was named after
“Diorphos the Earth-born (or the Titan),” about whom it was said:
Mithras, who wanted to have a son but hated the race of women,
ejaculated onto a stone. The stone became pregnant and—after the
appropriate time—produced a boy called Diorphos.
The name of this figure brought to mind the myth of the “Orphic Egg”
from the Orphic Mystery Schools, which went back to Greece in the fifth
century. They taught that the primordial being was a figure named
“Phanes,” whom they also called “Eros.” The creator of this egg was
“Nyx,” whose name meant “Night,” just like what the name of the
Kabbalistic demoness Lilith translates to. I felt that Phanes might also
relate to Ophion, a serpent who, with his Titan bride Eurynome, was
said to have ruled the Earth for a spell after being “cast down” by
Chronos and Rhea. This again indicates an identification with Diorphos,
the son of Mithras, identified with Chronos/Saturn.
Depictions
of Phanes with his body surrounded by a serpent, strongly resemble the
images of the leontocephaline (lion-headed) version of Mithras as Saturn
(also shown wrapped in a snake) that were found in many mithraeums,
as were Orphic depictions of the cosmic egg. Other related symbols
include the one-snaked rod of Asclepius and the double-snaked rod of
Hermes, the caduceus
Like Baphomet, the Persians had originally seen their Mitra
as an intermediary power, helping connect creatures on our plane with
both the celestial powers above and the infernal powers below. In the
Roman mystery school version, he became identified with Saturn, the
furthest from Earth of the planets then known about, seen in classical
astrology as the highest of the heavens. But he was also identified,
especially in the latter years of the Roman Empire, with Sol, the Sun.
In the old geocentric systems, Sol occupied the middle sphere of the
heavens, with other spheres, including those of Jupiter and Saturn, on
top of that.
The worshippers of Sol Invictus, like the Egyptians, saw the Sun as
the ultimate symbol of an omnipotent god. But in the Mithraic Mysteries,
which attempted to incorporate this cult in its later years, the
initiate made a symbolic journey through each of the heavens, in
imitation of this enhanced story of the adventures of Mithras. This did
not merely involve him passing through the various gates of Heaven with
special passwords. This (taught by Gnostic and Hermetic schools as
necessary for the soul to ascend to the highest realm after death).
Rather, in this case, it seems that Mithras actually conquered the
intelligences that ruled over these spheres, subduing them to his will.
After slaying the bull from which the material world was made, he
ascended this stairway to heaven, the “ladder of lights” we know as the
seven classical planets, until he got to Sol’s kingdom. There, after the
sun was overthrown, the luminary was forced to bow down on one knee to
his new master, Mithras. The two then shook hands as friends, and then
feasted together on the bull, with the domination of the new sun god now
having been established. Then Mithras took the reigns of the Sun’s
chariot and ascended to the next realm, which was that of Saturn.
Mithras then took on as his own identity as well, indicating that he
overtook that god just like he did the others, and henceforth ruled all
of the kingdoms below.
I think it is because he victoriously overthrew both the Sun and
Saturn, then took on both of their roles, that Mithras was seen as the
source of a light more primordial, beyond the known universe, the “sun
beyond the Sun.” The realm of light beyond the sphere of Saturn was
called Hyperurania. It was named after Saturn’s father Uranus, for the
same reason the planet beyond Saturn was so named by modern astronomers.
A document called “the Mithras Liturgy” described a Mithraic initiate,
in imitation of Mithras, entering the palace of the “Seven Pole Lords”
with the faces of black bulls. These are the guys who turn the wheels of
the heavens, causing earthquakes, thunder and lightning. But Mithras
basically makes slavish bitches out of them all.
The fact that Mithras was known for literally “storming heaven,”
invading the highest realm of the universe with shock and awe, seemed to
be part of why his cult was popular with the military of an imperial
power. Cybele was already an official patroness of the Roman
military, and it is no accident that her holy week took place during the
month dedicated to the war god Mars. But whereas the Magna Mater was
seen as the protectress of the state, and the status quo Mithras was a
god of rebellion.
The red Phrygian cap worn by Mithras and his helpers Cautes and Cautophanes—as well as by Cybele’s Galli,
coincidentally—is also known as a “liberty cap,” because in Rome it was
the symbol of a slave that had been freed. Saturn himself was shown
wearing it too, which is the origin of the hat that Santa Claus slaves
wore them during the festival of Saturnalia at the winter solstice,
because they were considered free during this time period. Indeed, all
rules were considered null during these days, giving way to orgies,
drinking, and much mischief.
This was done in honor of Saturn and his Golden Age, when nobody had
to work. It is the reason why we all take vacation around Christmas, and
why Santa Claus wears that funny red hat. It’s also why we get wildly
drunk on New Year’s Eve, just like the “Feast of Fools” celebrated in
medieval Europe, when the social order would be upturned in honor of the
“Lord of Misrule.” It’s why the liberty cap became the symbol of the
French Revolution, inspired by Freemasons, who, like the Mithraists,
gave no regard to social status within the boundaries of their lodges.
The seals of the US Army and the US Senate bear this symbol as well.
The record on the Mithraists is a bit confusing. On the one hand,
there are sources saying that the cult valued abstinence from sex, as an
extension of their general hatred of women, and that many of their
priests took vows of chastity. But at the same time they had a ceremony
for the second degree of their order, which is called “Nymphus”—“the
Bride.” It was dedicated to the love goddess Venus. The initiate would
be married to another brother in the order, dressed in a bridal veil.
From a Mithraic temple
In my research, I found indications that both Cybele and Mithras
frowned upon all practice of procreative heterosexual relations, and
that both had been born from inseminated rocks. I thought about the
castration of Cybele, and her original hermaphroditic state, in
comparison to Baphomet, also missing his penis, according to Eliphas
Levi, and sporting a caduceus instead.
These revelations about the nature of these two cults, apparently
connected, do fit in with what we know about Ophite Gnostics, the
Knights Templar, and the neo-Gnostic, neo-Templar order started by
Aleister Crowley. Crowley believed that new universes—new aeons—could be
created through homosexual sex magick. He and his partners recorded in
their journals that they could see with their own eyes the presence of
“universes” of their semen-filled rectums, formed by the fluids there,
and imagining they saw various events occurring with the inhabitants
thereof. Again, see the notes from “the Paris Working,” which state:
Inspection of Cakkras…. Muladhara. Blood-red, velvety, deep-bell
shape. Around it the Kundalini coiled, but in constant spiral motion.
Luminous triangle—mirror-like—opens at base (very small.) I looked down
through infinite stages of these triangles, at the bottom glitters a
pearl-like (but self-luminous and most intense) phallus. Presently this
goes, and up the tunnel march millions of men of every race, creed,
caste and colour—not a single woman.
The Muladhara is the base chakra, a.k.a. the “Fundament.” So
he is talking about a universe formed inside of an anus. As for this
celebration of the lack of women in the race of beings they witnessed,
this same attitude can be found in the Mithraic mystery schools, where
women were not allowed and were considered superfluous to life. It can
also be found in the fictional world of “The Smurfs,” which, as I
explain in Genuflect, is a model of a Mithraic commune,
populated by an all-male race of blue beings, led by Papa Smurf, a
figure clearly modeled on Mithras, the “Pater,” and all wearing Phrygian
hats. They were originally created, and can only reproduce, through
alchemical magic.
These Smurfs look just like not only Mithras himself, but also the
Chiaramonti, and Attis. The creatures seen on the sides of the coffers
in the British Museum, presented later on this this essay, look similar,
but without the hats: they seem short and hairless. This seems to be
what an all-male (or perhaps asexual) race of homunculi, look like.
Crowley would have seen them as a superior breed of humanity, as he saw
women to be only an obstacle standing in the way of man’s salvation
through sexual Gnosis.
It seems the Templars had a similar world-view. According to their
own confessions, as detailed by the Chinon Parchment released by the
Vatican in 2007, newly-inducted Templars promised to refrain from the
“impurity” of sex with women (including their own wives, many of whom
were reportedly abandoned when their husbands were inducted into the
order). They promised to instead unleash their lusts upon one another,
swearing to never deny their brothers’ requests for sexual favors.
This is in keeping with Ophite Gnostic doctrine. Perhaps the
composers of the Templars’ secret doctrine felt that transgressive sex
was somehow “pure” compared to normal, procreative sex with a female. In
the Ophite view, the latter form of sex is harmful because it has the
potential to lock more souls in the prison of the Demiurge by
engendering children. But transgressive sex went against the grain of
the creative world, therefore taking away a bit of Jaldabaoth’s over
them.
While we may find it hard to believe that grown men of respectable
positions (such as the Templars always were) would convince themselves
that sexual abuse of children and animals was somehow spiritually
enlightening, we should also keep in mind that this could also be yet
another veneer, with a more practical agenda behind it. In our own time,
our politics is occasionally rocked with scandals of child sex abuse by
the rich and powerful. This often involves so-called “pedophile rings”
that are quite secret and exclusive, making use of child prostitutes
that have often been obtained from orphanages. Photos are usually taken
at their meetings, for the purpose of establishing the ever-present
threat of blackmail and mutually-assured destruction should any members
of the abuse ring be tempted to give information to the authorities
about what they’ve been involved in. This ties the participants together
in a bond of evil, which is used for the coalescence of power into the
hands of a cabal. On more than one occasion it has come out that these
rings were actually being orchestrated by the intelligence services
acting on orders of some group within government that was using it to
control other powerful people. (See my 2008 book Mind-Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA for more on this subject.) According to Hammer-Purgstall, something similar may have been going on with the Templars:
It remains for us to comment on yet another expansion, or rather
subversion, of the Delphic dictum. They substituted in place of that
golden sentence, “Know yourself,” the crafty, “know all, but let no one
know you.” On this truly Machiavellian principle rests their whole
politic, which up to now they try to sustain by the gospel precept, “Be
wise as serpents.” To this depraved wisdom they connect unrestrained
conduct, so that, “Pursue all, and all is permitted,” they seem to have
proposed as the highest branch of wisdom…. Such persons, already
destined by nature as leaders, sought the highest goal of their labors,
not in satisfying desires, but in conducting state affairs. Finally,
people eagerly followed this doctrine because, once a person wickedly
indulges every sensual craving, it renders his associates more inclined
to all types of illicit activities.
In addition to the sexual crimes, Hammer-Purgstall’s artifacts
evidenced what I would consider the most outrageous accusation against
the Templars: the sacrifice of babes in a “Baptism of Fire.” There are
several pictures of babies or young boys either standing inside of a
burning brazier, or standing over one as if he they are about to.
According to Jules Michelet’s History of France, Volume 1, published in
1860 (and drawing on the Chroniques Francaises de Saint-Denys, compiled
during the Templar trials), there were:
…reports spread among the people against the Templars, ‘… that a
new-born infant, begotten of a Templar and a maid, was cooked and
roasted by the fire, and all the grease roasted out, and their idol
consecrated and anointed with it.’
Similarly, Thomas Wright described a group that once met in Orleans,
about which a document was found at the abbey of St. Pere in Chartres
that told of their alleged activities. After calling a demonic spirit to
appear “in the form of an animal,” they would purportedly indulge in
group sex (men and women both). Then, Wright says:
The child which was the fruit of this intercourse was taken on
the eighth day, and purified by fire, ‘in the manner of the ancient
pagans’—so says the contemporary writer of this document—it was burnt to
ashes in a large fire made for that purpose. The ashes were collected
with great reverence, and preserved to be administered to members of the
society who were dying, just as good Christians received the viaticum.
It is added that there was such a virtue in these ashes, that an
individual who had once tasted them would hardly ever be able to turn
his mind from that heresy and take the path of truth.
All this was backed up by papal pronouncements that had been made
both before Hammer-Purgstall’s time, and before. Pope Pius IX, in his
“Allocution against the Templars,” said:
Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the
world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more
than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were
wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for
the religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow.
Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined and
prevented. Pope Clement V and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to
Europe, and the Templars, taken as it were in an immense net, were
arrested, disarmed, and cast into prison. Never was a Coup d’Etat
accomplished with a more formidable concert of action. The whole world
was struck with stupor, and eagerly waited for the strange revelations
of a process that was to echo through so many ages.
It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the
Templars against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose
to them the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. The Templars were
gravely accused of spitting upon Christ and denying God at their
receptions, of gross obscenities, conversations with female devils, and
the worship of a monstrous idol.
In 2007, during Benedict XVI’s reign, a book called Processus Contra Templarios
was published by the Vatican in a limited edition of 799 copies selling
for $9000 each. It purported to reveal the “truth” about a document
they had dubbed the “Chinon Parchment.” It had been purportedly
discovered six years earlier in the Vatican Secret Archives by a
paleographist who worked there named Barbara Frale, “misfiled,”
allegedly, for 700 years. The book release was timed to coincide with
the 700th anniversary of the arrest of the Templars by the French police
on October 13, 1307, and gained a great deal of attention from the
international press.
What grabbed the headlines was the extraordinary claim that the
document proved that Pope Clement V had held his own trial of the
Templar leadership after King Philip IV’s, the results of which had
“exonerated” knights and proved that they were “innocent” after all.
These were the terms used in newspaper articles that were published.
They were also the words used by Barbara Frale herself when she
published a more accessible book on the subject several years later,
called The Templars: The Secret History Revealed. This would
certainly seem newsworthy: both the discovery of the document, and the
revision of history that its existence would apparently require.
The only thing is that once you read what Frale writes about what’s
actually in the document, you find that it proves nothing of the sort.
If fact, trying to follow Frale’s version of the story of the end of the
Templars, it quickly becomes very confusing, mostly because of the
meaning she attaches to certain elements of it. She has her own spin on
things, but frequently asserts these opinions as though they are facts.
It was these assertions that journalists repeated unquestioningly. For
instance, here is an utterly misleading description of the document’s
content from BBC News, using Frale’s own words:
However, according to Prof Frale, study of the document shows
that the knights were not heretics as had been believed for 700 years.
In fact she says ‘the Pope was obliged to ask for pardons from the knights… the document we have found absolves them.’
Actually, according to the Parchment, they did confess to what most
Christians today would consider blasphemy, including denying Christ and
spitting on the cross, as the BBC article states:
In the hearings before Clement V, the knights reportedly admitted
spitting on the cross, denying Jesus and kissing the lower back of the
man proposing them during initiation ceremonies.
This mention of the “kiss on the lower back” (which was also applied
to the navel and mouth, according to the document) is as close as the
BBC comes to addressing one of the most shocking things that one of the
knights, Hughes de Perraud, confessed to Clement’s cardinals: that the
brotherhood had a doctrine condoning—even insisting upon—homosexuality.
As the show relates, the knights were obliged to swear off all contact
with women the moment they joined the order (dumping their wives and
children, in many instances). So, as one of the knights told the
cardinals questioning him, they were instructed that if they couldn’t
control their desires, they should turn to each other for relief, and
not refuse one another’s advances. As Frale wrote in her book:
[T]he preceptor exhorted the new Templar not to have sexual
relations with women, inviting him, should he absolutely not be able to
live chastely, to unite with his brothers and not refuse them should
they request sexual favors from him. The novice often reacted angrily,
but there were no consequences because the ritual sequence did not
provide for any concrete application of this ‘precept of homosexuality.’
As far as the absolution the BBC refers to in their article, this was
the absolution of sin after confession, which of course the cardinals
had the right to issue. It in no way negated the fact that the sin had
taken place. But why did the BBC’s writers have the wrong idea here?
Even the Catholic News Agency presented the news with this spin when
Frale’s book came out in 2007, using the word “exonerated”:
The investigation took place in Rome between 1307 and 1312.
According to the document, Pope Clement V exonerated the Templars on the
charge of heresy, but found them guilty of other infractions. He also
ordered the Knights Templar to disband.
The BBC article had also used the word “exonerated,” and went even further:
The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely.
The last sentence refers to Ms. Frale. One can certainly see upon
inspecting her book where the authors of the news articles got their
ideas. In the first chapter, she declares that her discovery has finally
set the record straight on the Templar issue, even using the word
“innocent”:
[The Chinon Parchment] reveals that the grand master and other
high-ranking Templars were found innocent of the charges of heresy, were
absolved for less serious offenses by the apostolic authority, and were
fully integrated into the Catholic community. Historians believed that
the Templars were innocent of the charges brought against them by Philip
IV, but many outside academia still suspected the Templars of having
been heretics and occultists. The Chinon Parchment is the definitive and
incontrovertible proof of the Templars’ innocence and should finally
put this question to rest.
Apparently, only the uneducated ever had any doubt in the first
place! Now this word “innocence,” which has now been repeated by so many
other writers on the subject without any qualifications, could only
conceivably be used in regards to the very narrow definition of heresy
given by Ms. Frale. After describing the juicy details of the secret
Templar initiation ceremony, as the knights confessed it to Clement’s
cardinals, she says:
Although it was an unworthy tradition that the Templars had
further embellished with other vulgar and violent practices, under no
circumstances could it be confused with heresy, an offense that implied a
strict and long-term adherence to subversive doctrines.
So the Templars were not heretics, she thinks, because their bizarre
practices were not part of a religious lifestyle to the individual
knights, who, perhaps at least initially, had no idea why they were
being asked to do these things. She tells the story of the circumstances
that led up to the papal inquiry. Prior to sending the cardinals to
question the knights, and prior to Philip’s arrest of them, in March
1307 Pope Clement personally interviewed a couple of them. First he
called in grand master Jacques de Molay himself “and immediately
demanded an explanation for the infamous rumors of the idol said to be
secretly venerated in the Temple. . . .” This the grand master denied,
and insisted that the matter be investigated to clear the Order’s
reputation. She writes:
The grand master of the Templars, indignant at the rumors the
sovereign had been spreading, expressly requested the pope to open an
inquest into the state of the Temple so as to demonstrate that the
slanderous accusations were unfounded. . . .
“Slander” of course would mean that they were the targets of willful
lies. But is that what we’re talking about here? When the Pope then
interviewed Hughes de Perraud, he “confirmed to the pope that the
Templars practiced a ritual that required new members to spit on the
cross during their induction ceremony.”
After the knights were arrested by Philip, Clement sent the cardinals
to question the leaders mentioned, and that is when they all, including
De Molay, confirmed many of the accusations, as we have discussed. That
is also when all of the details about the initiation ceremony finally
came out. Frale’s description of events is full of contradictions. For
instance, she writes:
The written statutes of the Temple, which date back to the second
half of the thirteenth century, contain the complete text of the
initiation ceremony.
But she then admits that the controversial final elements of the
ceremony were not written in the Rule, and “can be constructed only from
the testimony given at the trial.” So the statutes didn’t in fact give
the complete ceremony, as she’d said earlier. According to her, after
the knight had sworn his oath to the Order and donned his mantle, he was
taken to an ante room, where he was suddenly told to spit on the cross
to prove his obedience. Frale gives the details of the ceremony, which
she put together from all of the similar elements found in each of the
confessions:
A systematic analysis of all the testimony revealed that at this
point most of the brothers resigned themselves to doing what had been
commanded, perhaps attempting to spit in the direction of the cross
without actually hitting it, while others adamantly refused. . . .
Sometimes a candidate’s firmness was respected, and he was asked nothing
more, but more often his brothers threatened him with prison or death,
beating him brutally with their bare fists or holding a sword to his
throat. Then the preceptor gave him the kiss of monastic brotherhood—on
the mouth. Often this kiss, common to all religious orders, was followed
by two more kisses on the belly and the posterior, which was usually
covered by the tunic, but at times there were officiators who exposed
their bottoms and, according to some witnesses, even obscenely proposed
kisses on the penis. Most postulants obeyed without arguing when the
request was moderately humiliating, such as a kiss on the behind, and
refused in more extreme cases. While the preceptors demanded that a
postulant at least deny Christ or spit on the cross, they usually
overlooked a refusal of kisses, and unwilling candidates were not forced
to comply.
Now a couple of questions about this clearly need to be asked. For
one thing, does spitting on the cross and denying faith in Jesus
constitute blasphemy for a Christian knight? Well, Ms. Frale manages to
describe the spiritual consequences of this without actually using that
term:
Although it was clear that they were not heretics, it was equally
clear that under church doctrine they were guilty, albeit of a much
lesser offence. According to canon law, anyone who commits an act of
rejection of the faith, even if he does so without conviction, removes
himself from the Catholic community, effectively excommunicating
himself. The excommunicant can be absolved of his guilt but cannot be
acquitted.
At this point in the story, the knights had been excommunicated, but
this decision got reversed later, according to the Chinon Parchment, for
reasons we will discuss shortly.
The second question that comes to mind after learning the details of
the Parchment is this: why was more of an issue not made about the
institutionalized homosexuality in the Order? According to Frale, Pope
Clement wanted to assign the knights penance, grant them absolution
(forgiveness), reverse their excommunication, and then combine the Order
with the Knights Hospitaller so that he could launch a new Crusade. How
could he even think of doing this in medieval Catholic Europe with a
bunch of guys who had all been kissing each others’ butts and penises at
the very least, and who had sworn not to refuse each others’ sexual
advances? The Parchment even details the initiation of an
eleven-year-old relative of the king of England, who was purportedly
subject to the same treatment (and pathetically begged for his uncle to
save him when they told him to spit on the cross). Frale seems to think
that almost no homosexual activity occurred beyond the homoerotic
initiation rite and oath. She writes:
The surviving trial testimony consists of approximately one
thousand depositions with only six attesting to homosexual relations,
all of which were described as long-term relationships that almost
always had a dimension of affection. . . .
As for the sexual humiliation and forced alienation from God that
each knight experienced during initiation, Frale says that these
feelings were alleviated afterwards because the neophytes were
encouraged to confess their “sins” immediately afterwards. This is in
fact how all those “slanderous” rumors got started, she says– you know,
the slanderous rumors that accurately stated exactly what the Templars
were doing? As she put it:
At the end of the ceremony, the ‘victim’ of all these impositions
was invited to report to the chaplain of the order to confess the sins
he had just committed and ask for forgiveness. The priests of the Temple
comforted these penitents by telling them that they had not committed
grave offenses and that if they demonstrated remorse and shame, they
would be absolved. Often, however, the brothers confessed to priests
outside the Temple, generally Franciscans or Dominicans, who, naturally,
were dumbfounded and amplified the brothers’ moral disquiet by telling
them that they had committed mortal sins, sometimes encouraging them to
leave the order. These indiscretions of these honest priests, who were
totally ignorant of the real function of the secret ceremony within the
Temple, undoubtedly contributed to the gossip circulating in the secular
world about the ‘dark side’ of the order.
So what on Earth was the supposed reason for doing any of this stuff
in the first place, if they were not heretics or even “occultists,” as
she put it? Ms. Frale trips all over herself to argue that it was just a
test of the postulant’s mettle.
Bernard of Clairvaux . . . insisted on inserting into the text of
the Rule a clause exhorting the leaders of the order not to accept new
vocations too hurriedly, but rather to subject candidates to a test to
ascertain their character and commitment. The exact nature of the test
is unclear. Bernard elegantly alluded to Saint Paul’s advice to ‘put
them to the test to see if they come from God. . . .’
The written Rule offers no details as to how the preceptor might
discourage postulants who were less than totally convincing. . . .
In her imagination, without specific instruction it was only logical
that over time tests would be devised that involved blaspheming Jesus
and making people kiss their private parts. But she simultaneously makes
two contradictory claims about the purpose of this: +
1) To see if a candidate would have the courage not to renounce Christ if the Saracens tried to force him to. +
2) To see if a candidate would be obedient to his superiors no matter what.+
So which were they looking for: loyalty to the Order, or loyalty to
Christ and Christian morality? Apparently, nobody flunked the test no
matter how they reacted. Frale’s opinion on the matter is confusing
(especially when she claims that it has somehow been established by the
evidence of the Parchment whilst still admitting that it’s purely
theoretical on her part). Regarding the need for strict obedience within
the Order, she states:
A cardinal point of the Templars’ ethical code was absolute obedience to one’s immediate superiors. . . .
As for the idea that they were testing their recruits to see how
they’d stand up to the religious persuasion tactics of the Muslim enemy,
here is what she bases it on. She says:
Perhaps they [did these things] because it immediately confronted
the new Templar with the violence that he would be subjected to if he
were captured by the Saracens.
. . .
We know that the Saracens used to beat and torture capture
Christians, forcing them to deny Christ and spit on the cross before
ultimately compelling them to convert to Islam.
. . .
The ritual took place according to a fixed script based on the
actual experiences of Templar escapees from Muslim prisons, and dated
back to the earliest days of the order… Over time, extraneous elements
were added, such as the kiss on the buttocks, a true example of hazing
aimed at humiliating the recruit in front of the veterans, and the
verbal exhortation to homosexuality, which probably started as a parody
of the precept that required Templars to give their whole selves to the
order and to their brethren. These vulgar and derisive practices were
typical of the often crude behavior found among military corps, and
probably arose when the order’s traditional discipline began to
deteriorate. +
This does not seem to fit with the existing legend of the brave
Templar knight. How is it that men who were charged never to retreat on
the battlefield when fighting Muslims for God would crumple under a bit
of peer pressure when asked by their superiors to renounce Christ? Also,
how does committing the blasphemy beforehand, without torture, help to
prevent you from doing so again later under torture from the enemy? If
renouncing Christ is a big deal with real spiritual ramifications, and
they were being trained to avoid having to do that, why would they go
ahead and commit the blasphemy during the training?
+At any rate, this is what the Templars confessed to, twice, both to
the king of France’s inquisitors, and to the Pope’s. So while they may
have had their reasons (if you follow and believe Frale’s twisted
apologist logic), and while they may have been absolved (as any murderer
or rapist who confessed to a priest would be), they were certainly not
innocent, either by contemporary standards, or today’s. +
But it does seem that when Frale says “exonerated,” she means
reconciled with the Church. She seems to place all the importance on the
Templars’ charter and the fact that it put them under the sole
authority of the Pope. She completely rejects the notion that the king
of France should have anything to say about the activities of the
knights who were stationed in his country. She constantly describes
Clement as having the best of intentions. She says he wanted to use his
power to protect them, but was constantly thwarted by the king of France
trying to “illegally” (her word) claim jurisdiction over them. +
The battle for political supremacy between the French crown and the
Papacy had been going on for several years. The election of Clement,
historians say, had been orchestrated by Philip IV in the first place,
as he felt that Clement could be a useful puppet. He then insisted that
Clement move the seat of St. Peter from Rome to Avignon, France, where
it remained until 1378. Prior to this, there had been a feud between
Philip and Clement’s predecessor, Pope Boniface VIII. +
It is interesting that, according to a National Geographic
documentary that featured Frale, one of the ways in which Philip kept
Clement in line was by threatening to publicly accuse Clement of heresy
as well. Furthermore, as she states in her book, Philip even wanted to
exhume the bones of Pope Boniface VIII and put him on trial as “a
heretic, a blasphemer, an atheist, and a practitioner of witchcraft.”
She describes how the bishops in France wanted to separate from the
papacy because they believed it “to have reached a state of decadence as
to be incapable of performing its traditional role.” Then she complains
about how a bishop in Troyes named Guichard was burned at the stake for
witchcraft at this time, “despite having been acquitted by the pope.” +
Frale describes the bizarre ending to this series of events. In
December of 1307, Jacques de Molay recanted his confession to Philip
IV’s inquisitors, claiming he’d lied because he was under torture, and
publicly displaying his wounds before an audience he was granted at
Notre Dame cathedral. The Pope’s panels of bishops decided that the
knights should be absolved, but that the leaders who were already in
prison must remain there for the rest of their lives to pay for what
they had done. The way Frale puts it, the papacy saw this as a
compromise, bargained down from the death penalty that Philip wanted
(although Philip had not actually negotiated with them at all). The
Church leaders thought this would enable them to wrap up the matter
quickly so they could get about the business of launching another war in
the Middle East:+
Upon the return of the three cardinals to Poitiers, the pope
drafted a second version of his bull faciens misericordiam. It
reiterated the main points expressed in the first release, but added
that the leaders of the Temple had been absolved and were now protected
by judicial immunity and that no one, except the Roman pontiff, could so
much as interrogate them.
But as it turned out, De Molay and his sidekick, Geoffrey de Charny,
did not care for this solution. They then recanted their confessions
again, this time presumably including the ones they gave to the Church
authorities who, according to Frale, had not tortured them. Instead, as
Frale put it, they proclaimed “the Temple’s absolute innocence of all
the charges brought against them. . . .” Again, it is hard to see how
any of this behavior could be classified as particularly noble,
considering that even Frale acknowledged that the Templars were, on many
of the counts, “guilty,” which normally is thought of as the opposite
of “innocent,” a term she also used to describe the knights.
At any rate, Frale still seems to think that the Church’s authority
here, which had failed on all counts, should have continued to reign
supreme over the situation. She describes what happened next as a
violation of the rights of the Church, as Philip took matters into his
own hand and acted decisively:
In 1310 [Philip IV] ordered 54 Templars who had been found
innocent burned at the stake, in total violation of papal authority.
Even the theologians of Sorbonne opposed this decision, declaring it
completely illegal, but their opinion was ignored.
In the south of France, where the powers of the Inquisition were
strongest, there were records of convictions for violations associated
with witchcraft, such as the witch’s Sabbath and group orgies, which
even went beyond the accusations of Philip the Fair in his indictment.
These Frale calls “the most baseless charges, which drew from the
most abominable fantasies of the popular imagination.” Then, she says,
Philip thwarted Clement’s authority once again:
Although the leaders of the Temple were still detained illegally
by Philip IV, the pope granted them judicial immunity. Templar grand
master Jacques de Molay tried multiple times to obtain an audience with
the pope, but royal agents prevented that meetings from ever taking
place. Nor were the Templars allowed to be in contact with their grand
master. . . .
Finally, Philip had De Molay and De Charny both executed, burnt at
the stake. Predictably, Frale sees these deaths as nothing short of
noble martyrdom. She writes:
Accounts of the execution attested to the great heroism
demonstrated by the two leaders. Jacques de Molay asked his executioners
to untie the knots around his wrists, raised his eyes to the cathedral
of Notre Dame, and prayed to the Virgin Mary. . . With his prayer, the
grand master bore glorious witness to the demise of the Temple and
proclaimed its innocence and fidelity to the Christian faith.
So clearly, the Templars have in no way been exculpated. They seem to
have been quite guilty of the elements of blasphemy (at least according
to the common definition) and committing homosexual acts. Many people
have been executed for less. The idea that this was not done as part of a
larger heretical doctrine is unproven and groundless. Contrary to the
sweeping claims of Barbara Frale (who in 2009 also claimed to have found
the name of Jesus written on the Shroud of Turin), the question of why
they did these things, and the extent to which they did, as well what
other crimes they may have committed, is as unanswered today as before
the Chinon Parchment was discovered in 2001. As for the question of the
Baphomet idol, Frale offers one sentence, proposing what seems a very
odd idea:
The last point raised in the indictment against the Templars
concerned the secret veneration of an idol in the shape of a bearded
head. There is clear evidence of the existence of an unusual image of
Christ in the religious life of the order, as well as a mysterious cult
devoted to the Sacred Blood.
So is she suggesting that the Baphomet head was a representation of
Jesus. It seems so. As strange as this may seem, the same idea was the
subject of the 1998 book The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars
by Keith Laidler. However, instead of claiming that it was a mere
representation of Christ, he theorized that actual man’s head had been
removed and preserved by them. He proposed that it is now buried
underneath Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. Perhaps he gave Frale the spark
of insight that led to her concocting the only “innocent” explanation
she could come up with for why the knights would be prostrating
themselves before a mummified head that the confessors described as
“terrifying.” But we need not go that far. The skulls and mummified
remains of many saints, including John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene,
are regularly venerated by Christians the world over, and all of them
look rather creepy. As we mentioned, the Templars were involved in the
relic trade. It could have been any one of these that the Templars used
in their ceremonies, or something else altogether.
As for Barbara Frale herself, who’s worked at the Vatican Secret
Archives since 2001, she comes across as a Church spokeswoman
apologizing for what happened to the knights, and offering up excuses
for why the Pope failed to protect them from Philip. While Philip’s
control of Clement has long been known, to us it seems that an attempt
is being made by her to rehabilitate the reputations of both the Church
and the Temple. We can only speculate on whether this is personal
interest on her part, or something that her employers have asked her to
do, but the Church certainly doesn’t seem to have corrected the record
at all on these issues in the intervening fourteen years since she
allegedly discovered the Chinon Parchment in 2001.
We should also note that, long before the Templars were openly
accused and arrested by Philip IV, several papal pronouncements had
stated explicitly that the Templars were guilty of the same sort of
things they were eventually prosecuted for. Prince Michael of Albany, in
his 2006 book The Knights Templar of the Middle East (co-authored with Walid Amine Salhab), recounts some of these:
Innocent II (1198-1216), writing to the grand visitor of the
order, said, ‘The crimes of your brothers pain us deeply by the scandal
that they provoke within the Church. The knights Templar practice the
doctrines of Satan.’ Gregory IX (1227-1241) mentions the fact that he
knew that the Templars practiced the act of homosexuality and occult
sexual magic under a secret new rule established by Roncelin de Fos
(later master of Tortosa and Syria) in 1240. This new rule was written
in a Templar book known as ‘the book of baptismal (sic) by fire.’
This final item is of great interest to us. We found mention of The Book of the Baptism by Fire
in a few other places, but not many (although we were not able to
corroborate that it was ever mentioned by Gregory IX, who as we said
previously, also condemned the Cathars for worshipping the anuses of
black cats). Oddvar Olsen writes about it in The Templar Papers, also from 2006:
In 1877, a German Masonic specialist named Merzdorf claimed to
have found, among other Masonic manuscripts, two Latin ‘Rules’ of the
Templars (purported to date from the 13th century). One was the Rule for
the ‘chosen brothers,’ and the other for the ‘consoled brothers.’ The
first Rule describes the church as the ‘Synagogue of Anti-Christ,’ and
stipulates an elect reception ceremony (involving various ritual
kisses—one on the male member—and including readings from opening verses
of the Koran). The latter Rule implies strongly that the Templars
shared the doctrines of the Cathars, including that of the
‘consolamentumm (sp),’ or mystical baptism. Still authenticity of these
has yet to be determined.
. . . I have recently been referred to a text called The Book of
the Baptism of Fire (The credence of this text needs to be ascertained,
so I will just briefly mention it here.) The text was apparently
transcribed by the Grand Master in England (Robert Sandford), in 1240
AD. It lists the different articles of The Order of the Weather. Some of
the articles refer to both the “chosen” and “consoled” brothers. There
is also mention of Baphomet and “the Secret Science of the great
philosophy: Abrax and the Talisman.”
So
according to Prince Michael, The Book of the Baptism of Fire
(which he calls the “baptismal”) actually contained these secret rules,
while Olsen claims that they are separate documents that nonetheless
seem to confirm one another. Yet another author, Timothy Hogan, in his
2012 book Entering the Chain of Union, tells the story differently still
(drawing on a French website edited by one Jean-Pierre Schmit):
There is a series of documents first published in 1877 by
Theodore Merzdorff, which were said to come from the Masonic Grand Lodge
of Hamburg. These Latin documents were the official Rule of the Knights
Templar followed by three other documents said to be secret statutes of
the Order. They were said to be copies of the original documents that
existed in the Vatican, which were copied in the 1780s-1790s by the
Danish scientist Frederic Münter. The documents were translated into
German, and from there into French in 1957 by Rene Gilles.
Hogan adds an extra “f” to the end of Merzdorf’s first name and tells
us that before they were stumbled upon at a German Mason’s lodge, they
were stumbled upon in Latin in the Vatican archives and translated into
German. That’s a whole lot of stumbling upon something that is of such
great historical importance, and presumably excuses the Church’s
treatment of the Templars. But yet again—whoopsy!—those Vatican file
clerks just can’t do anything right! Masonic lodges, as you will find
later in this chapter, are just the natural place for such things to
show up later for historians to find them. Hogan goes on to describe in
more detail what some of the documents were:
The third document dated July 1240 opens with “Here begins the
‘liber consolamenti’ or secret statutes, written by Master Roncelinus
for the Consoled Brothers of the militia of the Temple.” These statutes,
composed of twenty articles are signed by Master Roncelinus and another
dignitary of the Templar Order, brother Robert of Samford, Procurator
of the Knights Templar in England. . . . The last piece dated August
1240 starts with “Here begins the list of secret signs that master
Roncelinus has assembled in eighteen articles and addressed to the same
Robert of Samford.”
Yet
another version of the story, told by Mark Amaru Pinkham in his article
for Atlantis Rising Magazine, entitled “The Templars’ Biggest Secret
& the Vatican,” calls the text Baptism of Fire of the
Brothers-Consulate,
and says that it was discovered in 1780 at the Vatican Library by “a
Danish Bishop” (not, as Hogan had claimed, “Danish scientist Frederic
Münter”). Also, like the others but unlike Oddvar Olsen, Pinkham
purports that this document is one and the same as that which, he says,
is “often referred to by Templar historians as the ‘Secret Rule of the
Templars.’”
According to him, the document contains quite a few amazing
admissions not mentioned by the other writers on the subject:
Said to have been written in 1240 AD. by a French Templar Master
named Roncelinus, it appears to give a green light to all the heretical
offenses that the Knights were accused of in the 14th century.
Permission to indulge in all manner of Templar heresy can be found in
this document, including defilement of the Cross, denial of Christ as
the Savior, sexual liaison, and the worship of the idolic head known as
Baphomet. There is even a passage within the document that gives the
Knights permission to initiate other [G]nostics into their order,
including Cathars, Bogomils, and even Assassins. If the Baptism of Fire
of the Brothers-Consulate was indeed in circulation beginning in 1240
AD. It would have been an easy task for a Church or Royal spy to procure
a copy for their employers.
The
references made by the above-quoted sources to the “Consoled
Brothers,” “Brothers Consulate,” and “consolamenti” are taken by Oddvar
Olsen to imply that the Templars practiced the consolamentum of the
Cathars, which he describes as a “mystical baptism.” Benjamin Walker
tells us more about this mysterious ritual in Gnosticism: Its Influence
and History:
The central Cathar rite was the consolamentum, a
kind of adult baptism of the spirit, which was administered only once.
It was reserved as a rule for those who had attained the level of the
Perfect, but it could be given to any Cathar prepared to make an
irrevocable renunciation of the flesh and consecrate his or her life to
God. The rite was preceded by a fast and imparted by the laying on of
hands and placing on the head the gospel of St John. If anyone sinned
after being “consoled,” he was expelled from the Cathar communion.
So strict were the requirements that many Cathars only underwent
the rite at the point of death, so as to avoid any further chance of
sinning. Because it was generally held that death through illness or old
age only proved that Satan was still in control of the body, some
Cathars hastened the end by what was called the endura, a ritual suicide or killing. It was thought best to be purified by the consolamentum and then face the endura, for then salvation was certain. The methods of endura
included fasting to death or taking poison, or being smothered by one
or more of the Perfect who held a pillow over the mouth of the endurist,
or strangled him.
So this is the ritual that the “Consoled Brothers” of the so-called Book of the Baptism by Fire
were named after? We presently cannot be sure. A copy of the book in
which the alleged document was published, compiled by Theodor Merzdorf
(who spelled his first name without an “e” on the end, a detail that
none of the authors quoted above got right), has been obtained by our
research staff and is now being analyzed. It has an extremely long title
in German. But it seems to us that Prince Michael was probably able to
read the text, or at least knew someone who could, because it appears
that some of the “inside information” in his book about the Templars
must have come from this.
One
thing we do know, though, is that this Roncelin/Roncelinus fellow
has been associated with the Cathars, and blamed for introducing
blasphemous rituals to Templar tradition, in many books before. The
Temple and the Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (1989) tells
us:
Between 1248 and 1250, the Master of Provence was one Roncelin de
Fos. Then, between 1251 and 1253, Roncelin was Master of England. By
1260, he was again Master of Provence, and presided in that capacity
until 1278. It is thus quite possible that Roncelin brought aspects of
heretical Cathare thought from their native soil in France to England.
This suggestion is supported by the testimony before the Inquisition of
Geoffroy de Gonneville, Preceptor of Aquitaine and Poitou. According to
Geoffroy, unnamed individuals allege that all evil and perverse rules
and innovations in the Temple had been introduced by a certain Brother
Roncelin, formerly a Master of the Order. The Brother Roncelin in
question is bound to have been Roncelin de Fos.
Pope Pius IX (reigning from 1846 to 1878), in his “Allocution Against
the Freemasons,” charged that the Templars had tapped into the
existence of a secret Johannite church. Here are some of his words on
the subject, as quoted by Albert Pike in Morals and Dogma:
The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their
Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of
Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one
another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical
powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the
Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he
knew HUGUES DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of
his pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign
Priesthood and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his
successor.
Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin
devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns
of Kings, and the Apostolate of Kabbalistic Gnosticism was vested in its
chiefs. For Saint John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the
current translation of his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and
the pagans who denied that Christ was the Word, is throughout a
misrepresentation, or misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of
that Evangel.
On the one hand, the implication seems to be that the person who
initiated Hughes de Payens (whose name means “Hugh the Pagan”) into the
secret doctrine of Johannism was John the Baptist himself—or, at least,
that the Templar tradition claimed he was. This created a bizarre
unexplained gap of 1000 years between the alleged date of the death of
John and the alleged date of the inception of the Templar order. But
this gap is eliminated if we consider the chronological revisions of
Anatoly Fomenko, which eliminates the Middle Ages and puts the Crusades
right after the death of Christ. Also, another intriguing possibility is
allowed which makes this whole matter potentially much simpler. One can
then consider the perspective that maybe the Templars were, in
fact, practicing the religion of the Church that chartered them.
However, the rituals and teachings of the Church may have been quite
different than what has been handed down to us today. It may be that,
somewhere along the line, a decision was made to sanitize the religion,
to make it more palatable with the developing mores of the day. This may
have required the public sacrifice of the Templars, Cathars, and other
Christians, now “heretics,” to make it look as though the “impurities”
of the Church had been dispensed with. If we consider this, then a lot
of the most peculiar elements of Christian mythos and doctrine, as well
as many of the otherwise bewildering physical artifacts left behind by
our Christian ancestors, make a lot more sense.
First, let us note that the way in which some anti-Christian Roman
chroniclers described the “Agape feasts” of early Christian sects
sounded more similar to descriptions of the Satanic Black Mass or the
Witches’ Sabbath, rather than what we think of now as the traditional
Eucharist celebration. These rituals reportedly involved intoxication,
orgies, infant sacrifice and cannibalism. It is now thought by most
scholars that these chroniclers were probably mixing up reports on the
activities of both Christian groups, Gnostic Christian groups, and
non-Christian Gnostic groups, not being able to tell the difference.
Perhaps, though, the differences were not quite as great as modern
Christians would like to think.
La tentation de Saint Antoine (1878), Felicien Rops
The Agape feast
Another thing to note is the presence of a great many “medieval”
churches in Europe containing idols and other artwork involving Priapian
symbolism. I already mentioned the bust of a rooster with a penis for a
nose called “The Savior of the World,” once on display in a museum at
the Vatican. Much more can be found in the form of fascinum
present in old churches throughout Britain and the Continent, along with
vagina-flashing, masturbating Melusines (called “Shiela-na-Gig” by the
Irish), and thousands of monstrous beings, often shown contorting with
another like the host of Hell, or giving birth, anally or otherwise, to
more monsters. These latter are called “gargoyles,” and laughed off by
church historians as superstitious luck charms intended to “scare away”
demons. (Obviously, the idea is that nothing is more intimidating for
demons than other demons, which has mind-blowing implications when you
consider the Ophite view that Christ, like the rest of the family of
immortals he came from, was a serpent too.
Gargoyle from the Church of St. Peter in York, England
Gargoyles at Temple Church, London
Anatoly Fomenko’s radical view of history is the only thing I have
seen that makes perfect sense of a conundrum I have dealt with in my
research for decades: the fact that Christianity and traditions labeled
“pagan” or even “Satanic” seem to have a common origin. When it comes to
the Black Mass and the Witches’ Sabbath, Fomenko comes right out and says what I have been thinking for some time:
According to the experts in the history of religions, the Western
European Christians of the Middle Ages had . . . religious rituals
including nocturnal congregations called ‘agapes,’ or ‘nights of love.’
Despite the efforts of the late medieval and modern commentators to
convince us that these Christian ‘love suppers’ involved nothing but
‘comradely libations’ and ‘platonic cordialities,’ the initial meaning
of the word ‘agape’ reveals something completely different. As N.A.
Morozov duly remarks, the correct Greek word for fraternal love is
philia, whereas agape is solely used for erotic love.
Therefore the ‘agapes’ have most probably merely been the way
Christians referred to the medieval Western European baccanals of the
Dionysian cult with all of their orgiastic attributes–the attributes
considered ‘extremely ancient’ nowadays. . . .
. . .
The medieval descriptions of the infamous ‘diabiolic sabbats’ in
Western Europe must have been based on the same archetypal ‘agape’
Baccanals as mentioned above, but these have already been declared ‘a
creation of the devil.’ Let us remind the reader that dissolute
orgiastic excesses had been a notable feature of the agapes or sabbats
(according to Scaligerian history). Quite naturally, the new ‘reformed’
Western European church conveniently delegated the responsibility for
the agapes (or sabbats, or Baccanals) to ‘the devil’ in order to smother
all recollections of the recent Bacchic Christian past in the
congregation. The people’s own history was thus ruthlessly severed and
attributed to a ‘different religion’ or even to ‘the devil.’
This matches up precisely with something that my former colleague Nicholas De Vere once wrote in his book The Dragon Legacy: The Secret History of an Ancient Bloodline
. In De Vere’s worldview, Jesus was a genetic descendant of Satan, part
of what he called the “Dragon bloodline,” which he identified as being
the same as the “Grail bloodline.” He said that the ritual known as the
“Black Mass” is: “the original mass of Jesus which the Catholics later
stole and sanitized for public consumption. . . .” Also, he wrote:
. . . Royal Witchcraft, or Witchcraft proper, from the early Dark
Ages onwards owes as much to its clearly Christian [origins] as it does
to its direct Druidic origins. Both [traditions], [both] in their
original form, and in the publicly disseminated opinion of the Catholic
popes, were and are Satanic. Jesus’ heredity, and the descent of the
Druidic dynasties both derived from an identical Dragon nascence that
the Roman Catholics decided was devilish, because the descent of both
bloodlines was from the Sumerian Enki who was the Akkadian Samael; the
Roman Lucifer and thus the Catholic Satan. In Jesus’ case the Roman
church, as do all outsiders who know they are onto a good thing,
sanitized his rituals and concealed his descent. All those who continued
to follow Jesus’ original teachings—like the witches—they burned as
‘heretics’. . . .
Bacchanalia
The Witches’ Sabbath
Certain rites that early Christians were found to be celebrating,
which were then forbidden by the church, included those called “The
Feast of the Mad,” “The Feast of the Innocent,” and “The Feast of the
Ass.” These have been compared in symbolism to the Black Mass, in that
they contain what seems to be mocking imitation of Catholic rituals.
However, Fomenko again theorizes that they were not making fun of Jesus
but rather celebrating him in authentic form.
Illustration of Black Mass from Juliette by the Marquis De Sade.
Furthermore, Fomenko unequivocally sees the early Catholic Church as
perpetuating the rites of both Mithras and Cybele, whom he believes were
worshipped together. Quoting two other writers, he reports:
…[I]t isn’t a case of Christ resembling the ‘ancient’ Mithras,
but rather that Mithraism was a form of the Christian cult after the XI
century A.D. …
A. Drews says this about strong and extensive parallels between ‘ancient’ Mithraism and mediaeval Christianity:
‘The main Roman sanctuary of Mithras was in the Vatican,
on the site of St. Peter’s Cathedral. That is where he was worshipped,
together with Attis, who had been recognized officially even earlier….
Mithras, or Attis, was called Pater, or Father. The High Priest of this
deity was also called ‘Pater’ (or the Father of Fathers); the Roman Pope
is still called the Holy Father. The latter wears a tiara, or a mitre,
on his head, which is a head-dress of Mithraism, or Attis… and red
soldier shoes of the priests of Mithras, as well as keeping the keys of
the ‘Rock God’ [or St. Peter—A.F.], and has ‘the power to bind, and the
power to permit….’ The Catholic Pope’s equal in rank was the Pater, the
Pope of the Mithraist cult. This pagan Pope resided in the Vatican,
worshipped the sun as the savior, and Cybele as the virginal Mother of
God, who was usually depicted sitting with a child in her lap—her
Christian double is the Virgin Mary.’…
Like medieval Christianity, ‘ancient’ Mithraism had a concept of
purgatory; the two also shared the use of the aspersorium, and the
tradition of crossing oneself… Ecclesial ceremonialism and public forms
of church office are similar—the liturgy was read in a dead language
that the masses did not understand, both services used hosts (wafers, or
altar bread), albs, wide cingula, episcopal hats, etc….
N.A. Koun also tells us that ‘the Mithraist oblation is virtually
similar to the Christian Eucharist… Christians, as well as Mithraists,
considered Sunday a Holy Day, and celebrated… Christmas in the Christian
tradition, on the 25 December, as the day their ‘Invincible’ deity was
born’…Some monuments depicting a clandestine Mithraist Lord’s Supper
have reached our age. We can see altar bread with Christian crosses on
these ‘ancient’ pictures. The famous Cathedra Petri, or the Chair of
Peter in Vatican, also appears to belong to the Mithras cult.
If true, this would mean that the cult practices which we know were
done in the mystery schools of Cybele and Mithras, including the public
castrations in drug-induced frenzies, the transgendered priestesses, the
bestiality, the marriages of boy initiates as young as 7 to older
males, the subjection of initiates to hallucinogenic drug trips while
confined in a coffin, and all the other so-called “Tortures of Mithras”
that the Church Fathers wrote about, were all part of the early
Christian Church itself. This explains why all of the Christian holidays
are all based on the cycles of the solar year.
The article “Secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis” article on parareligion.ch quotes Aleister Crowley as writing, in a letter to William Bernard Crow
(1895–1976), dated 11th November 1944, that the purpose of the O.T.O.
was “to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar-phallic
religion.” Where did he get this radical viewpoint, when almost
no scholars at the time would have thought that way? Everyone else
writing on the subject merely thought that the symbols of antiquity had
been co-opted by the Church.
All this brings us back to the question of the Templars. As I have shown, the Templars confessed to such things
as spitting on the cross, kissing each others’ butts and penises, and
taking an oath not to refuse each others’ homosexual advances, all as
part of their initiation rite. They confessed to this twice, once to the
French government, and once to the Pope, according to the Chinon
Parchment, which, as you now know, says that the Pope then assigned the
knights minor penance and absolved them. Modern Christians would think
such practices unforgivable, but the Pope was reportedly ready to send
the knights out on a new Crusade, had the King of France not had them
executed instead. The king had also accused the previous Pope, Boniface
VIII, of witchcraft, and exhumed his body so that it could be tried of
this charge.
Depiction of the death of Boniface in a 15th-century copy of Boccaccio’s De Casibus
It seems that the French crown viewed the Church as a threat, and,
being more powerful than the church at the time, France had forced the
church headquarters to be moved to Avignon rather than Rome, so that
they could keep a close eye on the situation. I suggested earlier that
perhaps the first French King, Meroveus, rumored to be a descendant of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene, may have actually been Jesus himself, if we
accept a chronological rearrangement such as that suggested by Fomenko.
So maybe they had reason to believe that the Church and its most favored
militia had been infiltrated by the anti-Christian enemy beyond the
point of reconciliation, and sought to destroy them.
Considering all of the foregoing, is it not possible that
Christianity was an entirely different animal at the time that the
Templars were founded? Am I right to speculate that their initiation
rites, having much in common with the Black Mass and the Witches’
Sabbath, were not considered unusual at the time, but fell out of
practice later, and eventually became an embarrassment to the Church? Is
this the real reason why the French crown persecuted them while the
Church tried to protect them?
Templars desecrating the Cross at initiation
As we mentioned in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled,
the figure of Jesus shares many aspects with that of Dionysus, but so
too does that of John the Baptist. We also explained in that book that
there are very real reasons to believe that John was the originator of a
Gnostic mystery school of his own, the leadership of which was passed
on to Simon Magus after his death, and then from there, to many of the
Gnostic groups that followed in his footsteps. Shockingly, in his book
The Mysteries of John the Baptist, Tobias Churton described a painting
that appears to depict John the Baptist as Dionysus (known to the Romans
also as “Bacchus”). He wrote:
Underlying the ambiguous and arguably pagan inspiration of
Leonardo’s John is the existence of a similar work, thought to have been
painted between 1510 and 1515 by a follower of Leonardo from a drawing
by the master. The painting has a dual identity. It is known both as St.
John in the Wilderness and as Bacchus, the god of religious ecstasy,
wine, and intoxication.
. . .
[The painter] chose to add vine leaves to the figure’s head and
leopard spots to John’s hairy loincloth. A vine wreath added to the
Baptist’s former staff transformed it into a Bacchic thrysus, Dionysus’
sacred staff borne by his wine-intoxicated followers. According to
Euripides, the thrysus dripped with honey….
St. John in the Wilderness/Bacchus
St. John Goes Into the Wilderness, apparently leaving a medieval walled city
Left and Center: John the Baptist in attitude of Levi’s
Baphomet (right hand forming Manu Pantea (“Hand of Blessing”), pointing
upward, the other pointing down). Right: Crucifixion amulet inscribed
“Christ, Orpheus, Bacchus.”
These concepts, and their impact when combined with
Hammer-Purgstall’s evidence presented here, make it possible that John
himself was the original Templar secret chief while still in the flesh,
and that the Baphomet “head” they used for worship and divination was in
fact his. This, then, makes perfect sense out of the meaning of
Baphomet’s name “Baptizer of Wisdom (i.e., Gnosis).”More amazing things
become possible when we allow for a shortening of the chronology. Let us
consider another possible identity for the Templar secret chief called
the “Theoclet.” We mentioned this idea in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. In John 14:16-17 (KJV), Jesus told his apostles before he left them that:
I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. Even the
Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him
not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and
shall be in you.
The Greek word here, Periclytos, has been variously
translated as “comforter” and “consoler.” Some Islamic theologians
choose to believe that it is the equivalent of the Arabic word for
“praised one,” which is “Ahmad,” one of Mohammed’s epithets. In Sura
61:6 of The Koran (Sahih International translation), Mohammed is identified as the one whose coming was promised by Jesus:
And . . . when Jesus, the son of Mary, said, ‘O children of
Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came
before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come
after me, whose name is Ahmad.’ But when he came to them with clear
evidences, they said, ‘This is obvious magic.’
However, verse 22 of John Chapter 14 (KJV) makes it clear that the Comforter is in fact the Holy Spirit:
The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send
in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
This
would seem to disqualify Mohammed, unless we want to identify
the Prophet with the Holy Spirit. Certainly, we previously mentioned
evidence that suggests Baphomet may have been identified with the Holy
Spirit, as he/she was with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, which the Church
has always equated with the Holy Spirit. So we can connect Mohammed with
Allah, Allah with Allat, Allat with Lilith, and Lilith with Sophia, and
thus get to the Holy Spirit that way. Also, there is the possibility
that the baptism “with fire, and with the Holy Spirit” that John the
Baptist promised the one to come after him would bring was, in the eyes
of the Knights Templar, the same as their “Baptism of Wisdom.” Let us
recall that the Templars’ alleged secret rule, supposedly contained in
The Book of the Baptism of Fire, was said to have been written for the
“Consoled Brothers,” and possibly referred to the Cathar rite of
Consolamentum.
There are images of Mohammed being baptized with such fire, and
frequently his head is shown surrounded by flames. Many of these
pictures are illustrations of his “Night Journey,” during which he
allegedly flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back in a single night.
Actually, The Koran says that he was taken “for a Journey by
night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque,” but these have
always been taken by believers to be the Kaaba in Mecca and the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, respectively. He was taken to Heaven during this
trip, just like Enoch and Hermes are said to have done. While he was
there he met Jesus and John the Baptist.
Supposedly, it all started when he laid his head on the black stone
of the Kaaba (analogous to the biblical story of Jacob falling asleep
with his head on a sacred beytl stone), and was visited by the archangel
Gabriel (the angel of wisdom and communication, similar to Hermes in
that regard). He was given a ride on a winged horse with the face of a
human female whose name was “Barak” (meaning “Lightning”).
Recall that lightning was what supposedly inseminated the rock that
Mithras burst forth out of in the famous depictions of him. This rock,
it seems, was Cybele. She, like the meteoric, magnetized Kaaba stone, was thought of as a black rock. Not only does the word Kaaba evoke her name, but qibla,
the word for the direction in which Muslims are to pray towards the
stone, is almost identical to the way her name was purportedly
pronounced by Romans. The fact that Cybele may have been the mother of
Mithras makes me wonder if that it why it is now shattered into numerous
pieces, most of them seemingly missing. Are we really looking at a
broken eggshell here, with the main contents gone long ago?
Amazingly, before the Night Journey began, Mohammed was baptized with
“the holy water of wisdom,” including his internal organs (which I take
to be “the living waters of Mete”).
A hadith attributed to Malik bin Sa`sa`ah (as reported in the first
footnote on Sura 53 of the Hilali and Khan translation of The Koran)
says that Mohammed told him:
While I was at the House in a state midway between sleep and
wakefulness, (an angel recognized me) as the man lying between two men. A
golden tray full of wisdom and belief was brought to me and my body was cut open from the throat to the lower part of the abdomen and then my abdomen was washed with Zam-zam water and (my heart was) filled with wisdom and belief. (Emphasis added.)
Zam-zam is used by Muslims today in much the same way that
holy water is used by Catholics. It’s the word for water drawn from the
sacred well near the Kaaba, which they say miraculously sprang from the
ground when Abraham’s first son Ishmael, forefather the of the Arabs,
and his mother, the slave-woman Hagar, were dying of thirst in the
desert after being ditched there by Abraham.
In this, I see echoes of the Kabbalistic story of the “slave woman”
Lilith, who distracted God from his true wife, the Shekinah. We made a
case in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled,
as other scholars have done, before us, that Allah and Lilith might be
identical. Meanwhile, reminiscent of the castration of Attis, Ishmael
had to sacrifice his foreskin in Abraham’s religious ritual. The two
Jewish “tokens” of covenant with the Lord—circumcision and the
observance of the Sabbath Day on Saturday—and both evidence of devotion
to the cult of Saturn.
The whole incident is called “Isra,” which sounds an awful lot like “Israel,” yet is from the root sera,
meaning “to travel by night. But these are the actual words that are
being translated as “Night Journey.” Although it is described as
happening to Mohammed while he was in a state “midway between sleep and
wakefulness,” most Muslims take it to have been a literal, physical, and
miraculous journey.
However, to us it sounds identical to the term “go forth by night,”
which is used in the European witchcraft tradition to refer to the
process of astral-projecting in one’s sleep as a method of attending the
Witches’ Sabbath on a high mountain peak. After projecting their souls
into the ether, it was said that the witches would ride flying goats or
broomsticks to the secret meeting place for the ceremony. The Devil or
“Black Man” was sometimes said to arrive at the Sabbath by the same
method. Just like with Mohammed’s Night Journey, while it sounds like
it’s all just a dream, it was taken by the witches themselves to be
real. The Church took it to be so real that confessing to it was
punishable by death.
Though I haven’t read his thoughts on the matter yet, I’m willing to
bet that Anatoly Fomenko sees Islam as, originally, just another branch
of Christianity. Not only is Christ heavily venerated in The Koran,
as well as Mary, but it even asserts the truth of the Virgin Birth. But
it calls Jesus the “spirit of God,” seemingly identifying him with the
Holy Spirit, rather than the Son of God, which is a notion that Muslims
find blasphemous. Shia Muslims believe in the prophecy of the coming
Anti-Christ, and that Jesus will work in tandem with a figure called the
Mahdi to cleanse the Earth of his influence.
“Mahdi,” of course, makes me think of Mete. I also think of Saint Demetrios[11]
of Thessaloniki, who is often depicted as the companion of Saint
George. They are always shown with their appearance made to compliment
each other in several ways. Both are dressed in the armor of knights,
mounted and armed. George rides a white horse and is shown spearing a
Dragon, while Demetrius commands a red horse and pins down a man with
his weapon—supposedly an emperor, either third-century Roman emperor
Maximillian or Kayolan of Bulgaria. His epithet is Μυροβλήτης (Greek,
Myrovlētēs, “the Myrrh-streamer”), by which I cannot help but be
reminded of the Frankish King Meroveus.
Do we see, in the combination of these two saints, Christ and the
Mahdi working together to destroy the Great Beast (the Dragon) and his
human cohort, the Anti-Christ (the Emperor)? Also, considering the color
of their horses, are we looking here at two of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse? The one on the white horse is usually taken to be Saint
Michael, who appears to me, Alexander Rivera, and many other myth
interpreters, to be a form of Mithras. Theologians often see him as
synonymous with Jesus Christ, which, again, fits right in with the
hypotheses I have presented her. The Wikipedia article offers the
interpretation that they could be seen as “earthly manifestations of the
archangels Michael and Gabriel.” It was Gabriel who acted as guide to
Mohammed on the Night Journey.
Then we can’t forget the fact that until Hammer-Purgstall, most
writers on this subject assumed the truth of the assumption that the
name “Baphomet” was a corruption of “Mohamet.” Also, some prosecuted
Templars confessed to using the “words of the Saracens” in their
rituals, such as, for instance, “Yallah!”
Jules
Michelet reports that some knights said “they have fancied they saw a
devil’s head, a mauffe’s head, that in these ceremonies they have seen
the devil himself under the shape of a cat, or of a woman. . . .” The
word mauffe
appears to originate in French as a way of spelling this alleged
alteration of Mahomet, the name of the Muslim prophet, more frequently
spelled “Mohammed” or “Muhammad,” which supposedly morphed into the word
Baphomet. Variations seen in print also include Maufe, Mauffez, and
Maphumet (according to the Bulletin de la Societe Academique de Laon,
Vol. 21, 1876). .” Also, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary,
“Mahomet” was used in the Middle Ages as a generic word for “idol.”
The term Maphumet, I think, may have common origins with the
inspiration for Christopher Marlowe’s invented Devil Mephistopheles, to
whom Johannes Faustus sold his soul in the Marlowe play named after
him. Centuries later, a new revision on the Faust story was produced by
Johann von Goethe. As I mentioned previously, Goethe exchanged
correspondence with Hammer-Purgstall and greatly appreciated his
translation of The Koran.
. In De Vere’s worldview, Jesus was a genetic descendant of Satan, part
of what he called the “Dragon bloodline,” which he identified as being
the same as the “Grail bloodline.” He said that the ritual known as the
“Black Mass” is: “the original mass of Jesus which the Catholics later
stole and sanitized for public consumption. . . .” Also, he wrote:
