Bahomet Pt II

As posted earlier, the Bahomet meme is mostly put together during the nineteenth century part inspired by scraps of the Templar in particular and the secret societies in vogue.

Thus much antiquarian research has been folded in.  This well worth revisiting.  What we are seeing are pieces of the old pagan theology supplanted by Christianity.

Add in the plausible insight that the material can also hold channeled information as well and this remains worthwhile.



Pt II

Temple of Castor and Pollux, identified by Louis, Duc de Blacas

As for Purgstall-Hammer himself, his text is not very political at all, and it is almost hard to believe that Peter Partner and I are writing about the same book, considering the way he describes it. Besides the passage quoted before about the Templars’ alleged “Machiavellian principle” of blackmail, Hammer-Purgstall made very few comments in this text, tying the Templars, even implicitly, to the conspiracies brewing in his own day.

What he does do, however, is describe in detail the items he found, the entity of Mete that he believed was depicted on many of them, and the meaning he ascribed to the messages he found on them. These idols items bear inscriptions written in Greek and Arabic characters, but often in code (according to Hammer-Purgstall). Sometimes these letters are anagrammatized, and sometimes they are transliterated into the alphabet of another language. He believed that the messages identify the character depicted as “Mete” (M-E-T-E), which Hammer-Purgstall says was short for the Greek name Metis, meaning “wisdom,” “cunning,” “prudence” and “good advice.”

In Greek mythology, Metis the first bride of Zeus. She played a very important role in initiating and upholding his rule as king of the gods. To understand what happened to her, we must examine the quintessential Greek creation myths.

Zeus was the son of Chronos, who was, in turn, the son of Ouranos. Chronos castrated his father in order to escape the womb of his mother, Gaia. Ouranos had deliberately prevented his children from being born, cognizant that one of them was fated to overthrow his divine position. When Chronos engendered his own children with his wife Rhea, he became aware of a similar fate that was to come from one of these progeny. Therefore, he devised his own way of dealing with it by swallowing them upon birth.

But just as Gaia had schemed against her husband to aid her son Chronos in fulfilling his destiny (by supplying his with the castration knife), Rhea came up with a plan to save her son Zeus from ending up in his father’s stomach. In this case, she substituted the baby with a decoy in the form of a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Later, they say, Zeus found a way to poison his father, causing him to vomit up all the other children that had already been swallowed. Zeus and his siblings then fought their way to supremacy, overthrowing Chronos. The clever witch who conceived the poison plot was Metis, whom Zeus subsequently married.

As the story goes, Zeus, just like his predecessors, gained knowledge of a prophecy that if he bred with Metis, one of the children would overthrow him. Having already impregnated her, his solution was to swallow the mother before the birth ever happened. He was able to do this, some say, by tricking her into turning herself into a fly, so that she was small enough to go inside of his mouth. However, other depictions of the act show him eating her limb by limb at full size.

Whichever way it happened, as with the Olympian gods in the gullet of Chronos, Metis was immortal, so she remained alive inside of Zeus eternally. Eventually she gave birth to a daughter, the wise Athena. Metis worked from within Zeus’ body to hammer out a coat of armor for her daughter to wear. The hammering caused Zeus discomfort, and so he had his head cleaved open to alleviate the pressure. This allowed Athena to escape.

Athena with gorgon head on Aegis shield and Nike in hand

Athena went on to become an important goddess to the Greeks, associated, like her mother, with wisdom. But for some reason, Metis did not escape with her daughter, and remained inside of Zeus. He reportedly utilized her as a source of wise council during his reign, and she was often depicted supporting his throne from underneath, propping it up, like a royal slave.

 

Metis underneath the throne of Zeus

Athena freed from the head of Zeus. But where is her armor?

Thus I theorized in my novel Genuflect, via a fictional persona, that the image of Mete on the casket in the Duc de Blacas collection depicts Metis escaping from this bondage. This may be why she is shown breaking the chains off her legs while—it seems to me—dragging the Sun and Moon down, both of them inverted. As she does it, she is smiling maniacally. I think she is being shown upending Heaven, disrupting the order of the Gnostic Archons and their leader Jaldabaoth (a.k.a. Jehovah, and thus Jove, and thus Zeus, bit also Mithras, Chronos, and Saturn, as I shall explain).

Hammer-Purgstall said that Metis, or Mete, was the same a Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom associated with the Holy Spirit in the Christian religion, but known by the name of Achamoth to the Gnostics. Hammer-Purgstall believed that the word “Baphomet” came from the Greek Baphe meteos, meaning “tincture (or baptism) of Mete.” Although Sophia is a mainstream Christian concept, endorsed by the Church and identified with the Holy Spirit, to the Gnostics, she was the mother of the Demiurge, the god who created this world and ruled over it as a tyrant.

The Demiurge, whom they called Jaldabaoth, was seen by Gnostics as identical to Jehovah as depicted in the Bible. They thought of him as a crazy villain because he claimed to be the only god when he wasn’t. Sophia was the female figure from the Pleroma, the pure realm of light beyond the “curtain” of the fixed stars. In their cosmology, it was Sophia who accidentally miscarried the malformed fetus which became Jaldabaoth, in a misguided attempt to create her own “aeon” (god-world) without a male partner. As such, Sophia was a flawed, fallen figure to the Gnostics.

Hammer-Purgstall found what he thought were “Templar” inscriptions about Mete that refer to her as “sprouting,” or “the planter.” One inscription on an image of Mete given by Hammer-Purgstall refers to “sprouting water.” This, he said, is meant to indicate sperma genethliakon (Greek for “reproductive seed”). This fits with accepted history, for according to several of the confessions given by some of the knights who were arrested in Paris in 1307, Templar initiates were taught that the Baphomet idol “caused the land to germinate.” They were also reportedly told that this demon was responsible for the fecundity of the order’s finances. This, the confessors said, was why they kept copies of the idol in their money coffers.
 

In Hammer-Purgstall’s assessment as one of the top Orientalists of his time, the symbolism he found on his “Baphometic idols” was that of the “Ophite” sect of Gnosticism, which he believed was the secret Templar doctrine. They were a group who revered the Serpent of Genesis, and all of the villains in the Bible, for their opposition to Jaldabaoth and his creation. Hammer-Purgstall believed that they also revered Sophia, in the form of Mete, and that they did sex rituals in her honor.

The images he showcases seem to suggest the ritual sacrifice of young boys as well. In his analysis, however, rather than accusing the Templars of murdering children, Hammer-Purgstall merely gives his own interpretation of a Gnostic concept of a symbolic “baptism of fire.” As he wrote:

This Gnostic baptism was understood to be not a bath of redemption through water, but a spiritual purification through fire, which is clear from excerpts out of Theodotus and out of Justin, in just so many words.

In support of [the translations of the name Baphomet] as “spiritual baptism” and “tincture of fire,” there are the sculptured bowls at the feet of our idols, full of fire, demonstrating how that mystic rite should be administered. For example, here are two representations of this concept. The first is of an infant (which means a neophyte Gnostic) being placed by Mete at the pedestal to one of these bowls (See Tab. I, fig. 14). The other is of a boy standing over a flaming bowl (see Tab. II, fig. 3).3

Hammer-Purgstall references a passage in the Corpus Hermeticum referring to nothing less than a “baptism of wisdom.” Egyptian Hermeticists used a cosmology similar to that of the Gnostics, and likewise taught that there was redemption through Gnosis (as you will see below). But they can be distinguished from Gnostics by the fact that they held a relatively positive view of the Demiurge and his creation. Therefore, rather than condemning him for imprisoning mankind in the bondage of ignorance, they gave the excuse that this was merely a test to see which were aggressive enough in seeking wisdom to be worthy of it.

The Corpus Hermeticum allegedly records the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus. As we explain in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, this figure seems to be simultaneously the Greek god Hermes, yet also a pre-Christian pagan prophet/philosopher-king. In the fourth chapter of the Corpus, entitled the “Discourse of Hermes to Tat on the Mixing Bowl or the Monad,” Hermes explains that the Father of all didn’t give Nous (“mind,” “intelligence,” or “wisdom”) to every person born in the world. Rather, he put it in a “mixing bowl” which he sent down from Heaven, intending for people to compete with each other for access to it. Then a herald was sent (implicitly, it seems to me, Hermes himself), who declared to the people of the world:

Immerse yourself in the mixing bowl if your heart has the strength, if it believes you will rise up again to the one who sent the mixing bowl below, if it recognizes the purpose of your coming to be.

Then, according to Hermes:

All those who heeded the proclamation and immersed themselves in mind participated in knowledge and became perfect people because they received mind.

In Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, Alexander Rivera discuss, in the context of the Hermetic bowl of mind, the famous so-called “Ophite Bowl” (alternately sometimes called the “Orphic Bowl”). A link between these two things was also instinctively seen by Emma Jung, writer and wife of Carl Jung, in her book The Grail Legend, where she wrote:

Think of that vessel filled with nous (understanding and consciousness) which is mentioned in the Corpus Hermeticum and which, as Hermes taught his pupil Thoth, was sent from heaven to earth so that men, plunging into it, might understand the purpose for which they were created. A vessel of this kind also played a part in the Gnostic mystery celebrations of late antiquity. In Hans Leisegang’s study, “The Mystery of the Serpent,” an illustration is given of a bowl that appears to have originated in an Orphic community. On it sixteen naked men and women, in reverential and worshipping attitudes, stand around a coiled and winged serpent, the symbol of the Redeemer and Son of God in the Orphic Gnosis. . . . In this bowl the Logos-serpent is clearly being worshipped by the initiates.

The Ophite Bowl

Hammer-Purgstall argued that this “mixing bowl” of nous, a.k.a. Gnosis, is what is represented by all of the ritual bowls that he discovered. He said that this is what the Holy Grail symbolized as well, as he believed the Grail romances were Gnostic Templar allegories. It was, to him, the flaming censer of the Gnostic “baptism of fire” purification. Evidence connecting the Templars to this ritual is implied by the alleged existence of a secret Templar rule called The Book of the Baptism of Fire.

A text by this name was supposedly discovered in the Vatican archives by the Danish scientist and bishop Dr. Frederic Münter, who claimed that it described their secret baptism rite. It is this Baptism of Fire that Hammer-Purgstall believed to be depicted in this image of what looks like a child being put into a flaming bowl, and (presumably) another (seen on one of the caskets at the British Museum) of a body in flames on an altar. He wrote that this represents a Templar initiate, depicted as a child because he has not yet matured in the “wisdom” that he is about to be initiated into, represented by the bowl of fire. This is why he wrote:

Next [we see] a Neophyte with the appearance of an infant placed by a parent at such a bowl, surrounded by a whirling cloud of smoke from the incense (See Tab. II, fig. 3).

Tab. II, fig. 3, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Memorial to Dr. Frederic Münter, Bishop of Seeländ

Another symbol for the same idea, according to the learned Orientalist, was that of a dragon swallowing a child, an emblem also seen repeatedly on his Templar artifacts (and discussed in greater depth below). As he put it:

On the second bowl, beside the figure of Mete (See Tab. II, fig. 5), we see the Sun and Moon (See Tab. II, fig. 7, 8). A “baptism of fire” is shown there too (See Tab. II, fig. 3), and on the other side, a dragon, from whose jaws the ministers have snatched the infant.

Then later he writes:

Regarding the dragon, it will not be irrelevant for us to say a few words. That quadruped, scaly and rough, with tail twisted back, seems in actual fact to be a crocodile rather than a dragon, and soon you will see that it makes no difference if it is called a crocodile. Since in the sculpture of the bowl (Tab. II, fig. 4) it threatens to devour the infant, and since, in the sculptures of the Templar churches the same dragon is represented as swallowing down the infant, we call it a dragon. For according to St. Epiphanius the Ophites taught that the one presiding over this world has the likeness of a dragon.

By it, souls not having Gnosis are absorbed, and through its tail, [they are] poured back into this world. We will, however, find below, in the explanation by Schoengrad regarding the sculptures of the churches of the Templars, an image of such a dragon swallowing down and pouring back the infant. It is sufficient here to notice that that man who, in the relief of the second bowl, drags the infant out of the dragon’s jaw, represents a true Gnostic who, by pouring Gnosis into the infant, hinders him from being absorbed by the world.

I have much more to say about this symbol later on in this analysis, but for now, let us just unpack what Hammer-Purgstall is saying here. Gnostics and Hermeticists both believed that our fate as individuals was controlled by the planets (what they called the “Archons”) and their father, the Demiurge. This fate included multiple incarnations in different bodies, between which we are usually made to forget by drinking from the river of Lethe (“forgetfulness”) in the underworld. They thought one could escape fate by obtaining Gnosis directly from the realm of light beyond. This some said, could cause them to remain awake after death, and remember their past lives upon reincarnation. Or, said some, one could avoid reincarnating entirely by transcending the prison of materiality altogether.

The River of Lethe, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, 1890

In the Orphic mystery school, which is thought by scholars to have influenced Gnosticism, the initiates were baptized in the river of sobriety instead, and drank “wine” that made them sober too. The Gnostic Pistis Sophia also talks about a “cup of sobriety.” This brought awareness of one’s past lives, rather than forgetfulness, and caused one to be free of fate, so that you would not be forced to reincarnate again. It seems to represent the same thing as the bowl of Nous mentioned in Discourse 4 of the Corpus Hermeticum.

Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, baptizing an initiate of Orphic Mysteries with the waters of sobriety

This idea seems to have been at the root of another concept that later developed in Western ritual magic. The idea is that one can become free from fate while still alive, and thus have the power to contravene the laws of nature by commanding the material world to do your bidding, having risen above it. This same concept was expressed in one of the secret messages that Hammer-Purgstall found encoded on one of the artifacts: “The distinguished charity of Mete uproots the enemy.”

My interpretation is that “distinguished” means “peculiar,” or “strange; “charity” means “love,” and therefore “sex”; and “the enemy” is the Demiurge, along with his servants, the planetary archons. This is why Mete was depicted pulling the Sun and Moon down from the heavens by a pair of chains. She was “uprooting” the tyranny of the cosmic order, and freeing herself from the chains of her master.

In his analysis, Hammer-Purgstall seems to be saying that the Templars viewed sexual sin as a path to “uprooting the enemy” through transgression of the creator-God’s rules, and also to what they perceived to be the rules of nature. Hammer-Purgstall compared this to the libertine creed of the later incarnations of the Order of Assassins, which became a heretical Gnostic Muslim sect promoting the creed “Nothing is true and all is permitted.”

In Aleister Crowley’ O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis, meaning “Order of Oriental Templars”), which is accompanied by an affiliated “Gnostic church,” a similar creed is promoted, plagiarized from Rabelais: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Added to this were the words “Love is the law,” again putting emphasis on the use of transgressive “love” or sex as a path to spiritual freedom from the rule of the Demiurge and his cohorts. Crowley practiced and promoted homosexual, pedophilic and bestial sex rituals, just as the Templars were suspected by Hammer-Purgstall of doing. Thus, one of the phrases that Hammer-Purgstall found repeated in variations on the idols was (as per one example):

Reditus (ab apostasia) per πρωκτον facilis redditur

Professor X translated this for us as “Return (from apostasy) through prokton [Greek, “the rectum”] is made easy.” But I have discovered that the Latin, (reditus per facilis redditur) could also be read, by themselves, as “revenue through easy return,” as suggested by Google Translate. If we add in the word πρωκτον, it beings to sound as if we are talking about male prostitution and anal sex. This is absolutely relevant, as I am about to explain.

I am unclear as to exactly why Hammer-Purgstall added in the words ab apostasia (“from apostasy”) to this particular quotation (assuming this parenthetical addition wasn’t in the original inscription). But elsewhere among the artifact inscriptions, the Arabic word munker (“denier” or “apostate”) is used (meaning someone who denies the truth of the Islamic faith). It has a very particular meaning, as Satan or Lucifer (Iblis) was, according to the Koran, the first denier, because he refused Allah’s order to genuflect to Adam. As it says in Sura 23:97 (Pickthal translation):

And when We said unto the angels: Prostrate yourselves before Adam, they fell prostrate, all save Iblis. He demurred through pride, and so became a disbeliever.

Fay ce que devras (“Do what thou wouldst”), the phrase written on the Front of Rabelais’ fictional “Abbey of Thelema”

Also, Munkir and Nakir (“the Denied and the Denier”) are two angels who are said to test the faith of Muslims after their death. Furthermore, munkir carries with it an inherent implication alluding to the crime of sodomy, and is sometimes used as a euphemism for such. This is probably related to the lines from The Koran mentioned in one of my footnotes to Hammer-Purgstall’s text, “the word munker (or munkir) was used in The Koran’s reckoning of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Sura 26: 160-175, when Lot is quoted as using this term to rebuke the homosexuals who were attempting to rape his house guests, the visiting angels.”

Munkir and Nakir, as depicted by Zakariya ibn Muhammad Qazwini

Later in the text, Hammer-Purgstall describes a “genuflecting idol,” with what he calls a “dog” shown positioned behind it, “adhering to the posterior parts,” which, he says, “indicates none other than the most disgusting outrage of the Templars.” On another artifact, he found an inscription stating:

He ordered the camel to lie down on its knees, [to do] the most disgusting things.

Camels bowing down to Mohammed as an angel anoints him with fluid

Finally, he also describes another disturbing image:

…[We] see a boy, a future Ophite or Gnostic Templar, immodestly fondling a bear, an animal so addicted to this vice that among the Arabs is circulated a proverb [regarding such]. To prevent this, and to claim the nursling for himself, the Templar charges forward with a lance in order to pierce the bear through and to lead the infant over to his own enticements, at which the abovementioned dog not obscurely hints. On the other hand, the boy, now having become an adolescent, resists the flatteries of the girl, who has tried to entice him by offering him flowers.

The connection being made here is one I also made in my novel Genuflect, although I hadn’t at the time put together all of these layers of meaning consciously at the time. But implicitly, I think, the concept of anal rape is being subtly hinted at in the ritual of bowing down, whether to a king, a deity, or an army that has just slaughtered all of the adult men in your village, leaving you defenseless. As the villain Blake Rosenberg stated in that book:

[G]enuflection is ultimately a sign of sexual submission made into a societal custom. It’s an evolutionary vestige of our wild bestial ancestors. The animals do it whenever they lose a fight, or whenever they don’t even dare to fight. It was first practiced by human tribes conquered in war, to obtain mercy from the victors. Then it was made a general sign of ‘respect’ from slaves to their owners. Why do you think Muslims put their asses in the air when they submit to Allah?

The story of the fall of Iblis tells you that an angel fell from God’s grace, and was essentially kicked out of the Heavenly royal court for having refused to submit in this way. Is it possible that Iblis might be able to “easily” return to his previous position there with Allah if he did submit and prostrate himself to Adam? Would that, in the filthy minds of the Ophite Gnostic Templars, possibly involve submission to anal penetration?

Perhaps that would have made perfect sense to them, as in Greek mythology, that appears to have been the way in which Zeus, having escaped the attempts of his father Chronos to swallow him when he was a baby. He later obtained victory over his father Chronos by pretending to be his “cupbearer.” This was a euphemism used in the ancient world for a catamite—a young male sex slave. (This, by the way, is the position held by the figure personified by the constellation of the “water-bearer” Aquarius.)

A Roman with his catamite

It was said that Zeus used his intimate position in his father’s royal court to obtain an opportunity to “poison” Chronos, a plot said to have been devised by the goddess Metis. This caused Chronos to vomit up the children he had swallowed, the siblings of Zeus (the gods of Olympus). They emerged in reverse order from how they had been first born from their mother’s womb and eaten.

We should also note that, with these Greek creation stories (which I see as being referenced directly and indirectly by the Ophite and Templar code words and symbolic images that Hammer-Purgstall brings to us here), we once again we have the idea of a child being swallowed by a dragon, as Chronos and his wife Rhea were both, at times, depicted as such. They were certainly understood by mythographers to be giant monsters, as all the Titans were. Even Zeus was sometimes depicted with a serpent’s body from the waist down. They were a race of dragons, so the image of a baby being swallowed by a dragon, mentioned repeatedly by Hammer-Purgstall and recurring many times within the pictures on his artifacts.

Zeus as an anguipede, raping a human

A medieval rendering of the same incident

The parallels with the story of Jesus Christ might have been obvious to the Templars. After his death on the cross, he was swallowed by Hell, but, according to Catholic doctrine, released all the souls there (and according to most Christians, he certainly purchased the potential release of them all). Also, many Gnostic texts describe Christ as an “alien” from the light realm of the Pleroma beyond creation, whose presence here is being rejected as a foreign object by the body of the Demiurge, within whose gullet creation apparently was thought to reside. Finally, the way in which the children of Chronos are “born again” with the stone in reverse order from their first birth, like a Christian reborn with Christ, could have been seen as a fulfillment of the prophecy made by Jesus in Matthew 20:16 that “the last shall be first, and the first last”(KJV). Also, in Revelation 4:1, the one sitting on the throne of God is actually described as a stone.

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.

This takes place within the New Jerusalem, described as a cubic city, the righteous ones selected to be saved must enter before the Lake of Fire destroys the rest of creation (thus making the inside of the box a new cosmos in itself). It is described by St. John the Divine as “coming down out of heaven from God, shining with the glory of God. Its radiance was like a most precious jewel, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.”

Thus, any future emergence from this crystal enclosure into a larger realm could be considered a “birth from the stone,” and the cubic city viewed as a vehicle that safely guides the passengers through the ocean of chaos into a new realm. This is actually how oceans were viewed in ancient cosmologies: as bowls of primordial chaos, full of that which preceded material existence. Thus, existence was viewed as literally coming out of the sea, just as evolutionary biology now claims more complex forms of life were formed on Earth.

This would explain why the stone in the Greek story, the substitute for Zeus, was called omphalos, and said to be the “Navel of the World.” In Jerusalem, in the floor of the Al-Aqsa mosque, there is something similar, called the Eben Shityah, the “Foundation Stone of the World.” The Ark of the Covenant supposedly rested upon it, and there are even Christian traditions saying that this is the real location of Golgotha (“the Place of the Skull”), where Jesus was purportedly crucified.

Considering the anal connections here, it is not ridiculous to consider a connection between the English word “shit” and the Foundation Stone, as “fundament” is an antiquated term for both the buttocks and feces. The commonly-accepted etymology of this word, as expressed by EtymologyOnline.com, is:

Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic skit– (source also of North Frisian skitj, Dutch schijten, German scheissen), from PIE root skei– ‘to cut, split.’ The notion is of ‘separation’ from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere ‘to separate,’ Old English scearn (‘dung, muck,’) from scieran (‘to cut, shear’; see sharn). It is thus a cousin to ‘science’ and ‘conscience.’

“Scat,” of course, comes from this. “Earth,” “dirt,” and “soil” are synonymous in English, and at times, synonymous with excrement outright as well, as in the verb “to soil.” Tartarus was the womb of Gaia, the Earth. Again, the careful examination of the meaning of the words and their origins tells us how to interpret the myths that we have been dealing with here.

Saturn is specifically associated with sodomy, as the root words connected to his name attest. Satu means “sewing,” referring to planting seeds in the earth, just as Saturn’s title sator means sower. But amazingly, the noun “sewer”—a conduit for human waste—has its own etymology that nonetheless leads us right back to sodomy and male prostitution, stemming ultimately, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from the “Gallo-Roman exaquaria (source of Middle French esseveur),” which itself comes from the “Latin ex (‘out’)… + aquaria, fem. of aquarius”—the “Cup-bearer,” a.k.a. the “Catamite.”

Saturn’s epithet Sterculius comes from stercus, meaning “dung.” The English word “sod,” referring to earth covered with grass, may come from this connection in Latin between feces and agricultural fertilizer, and also from Saturn’s name. It’s also probably no coincidence that in Britain the word “sod” is a slang term for “sodomite,” or that the inhabitants of Sodom were known to be haughty because of their vast mineral wealth, which the subterranean Saturn (imprisoned in Tartarus ever since his) was thought to be the ruler of. Vulgar words for feces are often used colloquially to refer to gold, money or treasure in cultures around the world, probably because of the traditional connection between these things and the underworld.

In a section of his book about the Louis Bunuel’s 1930 film L’Age D’Or (The Golden Age, named after the term for Saturn’s pre-Olympian kingdom), Paul Hammond, analyzing the film’s scatological imagery, quoted one of the influencers of the film, Salvador Dali, who in the same year (1930) wrote somewhere that:

We learned long ago to recognize the image of desire behind the simulacra of terror, and even the reawakening of the ‘ages of gold’ behind ignominious scatological simulacra.

 

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, by Salvador Dali

The Etruscans called Saturn Satre, and said that he “hurls his lightning from his abode deep in the earth.” It was lightning, remember, that fertilized the rock which Mithras was born from. The similarly-named Egyptian god Set is most likely connected to the figure of Saturn, as well as the character of Seth in The Book of Genesis. In my book The Merovingian Mythos and Clock Shavings, I described how similar names in the lists Seth and Cain appears to be a refurbishing of the tarnished figure of Cain, I also demonstrate how Cain corresponds in many ways to the figure of Saturn.

Scholars speculate, based on the imagery found in the cult’s temples, that in the Roman mysteries of Mithras before cutting the bull’s throat, Mithras and his assistants sodomized the bull. This bestial rape is literally shown in some of the “taurtoctonies” (the term for depictions of the Mithraic bull slaughter) found in Europe. Even more common is for wheat to be shown sprouting out of the bull’s anus.

Mithraic relief from Heddernheim showing the sacred bull being sodomized by the Chiaramonti. From Franz Cumont’s Mysteries of Mithras.

Mithras was actually said to have been born from a rock that had been divinely inseminated. The source of the semen he came from was, strangely, said by some to be Jupiter or Zeus. Yet Mithras was considered interchangeable with Chronos by his followers, and thus identical to the figure who cut his way out of the womb of Gaia, castrating his father Ouranos (Uranus) in the process. Does this imply some sort of inverse order of generation? These details are, indeed, clues to a mind-blowing idea that is being hinted at in these myths. He was also said to have created a son of his own son in the same manner. I explore these facts in much greater detail below, and also in my novel Genuflect.

 

Mithras emerging from the rock

It seems to me that a story similar to that of Zeus and his revenge against Chronos is being referred to here by Hammer-Purgstall as coming from the Ophite Gnostics when he, after mentioning the anguipede (meaning “serpents for legs”) Gnostic figure of Abraxas, he writes (as rendered by Professor X):

This is the son of Sophia, Barbelot or Achamoth, called Sabaoth or Jaldabaoth. Among the Gnostics he was seen as the father of the seven Archons, creator and governor of all things heavenly and earthly, who rebelled against his mother and, exulting in his glory, insanely boasted that “he was father and God, above whom is no one.” However, the mother, hearing this, cried out, “Don’t lie, Jaldabaoth, for there is above you a father, first of all things, Anthropus, and Anthropus, son of Anthropus.” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book I, chapter 30, on the Ophites.)

This “Anthropus” is also called, by Manichean Gnostics, “Iblis Kadim.” The Catholic Encyclopedia from 1922, published by the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic Truth Committee, describes this figure thusly in a section on Manicheanism:

This incarnation of evil, called Satan or Ur-devil (Iblis Kadim, in Arabic sources), a monster, half fish, half bird, yet with four feet and lion-headed, threw himself upward towards the confines of light.

I believe we are talking here about an evil angel incarnating through an anal birth, coming out of the intestines of something, and taking on the form of a monster in the process. More on this in a bit.

Regarding the Demiurge Jaldabaoth, Hammer-Purgstall continues:

This is, according to the Ophites, the God of the Jews and Christians, whom they cursed, and whom they trampled underfoot. The Ophites thought that this one wages perpetual war against his mother Achamoth, and prohibits men from getting knowledge of his mother (that is, of divine wisdom). He produced, besides the seven Archons who govern the seven heavens (who rebelled against him as he did against this mother), yet another serpent-shaped son, that is (Greek, ton Noun, “the mind”) in the form of a contorted serpent. He first offered to his father Jaldabaoth a ministry so as to seduce mankind “to purge from him the seed of light.” Next, though, abandoning the sly and crafty aspects of the father, and becoming a follower of Sophia, he proceeded to lead men to her true knowledge, or Gnosis, and to the revelation of all the arcane things of nature.

Just to be clear: Hammer-Purgstall is saying that the Gnostic Demiurge Jaldabaoth, who is equivalent to Chronos in the Greek myths, was drained of his semen deliberately by the Gnostic Christ figure Anthropos, the First Man, the Alien, in order to empty him of his divine light. The words that Professor X rendered as “offered to his father Jaldabaoth a ministry” could, I think, be changed to “offered to minister to his father,” as in the form of a cup-bearer, or catamite. Hammer-Purgstall continues:

Finally, through the winding of intestines depicting contortion, he was held by the Ophites to be worthy to represent the “genital wisdom” (in Greek Zoogogon sophian, and in Arabic, ma-ta na-sha) of our inscriptions. For this reason, he was sometimes called by the Ophites Nous, and at other times by the name of the angels Michael and Samael. He was worshiped in the orgies as a symbol of the abominable wisdom and the true leader of Gnosis.

What Professor X renders as “offered to his father Jaldabaoth a ministry,” I take to more probably mean “he offered to minister to his father,” most likely referring to the role of the cup-bearer. The parallel being drawn between intestines and serpents is found in many ancient traditions. Thus, the image of a child being swallowed by a serpent may, in this context, imply a child being consumed in the process of anal rape. It may also imply the reverse, as Hammer-Purgstall himself suggests: a child coming out of the dragon. This, then, could mean a child being born rectally—though not, necessarily, any normal sort of child, as I shall explain.

In his analysis of all the images he found of children being swallowed by monsters and dragons, Hammer-Purgstall claims that the imagery of St. George (the patron Saint of England) slaying the Dragon—which is a veritable copy of similar imagery seen in depictions of the Saint/Archangel Michael (another name used by Gnostics)—is Gnostic in origin. He writes:

This is the dragon whom the Templars, having sculpted on their graves, trampled underfoot in the London temple.

He is talking about the effigies of Templar Knights on top of their tombs where they are buried beneath the floor of Temple Church in London. Their feet are indeed resting on top of creatures that do sort of look like lions, and a bit like dogs, but do also, in some cases, appear to have dragon-like tails. They seem to me somewhat like the “Luck-Dragon” featured in the fantasy film The Never-Ending Story.

Templar effigies at Temple Church in London

The way they are being walked upon reminds me of the way in which the goddess Cybele is shown standing on top of two lions who, in many depictions, are shown connected to one another as Siamese twins with one trunk and no backside between then, ala the Nickelodeon cartoon “Catdog.” This same emblem was called, in Egypt, Aker, and represented the past and future, just like a Roman bust of Janus. According to Hammer-Purgstall, these creatures represent the Demiurge, and the effigies of the knights are being shown trampling upon him.

But I have my own interpretation of the meaning of why they are being shown this these creatures, and positioned in the way that they are, as this study progresses. For now, I will just note that most of the knights are shown on their effigies with their legs twisted in a strange way, so that, to me, they look like they’re in pain. It looks exactly like the way Cybele’s son Attis is traditionally shown, as well as the two servants of Mithras, Cautes and Cautophanes, who are present when he emerges from the rock, and when he slays the bull, holding torches to light the way for him.

Cautes

Attis

In the case of Attis, this is because he has been castrated. The cult of Cybele celebrated this by castrating their newly-initiated Galli priests—who were thereafter referred to as female—on what they called the “Day of Blood,” March 24, near the Spring Equinox.

As I pointed out in my novel Genuflect, this was the same date that men in the Heaven’s Gate cult castrated themselves before they committed suicide. They believed that they were going to be taken up into a portal that they thought was riding past Earth with the Hale Bopp comet that night. They thought they needed to be castrated to get in. They wanted to be the “eunuchs of Heaven” that the Bible talks about. Some people think that comet was actually Nibiru, also called Planet X, which the Babylonians identified with the time of the Spring Equinox.

But the festival of Cybele and Attis began on March 15, which is also the same time at which the Gnostic Christian heretics known as the Cathars performed their secret ritual called consolamentum. The most famous such rite took place at the end of the siege of their fortress of Montsegur. As I explained in The Merovingian Mythos:

The Cathars and their defenders fought bravely, but in the end it was no use. Some of the few remaining Cathar strongholds, towards the end, were those in Arques, Narbonne, Toulouse, Carcassonne, and Rennes-le -Chateau. But the final fortress to capitulate was that of Montsegur, “poised”, as Holy Blood, Holy Grail relates, “like a celestial ark above the surrounding valleys.” It was besieged by the invaders for ten months, and finally fell in March of 1244.

On the first of March, the less than 400 remaining defenders, 180 of them actual Cathars, and the remainder mercenary soldiers, were offered terms for surrender. The soldiers would receive full pardon, and the heretics would only have to renounce their beliefs and make a full confession. The Cathars agreed to a two-week truce while they considered the terms, with the understanding that if anyone tried to escape, they would be immediately executed. They took the whole two weeks, but in the end, the Cathars refused, and were immediately burned to death.

Yet according to the legends, the night before the end of the ceasefire, a small group of Cathars managed to sneak out of the fortress carrying some unnamed treasure—one quite separate and distinct from the famed hordes of gold and other booty the heretics possessed, which had been smuggled out safely much earlier in the siege. Given the importance of the date, which was Easter, March 14, the day of the Spring Equinox, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail assumed that the “treasure” must have been some sort of holy relic, which they had needed to hold onto until that point for use in their Spring Equinox ritual. Records indicate that an equinox ritual did indeed take place. Whatever it consisted of was in all probability the reason why at least twenty of the mercenary soldiers who were defending the Cathars converted to their religion at the last moment, thus sealing their death warrants. The writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have theorized that the ritual had more to do with the equinox than with the Christian Easter, since Easter celebrated Christ’s resurrection after the crucifixion, and the Cathars did not believe that Christ had died on the cross. But could it not have been both an observance of the equinox and an Easter ritual—one that actually repudiated the crucifixion?

A letter written by Jean de Joinville, friend to French King Louis IX during the 13th century, stated that: ‘The king once told me how several men from among the Albigenses had gone to the Comte de Montfort… and asked him to come look at the body of Our Lord, which had become flesh and blood in the hands of their priest.’

The Cathar rite will come up again later on. It seems to involve several of the same ritual aspects that we are dealing with here in the alleged Ophite Templar ceremonies discussed by Hammer-Purgstall and illustrated on the artifacts he presents. But for now, allow me to quote from the article “Secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis” on parareligion.ch^[3]:

In the O.T.O.’s Gnostic Mass (Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass (Liber XV—Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae) a host called Cake of Light contains the Logos. Ingredients may be sperm, blood and vaginal secrets. … It is given its character in the making. It is consecrated, but not transubstantiated. The deity in the cake of light is the “Childe,” properly an aspect of Horus (or a sort of homunculus) and not of either Osiris or the cognate Christ. Transmutation is change of form, in the instance of the pertinent passage in Crowley’s Mass, by chemical processes of digestion. Transsubstantiation (sp), on the other hand, is change of essential quality without change of form. Transmutation is a physiological process. Transubstantiation is a non-physical process. Thus, a cake of light is transmuted in the preparation, to afford a character appropriate to the “miracle of the Mass”: it’s a sexmagical medium of the participant’s Will (the ritual itself can be interpreted as a mirror of the perpetual creation of the Universe). …Consumation (sp)^[4] of the host is necessary, body contact. Some say, it is not the host that is changed but the consumer of the host. Through contact with saliva, chewing, stomach acid. This is the transformation, the unification of the host with the consumer. The thelemic host changes the consumer—contrary to the Roman Catholic host. A Roman Catholic host is said to be transsubstantiated (sp) during the RC Mass, a change of its invisible essence (for the entering of the real-presence of the Christ) without a change in the appearance and chemical qualities of the thing. If a thing such as that was both transmutated (sp) and transsubstantiated (sp) to the body and blood, it would become actual bleeding meat from the transmutation.

It sounds to me very much as if the host here is a sort of seed or egg containing the necessary ingredients for a homunculus, just as the quotation mentions. This is an artificial man (what is, in Hebrew, called a golem), made out of mud, or even dung, it seems, and animated through magical or alchemical processes that I shall describe shortly. When commenting upon the emblem of the boy being swallowed by a “dragon” that looks suspiciously to me like he’s actually emerging from a set of intestines, Hammer-Purgstall mentions the biscione of the Royal House of Milan:

This, finally, is the same dragon who, at the time of the establishment of the Brotherhood of the Knights Templar, came out of Gnostic fabrications on the life of St. George, and with him, but without the infant, transferred into the British Shield. Also, it is certain that the Gnostic dragon absorbing the infant gave rise to the serpent of [the house of] Visconti, who up to the present can be seen in the seals of Milan.

Tab. IV, fig. 19-20. Does the knight represent Ottone? (See below)

This latter reference is about the biscione, the official device of the House of Visconti, a very influential royal family in Milan. It consists of a “Saracen” boy (naked, with red skin) being swallowed alive, feet, first, by a large serpent, much like many of the images on Hammer-Purgstall’s idols. The insignia is said to have been stolen, quite literally, as spoils of war from the Crusades in the year 1100. I will tell you the story, but I must warn you that it lacks sense because it contains several inconsistencies.

The biscione of Milan

Logo for Alfa-Romeo cars, featuring biscione and St. George’s cross

I first heard the story, or at least the details of it, just a couple of days ago, on a YouTube video, made by an Italian named Gian Luca Margheriti, which was published little over a month ago. It was called “The ‘biscione’ of Visconti and Sforza families of Milan in 90 seconds (or nearly so).” In it, the presenter states that:…[I]n 1100, during the Second Crusade, Ottone Visconti was leading seven thousand Milanese soldiers. During the siege on Jerusalem, Ottone was facing the cruel Saracen Voluce, who… fought under the symbol of a serpent devouring a man. [Voluce was defeated] and, following the custom of the epoch, Ottone took his arms and his emblems and brought them back to Milan. Since then he decided to make Voluce’s emblem the crest of his family, with one small change: the serpent, instead of devouring whatever man, would have a red Saracen in its mouth…. The symbol was then changed again, substituting the Saracen with a child, in order to suggest the innate kindness of the Visconti grass snake.”In addition to the absurdity of the last statement—for how is eating a child more “kind” then eating a grown man?—the main things that jump out are: 1) the year 1100 was at the end of the First Crusade, not the second, which didn’t start until 1147, 2) the siege of Jerusalem is recorded as happening the previous year, in 1099, and, 3) Ottone Visconti was not born until more than a century later in 1207. Yet every version of this story I found stated that it was Ottone Visconti who vanquished the Saracen, and that it took place in 1100 specifically. The closest thing I found to an admission of the inconsistency was a source that said it must have been a relative of his with the same name. 

Ottone defeating Voluce

The story becomes even more convoluted when you consider Gian Luca Margheriti’s assertion that there is another possible origin of the Visconti device. He says that “Uberto Visconti,” one of Ottone’s ancestors, defeated a dragon named “Tarantasio” that was terrorizing the women and children of Milan.A long time ago, between Milan, Lodi and Bergano, there was a large lake called Gerundo. Today there is nothing left of that lake. It was reclaimed during the Middle Ages, together with other territories around Milan, to create new arable lands. According to legend, a giant dragon called Tarantasio lived in the Milanese part of this swampy marsh, more or less where today we can find the gardens dedicated to Indro Montanelli. Chroniclers told that whoever approached its den would get devoured. All those that were not eater by the dragon were roasted by its mephitic burning breath. The dragon in the end was defeated by Uberto Visconti, count of Angera.

Biscione in the midst of a hydra

Tarantasio

This Uberto appears to be the progenitor of the royal line, and while his birth date is not recorded, his death is put by history at 1248, so we still don’t have a link to 1100. Further reading revealed that this creature was also called “Tartanus,” and that it is thought to be buried on the isle of Achilli. The biscione appears on the arms of Angera, as it does in Milan, to this day. Clearly, there is more to this story than is meant to be understood by the casual listener. The motto of the Visconti family is Viperas mores non violabo, which means “I will not violate the customs of the serpent.”

Ottone Visconti leads Milan’s surrender to Barbarossa, March 1, 1162

The biscione story has fittingly been compared with the image of the prophet Jonah, sometimes shown halfway through the act of being swallowed (or is he actually emerging)? He is also properly compared, then, with images of the Mesopotamian myth of Oannes, who is sometimes shown and emerging from the ocean to teach wisdom to his students. Also, Matsya, an incarnation of Vishnu, whose body is half-way out of the mouth of a fish. The name, of course, is undoubtedly connected to the same roots as the words Mete, Metis and Maat, discussed here. In full-fish form, Matsya is said to have rescued a king called Manu from a worldwide flood.

Various depictions of Matsya

This seems to be true with the biscione story as well, for, according to some sources, the boy is actually to be coming out of the serpent, a possibility that Hammer-Purgstall also suggests. Julia Kaziewicz writes in Study and Teaching Guide for the History of the Renaissance World that there is a version of the biscione that shows the creature “giving birth” to the boy, though I am not sure if she means that it is doing so orally, or otherwise.The biscione story was referenced by Italian poet Torquato Tasso in his 1581 book Jerusalem Delivered, which Hammer-Purgstall quotes in his footnotes commenting on this symbol. Strangely, Tasso seems to describe the Saracen’s shield as being decorated with a “naked boy coming out of the serpent.” There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that it was always a little boy, not a grown man.” As for the eleven possible translations of the Italian word esce, all indicate “coming out of” except one, “sticking up,” which is ambiguous in this instance.

If he is actually coming out of the biscione, this would explain the look of surprise, but not always anguish, that is sometimes seen on the face of the boy victim. Significantly, the word “anguish” shares the same root found in many words associated with snakes in several different languages, including the words that Torquato Taso used for the biscione: Angue. The syllable Ang, etymologically, has to do with twisting and bending, thus forming “angles.” “Anguish” comes from being twisted up emotionally, and causes physical contortions in the body.”

The house of Anjou, who consider as their ancestor the demonic creature Melusine, are undoubtedly named after her, since creatures like her, with serpents for legs, are called “Anguepedes.” As I have explained in other writings, there is also a connection between this word, due to its connotations involving angles, and the name of the people known as the “Angles,” as well as the language of English that they helped to influence.

Melusine flies away from Fulk the Black’s castle

The Italian pronunciation of “biscione” is specified by writing it with ʃ twice in place of the “sc” (to be pronounced like the “sh” in “ship), or as bissa in Milanese. (I at first thought I was looking at a double “f,” and almost jumped out of my chair thinking that the alternate spelling offered by Wikipedia to aid pronunciation was baffone, and thus almost identical to baffomet.)

Ultimately, “biscione” is said to come from the Latin bestia. But there are obvious connections with the names of other, similar creatures, explored in the paragraph below. To these I would add the unknown root of the word “bitch,” which, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Old English bicce meaning “female dog,” but stems “probably from Old Norse bikkjuna (“female of the dog”), “which is of unknown origin,” and, in that language, also applies to “the fox, wolf, and occasionally other beasts.” The same source also notes something significant to this book’s topics when it mentions that it has been “used among male homosexuals from 1930s,” and that “In modern (1990s, originally African-American vernacular) slang, its use with reference to a man is sexually contemptuous….” But then, what about “vicious,” from the Latin vitiosus and the Medieval Latin vicious, meaning “faulty, full of faults, defective, corrupt; wicked, depraved”?

Another family of related words includes guivre, which is defined as a mythical “dragon-like” animal with poisoned breath. That word connections to the French vouivre, and vipera, and thus to “viper,” then to wyvern, wurm, and thus “worm.”A side branch of this word cluster brings us to “wolf,” coming to us, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from:

Wlkwo (‘wolf’ source also of Sanskrit vrkas, Avestan vehrka); Albanian ul’k; Old Church Slavonic vluku; Russian volcica; Lithuanian vilkas (‘wolf’); Old Persian Varkana (‘Hyrcania,’ district southeast of the Caspian Sea, literally ‘wolf-land’); probably also Greek lykos, Latin lupus).

The name of “Hyrcania,” of course, made me think of Hercules, who seems to be all over these etymologically-related myths of fabulous beasts, as we shall see.

Supposedly there were two noble dynasties in Italy named Visconti, separated chronologically and physically by small amounts, and historians say they were unrelated, although I find that hard to believe. The later Viscontis, centered in Sardinia, used a black cock as their insignia. But the earlier Viscontis of Milan ended up fusing with the House of Sforza and adding another type of black bird to their arms, which they call an “eagle.”

Arms of the House of Sforza

But considering that the Gnostic anguipede symbol of Abraxas involves a creature with the head of a cock and two serpents for legs, I can’t help but wonder if the second house of Visconti is indeed related, but just chose a nicer way of depicting their mascot. Other creatures, like the cockatrice and the basilisk (whose name means “little king”), also combine the features of snakes and roosters, are also known for eating children, and are decidedly demonic in association. Interestingly, the Sforzas started out in the service of the Angevins, descendants of the anguipede Melusine, who herself was said to have such features because she had been fathered by the Devil himself.

Hammer-Purgstall describes the image on Tab. V, fig. 62 as “the Ophitic Mete wearing a towered crown and holding two snakes, just [like] those figures in the bas-reliefs of the church of Pictavien, as well as the many idols in the Imperial-Royal Treasury and the collection of Schoenfeld. It seems hard to believed that he did not recognize this image of the anguipede Melusine (a common European heraldic device featuring a crowned woman with snakes for legs, now morphed into the mermaid on the Starbucks logo), which it clearly is. Perhaps he would have interpreted all images of Melusine as Templar-inspired depictions of Mete. The story of the Melusine (inspired by a supernatural folk tale stating that the wife of Fulk III, Count of Anjou, was a half-demonic creature spawned by Satan), was first heard shortly before or contemporary with the foundation of the Templar order. The house of Anjou was intimately connected with the families of the founding knights.While for the present edition of this book I have not had Hammer-Purgstall’s footnotes to this essay fully translated yet, I have looked at them, and he seems to take the biscione symbol as a Gnostic one, as well as that of St. George slaying the Dragon. As he explains in the main text, the Dragon, in this instance, is the Demiurge. In his favor, the Viscontis were accused by Pope Giovanni XXII (particularly Ottone’s nephew Matteo, who replaced him in leading Milan) of being heretics in league with the Gnostic Cathars, practicing magic, stealing items from the church, and of teaching young women in their domains that casual sex was not a sin.I think this is the same “OTTO” that he mentions when analyzing coins with that name on them found at Templar properties (Tab. V, fig. 93-95), although there are two other candidates for the person that have been suggested by other scholars. Hammer-Purgstall wrote regarding one of these coins that it bears “the inscription [or, perhaps, ‘epigraph’] Ottonis Marchionis.” These last two words are not italicized, and he follows them with the statement that “it only goes to show that he was an initiate Gnostic doctrine or the secrets of the Temple.” Ottone Visconti is, as far as I know, the only one of the three who was an accused Gnostic heretic.Years ago, I wrote in my research notes about Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum that I thought (perhaps at the suggestion of someone else) Hammer-Purgstall was saying the coin depicted Otto de Grandson, a knight from Savoy who at the end of the thirteenth century fought off a Mamluk invasion in Cilicia alongside Jacques de Molay. (For this, he is frequently called “the Savior of the Templars,” and the Chateau de Grandson still stands proudly in the municipality of Grandson in Switzerland.) However, Frederic Münter, who first wrote about these coins, thought (and Michaud concurred) that they actually depict Otto II, Margrave of Brandenberg, who lived from 1147 to 1205. The word written as “Margrave” in English comes from the German Markgraf, made from graf, the German word for “Count,” and mark, translated “march” in English, which is the German word for a borderland.

Oddone of Savoy

Arms of the House of Grandson

Both Münter and Michaud see this implied in what they take to be the word marchio written on Coin 95, right after the word “OTTO.” Thus they see nothing heretical hinted at in this coin. Indeed, when you compare this coin to another one found on Wikipedia that does feature Otto II, the way the head and face are depicted is quite similar, as is the style of execution for both coins in their entirety (though not the design itself).

Tab. V, fig. 93, front and back

  

Tab. V, fig. 94

 


Tab. V, fig. 94-95

Left: Otto II, Margrave of Brandenberg

Right: Tab. V, fig. 31 and 56, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

This coin has been labeled by a numismatics website[5] as featuring Heinrich II von Rotteneck, Prince-Bishop of Regensburg (-1277-1296) on the obverse side (left), with his head “between two pillars.” On the reverse side (right),where the image is almost completely obliterated, the samesite says there was once “probably” an image of “Otto III… Duke of Lower Bavaria in 1290 and King of Hungary in 1305.”
 

One of the things that occurred to me when examining the mystery of the Ottos is that Aleister Crowley may have seen significance in the name “OTTO” when he saw this material while reading Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, which I know for certain he did. Considering that these are the letters involved in the name of his order, the OTO, he might have seen it as an omen that one of these coins was number 93, a number he held as sacred because of a message he divined from spirits telling him that this number somehow symbolized the zeitgeist of the coming “New Aeon” that his followers proclaim is upon us.

Further research into the names “Otto” and “Ottone” revealed some fascinating connections. I immediately thought of Odin, a.k.a Woden, the one-eyed Norse god considered equivalent to Hermes/Mercury. I also wondered if it was related to the name “Anthony.” Finally, I wondered if it was related to the name “Ottoman,” because the type of armor which the character “Otto Marchionis” on the said coin is depicted wearing reminded me of the way Ottoman knights dressed (even though the timeline, I figured, was off for there to be such influence).

Left: One-Eyed Odin. Right: Tab. I, fig. 5, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, allegedly

“Mete” Idol. The Dajjal, the Islamic Anti-Christ figure, is also said to have only one eye.

Wotan riding white horse, slaying dragon, just like St. George

 

Wotan with winged helmet, just like the Greek Hermes

As it turns out, “Othin” is an alternate way of spelling Odin, while “Othone,” “Ottho,” “Odo” and “Odon” are all alternate ways of spelling “Otto” in European languages. This brings to my mind the name of Thoth, the Egyptian equivalent of Hermes/Mercury.

In Latin the root “odo” connects mainly with words having to do with odor or hatred (odium). But “den,” which we find in “Woden/Odin,” but also, in “Eden” (I will explain, in due course, the symbolic connection between these things) yields interesting results in Latin and in many other languages, relating to a “grinder,” a “sickle,” a “tooth,” or, more broadly, anything that is, to quote my Latin dictionary, “sharp, biting or destructive.”

It means all these things in Latin, and has similar meanings in other tongues. This, of course, is where we get “dentist,” “orthodontia,” and the like. In Latin, the share-beam of a plough was called a dentalia. Saturn, who is Chronos and Mithras, was considered by Romans to be not only the patron deity of agriculture, but the actual inventor of the plough. The Latin dictionary even connects dens for “tooth” directly with a reference from Virgil about Saturn’s sickle, dens Saturni.

This is significant for many reasons. For one thing, I think it is reasonable, if one tries to imagine a baby cutting the penis off of his father from inside his mother’s womb (the first use of Saturn’s sickle), that we should consider the idea that the cutting instrument was really his teeth. Saturn was a beast, after all, a dragon, a Titan, connected to the word “Satan,” and he had been kept inside the womb too long, so his teeth might have been quite large.

Also, in the Persian-influenced Mithras cult, the bull is castrated by a scorpion, who then feeds the testicles to the Moon goddess. Luna was considered the genetrix of souls who brings them into human incarnation, and through which they must pass when they exit. In Ophite Gnostic cosmology, the realm directly above the Earth plane is occupied by Behemoth, a bull-headed monster. The next one after that is the Moon. In his The Makers of Civilization, L.A. Waddell connected Odin with “the first Sumerian king Uduin,” and adds:

[T]he Star named after King Uduin is called ‘The Star of the Lord King ME-TI-RA,’ which discloses the Sumerian origin of the Sanskrit title of Mitra and the Persian Mithra for the Sun, which luminary was the sole ‘star’ worshipped by the first king and his Goths in the Eddas. Stills further the Planet Jupiter, named as we have seen after the first Sumer king’s title of Ia or Ja, was called by the later Sumers ‘The planet UDU, the Etil (Lord), the GUT, wherein Gut, here spelt with signs meaning ‘The Bull of the Sun,’ is as we shall see later the ordinary Sumerian form of the word Goti or ‘GOTH.’

This identity is further confirmed by this Sumerian record stating… that ‘Kingship from Heaven was made arise. At Urdu City kingship was … At Urdu City Udu-in the king reigned.’ This is in strict agreement with the Nordic Eddas which state that Thor, also called in different stanzas of that episode Odo, descended from his Himin, i.e. ‘Heaven’ and enthroned himself as king at Urd.

The word “heaven,” which the names “Ouranos” and “Uranus” are most commonly taken to refer to, has, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, an uncertain origin, but they mention Watkins derives it elaborately from the Proto-Indo-European ak meaning “sharp,” itself coming from akman. This latter word means “stone or sharp stone,” and also “stony vault of heaven,” pertaining to the ancient concept of the arch of the sky being a hard domed firmament. I see in here the obvious lingering influence of the idea that the connection between the sky and the Earth (symbolized as the sky’s penis) has been severed by one of more of the objects in the sky.

Now consider that on Tab. V., fig. 100 of Hammer-Purgstall’s images, we see another coin featuring the name “OTTO,” but this time there is another strange character right after the last “O.” It looks like an X inside of a square. It really makes no sense, and I might take it to be the place where another letter or symbol has been rubbed off over time. But the first time I looked at this image, long before I knew about the etymological connections, I thought that I saw the word “TOOTH” there. See for yourself.

This seems significant, especially when combined with the fact that Otto is shown here holding a lance, with another weapon in the shape phallic fleur-de-lys (more on this symbol later) standing next to him, both standing between two phallic-looking towers, and a hand sticking out from above, poking through the veil of heaven as though through a membrane. In German the word “heaven” is himmin, and its etymology, as I mention elsewhere in this essay, means “stony vault,” while the word “hymen” (the same in German) is supposedly unrelated. (The fleur-de-lys, by the way, was supposedly handed down to the Frankish Merovingian king Clovis from Heaven by his wife Clothilde.)

Tab. V, fig. 100

Hammer-Purgstall himself made note of this extraneous X, and had a most unique interpretation. He wrote:

“Otto” can be read as numeric zeros with two truncated crosses, and also, not incorrectly, understood as phalluses and chalices, or as symbolizing [either χτενός, Greek, “comb,” or κτενός, “shortbread”]. Often, these are found signed at the end of a letter of correspondence, to signify their secret doctrine and arcane principles.

I’m not sure if either of those interpretations of the Greek word written here are correct, but I do note, of course, that a “comb,”—that is, the type that one uses for the hair—has teeth. This may be right on the money, since, as I wrote in my end-notes to the text:

Is he implying that the now-popular custom of signing a letter to a loved one with ‘Xs and Os’—taken now to mean ‘hugs and kisses’—is actually a symbol of Gnostic ‘genital wisdom’? If so, it would be fitting, since another symbol used in this manner, the heart sign, is thought by many to represent the head of a penis.

There is another reason why this is significant. Remember when I mentioned my pondering on the possible connection between “Otto” and “Ottoman”? Well, just keep in mind that the symbols associated with the Ottomans, which also came to be seen as synonymous symbols of Islam, were also used by the Knights Templar, particularly in conjunction with images of the mosque built on the alleged “Temple Mount” in Jerusalem, which they occupied. These symbols are the scimitar and the crescent. I will elaborate more on the significance of this in due time.

When we look at the name “Woden” as it’s commonly-used alternate, “Wotan,” interesting things happen, for then we can connect it to Lotan, a sea-monster in Ugaritic mythology in whom many scholars see the roots of the figure of Leviathan.^[6] The latter beast occupies, in Ophite cosmology, the position of Ouranos or Uranus. This is because he is not only the Perfect Man (the Zodiac Man, soon to be discussed below), but also the Ouroboros, the snake biting his own tail or, as I have reconstructed it (using the etymology of the root words), “he who drinks his own urine directly from his penis.” You see, the name Ouranos means “urinater,” although it is often just translated as “rain-maker,” since the deity of that name was the personification of the sky and the rain was considered as his urine. The word being translated here as “tail”(οὐρά) is being used as a euphemism for the male member.

Ouroboros fellating himself

Strangely, in the mystical Jewish cosmology of the Cabala, Behemoth and Leviathan are at once both rivals at war and long-lost lovers pining to unite with each other again. In Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, we wrote:

Very similar things are said about Leviathan and her consort as are said about Lilith and Samael. They are clearly just different names for the same figures. In both cases, it is said that they were once together physically, but that God separated them, because the act of their mating was somehow dangerous to the well-being of the universe. So, in both cases, they were cleaved apart, castrating the male, and preventing them from ever uniting sexually again. With both sets of characters, it is written that if they ever come together again, all of existence will somehow be annihilated.


 In the case of the leviathans, it is said numerous times in the Bible that at the End of Times, God will slaughter them and feed their flesh to the righteous among men. This will take place at a feast with the messiah in the New Jerusalem, inside of a tent made from the monsters’ skin. This is what the Jewish festival known as the “Feast of the Tabernacles” is meant to celebrate, and it is probably why the early Christians adopted the fish as their symbol.

Because Samael and Lilith (a.k.a Leviathan and Behemoth) are constantly longing for each other, they found a way to mate via an “intermediary” called “Tanin’iver” (“Blind Dragon”) or “the Groomsman.” We read about it in Treatise on the Left Emanation:

You already know that evil Samael and wicked Lilith are like a sexual pair who, by means of an intermediary, receive an evil and wicked emanation from one and emanate to the other. . . . The heavenly serpent is a blind prince, the image of an intermediary between Samael and Lilith. Its name is Tanin’iver. The masters of tradition said that just as this serpent slithers without eyes, so the supernal serpent has the image of a spiritual form without color—these are “the eyes.” The traditionists call it an eyeless creature, therefore its name is Tanin’iver. He is the bond, the accompaniment, and the union between Samael and Lilith. If he were created whole in the fullness of his emanation he would have destroyed the world in an instant.

The name “Tannin,” which contains key syllable “tan,” (interchangeable with “don,” “den/din,” and “dan”), applies another Ugaritic sea-monster who ended up in the Bible. As Wikipedia tells us:

The tanninim (תַּנִּינִים) also appear in the Hebrew Bible’s of Book of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Job, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. They are explicitly listed among the creatures created by God on the fifth day of the Genesis creation narrative, translated in the King James Version as ‘great whales.’ The tannin is listed in the apocalypse of Isaiah as among the sea beasts to be slain by Yahweh ‘on that day,’ translated in the King James Version as ‘the dragon.’

Returning to the meaning of “Otto,” “Wotan,” and “Woden,” we find the root syllables both connected to the very concept of water itself. Wed is a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “water” or “wet.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, its cousins are the Hittite watar, the Sanskrit udrah, the Greek hydor, the Old Church Slavonic and Russian voda, the Lithuanian vanduo, the Old Prussian wundan, the Gaelic uisge (meaning “water”), the Latin unda (meaning “wave”), the Old English wæter, the Old High German wazzar, and the Gothic wato water.

Regarding wazzar, I wondered if it was connected to “vizier.” While I didn’t find absolute confirmation, I think it’s close enough, as the same source quoted above also says of this word that it is:

…[F]rom Turkish vezir (‘counsellor’), from Arabic wazir (‘viceroy’), literally ‘one who bears (the burden of office),’ literally ‘porter, carrier,’ from wazara (‘he carried’).

Here again we have the concept of the cup-bearer illustrated, and defined not only as the role of a royal catamite, but also, by extension or by comparison, the role of the royal “prime minister” who must take all of the responsibility for the actions of the crown while the king remains regal, aloof and untouchable. All in all, the same source says that the root wed:

It forms all or part of: abound; anhydrous; carbohydrate; clepsydra; dropsy; hydra; hydrangea; hydrant; hydrargyrum; hydrate; hydraulic; hydro-; hydrogen; hydrophobia; hydrous; Hydrus; inundate; inundation; kirsch-wasser; nutria; otter; redound; redundant; surround; undine; undulant; undulate; undulation; vodka; wash; water (n.1); wet; whiskey; winter.

The connection with “otter” is particularly revealing. Again, from the same source:

Otter: Old English otr, otor (‘otter,’) from Proto-Germanic otraz (‘otter’) (source also of Old Norse otr, Swedish utter, Danish odder, Dutch otter, Old High German ottar, German Otter), from PIE udros, literally ‘water-creature’ (source also of Sanskrit udrah, Avestan udra (‘otter’); Greek hydra (‘water-serpent’), enydris (‘otter’); Latin lutra, Old Church Slavonic vydra, Lithuanian udra, Old Irish odoirne (‘otter’), from root wed– (1) (‘water’; ‘wet’). Sea otter attested from 1660s, also known as sea-ape.

This, they say, is the root of hydra, meaning “water-snake.” The connection with the word “vizier” is important for several reasons, some of which I’ve already mentioned. But now consider the biscione and the house of Visconti. The Italian word visconte means “viscount,” and visconti means “the viscounts.” Since the letters “v” and “b” are interchangeable in many languages, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to consider that the biscione may have been the source of the name of the noble family, and also of the notion of a viscount as a “water-carrier,” despite the fact that the Online Etymology Dictionary traces it to the fourteenth century, and to the Latin word viscomes.

Considering the possible connection between these words and “vicious,” which I mentioned before, I decided to see if there was any connection with “victory,” and that’s where I found the Proto-Indo-European root weik, meaning “to fight, conquer,” which, according to the same source, “forms all or part of: convict; convince; evict; evince; invictus; invincible; Ordovician; province; vanquish; victor; victory; Vincent; vincible.” As a verb, the same root weik means “to bend, to wind,” just like the previously-mentioned ang, another word based on serpentine symbolism. This, according to the same website, “forms all or part of: vetch; vicar; vicarious; vice (‘deputy,’ ‘assistant,’ ‘substitute’); viceregent; vice versa; vicissitude; weak; weakfish; week; wicker; wicket; witch hazel; wych.”

The connection (to be explained a bit later) between this and the name of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory and the tiny palm-sized companion of Metis’ daughter Athena, brings me to Hammer-Purgstall’s comments on the image of a coin featured on Tab. V, fig. 19. He writes:

The chalice on fig. 19 is kept safe by two erect serpents, just as you will see very frequently sculptured on mystic Dionysiac vases. Such snakes are also seen on vases commonly called “Etruscan,” which, 


it seems, represent  
and they [are shown accompanying] initiates into the sepulcher.

Tab. V, fig. 19 Professor X, whose main expertise was Latin, also attempted his best at translating several of the Greek words and phrases in the document. But he threw up his hands at the meaning of this word, which he had taken to be κτειδα and transliterated as Kteida (which Google translates as meaning “instances”). I think the word here is something related to κῆτος (kētos, meaning “whale or sea monster,” the source of the English word “cetaceans,” denoting large sea animals. The plural form of this word is κήτη or κήτεα (kētē or kētea). In Latin, these same words were expressed as cetus and cetea, and this is the source of the name of the constellation Cetus, “the whale.” Interestingly, there is another possible translation of the Greek κήτεα—“gardens”—that is highly significant if you consider the idea that the Garden of Eden was actually in the womb of the mother goddess, Gaia.Before I came across this family of Greek words, I had decided that the first character of the Greek word in the original text was intended to be a lower-case lambda (λ), equivalent to an “l,” and thus rendering the word λτειδα: “lydia.”But amazingly, I managed to arrived at the same set of myths and symbols coming from that direction that I would have found if I had already known about Cetus. This is because the defeat of the Lydian Dragon—who is in fact the same figure as Cetus— by Hercules is indeed a feature often depicted on kraters associated with the cult of Dionysus, a god who was thought to have come from Lydia. Snakes can be seen wrapped around all of the initiates of a Dionysian ritual procession on the famous “Lydos krater” on display in the New York Metropolitan Museum.

Hercules vs. the “Trojan Ketos.” Theoi.com refers to the weapon as a “fish-hook.” Note the otter behind the Ketos.

“Lydos” is the name of the maker of the vase, and it is thought to mean “the Lydian.” I began to wonder if the name “Lydia” was related to “Lotan,” as the Lydian dragon was considered the genius of the Sangarius River in Turkey. The story of his defeat by Hercules was thought to have been memorialized in the heavens with the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer.^[7]

Consider, then, the City of London, financial center of the world, which sits on the site of Roman Londinium, and utilizes two dragons, combined with a sword and the shield of St. George, as its official emblem. According to modern scholars, St. George was supposedly from Lydda, or (in Hebrew), Lod (Greek: Διόσπολις), now a town in Israel southeast of Tel Aviv. There is an Islamic hadith stating that this is where the antichrist (called Dajjal) will be killed right before Judgement Day.