Again we continue this stroll through this mix mash of medieval theology which was itself a recovery of scraps of pagan theology itself. There is an organizing framework within that we may well never truly fully understand as so much was suppressed. A lot of that, quite rightly, but as usual the good went as well.
Still good stuff. The whole antiquarian discipline has largely been forgotten and needs to be revived in academic circles as it does inform a deeper understanding of history as opposed to the perusal of offical memos.
Ample material here though as this represents a lifetime of collection.
The arms of the City of London
However, that same article goes on to state that:
Accounts differ regarding whether George was born in Cappadocia
or Syria Palaestina, but agree that he was raised at least partly in
Lydda in Palestine. His parents were Christian, of the nobility and of
Greek heritage. His father Gerontius was a Roman army official from
Cappadocia, and his mother Polychronia was from Lydda in the province of
Syria Palaestina.
So strangely, like a child born of two natures, George’s ancestry
hailed from two towns in two different countries with names that sounds
and are spelled similar, and which are often confused with each other.
But some writers have considered George to be from Cappadocia—that is,
from Lydia, Anatolia, Phrygia, or Modern Turkey—with the alleged
connection to the Palestinian town added later. I don’t really see much
evidence against this notion. As it says in Wikipedia regarding George:
A titular church built in Lydda during the reign of Constantine the
Great (reigned 306–37) was consecrated to ‘a man of the highest
distinction,’ according to the church history of Eusebius; the name of
the titulus (‘patron’) was not disclosed, but later he was asserted…to have been George.
By the time of the early Muslim conquests of the mostly Christian and
Zoroastrian Middle East, a basilica in Lydda dedicated to Saint George
existed. The church was destroyed by Muslims in 1010, but was later
rebuilt and dedicated to Saint George by the Crusaders. In 1191 and
during the conflict known as the Third Crusade (1189–92), the church was
again destroyed by the forces of Saladin, Sultan of the Ayyubid dynasty
(reigned 1171–93). A new church was erected in 1872 and is still
standing.
One such scholar who thought he was from Cappadocia, and that the
history had been misunderstood, was L.A. Waddell. According to him,
George is the same as Adam, and King Arthur. (While I haven’t come
across it in his book yet, we can safely presume that he thought the
name “Turkey” ultimately stemmed from this character.) In The British Edda,
Waddell presents texts he’s found and translated describing the figure
he identifies as “Thor” having a battle with a “lion” called
“Meide-Asa,” whom he connects with Medusa of Greek legends. (Note,
again, the syllable med, or “Mete”).
Waddell saw the Meide-Asa beast as representative of a tribe there in
Cappadocia that had lions as their totem symbol. He writes:
[T]he Lion tribe in Asia Minor [was] flocking to Thor’s standard
at Troy from so far afield as Vind in Eastern Phrygia, Aur-Vang, or ‘the
Van Lake’ in Uri or Armenia, as far as Lofar in the anti-Taurus in
Cilicia on the S.E. border of Cappadocia, also from Brimi’s Land to the
north of Carchemish.
The name ‘Phrygia,’ I have shown in my Dictionary is a Sumerian
word, from the Sumerian name Firig for Asia Minor, including also ‘the
Western Lands’ generally. It means ‘Land of the Lions,’ from Firig or
Pirig, ‘a lion,’ literally ‘Frightful, Fierce, or Ferocious,’ and it is
the Sumerian source of these and their other derivative English words.
The name was written by the picture of a Lion’s head; and the people of
that land were called by the Sumerians Firig-su.
Regarding this Thor’s alleged title of George, Waddell writes:
Striking corroborative evidence for the historical authenticity
of this Eddic tradition of the victory of Thor, Meide-Asa or Miod-Asa in
Ancient Phrygia [exists], as George with his Red Cross is found in the
stupendous rock-sculpture standing at the source of the Sangarios River
in the heart of Phrygia, at the site of its prehistoric capital with
mounds of ruins…. It is ‘the most beautiful of all Phrygian monuments,’
and is popularly called the ‘Tomb of Midas,’ see Fig. 39—although it is
admittedly not a tomb. It covers the face of an immense cliff, and
whilst its facade is characteristically Gothic, its chief ornament
consists of nine enormous St George’s Crosses. These are arranged in the
form shown in Fig. 40. Its inscription contains the name ‘Midas’ in
letters supposed to be of about the ninth century B.C., but more
probably of the twelfth or still earlier.
Interesting confirmation of these nine St George’s Crosses of
Thor or Meidi-Asa of the Eddic lay in their victory over the Serpent
cult of the Phrygians and Edenites and their identification of him as
Midas I of Fig. 4o.—The Nine St. George’s Crosses on the Midas
Monument…. Phrygia is found in the painting on an archaic Greek vase of
about 500 B.C., see Fig. 41…. The number Nine, moreover, is
significantly in Sumerian the mystic number of King Dar or Sagg (i.e.,
Thor or Sig) as the He-Goat…; and amongst the Greeks the number Nine was
also the mystic number of Prometheus…, who, we have found, is identical
with Thor as Bur-Mioth (‘Pro-metheus’) otherwise entitled Miot or
Miod-Asa (Midas) or St. George of Cappadocia.
Illustrations from The British Edda by L.A. Waddell. In fig. 41, the 9 crosses together form another symbol, the double-barred Cross of Lorraine
Once again, we have a connection here with Mete/Baphomet when Waddell says that Medusa is “also as Bur-Mioth (‘Pro-metheus’) otherwise entitled Miot.” In addition to connecting with her Gnostic title of Pronoia (‘forethought, providence,’ same meaning as Prometheus), “Bur-Mioth” brings to mind Behemoth, same as the Persian Bahumed, a.k.a. Bafomid, and thus, Baphomet, according to Hammer-Purgstall.
Also, it is hard not to notice the similarity with the stories of the
Babylonian story of Marduk and Tiamat, which itself is very similar to
my reconstruction of the Greek stories of Ouranos, Gaia and Chronos
(built through the implications found in the myths of all three figure).
Ouranos and Gaia were originally one hermaphroditic being, locked in
perpetual sexual union, and pregnant. Chronos is the one who, in order
to release himself from the prison of the womb, which was called
Tartarus, had to cut his way out of the beast. In the process he
castrated his father, and severed it into its male and female halves.
The female fell down and became Earth, while the castrated male stayed
up and became the sky.
As they were all three Titans, that means they were dragons, and
Chronos, though a dragon himself, is the one famous for defeating the
dragon, with the present cosmology we live in resulting from it. That
would make him the “son of Heaven,” and could thus be taken as the
progenitor of a race called “sons of Heaven,” or “sons of God.” This
term is used in the Bible to refer to a race of angels called, in the
extra-biblical Book of Enoch, the “Watchers,” or the Grigori, who fathered a race of semi-human giants called Nephilim.
Likewise, Marduk famously severed the beast Tiamat, cut her in half,
and used her body to form the universe. Her name not only contains the
syllable mat, indicating that she is the same as our Mete,
but her name contains the same syllables as Waddell’s “Meide-Asa”—“Dea”
and “Meid” if the “d” in that word is taken as interchangeable for “t”
and all vowels considered interchangeable for each other: something that
is done all the time when interpreting ancient writings.
Also, Waddell’s interpretation of his translated texts as describing St. George killing Medusa makes sense if we take seriously what J.M. Roberts said in A History of Europe, stating that “St. George only acquired his heroic repute as a dragon-killer in the twelfth century (possibly by confusion with the Greek hero, Perseus,” the one known for killing Medusa and for riding a white horse, like St. George. The fact that Perseus put the Gorgon’s head on his shield also reminds me of the story of the alleged hero Ottone Visconti taking the emblem of the biscione from the shield of the Saracen he defeated and putting it on his own. That story too, as I have proven, was projected erroneously back into the twelfth century. It is hard not to think that all of these coincidences somehow add up to something. In the Russian icon below, St. George looks red in skin color, just like the boy being swallowed by the biscione.
St. George of Lydda
However, he is more often depicted with green skin and conflated with the figure of the Green Man.
We wrote in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled that this character was one:
We wrote in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled that this character was one:
…[W]hose foliage-sprouting face can be seen in gardens and greenery
throughout Europe and the British Isles. Like the ritual phalli of
Priapus, these fertility totems were omnipresent there at one time. They
show the face of a man grimacing, seemingly almost under torture, as
plants sprout from his face, and even from his nose and mouth. In a
sense, it is reminiscent of the Gorgon head on the Aegis. He is
frequently shown horned, and seems somewhat similar to the bearded faces
of Bacchus or Dionysus that most of us have seen at one time decorating
a garden gate. These Green Man masks are purported to ensure favorable
circumstances to the crops nearby when given proper homage, just like
the herms mentioned previously. The oldest known version has been found
in France dated to 400 AD.
This “Green Man” is probably connected to several others in Celtic
folklore. Most notably, the story of the “Green Man of Knowledge” is
quite interesting. In this story, the title character, whose face is
described as similar to that of the Green Man totem mask mentioned
above, rules over a netherworld called “No Man’s Land,” which like the
chaos that Lilith sprang from, doesn’t really exist. He is, as a title
implies, as wise man, but he uses his wisdom for ill, to keep the land
enchanted under his spell, and rules as a tyrant.
St. George defeating a cockatrice
Both St. George and the Green Man are connected by scholars, and by
tradition, with the Islamic figure “Al-Khadir,” of whom we wrote in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled that:
His
name… is usually taken to be a misspelling of al-akhdar, and he is
known for wearing green clothing. Like Hermes, he is a psychopompus.
He shows up suddenly when worthy people need guidance, and imparts
wisdom (usually strange wisdom against common logic). He will steer you
into unforeseen luck, or away from danger, as he wishes. He is known to
appear to pilgrims on the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, where he “gives
power” to the holy Black Stone on display in the shrine called the
Kaaba. Like Mercury, he can appear and disappear quite suddenly because
his movements are very quick. He is said to look like a young man, but
with a white beard. He features in many stories having to do with the
Fountain of Youth and immortality. He lives at the junction of two
rivers.
Various images of Al-Khadir riding a fish
Al-Khadir is mentioned in The Koran as the “Servant of God”
whom the deity granted divine wisdom to. Al-Khadir then met Moses at the
crossing of two rivers, and taught him what he knew. He is also
associated with the Prophet Elijah. According to a hadith, the spirit of
Mohammed spends the month of Ramadan every year in Jerusalem with those
of Al-Khadir and Elijah. Sufis also believe that Al-Khadir is the ruler
of the rijalu’l-gyab (“the men of the unseen”), a panel of
saints and angels who actually make some of the more important decisions
regarding the fate of the universe and the things in it. This makes him
part of the “Qutb,” the spiritual pole of the universe that holds
everything up properly, and around which everything rotates.
The Green Man at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland,
built by descendants of exiled Templars
But according to Wikipedia, George himself is an Islamic figure as well: Saint George is described as a prophetic figure in Islamic sources. George is venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims because of his composite personality combining several Biblical, Quranic and other ancient mythical heroes. In some of he is identified with Elijah or Mar Elis, George or Mar Jirjus and in others as al-Khidr. The last epithet meaning the ‘green prophet,’ is common to both Christian and Muslim folk piety. Samuel Curtiss who visited an artificial cave dedicated to him where he is identified with Elijah, reports that childless Muslim women used to visit the shrine to pray for children. Per tradition, he was brought to his place of martyrdom in chains, thus priests of Church of St. George chain the sick especially the mentally ill to a chain for overnight or longer for healing. This is sought after by both Muslims and Christians. The same article quotes from Elizabeth Anne Finn’s Home in the Holy land (1866): St. George killed the dragon in this country; and the place is shown close to Beyroot. Many churches and convents are named after him. The church at Lydda is dedicated to St. George; so is a convent near Bethlehem, and another small one just opposite the Jaffa gate, and others beside. The Arabs believe that St. George can restore mad people to their senses, and to say a person has been sent to St. George’s is equivalent to saying he has been sent to a madhouse.The article cites J. E. Hanauer’s 1907 book Folklore of the Holy Land: Muslim, Christian and Jewish to say that Christians saw this same shrine as the tomb of George, and Jews saw it as the tomb of Elijah. Furthermore, the same article quotes G.A. Smith’s Historic Geography of the Holy Land thusly:The Mahommedans who usually identify St. George with the prophet Elijah, at Lydda confound his legend with one about Christ himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda. The notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief of George and the Dragon on the Lydda church. But Dajjal may be derived, by a very common confusion between n and l, from Dagon, whose name two neighbouring villages bear to this day, while one of the gates of Lydda used to be called the Gate of Dagon.Dagon, mentioned in the bible as the name of a Canaanite demon or “false god,” took the form of a half-man/half-fish just like Oannes. Thus he connects to Jonah/Jonas. Interestingly, around the same time in 2014 the terrorist group ISIS destroyed both an alleged tomb of St. George along with the supposed tombs of Jonah and Seth, both located in Mosul, Iraq.
But according to Wikipedia, George himself is an Islamic figure as well: Saint George is described as a prophetic figure in Islamic sources. George is venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims because of his composite personality combining several Biblical, Quranic and other ancient mythical heroes. In some of he is identified with Elijah or Mar Elis, George or Mar Jirjus and in others as al-Khidr. The last epithet meaning the ‘green prophet,’ is common to both Christian and Muslim folk piety. Samuel Curtiss who visited an artificial cave dedicated to him where he is identified with Elijah, reports that childless Muslim women used to visit the shrine to pray for children. Per tradition, he was brought to his place of martyrdom in chains, thus priests of Church of St. George chain the sick especially the mentally ill to a chain for overnight or longer for healing. This is sought after by both Muslims and Christians. The same article quotes from Elizabeth Anne Finn’s Home in the Holy land (1866): St. George killed the dragon in this country; and the place is shown close to Beyroot. Many churches and convents are named after him. The church at Lydda is dedicated to St. George; so is a convent near Bethlehem, and another small one just opposite the Jaffa gate, and others beside. The Arabs believe that St. George can restore mad people to their senses, and to say a person has been sent to St. George’s is equivalent to saying he has been sent to a madhouse.The article cites J. E. Hanauer’s 1907 book Folklore of the Holy Land: Muslim, Christian and Jewish to say that Christians saw this same shrine as the tomb of George, and Jews saw it as the tomb of Elijah. Furthermore, the same article quotes G.A. Smith’s Historic Geography of the Holy Land thusly:The Mahommedans who usually identify St. George with the prophet Elijah, at Lydda confound his legend with one about Christ himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda. The notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief of George and the Dragon on the Lydda church. But Dajjal may be derived, by a very common confusion between n and l, from Dagon, whose name two neighbouring villages bear to this day, while one of the gates of Lydda used to be called the Gate of Dagon.Dagon, mentioned in the bible as the name of a Canaanite demon or “false god,” took the form of a half-man/half-fish just like Oannes. Thus he connects to Jonah/Jonas. Interestingly, around the same time in 2014 the terrorist group ISIS destroyed both an alleged tomb of St. George along with the supposed tombs of Jonah and Seth, both located in Mosul, Iraq.
Jonah
While comparing a prophet to a sea-monster may seem absurd, when it
comes to Oannes, it is important to take seriously how he is remembered
as a teacher.
An account from third century BC Babylonian writer Berossus regarding
Oannes (who actually purported to quote the writings of this “Oannes”
himself) was paraphrased first century BC Greek scholar Alexander
Polyhistor, as quoted by Cory’s Ancient Fragments from 1876:
At Babylon there was (in these times) a great resort of people of
various nations, who inhabited Chaldea, and lived in a lawless manner
like the beasts of the field.
In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythaean
sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by
name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus)
was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with
feet also below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s
tail. His voice, too, and language were articulate and human; and a
representation of him is preserved even to this day.
This being was accustomed to pass the
day among men, but took no food at that season; and he gave them an
insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught
them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and
explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them
distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the
fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to
soften manners and humanize their lives. From that time, nothing
material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And
when the sun had set this being Oannes retired again into the sea, and
passed the night in the deep, for he was amphibious. . . .Dagon and
Oannes are literally considered the same figure by scholars, and images
of them are frequently labeled as one or the other interchangeably. But
some are indistinguishable from images of Jonah, and I wouldn’t doubt at
all if some images of these characters have been incorrectly labeled by
historians at variance from the creators’ original intentions.
In my book The Merovingian Mythos,
I speculated that the name of Iraq, thought by many scholars to come
from the city of Uruk, called “Erech” in the Bible, might have been the
world’s first city, mentioned in Genesis, that Cain allegedly
built. It was the first of six, each named after one of his sons. (The
connection between this and Gnostic creation stories, in which the
Demiurge generates six sons occupying “aeons” or layers of the heavens,
will become obvious to you as our study progresses.)
+
+Ophite diagram of the cosmos
I also pondered the possibility that this figure was also connected
to Poseidon Erechtheus, a king of Athens who was also thought to be
synonymous with the famous sea-god. The earliest texts also make no
distinction between him and Ericthonius, later listed as his grandson.
He was said to have been born from the womb of Gaia (Tartarus), who was
impregnated when Athena wiped the semen of Hephaestus from her thigh
with a piece of wool and then cast it to Earth. When he was born, Athena
placed the baby in a box to keep his presence secret. In the later
stories, where Erichthonios is distinct from King Erechtheus, it is said
that the box was given to the king’s three daughters, one of whom was
named “Pandrosus.” They were told to never open it, but eventually their
curiosity got the best of them. Finding inside a baby whose lower body
was that of a snake, they are said to have gone made and jumped from the
Acropolis to their deaths. The creature later succeeded Erechtheus as
king. Another king of Athens, Cercrops I, was said to have similar
anguipede features. He purportedly taught the people of Athens the
techniques of navigation.
Left: Cecrops I. Right: Erichthonius.
Returning to the subject of Enoch, I have mentioned elsewhere in this
essay that I consider the biblical Seth to be an alternate identity of
Cain, or perhaps literally a rebirthing of him (which you will
understand as you read further). He too had a son named Enoch, and it
was he who supposedly stands in the line of the biblical patriarchs,
ancestor to their kings and priests, and thus supposedly an ancestor of
Jesus Christ. He was the grandfather of Noah, and in The Book of Enoch,
he purportedly warned Noah of what was coming after learning about it
during a miraculous trip to Heaven that mirrors precisely that of his
counterpart Hermes. This is hinted at in Genesis 5:21-24, where
it says:And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: And
Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years,
and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enoch were three
hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not;
for God took him.This is always taken by modern Christians and Jews to
mean that he was translated to Heaven directly, and never died, just as
the rapture is said to be. What, then, if he was taken into this City of
Enoch, somehow? Could that possibly be the same as the cubic city of
New Jerusalem that the righteous saved go to live at the End of Days
according to the Revelation of St. John, including, presumably,
those who are raptured like Enoch beforehand?It was said that Enoch
lived 365 years and wrote 366 books. Hermes, according to ancient writer
Manetho, wrote 365,000. The Gnostic Basilides said that there were 365
heavens, with the highest god occupying that upper layer. The name of
Abraxas, in Greek, when interpreted numerically, adds up to 365 as well,
as does Mithras. Amazingly, Wikipedia tells us that in the country of
Georgia, there are:Exactly 365 Orthodox churches… named after Saint
George according to the number of days in a year. According to myth,
Saint George was cut into 365 pieces after he fell in battle and every
single piece was spread throughout the entire country.
Considering all of the evidence linking St. George to Lydia/Cappadocia/Phrygia, I would now like to submit for consideration some of the amazing coincidences I found between the European royal house of Ascania, from whence the previously mentioned Ottos called Margraves of Brandenberg, purportedly featured on the “OTTO” coins presented by Hammer-Purgstall. The name of the royal house was named, as Wikipedia puts it, after “Ascania (or Ascaria) Castle, known as Schloss Askanten in German,” which was itself located in and named after Aschersleben, now in Germany. It was founded in 1036 by a man named Esiko, grandson of Odo I, Margrave of the Saxon Ostmark. Odo was married to Hidda, sister of Gero, margrave of Geronis.
No link whatsoever is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, nor overtly
in anything else I’ve found, to the region now occupied by Turkey.
However, you will see that it is impossible for there not to be a link.
Tab. V, fig. 13-18. This “vase,” as Hammer-Purgstall calls it, appears to me to be the royal arms of the House of Ascania (see below)
As in turns out, there is a lake in Turkey that is incredibly historically significant, the name of which was always written in European languages just the same as that of this royal House of Ascania. Its name is said to be derived from the Assyrian Askuza, a name associated with the ancient people called the Scythians. On modern maps of Turkey, the lake is labeled “Isnik,” and the famous town located next to it is known to us as Nicea, where several ecumenical councils were held to decide on the tenets of Christian theology, and where the Byzantine Orthodox “Greek Empire” was based during the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople was occupied.[8] The name Iznik may even be connected with the victory goddess Nike, as well as Enoch, for, as one source wrote:
Nikaia (or Nicae) is located in the Turkish province of Bursa, on the southeastern edge of Lake Isknok (ancient Lake Ascania).
Apparently,
this place may be the very source of the Phrygian race, for as we read
in Paul and the Nations: The Old Testament and Jewish Background of
Paul’s Mission to the Nations :
The earliest settlement of the Phrygians may be the Mygdones, the
tribe of the eponymous Phrygian hero Mygdon, who traditionally lived
around Lake Ascania, by Nicea.
Then in an essay found online called “From Macedonia to Anatolia:
Some comments on the Phrygians and their migration,” by Manolis
Manoledakis, the author writes:
The first mention of the Phrygians in Anatolia occurs in the
Iliad, where they are described as coming from remote Ascania’ (mod.
Isnik Golu) and the banks of the river Sangarius….
That’s the same River Sangarius associated with the Hydra or Cetus
killed by Hercules. But moreover, it seemed impossible for this to be a
coincidence when I discovered that the lance that Saint George used to
kill the dragon, according to medieval romances, was named “Ascalon,”
allegedly, according to Wikipedia, “after the Levantine city of
Ashkelon, today in Israel.” Whatever the real source, it occurred to me
that the name of King Arthur’s sword Excalibur is related as well.
I started to wonder if the Ashkenazai Jews, of whom so many
conspiracy theories were written, might be from this area too, or
somehow have a common provenance with both the royal house of Ascania in
Germany and the Phrygian people of the Lake Iznik area in Turkey. I
found nothing to preclude that, but no outright confirmation.
Wikipedia defines the Ashkenazai as:
…[A] Jewish diaspora population who coalesced as a distinct
community in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first
millennium. The traditional diaspora language of Ashkenazi Jews is
Yiddish (a Germanic language which incorporates several dialects), with
Hebrew used only as a sacred language until relatively recently.
Throughout their time in Europe, Ashkenazim have made many important
contributions to philosophy, scholarship, literature, art, music and
science.Ashkenazim originate from the Jews who settled along the Rhine
River, in Western Germany and Northern France. There they became a
distinct diaspora community with a unique way of life that adapted
traditions from Babylon, The Land of Israel, and the Western
Mediterranean to their new environment.
The Ashkenazi religious rite developed in cities such as Mainz,
Worms, and Troyes. The eminent French Rishon Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki
(Rashi) would have a significant impact on the Jewish religion.As to
where the Ashkenazai name came from, the same article states:The name
Ashkenazi derives from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz, the first son of
Gomer, son of Japhet, son of Noah, and a Japhetic patriarch in the
Table of Nations (Genesis 10). The name of Gomer has often been linked
to the ethnonym Cimmerians. Biblical Ashkenaz is usually derived from
Assyrian Aškūza (cuneiform Aškuzai/Iškuzai), a people who expelled the
Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates, whose name is
usually associated with the name of the Scythians.
Here we are presented with the Scythians again. A scythe, of course,
is an object synonymous with a sickle, the weapon of Chronos, but
perhaps that’s just a coincidence.
The article continues:In Jeremiah 51:27, Ashkenaz figures as one
of three kingdoms in the far north, the others being Minni and Ararat,
perhaps corresponding to Urartu, called on by God to resist Babylon.In
the Yoma tractate of the Babylonian Talmud the name Gomer is rendered as
Germania, which elsewhere in rabbinical literature was identified with
Germanikia in northwestern Syria, but later became associated with
Germania. Ashkenaz is linked to Scandza/Scanzia, viewed as the cradle of
Germanic tribes, as early as a 6th-century gloss to the Historia
Ecclesiastica of Eusebius. In the 10th-century History of Armenia of
Yovhannes Drasxanakertc’i (1.15)
Ashkenaz was associated with Armenia, as it was occasionally in
Jewish usage, where its denotation extended at times to Adiabene,
Khazaria, Crimea and areas to the east. His contemporary Saadia Gaon
identified Ashkenaz with the Saquliba or Slavic territories, and such
usage covered also the lands of tribes neighboring the Slavs, and
Eastern and Central Europe. In modern times, Samuel Krauss identified
the Biblical Ashkenaz’ with Khazaria.Sometime in the early medieval
period, the Jews of central and eastern Europe came to be called by this
term. Conforming to the custom of designating areas of Jewish
settlement with biblical names, Spain was denominated Sefarad (Obadiah
20), France was called Tsarefat (1 Kings 17:9), and Bohemia was called
the Land of Canaan. By the high medieval period, Talmudic commentators
like Rashi began to use Ashkenaz/Eretz Ashkenaz to designate Germany,
earlier known as Loter, where, especially in the Rhineland communities
of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the most important Jewish communities arose.
Rashi uses leshon Ashkenaz (Ashkenazi language) to describe German
speech, and Byzantium and Syrian Jewish letters referred to the
Crusaders as Ashkenazim. Given the close links between the Jewish
communities of France and Germany following the Carolingian unification,
the term Ashkenazi came to refer to both the Jews of medieval Germany
and France.
“Loter” sounds related to Lydia, and Mount Ararat is commonly
identified as a mountain in the Lake Van region of Turkey. Flavius
Josephus thought that the name Lydia came from Lud, the son of Shem, the
later of whom is the namesake of the racial group “Semites,” containing
both Jews and Arabs. According to Wikipedia, “The whole west of Asia
Minor had Jewish colonies very early, and Christianity was also soon
present there.”One of the key take-aways here is that these Ottos from
the House of Ascania seem to be related to these tribes from Turkey, who
themselves seem to stem from the earliest characters in The Book of Genesis,
including the giant Gog-Magog. I would also assume that there is a
relationship between the House of Ascania and the numerous Ottos from
the House of Habsburg who occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor
throughout the Middle Ages. So it is natural to wonder if there is also a
relationship between the European Ottos and the royal dynasty that took
over Turkey and, from there, formed an empire that threatened the
autonomy of Europe: the Ottomans.Indeed, the Ottomans were named after
their founder Osman, an Oghuz Turkish tribal leader. Osman is a Turkish
form of the Arabic “Uthman,” the source of the Arabic “Osamah,” and even
the European “Osmond.” Uthman, it seems to me, may also be related to
“Uberto,” a name found frequently among the House of Visconti, and to
“Uther,” a.k.a. “Arthur,” both meaning “bear.” The bear is the totem
animal of the House of Ascania, with several of their scions boasting
the title “the Bear” as part of their names.
Coins featuring Albert I, “the Bear,” Margrave of Brandenberg, circa 1100
This, I am sure, would all make sense if we could put it in the
context of the work of Anatoly Fomenko. This Russian mathematician,
working with a team of experts with the same background, has created a
ground-breaking series of books titled History: Fiction or Science?
In it, they theorize that the chronology of history is greatly flawed.
He says that most of what we think of as “ancient” history is fake.
Basically, he claims that the stories that we have from the ancient
world are really just garbled versions of things that happened in
medieval Europe.
But more than that: he also says that the “Dark Ages” never happened,
and that this explains why so many of the alleged literary works from
the ancient world can be found now only in the form of translations that
were made in the Renaissance, with the originals lost. He says that
there was never such a long stretch of time in which the great cities of
Rome and Athens collapsed into ruin, men forgot the basics of science,
and everybody lost interest in art and literature. This, he says, is a
fabrication meant to cover up the erroneous nature of ancient history,
itself a result of mistakes made by a handful of people (central among
them sixteenth century theologian and chronologist Joseph Scaliger),
which were then covered up deliberately by academics with a vested
interest in keeping this flawed understanding of chronology as the
accepted version. Among his more radical claims, Fomenko says that Jesus
was actually born in what we think of as the twelfth century.
Actually, says Fomenko, tons of these stories are about things that
actually happened to the Ottomans, and that hundreds of Ottoman
buildings were destroyed to make room for fake “ancient” ruins, when in
face, he claims, the Ottoman buildings were the originals. What if, for
example, what’s being called the Temple of Solomon is actually an
Ottoman structure? Looking at the way “Otto Marchionis” is dressed on
the coins presented by Hammer-Purgstall, and at his weapons, and at the
turrets on the castles represented on these coins, which
Hammer-Purgstall takes to be the Temple of Solomon, I must admit that it
all does look quite Ottoman to me. Even the hooded people on the coins
that Hammer-Purgstall takes to be female and representations of Mete look, to me, identical to the way in which some Ottoman kings dressed.
Coat of arms of antipope Benedict XIII
Templar seals: Left: Star and crescent. Right: Mosque on Temple Mount
Fomenko is not the first to theorize that the Dark Ages never happened. In 1986, the German Heribert Illig wrote about what is called the “Phantom Time Hypothesis,” evidence of which, he claimed, could be found when looking at the Gregorian calendar reform. Immanuel Velikovsky had suggested something similar in 1952’s Ages in Chaos. When we open yourself up to the possibility of rearranging the chronology of history, it then becomes possible to build an entirely Christ-centric view of history. This is what one of Fomenko’s predecessors and influencers, Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov, another mathematician, did before him when he wrote the potentially revolutionary but little-known book Christ.
Many have noted the similarity between the figure of Jesus and other
gods of the ancient world, such as Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Mithras and
Krishna. Often this is cited as evidence of the fraudulent nature of
the Church, accused of ‘stealing’ the biographies of pagan gods. But in
Fomenko’s world-view, it’s the other way around: all these other gods
just represent Jesus, and they probably came about at around the same
time. He writes:
If we step aside from Scaligerian chronology, we shall see that all
of these parallels indicate the simultaneity of these cults, whose
differences are merely a consequence of the ethnic distinctives of their
localization. All of them probably hail back to the same common
source—that is, they are a reflection of the life and deeds of Jesus
Christ in the XII century A.D.While it would be impossible and
inappropriate to, in the present volume, explain Fomenko’s entire
world-view, or to examine everything presented by Hammer-Purgstall from
this perspective, I mention it as something to keep in mind. Correlation
does not equal causality, so I would submit that Fomenko’s view is
useful for breaking down the mental barrier of accepted chronology,
since in my 25 years of examining both history and mythology deeply, I
have often found myself spinning in circles created by the numerous
counter-claims of historians, and forced to question the assumptions of
historians made on the basis of previously assumed facts that I can see
with my own eyes are not true.
All this leaves us with is the humbling reality that the things we’ve
been taught are things that nobody really knows for sure. Often, the
best I can do as a researcher is to point out correlations and say
“these things must be related somehow.” While I may, for practical
purposes, explain that one thing came from another, I must admit that it
can be impossible to tell sometimes what gave birth to what. I mean
this in every conceivable sense. When the Online Etymology Dictionary
says that the word “hymen” is somehow unrelated to the identical name of
the Greek god of marriage, using the sneering term “folk etymology” to
denote the popular assumption of things seemingly obvious, I remember
Fomenko’s theories, and tell myself not to get too hung up about it.This
brave Russian mathematician faced the scorn of the academic community
to claim that the Crusades happened directly after Christ’s death, or
perhaps even began during his lifetime. He said that the stories of the
Trojan War and the Quest for the Golden Fleece were, like the Grail
romances, merely allegories for the Crusades.
While I haven’t read this in his work yet, I would assume that Jason, the hero who piloted the ship Argo
in the Golden Fleece adventure, and the purported founder of the city
of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is taken by Fomenko as another
version of Jesus. In my view, Jason and Zeus are both recapitulations of
Jesus, who in the Gnostic Christian world-view is an agent from beyond
the created world sent to free those trapped in the prison of the
Demiurge, as I mentioned previously. Zeus also shares aspects with
Jehovah as presented from the Jewish perspective, but this becomes
reconcilable if we allow a Trinitarian sort of solution. The idea of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Sophia, the Mother and Bride) all
being a little bit separate, but also a little bit inside of each
other, is really, quite frighteningly, the exact sort of beast we are
dealing with here. (I will add more on this topic later on in this
essay.)
There are many hints of this in Jason’s story. Jason’s father is
Aeson, just another version of the same name. His partner in crime and
first wife is Medea, a crafty witch, just like the relationship of Zeus
to Metis (Hammer-Purgstall’s Mete),
also described as a crafty witch. Among her tricks, she artificially
extended Aeson’s life by draining some of his blood, infusing it with
invigorating herbs, and pumping it back into him. She also claimed she
could to turn another old man, Pelias, into a baby by chopping him up
and boiling him in a cauldron with these herbs, after successfully
turning a full-grown ram into a lamb using this process. But sneakily,
she didn’t put the herbs in, and let the man die, resulting in her and
Jason being driven into exile.The Fleece sought by Jason was a royal
totem, consisting of the head, skin and wool of a magically golden ram
mounted on a stick.
This brings to mind both the figure of the crucifix, and the Aegis of
Zeus, his magical buckler, or shield, made from the skin of the goat
Amalthea who raised him in exile, and whom he subsequently slew to make
use of her body parts. This story, in turn, hints at the universe being
formed from the body of Tiamat after it was cut up by Marduk, or from
the beast that Chronos separated into Ouranos and Gaia. Of course, the
goat/ram imagery also brings to mind the Templar Baphomet.Jason’s quest
took him to Colchis, in modern Georgia. St. George is the patron saint
of Georgia. Now you might think that Georgia was named after George, but
according to academia, you’re just showing your peasant ignorance
there, even though they don’t actually seem to know where the name came
from. As Wikipedia puts it:
The country of Georgia, where devotions to the saint date back to
the fourth century, is not technically named after the saint, but is a
well-attested back-formation of the Greek name. However, a large number
of towns and cities around the world are. Saint George is one of the
patron Saints of Georgia; the name Georgia (Sakartvelo in Georgian) is
an anglicisation of Gurj, ultimately derived from the Persian word
gurj/gurjān (‘wolf’). Chronicles describing the land as Georgie or
Georgia in French and English, date from the early Middle Ages, as
written by the travellers John Mandeville and Jacques de Vitry ‘because
of their special reverence for Saint George,’ but these accounts have
been seen as folk etymology and are rejected by the scholarly community.
To take the Fleece from Colchis, Jason and Medea had to defeat a
dragon, which they did by putting it to sleep with tricks. Before that,
they had to defeat an army of sparoi (“Spartans,”) a word seemingly connected to Sfard (Sparda
in Old Persian), which is the name that the “Lydians” referred to
themselves with. These Spartans, like the other race of Spartans created
by the hero Cadmus, sprang from the ground after Jason, forced under
duress, sewed a ploughed field with the teeth of a dragon. Here
again we have a hint about Chronos using his teeth to break himself out
of the womb of Gaia, the Earth.Considering that Anatoly Fomenko sees
both Jason’s quest and the Trojan War to be retellings of the Crusades,
and that Troy was part of the same land called Lydia, I thought it was
significant that there is a story of Hercules rescuing a Trojan princess
named Hesione from a horned water-dragon. She had been chained to rocks
by her father, King Laomedon, in an attempt to appease the monster,
which had been sent by Poseidon to destroy the city. Hercules ended up
being swallowed by the dragon, and then, as the Wikipedia article on
Hesione puts it, he “he hacked at its innards for three days before it
died,” eventually emerging from it just like Jonah from the whale.
Strangely medieval-looking Hercules rescuing Hesione
Another rendering of the same incident
Amazingly, about five minutes after I first began pondering the
similarities of Jason and Jesus, a book that I rarely look at, Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with 1000 Faces, literally leapt out of the
bookshelf next to me. When I picked it up, it fell open to an
illustration that shocked me, with the following mind-blowing
caption:[This] view of the Return of Jason (from a vase in the Vatican
Etruscan Collection) illustrates a reading of the legend not represented
in any literary document.
Douris Cup from Vatican collection, featuring Jason
This is from an Etruscan krater called the “Douris Cup,” currently
held by the Vatican. The woman standing over Jason, watching him either
get swallowed by, or return from, the mouth of the dragon, is clearly
Athena, with a warrior’s helmet, clutching her pet, the Owl of Minerva,
and sporting her own trademark Aegis—said by some to be the same as that
of Zeus—which is always shown augmented with the head of the Gorgon
killed by Perseus. (This token was used by her to avert and reflect the
Evil Eye of her enemies). Note that this is an Etruscan vase, just like
those mentioned by Hammer-Purgstall, where he also mentioned the word
“Lydia.” Wikipedia tells us:An Etruscan/Lydian association has long been
a subject of conjecture. The Greek historian Herodotus stated that the
Etruscans came from Lydia, repeated in Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid,
and Etruscan-like language was found on the Lemnos stele from the Aegean
Sea island of Lemnos. However, the decipherment of Lydian and its
classification as an Anatolian language mean that Etruscan and Lydian
were not even part of the same language family. Nevertheless, a recent
genetic study of likely Etruscan descendants in Tuscany found strong
similarities with individuals in western Anatolia, indicating that
Etruscans may have lived in or near the region at one time.I cannot say
for sure whether Jason—whose name is an anagram of Jonas—is coming or
going from the belly of the beast in this instance. Neither did Joseph
Campbell, from what I read, but the image in his book is still labeled
“The Return of Jason.”
There
are, of course, essentially identical images of Jonah/Jonas in
the mouth of the whale, as I have shown. But it seems to me that Athena
is here playing the role of Medea (who, like I said, seems to be a
reimaging of Athena’s mother Metis. She’s immersing Jason in her
“cauldron,” the gullet of the beast, from which, with her magical
techniques, she can regenerate the human body. This seems just like the
Cauldron of Rebirth (called the Pair Dadeni) of Welsh mythology,
supposedly discovered by “the Irish king Matholwch,” is whose name we
now know to see Metis, or Mete.
Examining this myth, when I saw the word Dadeni, I
immediately thought of Dagon (another name for Oannes, as I mentioned).
How appropriate, then, that the Cauldron’s myth also contains a copy of
the story of Samson, who, in the biblical Book of Judges, sacrificed
himself by pulling down the pillars of the Temple of Dagon in which he
was imprisoned. Likewise, the Pair Dadeni
was destroyed from within by a man named Efnisien, who willingly died
in the process.Among Hammer-Purgstall’s images, there is a picture of
someone either pulling down pillars, or attempting to holding them up.
Tab. III, fig. 9
This
brings us to a fascinating and utterly perfect nexus of
symbolism and etymology, for in the midst of the constellation of the
serpent Hydra, the Cetus, defeated by Hercules, is the constellation
“Krater,” representing none other than the Greek vessel for serving
wine, exactly the imagery of a snake-entwined vase found on Tab. V, fig.
19.According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “krater” may
be part of the influence behind the word “Grail,” a term that originated
in the mystical romances of the Holy Grail, where it was written in
French as Sangreal, or in German as Sangraal. The syllable san is
usually interpreted to mean “Holy.” As I mentioned in my book The
Merovingian Mythos and the Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, the syllable
gar
meant “vessel” in many ancient languages. Astoundingly, in the very
next paragraph after discussing the coin with the serpents guarding the
vase, Hammer-Purgstall turns his attention to a coin engraved with the
word “GRAL” written in code.
Relevantly, the royal family being referenced in the title of that
book, called by some the “Grail family,” Meroveus was, according to the
legend, the spawn of two fathers: one, the Frankish King Clodio, the
other, a mysterious sea creature called “the Quinotaur.” This beast
raped his mother, already pregnant, as she was swimming in the ocean,
and managed to magically inject his own seed into the developing fetus,
co-mingling his own inhuman blood with that of the Frankish kings. This
is why Meroveus’ name bore within it the French word for “sea”, and why
his descendants, the Merovingian kings, were believed to possess
magical, super-human powers. As Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lindon states:
According to tradition Merovingian monarchs were occult adepts,
initiates in arcane sciences, practitioners in esoteric arts – worthy
rivals of Merlin, their fabulous near-contemporary. They were often
called the sorcerer kings or thaumaturge kings. By virtue of some
miraculous property in their blood, they could allegedly heal by the
laying on of hands; and according to one account the tassels on the
fringes of their robes were deemed to possess miraculous curative
powers. They were said to be capable of clairvoyant or telepathic
communication with beasts and with the natural world around them, and to
wear powerful magical necklaces. They were said to possess an arcane
spell that protected them and granted them phenomenal longevity—which
history, incidentally, does not seem to confirm.
In the New Jerusalem, according to The Book of Revelation,
there will be a Fountain of Life coming from the body of Jesus, which
the righteous will drink from, thus gaining eternal life. In Christian
iconography, we often see this represented by the Lamb of God standing
on the altar near God’s throne, bleeding into a cup—the Holy Grail. This
cup is often shown pouring from beneath the cup into the Rivers of
Life, also mentioned in Revelation, that seem to run like a
sewer system throughout the whole city, looking just like how the four
Rivers of Paradise are shown flowing through the Garden of Eden in
Christian religious imagery. I mean “sewer system” literally, for, when
not shown coming as blood from the neck of the Lamb, the Rivers are
sometimes shown coming from beneath the throne of the Lord. In color
version of these pictures, the rivers are sometimes shown as brown, and
running through pipes.
The Fountain of Life, from the Ghent Altarpiece
Fountain and rivers depicted as sewer system
An alternate depiction of the Fountain of Life: revelers bathe in Christ’s blood
According
to Hammer Purgstall, one of his idols, Tab. I, fig. 13, sports an
inscription that reads των υδατων χρυσος [ton ydaton chrysos],
which he interprets as meaning “golden waters.” He adds: “What is to be
understood by this golden water, or by this golden liquid, is reserved
for discussion further on.” It obtained this quality because of the food
and drink—nectar and ambrosia—eaten by the gods, which, in a previous
book of mine (Clock Shavings), I argued was most likely the flesh and
blood of those sacrificed to them.
I think it is noteworthy that the gods of Greece were said to have
blood which was golden in color, called ichor, the possession of which
was considered the cause of their immortality. When drained of it, they
died. But in medical pathology, the same term, according to
Dictionary.com, means “an acrid, watery discharge, as from an ulcer or
wound.” Regarding this, Church Father Clement of Alexandria wrote that
“the ichor of the poets is more repulsive than blood; for the
putrefaction of blood is called ichor.” This makes sense once we realize
that the gods of all traditions appear to be literally zombies rotting
in the bowels of the Earth, using magical techniques involving the blood
and flesh of humans to regenerate themselves.
Tab. I, fig. 13, Mysterium Baphometis
Unfortunately, when dealing with things supposedly ancient and
supposedly sacred, we can’t seem to get away from the gore of dead and
dismembered bodies, sexual depravity, and the unnatural abuse of bodily
functions, along with the resulting byproducts. The Gnostics were
accused of heresy for saying these things, and scorned for practicing
them, but we seem to find it hidden within every religious tradition,
but still hinted at by the myths and imagery in a way that is obvious
once you understand the symbols. So what is Jason “returning” from in
the picture provided by Joseph Campbell? Does the dragon represent the
intestines, as Hammer-Purgstall tells us? Is this what the inscriptions
were referring to that say “Return through the rectum is easy”?
There is a version of the Egyptian myth of the war between Horus and Set
where instead of nephew and uncle (respectively, with Osiris and Horus’
father and Set’s brother), they are both brothers, and Isis is their
mother. (These two versions would reconcile if Isis was recognized as
being both the mother and the lover of all of them, which would match
the proclivities of most of the goddesses of the ancient world.) Set
tries to overcome Horus’ position as heir to the chief god by sodomizing
and, thus, overcoming him as this was apparently how things worked in
the divine legal system in which Thoth was the judge.
But it turned out that Set had been having sex with Horus’ thighs,
not his buttocks, unbeknowst to him. Therefore the semen never went
“inside” him. Meanwhile, their mother Isis had conspired to help Horus
overcome Set. She jerked him off into a vase, them took the semen and
used it to contaminate the lettuce that Set ended up eating (yes, just
like the salad scene in Fight Club). Therefore Horus became the heir,
while Set was impregnated. The progeny emerged from the top of his head
as a golden solar disk, which Horus then took and used to crown himself
as the king of the gods.
In the Egyptian the Ogdoad cosmology (which influenced Hermetic and
Gnostic cosmology), Thoth reportedly gave birth to several of his
children by laying eggs from his anus. This aspect of the myth must have
influenced the Gnostics as well. Each one of those eight gods was, for
them, one of the aeons of the planetary archons, which were all stacked
inside of one another, imprisoning each other, with the Earth in the
center.
Were the aeons then also perceived as each bowing down to the ones on
top, forming a cosmic daisy-chain of sexual subjugation? This certainly
seems implied by of Nut, the night’s sky (female Egyptian equivalent of
the Greek male Ouranos) and her relationship with Shu, said to be the
god of the air. She is shown arched naked over him, bending over, and he
hold her body up over his head whilst simultaneously massaging her
breasts and vagina. Reflexively, Ouranos is depicted in astrological
emblems as the night’s sky, the “Zodiac Man,” also called the “Perfect
Man” (reminiscent of the Gnostic savior Anthropos or “First Man”), shown
bending over backwards with his pelvis sticking upwards, in a position
of stress and pain known as “the Arch of Hysteria.”
Nut, Shu and Geb
’
Nut and Geb, with erect phallus instead of Shu
In the image below, from The Secret Teachings of the Ages by
Masonic writer Manly P. Hall, Ouranos is shown in this position at the
feet of Zeus, who can be identified by the figure emerging from his
forehead. This could be Athena from the well-known Greek myth, mentioned
earlier. But since she is not wearing any armor, or indeed, anything at
all, I think she is more likely the “debauched woman” Mete, or Metis, a.k.a. Pronoia, “Dear Prudence,” finally “coming out” of the prison of her husband’s body.
Zeus, Ouranos, and Athena, from
The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The Zodiac Man, by Michael of Rhodes
Diagram of unknown origin
Perfect Man reborn from colorectal cloud, Paradox Emblematica, Dionysus A. Freher, 16th-17th century
This position is called “the Arch of Hysteria” is because this is
exactly the way in which victims of clinical hysteria are often found to
contort themselves. The position is technically known as “opisthotonos”
by doctor. It is also associated with other ailments, such as
meningitis and strychnine poisoning: anything that would cause “reduced
brain function or injury to the nervous system.” (Meningitis,
incidentally, is something associated anecdotally with chemtrails). We see something similar with the idol of Mete shown on Tab. I, fig. 3.
Tab. I, fig. 3 and 4, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
I couldn’t help but notice that this word contains “Opis”—reminiscent
of Ops, another name for Rhea, the wife of Chronos, and
“thoton”—reminiscent of “Thoth,” “Otto,” “Ottone,” “Othin,” (Odin), etc.
Looking up the etymology involved here, we find that tonus means “tension,” and opisthen means “from behind.”
The one shown next to it, Tab I, fig. IV, is the one Hammer-Purgstall
referred to as a “genuflecting idol” with a so-called “dog” positioned
behind him. Is it not possible that both of these figures are actually
being shown giving anal birth? Note also that the idol’s stomach appears
to have a surgical wound on it that’s been stitched up, as if it has
had a caesarian recently.
The
neck is decorated with images of an “annular eclipse,” which is when
the Sun appears with a black dot in the center, surrounded by a white
ring. “Ring” is actually the meaning and etymological root of the word
“anus.” The name “Uranus” most likely contains this root for more than
one reason. It is a reference to the Zodiac ring, but it’s also a
symbol, I believe, of this god’s sexual subjugation underneath Zeus, as
symbolize by image of the Zodiac Man doing the Arch of Hysteria pose in The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
Above: Stills from a Marilyn Manson video
In addition, the “genuflecting idol” is decorated with crescents, as can be found on other idols of Mete
presented by Hammer-Purgstall. The conjunction of the Sun and Moon is a
symbol of sexual alchemy, and really, sexual alchemy, as practiced by
ceremonial magicians, so that is most likely the reason why these things
are presented by Hammer Purgstall. These represent the crescent-shaped
“shadow bands” that appear on the ground during a solar eclipse.
The inscription on the back of this idol, according to Hammer-Purgstall, reads:
She is exalted, Mete, Consivia (‘she who plants’), I and our race were seven. If you are from those who deny.
Another idol, the previously-mentioned Tab. I, fig. 13, inscribed
with the message about “golden waters,” also sports another inscription
that reads, according to Hammer-Purgstall:
And there were seven, you, if you are denying, one, Omnipotent Mete sprouting, a debauched woman, it springs up for our race through πρωκτον (prokton, Greek, “the rectum”).
The “seven” in the “race” are the seven immortal planetary Archons,
and we are being told quite frankly that they are birthed anally. This
is how those of their “race” are reproduced. Most likely, this is a
variation on the process of producing a golem in the Jewish tradition.
Or, quite possibly, this is the process of creating a golem, and what we
are discovering here are the details of the process. According to the
article “Modern Jewish History: The Golem,” by Alden Oreck, published on
the Jewish Virtual Library
The word ‘golem’ appears only once in the Bible (Psalms139:16). In Hebrew, ‘golem’ stands for ‘shapeless mass.’ The Talmud uses the word as ‘unformed’ or ‘imperfect’ and according to Talmudic legend, Adam is called ‘golem,’ meaning ‘body without a soul’ (Sanhedrin 38b) for the first 12 hours of his existence.
Since God is quite specifically described in Genesis as
forming him in “his own image” So God created man in his own image
(1:27), and this type of language is used again in 5:3, when Adam begets
“a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name
Seth,” it seems likely to me that both Adam and Seth actually were
golems. Seth was most likely an artificial creation meant to host the
soul of Cain, who had been banished to “Nod,” seemingly a netherworld
that doesn’t really exist except in dreams, and which was overcome with
the waters of the Abyss of chaos during the Flood. This would explain
why Cain’s descendants—who, it is implied, died out with the Flood—have
nearly identical names to the first few generations that came from Set. I
think the hints in the story are implying that Cain’s soul was trapped
in Nod, but that his parents used magic to tap into that soul, and that
they were able to use it to animate the golem they had made—the real
Pinocchio.
Sumerian depiction of Golem creation.L.A. Waddell labels this image “The Birth of Cain,” but I think it is more likely to be Seth.
Continuing with his description of the making of a golem, Alden Oreck writes:
According to one story, to make a golem come alive, one would
shape it out of soil, and then walk or dance around it saying
combination of letters from the alphabet and the secret name of God. To ‘kill’ the golem, its creators would walk in the opposite direction saying and making the order of the words backwards.
Other sources say once the golem had been physically made one
needed to write the letters aleph, mem, tav, which is emet and means
‘truth,’ on the golem’s forehead and the golem would come alive. Erase
the aleph and you are left with mem and tav, which is met, meaning
‘death.’
Drawing of a rabbi animating a golem
This word emet seems to have the same meaning as the Egyptian maat,
“truth,” personified as the goddess Maat of the proper “world order,”
the basis of sound governance. Is this not also the same, essentially,
as the meaning of metis: “wisdom,” “prudence,” and “wise rule”? Note that emet is a literal anagram of “Mete,”
and that Hammer-Purgstall found this name written on idols within
messages that he thought were coded in the form of anagrams.
In Europe up until the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were accused of
sacrificing Christian boys and torturing them in bloodletting rituals
around Passover/Easter. This was happening while Hammer-Purgstall was
writing. As Alden Oreck writes:
Between 1805 and 1816 various cases of blood libel occurred in
places within the Pale of Settlement, and the investigations always
ended by exposing the lie on which they were based. In an attempt to
stop their dissemination the minister of ecclesiastic affairs, A.
Golitsyn, sent a circular to the heads of the guberniyas (provinces)
throughout Russia on March 6, 1817, to this effect. Basing his
instruction on the fact that both the Polish monarchs and the popes have
invariably invalidated the libels, and that they had been frequently
refuted by judicial inquiries, he stated in his circular that the czar
directed ‘that henceforward the Jews shall not be charged with murdering
Christian children, without evidence, and through prejudice alone that
they allegedly require Christian blood.’ Nevertheless Alexander I
(1801–25) gave instructions to revive the inquiry in the case of the
murder of a Christian child in Velizh (near Vitebsk) where the assassins
had not been found and local Jewish notables had been blamed for the
crime. The trial lasted for about ten years. Although the Jews were
finally exonerated, Nicholas I later refused to endorse the 1817
circular, giving as a reason that he considered that ‘there are among
the Jews savage fanatics or sects requiring Christian blood for their
ritual, and especially since to our sorrow such feaful and astonishing
groups also exist among us Christians.’
Because of this ever-present suspicion against the Jews, according to
legend, golems would be created around this time to protect the ghettos
from rampaging Christian mobs anxious to lynch the suspects of the
latest child disappearance in town. This, of course, is the same story
fictionalized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was an
artificial person, in that case, made from pieces of human cadavers,
animated with electricity (like Mithras being brought to life by
lightning). The roots of the word “frank” mean “truthful, honest” just
like emet and maat mean “truth.” Its also the name of
the Germanic people in Western Europe, the Franks, now known as “the
French,” whose first king was Meroveus, the creature with two fathers,
one of which was a water-dragon. Of course, “Stein” means “rock,” in
German. So “Frankenstein” means “Rock of Truth,” or “Rock of Mete.” Here’s how the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it:
[A]llusive use for man-made monsters dates to 1838, from Baron Frankenstein, character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Commonly taken (mistakenly) as the proper name of the monster, not the creator, and thus franken—extended
1990s as a prefix to mean ‘non-natural.’ The German surname is probably
literally ‘Franconian Mountain,’ stein being used especially for steep,
rocky peaks, which in the Rhineland often were crowned with castles.
The Shelleys might have passed one in their travels. The German surname
also suggests ‘free stone.’
Prometheus means “foreknowledge” (containing, again, meth, that is, “Mete”), and meaning the same as the Greek Pronoia, as well as the English words “prudence” and “providence.”
Flyer from Kiev, 1915: “Christians, take care of your children! March 17 is Jewish Passover.”
Aleister Crowley is recording as having an intention to, through
homosexual magic and alchemy, create a homunculus (another word for a
golem) that would be born rectally from a male, and whose birth would
herald the start of a new era. He called the anus the “Eye of Horus,”
and the vagina the “mouth of Isis.” He is quoted as writing:
Oh, how superior is the Eye of Horus to the Mouth of Isis!… The
‘Child’ of such a love is a third person, a Holy Spirit, so to speak,
partaking of both natures, yet boundless and impersonal because it is a
bodiless creation of a wholly divine nature.
He
was the first to coin the English word “Superman” in English. This came
from Aleister Crowley’s novel Moonchild, which is about creating a
child with divine parentage through sexual magic. Regarding this
process, he had said:
…[T]he idea has been almost universal in one form or another; the
wish has always been for a Messiah or Superman, and the method some
attempt to produce man by artificial or at least abnormal means.
Note that the word “Superman” contains all of the letters of the word “sperm.”
Superman appears on Earth. Note cosmic egg/Sun behind him, and pose of Mulier (“The Wife”), a.k.a. “Sign of Baphomet” from Crowley’s AA order dedicated to anal sex rites
In the “Secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis” article on parareligion.ch, we read:
The name Baphomet is used to signify the Lion-Serpent or Semen.
This is the Blood of the Phallus in which its life-force is
concentrated. The Phallus is the Wonder-Tree (in Crowley’s Gnostic
Catholic Mass) and the semen is the sap that continues its existence
from generation unto generation. Baphomet as the Semen is also the Holy
Ghost, the continuity between the Father and the Son, and one part of
the matter of the Sacrament.
Certainly, the acolytes of Aleister Crowley are taught that the way
to creating a “servitor” (an artificial spirit created as a servant) is
to make a sigil representing it and then “bring it to life” by applying
fresh sperm to a physical representation of the image. Does it not seem
likely that this is, along with the writing of the magic word emet or mete, might be the way to animate it?
From temple at Luxor, comes with inscription: “Water of Life and Good Fortune, rejuvenating thee like thy father Atum.” L.A. Waddell takes “Atum” to be the same figure as Adam
So
were Hammer-Purgstall’s idols actually meant to be golems? UCLA’s
Medieval History expert Zrinka Stahuljak, in her book Pornographic
Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French
Nation, quotes Friedrich Nicholai from 1782 (Essays on accusations
against the Templars, and the secret of this order, with a paper on the
origin of Freemasonry) and writes that he claimed, according to sources
he had read that:
[T]he name ‘Baphomet’ mentioned in the deposition… ‘was not the
name of the idol, but rather a hieroglyph imprinted on it. The head …
had been a symbol, the image of the eternal Father in a state of rest,
as the ancient Gnostics represented him.’ Baphomet would thus have been a
name for a Gnostic symbol.
This, then, may provide a total explanation for the inscriptions
referring to “sprouting water,” what Hammer-Purgstall interprets as
“sperma genethliakon (reproductive seed),” the source of the “genital
wisdom” (Arabic, ma-ta na-sha) of Mete?
In the Bible, “to know” is a euphemism of sex, and we still have the
term “carnal knowledge” for this. It was the “fruit” of the Tree of
Knowledge that they were forbidden to eat, because it made them as smart
as the gods were.
God reposing on the seventh day, from the first Russian engraved Bible
One of the words found on the inscriptions means “sperm” directly in
Arabic. I found this by typing out the letters from the inscribed word
myself into a search engine. The letters are the equivalent of “MNSY.”
MNSY from Mysterium Baphometis
I have many pages of notes I have made about the etymology of this word and its associated syllables. They all have to do with wisdom and sperm. Even the word “mayonnaise,” and the city of Mahon in Spain that it’s said to be native to, are connected, and just think about the implication of that (but not while you’re eating a sandwich, please). The other amazing connections relate directly to the name of the Prophet Mohammed, and also that of the Prophet Mani, founder of the Gnostic movement of Manicheanism.
The Egyptian fertility god Min
Amazingly, Mohammed is said to have died and been buried with his
penis remaining erect (a sign of poisoning, by the way). A glyph formed
by his name creates an image that looks like a skeletal man lying on his
back with his penis pointing up. This information can be found on a
website called “Pengetahuan Agama Islam,”
where the writer also points out that Mohammed’s name can also be
viewed as forming a human body genuflecting in prayer (see both
demonstrated on screenshots from that site featured below).
Note the symbol for the Multi-National Corps of Iraq, the name of which, in Arabic, in shortened into an acronym with the same letters as the Arabic word for sperm (MNSY). With the one on the right, it looks like the spear is going through the lion’s body. According to Hammer-Purgstall, the Ophites and Templars sacrificed lions because they saw them as symbols of Jaldabaoth, the Demiurge, whom Gnostics depicted as a serpent with the head of a lion. As for the spear with the palm branches coming out, it reminds me very much of a European heraldic device called the Alerion.
MNSY badges
Alerions
The
Alerion is supposed to be a bird with no beak and only one eye.
It is associated with the region of Lorraine in France, and with the
royal house that famously ruled it, related directly to the
Merovingians, Angevins and Plantagenets. The name “Alerion,” spelled
properly in French, is, by design, an anagram of the proper French way
of spelling “Lorraine” (Loraine). It is often featured alongside the
Cross of Lorraine. In The Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles
Fox-Davies, published in 1909, the author writes that:
[I]t is difficult to conjecture what may have been the origin of
the bird in this debased form, unless its first beginnings may be taken
as a result of the unthinking perpetuation of some crudely-drawn
example.
But
in Historic Devices, Badges, and War-cries, by Mrs. Bury Palliser from
1870, we are told that this symbol is traced to the mythos
surrounding Godfrei de Bouillon, the first of the Christian “Latin
Kings of Jerusalem” and one of the leaders of the first Crusade. Writes
Palliser:
It is related of him, that he, ‘At one draught of his bow,
shooting against David’s Tower in Jerusalem, broched three feetless
birds, called Alerions, upon his arrow, and thereupon assumed in his
shield, or, three Alerions argent on a bend gules, which the house of
Lorraine, descending from his race, continue to this day;’ adding to it
these words from Virgil, Dederitne viam casusve deusve, ‘Did chance or
God direct way?’
Left: Godfrei de Bouillon. Right: His royal device, the alleged inspiration for the Alerion
Godfrei de Bouillon dying, from William of Tyre’s History. What is going on here?
To
me, the Alerion is quite obviously a sanitized version of a winged
fascinus, a phallus worn for good luck, or to protect against the evil
eye, what Pliny the Elder called a medicus invidiae (“remedy for envy”).
In Worship of the Generative Powers, Thomas Wright claims that these
are all votives belonging to the cult of Priapus, stating:
The first of these is the figure of a double phallus. It is
sculptured on the lintel of one of the vomitories, or issues, of the
second range of seats of the Roman amphitheatre, near the entrance-gate
which looks to the south. The double and the triple phallus are very
common among the small Roman bronzes, which appear to have served as
amulets and for other similar purposes. In the latter, one phallus
usually serves as the body, and is furnished with legs, generally those
of the goat; a second occupies the usual place of this organ; and a
third appears in that of a tail.
Fascinum, most with wings
Only a few writers have commented on this obvious connection, as far
as I can tell, and only in the form of hints. But more scholars have
commented on the phallic appearance of another symbol associated with
French royalty, and specifically the first dynasty, the Merovingians. I
am speaking of the fleur-de-lys, which I think may derive from the fascinus as
well. Purportedly, as I mentioned before, it was handed down from
Heaven to Saint Clothilde, the wife of King Clovis I (who converted him
to Catholicism), and became the national heraldic device from then on.
In the context of all the myths we’ve examined, this would almost have
to be interpreted as the severed penis of “Heaven” himself:
Oannes/Uranus, the “Perfect Man.” (The Cathar heretics of France, by the
way, called themselves “The Perfect Ones,” and the rite that made them
“Perfect” was the consolamentum, which, as I allude to later in this essay, may have, in my opinion, been a castration rite.)
The Legend of the Fleur-de-Lys
Interestingly, France, and Lorraine in particular, is home to many places with names similar to Mete
and its variations, including the town of Metz in Lorraine, spelled
“Mettis” locally. It was known as Mediomatrici “in ancient times,”
according to Wikipedia, a name which the same source says means “the
people between the Matrona (Marne) and the Matra.” There’s also the
Meurthe river, after which the department Meurthe-et-Moselle in Lorraine
is named. Also, the town of Stenay, in the Meuse department, was once
the capitol of the Merovingian kingdom, and used to be called
“Satanicum.”
Left: Arms of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Right: A Merovingian coin inscribed with letters from which Hammer-Purgstall could surely form the name “Mete.”
One
figure said to be personified by the fascinus was called Mutinus
Titinus. Mutuniatis is a term for a well-endowed male, but let us also
not again the presence of the syllable “Mut,” interchangeable with Mete in the present context. Like Baphomet’s head, the fascinus was
considered capable of “saving” those who believed in its power.
According to Wikipedia, scholars think that “Mutinus” comes from the
Latin muto or mutto, which they say was a slang word
for a penis and which, in other contexts, is defined as a “cognomen,”
and as something like a surname, but also nickname.
But when I looked up muto and related words in my Latin
dictionary, I also found it to be the root of the English “mutual” and
“mutation,” because it means moving, shifting, changing, or exchanging
one thing for another. When I read this, I immediately thought of the
inscription on one of Hammer-Purgstall’s idols that I had translated to
“revenue through easy return.” Also, according to the Online Etymology
Dictionary, the word “mutton, ” from the Old French moton, has
been used as slang that meant “food for lust, loose women, prostitutes”
since the(1510s, which “led to extensive British slang uses down to the
present day for woman variously regarded as seeking lovers or as lust
objects.”
The phallic god’s second name, “Titinus,” is based on yet another old
Roman slang word for a penis, “Titus.” This, in the present context,
reminds me of the Titans of Greek mythology, the race “giants,”
“dragons” and “monsters,” ruled by Ouranos and Gaia, then by Chronos and
Rhea, before the overthrow of Chronos by Zeus. I also think about the
fact that in Lydda (Lod), Israel, Eusebius reports that during the reign
of Constantine the Great (the fourth century), a church was dedicated
there to an ambiguous “man of the highest distinction,” designated there
as the titulus, meaning patron. This man was later considered
to be St. George. George’s father’s name, Gerontios, means “old man,”
bringing to mind both Chronos in his role as “father time,” and also his
even older father Ouranos, whom he castrated. According to The Birthday Book of Saints,
“Riding Saint George”—that is, sexual intercourse with the woman on
top—was long considered a certain way of begetting a bishop.”[9]
Woman riding a green penis-shaped dragon
The Wikipedia article for Mutinus Tintinus mentions that this figure,
being a disembodies phallus, is comparable both to the fascinus, and
also to Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. Like Meroveus of the
French dynasty, he also had divine parentage, possibly even with dual
human/divine insemination, just like his French counterpart. The
Wikipedia page for Servius Tullius states:
Most Roman sources name Servius mother as Ocrisia, a young
noblewoman taken at the Roman siege of Corniculum and brought to Rome,
either pregnant by her husband, who was killed at the siege: or as a
virgin. She was given to Tanaquil, wife of king Tarquinius, and though
slave, was treated with the respect due her former status. In one
variant, she became wife to a noble client of Tarquinius. In others, she
served the domestic rites of the royal hearth as a Vestal Virgin, and
on one such occasion, having damped the hearth flames with a sacrificial
offering, she was penetrated by a disembodied phallus that rose from
the hearth. According to Tanaquil, this was a divine manifestation,
either of the household Lar or Vulcan himself. Thus Servius was divinely
fathered and already destined for greatness, despite his mother’s
servile status; for the time being, Tanaquil and Ocrisia kept this a
secret.
Interestingly, in the non-canonical Protovangelium of James,
it says that Mary, the mother of Jesus, been given over by her parents
at age three to temple priests, just as Ocrisia had been forced to serve
the priesthood. The author Mark Gibbs, in his book The Virgin and the Priest,
points out that this would have been highly unusual for a female child.
This sort of thing would only have happened with male children, who
were sometimes given to the temple, essentially as slaves, as a form of
ransom payment by the family. She would have been raised solely by men
not related to her. When she was approaching age 12, the priests decided
she could no longer stay there, but she went directly to the home of
Zacharias, described as “high priest.” Shortly after that, she was
engaged to Joseph, but before that was consummated, became
“miraculously” pregnant. More on this in a bit.
A denarius issued by Quintus Titius allegedly featuring Mutunus Tutunus
In Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, he writes:
. . . [T]he celebrated bronze in the Vatican has the male organs
of generation placed upon the head of a cock, the emblem of the sun,
supported by the neck and shoulders of a man. In this composition they
represented the generative power of the [Eros], the Osiris, Mithras, or
Bacchus, whose centre is the sun. . . . The inscription on the pedestal
[says] . . . The Saviour of the World . . . a title always venerable
under whatever image it be presented [with].
Fascinus ejaculates into the Evil Eye
The fascinus is ejaculating into the Evil Eye in
counter-attack. The eye’s poisonous effect is symbolized by the presence
of the scorpion. In the rites of Mithras, the scorpion was associated
with the grade of Perses, the Persian, which was dedicated to the Moon
goddess. According to their mysteries, when Mithras slayed the Bull, its
testicles were cut off by a scorpion and offered to the Moon, as she
was the goddess considered to be in charge of sexual generation. The
Moon was thought by the Romans to be the gate through which souls passed
into physical incarnation, and also how they exited this realm.
Perseus, by Cellini
You realize, now, that a caduceus, which is now commonly used as a
symbol of medicine (the “remedy,” with the etymology of “med” being
related to metis), is really a winged fascinus
entwined with snakes. In alchemy and other arcane traditions, a
crucified snake or impaled serpent or Dragon is symbolic of poison used
as an antidote, like the poison Zeus gave to Chronos, causing him to
vomit up his children.
El Greco’s John the Apostle, showing John’s symbol, a serpent in a cup. The story, according to Our Christian Symbols by Friedrich Rest, is that “an attempt was made to poison John, but the attempt was unsuccessful because the poison vanished in the form of a serpent.” The image below is from the same book.
Bohemian coin featuring Christ crucified on obverse side, brazen serpent on cross from Numbers 21 8-9 on reverse. The latter healed the Israelites from the bites of “fiery serpents” when they gazed upon it. The former was compared to this in The Gospel of John 3:14-15: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
It is also said to be symbolic of fixing the volatile. Consider the
fact that the “Evil Eye” can caused someone to freeze, like the stare of
the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, a dragon. This is what it means to “fascinate,” and what a fascinus is
really supposed to do. It points the Evil Eye right back at the
aggressor. Like a gargoyle used to scare away evil spirits, it takes a
demon to slay a demon. This is what St. George and the Archangel Michael
slaying Dragons is all about. They themselves were both viewed by
Gnostics as symbols of the Demiurge.
Left: Gorgon head on Byzantine Gnostic amulet. Inscription reads: “Holy, holy, Lord of hosts, in the highest, Blessed!” Right: Medusa by Carvaggio
The
caduceus between the legs of Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet is a bit
more complicated though. I rather think that it represents a straw
connected to his urethra, as used on the castrated priests/priestesses
of the Roman cult of Cybele, to keep them from closing up. I also think
it could be used to remove the “sprouting water,” as such transgendered
people can still produce it. Levi himself wrote in Dogme et Rituel about
Baphomet’s caduceus that “The rod standing instead of genitals
symbolizes eternal life.”
Add that to the alleged existence of a magical technology to engender
children rectally, and you have the ability for a parthenogenic birth
from the anus of a castrated man. The Ophites and Templars could have
seen that as a “virgin birth,” and a miracle. It would explain the
chicken symbolism seen on the emblem of Abraxas, on the “Savior of the
World” at the Vatican, and on the arms of the House of Visconti-Sforza.
Even
more horrific, one could conceivably conceive within one’s own anus,
and thus create a child without a partner, just like Sophia/Mete
is said to have done in Gnostic theology. (That pun about conception
was meant to prove once again the connection in our minds and our
language between knowledge or mental activity and sexual generation.)
You might even be able to project your own soul into the child, thus
escaping death and achieving “eternal life.” This self-impregnation,
this parthenogenesis, could presumably be achieved either through
masturbation or self-penetration, as long as there was a fertile
receptacle, or some (perhaps supernatural) way of making it fertile. Is
that what it means when, in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, it says that
the Father of All knew himself to generate Barbelo (seemingly an aspect
of Sophia)? In that text (as presented by Gnosis: The Nature and
History of Gnosticism by Kurt Rudolf), we read:
He [the Father of All] knew his own image when he saw it in the
pure water of light which surrounded him. And his thought (ennoia)
accomplished a work, it revealed itself. It stood before him out of the
glory of the light: this is the power which is before the all, which
revealed itself, the perfect providence (pronoia) of the all, the light,
the likeness of the light, the image of the invisible.
I think this—the Father’s self-knowing—is what is being illustrated
in the image referred to by Eliphas Levi regarding what he called “The
Great Kabbalistic Symbol of the Zohar” in his Magick: A History of Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, of which he writes:
That synthesis of the word, formulated by the human figure,
ascended slowly and emerged from the water, like the sun in its rising.
When the eyes appeared, light was made; when the mouth was manifested,
there was the creation of spirits and the word passed into expression.
The entire head was revealed, and this completed the first day of
creation. The shoulders, the arms, the breasts arose, and thereupon work
began. With one hand the Divine Image put back the sea, while with the
other it raised up continents and mountains. The Image grew and grew;
the generative organs appears, and all beings began to increase and
multiply. The form stood at length erect, having one foot upon the earth
and one upon the waters. Beholding itself at full length in the ocean
of creation, it breathed on its own reflection and called its likeness
into life. It said: Let us make man—and thus man was made. … Hereby is
man but the shadow of a shadow, and yet he is the image of divine power.
… Such is the sense in which he is depicted as a giant; and this is why
Swedenborg, haunted in his dreams by reminiscences of the Kabalah, says
the entire creation is only a titanic man….
But when you look at the image called “The Great Kabbalistic Symbol
of the Zohar” (see below), it really doesn’t look like any shadow would.
After all, how would the shadow of his legs be cast behind him like
that? It really looks like he’s knowing his own shadow, in a
biblical sense. Also, notice the surprised look on the top figure’s
face, as though what he is doing is causing pain to himself that he
didn’t expect.
Left: “The Great Kabbalistic Symbol of The Zohar.” Right: The Kabbalistic image “Zaur Anpin,” both from Magic: A History of its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, by Eliphas Levi.
The story of creation in The Apocryphon of John continues thusly regarding Barbelo:
She is the perfect power Barbelo, the perfect aeon of glory… She
is the first thought (ennoia), his (the Father’s ) image. She became a
first ‘man,’ which is the virgin spirit (pneuma)… And Barbelo asked of
him to give her a first knowledge; he granted it. When he granted it,
the first knowledge was manifested…
Note that Barbelo is described as becoming “a first ‘man’”: like
Adam? Adam, in the first description of the making of men in the first
chapter (verses 26-27) of The Book of Genesis, is described as
possessing both sexes within him. This was the creation of Adam as the
“image” of God, who, again, seems to be consist of a multiplicity of
beings, and presumably, like the image, possessing both sexes.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…
God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them.
It is only in the second creation of Adam, after God has already
rested from the previous creation, that Adam is said to be formed from
the dust of the ground, and Eve taken from his rib. This takes place
starting at verse 4 of the second chapter of Genesis, and here
there is no language implying the plurality of God. The Kabbalistic
interpretation of this is that the first creation described is of
another, more primary, cosmos, existing within and constituting the body
of that first first man, whom they call “Adam Kadmon.”
Adam
Kadmon is always portrayed as a Hermaphrodite, like God presumably is.
Notice that in Genesis,
this “man” is only declared to be made after the rest of the cosmos is
done—as if each element of creation appeared as the corresponding part
of Adam’s body rose from the depths of chaos. This is just like what The
Zohar claims happened when “God” arose in this manner, as paraphrased
in the passage from Eliphas Levi quoted above.
The cleaving apart of the hermaphroditic prime parents Ouranos and
Gaia by Chronos seems to be represented holding his scythe in the image
below, based on a bas relief at a church that Hammer-Purgstall included
in Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum as Tab. III, fig. 4. This
picture has no doubt naively taken by most who have seen it to merely
represent the curse of death that Genesis says the eating of
the “knowledge fruit” brought to Adam and Eve. But clearly, the genitals
have been cut, and they are bending over in pain, while the man who did
the cutting still holds the weapon, and one of the Titanic monsters
born from out of them slithers nearby.
Tab. III, fig. 1 an 4, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Left: Eve tempted by fruit of “genital wisdom.” Right: Both prime parents indulge.
This
leaves me to wonder if the notion of Adam and Eve having an
instinct to cover their genital areas immediately after obtaining the
result of their forbidden “knowledge” wasn’t at least as much about
stopping the bleeding with a bandage as it was about covering the
results of their act out of shame.[10]
Genesis abruptly moves from their expulsion from Eden to the birth of
their two sons, one of whom grows up to have an occupation associated
with imagery now commonly applied to Christ, which the other focuses his
expertise in the same area as Chronos, inventor of agriculture. “And
Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2).
Thus the man with the scythe is Cain, that is, Chronos, who killed
his brother, since his father was the also the son of his mother, Gaia.
Thus, he is the “Son of the Widow” of the Freemasons, and likely
equivalent to Horus in the Egyptian myths. His mother was the Earth, who
cried out when the blood was spilled, because her own guts were being
torn apart in the process also. Four fruits are shown on the tree on
Tab. III, fig. 4, which we could take to stand for Cain, Abel, Seth, and
perhaps a fourth progeny whose name is unknown or hidden in the
Biblical text.
Returning to The Apocryphon of John, Kurt Rudolph summarizes the next stage of creation:
In the same fashion (prayer, assent, manifestation) other aeons
also come into being: ‘incorruptibility,’ ‘eternal life’ (the formation
of a second Ennoia has evidently dropped out of our text); altogether
they form a bisexual ‘pentad of the aeons of the father’ or a ‘decad.’
Then a further action begins: Barbelo after ‘steadfast looking’ at the
Father brings forth a ‘blessed spark of light,’ which is described as
‘only-begotten’ (monogenes), ‘divine self-begotten (autogenes),’
‘first-born son of the all’ and is identified with the heavenly Christ
(interpreted as ‘kindly’=chrestos).
So Jesus is autogenes—self conceived and, the way I read it, conceived within
himself. Most would just chock up the oxymoronic nature of this
statement only seeming nonsensical because we can’t understand God’s
mysterious ways, and after all the Son is in the Father, while the
Father is in the Son, right? Yes, and I refer you to the Great
Kabbalistic Symbol of the Zohar as an illustration of how this was done,
quite literally.
Am I somehow saying that Christ and the Virgin, the Mother of God,
are in some way the same person? The Trinitarian doctrine says that
there is one primary creative deity with three distinct personalities.
This is commonly illustrated by the image you see below, where the only
commonality between them is that they are all somehow God, while any
sense of them being actually merged together is specifically denied:
But The Gospel of John couldn’t be more clear about the matter: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Therefore, a better illustration, also commonly used by mainstream Christian theologians today, can be found below:
This
image demonstrates how to visualize that the Father and Son are
within one another; that the Father and the Holy Spirit are within one
another (as though married and joined physically); and that this latter
statement also applies to the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Divine
Sophia. The Holy Spirit Sophia is also thought of as the creative Logos,
“the Word,” described in The Gospel of John 1:1: “In the beginning was
the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.” (Thus again
John
affirms and clearly describes the Trinity relationship.) Also,
theologians frequently agree with the idea that Sophia/the Holy Spirit
is the same as the Shekinah, the Cloud of Glory of God’s manifestation,
as described in the Old Testament, stated in Jewish theology to be God’s
bride.
This is something taken quite literally by Kabbalists, who even say, as in The Zohar, that God has taken a concubine, equated with the dark demoness Lilith, who has alienated him from his wife, but that God will return to her at the End of Days and reconcile everything. We see this in Greek mythology, where Zeus takes a second wife, Hera, who is hostile towards all of the demigod children that he then breeds with a variety of human females. But we see from The Apocryphon of John that in the Gnostic view, these sexual identities of God’s various personalities, which they all calling different aeons, are not really distinct unless in the context of breeding. That is, Barbelo (Sophia) seems to be female by virtue of the fact that she gives birth to another aeon. Merely a few lines of text before that, she is described as a “first man,” like Adam.
But
Jesus, whom both mainstream and non-mainstream Christians
frequently identify as a “second Adam,” is, in Gnostic theology, both,
seemingly, a son of Barbelo (the autogenes and chrestos
described above), and also as her husband or mate. Now recall that in
that Gnostic theology, the main fault with Sophia, the reason why she is
presented as a fallen figure, was because she made a baby by herself,
without her partner’s consent! In the passage below from The Apocryphon
of John, that Christ figure is described as “the male virgin spirit.”
Our sister Sophia, who is an Aeon, thought a thought of herself.
And through the thought of the spirit (pneuma) and the first knowledge
she wanted to reveal the likeness (of her thought) out of herself,
although the spirit had not consented or granted [it], nor again had her
partner consented, the male virgin spirit. So she did not find one in
harmony (symphonos) with her, when she was about to concede it without
the consent of the spirit and the knowledge of her own partner, when she
became strong (pregnant) in consequence of the passion that was in her.
Her thought could not remain inactive, and [so] her work came forth:
imperfect, hateful in appearance, since she had made it without her
consort (syzygos). And it was not like the appearance of the mother,
since it was of another form. But she looked upon it in her
consideration that it was of the stamp of a different appearance, since
it had the external (appearance) of a serpent and a lion; its [eyes]
shone with fire. She cast it away from herself, out of those places,
that none of the immortals might see it, since she had born it in
ignorance. She bound it with a cloud of light, set a throne in the midst
of the cloud, that none might see it except the holy spirit—whom they
call ‘life’ (zoe), the mother of all—and gave him the name ‘Jaldabaoth.’
This is the first archon. He drew much power from the mother, removed
himself from her, and turned himself away from the place in which he had
been born. He took possession of another place. He made for himself an
aeon flaming with shining fire, in which he now dwells.
The
Demiurge thus involuntarily brought into being now begins to create his
own world—again, by knowing himself! “He united himself with the
unreason (aponoia) which is with him,” the text says. It continues:
But Jaldabaoth, Saklas, the many-formed, so that he can show
himself with any face, gave to them (the planets) of the fire which
belongs to him; but he did not give them of the pure light of the power
which he had drawn from the mother. For this reason he ruled over them,
because of the glory which was in him from the power [of the light] from
the mother. For this reason he had himself called “God,” in that he
resisted the nature (hypostasis) from which he had come into being. And
he bound the seven powers with the principalities.
The seven powers, I think, are represented in the Mete
casket image in the Duce de Blacas collection at the British Museum as
the 7-pointed star on the bottom left, while the pentagram on the bottom
right (an ancient hieroglyph that literally meant “shackle” and
“prison” to the Sumerians) represents the shackles that bind them. The
notion of all the Archons being chained together by the Demiurge is
represented in Homer’s Iliad, where Zeus says to the other gods:
If you tied a chain of gold to the sky, and all of you, gods and
goddesses, took hold, you could not drag Zeus the High Counsellor to
earth with all your efforts. But if I determined to pull with a will, I
could haul up land and sea, then loop the chain round a peak of Olympus,
and leave them dangling in space. By that much am I greater than gods
and men.
Many of the sons of the Demiurge have names corresponding to words
used in the Old Testament for God (“Adonaios,” “Adonin,” like Adonai,
and “Sabaoth”), demons or “false gods” (“Belias,” like “Belial” or
“Baal”) and the names of Old Testament characters, such as Cain, who the
text overtly describes as being “the sun.” There’s also a “Hermas,”
corresponding to Hermes. But the syllable “Adon” has also been connected
by some writers (such as L.A. Waddell) to Adam. Some even suggest that
Adam is actually God himself, a notion implied in the Adam Kadmon
concept.
Also implicit with this belief in, and interpretation of, the idea of
Adam Kadmon, is the notion of God’s multiple personalities, and not
just two sets of sex organs, for “male and female created he them.” In
several of the lines in the Eden story in Genesis, God speaks
to unnamed others. This fact has inexplicably been interpreted by
mainstream theologians as God speaking to himself in the plural (and
calling himself a name with a plural form: Elohim) for no particular reason.
The main concern of the Elohim at the end of the Garden tale is that
Adam and Eve should not be allowed to eat from the “tree of life.” They
had already transgressed and eaten from the “tree of knowledge” that was
“in the midst of the garden.” In other words, Eve had already been
persuaded by this mysterious serpent creature, which is so often
depicted in religious artwork as wrapped around the tree of knowledge,
to eat the fruit from the tree, because it would make her wise.
What if we interpreted the tree as the human body, and note that it
was considered interchangeable with the cross of the crucifixion,
symbolized by the letter Tau (T), then take into account what
Hammer-Purgstall says about the letter Tau being a symbol for the
phallus? These things, taken together, would indicate that Adam’s penis,
with a mind of its own, persuaded Eve to eat of its produce. This
somehow made her “wise,” and so she persuaded Adam to do the same. Then
they realized they were “naked,” and that made the Elohim aware that
they had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God then discovered
their crime, and Adam blamed it on Eve.
In Gnostic cosmology, Jaldabaoth then seems to become the first male
entity to voluntarily bring forth sons. Before that, Sophia-Barbelo, the
“first man” and “virgin spirit,” couldn’t find a willing partner to
breed with, so she did it with herself. This, I think, is how, in a
Gnostic sense, she can still be described as a “Virgin” even after she
conceived: because she didn’t unite with a separate entity in order to
do it, but only with herself. That is why, thus impregnating herself,
she could be thought of as the “first man.”
As we know so well now, in Greek creation myths, we are told that
Ouranos, Chronos, and Zeus all wanted to avoid having offspring. In each
case, they were thwarted by their female half, and by the children
themselves. Zeus eventually changed his mind and wanted to beget
offspring, esp. with human females, but it was his wife Hera who was
always trying to kill them off. This is purportedly what led to him
having to rebirth Dionysus from his “thigh” (regenerating him from his
heart after the rest of him was torn apart in a plot devised by Hera).
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