We see texts like the Book of Enoch, the Hekhalot Rabbati (the Teaching of the Chambers), Shir Ha-Shirim (Song of Songs), and the Shi’ur Komah (The Measurement of the Height), the latter of which paints vivid pictures of heaven and even describes the divine nature of the Creator in anthropomorphic terms. The Shi’ur Komah portrays God as a humanoid of such gigantic dimensions as to occupy the whole cosmos: his neck is 130.8 million miles long; his fingers are each 150.3 million miles in length. These Kabbalists apparently have divine measuring rods capable of measuring God’s body! However, 2 Enoch 39:6, calls God’s entire stature as measureless and limitless:
You see the compass of my work like your own, but I have seen the Lord’s limitless and perfect compass, which has no end.
Scholars like Jarl E Fossum in The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord:Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, have also identified the Gnostic doctrine of the “Anthropos” from Marcus the Magician and with the enormous “Measurement of the Body,” viz “Kabod” or the “Glory of God” of Jewish mysticism. Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.14.-3) tells us more about this “Body of Truth” or the “Body of God” in feminine terms.
The infinitely exalted Tetrad descended upon him from the invisible and indescribable places in the form of a woman . . . and expounded to him alone its own nature, and the origin of all things, which it had never before revealed to any one either of gods or men. . . . [and] said:—I wish to show thee Aletheia (Truth) herself; for I have brought her down from the dwellings above, that thou mayest see her without a veil, and understand her beauty—that thou mayest also hear her speaking, and admire her wisdom. Behold, then, her head on high, Alpha and Omega; her neck, Beta and Psi; her shoulders with her hands, Gamma and Chi; her breast, Delta and Phi; her diaphragm, Epsilon and Upsilon; her back, Zeta and Tau; her belly, Eta and Sigma; her thighs, Theta and Rho; her knees, Iota and Pi; her legs, Kappa and Omicron; her ankles, Lambda and Xi; her feet, Mu and Nu. Such is the body of Truth, according to this magician, such the figure of the element, such the character of the letter. And he calls this element Anthropos (Man), and says that is the fountain of all speech, and the beginning of all sound, and the expression of all that is unspeakable, and the mouth of the silent Sige.
The vast dimensions of cosmic Adam appear, not only in gnostic texts but also in Rabbinic literature. The Adam of the Naasenni (Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies, V, II) was “like that of the Chaldaeans”, a “huge image of Him who is above.” Irenaeus, describing the Ophite doctrine of the unsuccessful creation of an Anthropos by Yaldabaoth, says the figure was of enormous dimensions (Irenaeus, Ag. Her., I, XXX). Adam Kadmon’s other names are also the “Immortal Androgynous Man” as well as the Adam Kasia, or the secret, “hidden” Adam of the Iraqi Mandaeans. Adam is not alone in his vast divine stature, since the insistence upon the vast sizes of divine creatures is also placed on the female angel called the Holy Spirit, to reveal Elchasai’s book (Hippolytus. Ref. IX. VIII).
The Harvard scholar David Brakke in his seminal essay, The Body as/at the Boundary of Gnosis, quotes a rare Sethian Gnostic text called the Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex, which bears many similarities with other Gnostic texts found in the Nag Hammadi Codices Zostrianos and the Gospel of the Egyptians. In the text, it also speaks of God or the Monad in terms of being a “city.” Interestingly, the text describes the divine body of the Monad in feminine terms.
[The Only-Begotten] is the one who dwells in the Monad who is in the Setheus, [the Monad] who emanated from the place whose location it is impossible to say, who emanated from him who precedes the Entireties, that is, the One Alone. It is he from whom the Monad emanated like a ship laden with every good thing, like a field filled or grown with every species of tree, and like a city filled with every race of humankind and every image of sovereignty. This is how they are all in the Monad: Twelve monads are making a crown upon her, each one making twelve. And ten decads are surrounding her shoulders. And nine enneads are surrounding her belly. And seven septets are under her feet, each one making a septet. And as for the veil that surrounds her like a tower, it has twelve gates. 120,000 powers are upon each gate, and they are called “archangels” and also “angels.” She is the mother-city of the Only-Begotten.
Hippolytus in Refutation of All Heresies (IX.VIII), mentions another little-known heretic by the name of Elchasai or Elxai. Accordingly, Elchasai taught a curious doctrine, which included male and female 96-mile-tall angels. For Elchasai, the male angel was the son of God or Christ, and the female angel was the Holy Spirit—reminiscent of the immanent mystery of the Christian Trinity. Elchasai also wrote a mysterious book that Hippolytus proceeds to explain with some detail where the Christian is said to be washed from their sins just by reading Elchasai’s version of the Book of Revelation.
And the contents of this volume, he alleged, had been revealed by an angel whose height was 24 schœnoi, which make 96 miles, and whose breadth is 4 schœnoi, and from shoulder to shoulder 6 schœnoi; and the tracks of his feet extend to the length of three and a half schœnoi, which are equal to fourteen miles, while the breadth is one schœnos and a half, and the height half a schœnos. And he alleges that also there is a female with him, whose measurement, he says, is according to the standards already mentioned. And he asserts that the male (angel) is Son of God, but that the female is called Holy Spirit. By detailing these prodigies he imagines that he confounds fools, while at the same time he utters the following sentence: “that there was preached unto men a new remission of sins in the third year of Trajan’s reign.” And Elchasai determines the nature of baptism, and even this I shall explain. He alleges, as to those who have been involved in every description of lasciviousness, and filthiness, and in acts of wickedness, if only any of them be a believer, that he determines that such a one, on being converted, and obeying the book, and believing its contents, should by baptism receive remission of sins.
Hippolytus also tells us more about Elxai’s baptism and chrismation practices in Ref. IX.X
To those, then, that have been orally instructed by him, he dispenses baptism in this manner, addressing to his dupes some such words as the following: “If, therefore, children, one shall have intercourse with any sort of animal whatsoever, or a male, or a sister, or a daughter, or hath committed adultery, or been guilty of fornication, and is desirous of obtaining remission of sins, from the moment that he hearkens to this book let him be baptized a second time in the name of the Great and Most High God, and in the name of His Son, the Mighty King. And by baptism let him be purified and cleansed, and let him adjure for himself those seven witnesses that have been described in this book—the heaven, and the water, and the holy spirits, and the angels of prayer, and the oil, and the salt, and the earth.” These constitute the astonishing mysteries of Elchasai, those ineffable and potent secrets which he delivers to deserving disciples. And with these that lawless one is not satisfied, but in the presence of two and three witnesses he puts the seal to his own wicked practices.
Again expressing himself thus: “Again I say, O adulterers and adulteresses, and false prophets, if you are desirous of being converted, that your sins may be forgiven you, as soon as ever you hearken unto this book, and be baptized a second time along with your garments, shall peace be yours, and your portion with the just.”
But since we have stated that these resort to incantations for those bitten by dogs and for other mishaps, we shall explain these. Now Elchasai uses the following formulary: “If a dog rabid and furious, in which inheres a spirit of destruction, bite any man, or woman, or youth, or girl, or may worry or touch them, in the same hour let such a one run with all their wearing apparel, and go down to a river or to a fountain wherever there is a deep spot. Let (him or her) be dipped with all their wearing apparel, and offer supplication to the Great and Most High God in faith of heart, and then let him thus adjure the seven witnesses described in this book: ‘Behold, I call to witness the heaven and the water, and the holy spirits, and the angels of prayer, and the oil, and the salt, and the earth. I testify by these seven witnesses that no more shall I sin, nor commit adultery, nor steal, nor be guilty of injustice, nor be covetous, nor be actuated by hatred, nor be scornful, nor shall I take pleasure in any wicked deeds.’ Having uttered, therefore, these words, let such a one be baptized with the entire of his wearing apparel in the name of the Mighty and Most High God.”
According to Elxai (via Hippolytus), Jesus would return to earth over-and-over again through various incarnations throughout history, which ultimately start with Seth and continuing with Enoch, Moses, Elijah, etc. This would also fit with the Sethian Gnostic idea that Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, was also a previous incarnation of Jesus. Could this also be a precursor to the Paraclete? The mention of “undergoing alterations of birth” is also remarkable as Hippolytus says the followers of Elxai are also Pythagoreans:
This Elchasai puts forward as a decoy a polity (authorized in the) Law, alleging that believers ought to be circumcised and live according to the Law, (while at the same time) he forcibly rends certain fragments from the aforesaid heresies. And he asserts that Christ was born a man in the same way as common to all, and that Christ was not for the first time on earth when born of a virgin, but that both previously and that frequently again He had been born and would be born. Christ would thus appear and exist among us from time to time, undergoing alterations of birth, and having his soul transferred from body to body. Now Elchasai adopted that tenet of Pythagoras to which I have already alluded. But the Elchasaites have reached such an altitude of pride, that even they affirm themselves to be endued with a power of foretelling futurity, using as a starting-point, obviously, the measures and numbers of the aforesaid Pythagorean art.
The book also is said to contain a prediction of a war among wicked, fallen angels, similar to what we see in Revelation 12 with Michael casting out Satan and his angels from the divine host or like how the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, wage divine warfare against the Titans, the previous gods of a former aeon. Returning to the large measurements of Christ and the Holy Spirit, also consider the enormous proportions of cabalistic angels like Metatron in 3 Enoch (25:3-4):
(3) And in those two eyes of his face, in each one of them lightning is flashing, and from each one of them burning staves are burning; and no creature is able to look at them: for anyone who looks at them is burned up instantly. (4) His height is the distance of 2500 years’ journey. No eye can see and no mouth can tell of the mighty power of his strength except the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. He alone can tell.
In 3 Enoch, Metatron is called “The Youth” because he was the newest, and youngest angelic office to join the divine host. In 3 Enoch 2:1-4, it states:
Rabbi Ishmael said: (1) Within the hour the eagles of The Chariot (Merkaba), the flaming Ophannim and the Seraphim of consuming fire asked Metatron: (2) “Youth! Why do you permit one born of woman to enter and see the chariot (Merkaba)? From which nation and from which tribe is this one? What is his nature?” (3) Metatron answered and said to them: “From the nation of Israel whom the Holy One, blessed be He, chose for his people from among seventy tongues (nations of the world). He is from the tribe of Levi, whom He set aside as a contribution to his name. He is from the seed of Aaron whom the Holy One, blessed be He, chose for his servant and He put upon him the crown of priesthood on Sinai.” (4) Then they spoke and said: “Happy is the people (nation) that is in that position!” (Ps. 144:15).
In other words, Metatron is the “youngest” angel to enter in the order of the celestial angelic host because he was originally human, specifically the prophet Enoch as we see in 3 Enoch 48-c. Other angels, like Michael, fulfill this role as well.
And I arranged all the works of creation for him. And I made him more powerful than all the ministering angels. (3) He gave Metatron-that is Enoch, the son of Jared- the authority over all the storehouses and treasuries, and appointed him over all the stores (reserves) in every heaven. And I assigned the keys of each store into him. (4) I made him the prince over all the princes and a minister of the Throne of Glory and the Halls of Araboth (the highest heaven). I appointed him over the Holy Chayoth for him to open their doors of the Throne of Glory to me, to exalt and arrange it, and I gave to him wreathe crowns to place upon their heads. I sent him to the majestic Ophannim, to crown them with strength and glory. I sent him to the honored Cherubim, to clothe them in majesty covered with radiant sparks, to make them to shine with splendor and bright light over the flaming Seraphim, to cover them with highness. I sent him to the Chashmallim of light, to make them radiant with light and to prepare the seat for me every morning as I sit upon the Throne of Glory.
I have given him the secrets above and below, which are the heavenly secrets and earthly secrets so that he can praise and magnify my glory in the height of my power). (5) I made him higher than all. The height of his stature stood out in the midst of all who are of high of stature. I made seventy thousand parasangs. I made his Throne great by the majesty of my Throne. And I increased its glory by the honor of My glory. (6) I transformed his flesh into torches of fire, and all the bones of his body into burning coals; and I made his eyes look like lightning, and the light of his eyebrows as a light that will never be quenched. I made his face as bright as the splendor of the sun, and his eyes like the splendor of the Throne of Glory.
3 Enoch tells us Enoch took on the mantle of the “Metatron,” the heavenly voice of God, on the throne of glory and became divine eternally. Both Enoch and Metatron are also described as divine scribes (2 Enoch 44:5), and are the only ones allowed to sit in the Lord of Spirits’ heavenly court, as opposed to the legions of angels that can stand only. In A Chronology of the Gnostic Movement by Johnes Ruta, he tells us more of Metatron’s backstory.[1]
The first (as also the last) of the 10 archangels, called king of angels, prince of the divine face or presence, chancellor of heaven, angel of the covenant, chief of the administering angels, and the lesser YHWH (Tetragrammaton). He is charged with the sustenance of mankind. In Talmud and Targum, he is the link between the human and divine. In his earthly incarnation he is identified as Enoch, although also claimed to be the angel Michael. In Kabbalah, he is the angel who led the children of Israel through the wilderness. Upon arriving in heaven as Enoch, he was equipped with 36 pairs of wings and innumerable eyes. His name has been interpreted as “the one who occupies the throne next to the divine throne.” When invoked, he appears as “a pillar of fire, his face more dazzling than the sun..” In the later Zohar, Metatron is spoken of as the “rod of Moses”, from one end of which comes life, the other end comes death. Also thought to be the supreme angel of death, to whom God gives daily orders of which souls to take. Also thought to be the angel who stayed the hand of Abraham, on the point of sacrificing Isaac. Also, thought to be the teacher of prematurely dead children in Paradise.
Another important prophet taken to heaven is Elijah. In 2 Kings 2:8-11, it tells us Elijah used his rolled-up cloak to strike the river Jordan and caused it to part. Together, he and Elisha crossed the river and continued to talk when suddenly a “chariot of fire and horses of fire” appeared and separated them. Elisha watched in astonishment as Elijah “ascended into the whirlwind into heaven.” Also, note in the same chapter, it tells us that Elijah and Elisha came from “Gilgal.” Gilgal means “rolling wheel” and “circle” in Hebrew and Aramaic. This fits with the “wheel of fate” we briefly touched upon earlier but will explore more in-depth later.
The Angel with the Millstone, manuscript illumination from the Bamberg Apocalypse, c. 1000–20; in the Bamberg State Library, Germany (MS. Bbil. 140, fol. 46R). Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Ger.
In Kabbalistic lore, the translated Elijah was also said to transform into Sandalphon and is said to be God’s messenger who carries the prayers of the saints to Heaven and guardian warrior angel like Michael, which battles Samael or Satan. Since Metatron rules Kether on the Tree of Life, Sandalphon also rules Malkuth, the plane of manifestation, or the physical world. They’re also associated with the two cherubs that face each other on the Ark of the Covenant and usually seen as brothers or twins. Indeed, just as Yahweh is seen as a “lesser deity” or chief archangel in Gnosticism, Metatron is also known as the “lesser YHWH.” As another parallel with Gnosticism, Metatron is equivalent to the “Little Iaô” of the Gnostic Pistis Sophia (Chapter 63).
JOHN also came forward and said: “O Lord, bid me also speak the solution of the words which thy light-power hath prophesied aforetime through David.”
And Jesus answered and said unto John: “To thee too, John, I give commandment to speak the solution of the words which my light-power hath prophesied through David:
“‘Grace and truth met together, and righteousness and peace kissed each other.
“‘Truth hath sprouted forth out of the earth, and righteousness looked down from heaven.’”
And John answered and said: “This is the word which thou hast said unto us aforetime: ‘I have come out of the Height and entered into Sabaōth, the Good, and embraced the light-power in him.’ Now, therefore, ‘Grace and truth’ which ‘met together,’—thou art ‘grace,’ thou who art sent out of the regions of the Height through thy Father, the First Mystery which looketh within, in that he hath sent thee, that thou mayest have mercy on the whole world. ‘Truth’ on the other hand is the power of Sabaōth, the Good, which bound itself in thee and which thou hast cast forth to the Left,—thou the First Mystery which looketh without. And the little Sabaōth, the Good, took it and cast it forth into the matter of Barbēlō, and he made proclamation concerning the regions of Truth to all the regions of those of the Left. That matter of Barbēlō then it is which is body for thee to-day.
Russian Orthodox Icons of Lord Sabaoth
As Andrei Orlov quotes Christopher Morray-Jones in his article, “Metatron as the Deity: Lesser YHWH”[2], Metatron functions much like the Logos as an intermediary, and perhaps a Jewish metaphysical response to the pre-existent Jesus Christ or Son of Man we see earlier in 2 Enoch.
As the Angel of the LORD, Metatron functions as the celestial vice-regent who ministers before the Throne, supervises the celestial liturgy and officiates over the heavenly hosts. He sits on the throne which is a replica of the Throne of Glory and wears a glorious robe like that of God. He functions as the agent of God in the creation, acts as intermediary between heavenly and lower worlds, is the guide of the ascending visionary, and reveals the celestial secrets to mankind. He is, by delegating divine authority, the ruler and the judge of the world. He is thus a Logos figure and an embodiment of the divine Glory. In his shi(ur qomah, we are told that Metatron’s body, like the kabod, fills the entire world, though the writer is careful to maintain a distinction between Metatron and the Glory of God Himself.
The Jewish Encyclopedia Entry for Sandalphon[3] also tells us that this angel’s immense size connects or act as a passageway between heaven and earth. Sandalfon also acts as a divine tailor for God!
Sandalfon is one of the oldest angel figures of the Merkabah mysticism. A baraita of the beginning of the second century says: “The ‘ofan’ mentioned in Ezek. i. 16 is called Sandalfon. He is an angel who stands on the earth, and his head reaches up to the ‘ḥayyot’ [animal-shaped angels]; he is taller than his fellows by the length of a journey of 500 years; he binds crowns for his Creator (Ḥag. 13b; comp. Pesiḳ. R. 20 [ed. Friedmann, p. 97a]). The angel Hadarniel led Moses in heaven until he reached the fire of Sandalfon; here he remained standing because he feared the fire. Moses himself was afraid at the sight of it, so that God placed Himself before it for his protection. The crowns that Sandalfon binds on God’s head are symbols of praise for the different angels” (Pesiḳ. R. l.c.).
If the accounts of 3 Enoch are to be believed, when certain chosen few in a favorable position with God, they ascended into heaven and were turned or translated into demiurgical angels or gods. They became examples of what humans could become. This is perhaps why, according to many ancient sources that Satan and his fallen angels hate humanity so much and jealous of their position before God, even in their fallen state, because of their ability to repent. They knew that a lowly human could one day surpass them in every possible way. Even St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians (6:3): “…do you not know that we are to judge the angels?” In the Letter of Hebrews 2:5-8, the Pauline author recalls one of the Psalms and states:
Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels.
But someone has testified somewhere,
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honor,
subjecting all things under their feet.”
Could it be possible that the purpose of humanity is to ascend and become divine beings? A re-reading of many ancient texts seems to indicate that this is indeed the case. Many Gnostic, Hermetic, and Cathar texts seem to underscore this idea in the initiate becoming divinized, and in Orthodox Christianity, theosis was a primary method for humans to become angels, which connects to the idea of the resurrection of the dead. This is also a core belief of the Mormons as well.
Although this was somewhat touched on in the discussion of Eastern Orthodox hesychasm, one author, Tanase Nichifor in “Shining Face: Hidden and Revealed Christology,”[4] succinctly summarizes the aim of its mysticism to create a Christ-like Body of Light. This is the aim of theosis, ultimately.
On these unveiled shining faces, the divine energy of the ‘Christ the Image and Glory of God’ is being revealed. Christ will radiate within us like to the desert Fathers: Pambo, Sisoe, Silvanus. Christology of the Desert Fathers overlaps with pre‐Nicene Christology. In anthropological terms of the theosis, man is the mirror of divine glory (δόξα). So, just as the light of the transfiguration the light‐bearing robe of the unfallen Adam has an equally theological importance for theosis. Deification at the Desert Fathers acquires a specific anthropological content as Christification, that finds its fulfillment in a face‐to‐face encounter who, is both a theological theme and a spiritual teaching, both the goal of the divine economy and the process by which the economy is worked out in the believer. For Palamas, deification is, also, a supernatural gift that transforms both mind and body, making divinity visible (Triad 3.1. 33). Likeness also means a radiation of the presence of God within man, a “reciprocal interiority”.
In the saints this communion is expressed in the way God’s glory is reflected in their faces, in anticipation of the age to come. Therefore, this study is about the Desert Fathers’ contemplative experience of an outward luminosity, a physical radiance, similar to that of the hesychasts Athonite of the 14th century in late Byzantium. So, there is a convergence of desert wisdom with the Palamite hesychast theology, because this putting on of the clothing of holiness of the Desert Fathers is another component of the Glory likeness, is the visible glory of Transfiguration. On these unveiled shining faces, the divine energy of ‘Christ the Image and Glory of God’ is being revealed.
This is the Christology of the Desert Fathers. Secondly, speaking about the hesychast method of prayer and transformation of the body, Gregory Palamas also uses this Pauline theology of 2 Corinthians in Triad 1.2.2: Paul says: ‘God, who has ordered light to shine from darkness, has made His light to shine in our hearts, in order that we may be enlightened by the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6); but he adds, ‘We carry this treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 4:7). So we carry the Father’s light in the face (prosōpon) of Jesus Christ in earthen vessels, that is, in our bodies, in order to know the glory of the Holy Spirit.” We could grasp the convergence between the desert ascetic spirituality and the hesychast spirituality in the work of Gregory Palamas. For him, Moses the lawgiver, Stephen the protomartyr, and Arsenius the desert ascetic are examples from the Bible and the Fathers are men who were visibly transformed by divine light (Triad 2.3.9). God transcends the senses yet the knowledge of God is experiential. The monks know this. They see the hypostatic light spiritually – in reality, not in a symbolic fashion. During the hesychast controversy, St Gregory Palamas defends the reality of the encounter with God of those monks who reported seeing a vision of light at the culmination of intense period of prayer.
….
In the Macarian homilies Moses’ shining countenance and the luminosity of Adam’s prelapsarian tselem serve as metaphors for major paradigms of the transformational vision. In the Macarian writings, one can also encounter a third paradigm of luminous transformation which is radically different from the previous two traditions. “In a peculiar Macarian understanding of Christ’s transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, the duality of inner and outer in visio Dei is attempted through in a new metaphor of the transformational vision – Christ’s ‘Body of Light’”. Therefore, into the Macarian theology the Kabod internalization become possible only as a consequence of the event of Christ’s transfiguration. ‘Brightening Face’ Christology of the Desert Fathers is an ascetic interiorization of Christ, together with a somatic experience and outward luminosity.
Moreover, Revelation 12’s man-child ascension to God’s throne from the Winged Sun Lady appears to be a fulfillment of this promise and prophecy that we see in Elijah, Enoch, and even Moses’s ascension. Margaret Barker in Temple Theology (pg. 23), writes about this theme specifically:
In temple theology, resurrection was not a post mortem experience. It was theosis, the transformation of a human being into a divine being – which came with the gift of Wisdom; and theosis, described in various ways, was at the heart of temple tradition, together with the belief in a resurrected anointed one, a resurrected Messiah. The Christians thought of themselves as angels on earth; Jesus had exhorted them to become sons of light (John 12:36; see also Eph. 5:8 ‘walk as children of light’), Paul reminded the Thessalonians that they were all sons of light (1 Thess. 5:5)…
I originally wrote this Gnostic Gospel a few years ago but I decided to edit it for clarity. It was originally called “Reception of the Grapes” but it seemed too “corny” and I got a few wine jokes out of it so I decided to change it a bit. This gospel is a mix of my own spiritual revelations and other mystical poetry like we see in Summer Harvest by Valentinus, among other sources like the Gospel of Philip. Anyway, without further ado, here is my gospel, as Miguel Conner would say, write your own gospel and live your own myth!
The Holy Day of the second and the twelfth, the First Aeon of Aeons illuminates upon the cascading trees of the vineyard. Because the many fruits flourish in the Gardens of Light, many seek their flowing juices, but few find it in the immortal generation. The juices that flow from each fruit contain the flowing waters where the light image is reflected. It glistens with delight, in knowledge and in truth, under the canopy of the All. Because it is sweet, it refreshes the taste and the tongue of the beholder—for it drives away all thirst and hunger pangs. Within each fruit contains an image of the All, for the All is the multiplicity and in the singular, within the secret core.
The fruit also contains the image of the self-generated Aeons, for it is they who bear fruit, for it swallows all hunger and all death. For Wisdom dwelt secretly in the Garden, and through a seductive whisper, the daughter of the voice, she imparted the true fruits of knowledge, the gift of the (perfect) gnosis into the breath and body of the prime parents, Adam and Eve. But the Book of Philip tells us about this: “In the place where I will eat all things is the Tree of Knowledge. That one killed Adam, but here the Tree of Knowledge made men alive. The law was the tree. It has power to give the knowledge of good and evil. It neither removed him from evil, nor did it set him in the good, but it created death for those who ate of it. For when he said, “Eat this, do not eat that”, it became the beginning of death.”
While the serpent introduced birth and death into the world, the true and last Adam brought forth good fruit and multiplied the perfection and ripening rays of light upon the immortal generation. Just as the Aeons exist in a family tree, the fruit likewise generate in the eternal.
For no eye has seen, and no ear has heard, and no tongue has spoken of the waves of the water of life. From His voice sounds like flowing of many, living waters. Kiss the Son. You must drink and consume the living waters, for it is given freely upon all who attain it and overcome the world. Behold! It flows freely yet it is not sensed with any carnal faculty. When the fruit is eaten, and consumed, the mouth and body become a wine-press for its free-flowing and downward pour, like rain nourishing the crops of the earth. For the Sovereign One reaps what he has sown the seed into the aeons he has begotten, and in the perfect light. For his name is secret yet is widely known to all—for Wisdom understands his utterance and his call and repeats his beckoning to those willing to hear.
For all those who seek, continue to strive until the realization has arrived and dissolved unto its root. For those who have sought to find only themselves and none other! For finding the fruit has come with a great price. But rejoice! For through death, life was possible to be found. For I have drunken from the well-spring which gives life to the rippling fields bearing wheat and crops of all manner and all likeness. But the vineyard’s roots belong in an eternal heritage.
In the Winter of the World, the seeds are sown. In the Spring, the trees start to bear rising and sprouting seedlings. In the Summer Harvest, they appear in vast clusters and it is these that do not rot or wither upon the vines even if left unattended for it has no need to be attended. For the immortal vine does not bare death and imperfection, but gives forth a multitude of fruit ripened into perfection in the four elements.
For in the height of Summer, the grapes are harvested and collected into the storehouse, to be eaten and consumed and made into fine wine. Was it not the Son of Man, the Sovereign One that had made water into wine at the Wedding Feast? For indeed it is true—the Kingdom is like a wedding feast, and the Sons of the Living One will be robed with glorious garments by the Son to all his guests. It is they who will be called first in the Kingdom. It is they who will be called his friends. As he was raised, his children will also be raised. The vineyard ripens in the Sun’s rays, for the truth bears this fruit and can withstand any opposition.
Sacrifice not, for it is written that those who sacrifice the bodies of the slain are accursed! Blood is on their hands. It is they who eat from the tree of ignorant chaos and it is they who dwell in barren poverty. It is also written that there is no good tree that produces corrupt, rotting fruit, nor is there a bad tree that produces good, ripe fruit. For those who sacrifice the fruit unto themselves as a Temple of the Holy Spirit is blessed and is likened unto something brighter than even a thousand, shining and blinding suns. For even the sun is not fit or able to capture the immortal and unshakeable generation of the Father.
Does the Book of Philip not say that “faith is our earth. It is that in which we take root. Hope is the water which nourishes us. Love is the wind through which we grow. Knowledge is the light by which we ripen.”? It is a truth that is sweet and cool, without a hint of bitterness and tastelessness. It bursts with the flavors of love and kindness even in this great burden that we carry when we gather our tools to toil under the midday sun and sow its seeds to grow in the seasons. While it is true that there is indeed nothing new under the sun, it is these pleasures that the Sovereign One has afforded us. When one aims and achieves the love and will, no object of desire remains, for the knower and the known dissolve into one body and one conjugal unity. This is how the image of the hot exists in a perfect unit, for it drives out all cold winds of fruitless desire and ignorance. For charity and love only gives without condition or rule or law; it does not take nor demand.
The birds chirp their song upon the branches in the present, where the fruit grow and ripen. Like the Aeons, the trees bear the fruit of both knowledge and of life in the true dwelling place, whereas the Archigenetor, the ruler of the aeons and the powers divided the great eternal angels in wrath. The fruit of knowledge was cursed and the fruit of eternal life denied to the children of light when he had cast out the primal parents in jealousy. However, it is both Wisdom and Sovereignty in superiority, conjoined into one unit, that has descended into and back from the abyss and anointed the natural man the gift of spirit and eternal life. The Mother, the Holy Spirit, sown the light in the lower aeons.
The seed of eternity was planted within the Holy of Holies. Do you not know that you are not just made of blood, flesh and bone? It is this same gift in where you shall draw peace and strength from. It is they who shine the true light upon it to grow. It is they who have offered forgiveness for the repentant. It is they who are the authors of the spirit, embraced in a Reception within the Temple who have etched their names within the inner and wicked spirit of gloom and darkness rent asunder in a grand spectacle of a blazing fire. Blessed be the saints who die the death of the fiery baptism, for it is they who will drink the godly nectar and the final baptism in the spring of the Living Water.
Wisdom (Sophia) is both the Virginal Mother, and Sultry Harlot—in her naked glory, the treasure trove of the divine heights, she bestows the knighted with an investiture and a crown of life, more precious then fine gold, as the archangels, thrones and the four living creatures assist her in a decent and an ascension in the beam of mine eye. Glory unto Thee! Glory to eternal heights! May the Sovereign One abide and fortify in the Aeon, for this Aeon is without Beginning nor End, Alpha and Omega. Truly! The eternal fruit contains the image of the solitary and the breadth of the immortal ones in a branching ladder of descent and ascent. Believe and feel my words, and see this truth as self-evident. For the Kingdom is a god-producing land and has many trees and every other manner of fruit, and is free to be eaten by the free and great, in an excess of liberation and forever away from a bitter slavery. Tears are to be no more, for only a bounty of joy exists, not in a future even nor in the far away past—behold! Tremble before the present wisdom of the Lord, and receive the gift of the fruit, for you will be first! Amen.
Trigger Warning: Highly controversial, X-rated material featured inside this article!
As I noted in my article, Gnostic Exegesis in Revelation 12, the Freemasonic scholar Manly P. Hall in the Secret Teachings of All Ages, claims the whore of Babylon of Revelation 18 is nothing more than a demonized version of Cybele (p. 188):
Here also is introduced a symbolic figure, termed “the harlot of Babylon, “which is described as a woman seated upon a scarlet-colored beast having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and bedecked with gold, precious st Here also is introduced a symbolic figure, termed “the harlot of Babylon, “which is described as a woman seated upon a scarlet-colored beast having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scones, and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations. This figure may be an effort (probably interpolated) to vilify Cybele, or Artemis, the Great Mother goddess of antiquity. Because the pagans venerated the Mater Deorum through symbols appropriate to the feminine generative principle they were accused by the early Christians of worshiping a courtesan. As nearly all the ancient Mysteries included a test of the neophyte’s moral character, the temptress (the animal soul) is here portrayed as a pagan goddess.
As we saw in previous posts, Cybele was the Phrygian mother-goddess or “mother of the gods” of ancient Troy, and ancient Rome as well with the royal Imperium and emperors. Her worshipers included priests who who castrate themselves (transgendered eunuchs) as well as women. She was also the wife and sister of her brother and husband Saturn/Chronos. Cybele also has strong connections with the “Great Whore of Babylon” of Revelation of St. John the Divine, who is eventually judged and destroyed by God in the apocalypse (17:4) (AKJV), “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. . .”
The Thelemic/Satanic explanation of the Whore of Babylon is presented to us in the form of “Babalon” conjoined or fornicating with the “Beast” of Revelation, which also reminds us of the cabalistic legends of Leviathan and Behemoth, in which we will discuss in due course. The Cybele cult was rumored to be involved with infant sacrifice, orgies and cannibalism—the very things of which the Templars, witches and Bacchus worshipers were accused of doing. Rumors have it that the catacombs underneath Vatican Hill (particularly St. Peter’s Basilica) contain the remnants of forbidden Cybele veneration, including human sacrifice, which some believe continue to operate in secret, even to this day. In part of Ecclessia Gnostica Catholica (Ordo Templi Orientis)’s “Gnostic” Creed, we read:
And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.
And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET.
According to the church father Hippolytus, the Phrygians passed on their mystery rites to the Naassene Gnostics. And they also claimed lineage to “Mariamne,” and to the Lord’s brother, James. Mariamne sounds like just another nickname for Mary Magdalene, an earthly counterpart of the Holy Spirit and twin of Helena, the concubine for Simon Magus (Hippolytus Philosophumena 5, 2). They celebrate the eunuch Attis because he swore against all carnal procreation and lust, in which many Gnostics thought was evil and derived from the fiery powers of the Demiurge to trap more souls of light in matter. And Attis was also celebrated because he was thought to be a transgender hermaphrodite, neither male nor female, but both at the same time. They had a tendency to mix Biblical exegesis from both the Old and New Testament with pagan mystery lore of the Phrygians, the Orphics and Eleusis.
On account of these and such like reasons, these constantly attend the mysteries called those of the Great Mother, supposing especially that they behold by means of the ceremonies performed there the entire mystery. For these have nothing more than the ceremonies that are performed there, except that they are not emasculated: they merely complete the work of the emasculated. For with the utmost severity and vigilance they enjoin (on their votaries) to abstain, as if they were emasculated, from intercourse with a woman. The rest, however, of the proceeding (observed in these mysteries), as we have declared at some length, (they follow) just as (if they were) emasculated persons. And they do not worship any other object but Naas, (from thence) being styled Naasseni (Hippolytus Philosophumena 5, 4).
Hippolytus also goes on to state that another Gnostic group called the Sethians like the Naassenes, thought that the Logos or Christ of the Gospel of John was the same as the serpent based on Jesus’s own admission that the Son of Man will be raised like how the brazen serpent of Moses is raised in Numbers. As it follows, to liberate the spirit, prisoner of matter, Logos took on a form of a slave, being born like a man according to Philippians 2.7. The Logos as he took on the form of a serpent, the shape that allowed the Logos to enter into the inferior world of darkness. But the Gnostic seeker, like the Logos is encouraged to drink the cup from the living waters (a code word for gnosis or salvation), puts away his servile, slave form of the human body and its constraints and assumes the celestial robe or raiment of Glory, close to that we see in Revelation 3.5.
First, then, from the wind— that is, from the serpent— has resulted the originating principle of generation in the manner declared, all things having simultaneously received the principle of generation. After, then, the light and the spirit had been received, he says, into the polluted and baneful (and) disordered womb, the serpent— the wind of the darkness, the first-begotten of the waters— enters within and produces man, and the impure womb neither loves nor recognises any other form.
The perfect Word of supernal light being therefore assimilated (in form) to the beast, (that is,) the serpent, entered into the defiled womb, having deceived (the womb) through the similitude of the beast itself, in order that (the Word) may loose the chains that encircle the perfect mind which has been begotten amidst impurity of womb by the primal offspring of water, (namely,) serpent, wind, (and) beast. This, he says, is the form of the servant, and this the necessity of the Word of God coming down into the womb of a virgin. But he says it is not sufficient that the Perfect Man, the Word, has entered into the womb of a virgin, and loosed the pangs which were in that darkness. Nay, more than this was requisite; for after his entrance into the foul mysteries of the womb, he was washed, and drank of the cup of life-giving bubbling water. And it was altogether needful that he should drink who was about to strip off the servile form, and assume celestial raiment.
The Womb is also portrayed as a realm of darkness, in a rare and highly esoteric Gnostic text, the Paraphrase of Shem. It is interesting in that it is the only Nag Hammadi text that has a three-principle cosmology (light, spirit, darkness).
And an unclean penis was with the demons in accordance with the example of the Darkness, and in the way he rubbed with the womb from the beginning.
The manifest universe is described as a giant vagina being tickled by an unclean demonic penis. The Paraphrase of Shem speaks about this “Womb” entity without a partner, manifestly androgynous, who copulates with herself, generating the phallic Wind-Demiurge “who possesses a Power from Fire and from Darkness and from the Spirit.” This sounds reminiscent of how Mete/Baphomet is described by both Gerald Massey and Joseph Von-Hammer Purgstall. St. Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.31.2) reports that the Cainites, like another Gnostic teacher, Carpocrates, would engage in all manner of sin to undoing creation or what they called “Hystera,” or the uterus.
I have also made a collection of their writings in which they advocate the abolition of the doings of Hystera. (2) Moreover, they call this Hystera the creator of heaven and earth. They also hold, like Carpocrates, that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintain, attends them in every one of their sinful and abominable actions, and urges them to venture on audacity and incur pollution. Whatever may be the nature (3) of the action, they declare that they do it in the name of the angel, saying, “O thou angel, I use thy work; O thou power, I accomplish thy operation !” And they maintain that this is “perfect knowledge,” without shrinking to rush into such actions as it is not lawful even to name.
Epiphanius in the Panarion, also ascribes the authors of the Gospel of Judas, being the Cainites and describing creation as the “Womb” (the Matrix) in a manner of a demiurgical force.
And they say that because of this Judas had found out all about them. For they claim him too as kin and regard him as possessed of superior knowledge, so that they even cite a short work in his name which they call a Gospel of Judas. And they likewise forge certain other works against “Womb.” They call this “Womb” the maker of this entire vault of heaven and earth and say, as Carpocrates does, that no one will be saved unless they progress through all (possible) acts.
For while each of them is doing some unspeakable thing supposedly with this excuse, performing obscenities and committing every sin there is, he invokes the name of each angel—both real angels, and the ones they fictitiously call angels. And he attributes some wicked commission of every sin on earth to each of them, by offering his own action in the name of whichever angel he wishes. And whenever they do these things they say, “This or that angel, I am performing thy work. This or that authority, I am doing thy deed.” And this is what they call perfect “knowledge,” since, if you please, they have taken their cue for venturing without fear on wicked obscenities from the mothers and fathers of sects whom we have already mentioned—I mean the Gnostics and Nicolaus, and their allies Valentinus and Carpocrates.
The Gospel of Thomas and Thomas the Contender have strong anti-woman sentiments, however, they equate all those who are alive in the flesh as fallen and equate this state as being “feminine” because they are born of earthly mother’s wombs and father’s sperm. And then there’s also the feminine soul metaphor as well that Exegesis of the Soul, a Simonian text, discusses at length. As the church fathers reveal, many Gnostic groups, like the Naassenes, Barbelites and the Carpocratians, were actually led and run by women! In Bentley Layton’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 79), it tells us that Jesus considered a virgin, and even, a barren womb as “blessed,” hence, he came to defeat the works of the womb while Jesus’s Gnostic spirituality as being “male.” In Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (3.IX.63), he writes about the Gnostic text, The Gospel of the Egyptians:
Those who are opposed to God’s creation, disparaging it under the fair name of continence, also quote the words to Salome which we mentioned earlier. They are found, I believe, in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. They say that the Saviour himself said “I came to destroy the works of the female,” meaning by “female” desire, and by “works” birth and corruption.
Simon Magus or the Simonian author taught that the Garden of Eden was the womb, according to Hippolytus’s discussion of the Simonian text, the Megale Apophasis or the Great Announcement. The text applies various places in Genesis as being applied to human physiology. It tells us that Eden is the placenta, the river coming out of Eden to water the Garden is the navel, and the river splits into four sources: two veins and two arteries. Adam and Eve are the twin fetuses. In Gnostic texts, Yaldabaoth, is, of course, an abortion of Sophia, because she created without her “male” partner, the aeon Jesus Christ. At the same time, there is also an aeonic womb that gives birth to the spiritual universe of the Pleroma. Here’s St. Irenaeus, discussing Valentinian cosmology in terms of aeonic sex magic in Against Heresies (1.1):
At last this Bythus determined to send forth from himself the beginning of all things, and deposited this production (which he had resolved to bring forth) in his contemporary Sige, even as seed is deposited in the womb. She then, having received this seed, and becoming pregnant, gave birth to Nous, who was both similar and equal to him who had produced him, and was alone capable of comprehending his father’s greatness. This Nous they call also Monogenes, and Father, and the Beginning of all Things.
So, if the “vault of heaven” is the firmament which is the same as Ouranos, the Cainite claimed that this “heaven” or the first heaven is also the demiurgical Womb. The phallic and sperm symbolism refers to the creativity of the artisan/demiurge and his archons and demons to create reality as they see fit. Saturn/Kronos/YHWH castrated Ouranos/El Elyion for his own machinations and Zeus and his progeny (Apollo, Helios, Minerva) would later take on the role as the Demiurge as well and perhaps even symbolize a new universe.
For while each of them is doing some unspeakable thing supposedly with this excuse, performing obscenities and committing every sin there is, he invokes the name of each angel—both real angels, and the ones they fictitiously call angels. And he attributes some wicked commission of every sin on earth to each of them, by offering his own action in the name of whichever angel he wishes. And whenever they do these things they say, “This or that angel, I am performing thy work. This or that authority, I am doing thy deed.
One wonders if this means that Epiphanius, like Irenaeus, claimed that the Sethian Cainites claimed that by performing obscenities (i.e. agape love feasts or orgiastic rites) that they were somehow influencing reality, by “weakening” or impressing another reality upon demiurgical Womb, that is the “vault of heaven.” They invoke the names of angels, associated with their ritual orgies, supposedly, and somehow use them to engage in magical warfare and storming the Gates of Heaven.
The magicians John Dee and Edward Kelley, near the end of their occult relationship engaged in wife swapping and likely invoked angels, as well. It was a spirit who called itself “Madimi,” who told them to swap wives, initially appeared as a child, but it aged with time and eventually took the form of a young adult girl and began instructing them to engaged in sex magick with her and other angels. According to the Golden Dawn and Gnostic magician Aaron Leitch, having sex with angels, demons and other spirits are apparently quite common. We even see demon sex occur in texts like On the Origin of the World, which discusses Solomonic goetic texts.
In one of the earliest of all alchemical manuscripts is the fragmentary Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus discovered in the Codex Marcianus, a medieval collection of Greek texts, it tells us that the Egyptian Goddess Isis tells her son, Horus, that while he was away defeating the evil, Set, she had been residing in Hermopolis studying angelic magic and alchemy and was eventually initiated into these mysteries by the angel of the sun, Amnael, as rendered in Kyle Fraser’s article, Zosimos of Panopolis and the Book of Enoch Alchemy as Forbidden Knowledge.
In accordance with the opportune celestial moments (tôn kairôn), and the necessary revolution of the heavenly sphere, it came to pass that a certain one of the angels who dwell in the first firmament, having seen me from above, was filled with the desire to unite with me in intercourse. He was quickly on the verge of attaining his end, but I did not yield, wishing to inquire of him as to the preparation of gold and silver. When I asked this of him, he said that he was not permitted to disclose it, on account of the exalted character of the mysteries, but that on the following day a superior angel, Amnael, would come…
The next day, when the sun reached the middle of its course, the superior angel, Amnael, appeared and descended. Taken with the same passion for me he didn’t delay, but hastened to where I was. But I was no less anxious to inquire after these matters. When he delayed incessantly, I did not give myself over to him, but mastered (epekratoun) his passion until he showed the sign on his head and revealed the mysteries I sought, truthfully and without reservation (Berthelot p. 29.2-11, 16-23).
Such lustful angel with human sex stories evokes the themes of the Watchers descending to earth to intermarry with human women to breed giants and engender all sorts of chaos on earth as recounted in 1 Enoch. This fits into my own theory that there are two strains of knowledge—one from God through the Logos, and one from the Devil, the “ape” of the Demiurge.
The symbolism of the womb constitutes an apt metaphor for generation, and was thus used in the ancient Mediterranean world to talk about the origins of the universe. It is only fitting that some Gnostics, having reservations about the goodness of the cosmos and its origins, were known to characterize the evil demiurge not as a male, lion-faced demon, but a womb, as well. Irenaeus of Lyons and later with Epiphanius, they accuse these same Gnostics having close kinship with Cain, Esau, and the Sodomites—of pursuing the goal of “dissolving the works of the Womb,” whom “they call the creator of heaven and earth,” through antinomian sex.
This is what Tracy Twyman writes at length about in her newest novel, Genuflect, in which strange aristocrats are obsessed with a perverted Satanic sex ritual which can somehow change the very fabric of the cosmos and create “a new sun,” in which a new deity manifests as. And perhaps this is what Eyes Wide Shut is hinting at with the rainbow and prism symbolism and the ritual orgies. And as the recent total solar 2017 eclipse occurrence indicates, there also seems to be an eclipse of sanity and manifestations of chaotic disaster, that is currently sweeping across America, the “new” Atlantis, according to Francis Bacon.
In the 1998 film, Dark City, by Alex Proyas, it portrays a perpetual night world, designed as a noirish, 1950’s-styled city, built on a spaceship disc that appears as a sort of “flat earth,” that keeps its human hosts in a state of constant nightmare and unreality, like we see in texts like the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, in describing matter. A collective group of “Strangers” being alien, parasitic creatures or demons inhabiting pale, dead humans, have been secretly influencing them and studying their subjects due to their jealousy of them containing immaterial souls and spirits. The fact that these parasitic demons inhabit dead humans reflects the idea of the three-leveled Gnostic anthropology that is hinted at in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13 by Jesus: pneumatic (spiritual), psychic (soulish), and hylic (material)—the latter of which are merely empty husks of flesh possessed by demons of hell. One of these subjects, the main character, John Murdock, eventually discovers he has god-like “tuning” powers that can influence the machines deep beneath the surface to manipulate “reality.” In my article, Ouranos: Lord of the Dome, I speculated:
Perhaps this “vault” or the firmament may be influenced on some level through the collective consciousness or will of the human race but not on the level of God or the gods, or whatever demiurgical force used the firmament or Ouranos to create reality.
We also find the Strangers are most active when the city has been put into the sleep state; unconscious. The Stranger’s subterranean control machine is a human head with a clock inside; the mind under the sway of Chronos/Saturn. When the Strangers focus in unison the machine generates the physical structure of the conscious world; the physical structures representing how our world view is limited/controlled by our unconscious projections. The Strangers create the memories which create the mental structure of the inhabitants; showing how our experiences are, again, controlled and guided by the unconscious mind. Since the unconscious content is so far out of balance with John’s (our) life, the psyche appears dark and we are seemingly trapped by the web of illusion spun by Maya; the Strangers. The web of Maya, is represented by the spiral, labyrinthine “web” of the streets of Dark City of which no person can find the way out; Shell Beach/Integration. John’s task, in life, is to reawaken and become the whole-self; alchemical marriage.
The movie itself appears to be based on Daniel P. Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, an account of his mental break. Dark City is the schizophrenic mind of Daniel Schreber. Dark City also appears to exhibit “the way out”, or the alchemical approach to finding wholeness; individuation. In The Red Book, Jung mentions the Schreber case, which along with his own personal mental crisis, most likely served as case studies in his development of the individuation process (alchemy).
The Womb of Darkness that we see in Paraphrase of Shem can also be linked to Dark City. In one particular scene, we see the Strangers conduct their “tuning” experiment with their collective will-power through a giant head, which opens to a clock at 9 p.m., which eventually turns to midnight. Such giant head imagery can be connected with other films like the Ridley Scott 2012 prequel to Alien, Prometheus, where the futurist, visiting human astronauts finds a giant head on a derelict alien planet, resembling that of their creators, the Engineers.
The imagery also reminds us of what the Knights Templar revered through the severed head of John the Baptist, who was said to make the “land fertile,” as described in Grail legends. This connects to the idea that on a subconscious level, belief gives imagination reality, and our experience of the world bends and shapes our expectations of it. The only difference is, is that, the Templars had a hermaphroditic, demonic egregore to help them out with the process! Although, Tracy and I discuss this idea in-depth, in our book, Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, here is Sean Martin in The Knights Templar (p. 139), describes the significance of the special “head,” that could “prophecy.”
Misunderstanding is almost certainly at the root of the allegation that the Templars worshipped an idol called Baphomet. Descriptions of it varied, but it was usually described as being a life-sized head, which was said to make the land fertile (as is said of the Grail). That the Templars did possess heads is without doubt. They possessed the head of St Euphemia of Chalcedon at their preceptory in Nicosia on Cyprus, and, more curiously, a silver head shaped reliquary was found after the arrests at the Paris Temple. This bore the inscription CAPUT LVIII, and inside it were parts of a woman’s skull (who was believed to have been one of the 11,000 virgins martyred at Cologne with St Ursula).
The heads may have indeed been worshipped, in the way that the Celts revered the head. The Assassins, during their initiation ceremonies, buried the initiate up to his neck in sand, leaving only the head visible, before disinterring him. Given their simulation of Saracen torture, the Templars may also have carried out this practice. A further possibility is that Baphomet, long thought to be a mistranslation of ‘Mahomet’ (the Prophet Muhammad), could well be a corruption of the Arabic word abufihamat, which means ‘Father of Understanding’, a reference to a spiritual seeker after realization or enlightenment has taken place: ‘The Baphomet is none other than the symbol of the completed man.’ It is therefore possible that the supposed head the Templars worshipped was actually a metaphorical head. That Hugues de Payen’s shield carried three black heads suggests that certain elements within the Order – the upper echelons perhaps – were involved with esoteric disciplines learned from the Sufis from the very beginning of the Temple’s existence.
Could these “alchemical heads of prophecy,” be code words for a secret knowledge held by their minds and severed heads, or could they refer to the idea that the human mind is, in fact, a reflection of a higher reality in the Logos, the Word of God? The idea that they revered Baphomet seems to be a later additional detail that emerges during the French Revolution and was later emphasized by the likes of Joseph Von-Hammer Purgstall, Eliphas Levi, Aleister Crowley, etc. Whatever the case may be, it seems as though the Templar treasure is somehow tied with the symbolism of the head, the mind, as well as the Holy Grail cup which is associated with drinking the wisdom of various Hermetic and Gnostic deities and alchemists like Zosimos, as discussed thoroughly in our book, Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. Indeed, even the Holy Grail/Fisher King legends themselves have strong associations with Gnosticism, and it is the Templar secrets that the Roman Catholic Church greatly desired to have suppressed and absorbed into their own occult practices and treasures.
The haunting icon of the skull and crossbones, which we today associate with poison, was most likely a symbol related to the earlier alchemical rites of the Templar Knights. During these early rites, skulls were used to represent “Caput Mortumm” or “Dead Head,” which refers to a stage in alchemy preceding the creation of the “Philosophers Stone,” which is the Great Work of the alchemists, equated with spiritualized gold. This is the stage of “Nigredo” or the “blackening” in Hades/Hell. The Templars were also said to have in their possession, ritual skulls made from precious metals and human bone covered in gold and silver. These skulls may have been their own deceased brethren.
There are testimonies taken from the Catholic inquisitions that purport of the Knights Templars alluding to possessing metallic skulls used in Templar ceremonies, especially in the legend of the “Necromantic Skull of Sidon.” Skulls tend to be used in ancestor worship rituals and happen to be the premiere emblem of Mexican commemoration of the Dia de Los Muertos (“Day of the Dead” is a pre-Colombian tradition of ancestor worship and colonial Catholicism) and demonic deity of the drug cartels, Santa Muerte, a mixture of the Virgin Mary (who, herself is the Catholic version of Astarte and Ishtar/Lilith) and the Aztec god of death Mictlantecuhtli.
We also see one of the supporting characters, Detective Walenski, draw a swirling spiral diagram on a wall with chalk in his “madhouse.” This isn’t a random design at all as it reflects the Ophite Diagram with its various concentric circles or archonic “heavens,” encircled by the Ouroboros dragon, as we will see below. It could also represent Kronos’ wheel of fate as discussed by the Peratic Gnostics.
We also see the Strangers track down a “streetwalker,” or a “lady of the night,” which, if you haven’t figured out are code words for prostitute. Not surprisingly, it fits with how the Simonian text Exegesis of the Soul, portrays the spirit or soul that is fallen in matter as a prostitute that commits adultery with all kinds of wanton, lustful, adulterous males. These same adulterers can be equated with the lustful angels or archons we see in 1 Enoch and Gnostic texts like Hypostasis of the Archons, which depict Ialdabaoth and his minion archons as horny, lustful, animal-headed demons, obsessed with the prospect of raping the luminous Eve in the Garden of Eden.
We also see the spiral shapes made on the prostitute that takes some interest in the protagonist, John Murdock, by the demonic Strangers, themselves. Please note the deer image reflected in the mirror, next to a dead prostitute. In the Naassene Hymn, as quoted by Hippolytus in Refutation of All Heresies, in which the soul is depicted as a (spiritually) dead deer, entrapped in the labyrinth of bitter chaos (the cosmos), surrounded by death’s grip.
The generating principle of the universe, the first in order, was ‘reason’; but the second principle was the firstborn’s emitted ‘chaos’; and the third principle was received by the soul, which descends from both. Therefore, fashioned like a trembling deer, the soul wrests herself free from the grip of death (strengthening itself by such exertions). Now she wins the mastery and sees the light; now plunged into wo, she weeps; again, in the depths of evil, the unhappy one becomes ensnared in a maze. Then spake Jesus: “behold, O Father! this being, pursued by ills, roams astray upon earth, far from thy breath. It seeks to escape bitter chaos, and knows not whither to find escape. Therefore, send me, O Father, with the seals in my hand will I descend: all eons will I traverse, all mysteries reveal, and show the forms of the gods. I will deliver the secret of the holy way, and call it Gnosis.”
In another choice scene, we see our hero, John Murdock, enter an abandoned amusement park called “Neptune’s Kingdom.” The name Murdoch means, “Seaman,” or the “man of the sea,” which relates to the idea of “semen,” or sperm ejaculate, which also resembles the “Lion and Serpent,” being the lustful Demiurge. We must also note that we first see Murdock wake up in a bathtub, alone, which corresponds to birth and the idea of the Demiurge, an unborn, abortive deity, being born or ejected out of the void or the bitter waters of chaos. John Murdock could also correspond to the idea of the “Grail/Fisher King,” or John Fisher, who like John the Baptist, was beheaded for defending the sacrament of matrimony for Queen Catherine from King Henry VIII. In John the Baptist’s case, he received martyrdom for protesting King Herod Antipas’ adulterous marriage to Herodias. In Jay Dyer’s film analysis of Dark City, one particular comment ties Murdock with the fallen civilization of Atlantis, which also forms a part of Hades or Hell, because it had sunk there.
This ties in nicely with the whole dream of a beach and his mystical experience at Neptune’s Kingdom, since in Neo-Platonic theology, individual souls’, separation from and return to the the Divine Mind or Platonic Absolute, was often portrayed single drops of water being reintegrated in the immensity of the Ocean. Additionally, it was Neptune/Poseidon who, according to Plato, founded Atlantis, a mythical city that is important to all sorts of occult groups.
Aleister Crowley, diary 30th June 1920: “When I was [Eliphas] Levi, I drew myself as Ayin or Baphomet, ‘The Devil’, with the Beast’s Head. This is the Beast throned, crowned, exalted; the leaper, the erect, the butter-in. Her womb is my city, Babel. This Ayin is then my Phallic Will, my Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwaz, who was afterwards called Satan.”Diary 19th/20th January 1918 about Baphomet: “I find 729 = the curse of Satan! Of course.” 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. This is the Holy Spirit on the Inner.
In the film Hellraiser II: Hellbound, we are treated to a haunting vision of Hades, where the god or fallen angel, Leviathan is depicted as being the chief ruler of the Cenobites and Hell. Hell, like the manifest cosmos in the Naassene Hymn is also depicted as a maze or labyrinth in which no one can get out of. One of the characters, Julia Cotton, makes a startling reply to the good Doctor Channard, after he says, “My God!” when he witnesses Hell’s Black Diamond which can be the Clive Barker equivalent to the “Black Sun.” She says, “No, this is mine—the god that sent me back. The god I serve in this world and yours—the god of flesh, hunger and desire—my god, Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth!” And then the doctor is tricked into becoming an agent of wrath for the Labyrinth Lord to enact vengeance against the Cenobites, later in the film. According to one website, it says the following about Levithan’s powers:
Leviathan is immortal and has the power to create any Cenobite in any way, shape, or form as it sees fit in order to serve it. It emits beams of black light that causes those hit by them to see and feel their sins and wrongdoings. It feeds on the souls of those that are brought to Hell, but are deemed unworthy to become Cenobites.
Leviathan gets weakened however and suffers a temporary power loss when the Lament Configuration is solved while in Hell. When this happens, it reverts into its cube shape and its captured souls flee out of it at a rapid rate.
The black light that the Black Diamond emits also resembles dark clouds from a supernatural storm or flood. Perhaps the black light could also represent the breath of Mete or Baphomet’s “baptism of wisdom,” as well. In the Sethian text, the Gospel of Judas, we read that Saklas (the demiurge) will also send a flood.
And Judas said to Jesus, “What will those who have been baptized in your name do?”Jesus said, “Truly I say [to you (sg.)], this baptism 56 [ . . . in] my name[ . . . ] will destroy the entire race of Adam, the earthly man. Tomorrow the one who bears me will be tortured. Truly I [say] to you (pl.), no hand of a mortal human being [will] sin against me. Truly [I] say to you, Judas, those who offer sacrifice to Saklas…
Minus the lucuna, what Jesus seems to be saying is, Judas offers Jesus and indirectly, himself, as being sacrificed to Saklas. This is where the scapegoat Azazel/Judas-Goat symbolism comes in. The baptism that Jesus is referring to could be a counterfeit one because it’s aimed at destroying the “entire race of Adam,” created by the archons. Perhaps this could refer to the “baptism of wisdom” of the Knights Templars and Baphomet, discussed at length in our book, Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled.
When it says, “tomorrow the one who bears me will be tortured,” it has an affinity with Paul, who also uses the language of magic to “give over” his enemies to Satan in 1 Corinthians 5:
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. … As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
This also matches with how at the end of the Gospel of Judas, Judas hands Jesus over the authorities, like he does in the Gospels. In the Gospel of John (13:26), Jesus invokes Satan into Judas with a piece of bread to carry out his dirty work! It also connects to how Baphomet appears to those being tortured as Rudolf Steiner once said. Margaret Jonas in The Templar Spirit: The Esoteric Inspiration, Rituals, and Beliefs of the Knights Templar, specifically connects Baphomet with the torture of the Templar Knights under the inquisition, while quoting Rudolf Steiner:
Baphomet is a being of the Ahrimanic world who appears to people when they are being tortured. That happens really cleverly, since they then bring a lot of visions back with them when they return to consciousness.
Baphomet, the Ahrimanic God of Torture, enters a human body under conditions of torture, such as experienced by the Templars and Cathars, done by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church. Perhaps the same can be said for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. This sheds new light on Aleister Crowley in The Book of the Law (Chapter 3), who advocates torture and also called himself “Baphomet.” “Mercy let be off; damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not; be upon them!”
As mentioned in the book Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, we also have the rare esoteric eighth-century Shiite text, Mother of Books (Umm al-ktab), which portrays the arrogant “Azazi’il” in terms identical to that of the Gnostic Demiurge. The Gospel of John’s description of Satan as the “prince of the world” or St. Paul’s moniker for the “god of this world” is virtually indistinguishable from the Yezidi and Shi’ite notions of who Melek Taus/Azazil is. In the same Shiite text (found in the compiled The Gnostic Bible by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer), it tells us that this “Azazi’il,” has gone by many guises throughout world history:
So the cursed Azazi’il, and those who proceeded from his cry fell down from the high king, down into the curtain, and fell for seven thousand years because of seven harsh denials and rejection. These are noted in the Qur’an: denial of the divinity, denial of the kingdom, denial of the glory, denial of the highest god, denial of his godliness, denial of light, and denial of the spirit’s mind. The high king had bestowed each particle of his inherent light to the rash fool, who used it to create his filthy creatures. From bellowing screams they made spirits, filling them with disbelief, denial, lies, error, rebellion, and corrupting avarice.
The name of this curse changes in each realm. In god’s realm he was called Azazi’il, and in the time of humans was called Harith, at the time of Adam, Ahriman, at the time of Noah and David, Suwa, at the time of Abraham, Nimrod, at the time of Moses, it was the pharaoh, at the time of Jesus, it was the tempter, and at the time of Muhammad, Abu Jahl. In our time he is called Satan. All names are sounds invented by the cursed one, who with the others in the turquoise dome refused to witness, while the ones who came before, whose leader is Salman, accepted manifestation of the highest king.
According to Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.31.1), the Gospel of Judas teaches that Judas’ act of betrayal of Jesus to die on the cross, thrown the ordered powers on earth and the heavens into chaos:
On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.
Similarly, the Gospel of Judas tells us after Jesus tells Judas that he will sacrifice the human being he inhabits, he announces that “the thrones of the aeons have been defeated, and the kings have become weak, and the races of the angels have grieved, . . . the ruler is destroyed.”
Even the canonical Gospels, seem to hint at this when Jesus dies on the cross and darkness and destruction envelopes Jerusalem and even eclipsed the sun, as we see in Matthew (27:45-54) (NKJV):
Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, “This Man is calling for Elijah!”
Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink.
The rest said, “Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.”
And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.
Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!”
If the fixed stars are enclosed by the Ouroboros, perhaps it was Jesus who also crucified the Ouroboros as well—thus affecting the heavens. The firmament may also equated with Ouroboros, the serpent that swallows his own tail—an image used to represent the barrier between the cosmos and eternity, where the beginning meets the end and engenders a new beginning. The Ouroboros is called the “sum of all philosophy,” according to Cleopatra the Alchemist, in the Gnostic-Hermetic text, Chrysopeia (Gold‐Making). In the Ophite Diagram, as described by Celsus in the True Doctrine, the Zodiac or the Fixed Stars is surrounded by the Ouroboros, which also resembles the Egyptian goddess Nut, who arches her body to create and adorned the sky when she, “fashioned great luminous bodies and all the stars.” Nut arches forward but the bent-over man arches backward, as “the Arch of Hysteria” by Louise Bourgeois, depicts.
The Gnostic text, On the Origin of the World, tells us that Sophia, “functioned as a veil dividing mankind from the things above.” The same tail-eating snake separates the manifest universe from the higher, heavenly realms, including Paradise, Life, and the Pleroma where the Father and Son rule and rest in the Empyrean. Just as Jesus invokes the brazen Serpent in John 3:14 with the Son of Man, the Ouroboros can also be compared with the Son of Man, as well, when he says things like, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Revelation 22:13). In Valentinian cosmology, the Cross is actually what separates the manifest universe from the Pleroma. Without the Cross, no one is able to enter into the Celestial Temple. Perhaps the Ouroboros functions in the same manner.
Tracy Twyman in Genuflect specifically connects Ouranos with the Ouroboros.
It was 8 a.m. now, and I thought I should probably check the news first. Yet I couldn’t shake the image of the mating worms in my dream. I knew that Leviathan, that dreaded sea serpent in the Bible, was often depicted just like the Ouroboros, swallowing its own tail, and encompassing the entire cosmos within its coil.
Like the monstrous Titans, Ouroboros was a representation of the chaos that was thought to preexist the creation of matter. But sometimes it was depicted as two serpents shown swallowing each other, much like the mutually fucking and devouring hermaphrodite worms in my dream.
I looked it up, and sure enough, earthworms are hermaphrodites, so this is how they mate. I remembered that the words for “worm” and “serpent” were the same in ancient Sumer: orm. I decided to look to see if there were any etymological links between orm, “Ouroboros,” and “Ouranos.” What I found was something better.
As it turned out, “Ouranos” and “Ouroboros” are definitely connected. I used “Google Translate” and found that the word which Wikipedia had rendered as “sky” actually means “rain‐maker,” or, more specifically, “urinater.” Rain was thus likened to urine from the sky. And Ouroboros didn’t mean “tail‐swallower,” as the same source had claimed. That was clearly a euphemism. I discovered a more literal rendering: “urine‐drinker.” The Ouroboros is the uncreated one, I thought. He needs nothing. He produces what he needs. And because he is eternal, because there is no future where he is, that is sufficient. But like Gaia and Ouranos, I mused, this Eternal Serpent was cut up. Isn’t that in Egyptian myth somewhere? Worms can regenerate if you slice them in half, and that’s what this one did. It became two. Then they started fucking and sucking on each other. It meant the same thing because their mouths and their wombs were the same thing. And the “children” in their wombs were the source of their nourishment. Their wombs were also their stomachs.
This seemed to me like a logical deduction to make from the known details of the story. I felt a flash of pride that I had figured it out. It was an ancient riddle that probably very few had even realized was a riddle, much less pondered about, in the intervening millennia (p. 126-127).
According to Irenaeus in Against Heresies, the Ophites conceived of Sophia as the “left power” whose existence is accounted for by an accident at the summit of the Pleroma. Her “right side” belongs to the living Son, Christ. Sophia is unable to contain in herself all the mass of fertile Light emanating from the universal Father and his Son. As Ioan Couliano summarizes in Tree of Gnosis (pg. 75):
…part of this luminous seed flows out from her left side, producing Sophia, a.k.a. Left, Prunicos, and Sinistra. Sophia descends to the immovable Waters, sets them in motion, and extracts from them a watery body that weighs her down to the point that she cannot discard it any more. In her effort to return to the heights of the Pleroma, she stretches out like a blanket, forming with her body the visible sky. For a while she dwells under the sky, yet eventually she is able to discard her material body, called Woman, and escape beyond the sky. She has a son, Ialdabaoth, who begets the six Archons; together the seven form the Hebdomad of the planets. Against the Rulers of the universe who tyrannize humankind, Sophia does not miss any occasion to cheat the former in order to help the latter. Yet unable to make an end to her son’s despotism, she calls for aid from the Mother of the Living, who dispatches Sophia’s “right” brother Christ to join her. He becomes her partner (syzygos) and saves humankind under the guise of Jesus Christ.
What we are experiencing is the possible reversal of that bending backwards process that unfolded the universe in the first place, in the “Big Bang.” It is essentially, the destruction of the fixed stars or the Zodiac. For Gnostic authors like Philip K. Dick in Tractates Cryptica Scriptura (as found in his book VALIS), the movement of time actually flows backward:
The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.
The Gospel of Philip also tells us that the universe is literally ass-backward with the archons swapping evil for good.
But truth brought names into existence in the world for our sakes, because it is not possible to learn it (truth) without these names. Truth is one single thing; it is many things and for our sakes to teach about this one thing in love through many things. The rulers (archons) wanted to deceive man, since they saw that he had a kinship with those that are truly good. They took the name of those that are good and gave it to those that are not good, so that through the names they might deceive him and bind them to those that are not good. And afterward, what a favor they do for them! They make them be removed from those that are not good and place them among those that are good. These things they knew, for they wanted to take the free man and make him a slave to them forever.
What we are experiencing is the possible reversal of that bending backward process that unfolded the universe in the first place, in the “Big Bang.” It is, essentially, the sacrifice or destruction of the fixed stars of the Zodiac. In Joel (2:30-31) (KJV), we are told that the Lord will produce many violent upheavals in the heavens and on earth:
And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come.
As the sun is darkened, dies, and replaced, it also affects reality on earth. And as we already established, the physical sun essentially filters through a spiritual light from beyond the cosmos and is even compared to (along with the moon), as eyes in the body in the Manichaean Kephalaion LX. The implication for all of this is, that mankind is trapped in some sort of purgatory-like labyrinth realm. It becomes clear what Dark City along with the Matrix films are telling us, like what the Cathars believed: the earth is hell, and we are living in it here and now. “Ye shall not surely die.” Perhaps the Serpent’s admission in Genesis refers to eternal existence on earth reincarnating into bodies with false memories implanted in each succeeding life. This is what Dark City seems to be telling us, as well as television shows like HBO’s Westworld, which would take an entire dissertation to dissect properly.
The Strangers are clearly fallen angels and demons. They have warped mankind’s views of reality and have conducted experiments on them, which could also connect to macroevolution, or that is, the evolution of one species into another species. Texts like 1 Enoch (86:3-5) say this exactly, in which fallen angels procreated with both animals and people to create new hybrid species. These fallen angels caused evolutionary change by breeding biologically.
I saw a vision, and behold, I saw in the sky many stars falling and throwing themselves to the first star. They became cows like other cows, and they grazed with them. I looked again and behold, I saw all of them getting erect penises, and they started mounting the female cows. They got pregnant, and gave birth to elephants, camels, and donkeys.
They also stole our memories of our previous lives in the Celestial Temple being Heaven/the Garden of Eden. We fell from the Garden and the earth serves as a form of punishment of being “baptized in the punishments of matter,” as the Corpus Hermeticum tells us.
Clement of Alexandria says that Marcion and his followers derived their doctrine that birth is evil from Plato and the Pythagoreans. They hold the view that the soul is punished in the body and transmigrate (III 12, 1ff; 13, 1-3) in accordance with Philolaus:
The follower of Pythagoras says: “The theologians and the wise man of old witness that the soul is yoked to the body to undergo acts of punishment and is buried in it as in a grave” (Stromata. III 17,1= Philolaus. fr. B 44 DK).
In the Cathar text, The Secret Supper: The Book of John the Evangelist, Satan is depicted as a demiurgic fallen angel with seven tails, who tricks other angels in heaven to leave their home in heaven and become entrapped in bodies of clay of the first humans, being Adam and Eve.
And Satan bade them to perform the works of the flesh in their bodies of clay, but they did not know how to commit sin. The originator of sin accomplished his purpose by his seduction, in this way: He planted a paradise and set men therein and bade them not to eat of its fruits. The devil entered Paradise and planted a bed of reeds in the midst of Paradise; of his spittle he made a serpent and bade him remain in the reeds. Thus the devil concealed the knowledge of his deceit so that they would not perceive his treachery. He went in to them saying, ‘Eat of all the fruit in Paradise, but of the fruit of good and evil eat not.’
Thereafter the wicked devil, entering into the evil serpent, deceived the angel who was in the form of a woman and poured out upon her head a longing for sin,” and Eve’s desire was like a glowing oven. Forthwith, the devil in the form of the serpent came out of the reeds and sated his lust on her with the serpent’s tail.
That is why [the offspring] are called not sons of God but sons of the devil and sons of the serpent, fulfilling the diabolic desires of their father even unto the end of the world. After this, the devil poured out his longing upon the head of the angel who was in Adam; and [both angels] were affected by a lust for debauchery, together begetting children of the devil and of the serpent, until the consummation of the world.”
The globalist framework is geared towards maintaining their power as agents of the Labyrinth Lord, Leviathan. It’s too late for them and so they want to drag everyone else to hell with them—dead or alive. The “alt. left,” and the “alt. right,” framework are just methods to grind your reality into, as the Gnostics would call it, “bitter chaos.” Ordo ab Chao (Order out of Chaos). Solve et. Coagula. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They are impressing unreality and hysteria into existence—perhaps even the very wheel of fate and manifest a new universe in their own likeness and their own image so that they can control and become God, or so they think. There’s no coincidence that the words “hysteria,” or “mania,” are etymologically close to the word “Hystera,” which is the Womb or “tomb” of matter.
In many ways, the Old Testament connects with the New Testament in its constant foreshadowing. The true Exodus from the world is the Exodus from Egypt, Sodom, and Babylon as we see in the Old Testament. At the same time, many of the practices of the Old Covenant are rendered null and void because Jesus Christ not only became the atonement on the Cross but also the High Priest as we see in Hebrews. The spiritual journey or way back through the Cross of Christ is also our way back into the true Promised Land, the Garden of Eden, reconfigured as the New Jerusalem with eternal and free communion with the Godhead and eternal access to the Tree of Life. And so, we are called to walk the great end-times New Exodus through the Cross and out from Babylon, which is epitomized as the Harlot or Whore of Babylon that is in “hysteria” in the “dark womb” that is eventually judged and totally engulfed and destroyed by fire.
The scholar April DeConick in her book The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today, connects state political figures with that of demonic archons.
There is a revolutionary edge to the Gnostic vision of the gods, one with political implications. Traditionally, kings and emperors were representatives of the gods, tasked with maintaining cosmic and civil order. When Gnostics characterize the traditional gods as demonic monsters in Roman military uniform, they are implying that their political leaders, the Roman power brokers, are demonic too. In Gnostic thought, the royals and their officials are the bad guys, terrorizing the rest of us, lying to us, and keeping us in servitude in the interests of their demonic overlords.
And perhaps this is what the world is currently facing as it stares down into the dark abyss, waiting for the great red dragon to strike as the male child of the Winged Mother is taken away while the world suffers the wrath of the archons, and revenge of the Titans. Will the eye of light finally one day close on the world? In the next post, we will examine other parts of Revelation and how it connects in concert with the Winged Mother and her escape from the wrath, including the supposed Anti-Christ figure that is supposed to one day manifest as an instrument to deceive the entire face of the world. Luke 21:38 tells us to watch and not marvel at the signs and constantly pray to stand worthy before the Son of Man:
Watch therefore, and pray always, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.
In Revelation (3:10-12) (NRSV), we see Jesus telling the reader to endure in the faith and that the city of New Jerusalem will descend from heaven, at the end.
10 Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. 11 I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. 12 If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name.
Later, we see in Revelation (21:2) and (9-14), fulfill Jesus’ promises, when it descends to earth after the apocalypse is over.
2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
…
9 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; 13 on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. 14 And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
In Tracy Twyman’s Clock Shavings (p. 282-283), she writes how the Cube of the New Jerusalem, at the end of the apocalypse of Revelation, will somehow merge with the black cube of Saturn, below, in hell. Saturn, as many of my readers will know, is also synonymous with the demiurge, Ialdabaoth.
Cain wants to get out. All of those in who are in Hell want out. But the fallen angels down there know something that the human spirits also trapped there probably don’t know: that at the End of Times, the Abyss will open up and let them out of Hell, temporarily. Heaven will also open up, and literally merge with Earth as the white cube of the New Jerusalem descends. In my mind, it is most likely that the black cubic city will ascend from the depths as well. Heaven, Hell and Earth will all co‐mingle in a timeless moment. Perhaps the black and white cubes will merge. This may be the ultimate explanation for the checker pattern on the Ageio board. This, I think, will be their opportunity to switch places with humankind, and be back in the bosom of the Lord. Then again, perhaps they think that they will be able to take control of the celestial Ark, the cube, and be in the driver’s seat, the God position, when things start anew. I think the belief is that, if they can get inside the white cube, in the position of God, they can be God, and they can win the Apocalypse game. Meanwhile, they believe, Baphomet will get his expressed wish: to see “MAN LOST IN HELL.” We will be outside the cube, trapped in the chaotic Abyss where they were once tortured.
There isn’t just one cosmic cube, but two. In addition to the black cube, which she says is the city, Enoch, there’s a white cube, in heaven per Revelation. When the cubes meet the world we know will be destroyed except for those inside the white cube of the New Jerusalem, the shining city that lands on earth after all of the turmoil and suffering after the events of the apocalypse have passed. The cube shape is also associated with Saturn.
So, what do the rainbow and the triangle-shaped prism represent? I’d wager somehow the black prism somehow (alchemically) changes the nature of light, it circles around Saturn and comes back to the moon to do another loop. This is what I believe the black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, represents and perhaps can be connected to the stones of acquittal per Revelation and Zechariah. The monolith could also be a black inversion of the holy stones and instead, a cursed object in which Kronos or Saturn or whatever demiurgical power guides creation on the course of evolution to eventually merge with it.
Perhaps, as I’ve theorized earlier in my article “Ouranos: Lord of the Dome,” of the possibility that the earth may have dome-like Firmament over it as is described in the Bible and other ancient myths like the Greeks and Babylonians, especially in how Ouranos’ relationship to Gaia or the Earth. The rainbow could very be evidence of a glass-like dome over our world as many flat-earthers maintain. A light that shines through a prism can create the colors of a rainbow, and a thick enough piece of glass can act as a prism.Moreover, could this represent what the new age conspiracy author David Icke postulates as the Saturn-Moon Matrix? An answer to this question may be found in the European Space Agency website titled Saturn’s Rainbow Rings:
As we saw earlier in part 3, the seven rays are intimately connected with Gnosticism and can also be connected with the idea of the rainbow, which is a pride symbol for the gay LGBTQ movement. The rainbow rings of Saturn also look particularly like a chain as well, symbolizing imprisonment and enslavement. Interestingly, in the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, we also see seven diamonds in the haunting and famous “Stargate” montage sequence, which could possibly connect to the seven pillars or the seven parts of the Holy Spirit and the seven churches that John the Revelator addresses in Revelation 1.
In Genesis, Yahweh provides the sign of the rainbow at the end of the flood to signal that he would never again flood the world. In a way, this mirrors what is described in Greek mythology, as the titan Atlas, holds heavens on his shoulders. Without this “column” or “pillars” between the earth and the heaven, the sky falls and causes the Great Flood and the fall of Atlantis. The rainbow could also symbolize this separation between heaven and earth, where the pillars of Wisdom are held up.
Ezekiel described Yahweh as being bronze from the waist up and made of fire from the waist down with a rainbow surrounding him (Ezekiel 1:27-28). Daniel describes a similar figure made of bronze and fire (Daniel 10:5-6). And as we saw earlier, the theme of the “seven rays” also fits quite well with rainbow symbolism. Even in (2 Enoch Chapter 12, XII), we see rainbows in Eden like realms:
And I looked and saw other flying elements of the sun, whose names (are) Phoenixes and Chalkydri, marvellous and wonderful, with feet and tails in the form of a lion, and a crocodile’s head, their appearance (is) empurpled, like the rainbow; their size (is) nine hundred measures, their wings (are like) those of angels, each (has) twelve, and they attend and accompany the sun, bearing heat and dew, as it is ordered them from God.
Thus (the sun) revolves and goes, and rises under the heaven, and its course goes under the earth with the light of its rays incessantly.
In Stanley Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut, we do see a few references to rainbows. There has been countless “esoteric” or “Illuminati” analysis articles and videos per Eyes Wide Shut, and the triangular prism and rainbow symbols are especially interesting and present with this film.
The first instance we see of a rainbow reference is when Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s characters are invited to a Christmas Ball. In one scene Tom Cruise/Dr. Bill Harford is confronted by two prostitutes, or perhaps covert agents of the pagan orgy cult, who ask him if he would like to go “where the rainbow ends?” To which Bill Harford replies, “that all depends on where that is.”
(Tom Cruise with two prostitutes or members of the orgy cult with Christmas lights behind symbolizing, perhaps, the “lights in the firmament” per Genesis 1:14.)
Later in the film, the good doctor finds himself at a costume rental shop so he can attend the masked orgy we see later on in the film.
According to one YouTube video, the rainbow is also connected to not only various occult ideas but also MK-Ultra “Illuminati” mind-control, child-rape/pedophilia and other forms of sexual deviancy. The video describes the rainbow as a “hypnotic device.” This is no doubt connected to gay rainbow flag and perhaps even Pizzagate and Project Paperclip. As the video points out, rainbows are also associated with the 1950’s classic Wizard of Oz film. The term “Oz” can be connected with a book that Aleister Crowley authored being “Liber Oz” or “Book 77,” as well as Liber 777, which obviously ties with 777 (a number of completion, perfection, and judgment) and 70 generations and angels in the Old and New Testament. 70 generations equal to approximately 4,900 to 7,000 years, if generation can represent 70 years to 100 years in a human life span. Jay Dyer, in his book Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film, writes about the film and points out how all of Bill’s experiences and events are sort of a journey of initiation into the dark mysteries sort of like Jonah’s journey or descent into the belly of the whale or Christ’s descent into Hades. But the symbolism is closer to a Masonic initiation ceremony, where the initiate is blindfolded and lead by the “hangman’s noose.”
Still oblivious to these synchronicities, Bill remains blindfolded like Nick, yet not with a literal blindfold. Bill’s blindness is to his own naivety and ignorance concerning himself and the world around him. All the clues are before him, that he is being led like a lamb to the slaughter, should he choose to see it. The event’s are Bill’s initiation as he tested regarding his “fidelio,” faithfulness either to his wife, his ambiguous sense of middle-class morals, or, ultimately, to the cult – hence the password. It should be noted as well the cult retains these sexual elements, where the profane seeker is in darkness (eyes wide shut or blindfolded), in which only only the hierophant or cult leader can enlighten, remembering that light is a prism or rainbow. The rainbow is also a symbol of the disregard of sexual inhibitions in relation to the rainbow flag of the homosexual movement.
Then, there’s also the Christmas decorated, eighth-rayed star, which interestingly, is associated with the Priesthood of Melchizedek, symbolizing baptism, rebirth, the female uterus/womb and eternity. It also connects to the 888 Logos numerology and being reborn in the spiritual sun or the “eye of light” of the light Adam.
In the book Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, we (Tracy Twyman and I) discussed how the hermaphroditic figure of “Mete” which is the Greek equivalent to Baphomet. For the Orientalist, Von Hammer-Purgstall, he considers “Mete” to be simply the Greek word “wisdom,” a personification in what we may perhaps call the Gnostic mythology answering to the Sophia of the Ophianites. He considers that the name Baphomet is derived from the Greek words “the baptism of Metis,” and that in its application it is equivalent with the name Mete itself. He has further shown that Baphomet is connected with the Gnostic sects of the East, as we theorized, starts with John the Baptist, continuing on with Simon Magus and his Gnostic successors. Like the image above of the horned naked woman with spider legs, Baphomet was also conceived as a chimeric creature, containing both angelic and bestial, divine and infernal components. In a way, the Old Testament scripture, Deuteronomy 4:15-19 (NKJV) anticipates Baphomet worship of the Knights Templars:
Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure: the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth or the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground or the likeness of any fish that is in the water beneath the earth. And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, you feel driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord your God has given to all the peoples under the whole heaven as a heritage.
As quoted in our book, according to Thomas Wright in The Worship of The Generative Powers, Mete can be equated with the number 8, because Mete is “one and seven” or “1 plus 7,” which can also correspond to the seven colors of the rainbow and the seven planetary archons and the Demiurge.
This still is, it must be confessed, rather mysterious, and, in fact, most of these copies of the formula of faith are more or less defective, but, from a comparison of them, the general form and meaning of the whole is made perfectly clear. This may be translated, “Let Mete be exalted, who causes things to bud and blossom! he is our root; it (the root) is one and seven; abjure (the faith), and abandon thyself to all pleasures.” The number seven is said to refer to the seven archons of the Gnostic creed.
The 19th-century mythicist, Gerald Massey in The Natural Genesis, Volume 2, he explicitly connects Mete and Baphomet with what is associated with the Holy Spirit, being the pneumatic breath of God:
Mete was the Baphomet or the mother of breath. An invocation addressed to this form of the bearded mother is shown by Du Puy to have been “Yalla” a supposed Saracenic word. This like so many other titles of the genetrix, such as nana and Maya, is an Inner African name for the great or Grand Mother…The oldest form of the great mother, the mother of the gods, known to the Greeks as Rhea, Kubele, Kubebe, Abbas and Ma, is identified by her other names with this the most recent genitrix.
In Joseph von Hammer‐Purgstall’s 1818 treatise Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, it depicts many androgynous demons and naked men and women that were copied from actual “Templar artifacts.” In one illustration, we see a naked woman kneeling on the ground between two images of a figure identified on several of the artifacts as Mete/Baphomet and even Sophia-Achamoth. The woman is pouring water out of a vase onto the candles of a candelabrum called a “seven‐branch” or the Jewish menorah, which represents the seven pillars of Wisdom per Proverbs and the seven golden lampstands being the seven churches, ruled over by the seven stars (or angels) that the Son of Man addresses (to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea) in Revelation 1:1-20. In other words, the hermaphroditic harlot, Mete, is out to pour torrents of water over the spiritual church or assembly (the Body of Christ), much like the great dragon per Revelation 12!
The church historian Eusebius in his Church History wrote about a fringe Christian cult leader named Montanus. Montanus operated in Phrygia in the second century, the homeland of the infamous Cybele cult, which demanded its followers to castrate themselves and slash their bodies while being spattered by the blood of a sacrificed bull as part of their initiation into the priesthood of Cybele. The Thracians thought that the chief divinity of the Samothracian and Lemnian mysteries as Rhea-Hecate, a chthonic deity associated with Cybele.
The hymn of Proclus with the title “Hekate and Ianos,” shows that connection. Proclus is one of the most important philosophers of the ancient Hellenic philosophy, a representative of Neoplatonism, a follower of Hekate and a great theurgist. There is also a great number of archaeological evidence showing the connection of these two goddesses and it seems that Cybele and Hekate are great friends. Here, Hekate is called the mother of gods and according to the mythology, Cybele is the mother of gods. Part of the hymn:
(Ancient text):
Χαίρε, θεών μήτερ, πολυώνυμε, καλλιγένεθλε
χαίρ’ Εκάτη προθυραία, μεγάσθενες αλλά και αυτός
χαίρ’ Ιανέ προπάτορ, Ζευ άφθιτε, χαίρε ύπατε Ζευ.
(Translation):
Chaire, mother of the gods, polyonyme, kalligenethle,
chaire Hekate prothyraia, megasthenes, chaire
chaire Iane father of our fathers, Zeus imperishable, chaire you ruler Zeus.
(Translation of the epithets):
kalligenethle = with good and beautiful children
prothyraia=the one who stands before the door
megasthenes=with great power
Montanus, also considered himself to be the “Holy Paraclete,” along with two women priestesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, who remarried themselves to God full-time, leaving their families to pursue a more spiritual life through celibacy, fleshly mortification and rigid focus for holiness. Eusebius tells us:
For some persons, like venomous reptiles, crawled over Asia and Phrygia, boasting that Montanus was the Paraclete, and that the women that followed him, Priscilla and Maximilla, were prophetesses of Montanus. (Church History, V. 14).
There is said to be a certain village called Ardabau in that part of Mysia, which borders upon Phrygia. There first, they say, when Gratus was proconsul of Asia, a recent convert, Montanus by name, through his unquenchable desire for leadership, gave the adversary opportunity against him. And he became beside himself, and being suddenly in a sort of frenzy and ecstasy, he raved, and began to babble and utter strange things, prophesying in a manner contrary to the constant custom of the Church handed down by tradition from the beginning (Church History, V. 16, 4).
Eventually, these Montanists would be excommunicated out of the early church and would even reject any Christian who was baptized as a Montanist. The church fathers unanimously rejected this group, all except for Tertullian, who ironically, considering his staunch stance against any and all Gnostic heresy, became a Montanist convert himself! In fact, Tertullian describes a specific Montanist church meeting:
We have now amongst us a sister whose lot it has been to be favoured with sundry gifts of revelation, which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord’s day in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she both sees and hears mysterious communications; some men’s hearts she understands, and to them who are in need she distributes remedies. Whether it be in the reading of Scriptures, or in the chanting of psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering up of prayers, in all these religious services matter and opportunity are afforded to her of seeing visions. It may possibly have happened to us, whilst this sister of ours was rapt in the Spirit, that we had discoursed in some ineffable way about the soul.
Although the Montanists were orthodox in all matters of doctrines, their methodologies for worship and self-discipline were considered to be heretical in the sense that they were “legalistic” in keeping hold to their torturous methods of self-mortification. In a sense, they can be considered “proto-pentecostal.” Responses to this movement were mixed within the church, since, after all, prophecy was a genuine gift of God or the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Interestingly, the church father Jerome would deride Montanus as a “cut-off, half-man,” a not-so-subtle allusion that Montanus was a castrated priest of the Phrygian Mother goddess Cybele. He is also called a “priest of Apollo” or a “priest of an idol” (hence the sin of idolatry) before his conversion to Christianity, according to the text, The dialogue of a Montanist with an Orthodox.
It is said that when he read the Gospel of John’s Jesus’s promises that the spirit of truth will be with his disciples. They also held on to a modalistic view of the Trinity, by stating that three different epochs within history were divided up according to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and their “age of grace,” was ruled over by the Holy Spirit. Montanus’ prophetic, ecstatic utterances could also very well be mistaken to those cults dedicated to Apollo and Dionysus. At worse, according to some Orthodox bishops, Montanus and his followers were under a demonic deception and a tool of the devil since Montanus himself was a pagan priest. As it follows, perhaps, Montanus was also a priest dedicated to an earlier incarnation of Mete/Baphomet.
In the next post, we will see how the symbols and numerology used in Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey, all converge in their representation to initiated eyes to see. Is the dream offered by the Womb of Darkness closing and folding up as time flows between our fingers? What exactly is the Womb of Darkness? It connects to what Genesis refers to as the firmament or the vault, as we will see next time. The recent 2017 eclipse does seem to provide us with a major celestial sign that ties with repenting with “sackcloth and ashes,” that Jesus advises in Luke 10 and the Sign of John that Jesus invokes in Matthew 12:40. It also happens to have occurred 40 days from September 23, 2017, in which the great, astrological wonder sign of Revelation 12 is supposed to manifest in the heavens, much like how the inhabitants of Nineveh had 40 days to repent. Also, Big Ben is being shut down until 2021 for repairs. Odd synchronicities with everything that’s going on right now.
Even, in the film, Dark City, features an eclipse embedding in one of their logos! We also saw the deaths of certain celebrities like David Bowie (2016) who invoked the “Dark Star,” and Chris Cornell (2017) from the band Soundgarden, which performed the song, “Black Hole Sun.” Here are part of the lyrics:
“In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
The sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat, summer stench
‘Neath the black the sky looks dead
Call my name through the cream
And I’ll hear you scream again
Black hole sun
Won’t you come
And wash away the rain
Black hole sun
Won’t you come
Won’t you come (won’t you come)…”
We see in Revelation 12:5, that the male child is “caught up” in a divine cesarian operation. The Greek word used for “caught up” or “snatched up” is harpazo, and it is the word used for the rapture of the Church in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Every single mention of Jesus’ ascension is described using the words epairo or anabaino, both of which indicate a gradual rising (like climbing a mountain), not a quick and violent snatching away (harpazo). Does the date 9/23/2017 have anything to do with this “snatching away” as some believe? Perhaps, but it would contradict another verse of scripture in Matthew (24:32-33):
“Now learn a parable of the fig tree (Israel); When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye SHALL SEE ALL THESE THINGS, know that it is near, even at the doors.”
In other words, perhaps such an event could happen in the early summer, if we are to take the “rapture” idea literally. The 2017 eclipse happened on the 21st. Hurricane Harvey came in on the 25th and flooding the 26th. And very soon, Hurricane Irma is about to unleash a torrent of floods and violent winds, against the southern parts of the United States, stronger than any natural disaster known in recent memory. Now look what Luke 21:25-26 (NKJV) says:
And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.
A special note for all my readers: I am planning on publishing these articles in an e-book in the next few weeks. It is tentatively titled, “The Sun Lady Unveiled: Revelation 12 Decoded.” Stay tuned for more information, soon to come!
In my article, Render Unto Caesar: Paying the Last Penny, I noted how the language of Luke (21:35-37) presents the so-called “rapture” or the second advent of Christ as a snare or trap laden for “all those who dwell on the face of the whole world.” This is tied with what is being prophesied by St. Paul, writing about A.D. 51 to the Thessalonians for the second time, from Corinth, bids them understand that the Day of the Lord, of whose coming they seem to have been in immediate expectation, would be preceded by the manifestation of the “man of sin” or “son of perdition” (2. Thess. 2, 3) with a “falling away” or apostasy. 2 Thess (2:1-5) tells us that the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ will not occur until the man of lawlessness manifests and exalts himself, “over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” (We will revisit the Anti-Christ in another post.)
Interestingly, St. Paul also introduces the concept of the Winged Mother, the Harlot/Whore of Babylon and even the Heavenly Jerusalem that descends from heaven we see in later in the Book of Revelation (21:2). In Galatians (4:21-32) we read:
Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman through promise, which things are symbolic.For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar—for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children—but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.
For it is written:
“Rejoice, O barren, You who do not bear! Break forth and shout, You who are not in labor! For the desolate has many more children than she who has a husband.” Nevertheless what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.’” Now we brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. But as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.
In Galatians the old covenant community is represented by earthly Jerusalem. This is the exact equivalent of harlot Babylon in Revelation, the great city (Rev. 17:18; 18:21). Earlier in Revelation we are told that “the great city” was where Jesus was crucified (i.e., Jerusalem, Rev. 11:8). As in Galatians (4:29), the one woman persecutes the other woman (the harlot was persecuting the bride, Rev. 19:2). As in Galatians (4:30) the one women is cast out (the harlot, Rev. 18:21) at the time that the other Winged Woman receives her inheritance (the bride becomes married per Rev. 19:1-9).
Galatians (4:21-31) provides some of the backbone details for Revelation (12, 17 and 18). Revelation is a book about two women/cities who are two wives that represent the two covenants. The unfaithful widowed wife is destroyed and then the bride or the church becomes married with God’s Son in the Kingdom of God. By the way, this narrative also exists in the Parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew (22:1-10.)
According to Margaret Barker in the Mother in Heaven and Her Children, the Sun Lady represents an ideal contained in the First Temple of Solomon, which is an interesting detail considering the darker origins of Solomon’s Temple we will get to later.
The vision of the Sun Lady concerns the restoration of the first temple. This is why it is so important to recover the world of the first temple, so that we can recognise the crucial elements in the New Testament that were signs of the restoration.
What I have proposed is a hypothesis, but it does make sense of a great deal of the evidence that is otherwise only fragments. The Sun Lady was the Mother of the Messiah who had been driven from her temple and replaced by the harlot. Only when the great harlot had been judged and destroyed could the Bride of the Lamb return, and here we glimpse another aspect of the ancient monarchy.
The Lady was the eternal Mother of the kings, and so she was the spouse of one king and also the Mother of the next. In Revelation she is also called the-Spirit-and-the-Bride, that double naming which characterised Temple discourse, and she gives to the thirsty the water of life (Rev.22.17). And this is why the Hebrew gospel had Jesus describe his Mother as the Holy Spirit, and the Book of Revelation depicts her as the winged Woman clothed with the Sun who gives birth to the Messiah.
We see in Revelation 12 that the Devil and 1/3rd (33%) of the angels from the “first estate” are cast out by Michael the Archangel. Ezekiel also expands on the fall of Satan. While comparing the King of Tyre with Lucifer, Ezekiel identifies Lucifer as the anointed cherub, who once walked in the Garden of Eden while covered in precious stones, including the emerald, and was perfect in his ways and from that day he was created until iniquity was found in him. Thus Ezekiel perpetuated the tradition of Isaiah by making Lucifer’s fall the product of pride.Ezekiel (28:13-16) (NKJV) makes a powerful proclamation against the “King of Tyre” which is a title for the archangel:
“You were the seal of perfection,
Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
Every precious stone was your covering:
The sardius, topaz, and diamond,
Beryl, onyx, and jasper,
Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold.
The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes
Was prepared for you on the day you were created.
“You were the anointed cherub who covers;
I established you;
You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.
You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you.
“By the abundance of your trading
You became filled with violence within,
And you sinned;
Therefore I cast you as a profane thing
Out of the mountain of God;
And I destroyed you, O covering cherub,
From the midst of the fiery stones.
Lucifer then resolves to rule in Heaven and this culminated in his expulsion from Paradise we see in what John the Revelator says in Revelation 12. The “fiery stones” can be interpreted as cosmic spheres or even planets which was once under the domain of Lucifer. We can call this the Biblical Star Wars! The asteroid belt could very well be the result of the cataclysmic destruction of Lucifer’s Kingdom of the “fiery stones.” In Isaiah (14:12–17), it portrays Lucifer having control of ruling over the nations on earth and this passage shows that there were nations of people and perhaps even angels, inhabiting earth at the time of Lucifer’s rebellion.
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
According to one website, it speculates that the Earth, Mars and the planet called “Rahab” might have been part of this galactic kingdom:
The phrase, “which didst weaken the nations,” makes this quite clear. It can be gathered that before Adam, civilizations of angels existed on the earth and also perhaps on the other terrestrial planets. Satan was destroyed from the midst of the “stones of fire “, i.e.: the planets. We may find evidence of this in such places as the Cydonia section of Mars. One of the more interesting trips we could take is the legend of the destroyed planet Rahab which is thought to have been the home of an angelic civilization, perhaps Satan’s home world. It is thought to have been the fifth planet out, where the asteroid belt is now located.
The same author interprets how in Job and Genesis says that God looked upon the wiped out civilization and recreated it on another planet, made man in his own image (along with his fellow Elohim) and replenished it. However, the formerly anointed arch-angelic cherub, Lucifer, had other plans for the primal pair of humans in Eden. Skipping all the way to Matthew (4:8-10), we see the Devil confront and tempt Jesus during his 40 days fast.
Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’”
Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.
It is quite clear that Jesus doesn’t contradict the Devil about his position of authority over the world, at all. In fact, the whole orientation of the Bible is to convince that (1) humans are fallible, fallen creatures in league with Satan and his demons; and (2) they are desperate need of a redeemer and (3) if they refuse the offer, they’re going down with Satan himself.
The Russian Theosophist, Helena Blavatsky tells us in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2) page 206, that the Apostle Paul’s comments in the Letter to the Ephesians and 2 Corinthians are similar to that of the Ophite Gnostics.
The Biblical Paul, believing in all such occult powers in the world “unseen”, but ever “present,” says: “Ye walked according to the Aeon of this world according to the Archon (Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge) that has the domination of the air,” and “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the dominations, the powers; the lords of darkness, the mischievousness of spirits in the upper regions.” This sentence, “ye were dead in sin and error,” for “ye walked according to the Archon,” of Ialdabaoth, the God and creator of matter of the Ophites, shows unequivocally that: 1st, Paul, notwithstanding some dissension with the more important doctrines of the Gnostics, shared more or less their cosmogonical views on the emanations; and 2nd, that he was fully aware that this Demiurge, whom Jewish name of Jehovah, was not the God preached by Jesus. And now, if we compare the doctrine of Paul with the religious views of Peter and Jude, we find that, not only did they worship Michael, the Archangel, but that also they reverenced SATAN, because the latter was also, before his fall, an angel! This they do quite openly, and abuse the Gnostics for speaking “evil” of him.
NO one can deny the following: Peter, when denouncing those who are not afraid to speak evil of Dignities,” adds immediately, “whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them (the dignities) before the Lord”. Who are the dignities? Jude, in his General Epistle, makes the word as clear as day. The dignities are the DEVILS!! Complaining of the disrespect shown by the Gnostics to the powers and dominions, Jude argues in the very words of Peter: “Yet Michael the Archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” Is this plain enough? If not, then we have the Kabala to prove who were the dignities.
Considering that Deuteronomy tells us that the “Lord” Himself buried Moses in a valley of Moab, “but no man knoweth of this sepulchre unto this day,” this Biblical lapsus linguae of Jude gives a strong coloring to the assertions of some of the Gnostics. They claimed but what was secretly taught by the Jewish kabalists themselves; to wit: that the highest supreme God was unknown and invisible; “The King of Light is a closed eye”; that Ialdabaoth, the Jewish second Adam, was the real Demiurge; and that Iao, Adonai, Tsabaoth, and Eloi were the quarternary emanation which formed the unity of the God of the Hebrews – Jehovah.
The opening paragraphs of Hypostasis of the Archons would support Blavatsky’s theory, as well. It states:
Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.” When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying, “You are mistaken, Samael” – which is, “god of the blind.”
The “King of Light is a closed eye” is a particularly interesting statement. In Tracy Twyman’s newest novel, Genuflect, she writes that the various eye in the triangle images in Freemasonry and even in our one dollar bill indicates a sort of “gateway” to a transcosmic, hyperuranium deity, similar to the God of the Pleroma we find in Gnosticism, above the creator or the Demiurge.
But this is, in fact, what the Masonic keystone represents. It is a stone that does just this: acting simultaneously as a deck prism and as a protective light filter. It is because it provides protection that it was represented as a “buckler” or a shield in Rothschild heraldry. This is why it’s so often represented on Masonic tracing boards in the arch of the sky, between the Sun and the Moon, forming a third, and higher, source of light. It’s a window that plugs up the hole, allowing the transcosmic God to see you, and perhaps for you to see him as well. This is why the Masons also represent the same concept with an eye in a triangle, sun‐like rays often streaming out of it, like a prism refracting light. Also used interchangeably with these symbols, or in combination with them, is the letter G, the seventh letter of the alphabet—which I believe stands for the Gamma ray, as I mentioned before. These Masonic images amply demonstrate that my interpretation is correct.
In the Old Testament, we see in Zechariah (3:8-9), how the appointed High Priest, Joshua is given a precious, holy stone with seven eyes that will somehow remove the impurity and immorality of his land. Please note that in Revelation (5:5-6), the slain Lamb is also depicted as having seven horns and “seven eyes.”
Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, thou, and thy fellows that sit before thee: for they are men wondered at: for, behold, I will bring forth my servant the Branch. For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day
The closed eye of the King of Light represents the Pleromic light hidden from the manifest world. In Paul’s writings, like in 2 Corinthians 3, Jesus appears “open faced” without a veil to shine the glory of the Lord upon the world. This is much how the skies open over Jesus when he is baptized in Matthew (3:16) (AKJV), “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, see, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting on him.” And it was Jesus who rent the otherwise closed veil as we see in Matthew (27:51). Over at OverLordsofChaos.com, the author states that the piercing of the veil may also be linked to the piercing of Jesus’ side by the “Spear of Destiny”:
Longinus had not only used the Spear to thwart the Temple guards’ dark ambition to mutilate Messiah’s body but had also caused the release of Christ’s blood that brought about the birth of the Cosmic Christ as the Earth Spirit. This slow descent of the Cosmic Christ from the highest celestial spheres and His becoming the Spirit of the Earth was the main concern of ancient mythology and part of the many great and weighty matters that is the Mystery of Golgotha. The instant the side of the divine-human called Jesus Christ was pierced the sun darkened, the skies dimmed, the earth quaked. In the Temple where Annas and Caiaphas eagerly awaited news of Messiah’s mutilation the Veil of the “Holy of Holies” in the Temple was rent from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51). As the veil of the Temple fell aside it exposed the black cube of the Old Covenant –the Yahweh Covenant- which at this most momentous time split along its sides and opened out in the form of a cross.
Perhaps we can say that it was Jesus who pierced the veil for the light of the transcosmic eye to shine through—hence the religion of the “open sky” was unveiled for all. The eye in the triangle typically represents divine providence of God overlooking mankind. The Spear of Destiny that pierced the side of Jesus is also connected to the so-called “Grail Bloodline” and the so-called “Anti-Christ,” in which we will see later in this series. Jesus can also be likened to the “spiritual sun,” hence the routine comparison between Jesus Christ and the Sun/Solar symbolism by many “astrotheologists” and “mythicists.” In the article The Gnostic Jesus: The Invisible Sun Behind the Sun by David Fideler, he writes the number 6 represents the physical cosmos while the number 666 equals to that of the physical sun. Meanwhile, the number 8 represents a higher spiritual order:
In numerology, the number of the physical world is six, the number of the spiritual world is eight. 600 is the number of “COSMOS”, while 800 is the number of the lord of the cosmos. Similarly, the sacred number of Jesus, 888, symbolizing the Spiritual Sun, is contrasted with the number 666, that of the physical sun.
In geometry, it is the figure of the Cube, which unites the numbers six and eight. That is because a cube has six sides and eight corners.
God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, which was a Saturday. Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, which for the early Christians became the “eighth” day, symbolizing the new spiritual creation and the regeneration of time. The number 8, the Ogdoad, symbolizes the new order of Christianity, and Jesus, 888, was known as the Ogdoad to the early Christian Gnostics.
In the lower illustration, a cube is shown in isometric projection. Six rays emanate from a seventh inner point. These “seven stars” are the planets of traditional cosmology, led in their choral dance by the central point of the sun.
Viewed from another perspective, as in the upper illustration, we can see that there is more to the lower arrangement than meets the eye. Here, a seventh hidden ray is revealed, as is an eight point, the hidden Spiritual Sun from which all things flow.
One step further, the 666 can also represent the physical cosmos as well as the demiurge, who according to Marcion and many Gnostics, was Anti-Christ! In the same article, the author points out that the Roman-god Mithra can be identified as a “seven-rayed” deity. The “eye of light” represents the rift within Saturn’s cube, which represents the physical cosmos, where the Pleromic rays of light are caught inside to create life or drive the engine of creation. In fact, the “eye of light” is curiously called “Adam” in the Nag Hammadi text, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, which corresponds to the idea of the Naassene “First Man” or the Manichaean Primal Adam and even the Second Adam/Logos doctrine of Paul per 1 Corinthians 15.
The perfect Savior said: “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. First Begetter Father is called ‘Adam, Eye of Light,’ because he came from shining Light, and his holy angels, who are ineffable (and) shadowless, ever rejoice with joy in their reflecting, which they received from their Father.
The “seven rays” theme can be found in Gnosticism and Theosophy as they relate to the seven pillars of the Holy Spirit. Over at Jesus8880.com, Daniel Gleason writes about isopsephia (the ancient Greek practice of gematria in which hidden meaning is found based on the numerical values of Greek letters):
Basilides was absolutely famous for combining mathematics with religion. Orthodox Christians viewed the practice of isopsephia as a kind of “number magic” and the graphing of diagrams (images) as “another kind of curious art.” There are three isopsehia riddles hidden in Irenaeus’ account: The barbarous name “Caulacau” is a pun on Isaiah 28:9-13 which reads . . . “To whom would God impart knowledge (gnosis)? To whom would he convey the message? . . . [F]or them the Word of the Lord shall be: command upon command, line upon line, here a little there a little.” The Hebrew pronunciation for the words “command” and “line” is SAU-LASAU and CAU-LACAU! Amazingly, it appears no one before me has bothered to compute the isopsephia value of the Greek spelling for the name Cau-la-cau (Kaeu-lae-kaeu). The answer is “888,” the same number as Jesus! The “coined name” Caulacau is thus a clever Gnostic riddle that equates the name Jesus with gnosis (knowledge)!
These authors are actually inspired by Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.XV.2), when they equate Jesus with 888 since Marcus the Magician allegedly did the same thing with his esoteric numerology. In the Gnostics and Their Remains, by Charles William King, he writes how the seven rays connect to the crown of the demiurge or the Khnoubis, the 1st decan of Leo and much more:
Over the seven rays of the lion’s crown, and corresponding to their points, stand often the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet, ΑΕΗΙΟϒΩ, testifying the Seven Heavens; a mystery whereof notice shall be taken in the fitting place (p. 218).
Earlier in Revelation 2:17, Jesus tells the reader that the one who “overcomes” will be given a white stone with a new name:
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.
This white stone with a new name can be linked with the holy stone with the seven eyes we see in Zechariah. This white stone is the stone of acquittal, given to those who have been found not guilty. There is a hidden manna also bestowed upon the believer. The manna and the stone go hand in hand. Manna is a code word for divine love, the hidden mystery of God, revealed to the overcomers. The divine stone is also associated with the birth of Mithra, who was born from a rock. Revelation (2:26-28) also tells us that the “morning star” will be given to those same overcomers:
To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— that one ‘will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery’ —just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give that one the morning star.
The saved or the overcomers will also reign with Christ and sits on the throne with Christ and is given the gift of the “morning star” of salvation! In Ioan Culianu’s Tree of Gnosis (p. 153), we see the scheme of how the demiurge functions in relation to the Good God:
The revelation of the good God is not deserved by humans in any way, either as a result of relation or of any particular merit. The good God is totally alien to the world and has not been announced by anyone before Christ. Whereas the inferior Demiurge dwells in the first heaven, the good God, defined as superior and sublimior, dwells in the third. He deserves the title “Father” not because he is the Father of humankind but because he is the Father (Creator) of an immaterial and inaccessible World. An infinite distance separates this God, who reigns at the top of the universe, from the lower Demiurge, the god of this time period, deus saeculi huius. Whereas the Demiurge is primarily just, the superior God is good. He does not judge. Only pity moves him to reveal himself through Christ and make an end to the terrible Law. Although deprived of a physical body, Christ suffered and died on the cross, after which he went to hell, a place divided into a compartment where sinners are tormented, and a purgatory (refrigerium) for the righteous according to the Demiurge’s conception of justice. In the first he saved a few people who underwent cruel and unnecessary punishment.
Perhaps those who obtain the white stone are saved from the wrath of the demiurge and the judgment of the world, including the angels by Christ’s saints (1 Cor. 6:3). The “white stone” is also associated with the Temple Mount as well as the Foundation Stone story we see in texts like in 2 Enoch. Revelation explains that one day, the devil, and the principalities of St. Paul, will be forcefully evicted from heaven and thrown down to earth, where they will be in control for only a short time before their judgment comes as we saw previously in Revelation 12:7-9. The long article Domination by Deception by Peter Goodgame is also an essential key to our discussion of Revelation 12 and how it fits in with the current “zeitgeist.”
In the next post (or perhaps the book itself), we will see how the symbols used by Zechariah, Genesis, and Revelation are also integral in the Esoteric Hollywood’s predictive programming methods in popular culture. Do the films Dark City, Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey have special coded messages that refer to our reality and future events?We will also re-examine Baphomet and Mete’s special significance in this strange tale in light of Revelation, the Winged Mother, the Great Red Dragon and the Anti-Christ
In the Gospel of John (14:26), we see Jesus saying:
But the Parakletos, Who is the Holy Spirit, Who the Father will send in My name, He will teach you everything…”
The pronoun “He” is demanded since the Greek word Parakletos, is a masculine noun. It means “advocate” (or “comforter” as Origen and the KJV would have it). Many Christians regard the word Paraclete as a proper name for the Holy Spirit, but this assumption is false because the Holy Spirit is not the only Paraklete.
If anyone sins, we have a Parakletos Who is with the Father – Jesus Christ the righteous. – I John 2:1
We see here, quite plainly, that Jesus Christ is a Paraklete along with the Holy Spirit, Who is another Paraclete.
“I (Christ) will pray to the Father and He will give you another Parakletos, Who will live with you forever, even the Spirit of truth.” – John 14:16
What does the term “another” mean except that there must be at least two Parakletes, the Son and the Spirit. Therefore, the word “Paraklete” cannot be a specific name for the Holy Spirit. It is not a proper name. It is only a descriptive noun whose gender is incidental and unimportant. Once this is grasped, the masculinity of the Holy Spirit becomes completely unnecessary.
Another reason for why the Holy Spirit is traditionally called “He” occurs because of Hebrew-Greek translation issues. As mentioned before, the Hebrew word Ruach, a feminine noun meaning breath, wind, or spirit, was used frequently in the Hebrew Bible in the phrase Ruach Elohim which means “Spirit of God.” Thus, the Holy Spirit of the Old Testament is undoubtedly feminine. When the Hebrew was translated into Greek, the Greek word “Pneuma” was chosen to substitute for “Ruach,” since it also meant breath, wind, or spirit. But the gender was lost in translation, for Pneuma carries a neuter gender. Thus, the phrase Pneuma to Agion, which is used very commonly throughout the New Testament and means “Holy Spirit,” actually possesses a neuter gender. We can see the linguistic tension displayed by studying several translations of Acts 8:15-16,
Prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for it had not yet fallen on any of them – RSV
Prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (For as yet he was fallen upon none of them) – KJV
Prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them – NIV
The RSV preserves the most literal meaning, calling the Holy Spirit an “it,” according to pneuma’s neuter gender. The KJV calls the Holy Spirit “He” in an attempt to preserve the Personhood of the Trinity’s third member, but the literal translation demands the pronoun “It.” The NIV attempts to sidestep the issue altogether, intentionally ignoring the actual Greek and spelling out the noun again when, in fact, the Greek text demands a pronoun instead. Of course, the KJV’s solution to the problem has become the convention. The web of doctrinal errors caused by the translators can be superseded by a more ancient doctrine that is closer to what the earliest Christians believed, which that the Mother is one and the same as the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, according to scripture, the Holy Spirit is composed of seven parts!
Wisdom has built Her house. She has hewn out Her seven pillars. – Proverbs 9:1
Grace and peace be with you from Him Who is, Who was, and Who is to come, and from the seven Spirits Who are before His throne, and from Jesus Christ…”- Revelation 1:4-5
There are seven eyes on that stone – Zechariah 3:9
She says “Come, eat My bread and drink the wine I have mixed.” – Proverbs 9:5
“There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse,
And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him,
The Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The Spirit of counsel and might,
The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” – Isaiah 11:1-2
The seven pillars, the seven spirits of God and the seven eyes of the holy stone all refer to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit according to St. Paul 1 Corinthians (12:27-31):
27 Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually. 28 And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues. 29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? 30 Do all have gifts of healings? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? 31 But earnestly desire the best gifts. And yet I show you a more excellent way.
And yet without the spirit of Love, all of these gifts are vanity as St. Paul continues in the next chapter:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Revelation 12 also seems to have a Gnostic flavor to it as well, as I’ve discussed in depth in Gnostic Exegesis in Revelation 12. As quoted above, we do see the woman with eagle wings who gives birth to the “male child” sounds curiously close to Sophia-Achamoth who is oppressed by the “red dragon” or the “serpent,” which are codes in Ophite-Gnostic terminology for Yaltabaoth, the “child of chaos” we see in many Gnostic texts. He is a sort of a Chimera of Satan, the Dragon of Revelation, and Yahweh or Jehovah’s more negative aspects of jealousy, anger and wrath. The “male child” is a Gnostic code word for spirit. And as we already saw, the spirit is often portrayed as female, however it is equally acceptable for the spirit to to be depicted as male as well. The offspring of Sophia, or the Mother are the pneumatics who obey God’s instructions and commandments and worship the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. As Tim Claason points out in Sophia and the Queen of Heaven, there are striking similarities between the Winged Mother and Male Child and the Christ that was brought forth from a heavenly Mother per Irenaeus in Against Heresies (Book 1, 11).
Christ also was not produced from the Æons within the Pleroma, but was brought forth by the mother who had been excluded from it, in virtue of her remembrance of better things, but not without a kind of shadow. He, indeed, as being masculine, having severed the shadow from himself, returned to the Pleroma; but his mother being left with the shadow, and deprived of her spiritual substance, brought forth another son, namely, the Demiurge, whom he also styles the supreme ruler of all those things which are subject to him.
The “wilderness” that the dark face of Sophia finds herself stranded in is the bitter waters of primordial chaos that existed before the ordered structure of the universe as does the floods spewed from the serpent’s mouth to drown the “male child”. We see other instances of the “wilderness” of chaos throughout the Old Testament including where the Israelites and the sacrifice of atonement, Azazel, were cast into. 1 Enoch also tells us that sin would be “ascribed to” or “given” to Azazel, chained in Sheol, or the wilderness, from the time of Noah. In a way, the wilderness can be seen as being somehow connected to “Sheol,” “Hades” or the intermediate realm. And somehow the Winged Woman escapes the wrath of the gods and hides in the wilderness, as well. The flood symbolism also connects to Jesus’ own words from Luke 17:26, connecting the return of Christ during a time that resembles just like the days of Noah, in which the flood obviously occurred: “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man.”
In the first part of Revelation 12, we see the Woman Clothed with the Sun as being in labor pains about to give birth while the great, fiery red dragon with seven heads and ten horns is not too far behind that is preparing to devour the “male child” of the Sun Lady. This red dragon also happened to drag one third of the stars with him from heaven to earth. The male child or the Body of Christ is also prophesized to be given a “rod of iron”to rule the nations one day, under the reign of Christ and the saints to replace the rulership of Satan and hostile his angels over the world.
The word “rod” is connected to the Shepherd’s club as well as the raised staff with the brazen serpent that Moses was instructed to erect so that the children of Israel could look upon it be saved from the wrath of fiery serpent demons. The male child here seems to have a threefold meaning: it represents not only the “spirit” but also the church. Although the church is depicted many times as the “Bride of Christ” it can also be depicted as “male.” The male child can also symbolize the Messiah as prophesied in Isaiah and fulfilled in the Gospels and in Paul’s epistles.
In both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, believers are encouraged to offer prayers to the Virgin Mary, whom they honor as the Mother of God. It is fitting for them to turn to her and ask her to intercede on their behalf before her beloved Son. In many of their services, they find themselves singing a simple refrain: “O’ Most-Holy Theotokos, Save Us!” Another popular prayer to the Virgin is based on the words of the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation: “Rejoice, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.” And so, Orthodox Christians are reminded to never lose sight of the significant role that the Theotokos played in God’s plan of salvation for mankind. She found favor with God and was selected from all the women who ever lived to the instrument of God’s grace, giving flesh to His Divine Son.
Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.15.3), tells us that a certain arch-heretic, Marcus the Magician taught that the historical, fleshy Jesus was born not just from the Holy Spirit but also from the “Son of Man,” the Church, the Logos, and Life:
As to the AEons, they proceeded from the Tetrad, and in that Tetrad were Anthropos and Ecclesia, Logos and Zoe. The powers, then, he declares, who emanated from these, generated that Jesus who appeared upon the earth. The angel Gabriel took the place of Logos, the Holy Spirit that of Zoe, the Power of the Highest that of Anthropos, while the Virgin pointed out the place of Ecclesia. And thus, by a special dispensation, there was generated by Him, through Mary, that man, whom, as He passed through the womb, the Father of all chose to [obtain] the knowledge of Himself by means of the Word.
The Sun Lady is also taken into the wilderness and is actually prepared a place for her to rest in as some sort of bubble that separates her from the chaos outside and is even “fed” for 3 and ½ years. In the second part of the chapter, we see Michael battling Satan, the Devil and Deceiver, who casts him out from heaven and his angelic host. Next, Revelation 12:10-13 states:
10 Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. 11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”
It is clear that after the “Male child” is snatched away and taken up to heaven, while the Devil is cast out to the earth and tribulation and chaos quickly ensues thereafter upon all who dwell in the world, hence: “Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”Margaret Barker in The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Book of Revelation remarks on this part of Revelation 12, connecting Jesus’s testimony to his disciples from Luke 10:
Jesus had seen this vision. When the seventy disciples returned from their mission, joyful that they had been able to cast out demons, Jesus said: ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy…’ (Luke 10.17-19). When had he seen this? Seventy is a significant number since there had been 70 sons of God, that is, 70 great angels, in the world of the first temple, and here they have defeated the offspring of the great dragon, the ancient serpent.
There are many indications in the gospels that Jesus knew the visions in Revelation. His parable of the angel reapers, for example (Matt.13.36-43) is very similar to the vision of the angel reapers in Revelation 14; and the so-called little apocalypse (Mark 13 and parallels) is a summary of Revelation 6, the vision of the seven seals. The opening lines of the Book of Revelation say that these are the visions received by Jesus: ‘The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show to his servants what must soon take place…’ John the Baptist knew that Jesus had received visions: ‘He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony (John 3.32). The meaning of the visions was revealed to John, when Jesus the Lord sent his angel to him. In John’s gospel, this angel is the called the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth who teaches all things and helps the disciple to remember (John 14.26; 16.13).
The number 70, as Barker points out is a very important point and is tied with numerology/Greek gematria. As pointed out previously in my article, High Priests of the Heavenly Temple: Jesus, Melchizedek and Metatron of 3 Enoch, Paul believed that his generation was ruled under the 70th angel, which is one the “Sons of God” of the “Most High God” being “El Elyon.” This is indicated in Ephesians 6:12, where he states that various principalities, powers and archons of darkness that rule over the heavens and earth. Psalms 82 tells us that the Most High God, through his Son, Yahweh/Jesus, will eventually judge the seventy angelic princes who fell from their “first estate” in the Divine Council. He will also judge the nations that are put under the sway and control of Satan, the “Prince and Power of the Air” and the injustices carried out under the rulership of “the gods” or the archons. There are many meanings attached the the number 70. The number 70 is also connected to the number of generations that exist between Enoch and Jesus. In 1 Enoch 10 (11-12), God commands Michael to bind the sinful Watchers in the valleys of the earth for 70 generations:
And the Lord said unto Michael: ‘Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated.
It was the mission of Jesus to undo the damage inflicted from the cursed covenant made with the Watchers, placed upon mankind. In the article, The Divine Council and the Kabbalah by Peter Goodwill, he writes:
Liberation is what the sacrifice of Jesus did for humanity. Prior to the Messiah God possessed just one nation, but after the Cross the grip on the nations that was held by the wicked b’nai ha elohim was broken, and the way became open for every human being to become one with the Creator. The old system of God dealing with the pagan nations on a second-hand basis through the medium of the Divine Council was ended. The rule of the gods was over, and through Christ every human being could become personally reconciled with the one true God.
In the Old Testament God stands in the divine assembly and accuses the b’nai ha elohim of being unjust and merciless in their dealings with humanity (Psalm 82), and of being in error (Job 4:18), and unclean (Job 15:15). And in Psalm 82 and Isaiah 24:21 God declares that one day these powers will be punished and destroyed. That day is not far off, but in the meantime these fallen and humiliated b’nai ha elohim continue to plot against God and deceive humanity.
It should be noted that these are also the same as the “Shepherd angels” or “Watchers” discussed at length in Jeremiah and 1 and 2 Enoch and even their titanic and daemonic Nephilim children. The Dead Sea Scroll Damascus Document (3:15-20) even mentions the angels who would intermarry with the daughters of men and have intercourse with them.
Hear now, my sons, and I will uncover your eyes that you may see and understand the works of God, that you may choose that which pleases Him and reject that which He hates, that you may walk perfectly in all His ways and not follow after thoughts of the guilty inclination and after eyes of lust. For through them, great men have gone astray and mighty heroes have stumbled from former times till now. Because they walked in the stubbornness of their heart the Heavenly Watchers fell; they were caught because they did not keep the commandments of God. And their sons also fell who were tall as cedar trees and whose bodies were like mountains. All flesh on dry land perished; they were as though they had never been because they did their own will and did not keep the commandment of their Maker so that His wrath was kindled against them.
And as Barker mentions in her lengthy article, Jesus Christ himself in Luke (10:1-7), gives his seventy disciples, a holy mission to preach that “the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you”:
After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come. Therefore said he unto them, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest. Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves. Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the laborer is worthy of his hire.”
It seems to me that these seventy missionaries are undoing the evil influence of the angelic rulers in the cities and nations that Jesus threatens with fiery judgement, in the end, as we see only sentences later. Jesus then testifies that he witnessed Satan fall like lightning from heaven to earth, mirroring how the Devil is cast to earth by Michael in Revelation 12:
“Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which have been done in you, they had a great while ago repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be thrust down to hell. He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.”
And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”
In the book, Gnostic John the Baptizer: Selections from the Mandæan John-Book by G.R.S. Mead says that the Jonah myth is tied with the idea that the initiate would have to descended to the “Belly of the Whale” which is a metaphor for descending to Hades or hell, would preach to those in Nineveh, which is symbolic of the world much like how Jesus descends to Hades to preach to the condemned spirits. Such episodes sound like they are related to spiritual alchemy and the rebirth process.
The Jonah-legend provided a very suitable setting wherein to depict the life of a prophet who caused his hearers to repent, and it may be that Jesus referred to John as ‘a greater Jonah’ (Mt. 12:41). The most striking image in the mythic story is the Great Fish. Now the belly of the Great Fish for the Jewish allegorists, and indeed it is plainly stated in the legend itself, was Sheōl, the Underworld, the Pit. But another mythic Great Fish, or perhaps the same in another aspect, was the cosmic monster Leviāthān. And symbolists, allegorists and mystics got busy with this mythic figure. Thus we find that Leviāthān was the name given by the Ophites of Celsus, who are plainly of Syrian Babylonian origin, to the Seven,—that is to the cosmic animal psychē, the hierarchy of rulers and devourers of the animal souls of men as well as of animals proper, each of the Seven being symbolized by an animal figure, probably an animal-faced (lion, etc.) dragon or fish.
In the Mandæan tradition the Fisher of Souls takes the Seven in his net and destroys them, even as in the old Babylonian myth the Saviour-god Manduk {sic., read Marduk} catches Tiamāt, their mother, the primeval dragon of the deep, in his net and destroys her. And strangely enough there is an old Rabbinical legend of Jonah preserved in the Midrash Yalqut Yona (§ 1), which relates that, when the prophet was in the belly of the Great Fish, he prayed that it should carry him quickly to the Leviāthān, so that be might catch it with his fishing tackle. For Jonah desired, when once again safely ashore, to make of its flesh a feast for the righteous,—a distinct reference to the Messianic fish-banquet which is to take place in the days of the End.
In the Strong Concordance, we see the number 70 is connected to the Hebrew word “oben.” Oben means a “wheel” or a “disk.” In the Greek, the number 70 is connected with “watching” or “sleeplessness” which have potent connections to gnosis as we see in the Parable of the Ten Maidens (Matthew 25:1-13) and in the Gospel of Mark 14 (32-42). The prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a “tetramorph,” which is composed of four creatures, having the heads of a man, a bull, a lion and an eagle, each attached to one of the sides of God’s “chariot,” or traveling throne.
Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel (Ezekiel 1:15-16).
In the Gnostic text, On the Origin of the World, it tells us that the redeemed Archon Sabaoth creates for himself a throne attended by “Cherubin” or Cherubim. This Archon sounds a lot like Yahweh and his heavenly throne envisioned by Ezekiel. It also tells us that there also 72 gods or kosmocrators that rule over the 72 languages of the “peoples” being mankind.
And before his mansion he created a throne, which was huge and was upon a four-faced chariot called “Cherubin”. Now the Cherubin has eight shapes per each of the four corners, lion forms and calf forms and human forms and eagle forms, so that all the forms amount to sixty-four forms – and seven archangels that stand before it; he is the eighth, and has authority. All the forms amount to seventy-two. Furthermore, from this chariot the seventy-two gods took shape; they took shape so that they might rule over the seventy-two languages of the peoples. And by that throne he created other, serpent-like angels, called “Seraphin”, which praise him at all times.
This is what St. John the Divine also sees (with some variations) in Revelation 4:6-9. The wheel is also connected to “wheel of fate” mentioned by the church father Hippolytus in Refutation of All Heresies (V, 10), as being guided by Kronos, the demiurge as testified by the Peratic gnostics. What does any of this have to do with the assumption of the Mother and the male child into heaven? As we saw just now, the Book of Revelation has many correspondences to not only Gnosticism, but also other apocalyptic literature such as Ezekiel and the Book of Enoch. It is this wheel of fate that also seems to be broken and even transformed as we will discuss more in depth in a future chapter. And in the next post, we will see how all of this connects to what is occurring on the world stage and perhaps even in future events.
Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ (Revelation 12:13-17).
In recent months, there has been much discussion and rumors about the 9/23/2017 date being a “pivot” date for the Revelation 12-star sign connected with the Sun Lady, the Woman clothed with the Sun and the Zodiacal star-sign of Virgo. Some have even connected the date with the pre-tribulation/mid-tribulation/post-tribulation rapture or the “translation of the saints” as per 1 Thessalonians (4:13-17). This won’t be an article in full support for prophetic dates but more about unpacking the less obvious theological implications as prophesied all throughout Revelation 12 and associated religious and even esoteric, occult connections.
The Woman Clothed with the Sun is depicted as the Mother of whose children keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus per Revelation 12. The Woman was a Mother in heaven whose firstborn was a king, as in Psalm 2. She was a Queen, threatened by the red dragon or the “prince and power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2). She fled to the desert or the “wilderness” (there are manifold meanings attached to this term to be explored later). Her children were the Christians. Jesus was the firstborn among many children:
“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8.29).
However, it does not mean that Jesus Christ is simply a created angel like the Egyptian Arians maintained since the Gospel of John refutes this position. Keeping the commandments is linked to the “preservers” or the “preserved” (Psalm 31:23). The Methodist scholar Margaret Barker states in the Mother in Heaven and Her Children that the Nazarenes were also called the “preservers.”
The dragon attacked the woman’s other children, and John explained who they were. They kept the commandments of God and they had the testimony of Jesus. Keeping the commandments might mean simply not breaking any of the ten commandments, but the word used, tēreō, is quite strong and means ‘guard’, or ‘preserve’. It was used in the Greek Old Testament to translate the word nāṣar. This word too was sometimes used to mean keeping the commandments, e.g. Psalm 78.7: ‘They should guard/preserve his commandments’; but it was also used to describe a particular group of faithful people within Israel were preserved or guarded, e.g. Psalm 31.23: ‘Love the Lord all you his saints! The Lord guards/preserves the faithful! Or Isaiah 27.3: ‘I, the Lord, guard/preserve[the pleasant vineyard]… I guard/preserve it night and day’.
The role of a mysterious figure called the Servant of the Lord was to restore the faithful, these ‘guarded/ preserved ones’. This means that at some stage they were driven out.
The prophet Micah described a woman, the daughter of Zion, as being a woman in “birth pangs” and that the Lord will deliver her from the hands of the enemies in Micah 4.8-13. She then reappears in the Book of Revelation. In the prophecies of the Virgin, the Mother and the rulership of her son as in Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 9:6-7, also seem to mirror the Sun Lady of Revelation 12 with the birthing of the “male child” (more on this later). We see in the wisdom texts of Solomon, namely Proverbs 1:22-23, that the Mother warns her children of their stupidity since they are “simple.”
“How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?
For scorners delight in their scorning,
And fools hate knowledge.
Turn at my rebuke;
Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.
Wisdom is personified in the book of Proverbs in such a way that She is equal with God. The Hebrew word for Wisdom, Chokmah, carries the feminine gender. Both ancient Jewish and ancient Christian authorities point to Her co-divinity with God, as we shall demonstrate. Speaking as Wisdom in the first person, Solomon wrote in Proverbs (8:23), that she was with God and the Logos before creation:
“I have been established from everlasting, From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.”
In an early Christian text found amongst the Nag Hammadi Codices, the Teaching of Silvanus 90-91, tells us:
“From now on, then, my son, return to your divine nature. Cast from [you] these evil, deceiving friends! [Accept] Christ, [this true friend], as a good teacher. Cast from you death, which has become a father to you. For death did not exist, nor will it exist at the end. But since you cast from yourself God, the holy Father, the true Life, the Spring of Life, therefore you have obtained death as a father and have acquired ignorance as a mother. They have robbed you of the true knowledge. But return, my son, to your first Father, God, and Wisdom your mother, from whom you came into being from the very first in order that you might fight against all of your enemies, the Powers of the Adversary.”
In the [now almost] lost The Gospel of the Hebrews has Jesus calling the Holy Spirit his Mother.
“My Mother, the Holy Spirit, took Me by one of My hairs and carried Me to Mount Tabor.” – Jesus Christ
The Gospel of Hebrews was an accepted scripture of the Judaizing Nazarene Sect of Christianity – a group of Jewish Christians led by Jesus’ brother James, and later, by Jesus’ cousin Simeon. Spirit is a feminine noun in Hebrew (ruach), and so the children of the Spirit should be understood as the children of the Mother in heaven:
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Romans 8:16-18).
This teaching is not too far from how the Gnostic Ophites (according to St. Irenaeus in Against Heresies) claim that Sophia prepared Jesus’s baptism at the river Jordan and united with Christ to possess Jesus. They departed from him after the crucifixion but Christ resurrected Jesus with a special resurrection spirit body since “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). Wisdom is justified, edikaiōthē, by all her deeds/children (Matthew 11:19). We also see the Mother archetype in the Nativity story in Luke (2:1-20), as depicted as the holy virgin Mary, who gave birth to her firstborn son, Jesus, and wrapped him in garments in a manger. Before Jesus ascended, he said to his disciples:
44 Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” 45 And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.
46 Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, 47 and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48 And you are witnesses of these things. 49 Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high.”
The promise that Jesus gave to his disciples was that the Mother or the Holy Spirit would clothe her children with righteousness and understanding (wisdom/logos). This is confirmed back in Proverbs (2:2-6).
So that you incline your ear to wisdom,
And apply your heart to understanding;
Yes, if you cry out for discernment,
And lift up your voice for understanding,
If you seek her as silver,
And search for her as for hidden treasures;
Then you will understand the fear of the Lord,
And find the knowledge of God.
For the Lord gives wisdom;
From His mouth come knowledge and understanding;
The Hebrew for “understanding” is Tawboon and the and the Greek Logos, both of which are masculine in gender, we can identify Tawboon with Logos, Understanding with Christ. Thus we have here Son and Spirit, Understanding and Wisdom, together with God, completing the Holy Trinity. That the early church fathers identified Lady Wisdom with the Holy Spirit is beyond a doubt. St. Irenaeus in Against Heresies (4.20.1):
For the Word and Wisdom were always present with God, the Son and the Spirit, by Whom and in Whom He freely and spontaneously created everything. These are the Ones to Whom He said, “Let us make man in Our own image and likeness… Therefore, it was not angels who made us”
The Word, Who is the Son, was always with the Father. Wisdom, too, Who is the Spirit, was in God’s presence before anything was created. For the Spirit declared by Solomon, “By Wisdom God set the foundations of the earth, and by Understanding He set up the heaven. By His knowledge the Deep burst forth and the clouds dropped down the dew…” and again, “When he began the heavens, I was with Him…” Therefore, there is one God, Who, by the Word and Wisdom created and arranged everything.” – Against Heresies (4.20.3-4).
Wisdom is more versatile than any motion. Since She is pure, she pervades and penetrates everything. She is the breath (Ruach/Spirit) of God’s power, and the spotless emanation of the Almighty’s glory. Thus, no unclean thing finds a place within Her. She is the reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of God’s works, the image of His goodness. She is only one, but She can accomplish anything, and being within Herself, She rejuvenates everything. Throughout all generations She lives within holy souls, making them God’s friends and His prophets. – Wisdom of Solomon (7:24-27)
This last quote is especially interesting since it points to the fact that ancient pre-Christian Judaism identified Wisdom with the Spirit of prophecy, a trait of the Holy Spirit. Certainly, English Bibles have been calling the Holy Spirit “He” according to the masculine gender for a long time. You might ponder, “There must be a reason for this.” Indeed there is!
Hey, folks. Here is the first guest post of 2017. This is by a friend of mine but who wants to remain anonymous through the pen-name “Colorbas”. This one is about the concept of the “abortion” in reference to Demiurge being a malformed aborted fetus which eventually grow up into a blundering “god of the void,” when he stole a portion of Sophia’s power. This connects to the Eucharist, the Gospel of John, and Epiphanius’ slanderous and lurid description of a Gnostic cannibalistic practice. Yeah. Read on to find out more!
Before learning what the truth of the crucifixion actually is, one must first understand the same theology that the Ancients understood. It is a prerequisite because today we live in a 2000 year old smoke screen theology of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches which has only served to provide a false foundation which corrupted a proper understanding of the true meaning of the crucifixion.
So for the first part we shall learn the story of Sophia (Wisdom), her fall, her birth of a male child first called “Yaldabaoth,” then also called “Samael.” But this child was the one who was the architect of this world. His servants call him Jehovah or Yahweh. But what one must learn is what Sophia and her child must do to have Sophia’s error corrected. So let us begin with this: Who was Sophia? Sophia (“Wisdom”) was the youngest of the emanated divinities (or “Aeons”). Here is an explanation of the Aeons derived from the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis – Section 31:
These are the 30 Aeons … which have been kept secret and are not known. This is their invisible, spiritual Pleroma, with its triple division into “Ogdoad”, “Decad” and “Dodecad”. … “First-Progenitor” is known only to “Only-Begotten”, that is to “Mind”, who originated from him. To all the rest he is invisible and incomprehensible. Only “Mind” … enjoyed the contemplation of the Father and rejoiced in the perception of his immeasurable greatness. And he intended to communicate the greatness of the Father to the remaining Aeons, what he was like and how great he was, and how he was without beginning, uncontainable and impossible to see. But by the Father’s will Silence restrained him, because she meant to arouse them all to an intent and yearning to seek after their “First-Progenitor”.
Similarly the other Aeons also had a sort of silent yearning to see the originator of their seed, and be informed of their root which had no beginning. Sophia, the youngest of the Aeons (emanated divinities), was the one who was responsible for the “Fall”. Sophia (“Wisdom”) attempted to know the “First-Progenitor;” although this was impossible for the Aeons who had come after the first “Ogdoad.” (Male-female pairs are called “Syzygies.” Two such Syzygies are called a “Tetrad.” Two such Tetrads are called an “Ogdoad.”)
How did Sophia Fall?
“And … Sophia (Wisdom) … being an Aeon, conceived a thought from herself with the reflection of the Invisible Spirit and Foreknowledge. She wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the [Invisible] Spirit … and without her consort… And because of the invincible power which is in her, her thought did not remain idle and a thing came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort… And when she saw the consequence of her desire, it had changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires… She cast it away from her, outside that place [the Pleroma], that no one of the immortal ones [the other Aeons] might see it, for she had created it in ignorance… And she called his name Yaldabaoth…” [Apocryphon of John, from the Nag Hammadi Library]
Yaldabaoth is the negative and/or inferior world-architect (“Demiurge”). The Cosmos is the result of a celestial error. The only perfect existence is the Pleroma. The Cosmos is not the result of a deliberate act of a supreme God (as is taught by most modern versions of Christianity) but rather the result of an error made by the lowest of the emanated divinities. Sophia’s passion generates an “abortion,” a “formless entity,” which she cast outside the Pleroma. As a result of this error, the Father emanates a new Aeon-pair (a new “syzygy”), Christ and Holy Spirit, to take care of the “formless entity” which had resulted from Sophia’s passion. And a new, unpaired Aeon, Jesus, is emanated, who is the “perfect fruit of the Pleroma”, and expresses in his being the full attributes of all the Aeons.
As it says in Colossians, “For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”. The Christ Aeon re-shaped the “formless entity,” which then became the Demiurge. And Sophia becomes known as “Achamoth,” a lower Sophia. She becomes the spiritual essence hidden in the soul; and even unknown to her child the Demiurge. The “Fall” actually Preceded “Creation.” The Demiurge, upon,
“opening his eyes, he saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, “It is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me”. When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are mistaken, Samael” – which is, ‘god of the blind’. [The Hypostasis of the Archons]
***
“And our sister Sophia is she who came down in innocence in order to rectify her deficiency. Therefore she was called Life, which is the mother of the living, by the Foreknowledge of the sovereignty of heaven. And through her they have tasted the Perfect Knowledge.” [The Secret Book of John]
Warning: The following last part is VERY GROTESQUE!
But it is necessary in order to come to a proper understanding of the crucifixion! How the Error of Sophia is Corrected Holy Communion, the bread and wine, from the earliest of times has always been understood to literally be the body and blood of Christ. Early Christians believed that the body of Christ was the dead body of that “formless entity” which emanated from Sophia. It was the “Abortion” which Sophia cast outside the Pleroma! If you are of the Spiritual you have true life within you. You must return that “formless entity” back to Sophia by eating it. Eating the body of Christ means to eat Sophia’s abortion! And this, the early Gnostic Christians called the “Perfect Passover.”
« But even though one of them should accidentally implant the seed of his natural emission prematurely and the woman becomes pregnant, listen to a more dreadfulthing that such people venture to do. They extract the fetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this [herd] of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers. And now, after this cannibalism, they pray to God and say, “We were not mocked by the archon of lust, but have gathered the brother’s blunder up!” And this, if you please, is their idea of the “Perfect Passover.” » (Panarion 26.5,4-6)
Gnostic Christians understood that having children is an error because all flesh in this world is the flesh of the archon who created the world and it really is a taking part in the Heavenly error made by Sophia when she gave birth to the abortion. The error is corrected by Sophia taking the archon/abortion back into herself. We take part in this correction by eating the aborted body and thus taking it back into ourselves. The Body of Christ is the dead body of this archon/abortion! This is the original understanding of Holy Communion and the Body of Christ on the Cross. Yes indeed! This theology is very grotesque! Christ gave the rite of Holy Communion to spare our minds from experiencing the consumption of human flesh and blood, which would only serve to set our minds on the flesh, rather than set our minds on the spirit. As it is recorded in the Gospel of John, “It is spirit who gives life; flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (John 6:63).
“Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me, he also will live because of me” (John 6:52-57).
***
« “The Lord hath shown me what my soul must say on its ascent to heaven, and how it must answer each of the powers on high. ‘I have recognized myself,’ it saith, ‘and gathered myself from every quarter, and have sown no children for the archon. But I have pulled up his roots, and gathered my scattered members, and I know who thou art. For I,’ it saith, ‘am of the ones on high.’ “ » [From the Gospel of Philip – not the one in the Nag Hammadi Library, but rather the real one!] (Panarion of Epiphanius 26.13,2-3)
This quote is from the real Gospel of Philip, I say, because it is quoted by Epiphanius as such. And, the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi Library not only does not have this verse, but – in reading it – there is a lot of Catholic-like verses contained in it. The verse here quoted relates to the early Gnostic Christian understanding of how to correct the error of having children, i.e. “sowing children for the archon” (the archon is Jehovah). – The correction is by “gathering your scattered members.”
Epiphanius comments:
“But if it turns out to have fathered a son, it is detained below until it can take its own children up and restore them to itself.”
Conclusion
Now it becomes clear why they Apostle Paul referred to the “Cross” with the words the “offense of the Cross” (Galatians 5:11)! “As a result of this many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore” (John 6:66). After Jesus left the Christ on the Cross, and the Christ said to Jesus, “My God my God why have you forsaken me,” the Second Man sacrificed his body on behalf of all bodies of flesh, so that by eating we spiritually we take part in the Perfect Redemption! “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). “Now those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).
Welcome to 2017! In previous posts, especially this one, I’ve noted that the Old Testament and even the New Testament are rife filled with references to other gods, or a plurality of gods (which are actually angels or archons, according to the Christian and Gnostic traditions). This is especially evident in the Apocrypha like the Books of Enoch, Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Library. According to the dogma of the Nicene Creed of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Moses taught monotheism on Mount Sinai from Yahweh. But careful research will lead to the opposite. He didn’t. They tell us that the Judeo-Christian tradition has always believed in only one God since the beginning. It didn’t. In fact, monotheism wasn’t even part of church doctrine until well into the Middle Ages. It didn’t even exist in the minds of the ancient Hebrews or Egyptians until the late 600’s BCE, long after Moses and the early Prophets. As we saw, the Bible is one of many places that the tradition of “many gods” can be found.
In the Dead Sea Scrolls for instance, the War Scroll 1:10 tells us:
On the day when the Kittim fall, there shall be battle and terrible carnage before the God of Israel, for that shall be the day appointed from ancient times for the battle of destruction of the sons of darkness. At that time, the assembly of gods and the hosts of men shall battle, causing great carnage; on the day of calamity, the sons of light shall battle with the company of darkness amid the shouts of a mighty multitude and the clamour of gods and men to (make manifest) the might of God. And it shall be a time of [great] tribulation for the people which God shall redeem; of all its afflictions none shall be as this, from its sudden beginning until its end in eternal redemption.
In the Nag Hammadi Codices, a rather curious and long, late Valentinian text, called the Tripartite Tractate, the author goes on a long-winded diatribe about how some Jews were not monotheists:
By interpreting them, they established many heresies which exist to the present among the Jews.Some say that God is one, who made a proclamation in the ancient scriptures. Others say that he is many. Some say that God is simple and was a single mind in nature. Others say that his activity is linked with the establishment of good and evil. Still others say that he is the creator of that which has come into being. Still others say that it was by the angels that he created.
Back in the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically in the War Scroll (IQM, 1Q33, 4Q491-7, 4Q471), it mentions a church of gods, and that Michael reigns over a kingdom of gods. They also specify that these are living gods, indicating their real existence outside the imagination.
Be strong and fear not; [for they tend] towards chaos and confusion, and they lean on that which is not and [shall not be. To the God] of Israel belongs all that is and shall be; [He knows] all the happenings of eternity. This is the day appointed by Him for the defeat and overthrow of the Prince of the kingdom of wickedness, and He will send eternal succour to the company of His redeemed by the might of the princely Angel of the kingdom of Michael. With everlasting light He will enlighten with joy [the children] of Israel; peace and blessing shall be with the company of God. He will raise up the kingdom of Michael in the midst of the gods, and the realm of Israel in the midst of all flesh. Righteousness shall rejoice on high, and all the children of His truth shall jubilate in eternal knowledge. And you, the sons of His Covenant, be strong in the ordeal of God! His mysteries shall uphold you until He moves His hand for His trials to come to an end.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by the Essenes, who, as many other authors have stated, were in many ways similar to Jesus, and were the only major denomination of Judaism that Jesus did not criticize. One must ask: if Jesus were so adamantly opposed to the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who believed in only one God, yet was tolerant toward the Essenes, who believed in many gods, then does it not stand to reason that Jesus Christ himself may have also believed in many gods? In fact, Jesus Christ did believe in many gods. This is implicitly stated within his commentary on Psalm 82 in the Gospel of John! The Jews were criticizing him for calling himself the Son of God, because they thought it was blasphemy. In response, Jesus pointed out that Psalm 82 in the Bible says that there are many gods, and so therefore it is not blasphemy for Jesus to assert that he is one of these gods, as he put it (John 10:33-38):
The Jews answered Him, “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods’”? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came–and Scripture cannot be set aside–what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.”
6 I (the speaker is God) have said, “You are gods (Myhl); )eloh|4m); and all of you are children of the most High (!Ayæl.[, ynEßb.; be ne, (elyo4n). 7 But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
To whom is he speaking? The Jews at Sinai? No – the other elohim of the council in verse 1 of Psalm 82 are the audience. When Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6, he is mouthing the words of Yahweh (the original speaker in 82:6) and quotes the passage as it originally reads – God speaks to the other elohim. Jesus is not using the verse to say that Psalm 82 had God speaking to the Jews at Sinai.
Verse 7, the next verse, confirms this interpretation, since it says that these gods to whom God was speaking would “die like men” – if they were already men, this makes no sense. Who are the princes? See Daniel 10 – divine beings (the same Hebrew word for Michael and Gabriel beings “princes” is used here in Psalm 82:7 – r#o – sar).
POINT: Jesus does not view the plural elohim of Psalm 82:1 as mere humans, and there’s a reason this is so. The reason he quotes this verse is NOT to claim he’s just a man who can call himself a god like other men – it’s to claim deity as a son of the Most High, and to DISTINGUISH himself from the other sons. The former is the direct impact of John 10; the latter requires taking John 10 in the context of Jesus and John’s prior descriptions of Jesus in this same gospel as the “monogenes” – the UNIQUE son.
There are many other references to “many gods” in the Nag Hammadi as well. In the text On the Origin of the World, 2:97, it tells us:
Seeing that everybody, gods of the world and mankind, says that nothing existed prior to chaos, I, in distinction to them, shall demonstrate that they are all mistaken, because they are not acquainted with the origin of chaos, nor with its root.
And it is these gods that are actually subservient to what the text calls “Yaldabaoth,” the child of chaos or the Satanic demiurge and material principle.
And when Pistis Sophia desired to cause the thing that had no spirit to be formed into a likeness and to rule over matter and over all her forces, there appeared for the first time a ruler, out of the waters, lion-like in appearance, androgynous, having great authority within him, and ignorant of whence he had come into being. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depth of the waters, she said to him, “Child, pass through to here,” whose equivalent is ‘yalda baoth‘.
Since that day, there appeared the principle of verbal expression, which reached the gods and the angels and mankind. And what came into being as a result of verbal expression, the gods and the angels and mankind finished.
And in the place of the indivisible one there are twelve springs, and upon them twelve fatherhoods, surrounding the indivisible one in the manner of the deeps or these veils. And there is a crown upon the indivisible one in which is every species of life : and every triple-powered species; and every incomprehensible species : and every endless species ; and every unutterable species; and every silent species ; and every unmoved species ; and every first-visible species ; and every self-begotten species ; and every true species ; all being within it.
And in this is every species and every gnosis. And every power receives light from it.And every mind is revealed in it. This is the crown which the Father of the All gave to the indivisible one, in which there are 365 species, and they shine and fill the All with imperishable and inextinguishable light.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 30, Jesus seems to indicate the reality of the divine mystery of the Trinity. But as in due course, we will see this mystery is anything but.
Jesus said, “Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.”
In the Gnostic text Melchizedek, it differentiates between the gods, the archons and the archangels:
Death will tremble and be angry, not only he himself, but also his fellow world-ruling archons, and the principalities and the authorities, the female gods and the male gods, together with the archangels.
In the Hermetic-Stoic text Asclepius 21-29, it says that certain Gnostic human beings or Hermetic sages have expanded their spirits enough to be indeed enlightened dual beings–being of both spirit and matter and actually contain in themselves the ability to create gods through their theurgical rituals which tap into the realms of the imaginal, in which I will discuss later.
“And it happened this way because of the will of God that men be better than the gods, since, indeed, the gods are immortal, but men alone are both immortal and mortal. Therefore, man has become akin to the gods, and they know the affairs of each other with certainty. The gods know the things of men, and men know the things of the gods. And I am speaking about men, Asclepius, who have attained learning and knowledge. But (about) those who are more vain than these, it is not fitting that we say anything base, since we are divine and are introducing holy matters.
“Since we have entered the matter of the communion between the gods and men, know, Asclepius, that in which man can be strong! For just as the Father, the Lord of the universe, creates gods, in this very way man too, this mortal, earthly, living creature, the one who is not like God, also himself creates gods. Not only does he strengthen, but he is also strengthened. Not only is he god, but he also creates gods. Are you astonished, Asclepius? Are you yourself another disbeliever like the many?”
The Gospel of Philip tells us something very similar:
That is the way it is in the world – men make gods and worship their creation. It would be fitting for the gods to worship men!
Returning to the Hermetic text, Asclepius, it also states that “the gods are derived from pure matter.” Here, the gods are not spiritual entities, but material entities, and therefore may be biological in nature like humans are. Yet the same passage also asserts that the gods are immortal. Perhaps certain biological entities that are much more intelligent than mankind have figured out a way to cheat death indefinitely, and thus become “pure matter.”
For the gods, since they came into being out of a pure matter, do not need learning and knowledge. For the immortality of the gods is learning and knowledge, since they came into being out of pure matter. It (immortality) assumed for them the position of knowledge and learning. By necessity, he (God) set a boundary for man; he placed him in learning and knowledge.
The depths of hell are also filled with distinctly different entities, including at least four different types, according to the Trimorphic Protennoia:
I am the life of my Epinoia that dwells within every Power and every eternal movement, and (in) invisible Lights and within the Archons and Angels and Demons, and every soul dwelling in Tartaros, and (in) every material soul. I dwell in those who came to be. I move in everyone and I delve into them all. I walk uprightly, and those who sleep, I awaken. And I am the sight of those who dwell in sleep.
In the Platonizing Sethian text, Allogenes, it ruminates on whether or not the “Summum Bonum”, or the Highest Good actually has angels at his beckoning call:
We do not know whether the Unknowable One has angels or gods, or whether the One who is at rest was containing anything within himself except the stillness, which is he, lest he be diminished.
In Genesis 3:5, the Serpent tempted Eve saying:
For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
In other words, the fruit from the tree of knowledge would give Eve the perspective and “knowledge” of the Elohim. The Hebrew word elohim can mean either “God” singular or “gods” plural, depending on the verb. The Hypostasis of the Archons clarifies the matter, explicitly saying that Eve would become like the gods but the “chief ruler” or Yaldabaoth/Yahweh, out of jealousy, damned the primal couple, when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden.
And the snake, the instructor, said, “With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.
Moreover, the book of Jubilees (3:19) found among the Dead Sea Scrolls also confirms that “gods” plural is the original meaning.
And the serpent said unto the woman, ‘Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that on the day ye shall eat thereof, your eyes will be opened, and ye will be as gods, and ye will know good and evil.
Moreover, it seems like the God of Genesis doesn’t really know everything when he asks:
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
The Testimony of Truth has this to say about the Genesis account:
But what sort is this God? First he maliciously refused Adam from eating of the tree of knowledge, and, secondly, he said “Adam, where are you?” God does not have foreknowledge? Would he not know from the beginning? And afterwards, he said, “Let us cast him out of this place, lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever.” Surely, he has shown himself to be a malicious grudger! And what kind of God is this? For great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know him. And he said, “I am the jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three (and) four generations.” And he said, “I will make their heart thick, and I will cause their mind to become blind, that they might not know nor comprehend the things that are said.” But these things he has said to those who believe in him and serve him!
The Genesis account presents us with one single all-powerful Creator God and yet has a few references to the Elohim in regard to both the Trees of Knowledge and Life. Does Jesus say anything in reference to Genesis? Actually, Jesus never does affirm that the earth was literally created in six days nor does he affirm the literal creationist timeline as creationists might have you believe. There is only one reference out of the entire New Testament that discusses the creation account in the 7 day period including the day of rest in Hebrews 4:3-7, a text, by the way, which had a hard time entering into the traditional canon, much like Revelation.
3 Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,
“So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’”
And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world.4 For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.”5 And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”
6 Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience,7 God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.”
Moreover, the opening verse of John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” presents a creation account that appears to be aimed at competing against Genesis 1. The Greek word Logos implies logic, order, and reason, which is the exact opposite of what Genesis 1 says about the earth being “without form and void.” This indicates that the Logos was sort of a demiurgical force that gave some sort of semblance of order from the chaotic abyss, from which Yaldaboath, the god of the void, also emerges from.
Henotheism, not monotheism, is the theology of Moses and the Prophets. It is the chief theology of Jesus Christ himself as well. This fact is generally accepted by scholars, as any number of authorities can attest. So, what exactly is Henotheism? Nothing better defines Henotheism than what St. Paul the Apostle told in 1 Corinthians 4-8:
4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.”5For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”),6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
Henotheism is the belief that many gods exist, but that only one God should be worshiped. Unlike monotheism, there are truly many gods and they really do exist. Yet unlike polytheism, not all the gods are worshiped. Only one of them is worshiped, and the rest are profane and are to be shunned. Henotheism explains why James the brother of Jesus and Saint John the Apostle, together with all the Prophets, were so thoroughly against idols and eating meat sacrificed to idols, even to the point where it was one of the few regulations of the Old Testament that they insisted non-Jewish Christians must keep in full as stated in Acts 15:29.
You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.
This is because sacrifices to idols serve profane entities that truly do exist, according to 1 Corinthians 10:19-22:
19 What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything?20 No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.22 Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
Henotheism explains why idolatry is the most frequently mentioned offense in the entire Bible–for if God is all-powerful, then an idol is nothing, and it would only be an inconsequential joke and hardly worth the mention. But if idolatry truly serves other gods that truly do exist, and if sacrifices to idols truly feeds those gods, then this explains why Yahweh and his Prophets are so vociferously against idolatry. For if there are other gods, then these gods are truly a threat to Yahweh and to his Messiah, and therefore it is particularly important that idolatry does not infiltrate the ranks of the faithful, for it truly gives enemies a foot in the door by which they can infiltrate the armies of Yahweh. The God of Henotheism is actually competing against other gods who are real. Worshiping other gods is serving other gods, and serving other gods undermines the power of your covenant God, and this is tantamount to adultery against your God and treason against your nation. In such terms, the Prophets speak of idolatry. This line of thinking only makes sense in light of Henotheism.
If God were Almighty, then the overarching importance of the prohibition against idols makes no sense at all, because in a monotheistic system, and idol has no power. Which is worse, praying to rocks and dead trees, or committing murder? In a monotheistic system, the first is laughable but the second is quite heinous. But in a Henotheistic system, idolatry is even more heinous than murder, for murder can only kill the body, but idolatry kills both body and soul, for it puts the soul at the mercy of gods who care not for humanity. Only within the framework of Henotheistic thinking does it make sense that idolatry is a worse crime than murder, theft, sexual perversion, or any other infraction. Seeing that the Bible condemns idolatry more frequently than any other sin, this is a case for Henotheism. Idolatry is also considered the same as adultery by Jesus as well in Matthew 5:27-28.
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
In other words, if you are worshiping God but then praying to other pagan gods, then in reality, you are already committing adultery. In the Old Testament, we actually the first instance in which a foreign god actually humbles himself before Yahweh–that being is Dagon, the fish god in 1 Samuel 5:2-4:
2 Then they carried the ark into Dagon’s temple and set it beside Dagon.3 When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back in his place.4 But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained.
In the text Ruth 1:15-17, we have Naomi who was a Hebrew who believed in Yahweh, but here she sanctioned the worship of other gods besides Yahweh, but only for those outside the Hebrew nation.
15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely,if even death separates you and me.”
In Jeremiah 48:7, the Moabite god Chemosh is said to be bound in chains like an actual person, thanks to Yahweh’s invasion.
Since you trust in your deeds and riches, you too will be taken captive, and Chemosh will go into exile, together with his priests and officials.
As stated in earlier posts, we saw that many of the western Semitic peoples, including Hebrews, Canaanites, and the more archaic city of Ugarit, believed in a Father-God called El, which corresponds to the Greek Ouranos. The name El and its variants are known throughout the Bible, El, Elyon, El-Shaddai, and Eloah. They believed El spawned a brood of sons called bn-Ilm (Ugaritic) or beni-ha-Elohim (Hebrew), which means “sons of El” or “sons of the God,” and that these sons of El participated in some kind of divine government called “the congress of the gods.” Mark S. Smith in the book The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, tells us that the Psalms 82 reference of the “divine council” scene, doesn’t actually portray Yahweh as the head of the assemblage.
One biblical text that presents Yahweh in an explicit divine council scene does not cast him as its head (who is left decidedly mute or undescribed, probably the reason why it survived the later collapsing of the different tiers). This text is Psalms 82, which begins in verse 1:
“God (elohim) stands in the divine assembly of El, among the divinities (elohim) He spronounces judgment.”
Here the figure of God, understood as Yahweh, takes his stand in the assembly. The name El was understood in the tradition – and perhaps at the time of the original text’s composition as well – to be none other but Yahweh, and not a separate God called El.
This is the origin of the title “Standing One” of Simon Magus. It indicates that a divine power has decided to stand up and forge his own divine kingdom and even wage war against the other gods. The operations of this congress are implicit within such Biblical stories as the Tower of Babel, where Yahweh consults with the other gods – “Let us go down and confuse their language” Genesis 11:7 – and in Job, where “the sons of God came to present themselves before Yahweh.” Job 1:6, 2:1. El and his wife Asherah had a total of 70 sons in the Biblical and Ugaritic traditions, or 77 in the Hittite tradition. These were the “sons of God,” and to each of them El gave a nation as an inheritance. Yahweh was one of these sons of El, and his inheritance was Israel, as stated in an earlier article. Consequently, each nation was supposed to worship one of the sons of El as its appointed God. Canaan worshiped Baal, Moab worshiped Chemosh, Ammon worshiped Molech, and Israel worshiped Yahweh. They all paid homage to El as the Father-God. This can be seen in Jubilees, where Shem,
“blessed the God of gods, who had put the word of the Lord into his mouth, and the Lord for evermore.” Jubilees 8:20-21.
In this passage, it sounds as if Shem was blessing two distinct divine entities – El and Yahweh, Father and Son. We already saw that in Deuteronomy 32:8, Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint tells us:
“When Elyon divided the nations, when He separated the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the sons of Elohim.”
What this passage means is this: The Father-God Elyon divided the nations according to the number of sons he had, and so each nation got its own god. Your Bible might say “sons of Israel” in place of “sons of Elohim,” but both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint attest that the Bible originally said “sons of Elohim” not “sons of Israel,” as does Irenaeus also (Against Heresies 3.12.9). Many scholars believe that the Hebrew Bible was intentionally corrupted by the monotheists to read “sons of Israel” because later Judaism evolved to become monotheist.
Often, even in early times, the national god was combined with the Father-God El to form one entity, hence the term “Yahweh Elyon” (the LORD Most High) in Genesis 14, and “Yahweh Elohim” (the LORD God). Hence, the two deities were collapsed into one long before monotheism was invented. This also is the origin of Trinitarian thinking – that Jesus Christ, as an entity, can be collapsed into a single entity with the Father and the Spirit, thus making God three-in-one. Today, theologians often refer to the Trinity as a “mystery,” but there was no such “mystery” in the minds of ancient Christian Trinitarians. They took it for granted, because it was consistent with the same way they had thought for centuries. Only with the general acceptance of the monotheistic heresy did the Trinity become a seemingly self-contradictory “mystery.”
This brings us to the violent activities of the God of Israel. Psalm 82:6-8 tells us:
6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’
7 But you will die like mere mortals;
you will fall like every other ruler.”
8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.
In other words, the God of Israel’s rightful destiny is to ultimately conquer the other gods and appropriate their inheritances. In a world filled with warfare and hostile nations, the logical thing to do is to have your nation and the god that rules over it, top dog. That is exactly how the ancient Israelite’s viewed such things. Yahweh should be president in the congress of the gods and should have the power to make war with the other gods and take away their power.
This is especially evident when we study the Psalms and the life story of King David. David’s covenant or pact with Yahweh was simple: you keep me from being killed by my enemies, and I will conquer all Israel’s neighbors for you. The covenant was a contractual obligation between two parties for their mutual benefit. The benefit to David was a long life. The benefit to Yahweh was the conquest of Edom, Moab, Philistia, Syria, Ammon, and the national unity of Israel. Once this is understood, David’s Psalms make sense. His frequent mention of the underworld and his intense fear of death–coupled with his description of Yahweh as a god of war with nostrils filled with fire, riding on thunderclouds, sword in hand, hurling lightning bolts, and shooting arrows at his enemies, along with multiple songs of victory–these features are consistent with David’s incessant wars of conquest against all Israel’s neighbors.
In this god-eat-god cosmic system, David wanted to ensure Yahweh was the top dog or the king of the jungle–hence the image of the lion and the serpent associated with the Jewish god. This sort of alliance system between gods and humans is what Old Testament covenant theology is all about. When Israel went to war, they carried the throne of Yahweh into battle, the Ark of the Covenant, because Yahweh was their commander and ally. Before they attacked, they consulted with Yahweh, to make certain he approved of the military action. Every war was a holy war against some other competing nation and its god. Expanding the boundaries of your nation meant expanding the empire of your covenant god, and your god would reward you for it.
Jesus himself acts like a warring Son of God with words like:
“Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword?” Luke 12:51, Matthew 10:34.
Jesus, is in essence, a holy warrior. Jesus says things like this because he knows he is in an all-encompassing cosmic battle with the chief principle of matter of this world–Satan–as well as his hordes of demons. Jesus Christ made friends with the poor and the wretched, the prostitutes, and social outcasts. He was not looking for ethical or self-righteous people. He was looking for loyal people, worthy to his cause. He was looking for people in the dregs of society or the worst of sinners who would fight for him–who would risk everything for him because they had nothing to lose anyway. Jesus is presented as not an all-powerful being but a god among gods, who must fight his way to become chief of the gods, or else he would become a slave to gods more powerful than himself–at least in this world anyway. He wants violent people, red hot for their faith and devotion to his cause rather than embrace a universalistic religious message as espoused by more pacifist saints. That is why Jesus says he will vomit out the lukewarm in Revelation 3:16.
Jesus continually talks about the wicked hearted hypocrites and calls them vipers and perverse. He also referred to gentiles as dogs. The Lord wasn’t some friendly hippie that the New Age makes him out to be. He’s too much of a truth teller so they killed him for it. Jesus continually told his disciples to count the cost of being loyal in his service. In Luke 14:25-33, he tells them to properly anticipate all the costs of being associated with the Son of God in terms of building towers and warfare strategies similar to those devised by Sun Tzu.
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?29 For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,30 saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
However, very few make it past the veil and are indeed victorious over the world.
13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
If I’m right, and all these deities have competing interests and are recruiting followers on earth for unseen cloak-and-dagger conspiracies on the other side, Jesus could be some opposing force that steals their recruits and diminishes their ranks, which would explain why they hate him so dearly. Jesus, in essence, would be like the “get out of jail free” card of the spirit world. This also explains why the other gods also hate Yahweh, because he is in constant war and competition with them. So, were the Gnostics right in saying we are in a prison house or insane asylum ruled by multiple cosmocraters and demonic archons? And that Jesus chooses to baptize those who he wants to be his disciples? The Excerpts of Theodotus say something to this effect.
Now, regeneration is by water and spirit, as was all creation: “For the Spirit of God moved on the abyss.” And for this reason the Saviour was baptized, though not Himself needing to be so, in order that He might consecrate the whole water for those who were being regenerated. Thus it is not the body only, but the soul, that we cleanse. It is accordingly a sign of the sanctifying of our invisible part, and of the straining off from the new and spiritual creation of the unclean spirits that have got mixed up with the soul.
Some of the archons would undoubtedly be less evil than others. Some might not even be evil and may be, in fact, good, but their ultimate intentions may not be so pure. They could, perhaps, all desire power, worship, and honor, even the good ones, so even if you serve the good archons, you’re still a slave. Jesus is some formerly unknown alien infiltrator who showed up out of nowhere and began zapping people out of the sphere of the archons. Yahweh would be one of the archons, not the true father of Jesus Christ. Maybe he’s a good archon, but he still wants power, glory, and submission. This is the Gnostic belief. Sabaoth, the “Lord of Forces” would essentially be Yahweh as we think of him today. The malicious aspects of the OT deity could be Yaldabaoth or Satan. They would all be part of the Elohim or the original pantheon of divinities worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia.
The Marcionites believed that the ones who would be saved were those who were cursed by the demiurge and were unfairly treated in this world, i.e., sinners and outcasts, kind of like Cain, Korah, Balaam, and other so-called bad guys of the Old Testament. Because these sorts of people were so unfairly mistreated in the world, the Marcionites thought, they would be the only ones who would be opening to receiving the radical gospel about the alien God of Jesus Christ. They were the perfect soldiers for Jesus’ controversial and exclusive message of his divine sonship, the redemption of the believer and the coming judgment and destruction of the cosmos through the fiery conflagration.
This is perhaps where some mythicists go wrong. They are right in saying that Jesus shares many similarities with other pre-Christian gods and their dramatic stories. Jesus also shares similarities with other enigmatic and magical figures in the Bible like Simon Magus, etc. But to say that Jesus was simply invented in the twisted, archonic minds of the Roman rulers or invented by some unknown cabal is exactly what the controllers want you to believe. This is exactly what Gnostic texts like On the Origin of the World is refuting!
“Now the Word that is superior to all beings was sent for this purpose alone: that he might proclaim the unknown. He said, “There is nothing hidden that is not apparent, and what has not been recognized will be recognized.” And these were sent to make known what is hidden, and the seven authorities of chaos and their impiety. And thus they were condemned to death.
So when all the perfect appeared in the forms modelled by the rulers, and when they revealed the incomparable truth, they put to shame all the wisdom of the gods. And their fate was found to be a condemnation. And their force dried up. Their lordship was dissolved. Their forethought became emptiness, along with their glory.”
I definitely don’t think it’s mythology. I know it’s not mythology. These entities are real. Once you conjure to manifestation, you know of their reality forever. And of course, they know that you know of their reality forever. You get marked, essentially. Whether by Jesus Christ or some other demonic being. And we have to decide which team to side with since they are all fighting for our souls.
But believing Jesus or Paul were real people doesn’t mean you need to buy into the tenets of orthodox Christianity, or of any other kind of Christianity, for that matter.
And finally, the Neoplatonists taught the idea of a world-soul, or the Anima Mundi, in which they acquired from Plato. This is the divine, noetic realm from which emerged the gods and daimons. It is also the equivalent of Dr. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and Dr. Henry Corbin’s Imaginal Realm. All gods, daimons, angels, heroes, fairies, devils, monsters, and myths originate from there as well. This is the very subject of focus in Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld by Patrick Harper and John Keel’s The Eighth Tower. In fact, that is what the On the Origin of the World is telling us, explicitly:
Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name ‘darkness’. From it, there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness. And the forces that came into being subsequent to them called the shadow ‘the limitless chaos’. From it, every kind of divinity sprouted up […] together with the entire place, so that also, shadow is posterior to the first product. It was <in> the abyss that it (shadow) appeared, deriving from the aforementioned Pistis.
The Soul of the World, collective unconscious, or Imaginal Realm, is the very source of which all the gods emerge from, like droplets from a wave. In other words the gods, daimons, and myths of the Imaginal Realm are not in the Imaginal Realm etc.–they are the Imaginal Real. It is this dynamis or power from which many Gnostics drew their strength from to create the gods through occult means similar to that of creating egregores as hinted at in the Hermetic text, Ascelpius. In fact, it is a dynamic, tempestuous place that constantly branches into “our” world–its tendrils leaping into the physical plane, the mental plane (our thoughts/imagination) and our psychological complexes and dreams.
The Anima Mundi, the daimonic reality in which our spirits also originate from, also exists within each of us–it is a plan of being that is as much “out there” as it is “within us,” as as opposed to how the “unconscious” part of the collective unconscious suggests as area of being that can be reduced to psychological factors. It is also connected to the idea of the “vault of heaven” as per Genesis or the demiurgical “womb” of the Cainites per the church father Epiphanius. And it is the means by which we can create physical reality and impress our will upon (e.g) the law of attraction–a subject and direction that will be explored further in depth, this year in 2017.
In the book, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second Son by Dr. Margaret Barker, she discusses in depth on how the angels Metatron of 3 Enoch, the god of Jews, Yahweh, the High Priest of El Elyon, Melchizedek, and Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospels and Hebrews, may actually describe one and the same being. Margaret Barker, in the same book, showed how the first Christians recognized Jesus as YHWH, the LORD, the Son of God Most High. And yet, YHWH is denied as the true god by other Christians, including the Sethian Gnostics and it is also vigorously denied that Jesus was also the god of the Old Testament by other Gnostics like Valentinus, and early Christians like Marcion. Why is there such a differentiation of opinion on this matter? The answer to this mystery will be answered in due course.
Be warned: This will be an admittedly lengthy article, and not for the faint of heart.
Margaret Barker argues in this book that the more traditional understanding of rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.C. is not as monolithic as understood today. In fact, Barker argues that the Gnostic understanding of the Old Testament is largely derived from a much earlier tradition of pre-Deuteronomic Israelite polytheism rather than a dualistic mutation of early Christianity into multiple “heresies”.
While her work is popular with the Mormon church, I have no reason to think she herself is a Mormon. In the Great Angel, Barker claims that the term “Son of God” in the Old Testament, meant that they were some sort of divine power, like an angel:
It is customary to list the occurrences of “son of God” in the Old Testament, and to conclude from that list that the term could be used to mean either a heavenly being of some sort, or the King of Israel, or the people of Israel in their special relationship with God. (p. 4).
But Barker remarks that these studies have ignored the distinction between two different words for God in the Old Testament:
All the texts in the Hebrew Bible distinguish clearly between the divine sons of Elohim/Elyon and those human beings who are called sons of Yahweh. (p.10)
For example, numerous theologies are preserved in the Bible that does not simply reflect one monotheist god. In Deuteronomy 4:35, it says that “the Lord is God: there is none else besides him.” However, Psalms 82 says that “God stands in the company of the gods” and judges among them; and that “God” shall inherit all nations (v. 8). Deuteronomy 32:8-9, as preserved in both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (LXX), it tells us:
When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds according to the number of the angels of God. For the Lord’s portion is his people. Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. (LXX)
Here, there is an obvious distinction made between Yahweh and the Most High, where Yahweh is simply the “son” or “great angel” of the “Lord” being El Elyon. Clearly this passage says that the “Most High” grants the inheritance and that YHWH has received “Jacob” (read: Israel) as his “lot.” The later Masoretic text in which the traditional KJV and Catholic translations rely on says the following:
“When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds according to the number of the sons of Israel. For YHWH’s portion is his people. Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” (MT)
The words “sons of Israel” mask the reference to the “sons” or “angels of God” that appears in older manuscripts and covers the true theological implications of the passage. Clearly these translations contradict each other in that the “sons of Israel” meant human beings and the “sons” or “angels of God” meant divine beings or messengers. According to Stephen Peter at Bridal Chamber, in his article, “The Rule of the Shepherd Angels,” the Shepherds mentioned in Jeremiah (25:34-36), are in fact, angelic rulers rather than human gentile kings. This also extends to the Babylonian King, e.g. Lucifer, the rebel angel and fallen star, seen in Isaiah 14:12-15. These are the same beings as the rebel angelic, “Watchers” described in the Book of Enoch. Stephen Peter goes on to write:
The appointment of the seventy was itself the result of man’s disobedience. Man had turned away from Yahweh to worship idols of wood and stone. So in his anger Yahweh turned man over to the authority of the fallen angels or demons that had corrupted him. Yet at the same time he made a compact with man. The rule of the demons was not to last forever. Yahweh would redeem mankind by sending the Messiah, the Christ to end the rule of the demons. At this time the demons themselves and all who had been corrupted by them would be cast into the abyss. Most of the early followers of the Jesus movement, including Paul, thought that they lived during the reign of the seventieth angel and that this final reckoning would happen in their lifetime.
…
The fallen stars and the Shepherds may have been originally the same group – in the book of dream visions both are judged at the same time and in the same manner and both meet with identical punishments. The scriptural authority for the story of the fallen angels is a few lines in Genesis –
the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:2-5).
As a result of the failings of man Yahweh decides to send the flood. There is nothing here about the punishment of the ‘sons of God’. But there is a great deal in Jeremiah about the punishment of the Shepherds. Did some of the proto-gnostics equate the sons of God in Genesis with the Shepherds in Jeremiah? There is a certainly a deep connection between the events of the flood and the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Both are disasters which are inflicted by Yahweh in response to the wickedness of men and both result in a new covenant between man and Yahweh.
But the most important piece of evidence linking the Shepherds to the fallen stars is the extraordinary taunt against the Babylonian king in Isaiah 14. This seems to compare the king to Satan –
How you have fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you weakener of nations! And you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high.’ Only into Sheol you are brought down, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:12-15).
It is easy to see that the proto-gnostics would have made the connection that the King of Babylon was another name for the chief of the fallen stars. We see in this passage that the fate of the king of Babylon is to be brought into the pit of Sheol. This agrees with the punishment of the stars and the Shepherds in Enoch.
The significance of the morning star is that it reigns in the sky in the pre-dawn hours. Although it is splendid and rules the sky in the hours of darkness the coming of dawn shows that it is feeble and easily extinguished by the light of the true sun. In the same way the King of Babylon shall rule the earth only to be extinguished with the coming of the messiah.
In other words, these seventy Shepherd angels are also the “sons of the Most High,” in which they are judged. The Ancient Hellenistic Jews like Paul, Philo and many other Gnostic teachers like Simon, Marcion, Carpocrates, Basilides, Saturninus, etc., would have read the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) would have read that the nations were divided among the “angels of God” and that Jacob and Israel were the “Lord’s inheritance,” meaning the nation belonged to YHWH.
Both translations agree that the Kurios or the “Lord” has dominion over Jacob, but the “sons of God” were modified later to mean the “sons of Israel” instead. Luke 1:32 calls Jesus the “Son of the Most High” while Mark 5:7 narrates a demon calling Jesus “Son of the Most High God.” Elsewhere, we read Deuteronomy 6:5 “You shall love Yahweh your God…” Luke 10:27, tells Jesus’s disciples to, “You shall love the Lord [Kyrios] your God…” And Jesus is not ever called the “son of Yahweh” or the “son of the Lord” but called the Lord himself. These angels or Shepherds of God, are the same as the “archons” of Gnosticism.
It is clear that Babylon stands for the rulership and dominion of the angels, archons and demons over the world–especially Israel and Jerusalem–the apple of Yahweh’s eye. These Shepherds and their dominion over the world would one day be destroyed, which is prophesied in many Gnostic texts (On the Origin of the World, the Concept of Our Great Power, 1 Enoch) as well as the Book of Revelation. Jesus also calls himself the “good shepherd” of the sheep in Gospel of John, which indicates, he came to “replace” the seventy angelic rulers as the chief ruler and head high priest of the chosen elect as well as all of the heavens and all of creation itself–even holding the keys to Hades!
Margaret Barker further remarks:
This suggests that the Gospel writers, in using the terms ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God Most High’, saw Jesus as an angel figure, and gave him their version of the sacred name Yahweh. (p.5)
Paul himself believed that the Lawgiver god was merely a chief angel or a lesser god/lower manifestation of the Supreme being, as I stated in earlier articles. In fact, Paul makes a distinction between the law of his mind or heart that corresponds to the Most High and the law of the flesh connected to YHWH, as stated in Romans 2:15:
15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)
And so Paul claimed that the Law of Moses had no role in the divine plan for salvation and that there was more than one divine power at play here. This claim of divinity came from Jesus himself, who had attained the ultimate mystical experience of the high priesthood, seen the divine throne and been transformed by that experience. The messianic titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God,” and the role of the mysterious Servant, resulted from that experience, as did the realization that the coming of the LORD to his people meant the great Day of Atonement when he took upon himself the sins and sicknesses of the Creation as stated in Matthew 8:17:
17 This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.”
This is much like how Azazel bares the sins of Israel in Leviticus 16, as the “serim” scapegoat–imagery associated with the goat-demon, Baphomet. The Lord Jesus Christ takes on the sins of the elect or “the world”, and becomes a “scapegoat” like Azazel, as well. Thus it was that Peter could say in Acts 3:14-16:
You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate,though he had decided to let him go.14 You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you.15 You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.16 By faith in the name of Jesus, this man whom you see and know was made strong. It is Jesus’ name and the faith that comes through him that has completely healed him, as you can all see.
Once Jesus is placed within the temple tradition, there is a whole new landscape for the study of Christian origins. The pre-existent, docetic and later adoptionist Christologies are contingent on temple symbolism that originates to the temples of Moses and the first temple of Solomon, which are themselves, replications of the Garden of Eden of Genesis. The Temple symbolism and theology of the Old Testament is also replicated in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John, Paul’s epistles and Revelation of St. John, the Divine.
The “knowledge” characteristic of the non-canonical gospels would have originated in esoteric teaching such as was characteristic of priestly groups, and perhaps even underlying Isaiah 53.11.
11 After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
The central themes of sacrifice, redemption and atonement can be seen in their original setting, and Jesus’ disregard for the purity laws can be seen as the practical enactment of priestly atonement in his own sacrifice on the cross by bringing the excluded sinner unto redemption.
Before Jesus’ experience of becoming the Great Angel, the LORD, he taught as a wise man and a healer, like many others of his time, warning of the judgment to come. For many, this is what he remained. We see references to Jesus as the the Great Angel, the Son of Man, and even as a High Priest in texts such as 2 and 3 Enoch, Hebrews and the canonical Gospels. Once Jesus had achieved his transforming vision, he spoke as the “Son of Man,” or the “Divine Man” who had passed beyond the gates of Hades and rose back again, becoming an emissary from the other world as a heavenly revealer (the Gospel of John, Gospel of Thomas) and the future judge of the world that separates the sheep from the goats (Matthew, Revelation of St. John, the Books of Enoch, Luke, etc). The Gospel of John (14:9) tells us that whoever had seen Jesus had the transforming vision:
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
In the Epistle of the Hebrews, the letter is addressed from a Hellenistic/Pauline wing to the Hebrew Christians, who place emphasis on Moses and the Law over and above Grace. The writer of Hebrews claims that the Law of Moses is the “word spoken by angels” and he makes a distinction between the Law and the plan for salvation which was revealed by the Lord with God bearing witness “with signs and wonders” (Hebrews. 2:2-4). Interestingly, the author draws a distinction between the priesthood established through Moses, and another priesthood, established through “Melchizedek”, who was known as the “priest of the Most High God” or “El Elyon.”
In Hebrews, we see Jesus depicted as the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, and not after the order of Aaron, which was established by Moses–according to the Law. Jesus and Melchizedek follow after the Most High, while Aaron and Moses represent the Lawgiver, Yahweh. Melchizedek, the high priest of the Most high God, is actually a part of ancient Semitic history that predates the nation of Israel. In Genesis 14, Melchizedek is portrayed as a priest-king of Jerusalem, which was controlled by the Canaanites, and the city was originally called “Salem.”
18 Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High,19 and he blessed Abram, saying,
“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Creator of heaven and earth.
20 And praise be to God Most High,
who delivered your enemies into your hand.”
Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.
Here, Melchizedek, the King of Salem, is presented as the chief archetype of the High Priest that distributes the Holy Eucharist to the Church. Melchizedek is in actuality, the priest of the Most High God, being El Elyion/Ouranos, and is really a part of the ancient Semitic history that predates Israel, where the Canaanite/Jebusite tribe lived in the city of Salem. According to Joshua 15:63, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin are said to have conquered Jerusalem but could not defeat the Jebusites as they merged with the Israelites. Thanks to the Jebusites, Melchizedek is intimately part of the Hebrew and Christian traditions. In Psalms 110:1-4, it reads:
The Lord says to my lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
3 Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy splendor,
your young men will come to you
like dew from the morning’s womb.
4 The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”
Here, King David writes that Jehovah places Jesus’s enemies under his feet, and that Jesus will be made a priest after the “order of Melchizedek.” The Jebusites are the source of the high priest, Melchizedek. This name derives from the Canaanite pantheon, being the god “Zedek.” Zedek is actually, the Phoenician name for the Roman god, Jupiter! According to Varchive, the name Zedek means “righteousness.”
The meaning of the name Melchizedek is “Zedek is [My] King.” Zedek, as said, is the name of the planet Jupiter, remaining so in the astronomy of the Jews in later ages. In the Talmud Zedek refers to Jupiter. Zedek also has the meaning of “righteousness” or “justice.” It is beyond the scope of this work to find which of the meanings—the name of the planet or a word in common usage—preceded and which followed. It is conceivable that this planet was worshipped in that remote time and that, in the days of the patriarch Abraham, the cult of Jupiter was prominent in the Salem of the high priest Melchizedek. Melchizedek, “priest of the most high,” was, it follows, a worshipper of Jupiter.
Even from biblical evidence, ancient Israelite history and culture was polytheistic. The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, are rabid devotees of YHWH, while guys like King Solomon are accused and blamed for worshiping and bringing in foreign gods to worship, as we see in 1 Kings 11:4-9. In Psalms 82, we see clear references to a pantheon of gods, or the Elohim, being the sons of the Most High God, who judges them. Clearly, the Old Testament is making references to an older pagan tradition, being the Canaanites, the Egyptians, etc. For the Gnostic, Melchizedek represents a higher spiritual order, above YHWH, as he is after the priesthood order of Jesus Christ, who is the face or angelic representative of the Supreme God, El Elyon.
In the Pauline Hellenist, Epistle to the Hebrews (1:2), the writer makes some curious statements as he addresses the Hebrews, being the followers of the Law:
“Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;”
“Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;” (1:3).
“For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?” And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. (1:5-7)
In other words, Jesus is actually the High Priest and Leader of the aeons and the various archangels, who “ministers a flame of fire” that worship Jesus Christ! The Greek word for “worlds” as the KJV writer used is actually “aeon” or “aion” which are references to Saturn, as well as the primeval aeons of the Pleromic world of light that existed prior to the creation of the physical universe, and it is the “Son” who is involved in the creation of these aeons, being the Logos, or Christ.
Hebrews 2:5, makes it clear, however, that Jesus is not simply one of the angels:
For unto the angels has he not put in subjection the world to come, of which we speak.
In fact, it is Jesus who rescues those subject under the dominion of the Law of Moses, given by the angels as well as the power of the devil (diabolon):
“For truly he did not give aid to angels but he took on the seed of Abraham…that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil. And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” Hebrews 2:14–16.
Paul says similar things in Galatians 5:4, in that the Law was ordained by angels and throughout 2 Corinthians 3, the Law of Moses is derided as the “ministry of death” and that Moses himself is a deceiver and a liar that hid the Glory of God from the children of Israel! Margaret Barker in the article, “Who was Melchizedek and Who Was God?” explains how the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo connects Melchizedek with that of the Logos, that prefigures Jesus. In the Clementine Homilies (3.II), Simon Magus and the Apostle Peter have a lengthy debate about Scripture and the multiplicity of the gods, as Peter says:
I wish you to know that those who, according to our arrangement, associate with Simon that they may learn his intentions, and submit them to us, so that we may be able to cope with his variety of wickedness, these men have sent to me, and informed me that Simon today is, as he arranged, prepared to come before all, and show from the Scriptures that He who made the heaven and the earth, and all things in them, is not the Supreme God, but that there is another, unknown and supreme, as being in an unspeakable manner God of gods; and that He sent two gods, one of whom is he who made the world, and the other he who gave the law.And these things he contrives to say, that he may dissipate the right faith of those who would worship the one and only God who made heaven and earth.
Elsewhere, in another chapter, (16.VI) Simon Magus explains the polytheistic nature of Scripture:
Peter then said: “I am ready to do as the umpire of our discussion has said; and straight-way without any delay I shall set forth my opinion in regard to God. I then assert that there is one God who made the heavens and the earth, and all things that are in them. And it is not right to say or to think that there is any other.” And Simon said: “But I maintain that the Scriptures believed in amongst the Jews say that there are many gods, and that God is not angry at this, because He has Himself spoken of many gods in His Scriptures.
For instance, in the very first words of the law, He evidently speaks of them as being like even unto Himself. For thus it is written, that, when the first man received a commandment from God to eat of every tree that was in the garden, but not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent having persuaded them by means of the woman, through the promise that they would become gods, made them look up; and then, when they had thus looked up, God said, ‘Behold, Adam has become as one of us.’
When, then, the serpent said, ‘You shall be as gods,’ he plainly speaks in the belief that gods exist; all the more as God also added His testimony, saying, ‘Behold, Adam has become as one of us.’The serpent, then, who said that there are many gods, did not speak falsely.
Again, the scripture, ‘You shall not revile the gods, nor curse the rulers of your people,’ points out many gods whom it does not wish even to be cursed. But it is also somewhere else written, ‘Did another god dare to enter and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, as did I the Lord God?’
When He says, ‘Did another God dare?’ He speaks on the supposition that other gods exist.
And elsewhere: ‘Let the gods that have not made the heavens and the earth perish;’as if those who had made them were not to perish. And in another place, when it says, ‘Take heed to yourself lest you go and serve other gods whom your fathers knew not,’ it speaks as if other gods existed whom they were not to follow. And again: ‘The names of other gods shall not ascend upon your lips.’
Here it mentions many gods whose names it does not wish to be uttered. And again it is written, ‘Your God is the Lord, He is God of gods.’ And again: ‘Who is like unto You, O Lord, among the Gods?’
And again: ‘God is Lord of gods.’And again: ‘God stood in the assembly of gods: He judges among the gods.’ Wherefore I wonder how, when there are so many passages in writing which testify that there are many gods, you have asserted that we ought neither to say nor to think that there are many. Finally, if you have anything to say against what has been spoken so distinctly, say it in the presence of all.
Peter then goes on to explain how he is grieved that Simon believes such things (3:III-IV):
When I heard this, how was I not disheartened! Wherefore I wished you also, my brethren, who associate with me, to know that I am beyond measure grieved in my soul, seeing the wicked one awake for the temptation of men, and men wholly indifferent about their own salvation. For to those from amongst the Gentiles who were about being persuaded respecting the earthly images that they are no gods, he has contrived to bring in opinions of many other gods, in order that, if they cease from the polytheo-mania, they may be deceived to speak otherwise, and even worse than they now do, against the sole government of God, so that they may not yet value the truths connected with that monarchy, and may never be able to obtain mercy. And for the sake of this attempt Simon comes to do battle with us, armed with the false chapters of the Scriptures. And what is more dreadful, he is not afraid to dogmatize thus against the true God from the prophets whom he does not in fact believe.
And with us, indeed, who have had handed down from our forefathers the worship of the God who made all things, and also the mystery of the books which are able to deceive, he will not prevail; but with those from amongst the Gentiles who have the polytheistic fancy bred in them, and who know not the falsehoods of the Scriptures, he will prevail much. And not only he; but if any other shall recount to those from among the Gentiles any vain, dreamlike, richly set out story against God, he will be believed, because from their childhood their minds are accustomed to take in things spoken against God. And few there shall be of them, as a few out of a multitude, who through ingenuousness shall not be willing so much as to hear an evil word against the God who made all things. And to these alone from amongst the Gentiles it shall be vouchsafed to be saved. Let not any one of you, therefore, altogether complain of Simon, or of any one else; for nothing happens unjustly, since even the falsehoods of Scripture are with good reason presented for a test.
After this Peter drops a bomb that should shock many Christians, Peter explains to Clement that:
Worthy, therefore, of rejection is every one who is willing so much as to hear anything against the monarchy of God; but if any one dares to hear anything against God, as trusting in the Scriptures, let him first of all consider with me that if any one, as he pleases, form a dogma agreeable to himself, and then carefully search the Scriptures, he will be able to produce many testimonies from them in favour of the dogma that he has formed. How, then, can confidence be placed in them against God, when what every man wishes is found in them?
Therefore Simon, who is going to discuss in public with us tomorrow, is bold against the monarchy of God, wishing to produce many statements from these Scriptures, to the effect that there are many gods, and a certain one who is not He who made this world, but who is superior to Him; and, at the same time, he is going to offer many scriptural proofs. But we also can easily show many passages from them that He who made the world alone is God, and that there is none other besides Him. But if any one shall wish to speak otherwise, he also shall be able to produce proofs from them at his pleasure. For the Scriptures say all manner of things, that no one of those who inquire ungratefully may find the truth, but simply what he wishes to find, the truth being reserved for the grateful now gratitude is to preserve our love to Him who is the cause of our being.
In other words, Peter is saying that the scriptures have “books which are able to deceive” and that the only people Simon Magus will be able to convince are polytheist Gentiles, “who know not the falsehoods of the Scriptures”!!! Peter also says that these falsehoods of scripture are presented for a test. So, why would Peter say such a thing? Does he not believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God? Peter actually derides the Scriptures as simply an incoherent mishmash of contradictory doctrines. And this is coming from the “mouth” of the supposed founder of the Roman Catholic Church!!!
Peter also says that the scriptures were written in such a manner that each person who reads the texts would find whatever they are predisposed to believing in, as in projecting their theological bias. That Peter’s warning is correct, is overwhelmingly proven by the modern church and even biblical criticism and scholarship, in that many intelligent minds and astute biblical students have studied the scriptures and continue to hold conflicting opinions that oppose what the next person sees very clearly represented in the Bible!
We have many cults and factions within Christianity that have contradictory doctrines, as we see with the Jehovah’s Witness who do not believe that Jesus is God and instead is the archangel Michael while denying the Trinity. Meanwhile, the Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists believe that Jesus is God and have many scriptural proofs to back up their claims. The Mormons believe in the pre-existence of the soul and that the faithful Mormons will one day inherit their own worlds to rule over as gods with their extended families. The Seventh Day Adventists believe that the Sabbath should be strictly observed whereas Paul clearly says Sabbath-keeping is simply works and of the Law. The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, also have contradictory views on scripture and ritual. So, how can we trust such a book that has so many contradictions interwoven throughout, as Peter says, “what every man wishes is found in them”?
The answer to this conundrum perhaps may be found in Hebrews (6:1-3) itself:
6 Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God,2 instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.3 And God permitting,we will do so.
Even the Jewish Zohar says similar things about Scripture:
“The narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the garment — that is, upon the narrative of the Doctrine; more they know not. The instructed, however, see not merely the cloak, but what the cloak covers.” (The Zohar, iii., 152; Franck, 119.)
Could you imagine a Christian minister preaching this on his own from the pulpit to his congregation? I don’t think so. The author is saying that these teachings are actually elementary principles for beginners or “babes in Christ.” But the end of the Christian walk is initiation, where one achieves the spiritual realization or gnosis, where the deeper, esoteric doctrines are taught and embraced. The initiates in the order of Melchizedek possesses a knowledge of God which transcends faith and belief, and as the wisdom to distinguish the Good god from the binding evils of the angelic powers that rule over the world. The high mysteries of the Gospel are realized by the Gnostics, who have uncovered the polytheistic roots of the Old Testament, the false god of this world exposed, the triumph over the power of the devil, and the Good father made known, through the face of the Son of Man.
The title is not from the Book of Daniel. In Daniel, the Son of Man’s role is that of the sovereign of all people. The only relevant reference is from Daniel 7:13. Not much insight or inspiration can be gleaned from this meager description.
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. 14 And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. – Daniel 7: 13
It was from the Book of Enoch, which was widely used by the early Christians, and the second Similitude (written c. 2nd Century BC) was available during Jesus’ time. For instance, Jude mentions Enoch. It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying:
“See, the Lord is coming with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” – Jude 1:14-15
The Book of Enoch was highly regarded until the 4th century AD. For example, Epistle of Barnabas regards it as Scripture. Early church fathers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian regarded it highly. Since the 4th century, the manuscripts and any mention thereof disappeared, probably to stamp out heresies. Ethiopic manuscripts of the Book of Enoch was discovered by Bruce in 1773.
There are three “similitudes” (parables) attributed to Enoch. First Similitude (38 – 44) deals with final judgment. The Second Similitude (45 – 57), the Son of Man is one who was given that name before Time itself. He would become a light to the Gentiles, and will be worshiped throughout the earth. Son of Man is also known as Messiah or Elect One.
In Chapter 48, the Son of Man’s name was invoked in heavenly court, in the presence of the Lord of Spirits and the Ancient of Days. This event occurred during the time before time, i.e., before the sun and the stars were formed and before the world was created.
In that place I beheld a fountain of righteousness, which never failed, encircled by many springs of wisdom. Of these all the thirsty drank, and were filled with wisdom, having their habitation with the righteous, the elect, and the holy.
In that hour was this Son of man invoked before the Lord of spirits, and his name in the presence of the Ancient of days. Before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were formed, his name was invoked in the presence of the Lord of spirits. A support shall he be for the righteous and the holy to lean upon, without falling; and he shall be the light of nations. He shall be the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All, who dwell on earth, shall fall down and worship before him; shall bless and glorify him, and sing praises to the name of the Lord of spirits. Therefore the Elect and the Concealed One existed in his presence, before the world was created, and for ever.
This is consistent with John’s description of Jesus’ existence before the world was created.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,a and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. – John 1:1
The Lord of Spirits chose the Son of Man to come to the earth to reveal the concealed treasures (e.g., eternal life), and he will overthrow the kings and their dominions, as stated in Enoch 46. The main result of the advent of the Son of Man is that he will be the light of the nations.
There I beheld the Ancient of days, whose head was like white wool, and with him another, whose countenance resembled that of man. His countenance was full of grace, like that of one of the holy angels. Then I inquired of one of the angels, who went with me, and who showed me every secret thing, concerning this Son of man; who he was; whence he was and why he accompanied the Ancient of days.
He answered and said to me, This is the Son of man, to whom righteousness belongs; with whom righteousness has dwelt; and who will reveal all the treasures of that which is concealed: for the Lord of spirits has chosen him; and his portion has surpassed all before the Lord of spirits in everlasting uprightness.
This Son of man, whom you behold, shall raise up kings and the mighty from their dwelling places, and the powerful from their thrones; shall loosen the bridles of the powerful, and break in pieces the teeth of sinners.
He shall hurl kings from their thrones and their dominions; because they will not exalt and praise him, nor humble themselves before him, by whom their kingdoms were granted to them.The countenance likewise of the mighty shall He cast down, filling them with confusion. Darkness shall be their habitation, and worms shall be their bed; nor from that their bed shall they hope to be again raised, because they exalted not the name of the Lord of spirits.
The title “Son of Man” is combined with glory as 1 Enoch 69,29 says: “For that Son of Man has appeared and has seated himself upon the throne of his glory.” Jesus talks about “the Son of Man coming in his glory,” in Matthew 24,30. “To him was given dominion and glory…” Daniel 7:13. The Son of Man is this human appearance of God, the likeness and visible image of the invisible God and therefore identified with the “first-formed man” created “in the image of God” (Genesis. 1:27).
According to the late, great Gnostic scholar, Gilles Quispel, the notion of a heavenly “man” as the icon of God’s glory is heavily emphasized in literature mentioned earlier like Enoch, Daniel, Jude, Ezekiel, as well as Paul’s “Heavenly Man” or “Second Man” contra the earthly Adam humiliating himself in original sin in Eden, discussed in 1 Corinthians, the Corpus Hermeticum’s heavenly Anthropos breaking through the spheres of the archon administrators, the “Primal Man” of the Persian Manichaeans and the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah. The Apocryphon of John of the baptizing Johannite Gnostics, states similar things:
“And a voice came forth from the exalted aeon-heaven: ‘The Man exists and the son of Man.’ And the chief archon, Yaltabaoth, heard (it) and thought that the voice had come from his mother. And he did not know from where it came. And he taught them, the holy and perfect Mother-Father, the complete foreknowledge, the image of the invisible one who is the Father of the all (and) through whom everything came into being, the first Man. For he revealed his likeness in a human form.
“And the whole aeon of the chief archon trembled, and the foundations of the abyss shook. And of the waters which are above matter, the underside was illuminated by the appearance of his image which had been revealed. And when all the authorities and the chief archon looked, they saw the whole region of the underside which was illuminated. And through the light they saw the form of the image in the water.
So it would follow that the “Son” of “Man” is the same as Jesus, who is the exalted “Son” of God, who is also called “Man” or the Divine Father. The “glorious Son of Man” is closely connected to the visions quoted earlier. In Revelation 1,12 the Son of Man is seen with the characteristic features of the Ancient of Days, Daniel 7,9: “hair like wool”, “white as snow.” His appearance is like the blazing light of the sun and he is seen together with the mystical symbol of the sevenfold light per Revelation 1,16, known from the visions of Zechariah where the divine light is seen as a seven times sevenfold flame. We also see that the Son of Man in 1 Enoch 62:7 is only revealed to the chosen few. How? In visions I presume! Otherwise, he is hidden until the day of judgment, with the “powerful kings” of the earth who abused the Lord’s chosen are punished and sent into the pit of Sheol, the same hellish pit that the Shepherd angels are condemned in chains in eternal ruin:
For formerly the Son of Man was hidden, and the Most High preserved him before his power, and has revealed him to the chosen. And the congregation of the holy and the chosen will be sown, and all the chosen will stand before him on that day. And the congregation of the holy and the chosen will be sown, and all the chosen will stand before him on that day. And all the powerful kings and the exalted and they who rule the earth will fall before him upon their faces, and will worship and will hope in this Son of Man, and will petition him and ask him for mercy. And that Lord of the spirits will only press them, that they hasten to leave his presence and their countenances will be filled with shame, and darkness will be heaped upon their countenances. And the angels of punishment will receive them to take vengeance on them, because they have abused his children and his chosen.And they will be a spectacle for the just and for his chosen; they will rejoice over them, because the wrath of the Lord of the spirits rests upon them, and the sword of the Lord of the spirits is drunk with them.
Seal Cube of Metatron. Taken from here. Please note the black cube of Yahweh is also a symbol of Saturn.
Enoch is also sort of a proto-Messianic figure and even has many similarities with Hermes and Thoth as well, noted in our book. In 2. and 3. Enoch the culmination of Enoch’s fate is his transformation to a high-ranking angelic being, in 3.Enoch, to Metatron, the “lesser YHVH”, God’s viceroy, sitting on a throne next to God. In 2 Enoch, he is made to stand by God’s left hand and receiving secrets hidden even to the angels. In 1.Enoch 71, Metatron is put on God’s throne of glory to reign in eternity on God’s behalf.
Enoch is also sort of a proto-Messianic figure. In 2. and 3. Enoch the culmination of Enoch’s fate is his transformation into a high-ranking angelic being, in 3.Enoch, to Metatron, the “lesser YHVH,” God’s viceroy, sitting on a throne next to God. In 2 Enoch, he is made to stand by God’s left hand and receiving secrets hidden even to the angels.
Grant what no angel eye has seen and no archon ear (has) heard, and what has not entered into the human heart which came to be angelic and (modelled) after the image of the psychic God when it was formed in the beginning, since I have faith and hope. And place upon me your beloved, elect, and blessed greatness, the First-born, the First-begotten, and the wonderful mystery of your house; for yours is the power and the glory and the praise and the greatness for ever and ever. Amen.
In 1.Enoch 71, Metatron is put on God’s throne of glory to reign in eternity on God’s behalf. In the article, Third Enoch and the Mystery of “Metatron”by William F. Dankenbring, he writes that Metatron is in actuality, simply another guise of none other than, the Son of Man!
The name “Metatron” itself has prompted much speculation as to its meaning. The Latin metatorwas used of “anyone who prepares the way.” The Greek word metaturannosmeans “one next to the ruler.” The Greek metathronon means “next to the divine throne,” “the second throne.”
Says P. Alexander, “The powerful ‘angel of the Lord’ in the Old Testament (who is sometimes hard to distinguish from God himself) may be the prototype of 3 Enoch’s Metatron” (p.246). In a Dead Sea scroll (11Qmelch) the personage known as Melchizedek “appears as being exalted over all the angels,” and it is stated that He will “preside over a heavenly assize and exact punishment, with the help of the other angels” (p.249). The Qumran community apparently regarded Melchizedek as the high priest of the heavenly Temple – the same role in which Metatron is pictured in 3 Enoch.
Thus Metatron is the same personage as Melchizedek – and the apostle Paul identifies Melchizedek as none other than the One who became Jesus Christ! Paul writes that Melchizedek, to whom Abraham paid a tithe of all (Gen.14:18-20), was “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but MADE LIKE the Son of God, REMAINS a priest continually” (Heb.7:1-3).
Notice! This person had no parents, humanly speaking. He was KING of Salem, or Jerusalem, meaning, “king of peace” (verse 2). His name, itself, means “King of righteousness.” He pre-existed the Universe, having no “beginning of days.” He is an ETERNAL being, having “no end of life.” Thus His beginning had to be BEFORE CREATION, as “days” are defined as a product of the earth turning on its axis causing night and day.
So, it is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of Man and Son of God, who is also the supra-angelic Metatron that is also, interestingly, has seventy names that corresponds to the seventy angelic sons of God, chosen by the Most High to rule over the nations. William F. Dankenbring further writes:
Now let’s notice what 3 Enoch reveals about this mysterious figure known as “Metatron” in Jewish apocalyptic, mystical literature of the early centuries of the present era! Let us examine how this being’s pre-existence compares with the stated pre-existence of the Christ, the Nazarene – Jesus, the “Son of God” and the “Son of man.”
In 3 Enoch, Rabbi R. Ishmael begins with a vision wherein he ascended to behold God’s chariot in heaven. He prayed for God to protect him, as he felt very insecure in this awesome place. He relates, “At once the Holy One, blessed be he, summoned to my aid his servant Metatron, Prince of the Divine Presence” (3 Enoch 1:4). In 3 Enoch, the overwhelming majority of chapters begin with a reference to “Metatron, Prince of the Divine Presence.”
In chapter 3, the Rabbi asks Metatron, “What is your name?” He replies, “I have seventy names, corresponding to the seventy nations of the world, and all of them are based on the name of the King of the kings of kings; however, my King calls me ‘Youth.’” (3:1-2). Compare this with Proverbs 8, where Solomon speaks of Wisdom as being “brought forth” in the beginning. Solomon quotes Wisdom as saying, “When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him” (Prov.8:22-25, 29-30).
Metatron was called “Youth,” by God the Father, the Ancient of days. This implies that as compared to the Father, the super-archangel Metatron has a beginning, a time when He was “youthful.” Yet He became the Prince over all God’s Creation, and Co-ruler of the Universe!
What we are seeing here is a complex multiplicity of gods, aeons, and angels that is most prominent in the Old Testament scriptures, many of which are considered “apocrypha” today but back in the time of the ancients and after the time of Jesus, was considered canonical and openly accepted until the reign of Roman Orthodoxy came into fold around the fourth century, CE, and later with the Protestant Reformation of Catholicism with the (Masonic) King James Version of the Catholic Latin Vulgate.
As it follows, Metatron of 3 Enoch, Melchizedek, the High Priest of El Elyon and Jesus Christ as a “High Priest” in Hebrews, are all the same being. Metatron is depicted as the lesser “YHWH”. Perhaps Jesus was the replacement “Great Angel” for Yahweh, just like how Seth (being of “another seed”) is the replacement for Cain and Abel in Genesis and Sabaoth (Jupiter) is the replacement for Yaldabaoth (Saturn) in texts like the Hypostasis of the Archons. And El Elyion is the “Lord” in the Old Testament, while Yahweh is simply one of many “sons of the Most High” or the Elohim angels. Yahweh is probably just a Hebrew reiteration of Dyaus Pitar/Jove and the Canaanite Ba’al and El.
According to Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1,30:10-11), the Ophites saw multiple powers embedded in the Old Testament as well, and the prophecies associated with Jesus are attributed to Sophia, who is also called “the Lord,” the “Mother” and the “Heavenly Jerusalem” while Ialdabaoth (YHWH/Satan) turned Abraham’s seed from Egypt into Jews!
Ialdabaoth himself chose a certain man named Abraham from among these, and made a covenant with him, to the effect that, if his seed continued to serve him, he would give to them the earth for an inheritance. Afterwards, by means of Moses, he brought forth Abraham’s descendants from Egypt, and gave them the law, and made them the Jews. Among that people he chose seven days, which they also call the holy Hebdomad. Each of these receives his own herald for the purpose of glorifying and proclaiming God; so that, when the rest hear these praises, they too may serve those who are announced as gods by the prophets.
Moreover, they distribute the prophets in the following manner: Moses, and Joshua the son of Nun, and Amos, and Habakkuk, belonged to Ialdabaoth; Samuel, and Nathan, and Jonah, and Micah, to Iao; Elijah, Joel, and Zechariah to Sabaoth; Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, to Adonai; Tobias and Haggai to Eloi; Michaiah and Nahum to Oreus; Esdras and Zephaniah to Astanphæus. Each one of these, then, glorifies his own father and God, and they maintain that Sophia, herself has also spoken many things through them regarding the first Anthropos (man), and concerning that Christ who is above, thus admonishing and reminding men of the incorruptible light, the first Anthropos, and of the descent of Christ.
And as we already saw, Simon Magus in the Clementines argues with Peter that polytheism/henotheism is the real undercurrent of the Old Testament, which underscores a pagan origin or perhaps even an anticipation of the revelation of the coming of the Son of Man into enemy territory of the ruler rebel angels to extract and save his elect, chosen before the foundation of the world. The more one investigates into the scriptures, even the “false ones” per Peter in the Clementines, monotheism isn’t exactly the ruling theology of the Old Testament writers had in mind.