“Truth is a multi-facetted diamond.” Luigi Ricceri 
edited and arranged by
Preliminary LibrArian I+N The Neith Network
All extracts and quotations copyright © the respective copyright owners
original texts and illustrations copyright © Colin James Hamer 10th February 2000
WHEN EXACTLY WAS JESUS OF BETHLEHEM ACTUALLY BORN? - WHERE IS MOUNT SINAI? - WHO IS YAHWEH? - WAS ADAM THE FIRST TEST-TUBE BABY? - WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE YEAR 2000? - CLASSIFIED A-Z OF PUBLISHED SOURCES QUOTED, MENTIONED, OR ADDITIONALLY RECOMMENDED - RESEARCH GUIDE-LINES & SEVEN VERY PRACTICAL RULES YOU MAY WISH TO MAKE YOUR OWN.
PRAYERFUL GREETINGS TO ALL WHO BELIEVE I+N JESUS CHRIST
"Christ is all, and in all. Clothe yourselves, then, as G-d's chosen ones - consecrated to him and dearly loved by him - with a compassionate heart, with kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another, should anyone have a complaint against someone else. As the Lord has granted you his forgiveness, so you must forgive. And over and above all that I have mentioned, clothe yourselves with love, love being that by which all things are bound together in a perfect unity. And may the peace which has its source in Christ be what bears rule in your hearts, in you who, as members of the one body, have received G-d's summons, so that you might pursue that peace, being ever thankful. May Christ's message dwell in you in all its richness, endowing you with the highest wisdom as you are instructing and admonishing one another, holding converse with one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, chanting in your hearts, under grace, in praise of G-d. And whatever you are about, in word or in action, let all things be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, he being the one through whom you render thanks to the Father." (Col 3:11-17.)
“Since the beginning the Christian faith has been challenged by responses to the question of origins that differ from its own.”1
Nevertheless, when discussing the Last Judgment & the End of Time, Don Nazareno Camilleri, Rome's Salesian University's best remembered Maltese Professor of dogmatic, ascetical and mystical theology, confidently and consistently taught that I+N the Resurrection all human bodies will, as it were, come together to form one single Person, this being a natural exigency as well as the gift of Grace.
Thomas Merton, moreover, also maintained that we Earthlings are already all effectively related to each other as One - even if appearances often convey a very different impression of the actual Truth.
Within that context all the following extracts from importantly divergent and as yet unreconciled recently published interpretations of ancient data have their legitimate place but, although a proper understanding of them is, I believe, directly relavant to human life today and throughout the third millennium, their true meaning is unlikely to be sufficiently discerned so long as they continue to be discussed only in isolation from each other! In other words, as King Hussein of Jordan so wisely appreciated, if ever we are confronted by enmity, that challenge is, I+N Truth, always an important part of our own responsibility.
“If a breach goes through a house, then the whole house is affected, not just one half of it. The house is no longer trustworthy. The conscientious architect does not seek to convince the inhabitants that the rooms on one side or the other of the breach are still in excellent condition, but will concern himself about the breach and will seek ways and means of putting the damage right… As a doctor I am interested solely in the question: How can the wound be healed? It is quite certain that the breach will never be closed by both sides apologeticly extolling their advantages instead of bewailing their lamentable inability to make peace. While mother and daughter squabble, their mutual enemy - Antichrist - is coming to the fore and showing these Christians, who are quarrelling over ‘their’ truth, what he can do, for he is more egotistical than all.”2
"Graciously hear us, Lord, holy Father, almighty eternal G-d, and deign to send your holy Angel from heaven, to guard, cherish, protect, visit and defend ALL residents in this tiny dwelling-place3...."
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1 Catechism of the Catholic Church: London, Geoffrey Chapman 1994, p.66, § 285, translated from p.69 of the 1992 French Mame/Plon: “Depuis ses débuts, la foi chrétienne a été confrontée à des réponses différentes sur la question des origines.” The corresponding text in the Italian version also incorporates an implied reference to the Eucharist: “Fin dagli inizi, la fede cristiana è stata messa a confronto con risponse diverse dalla sua circa la questione delle origini” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 1992, p.88).
2 CARL G. JUNG, Letter of 9 September, 1944.
3 i.e., the manifest cosmos.
WHEN EXACTLY WAS JESUS OF BETHLEHEM ACTUALLY BORN?
“There was one of the Pharisees called Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus by night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you have come from G-d as a teacher; for no one could perform the signs that you do unless G-d were with him.’
Jesus answered: ‘In all truth I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of G-d without being born from above.’
Nicodemus said: ‘How can anyone who is already old be born? Is it possible to go back into the womb again and be born?’
Jesus replied: ‘In all truth I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of G-d without being born through water and the Spirit; what is born of human nature is human; what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be surprised when I say: You must be born from above. The wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ ”1
“In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with G-d and the Word was G-d. He was with G-d in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, not one thing came into being except through him. What has come into being in him was life, life that was the light of men; and light shines in darkness, and darkness could not overpower it…
The Word was the real light that gives light to everyone; he was coming into the world. He was in the world that had come into being through him, and the world did not recognise him. He came to his own and his own people did not accept him. But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of G-d, to those who believed in his name who were born not from human stock or human desire or human will but from G-d himself. The Word became flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.
John [the Baptist] witnesses to him. He proclaims: ‘This is the one of whom I said: He who comes after me has passed ahead of me because he existed before me.’ ”2
“In the days of King Herod of Judæa there lived a priest called Zecharia who belonged to the Abijah section of the priesthood, and he had a wife, Elizabeth by name, who was a descendant of Aaron… Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in years…
Then there appeared to [Zecharia] the angel of the Lord… The sight disturbed Zecharia… But the angel said to him, ‘Zecharia, do not be afraid, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth is to bear you a son and you shall name him John…
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1 John 3:1-8. Unless indicated otherwise, all direct quotations of biblical texts are from the New Jerusalem Bible edited by Dom Henry Wansbrugh (Darton, Longman & Todd - Doubleday & Company, 1985). The spelling “G-d” has, however, been preferred to “God” whenever the context seems to me clearly to imply a reference to the Supreme Being.
2 John 1:1-5, 9-15.
Some time later his wife Elizabeth conceived and for five months she kept to herself, saying, ‘The Lord has done this for me, now that it has pleased him to take away the humiliation I suffered in public.’
In the sixth month the [same] angel Gabriel was sent by G-d to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice [Shalom!], you who enjoy G-d's favour! The Lord is with you… You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord G-d will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about, since I have no knowledge of man?’ The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of G-d. And I tell you this too: your cousin Elizabeth also, in her old age, has conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month’…
Now it happened that at this time Cæsar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be made of the whole inhabited world. This census - the first3 - took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee for Judæa, to David's town called Bethlehem, since he was of David's House and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the living-space. In the countryside close by there were shepherds out in the fields keeping guard over their sheep during the watches of the night. And the angel of the Lord stood over them and the glory of the Lord shone round them. they were terrified, but the angel said, ‘Do not be afraid. Look, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’ And all at once with the angel there was a great throng of the hosts of heaven, praising G-d with the words: ‘Glory to G-d in the highest heaven, and on Earth peace for those he favours.’ ”4
“…Zadok fathered Achim, Achim fathered Eliud, Eliud father Eleazar, Eleazar fathered Matthan, Matthan fathered Jacob; and Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary; of her was born Jesus who is called Christ. The sum of generations is therefore: fourteen from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the Babylonian deportation; and fourteen from the Babylonian
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3 The first in a series and, by most scholars, dated as occurring in 6 AD on the doubtful authority of Josephus who may, in fact, simply have been indicating when a general census of the Roman empire, begun even in Palestine before Herod's death and as early as 8-6 BC, was at last completed. The alternative translation, “This census preceded that which was held when Quirinius was govern of Syria” is, grammatically speaking, difficult to justify - and Gamaliel's reference to “the time of the census” (Acts 5:37) implies that up to that time only one relevant census had been taken. Whether or not any of this implies that Dionysius Exiguus' sixth-century establishment of our present dating-system (according to which the current year is “1999” AD or CE) was erroneously based, is, of course, quite a different question - which birth of Jesus was the focus of Dionysius' attention, his eternal Sonship, his earliest extra-uterine presence as a human baby, his officially commemorated birthday, the festive circumcision that marked his entrance into the community of Isræl, the heaven-sealed occasion of his baptism in the Jordan, or…?
4 Luke 1:5, 7, 11-13, 24-28, 31-36; 2:1-14. .
deportation to Christ”5
“Now it happened that when all the people had been baptised and while Jesus after his own baptism was at prayer, heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in a physical form, like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son; today have I fathered you.’
When he began, Jesus was about thirty years old, being the son, as it was thought, of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi,… son of Cainan, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.”6
“After Jesus had been born at Bethlehem in Judæa during the reign of King Herod, suddenly some wise men came to Jerusalem from the east asking, ‘Where is the infant king of the Jews? We saw his star as it rose and have come to do him homage.’ ”7
Robert Powell has penned for us a fascinating explanation of this celestial vision in words he attributes to Ancient Egypt's thrice greatest sage, Hermes Trismegistus: “A great soul such as Zoroaster, who incarnated as Jesus, can be likened to a star of first magnitude, such as the star Sirius, which shines so brightly that it stands forth from the other stars in the firmament. At the birth of Jesus the magi beheld the radiant star of the soul, and it was this which went before them, guiding them to the place of birth. On the face of the Full Moon in Virgo the magi read the name written there and knew that it was their spiritual teacher whose birth they beheld. In his spirit they had continued the tradition of star-gazing - a living astrology - which Zoroaster had inaugurated centuries earlier in Babylon. This great teacher summoned the three kings with his own being to the place of birth, going before them in shining star-like radiance. This was no outwardly perceptible star, and it was not visible to Herod and the others. Each incarnation of a great master follows the same archetype as that of Zoroaster. A star of first magnitude descends to the Earth, and at birth (or even earlier, at conception) the name of this star may be read by the eye of the spirit from the face of the Moon. This belongs to the mysteries of the Holy Grail.”8
As regards specific dates, Robert Powell also presents Hermes as being most generous with his information: “In the year 7 BC [the magi] became aware of Zoroaster's approaching incarnation by a conjunction between the planets Saturn and Jupiter in the star-sign Pisces. There were in fact three conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in that year, but it was the first of these three conjunctions which heralded the approaching incarnation of the great teacher, Zoroaster, whose name means ‘radiant star’. This first conjunction took place on May 27 at 24º Pisces, beneath the Eastern Fish of the two Fishes. At that time the Sun was in the sign of Gemini, close to the feet of the Twins. Two days later the New Moon took place in Gemini, and on the evening of May 30 the thin new sickle crescent of the Moon became visible on the western horizon. The magi, as was their practice, followed the passage of the Moon through the signs of the zodiac, watching it grow as it waxed brighter each evening. Each night they saw the progress of the Moon: through the signs of Cancer, Leo and Virgo, gradually increasing its distance from the Sun in Gemini. The waxing moon was visible to them during the first part of the night. Later in the night Saturn and Jupiter rose together across the eastern horizon - a magnificent sight - to stand high overhead by the time of sunrise. On the evening of June 6, the Moon had just overtaken the star Spica at 29º Virgo, the ear of corn held by the Virgin, and entered Libra. Westward of the Moon was
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5 Matthew 1:14-17. 6 Luke 3:21-24, 37-38. 7 Matthew 2:1-2.
8 Christian Hermetic Astrology (Golden Stone Press, Massachusetss, 1991), p.16.
Spica, and six degrees further westward from Spica was Mars, also in the Virgin. Mars was in opposition to the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces. The Moon was not yet full but was an impressive sight in the night sky; it disappeared from view during the early hours of the morning of June 7. The gaze of the magi shifted again to the planets Jupiter and Saturn, together high above in Pisces. With a sense of wonder they felt the presence of the soul of Zoroaster. And indeed on that very day, June 7 in 7 BC, the incarnation of this kingly soul began. The moment of spiritual conception, beheld clairvoyantly as the ‘descent of the stork,’ took place in Bethlehem shortly before midday. In the hermetic chart for this moment Venus and Pluto were in conjunction with the Ascendant in the sign of Virgo (13º Virgo). It was a conception in the sign of the Virgin, with the Sun high above in the Twins (16º Gemini) and the Moon in the sign of the Balance (10º Libra). Geocentrically, Saturn and Jupiter were close to setting on the western horizon and were in opposition to Mars; Pluto was rising, and Uranus - in opposition to Pluto - had just set. In the hermetic chart Mars and Neptune were in conjunction in the claws of the Scorpion, and Mercury was also in the Scorpion, in conjunction with Antares, the Scorpion's heart (15º Scorpio). From this moment on there began the weaving of the web of destiny of the incarnating soul of Zoroaster, who was born in Bethlehem nine months later and received the name Jesus…
But there is more to be said concerning this, from which you will see that the revelation of the stars during the entire period from the conception in 7 BC to the birth in 6 BC may be called the star of the magi. But in so far as the beginning of Zoroaster's reincarnation was heralded by the first meeting in 7 BC between Jupiter and Saturn, this may be called the onset of the star of the magi, the commencement of the revelation of ‘radiant star’ (Zoroaster) from the world of stars, announcing to the magi his incarnation. And the culmination of this revelation was the birth nine months later…
But let us now contemplate the speaking of the stars - and of ‘radiant star’ (Zoroaster) - to the magi on this day, or rather on the evening of March 5, for the birth took place in Bethlehem almost exactly two hours after the Sun had set.
The Sun was in the middle of Pisces, and Saturn (in Pisces) and Mars and Jupiter (in Aries) had already set. It was the night of the Full Moon. The shining orb of the almost Full Moon shone above the eastern horizon from the middle of the Virgin. The Moon alone was visible in the night sky, for all other planets were below the horizon - except for Pluto, which was in conjunction with the Moon, but was not visible. In the East the star-sign of Libra was beginning to rise, and at the moment of the birth the Ascendant was at 10º Libra, exactly where the Moon had been at the conception nine months earlier. And the Full Moon was at 13º Virgo, which had been the place of the Ascendant at the conception. So the moment of the fulfilment of the hermetic rule had arrived, and the birth took place. From the womb of Mary, in her house in Bethlehem, the new-born child emerged to begin a new incarnation upon the Earth. And at this very moment the magi beheld an awe-inspiring vision in the heavens. They saw the Full Moon in the Virgin, whereby the Virgin appeared standing on the Moon. In her right hand she was holding a sheaf of wheat, at the tip of which was the ear of corn (Spica), and on her left side was a vine. Encircling the Moon they saw a magnificent halo, a rainbow of light, upon which the Virgin was enthroned. Issuing forth from the Virgin they beheld a chalice - the sacred vessel of the grail - from which there arose a child. Above the child's head was a disc, like the Blessed Sacrament, from which rays of light streamed forth. The child was radiant with light, and proceeded from the Virgin towards them; and they knew that they were to follow it…”9
“At the adoration of the magi, on the evening of December 26, 6 BC, Saturn (2º Aries) and Jupiter (24º Aries) were high overhead in the Ram and Mars (13º Libra) was opposite in the sign of the Balance. The Sun (6º Capricorn) was in the horns of the Goat, and the Moon (15º Cancer) was opposite in the middle of the Crab. The three kings were in ecastasy, transfused by the light which emanated from the child, which was no outwardly perceptible light, but was the Light of the World.” “The child - now ten Full Moons old - was sitting on his mother's lap…
But [now] I must speak to you of a holy mystery which has remained concealed until the twentieth century… two children, both belonging to the royal house of David, one extending back to David's son Nathan, the prophet, and the other reaching back to David's son Solomon, the king… The kingly line, passed by way of Solomon down to Jacob, the father of Joseph. Into this kingly lineage incarnated Zoroaster, who was born as Jesus, the son of Joseph of Bethlehem, and was visited by the three kings… The prophetic line [proceeded] by way of Nathan down to Heli, later named Joachim, who was the father of Mary of Nazareth. [According to Anne Catherine Emmerich's visionary understanding there was a] crossing of the two lineages, the fruit of which was Jesus. For Mary married Joseph, and their child Jesus was the offspring of this union. This marriage, however, was the marriage of Mary of Nazareth to a man from Nazareth, Joseph the carpenter, not to Joseph of Bethlehem…
[Anne Catherine Emmerich's had only been allowed to see so far, but Rudolf Steiner was permitted to enter more deeply into this mystery -] Two children with the name Jesus - one born from the line of Solomon and the other from the line of Nathan… Unlike Zoroaster, who had lived in many lives previously on the Earth, the child Jesus, born as the son of Mary of Nazareth, had never before been incarnated on the Earth. This was a pure soul, an immaculate soul, untainetd by the consequences of the Fall - a soul straight from Paradise, so to speak. It was this child Jesus, born of Mary of Nazareth, who was visited by the shepherds on the morning after his birth… The Annuncation to Mary of Nazareth by the Angel Gabriel at the conception of the pure soul of Jesus took place on the same night on which the birth of ‘radiant star’ took place nine months later. This was in the year 2 BC, when Quirinius was governor of Syria… In Bethlehem… in a cave which was used as a stable… Jesus of the line of Nathan was born… shortly before midnight on the night of December 6/7 in the year 2 BC… Saturn was bright in the night sky, high above Bethlehem at the time of the birth. It had just left the star-sign of the Bull and was entering the Twins (1º Gemini). At the moment of birth the Star-sign of the Virgin was rising in the East; the Ascendant at the birth was 10½º Virgo. And Jupiter, too, was rising in the East, at 12½º Virgo. Over in the West the Moon - which was large, but not yet full - was on its way towards setting. It was in the Ram, at 10º Aries, close to where the Sun later stood at the crucifixion. As it was shortly before midnight, the Sun was at the deepest part of its passage beneath the Earth, and was in the middle of the star-sign of the Archer, at 16º Sagittarius.
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9 Ibid., pp.11-14.
This… was the position of the Sun in the zodiac when [Anne Catherine Emmerich] received the stigmata on the afternoon of December 29 in the year 1812. A cosmic remembrance of the divine birth of the immaculate soul of Jesus takes place each year when the Sun is in the middle of the Archer… Although the historical date of the divine birth was December 6, the cosmic remembrance - when the Sun is in the middle of the Sagittarius - now takes place later. In 1812 this fell on December 29, but in the twentieth century the cosmic remembrance is more appropriately celebrated at midnight from December 31 to January 1. And it was at just this moment in time, from 1922 to 1923, that the House of the Word, designed by [Rudolf Steiner] and sculpted in wood in dedication to the Advent of the Second [and Cosmic] Coming of the Lord, was tragically burnt down… At the moment of the birth, only the Moon and Saturn were visible. But Jupiter was rising, so it too became visible a little later on. And somewhat later still, towards dawn, as the shepherds made their way down from the hill towards the cave of the nativity, Venus and Mars were visible together above the horizon in the East - in conjunction near the start of the star-sign of the Scorpion (3º Scorpio). This was, so to speak, the star of the shepherds… In both cases, the red planet Mars was involved, as the activator - with the magi: in conjunction with Jupiter, and with the shepherds: in conjunction with Venus. Jupiter, as the planet of wisdom… Venus, the planet of love…
The elder Jesus, the reincarnated Zoroaster, was four years and nine months older than the younger Jesus, the paradisiacal immaculate soul… From the autumn of AD 2 onwards the two Jesus children both grew up in Nazareth… At the Passover in AD 8, the younger Jesus, having attained the age of eight, for the first time accompanied his parents to Jerusalem. He did so again in AD 9 and in each subsequent year. He was a pure and loving child but did not yet display any sign of genius. After the end of the Feast of the Passover in AD 12, the 12-year old Jesus parted company with his parents and set off on the return journey with other youths from Nazareth. But while still in Jerusalem, not far from the Mount of Olives, he took leave of his youthful friends, who thought that he was going to rejoin his parents… It was at this moment in time that the two Jesus children became one. The decision on the part of the 12-year old Jesus to separate from his parents and friends and return to Jerusalem came about through the union of the elder Jesus with him, an inner union whereby the soul of ‘radiant star’ separated from his body and united with the immaculate soul to indwell the latter's body. This was the joining together of the two lineages in Jesus - the priestly… and the kingly… Two months after this occurrence, the body of the elder Jesus - now just seventeen years old - having been vacated, was laid to rest. [This mysterious union of the two, which profoundly transformed and imbued with wisdom the human soul of the surviving 12-year old Jesus] took place around April 3 AD 12, exactly twenty-one years prior to the crucifixion on April 3 AD 33, so that the sun was at more or less the same place in the zodiac… The sacrifice of ‘radiant star’ in leaving his body to unite with the younger Jesus mirrored in advance - but on a lesser scale - the sacrificial death on Good Friday twenty-one years later.”10
“Jesus, with the power of the Spirit in him… came to Nazara, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood up to read, and they handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll he found the place
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10 Op.cit.,pp.18-28.
where it is written: ‘The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord.’ He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the assistant and sat down. And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today [that is to say, now] even while you are listening.’ ”11
The Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that “many things about Jesus of interest to human curiosity do not figure in the Gospels,” but also insists that “ ‘all that Jesus did and taught, from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven’ is to be seen in the light of the mysteries of Christmas and Easter.”12
In this connection His Royal Highness Prince Michæl of Albany, Head of the Royal House of Stewart, has more recently written: “Early Celtic Christianity was the closest of all religious teachings to the original doctrines of Jesus, and it had emerged within a few years of the Crucifixion as the foremost Church of the Christian world. Christians of the Celtic Church were recorded in Ireland in the latter reign of Emperor Tiberius (AD 14-37), long before St Peter went to Rome. Given that Jesus' own teachings formed the basis of the faith, the Mosaic structure of the Old Testament was duly incorporated. Judai marriage laws were observed, together with the celebrations of the Sabbath and Passover, while Easter was correctly held as the traditional feastday of the Spring goddess, Eostre, long before the Roman Church foisted a new significance on the old Celtic festival at the Synod of Whitby in 664.
Contrary to traditional belief, Emperor Constantine the Great (AD 274-337) did not embrace Christianity as the religion of Rome; he adapted Christianity into a new form which was implemented as the religion of Rome. Constantine's reign as Emperor was actually related to the Syrian Sol Invictus cult of sun worship, but he determined to create a purpose-built religion to divert Christianity from its Judaic origins. He redefined Jesus' birthday to comply with the sun Festival on 25 December, and substituted the sacred Sabbath (Saturday) with the Sun-day…”13
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11 Luke 4:14, 16-21. 12 Cathechism of the Catholic Church, p.114, nos.512, 514.
13 The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland (Element, 1998), pp.30-31. According to P. A. H. Seymour, The Birth of Christ - Exploding the Myth (Virgin Publishing 1998) Jesus was born on 15 September 7 BC. For a discussion of several other aspects of this question, cf W. B. Trevelyan, Sunday (Longman, Green & Co., 1902).
“A huge disklike spacecraft appears in Earth's skies; engulfed in a brilliance, it floats down upon beams of light… It lands in sight of stunned multitudes… It was, indeed, the greatest Divine Encounter in human memory - the greatest Theophany on record, witnessed by no less than a multitude of 600,000 people. The site of the Theophany was Mount Sinai, the ‘Mountain of the Elohim’ in the Sinai peninsula; the occasion was the granting of the Laws of the Covenant to the Children of Isræl, the high point of an eventful and miracle-filled Exodus from Egypt.” So wrote Zecharia Sitchin in 19951 but where, according to the Bible, is Mount Sinai actually to be found?2
“The Isrælites left Rameses for Succoth, about six hundred thousand on the march - men, that is, not counting their families. A mixed crowd of people went with them, and flocks and herds, quantities of livestock…
Moses led Isræl away from the Sea of Reeds, and they entered the desert of Shur. They then travelled through the desert for three days without finding water. When they reached Marah, they could not drink the Marah water because it was bitter; this is why the place was named Marah. The people complained to Moses saying, ‘What are we to drink?’ Moses appealed to Yahweh for help, and Yahweh showed him a piece of wood. When Moses threw it into the water, the water became sweet…3
So they came to Elim where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees; and there they pitched camp beside the water.4
Setting out from Elim, the whole community of Isrælites entered the desert of Sin, lying between Elim and Sinai - on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had left Egypt…
As Aaron was speaking to the whole community of Isrælites, they turned towards the desert, and there the glory5 of Yahweh appeared in the cloud. Yahweh then spoke to Moses…
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1 Divine Encounters: pp.284-5.
2 “In May 1997… a new edition of the HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible was published… Its editor was Dr. James B. Pritchard… It was Dr. Pritchard's intention that this new edition of the Atlas sould be authoritative. In an interview about the forthcoming volume shortly before his death in January 1997, Dr. Pritchard said, ‘Geography is something we all have in common. We may not agree on who, what, when or why things happen, but we do have to agree on where.’
In this new edition, a map tracing the route of the Exodus indicates that there are two ‘probable and possible’ locations for Mount Sinai. One is at the traditional spot in the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula near St. Catherine's Monastery. The other location is across the Gulf of Aqaba, in the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia. It is the mountain known as Jabal al Lawz.” (Howard Blum, The Gold of Exodus: pp.347-8)
3 “It was not sand beneath his boots. It was clay, a hard, sun-bleached, whitish clay… He was walking through a dried-up lake bed… He hurried over to inspect a nearby crater. It was a man-made well. On its slope, there was an indentation cut by a rope… The Arabs, he quickly deduced, still continued to dig for water in the depths of this parched lake bed… A tree was adjacent to a dry, alkaline lake bed that was approximately forty kilometers from the Saudi coast and the Strait of Tiran.” (The Gold of Exodus:pp.253-4)
4 “Al Bad, or Elim, or whatever you want to call this place, is midway between the coast and Jabal al Lawz.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.233) “This is Elim. The springs, the seventy palm trees - it's all here.” (Ibid.)
5 “Yahweh landed on Mount Sinai in an object that the Bible called Kabod that had the appearance of a ‘devouring fire’ (Exodus 24:11); the Prophet Ezekiel described the Kabod (usually translated ‘glory’ but which literally means ‘the heavy thing’) as a luminous and radiating vehicle equipped with wheels within wheels.” (Zecharia Sitchin, The Cosmic Code: pp.270-71)
The whole community of Isrælites left the desert of Sin, travelling by stages as Yahweh ordered. They pitched camp at Rephidim where there was no water for the people to drink… Yahweh then said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, taking some of the elders of Isræl with you; in your hand take the staff with which you struck the River, and go. I shall be waiting for you there on the rock (at Horeb). Strike the rock, and water will come out for the people to drink.’ This was what Moses did…
The Amalekites then came and attacked Isræl at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, ‘Pick some men and tomorrow morning go out and engage Amalek. I, for my part, shall take my stand on the hilltop with the staff of God in my hand’… As long as Moses kept his arms raised, Isræl had the advantage… But Moses' arms grew heavy, so they took a stone and put it under him and on this he sat, with Aaron and Hur supporting his arms on each side. Thus his arms remained unwavering till sunset, and Joshua defeated Amalek, putting their people to the sword. Yahweh then said to Moses, ‘Write this down in a book to commemorate it’…
Moses then built an altar and named it Yahweh-Nissi, meaning, ‘Lay hold of Yahweh's banner! Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation.’…
Then Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, with Moses' sons and wife, came to Moses in the desert where he was encamped at the mountain of God… and Aaron and all the elders of Isræl came and ate with Moses' father-in-law in the presence of God… Moses then set his father-in-law on his way, and he travelled back to his own country.6
Three months to the day after leaving Egypt, the Isrælites reached the desert of Sinai. Setting out from Rephidim, they reached the desert of Sinai and pitched camp in the desert; there, facing the mountain, Isræl pitched camp.
Moses then went up to God, and Yahweh called to him from the mountain… Yahweh then said to Moses, ‘Look, I shall come to you in a dense cloud so that the people will hear when I speak to you and believe you ever after.’ Moses then told Yahweh what the people had said. Yahweh then said to Moses, ‘… The day after tomorrow, in the sight of all the people, Yahweh will descend on Mount Sinai. You will mark out the limits of the mountain7 and say, “Take care not to go up the mountain or to touch the edge of it. anyone who touches the mountain will be put to death. No one may lay a hand on him: he must be stoned or shot by arrow, whether man or beast, he shall not live.” When the ram's horn sounds a long blast, they must go up the mountain’…
Now at daybreak two days later, there were peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, dense cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast; and, in the camp, all the people trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God; and they took their stand at the bottom of the mountain.
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6 “The ruins… on the outskirts of town…are the caves of Moses.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.238) “It was common knowledge among the people of the surrounding desert that [Moses] had camped in al Bad on his way to Mount Sinai… Moses was also a Muslim prophet… Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, the priest of Midian, had lived in the caves… They were Moses' home for the forty years he spent in Midian, before God appeared to him in the burning bush and ordered him to return to Egypt… Jethro lived just a hop, skip, and a jump from Mount Sinai,” which is “an 8,465-foot mountain… surrounded not by desolation, the oceans of sand or inhospitable rock of the desert, but a mountain that faced a relatively verdant valley, a suitable home to the Isrælites for the eleven months they camped at Sinai.” (Op.cit.: pp.239, 270 & 279)
7 “When Cornuke got to the mound, he asked Williams for his binoculars… ‘I knew it,’ he announced when he lowered the glasses. ‘They seem to go around the entire front of the mountain. Pretty evenly spaced, too. It's got to be.’ ‘Got to be what?’ Williams asked. ‘The boundary markers,’ Cornuke said… ‘God ordered Moses to come up with something that would keep the Isrælites a safe distance away from Mount Sinai… And here they are - stone boundary markers. Right where you'd expect them to be.’ ” (The Gold of Exodus: pp.290-91)
Mount Sinai was entirely wrapped in smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire. The smoke rose like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain shook violently.8 Louder and louder grew the trumpeting. Moses spoke, and God answered him in the thunder. Yahweh descended on Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain, and Yahweh called Moses to the top of the mountain; and Moses went up. Yahweh then said to Moses, ‘Go down and warn the people not to break through to look at Yahweh, or many of them will perish’… So the people kept their distance while Moses approached the dark cloud where God was…
Moses put all Yahweh's words into writing, and early next morning he built an altar at the foot of the mountain, with twelve standing-stones for the twelve tribes of Isræl9… Then, taking the Book of the Covenant, he read it to the listening people, who then said, ‘We shall do everything that Yahweh has said; we shall obey’…
Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu and seventy elders of Isræl then went up, and they saw the God of Isræl beneath whose feet there was what looked like a sapphire pavement pure as the heavens themselves,10 but he did no harm to the Isrælite notables; they actually gazed on God and then ate and drank.
Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Come up to me on the mountain. Stay there, and I will give you the stone tablets - the law and the commandment - which I have written for their instruction. Moses made ready, with Joshua his assistant, and they went up the mountain of God. He said to the elders, ‘Wait here for us until we come back to you. You have Aaron and Hur with you; if anyone has any matter to settle, let him go to them. Moses then went up the mountain.
Cloud covered the mountain. The glory of Yahweh rested on Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day Yahweh called to Moses from inside the cloud. To the watching Isrælites, the glory of Yahweh looked like a devouring fire on the mountain top. Moses went right into the cloud and went on up the mountain. Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights… When [Yahweh] had finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God…
Aaron built an altar before the statue…”11
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8 “Cornuke and Williams explored the entire summit, walking methodically in one direction and then another… The ground they walked on was coloured a deep, unnatural black… as black as obsidian. The rocks were like lumps of coal. There was no reason it should be that way. Unless… The earth beneath them had been blackened by heavenly flames. It had been scorched by God.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.297)
9 “ ‘We should come across those pillars in a minute,’ he told Williams. ‘Should be twelve of them’… Williams was too excited to ask for chapter and verse. He stood up, scanning the plain with his binoculars, and he found them. They were sticking out from the sand, all in a row, each one perhaps eighteen feet in diameter and spaced about five feet apart.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.306)
(Ibid.:p.280) “Just beneath the pinnacle of the mountain, two huge rocks fused together in a V, the cleft between them wide enough for a man to hide in… This was, Cornuke believed, the very rock where God had revealed a portion of His mystery to Moses, an event of incredible intimacy.” (Op.cit.:p.298)
10 “Jabal al Lawz… was in front of him, and it was a powerful sight. The full moon played across it, bathing the entire mountain in a splendid blue light. It was not like any blue he had ever seen before. Not the blue of the desert sky or of the sea in the Strait of Tiran. Rather, he decided, it was a blue that was so luminous, so shimmering in its soft, pale intensity, that it must have been filtered through heaven itself: a holy light.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.287)
11 Genesis 12:37; 15:22-25; 15:27-16:1; 16:10-11; 17:1, 5-6, 8-9, 11-16; 18:5, 12, 27; 19:1-3, 9-13, 16-21; 20:21; 24:4, 7, 9-18; 31:18; 32:5. “The stone at its thick base was, he estimated, ten feet long and perhaps twice as high. On top of it was another smaller, yet still huge rock with a flat, almost smooth surface as if it were an altar. And painted on these rocks were distinct drawings of cows - not sheep, not animals that were native to the desert, but cattle… drawn with large, graceful horns, cattle that even to Williams' untrained eye looked Egyptian, the very image of the Apis and Hathor bulls he had seen in books. But, he realized when he looked closer, there was more. The stick figures in the petroglyphs were not hunting. they were holding a cow above their heads - as if they were worshipping it.” (The Gold of Exodus: p.280)
Moses “then said, ‘Please show me your glory.’ Yahweh said, ‘I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and before you I shall pronounce the name Yahweh; and I am gracious to those to whom I am gracious and I take pity on those on whom I take pity.’ ‘But my face,’ he said, ‘You cannot see, for no human being can see me and survive.’ Then Yahweh said, ‘Here is a place near me. You will stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I shall put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have gone past. Then I shall take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face will not be seen.’ ”12
Elijah “walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, God's Mountain. There he went into a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of Yahweh came to him saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He replied, ‘I am full of jealous zeal for Yahweh Sabaoth, because the Isrælites have abandoned your covenant, have torn down your altars and put your prophets to the sword. I am the only one left, and now they want to kill me.’ Then he was told, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before Yahweh.’ For at that moment Yahweh was going by. A mighty hurricane split the mountains and shattered the rocks before Yahweh. But Yahweh was not in the hurricane. And after the hurricane, an earthquake. But Yahweh was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire. But Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire, a light murmuring sound. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then a voice came to him…”13
Jabal Al Lawz rises due North of Jabal Az Zuhd and their two summits are equidistant from that of Mount Katherine (28º30'N.) which rises due West about 80 miles away. Giza, Mount Nezzi and nearby Karnac in Egypt are also all three equidistant from Mount Katherine, Giza (29º59'N.) being, moreover, due West and the Valley of the Kings due South of the northern extreme (29º59' N.) of the extended fingertip of the Red Sea.14
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12 Genesis 33:18-23.
13 1 Kings 19:8-13. “By this time they were dangling on the sheer face of the mountain, somewhere between the summit and the narrow ledge about twenty feet below… It took all their concentration to control the sound of their feet hitting against the side of the mountain as they lowered themselves… They made it down to the ledge… But they were still exposed. There was no cover… But Cornuke was pointing to something not more than twenty yards away, a short walk along the narrow ledge… It was a cave.” (The Gold of Exodus: pp.301-2)
14 I am indebted for these (and many more intriguing) details to Mark Vidler, The Star Mirror (Thorsons: 1998), q.v.
“Moses then said to God, ‘Look, if I go to the Isrælites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they say to me, “What is his name?” what am I to tell them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am he who is.’1 and he said, ‘This is what you are to say to the Isrælites, “I am2 has sent me to you.” ’ God3 further said to Moses, ‘You are to tell the Isrælites, “Yahweh,4 the God3 of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name for all time, and thus I am to be invoked for all generations to come.’ ”5
According to Valentin Tomberg: “Two names were revealed to Moses - one name that is absolute: ‘I am the I am’ or ‘I am’; and a second, the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, YHVH, which is to be His name for ever and which, ‘to His remembrance’, is to be valid throughout all generations. Thus was revealed to Moses the timeless, absolute, and cosmic name ‘I am’, and also the name valid for historical time, the name of the ‘God of the fathers’, YAHVEH (YHVH).”6
“The two names of God EHIYEH (‘I am’) and YHVH (‘He who is’) are,” he adds, “in Hebrew, forms of the verb to be. In fact, they are in the future tense which, however, in Hebrew means not just the future, but also (and much more so) duration, permanence. EHIYEH is the form of the future (duration) in the first person and YHVH ‘He is, he was, and he will be’.
The name ‘I am’ (EHIYEH) was unutterable because there was no legitimate speaker for this name. One one occasion it was spoken, and concerning this occurrence the Gospel of John, written in Greek, reports Jesus answering the ironical question of the Jews: ‘ “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.’
As far as the name ‘He who is’ (Yahveh) is concerned, the high priest was allowed to speak it reverently once a year at a celebration in the temple, in the Holy of Holies. Otherwise, instead of the unutterable name the substitute name ADONAI (‘Lord’) was used.”7
Moreover, as Tomberg also feels it is important to notice, “God did not reveal Himself to the patriarchs as YHVH, let alone as ‘I am’ (EHIYEH), but as ‘SHADDAI’ (THE ‘Almighty One’).” And he adds: “This name corresponds to the level of the comprehension and revelation of God at that time. SHADDAI was used whenever it was a matter of convincing the human being that for God nothing is impossible (Gn 17:1; 28:3; 35:1; 43:14; 48:3; 49:25). And it was with this name that God revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…
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1 “EHIYEH ASHER EHIYEH” - sometimes translated: “I AM THE I AM.”
2 “EHIYEH” is here rendered simply: “I AM.”
3 “ELOHIM” has been translated here as “GOD,” “THE GOD.” The name ELOHIM appears 32 times in the first chapter of Genesis, but the name YAHVEH ELOHIM isn't mentioned at all until Genesis 2:4.
4 “YHVH” in the sense of “THE LORD.” 5 Exodus 3:13-15.
6 Covenant of the Heart (Element, 1992), p.161. 7 Ibidem, pp.162-3. Cf John 8:57-59.
The name ‘SHADDAI’ (‘Almighty One’) does not go any further than the morally indifferent concept of ‘might’ and ‘being able to do everything’. Comparing this, for example, with the words of the old Russian prince alexander Nevski: ‘God is not in might, but in truth and righteousness’ (Ne w sile Bog a w prawd), one understands, then, how great a step in the interiorization of the knowledge of the being of God this interpetation of St. Alexander Nevski signifies. In this connection it must also be mentioned that one of the most amoral and barbarous men of our time, Adolf Hitler, often expressly appealed to the ‘Almighty One’.
The name EL (‘Strong One’,‘Exalted One’, ‘Superior One’) represents a further stage in the interiorization of the knowledge of God's being. [Note, however, that EL SHADDAI more literally means ‘Lofty Mountain’.]… For here it is not a matter of might or omnipotence, but of the higher hierarchical order of rank - God's exaltedness in comparion to the human being…
It is scarcely necessary to say that Moses himself possessed a much more intimate and inwardly deeper knowledge of God than that which he had to represent in Egypt… Since Moses had declared his readiness to die for the people, he was, together with Elijah, found worthy to take part in the dialogue on Mt. Tabor with the Transfigured One… The most mysterious name of God, the name ‘I am’ (EHIYEH), which was revealed to Moses, is in truth the name of Christ before His appearance as the Son of Man…
There is a name of G-d in the Bible and in the tradition of the Cabala which unites the two names of the highest level ‘I am’ (EHIYEH) and ‘He who is’ (YHVH), in that it is a part of both. This is the name JAH. The name JAH is not often mentioned in the scriptures. It appears in the song of Moses [Exodus 15:2] and represents the princple of redemption for the period of time from the destruction of the temple until the coming of the Messiah… According to the Zohar the name JAH is the most mysterious of all the holy names. It designates the source of the divine stream where ‘the Yod gives its light to the Hé, which grants nourishment to the world below’.”8
“Enki - the god of wisdom and the abyss - was also the Sumerian deity responsible for creatring humankind… Enki (‘Lord of the Earth’) was called Ea in Akkadian (East Semitic) - that is to say in the Babylonian tradition. Scholars have determined that Ea was vocalised as ‘Éya’. So, when Moses stood before the burning bush and asked the name of the god of the mountain, did he really reply ‘I am who I am’ (Hebrew: Eyah asher eyah)? This puzzling phrase has long perplexed theologians but now there is a simple explanation. The voice of God simply replied ‘Eyah asher Eyah’ - ‘I am (the one) who is called Eyah’ - the name of Ea in its West Semitic (i.e. Hebrew) form. Scholars have simply failed to recognise that this is another of those characteristic puns in which the Old Testament abounds. [This] also explains God's apparently nonsensical instruction: ‘This is what you are to say to the Isrælites, “I am has sent me to you”.’ God's words should really be translated as ‘Eyah has sent me to you’.”9
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8 Op. cit., p.166-69.
9 David Rohl, A Test of Time - Volume 2: Legend, The Genesis of Civilisation (Century, 1998), pp.206-7.
The Prior of the Celtic Church of the Sacred Kindred of St. Columba, Sir Laurence Gardner has explored this topic in some detail, and he disagrees entirely: “In English-language Bibles the definition ‘Lord’ is used in a general context, but in earlier texts a positive distinction is drawn between ‘Jehovah’ [‘Yahweh’] and ‘the Lord’… They were, in fact, quite separate deities. The god referred to as ‘Jehovah’ was traditionally a storm god, a god of wrath and vengeance, whereas the god referred to as ‘the Lord’ [‘Adon’ in Hebrew] was a god of fertility and wisdom… To the Canaanites, these gods were respectively called ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’ - which meant precisely the same things (‘Lofty Mountain’ and ‘Lord’)…
Throughout the patriarchal era the Isrælites endeavoured to support Adon, the Lord, but at every turn El Shaddai (the storm god, Jehovah) retaliated with floods, tempests, famines and destruction. Even at the very last (around 600 BC), the Bible explains that Jerusalem was overthrown at Jehovah's bidding and tens of thousands of Jews were taken into Babylonian captivity simply because their King (a descendant of King David) had erected altars in veneration of Baal, the Adon.
It was during the course of this captivity that the Isrælites weakened and finally dconceded. They decided to succumb to the ‘God of Wrath’, and developed a new religion out of sheer fear of his retribution… Subsequently, the Christian Church took Jehovah on board as well, calling him simply ‘God’10 - and all the hitherto social concepts of the Adon were totally discarded. The two religions were henceforth both faiths of fear.”11
According to Gardner both gods originally held court “in the Tigris-Euprhates valley in Mesopotamia, in the Sumerian Eden delta of the Persian Gulf… We can trace the Sumerian written records back to about 3700 BC, and they tell us that the gods in question were brothers. In Sumer, the storm god who eventually became know as Jehovah was called ‘Enlil’ or ‘Ilu-kur-gal’ (meaning ‘Ruler of the Mountain’), and his brother, who became Adon, the Lord, was called ‘Enki’. This name is really important to our story because ‘Enki’ means ‘Archetype’.”12
Moreover, if Sir Laurence is correct), Enki, not Adam, was Cain's father and the Bible, properly translated, identifies the latter not as a ‘tiller of the soul’ labouring to have ‘dominion’ over the earth, but instead as an ‘Earthling’ of ‘kingly status’. Adam and Eve (whom another incorrect translation has traditionally but mistakenly associated with Adam's ‘rib’) were, he suggests, also purpose-bred for kingship by Enki and his sister Nin-khursag, the Lady of Life (‘ti’ in Sumerian, where it also means ‘rib’).13
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10 ‘Father’ being the new preferred designation of G-d considered under a benevolent aspect. Gardner also understands ‘Ahriman’ and ‘Mazda’ not as personal names but titular styles parallel to ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’.
11 “Star Fire - The Gold of the Gods” in Nexus New Times (Vol.5, no.6), pp.32. 12 Ibidem, pp.32-3.
13 “According to the Dragon tradition, the importance of Cain was that he was directly produced by Enki and Ava, so his blood was three-quarters Anunnaki. His half-brothers Hevel and Satanael (better known as Abel and Seth) were less than half Anunnaki, being the offspring of Atabba and Ava (Adam and Eve). Cains's Anunnaki blood was so advanced that it was said that his brother Abel's blood was ‘Earthbound’ by comparison. Cain, it was said in the scriptures, ‘rose far above Abel’, so that his brother's blood was swallowed into the ground. But this original description was thoroughly mistranslated for our modern Bible, and we are now told that ‘Cain rose up against Abel and spilled his blood upon the ground’. This is not the same thing at all.” (Op.cit., p.34)
Alan F. Alford will have none of this. In his view the Anunnaki, “the enigmatic Nefilim who came down from the sky, slept with the daughters of men, and had children by them, were not ancient astronauts… but meteoric fragments… The etymology of Nefilim comes from the Hebrew root nfl, meaning ‘to fall’… These meteorites were literally the sons of the exploded planet Osiris, hence the biblical assertion that they were ‘sons of God’.”14
Zecharia Sitchin certainly doesn't believe that Yahweh is or was a ‘meteroric fragment’, but neither is he persuaded that ‘Yahweh’ is simply just another name for either Enki or for his rival and half-brother Enlil.
True, he allows, “it had to be Enki whom the Bible quotes as saying ‘Let us make the Adam in our likeness and after our image.’ An epithet of Enki was NU.DIM.MUD, ‘he who fashions’; the Egyptians likewise called Enki Ptah - ‘the developer’ [and there are several other factors that favour such an identification, but] if we examine closely the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we will find that… the Bible equates Yahweh not with Enki but with Enlil…
[However, although] a strong case can be made for such an identification, …two characteristics of Enlil - strictness and punishment for transgressions, benevolence and protection when merited - are similar to how Yahweh has been pictured in the Bible, [and] the numbers seven and fifty… were associated in Mesopotamia with Enlil, …one of the most powerful biblical epithets for Yahweh is El Shaddai [which] simply means ‘God of mountains’ [but] there are no mountains in the great plain that was (and still is) Mesopotamia.
In the Enlilite domains the land that was called ‘Mountainland’ was Asia Minor to the north, beginning with the Taurus (‘Bull’) mountains; and that was the region of Adad, Enlil's youngest son. His Sumerian name was ISH.KUR… The Sumerian ISH was rendered shaddu in Akkadian; so that Il Shaddu became the biblical El Shaddai. Scholars speak of Adad, whom the Hittites called Teshub as a ‘storm god’, always depicted with a lightning, thundering, and windblowing, and thus the god of rains. The Bible credited Yahweh with similar attributes, [but it also] recognized the [distinct and separate] existence of Hadad (as his name was spelled in Hebrew) as one of the ‘other gods’ of other nations, not of Isræl.”
Neither can Yahweh be identified tout court with Ninurta, Nergal, Nannar-Sin, Thoth, Marduk or any other one of these ‘other gods’ - not even with Anu, their acknowledged chief, usually resident on the Anunnaki's home-planet, known to the Sumerians as the ‘12th planet’, Nibiru. “‘Thou art from Olam,’ the Psalmist declared - G-d is from a place which is a hidden place (and therefore G-d has been unseen). It was a place that was conceived as physically existing: Deuteronomy (33:15) and the Prophet Habakkuk (3:6) spoke of the ‘hills of Olam.’ Isaiah (33:14) referred to the ‘heat sources of Olam.’ Jeremiah (6:16) mentioned the ‘pathways of Olam’ and (18:5) ‘the lanes of Olam,’ and called Yahweh ‘king of Olam’ (10:10) as did Psalms 10:16…
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14 The Phœnix Solution - Secrets of a lost civilisation (Hodder & Stoughton 1998), p.396.
[However, even if Olam sounds very much like Nibiru,] in the biblical view Yahweh was more than ‘king, lord’ of Olam, as Anu was king on Nibiru. He was more than once hailed as El Olam, the G-d of Olam (Genesis 21:33) and El Elohim, the G-d of the Elohim (Joshua 22:22, Psalms 50:1 and Psalms 136:2). [This] biblical suggestion that the Elohim - the ‘gods,’ the Anunnaki - had a G-d, seems totally incredible at first, but quite logical on reflection…
‘Ab-reshit bara Elohim, et Ha'Shamaim v'et Ha'Aretz - The Father-of-Beginning created the Elohim, the Heavens and the Earth. (Genesis 1:1)” In today's Bible that, beyond any shadow of doubt, IS WHO YAHWEH NOW IS… “I, Yahweh, was the First and the Last I will aso be! I am the First and I am the Last; there are no Elohim without Me! I am He. I am the First, I am the Last as well. (Isaiah 41:6, 42:8, 44:6).”15
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15 Cf Zecharia Sitchin, Divine Encounters - A Guide to Visions, Angels, and other Emissaries (Avon Books 1995), pp.347-380. I remain deeply indebted to this author for so courageously opening up this far too neglected area of study and research. Far from incidentally, “At the beginning of Christianity an Alexandrian sect held that the name of the supreme and primordial creator was Abraxas, the sum of whose letters equalled 365 - the number of days in a solar year. The sect's members used to wear cameos made of semiprecious stones, bearing the god's image and name - as often as not equated with YaHu (short for Yahweh). There is every reason to believe that Abraxas stemmed from Ab-reshit, ‘Father/Progenitor of Beginning’, that we have proposed as the full first word, starting with an ‘A’, of Genesis, rather than the current Breshit which makes Genesis start with a ‘B’.” (Z. Sitchin, The Cosmic Code - Book VI of The Earth Chronicles (Avon Books 1998), p.164.
WAS ADAM THE FIRST TEST-TUBE BABY?
It would be entirely superfluous to reproduce here all the surviving documentary evidence intensively researched by Zecharia Sitchin which underpins his own affirmative reply to this very important as well as exceedingly topical question. Neither is it necessary to repeat in detail all that I have already openly and publicly stated about my own understanding of the matter.1
It is part of the prevailing consensus view that about 285,000 years ago, despite the then prevailing ice-age conditions, Homo sapiens flourished in western Asia and North Africa. This fits in quite nicely with the ancient Sumerian teaching that in 298,000 B.C., after a strike by Anunnaki miners in southern Africa, Enki and Ninharsag successfully created first a male, and then both male and female non-reproductive versions of Homo sapiens by implanting into selected Anunnaki females ova previously extracted from ape-women and genetically manipulated by fertilisation with male Anunnaki semen, possibly in combination with blood and, perhaps, copper-irradiated red earth.
Enki and Ninmah (later also called Ninharsag) are the Elohim, gods, Nefilim or Anunnaki mentioned as the Adam's first creators in the Book of Genesis, which elsewhere refers to the Anunnaki as men, angels, giants or Anakim - the Ancient Egyptians knew them as Neteru, Watchers or Guardians.
According to the same Sumerian and other Mesopotamian sources, Enki and Ninharsag are also those we have to thank for our own current mode of existence as beings normally and quite naturally capable of biological self-reproduction. By about 250,000-110,000 years ago these great scientists had learned even more about the mysteries of DNA and the practical problems of genetic engineering, so that they were at last able to respond positively to the other extraterrestrials' complaints about the by then all too familiar short-comings and inadequacies of cloned hybrids. Following procedures not essentially different from those currently being researched by human scientists in several countries, Enki and Ninharsag bestowed on Homo sapiens the potential for sexual self-reproduction. This new Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) soon spread to other continents. Comparisons of the placentas from women of different races and geographical backgrounds do, in fact, indicate they all descend from a single mitochondrial female ancestor who lived in Africa between 300,000 and 180,000 years ago.
Incidentally, Sitchin is inclined to think that Cain2 may have been of Neanderthal stock and may eventually have settled somewhere in Central America.3 Seth's son Enosh, on the other hand, may have been Cro-Magnon.4 Evidence in Armenia in the Shanidar Cave suggests that while life in that area had almost entirely degenerated by about 23,000 B.C.,5 in about 100,000 B.C. relatively high standards of living were being there enjoyed.6
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1 C. J. Hamer, “The ‘12th’ Planet: Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator - Zecharia Sitchin's Hypothesis, A Preliminary Assessment” (privately distributed text of a Lecture to RILKO - Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation: 31 March 1995).
2 Mentioned in Genesis 4:1 as having been born to Eve after she had had intercourse with “the man”, but only thanks to the assistance of Yahweh… a suggestion of some form of technical or medical intervention, perhaps?
3 ‘Inca’ could simply be ‘Cain’ rearranged.
4 The replacement of Neanderthal man by the already well-established Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens occurred somewhere between 36,000 and 33,000 B.C.
5 No more than 3 Nibiruan years before Enlil's decision to make no attempt to save life on Earth from the already anticipated disaster of the Flood.
6 With the onset of the Cainozoic Age and a new glacial period in about 200,000 B.C., human life regressed, but the climate improved in about 100,000 B.C.; Neanderthal man lived, and was present in Europe, until about 35,000 B.C. and during this period, very much to Enlil's disgust, the sons of the Anunnaki began to take as wives the daughters of Man.
Every 3,600 years, if not more frequently, the Anunnaki review the situation on Earth, where the record shows that their influence has always been much more benevolent than otherwise, so that it is very hard to over-estimate the importance of the part played by the Anunnaki in the course of human development to date on this planet.
It appears likely that the personage known to the Sumerians as Enki is the same individual as he whom the pre-Celtic Irish knew as Oengus, the Ancient Egyptians called Ptah and Khnemu, and the Classical Greeks revered as Vulcan. She whom the Sumerians called Ninmah or Ninharsag, the Ancient Egyptians called Hathor, and perhaps also Neith. Not surprisingly, since she it was who, under Enki's direction, actually created first the Adam and subsequently Adam (whom the Sumerians knew as Adapa), she is also known as Mami. Among the other names of this same individual are Ninti and Sud.7
Both Enki and Ninharsag were Anu's children. Anu was the 22nd at least of a line of actual supreme rulers resident on Nibiru. Anu's great-grand-daughter, Ninni is also known as the same historical individual as Innin, Inanna, Irnini, Ishtar, Eshdar, Astarte, Ast, Ashtoreth, Venus, Aphrodite, Athena, Isis, Anat, Calypso.
Similarly, Enki's son Marduk is perhaps identical with Ba'al, Ra, Amun, Zeus, Jupiter, Jove and Dyaus-Pitah, and Enki's son Thoth is probably Xiuhtecuhtli, Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, Hermes, Mercury, Hephaestus, Kothar-Hasis and Ninghiszada (but Shepesh, "Torch of the gods", is a goddess). The Sumerian Adad or Ishkur was called Ramman by Babylonians & Assyrians, Hadad by West Semites, Teshub by Hittites & Cassites, Rimac on the southern coast of Peru, and Viracocha at Tiahuanaco.
Nor are these the only instances Sitchin mentions of one and the same individual having several quite different names. Enmenduranna, for example, the seventh pre-Diluvial holder of kingship mentioned in the Sumerian list, began his 21,600 years' reign at Sippar in 241,400 B.C. but, after completing this period of 6 sars in office, became Sumer's first High Priest and was renamed En-me-dur-an-ki, which literally means "High Priest of the ME's of the Bond Heaven-Earth. According to Sitchin, he is the same individual as the Enoch mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 5:18-24).
Sir Laurence Gardner acknowledges the value of Sitchin's published reports on the cumulative findings of the last several generations of hundreds of dedicated scholars and researchers into the human family's ancient past, but he still feels a need to delve far more deeply into “the story of Adam and Eve and of how they were the result of clinical cloning.”8
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7 Complaints are still made about the patriarchal life-style favoured in Old Testament times. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are undeniably key-figures in the biblical narrative. “Yet the fact is that it was the mothers, not the fathers, who controlled the act that, in the ancients' view, gave the subject of the tale its status of ‘being’ - the naming of the child. Indeed, not only a person but a place, a city, a land, were not deemed to have come into being until they were given a name… When Man was given the ability to procreate on his own, it was Eve - not Adam - who had the right and privilege of naming their first male child Cain (Gn 4:1) as well as Seth who replaced the slain Abel (Gn 4:25).” (Z. Sitchin, The Cosmic Code, p.112.)
8 “Star Fire - The Gold of the Gods” in Nexus New Times (October-November 1998), p.33.
“One of the interesting items from the archives of the Dragon Court is the origin of the word ‘kingship’. It derives from the very earliest of Sumerian culture, wherein ‘kingship’ was identical with ‘kinship’ - and ‘kin’ means ‘blood relative’. In its original form, ‘kinship’ was ‘kainship’. And the first King of the Messianic Dragon succession was the biblical Cain (Kain), head of the Sumerian House of Kish.
On recognising this, one can immediately see the first anomaly in the traditional Genesis story, for the historical line to David and Jesus was not from Adam and Eve's son Seth at all. It was from Eve's son Cain, whose recorded successors (although given little space in the Old Testament) were the first great Kings (or Kains) of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Two more important features then come to light when reading the Bible again with this knowledge in mind. We all tend to think of Cain as being the first son of Adam and Eve, but he was not. Even the Book of Genesis tells us that he was not, and it confirms how Eve told Adam that Cain's father was the Lord. Who was ‘the Lord’? The Lord was Adon, and Adon was Enki. Even outside the Bible, the writings of the Hebrew Talmud and Midrash make it quite plain that Cain was not the son of Adam…
The Sumerian records state that around 6,000 years ago, Adam and Eve (known then as ‘Atabba’ and ‘Ava’, and jointly as the ‘Adama’) were purpose-bred for kingship at the House of Shimti by Enki and his sister-wife Nin-khrsag. In Sumerian, the word Shi-im-ti meant ‘breath-wind-life’.
Adam was certainly not the first man on Earth, but he was the first of the alchemically devised kingly succession.9 Nin-khursag was called ‘Lady of the Embryo’ or ‘Lady of Life’, and she was the surrogate mother for Atabba and Ava who were created from human ova fertilised by the Lord Enki…
According to the Dragon tradition, the importance of Cain was that he was directly produced by Enki and Ava, so his blood was three-quarters Anunnaki. His half-brothers Hevel and Satanæl (better known as Abel and Seth) were less than half Anunnaki, being the offspring of Atabba and Ava (Adam and Eve).”10 What is this Dragon tradition that Sir Laurence Gardner here so confidently invokes?
In Jewish and also, therefore, in Christian tradition all authentic understanding (‘binah’) and wisdom (‘hokhmah’) owe any validity they enjoy to the overarching and supporting divine presence of the Hidden One (‘kether’, ‘ain-suph’), but there have always been “two lines of priesthood - one Enlilite and one Enki'ite”, and there were also in ancient times “two central scientific academies, one in Enlil's Nippur and the other in Enki's Eridu. Both competing and cooperating, no doubt, as the two half-brothers themselves were,” but with, we have reason to suppose, an important goddess whenever necessary mediating and holding the balance between them.
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9 David Rohl goes much further; he speculates that ‘Atum’ is the same name in Ancient Egyptian, and so equates him to “the first god and living being in Egyptian theology.” (Legend - The Genesis of Civilisation, p.398-9.)
10 “Star Fire…”, pp.33-34.
“In the scene of the introduction of the king-priest to Shamash, the purpose or essence of the occurrence is indicated by two divine Cordholders [italics added]. The two cords as they stretch to a ray-emitting planet form an angle, suggesting measurement not so much of distance as of orientation… The stretching of cords to determine the proper astronomic orientation of a temple was the task of a goddess called Sesheta in Egypt. She was on the one hand a Goddess of the Calendar; her epithets were ‘the great one, lady of letters, mistress of the House of Books’ and her symbol was the stylus made of a palm branch, which in Egyptian hieroglyphs stood for ‘counting the years.’ She was depicted with a seven-rayed star within the Heavenly Bow on her head. She was the Goddess of Construction.”11
Since today's Jewish Calendar (in which 2000 AD is accounted 5,760) originally started as a count of the anniversaries of Anu's state-visit to Earth 2 sars after the Great Flood, which had incorporated a tour of inspection of some of the more important post-Diluvial constructions in both the Near East and in Central and Southern America, we may conclude that not only the Jewish scriptures but also their oral traditions transmit a gread deal of the knowledge that had been cultivated in the above-mentioned Enlilite and Enki'ite academies but, just as clearly, Palestine and its neighbours are not the only source of Tradition, and Sir Laurence Gardner is Prior of the Celtic Church of the Sacred Kindred of St. Columba, with all that that implies.12
“The oldest Grant of Arms in sovereign history… denoted the Messianic Dragon Bloodline for all time. The Sumerians referred to this insignia as the Gra-al… From biblical history, however, we know it better as the ‘Mark of Cain’… The ‘Mark’ was settled upon Cain by… Cain's own Father, Enki… It was an emblem dignified as the ‘Cup of the Waters’ or the Rosi-Crucis (the ‘Dew-Cup’), and it was identified in all records (including those of Egypt and Phœnicia and in the Hebrew annals) as being an upright, centred red cross within a circle13…
Cain was married to his half-sister - a pure-bred Anunnaki princess, Luluwa. Her father was Enki and her mother was Lilith, a grand-daughter of Enlil. Although not giving the name of Cain's wife, the Bible does name their younger son Enoch, while the Sumerian records cite his elder son and kingly successor, Atûn, who is perhaps better know as King Etana of Kish.
Etana was said to have ‘walked with the gods’, and to have been fed from the ‘Plant of Birth’ (or the ‘Tree of Life’, as it is called in Genesis). Henceforth, the kings of the line were designated as being the twigs of the Tree - and the ancient word for ‘twig’ was klone (clone).
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11 Z. Sitchin, When Time Began, pp.135-136.
12 Various features of the Hungarian, Finnish and Celtic languages (Basque, Welsh, Irish & Scottish Gælic) suggest they may even today still carry pre-Diluvian echoes. As regards a possible Hebrew origin for the Celts, cf Yair Davidy, The Tribes - The Isrælite Origins of the Western Peoples (Hebron, Isræl: Russell-Davis 1993). In any case, Jesus of Nazareth explicitly stated: “Mine is not a kingdom of this world” (John 18:36), clearly differentiating his own office, rôle and function from that of the kings of this world, whose existence he did not, therefore, deny. Neither Sitchin nor Gardner claim to be historians; Sitichin regards himself simply as an interested and honest reporter, and Gardner is the House of Stewart's officially appointed historiographer.
13 From this description it sounds rather like the Mesopotamian glyphy for planet Nibiru or the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning ‘town’.
In later times this ‘Plant’ or ‘Tree’ was redefined as a ‘Vine’, and so the Gra-al, the Vine and the Messianic Bloodline became conjoined as one in the literature [emphasis added] of subsequent ages.
In virtue of their contrived breeding, this kingly succession was modelled specifically for leadership, and in all aspects of knowledge, culture, awareness, wisdom and intuition they were highly advanced against their mundane contemporaries.14 In order to keep their blood as pure as possible, they always married within a close kinship.
It was fully recognised that the prominent gene of the succession was carried within the blood of the mother. Today we call this the ‘mitochondrial DNA’. And so was born a tradition inherited by their kingly descendants in Egypt and by the later Celtic rulers of Europe. True kingship, it was maintained [and the example of Abraham's son Isaak springs to mind], was transferred through the female, and so kingly marriages were strategically cemented with maternal half-sisters or first cousins…
At this point we begin to learn how the kingly succession was orally fed with bodily supplements from the early days. This practice continued for more than 1,000 years until the nourishment programme became wholly scientific and alchemical…15
Jehovah apparently warned Noah and his sons against the ingestion of blood… In the Christian tradition… blood is strunk from the sacred chalice, symbolically representing the blood of Jesus, the lifeblood of the Messianic Vine. Could it be, perhaps, that the modern Christian cusom is an unwitting through-back to some distant pre-Noah ritual which Jehovah opposed? If so, then since it is known that the chalice is a wholly female symbol which has been emblematic of the womb from the earliest times, might this even have been an extract of menstrual blood? The answer to these question is ‘Yes’… The sacred Anunnaki lunar essence - that of Enki's sister Nin-khursag, the designated lady of Life… was defined as the most potent of all life-forces and was venerated as being ‘Star Fire’. It was from the womb of Nin-khursag that the kingly line was born, and it was with her blood, the divine Star Fire, that the Dragon succession was supplementally fed.”16
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14 Possibly an especially significant choice of words.
15 It is possible that the relevant scientific and alchemical lore has in the course of time been diminished and to some extent distorted.
16 “Star Fire - The Gold of the Gods” in Nexus New Times (October-November 1998), pp.34-35. Biologically, however, the womb is not primarily a source of nourishment but one of three possibilities (egg, sac, womb) provided by Nature “of protecting the maternal organism from the foreign protein of the fœtus.” (Peter Plichta, God's Secret Formula, Element 1997, p.200.) Readers interested in further details about Star Fire, ambrosia, soma or whatever one wishes to call it, are referred as well as to Sir Laurence's publications to Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the origins of knowledge (Victor Gollancz 1998), and to Richard Evans Schultes & Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (reprinted, Swindon: TSP Paperbacks 1992). Despite the rudimentary state of current human knowledge, it is already recognized that all living things inhabiting this planet (plants as well as animals and incarnate humans) share what is radically the same DNA. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. 22 “is the number of human chromosomes when The Adam was created, before the secnd genertic manipulation had added the sex chromosomes ‘Y’ and ‘X’… In nature, the genetic information encoded in the DNA is decoded, at lightning speed, by a messenger called RNA that transcribes and recombines the DNA ‘letters’ into ‘words’ consisting of three letters. These three-letter groupings, it has
Also: “The priestly line begun with Aaron was subjected to rigorous laws imposing marital and procreation constraints. Whom they could have conjugal relations with and especially whom they could marry required that ‘the priestly seed shall not be profaned,’ and if one's seed shall be imperfect - ‘shall have a blemish’, a mutation, a genetic defect - that man was prohibited through all generations to perform priestly duties, ‘for I Yahweh hath sanctified the priestly line’ of Aaron… In January 1997, in the journal Nature, an international group of scientists reported the existence of a ‘Priestly Gene’ among Jews whose lineage can be traced back to Aaron…
The patrilineal nature of the Jewish Cohen tradition intrigued a research team from Isræl, England, Canada, and the USA. Focussing on the male (‘Y’) chromosome that is passed from father to son, they tested hundreds of ‘Cohens’ in different countries and found that by and large they had two unique ‘markers’ on the chromosome. This proved to be the case both for Ashkenazi (East European) and Sephardi (Near Eastern/African) Jews who had branched out after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70, indicating the antiquity of the genetic markers. ‘The simplest and most straightforward explanation is that these men have the Y chromosome of Aaron,’, explained Dr. Karl Skorecki of the Isræl Institute of Technology in Haifa.”17
More generally and far from coincidentally - “The influence of Sumerian religion and culture upon the whole history of western Asia down to our era, and continued in the Jewish calendar to our day, in the Syriac Christian calendar, and in the religious year of the Sabeans of the Middle Ages, can be traced and proved.”18
“A reaction against the trend of Assyriological interpretation of Sumero-Babylonian Religions, which has hitherto emphasized the magical side of this religion in a way wholly out of proportion to its purer ceremonies and deeper theology” remains an important priority. “The worship of Tammuz in Babylon and in those adjacent lands to which it spread was a cult of sorrow, death, and resurrection… The name itself is Sumerian and means the ‘faithful son’… The cult evidently originated much earlier, for when our epigraphical sources for Mesopotamian history begin, we have already before us a highly developed religion. It would not be venturesome to assert that this mystic cult of death and resurrection is one of the earliest forms of worship known to us, and so far as our sources permit us to speak, precedes the lower form of incantation and magic… Certain it is that the son of a virgin mother, whom the shadows of the nether world each year claimed as a divine sacrifice for man and beast and vegetation, forms an important part of the earliest known religious worship… A virgin mother and a divine son who suffers death and return to life. It is he whom the Sumerians called the damu-zi, the ‘faithful son’… The strongest evidence is at hand for supposing that
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been established, lie at the core of all life forms on Earth because they spell out chemically and biologically the twenty amino acids whose chains form the proteins of which all life on Earth - and probably elsewhere in the cosmos - consists.” (The Cosmic Code, pp.149-151.)
17 The Cosmic Code, pp.133-134.
18 Stephen Langdon, Babylonian Menologies and the Semitical Calendars - The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1933 (Oxford University Press: Humphrey Milford 1935, page vi.).
the first deity worshipped [in the cult of Eridu, centre of the worship of Ea, by the ancient Sumerians] was Mother Earth under the specific name, ‘Goddess of the vine’. The vine is not an indigenous plant in Mesopotamia… The title ‘faithful lady’, or ‘faithful queen’, is parallel to that of Tammuz the ‘faithful son’. Both titles probably reflect the ancient idea that these deities died for the life of the world, and of the two titles, nin-zi-da and dumu-zi-da, the former may well be the older… not only a divine mother who assists the birth of all life and perishes that it may revive, but she is the matron of rulers and the incarnation of justice… In due course of time the licentious nature of her worship was unfortunately retained. This was the feature of her cult which made the greatest impression upon Herodotus. In book I, chapter 99 of his History he describes that shameful law of the Babylonians which sent every Babylonian woman once in her life to the temple, the goddess of love, to sacrifice her honour for gold. The historians tells us that the Assyrians called this goddess Mylitta, and this, no doubt, means Innini and not Nintud.”19
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19 Stephen Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar - A Monograph upon Babylonian Religion and Theology containing extensive Extracts from the Tammuz Liturgies and all of the Arbela Oracles (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1914, passim).
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE YEAR 2000?
“It is not fair that you should so earnestly inquire after my secrets,” wrote Rudolf Steiner1, “when you paid so little attention to my questions.”
Nostradamus seems to have foretold that the 20th century, for him a period marked by the occurrence of a remarkably high number of fundamental changes in social and political life as well as in religious outlook and behaviour, will end on 9 May 2000, when the Sun is in 20° of Taurus in conjunction with Mercury (20°), Venus (11°), Jupiter (18°) and Saturn (20°), undeniably an impressive astrological event.2
A less rare, but still impressive celestial happening is already being eagerly awaited before that, a total eclipse of the Sun on 11 August 1999, but that isn't the year 2000. There was also a total eclipse of the Sun on the day Karol Wojtyla, the future 263rd Pope, John-Paul II, was born at Wadowice, just outside Cracow, in Poland on 18 May 1920, which greatly redounds to the credit of the Irish seer, St. Malachy, who referred to him as de labore solis (in medieval Latin: ‘from an eclipse of the Sun’), but again says nothing about the year 2000.
It is true that Malachy has predicted only two more occupants of the papal throne, gloria olivæ (‘the glory of the olive’) and Petrus Romanus (‘Peter the Roman’), but the commentators agree Malachy may have wished us to suppose an addtional succession of Pontiffs presiding over the Church for some unspecified period of time between the death of gloria olivae and the accession of Peter the Roman, only “after which” will “the seven-hilled city be destroyed and the dreadful Judge judge the people.” However, even if there are only destined to be two more Popes, in view of the current arrangements for papal funerals, elections and subsequent enthronements, it is prima facie unlikely that both of these can be accommodated within a time-frame that closes in the year 2000. So it seems fairly safe to conclude that Malachy's world is not predicted to come to an end then.3
Like today's Christians, Malachy will have been familiar with chapter 13 of Mark's Gospel, where the disciples of Jesus are described as asking their Master two quite distinct questions, one regarding an impending destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, the other about the Final Judgment at the end of the world.
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1 Quoting (in Gœthe's Standard of the Soul, 1925, p.87) from Gœthe's own The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lilly.
2 Cf David Ovason, The Secrets of Nostradamus - The Medieval Code of the Master Revealed in the Age of Computer Science (London: Century 1997), pp. 292-294. Several fanciful interpretations of the Quatrains are based on quite erroneous translations of their deliberately obscure and dificult French wording, which even the Master's own contemporaries and compatriots had already in the Middle Ages found frustratingly enigmatic. There are no good grounds for believing Nostradamus anticipated the world's coming to an end in or around the year 2000.
3 Peter Bander, The Prophecies of St. Malachy & St. Columbkille (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1989), pp.97-99. Unlike St. Malachy, however, Peter Bander seems to have been unaware of the solar eclipse of 18 May 1920. In June 1963 when Conchita Gonzalez heard the bells in Garabandal church-tower tolling for the death of Pope John XXIII, she mentioned to her mother, who was with her in the kitchen at the time, that the Virgin had told her he would have only three successors and then the end of times. “Do you mean the end of the world is coming?” “The end of times.” “That isn't the same?” “I don't know,” was Conchita's response. (cf Bruce L. Cathie, The Bridge to Infinity - Harmonic 371244 (1983 - reprinted: Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press 1997.)
Jesus's reply is transparently clear in its simplicity - “In those days, after that time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will come falling out of the sky and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send the angels to gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the world to the ends of the sky.”4 Nevertheless, he refuses to be specific about dates: “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and produce signs and portents to deceive the elect, if that were possible. You, therefore, must be on your guard. I have given you full warning.”5
Are there, then, any “signs and portents” now to be seen which it is prudent and reasonable to conclude have not been produced either by false Christs or false prophets? The answer seems to be ‘Yes’. An entire book is needed to supply even a brief summary of the clear and abundant evidence that justifies that affirmation, and it makes fascinating reading;6 what follows is no more than a list of the author's principal conclusions.
Although there are in the heavens millions of stars, indeed, millions of galaxies each comprising millions of stars, only about 4,000 stars are on a clear night visible to the naked human eye, and of these only a relatively small number are sufficiently bright to be classed as stars of the first magnitude. Since the Earth spins round on its North-South polar axis once approximately every 24 hours, it follows that from the viewpoint of a stationary terrestrial observer located anywhere along the Earth's equator, which particular stars are visible directly overhead (or, alternatively, just above, say, the eastern horizon) will vary from hour to hour (strictly speaking, even from moment to moment) as first this then that North-South slice of the heavenly panorama is brought perpendicularly above that North-South portion of our ever-revolving planet on which this observer is placed at that time. There is nothing out of the ordinary about this situation and in most years and at most periods, either in the past or in the foreseeable future, there have been no special correlations of any importance to be observed between the positions of the stars and the positions of various topographical features characterising planet Earth.
Therefore, it is quite remarkable that in the year 2000 an unusually large number of significant stars are to be found each day directly above some of the summits of some of Earth's highest mountains, over the extreme tips of continents, over isolated islands set in the midst of vast oceans and over a number of the ancient world's principal surviving monuments. In cataloguing these here it seems best to apply to the seemingly revolving heavens an imaginary division of its visible span in terms of latitude and longitude, even though that particular terminology is not properly applicable to it. Because of the vastness of the heavens and the Earth's daily revolution any star that is visible at all will, in the course of each night, vary in its apparent longitude by (on average) 180°, reappearing each night in the East or disappearing each night in the West almost precisely at whichever position and at whichever time it had done so in the course of the night previous. Because of this, in order to become aware of the wondrous nature of the following truly astronomical signs and portents, degrees not of longitude but of latitude are the decisively important data to be noticed and assessed.
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4 John 13:24-27. 5 John 13:22-23.
6 Mark Vidler, The Star Mirror - The Extraordinary Discovery of the True Reflection between Heaven and Earth (Thorson 1998).
Every day throughout the year 2000 A.D. the star Eltanim passes directly over Silbury Hill (51°24'50" N.) near Avebury in England, Juza over the summit (56°47'30"N.) of Ben Nevis in Scotland, and Alwaid over that of Mount Brandon (52°13'40"N.) - the second highest mountain in Ireland. Similarly, Vega passes over Monk's Mound (38°40'N.), the largest prehistoric settlement north of Mexico; Arcturus over Cholula (19°03'N.), site of the largest known pyramid on Earth; Antares over Easter Island (27°5'S.). Additionally, the three brightest stars in the eye of Orion encircle Mount Ararat; Rigel and Saiph pass over the mouths of the Ganges Delta - and there is more, much more, certainly enough to make it reasonable not to attribute this all to simple coincidence or mere chance…
However, instead of just listing all the remaining data valid for the year 2000, I have preferred to mention a few more directly relevant facts. As well as being vast and numerous, all the stars are constantly on the move relatively to each other and not only relatively to us. Hence, their overall disposition in the sky nowadays is quite different from that which might have been observed 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, and so on. And this is also true as regards the so called North Star or Polar Star. While an imaginary observer stationed anywhere along the Earth's equator may on a clear night be credited with an unobstructed vision of the skies above, not all of the stars will appear to him to move equally throughout the course of the night; stars in the sky's equatorial region will appear to him to move slowly but relatively rapidly, stars further North or South will have an apparent motion that is proportionally slower (just as points on the upper and lower parts of the surface of any spinning ball are, being confined within narrower limits, in a sense moving more slowly than the points comprising its central periphery), and any star situated exactly at the sky's imaginary North Pole or South Pole will, of course, appear stationary.
Sometimes there is a star to be seen precisely at the North Pole, sometimes not - even though, of course, several stars always appear to be not too far away from it. In 2450 BC the visible heavens, including the visible most northerly and southern stars were quite differently arranged than they are today. However, their arrangement in 2450 BC was not very much different than it was at any other time between 2510 and 2390 BC and, when I referred earlier to the sky as it will be in 2000 AD, what Mark Vidler has me thinking about is really the sky as it is for the most part arranged between, say, 1995 and 2115 AD but, whenever more precise comparisons are being made with either the 2450 BC or any other specific year's layout, the main focus is on the years 2450 BC and 2080 AD respectively, and not on the year 2000 at all!
But this doesn't mean that the reader is being cheated. Partly it results from the sky's being so large and the Earth so small. In the present context, however, it derives primarily from the divine munificence in providing us with so many magnificent “signs and portents’ to observe. Secondly, but in certain respects even more impressively, the reason why all these details are so important is that, as Mark Vidler's investigations have made quite evident -
1. Star-gazers active in Ancient Egypt and elsewhere in or before 2450 BC were fully aware of a large number of Earth-Star correspondences obtaining in that year, correspondences which were, indeed, of such a kind as to make the visible surface of planet Earth truly a mirror-map of the heavens above.
2. The same star-gazers left evidence to indicate that at that (from our present point of vantage) remote time they were also fully and in detail aware of a large number of different yet typically similar correspondences that are only now (and with greater precision in 2080 AD) once more accomplishing the rare and but seldom achieved feat of making our Earth's surface significantly mirror and reflect the face of heaven.
3. In order to make it evident to present-day researchers that they really had achieved what is claimed for them in 1 and 2 above, the same star-gazers pulled off one more attention-grabbing trick. They invited us just to imagine, without actually saying that this will happen, that for some reason or other in or about the year 2080 AD planet Earth, as well as continuing to spin daily around what is (as far as the arrangement of the stars in the sky is concerned) its present vertical axis, will find itself obliged (a bit like the nursery-rhyme's “Cow over the Moon”) suddenly to skip or jump once, so that what yesterday had been the equator is now 30° North… Incredibly, if a suitable computer-program is used to simulate such an event, the results are such that the Earth's surface remains in different yet significant ways a mirror of the sky!
It was (among other things) to draw our attention to this proof of their wisdom that the ancient builders of the three pyramids at Giza not only located these impressive monuments on that site, but arranged them there in the same pattern as the stars in Orion's belt.7 In 2080 AD these stars pass directly over the Equator each day, their most northerly celestial station ever - they never have in the past and, unless the Earth jumps or the skies take a dive, they never will pass directly over Giza; it is 30° too far North!
Since this discussion relates mainly to 2,000 AD, I must now leave each reader study Vidler's discoveries more directly as he has presented them in his fascinating book. Neither do I propose to devote any space here to another intriguing and important topic, a discussion of the already eagerly (by many) awaited Harmonic Convergence and synchronization of the Hopi prophecies with the Mayan and other traditionally sacred calendars on or about 21 December 2,012 AD…
So, the only clearly datable event we are left with is Nostradamus's already cited conjunction in 9 May 2,000, which other credible published sources assure us will actually take place not on 9 May but on May 5th - both dates may be correct, since most present-day astrologers' calculations are made within a geocentric perspective, while the ancients inhabited a less self-centred locally heliocentric and more generally astrocentric cosmos (hence the term ‘astrology’). In any evert being personally qualified neither as an astrologer nor as an astronomer, I now propose simply to wait and see.
Instead of coming to any final conclusion, therefore, I leave you to meditate on the maxim of that great Emperor Julian the Apostate: “That which never happened is eternally true.”8
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7 Cf Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery (Heinemann 1994). In connection with this publication at 9.30pm on Sunday 6 January 1994 Emma Freud presented on BBC 2 “The Great Pyramid - Gateway to the Stars” produced by Chris Mann, executive producer: John Blake; there is a related article in Radio Times (vol.280, no.3656, 5-11 February 1994, pp.24-7). Almost invariably - and this was not an exception - such articles, programmes and high-profiled books contain avoidable serious errors those responsible appear not to wish to acknowledge. Biblical ‘translations’ are not immune to this defect - for two excellent illustrations cf John Sassoon, From Sumer to Jerusalem - The Forbidden Hypothesis (Oxford: Intellect Books 1993, pp.118-120 - collects together these alternative ‘translations’ of part of Genesis 11,2: “from the east”, “in the east”, “east” and “eastwards”!) and I. Kozminsky, Numbers - Their Meaning & Magic (Rider 1974).
8 Cf my related letters: to Bishop Christopher Budd, “Actuality 2000 - Why is the Millennium News?” (9 November 1997, p.9); to Revd John R. Bradley, “Actuality 2000” (11 November 1997); to Cardinal Godfried Danneels, “Weekly Mass Obligation” (13 November 1997). As well as providing additional bibliographical references, this correspondence touches on the question of Sabbath and/or Sunday observance (see page 9 above).
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