alternative history

Welcome to the Past

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:56:00 +0000

This is a work in progress - and none of these articles are the final draft... but I think they can be enjoyed regardless.

Below you will find the articles so far posted, but there is much more to come so be patient.

I have tonight added, as promised, the Serpent chapters and also the Seven chapter. All these, together with the Epiphysis Cerebri chapters, are all inter-connected and should be read as such.

Also added Lucifer and Magic chapters (although incomplete, but still readable).

Enjoy!

© deviadah

Bibliography

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:53:00 +0000

These books were used when writing the Alternative History chapters;

BACON, ROGER
Mirror of Alchemy, The

BAIGENT, MICHAEL and LEIGH, RICHARD
Elixir and the Stone, The

BAIGENT, MICHAEL, LEIGH, RICHARD and LINCOLN, HENRY
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The

BARBER, CHRIS
Kali’s Killer Thugs

BLAVATSKY, HELENA P.
Isis Unveiled
Secret Doctrine, The

BOORSTIN, DANIEL J.
Discoverers, The

CARUS, PAUL
History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, The

CAZAZZA, MONTE and QUAYZAR, MARZY
Death Spiral of the Assassins

CHURTON, TOBIAS
Gnostic Philosophy

COCKREN, ARCHIBALD
Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored

COOPER-OAKLEY, I.
Comte de St. Germain, the

DILWORTH, JAMES
Alessandro, Count di Cagliostro

DONNELLY, IGNATIUS
Atlantis, The Antediluvian World

FRIEDLANDER, WALTER J.
Golden Wand of Medicine, The

GIBBON, EDWARD
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The

HALL, MANLY P.
Magic
Most Holy Trinosophia of the Comte de St.-Germain (introduction), The
Secret Teachings of All Ages, The

HAUCK, DANIEL WILLIAM
Emerald Tablet, Alchemy for Personal Transformation, The

HAWKINS, STEPHEN
A Brief History of Time

KELLY, EDWARD
Stone of the Philosophers, The

KENTON, WARREN
Astrology, The Celestial Mirror

KERÉNYI, C
Gods of the Greeks, The

KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA, STANISLAS
Alchemy, The Secret Art

LAVEY ANTON
Satanic Witch, The

LÉVI, ÈLIPHAS
History of Magic, The

MACKAY, CHARLES
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

MARCOS, SUBCOMMANDANTE
Our Word is Our Weapon

McCALMAN, IAIN
Last Alchemist, The

MISCELLANEOUS
Concise Oxford Dictionary, The
King James Version Bible, The
Websters Dictionary

NARBY, JEREMY
Cosmic Serpent, The

NATAF, ANDRÉ
Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult, The

NORVILL, ROY
Hermes Unveiled

PARACELSUS
Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim called Paracelsus (edited with preface by Henry E. Sigerist)

PIKE, ALBERT
Morals and Dogma

QUAYZAR, MARZY and CAZAZZA, MONTE
Death Spiral of the Assassins.

READ, PIERS PAUL
Templars, The

ROOB, ALEXANDER
Alchemy & Mysticism

SARGEANT, JACK (editor)
Death Cults (including Kali’s Killer Thugs and Death Spiral of the Assassins)

SCHOLEM, GERSHOM
Kabbalah

SINCLAIR, ANDREW
An Anatomy of Terror

STAVISH, MARK
Alchemy, it's not just for the Middle Ages anymore

STEWART, DESMOND
Early Islam

TOWERS, ERIC
Dashwood

VOLTAIRE
Candide

WAITE, ARTHUR EDWARD
A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry

WILSON, COLIN
Starseekers

WRIGHT, DUDLEY
Builder, The

© deviadah

The Serpent - part 2

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 18:47:00 +0000

The word chakra comes from the Sanskrit cakra meaning wheel or circle (wheel of life). It’s pronounced chuhkruh, with ch as in chart and both a as in yoga. The notion of a chakra as an energy node in the human body can be found mainly in Hinduism and its spiritual systems of yoga, and in the New Age movement. (1)

We will here go into a lot of numbers, especially number seven. Therefore I suggest also reading the chapter about this most elusive number that can be found HERE. This part and that chapter can't be understood separately.

The Spiritual Currents in the Wheel of Life

There are seven main charkas, each with different attributes and powers, aligned from the base of the spine to the top of the head. They are: (2)

Chakras are the loci of prana, life-energy/spiritual currents, which flow through the nadis, Sanskrit for channel, in the human body. There are three principal nadis. The first is the sushumna or in other words the spinal column through which the prana flows and by which means we enter and leave the body. The second nadis is the ida associated with the higher mind, or manas, and the third is the pingala associated with the force of desire. (3)

In Hinduism these three principal nadis, or pathways if you will, are all represented in the Caduceus of Hermes. The rod itself symbolizes the spinal column, the sushumna, and the two serpents conduct the spiritual currents, or pranas, along the ida and pingala channels. This is symbolized by the double-helix pattern from the chakra at the base, root, of the spine up to the top, the pineal gland, and the pair of wings (mercury/intellect). The serpents represent the positive and negative energy ascending and descending from above and below.

There has been some interesting experiments with caduceus-wound coils, or tensor coils, which is basically an ordinary copper wire wound in a double-helix, like the two serpents, but around a ferrite core instead of a staff. This coil has shown some amazing properties.

Firstly it has zero impedance, which means when fed electrical energy it does not get hot. Secondly it has infinite resonance, which means it can resonate strongly on any number of frequencies randomly spaced in the spectrum. A signal pumped into the coil can’t be detected by standard RF (radio frequency) detection apparatus. Thirdly, and most astoundingly, it has been known to levitate, pulsating bursts of microwave frequencies eerily reminiscent of a connection with something divine

The tantric texts Sat-Cakra-Nirupana and the Padaka-Pancaka describe the chakras as emanations of consciousness from the Brahman. The chakras are part of an emanationist theory, like that of the Kabala, Lataif-e-sitta in Sufism and Neo-Platonism. The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia says:

“The energy that was unleashed in creation, called the Kundalini, lies coiled and sleeping, and it is the purpose of a tantric yogi to arouse this energy, and cause it to rise back up through the increasingly subtler chakras, until union with god is achieved in the Sahasrara chakra at the crown of the head.”

When a serpent attacked Buddha, as the legend goes, it bound itself seven times around his waist, which could be symbolic of the seven main charkas, each with different attributes and powers, aligned from the base of the spine to the top of the head, but because of Buddha’s inner strength the serpent surrendered and became his follower. The serpent here is not a malevolent creature that Buddha masters, but instead the cosmic energy that lies coiled up inside that he gains control of.

This energy is the Kundalini, derived from a Sanskrit word meaning either coiled up, coiling like a snake or serpent power. The Caduceus of Hermes is thought to be an ancient symbolic representation of Kundalini physiology. Kundalini, according to the Yogic tradition, is curled up in the back part of the Root chakra in three and one-half turns around the sacrum. (4) Rumi, a Sufi mystic, wrote of Kundalini:

“You have the energy of the sun in you, but keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.”

The Yogic philosophy of ancient India is the originator of the Kundalini concept, which is the mothering intelligence behind yogic awakening and spiritual maturation. Both Charles Webster Leadbeater (5) and Carl Gustav Jung (6) gave early western interpretations of Kundalini.

There is also a connection, or similarity, with the Masonic CHiram (7) and the Kundalini as Manly P. Hall points out in The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

“…CHiram may be considered a symbol also of the Spit Fire moving through the sixth ventricle of the spinal column. The exact science of human regeneration is the Lost Key of Masonry, for when the Spit Fire is lifted up through the thirty-three degrees, or segments of the spinal column, and enters into the domed chamber of the human skull, it finally passes into the pituitary body (Isis), where it evokes Ra (the pineal gland) and demands the Sacred Name.”

The chakras are supposed to vitalise the physical body and interact with both the physical and mental nature. They are levels of consciousness and states of the soul difficult to prove scientifically, but it is interesting that the positions of the chakras correspond with the positions of the glands in the endocrine system and also the positions of nerve bundles called ganglions along the spinal column.

Since chakras are seen as having its existence in the spirit or psyche these glands can be the proof that they also exist in the physical body. The various hormones secreted by these glands can have dramatic effect on the psyche of a person if they are imbalanced. The most potent secretion of these glands is DMT synthesized by the pineal gland.

In men the region of the first chakra, the Root, has no gland but here lies the muscle that controls ejaculation. Together with the ovum in women this clearly symbolize the location of the genetic code that lies coiled up in the sperm/ovum. This fits the legend that the Kundalini lies coiled up in the Root chakra ready to uncoil and bring man to his highest spiritual potential.

The second chakra’s primary function is related to emotions, sexuality and creativity. The testis and the ovaries that produce sex hormones can both cause dramatic mood swings.

The third chakra, the solar plexus, is related to energy and digestion and here is the pancreas and the adrenal cortex that play valuables roles converting food matter into energy for the body.

The fourth chakra is connected to love and well-being. The thymus, in the chest, is part of the immune system. It produces T cells responsible for fighting of disease and can be harmed by stress.

The fifth chakra equals communication and growth. The thyroid, a gland located in the throat, produces thyroid hormones responsible for growth and maturation.

The sixth chakra, the third eye, is linked to the pineal gland, which is a light sensitive gland that produces the hormone melatonin. This hormone regulates the instincts of to sleep and awake, and also produces trace amounts of the psychedelic chemical dimethyltryptamine.

The final chakra, the Crown, controls all the other six. The pituitary gland secrets hormones in order to control the rest of the endocrine system and also connects to the central nervous system via the hypothalamus. The thalamus is thought to have a key role in the physical basis of consciousness. (8)

In The Secret Teachings of All Ages Manly P. Hall explains that the Brahmin and Egyptian initiates: “employed the lotus blossoms to represent the spinning vortices of spiritual energy located at various point along the spinal column…” These correspond with the chakra and endocrine glands as such:

There are clear similarities between the Seven Souls of esoteric Indian culture and the Seven Souls of Egyptian culture as well as the Egyptian hieroglyphics of the Seven Constitutions of Man: (9)

The chakras, the Seven Souls of India/Egypt and the constitutions of man all correspond with each other. If these are abbreviated and summarized into an essential form and compared to the seven stages of alchemical transmutation we get:

The Double-Helix

Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, stores all the information needed to make all parts of a living being. It contains four types of bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine abbreviated A, T, C and G. Similar to a computer that uses 1s and 0s to store data, the cells in the body use As, Ts, Cs and Gs to store the genetic data such as gender, facial features and all things that can be inherited.

DNA resembles in form two serpents that are entwined, much like the Caduceus of Hermes, is referred to as the double-helix. Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the origins of knowledge centres around this theme and delivers and interesting theory that explains how ancient people knew of the hidden secrets to life, the DNA, and correctly represented its shape and form as that of two entwined serpents or a ladder.

Most famous of these ladders is Jacob’s Ladder. In Genesis 28:12 it says that Jacob ”dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.”

Jeremy Narby writes in The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the origins of knowledge:

“Scientists have found spread out among the non-coding parts of the text a great number of endlessly repeated sequences with no apparent meaning… they have called this apparent gibberish, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the genome, junk DNA… There is even a 300-letter sequence that is repeated a total of half a million times. All told, repeat sequences make up a full third of the genome Their meaning, so far, is unknown.”

The most stunning similarity in all this is the creation myth and the DNA-serpent in Genesis and the fact that all things alive are made of genes.

Could all this mean that not only does the entwined serpents of the Caduceus represent DNA and the source of life, but also great technological powers, such as the caduceus-wound tensor coils, perhaps already known to the antediluvian world. If the forces that flow through the pranas… or is all this just mere coincidence?

If the Staff of Hermes symbolise the Above and Below, the Visible and the Invisible, and the Serpent crawling and twirling around it represents moving in and out, up and down, these two realities then the Serpent is some sort of vessel. More than the source of Wisdom it is the Vehicle of Wisdom.

It is difficult with certain subject to keep them in different categories since they literally intertwine. The continuation of these two parts of The Serpent continue HERE, which is a chapter on the number seven.

Footnotes:
(1) Traditional Chinese medicine has a similar system for energy in the human body.
(2) There is also a transpersonal Chakra above the crown Chakra together with many minor Chakras between the major Chakras.
(3) From G. de Purucker’s Man in Evolution and Fountain-Source of Occultism.
(4) Composite triangular bone of anchylosed vertebræ forming back of pelvis.
(5) Leadbeater often claimed to have been born on the 17th of February, 1847, although his birth records states it was the 16th of February, 1854. He was ordained an Anglican priest in his mid-twenties and later in life, when 62, consecrated a bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church. Aleister Crowley called him a senile sex-maniac and in 1906 Leadbeater was forced to resign from the Theosophical Society, where he was an associate of Annie Besant, because he was teaching masturbation. Was he a loon or a man before his time? Regardless Leadbeater was readmitted three years later. He died on the 1st of March, 1934.
(6) Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961).
(7) CHiram is a representation of mans spiritual death and regeneration, also identified with both Osiris and Hermes.
(8) Worthy to note is that some argue the pineal gland is the seventh Chakra and the pituitary gland is the sixth. See Arthur Avalon’s book Serpent Power.
(9) In the Kabbalah these are the corresponding names: Guf, Kuch ha Guf, Nephesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chayah and the seventh being Yechida.

© deviadah

Epiphysis Cerebri - part 2

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:21:00 +0000

The Bhagavad-Gita explains how we all carry within a sublime friend that is unknown to us. A God that dwells in the inner parts of us all and this God is, of course, the Universal Mind of which we are all a part and the pineal gland is the doorway into this realm of oneness, but few humans know how to get there.

The Bhagavad-Gita states that “the man who sacrifices his desires and his works to the being from whom the principles of everything stem, and by whom the universe was formed, through this sacrifice attains perfection. For one who finds this happiness and joy within himself, and also his wisdom within himself, is one with God. And mark well, the soul [astral body] which has found God is freed from rebirth and death, from old age and pain, and he drinks the water of immortality.”

The Arabian philosopher Al Ghazzali writes about the same subject, as has just been quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita, in his book The Alchemy of Happiness: (1)

“No one can understand a king but a king therefore God has made each of us a king in miniature, so to speak, over a kingdom which is an infinitely reduced copy of His own. In the, kingdom of man God’s ‘throne’ is represented by the soul, the Archangel by the heart, ‘the chair’ by the brain, ‘the tablet’ by the treasure-chamber of thought. The soul, itself unlocated and indivisible, governs the body as God governs the universe. In short, each of us is entrusted with a little kingdom, and charged not to be careless in the administration of it.”

The Activation of the Third Eye

If we want to activate the third eye and become reborn then the pineal gland and the pituitary gland must vibrate in unison. (2) To be able to do this one must be placed in deep mediation and relaxation, but for this to be possible it is vitally important to know oneself and feel comfortable with ones own inner mind.

The Gnostics preached this idea repeatedly, as has been stated previously, and they were certainly not the only ones. There is more meaning behind the famous phrase know thyself than what people give credit.

In the The Book of Thomas the Contender it states that “For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all.”

Jesus, and others as has been shown, point to the fact that the source of knowledge is in man himself. Looking for this knowledge, or gnosis, is a lonely and difficult process in which one encounters an inner resistance. This resistance against gnosis is the desire to sleep or to stay drunk, which in modern times explains why alcohol and TV has enjoyed, and enjoys, such success. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says: (3)

“If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

The Arabian Gnostic Monoimus, (4) or Mun’im, gave the advice to “give up seeking for God, the creation and other such things. Seek him by taking yourself as point of origin. Learn who he is, inside you, attract everything to itself and say: ‘My God, my spirit, my thinking, my soul, my body’.”

Al Ghazzali, expands on the concept of what self-knowledge is in his, previously quoted, book The Alchemy of Happiness:

“Some of thy attributes are those of animals, some of devils, and some of angels, and thou hast to find out which of these attributes are accidental and which essential. Till thou knowest this, thou canst not find out where thy real happiness lies. The occupation of animals is eating, sleeping, and fighting; therefore, if thou art an animal, busy thyself in these things. Devils are busy in stirring up mischief, and in guile and deceit; if thou belongest to them, do their work. Angels contemplate the beauty of God, and are entirely free from animal qualities; if thou art of angelic nature, then strive towards thine origin, that thou mayest know and contemplate the Most High, and be delivered from the thraldom of lust and anger. Thou shouldest also discover why thou hast been created with these two animal instincts: whether that they should subdue and lead thee captive, or whether that thou shouldest subdue them, and, in thy upward progress, make of one thy steed and of the other thy weapon.”

In other words to know the nature and destiny of man is to know oneself, and this kind of knowledge is, in the eyes of the Gnostics, divine. The emancipation from the false god, the Demiurge, is the rise out of the material into a liberated spiritual form, a rebirth, and it is here that it’s possible to attain a deep meditative state because in the inner part of the mind one is completely free and great powers awaits there. Bring to mind how Theodotus defined knowledge as, amongst other things, “the nature of our birth and of our rebirth.”

Alexander Roob writes in his Alchemy & Mysticism:

“The first and most fundamental form of knowledge is good news, and concerns the divine nature of one’s own essence: the soul appears as a divine spark of light. The second is bad news and concerns the “terror of the situation”: the spark of light is subject to the influence of external dark forces, in the exile of matter. Imprisoned within the coarse dungeon of the body, it is betrayed by the external senses; the demonic stars sully and bewitch the divine essence of one’s nature in order to prevent a return to the divine home.”

In the introduction of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s book The Elixir and the Stone (5) they name Faust (6) as the defining figure of our western civilization because “unlike Jesus Christ, this figure does not seek to lead others to God, nor even to attain his own personal oneness with God. On the contrary, he seeks nothing less than to become God himself.”

But Gnosticism and Alchemy, together with many other esoteric orders or systems, the aim is not to become God but realise that one is God already, only forgotten, and here lies the heresy that has sent thousands to their death and still does in some parts of the world.

Although Faust may be the defining figure of the modern age it is, like always, due to confusion and misunderstanding. The force that guides acts such as constructing artificial intelligence or cloning a human being successfully, or even conquering space, may be the urge to become a God but it’s in fact a failure in realising that we are already Gods – all of us. Within lies great powers sleeping that only need to be awakened, and it calls out for our attention. Perhaps this cry has been misinterpreted? Perhaps our feelings of being below God feeds our hunger to be above, instead of seeing the truth of the matter; that we are him/her… it already!

So with the importance of self-knowledge in mind we need to, in order to activate the third eye, place ourselves in a deep meditative state. In an Eastern manuscript, called the Oupnekhata, the following guidance is given concerning meditation:

“Breathe deep and slow and concentrate your unwavering attention into the midst of your body, into the region of your heart… withdraw your senses into yourself, like a turtle which withdraws its members within its shell.”

When the unison of the pineal and pituitary glands is achieved, the negative and positive forces connect, and a magnetic field is created. When this is strong enough it generates a light in the head and, as Jesus said: “thy whole body shall be full of light.”

This state will make astral travel, and/or astral projection, possible and like it states in the Emerald Tablet: “it [astral travel] overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates every solid thing.”

Now the pineal gland produces the hormone melatonin, which regulates the instincts of sleep and awake, and also produces, as has been covered, trace amounts of the psychedelic chemical dimethyltryptamine, which could be argued only creates the illusion of astral travel than the actual effect. But that is for the cynic to discuss.

When meditating it is important to be physically relaxed. Concentrate upon the pineal gland by staring at a point in the middle of the forehead. When the awakening of the pineal gland begins a pressure is felt at the base of the brain. This pressure will often be experienced when connecting to a higher frequency.

Once it is awakened many feats can be achieved such as astral travel. It is a difficult process, and a long one to master at will, and this is what Alchemy is all about; because first we are born, and then we are re-born. Or as it says in The Gospel of Philip:

“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.”

Footnotes:
(1) Translated from the Hindustani by Claud Field, London 1909. Al Ghazzali wrote Ihya-ul-ulum (Revival of the Religious Sciences) in Arabic, and then composed, for popular use, an abridgment of this work in Persian entitled Kimiya'e Saadat (The Alchemy of Happiness).
(2) Even a head injury can, allegedly, activate the third eye.
(3) Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University notes that though ultimately this Gospel was condemned and destroyed by the evolving Orthodox Church, it may be as old or older than the four canonical gospels preserved, and even have served as a source document to them. The Gospel of Thomas was one of the Gnostic texts found preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library.
(4) Lived about 150 - 210. Known for coining the usage of the word monad in a Gnostic context. According to Monoimus the world is created from the Monad (or Yod meaning ’one horn’).
(5) Published in 1997.
(6) Featured in a play by Marlowe and a poem of Goethe.

© deviadah

Seven

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:06:00 +0000

The Number of Numbers

As may already have become evident the number seven is an important mystical and magical number. Since ancient times seven has been a revered and sacred symbol. The Babylonians translated the Sumerian word for seven into the Babylonian word for completeness or all. In Greek and Roman mythology the number seven occurs time and time again. In China seven is a celestial number (together with 1, 3 and 5).

The uraeus is a serpent as a head-dress of Egyptian kings and divinities. According to the pyramid texts: “the king absorbed the seven frontal cobras which then became the seven cervical vertebrae which commanded the entire dorsal spine.”

These cobras, which spit fire, recall the Kundalini serpent-fire of the Hindu tradition, and this passage also seems to refer to certain of the vital centres or chakras, one of which occupies precisely the place of the royal uraeua in the forehead. This spiritual light is called akh by the ancient Egyptians.

The Egyptians also divided the night sky into seven parts and the moon changes its phase every seven days resulting in the creation of the week, which completes its cycle four times every month. There are seven fundamental notes in music. (1) In numerology seven represents philosophy and wisdom. There are, according to H.P. Blavatsky, seven root races. Then we have the significance of seven as a lucky number and the seven wonders of the world.

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, or the Unknown Philosopher, of the 18th century, declared that “numbers are the only sensible expression of the different properties of beings, which all proceed from the one and only essence.” Specifically of the number seven he viewed it as the ruling number of the manifested universe.

There is also the Hebrew candlestick with seven branches each representing, as put by Warren Kenton in The Celestial Mirror: (2) “a cosmic diagram of active and passive forces on either side of a central column of equilibrium.” Even in the Kabbalah itself all things depend on the seventh “for assuredly there can be no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh.”

In short seven can be found everywhere but nowhere as prominent as in the Bible. Faith Javane and Dusty Bunker show in their book Numerology and The Divine Triangle that seven is the principal number in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Apart from such obvious examples as the fact that the Lord rested on the seventh day and the seven angels with seven trumpets in Revelations, they put forth the seven-fold path of the Lord’s Prayer as a union of the triad, or trinity, and the quaternary. The Lord’s Prayer can be found in Matthew 6:9-13:

1. Our Father which art in heaven,
2. Hallowed be Thy Name.
3. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as [it is] in heaven.
4. Give us this day our daily bread.
5. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
6. And lead us not into temptation,
7. but deliver us from evil:

The father, in the Lord’s Prayer, can be seen instead as the root i.e. our basic material self. The hallowed name is the sacred source of our feelings. The will which shall be done in earth as in heaven, above as below, is the vital energy that flow through us. The daily bread is the deeper emotions that we feed upon. The debt, the original sin, which we keep needs to be forgiven and overcome and we need to let our soul surface instead of becoming trapped by material temptation. This will deliver us from unimportant material evils and result in bliss and a heightened state of being as explained in the final statement, that symbolize the return to the heavenly state, nirvana or more appropriate a oneness with everything.

8. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

And in the figure 8 we see, yet again, the serpent or Ouroboros as a symbol of infinity and paradise regained. It is, spiritually, the goal of the initiate, having gone through the seven stages.

Augustus Le Plongeon writes in his book Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11 500 years ago:

“Seven seems to have been the sacred number par excellence among all civilized nations of antiquity… That it was the number of numbers for those initiated to the sacred mysteries there can be no doubt. Pythagoras… calls it the ‘Vehicle of Life’, containing body and soul, since it is formed of a quaternary, that is: wisdom and intellect; and a Trinity, or action and matter.”

The Pythagorean Quaternary is the following sequence: 1+2+3+4 = 10 and has great significance since the union of the four numbers results in a oneness (3) and it can be represented as a triangle within a square (the 3 points of the triangle plus the four corners of the square equals seven).

Footnotes:
(1) The eighth is the beginning of the series again, the start of the higher octave.
(2) Published in 1974.
(3) 10 = 1+0 = 1.

© deviadah

The Gnostics and Gnosticism

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:00:00 +0000

In December of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer discovered, digging around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields, a large jug containing thirteen volumes of a book of 52 texts. They were Coptic (1) writings made by Gnostics and hidden away approximately 1600 years ago, around 390 C.E, by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, (2) to escape destruction under order of the emerging Orthodox Church in its violent obliteration of all unorthodoxy and heresy. Before 1945 Gnosticism was mainly understood through bias accounts of their persecutors, but now they had a voice again.

Gnosis is derived from Greek and means knowledge or the act of knowing. It is used in relation to the Divine, and point to the knowledge about the Divine. In the philosophical sense Gnosis is the knowledge of a God that exists outside creation and man, and of all the actions of God over time. In spirituality and mysticism Gnosis means experiencing the presence of the Divine within one’s soul and within the creation.

In essence the Divine experience is beyond our language and concepts. We can talk and think about it, but these actions will always remain outside the realm of what it really is, since no word or thought exist that can describe it fully.

To define exactly who the Gnostics were is difficult since there were many sects, communities and groups who all shared similar ideas but did not all call themselves Gnostics. Although it was not important that the many groups they consisted of had different opinions and teachings, as the Truth has many facets.

They encouraged each other to develop one’s own ideas. They considered their teachings, and also those of other religions, to only be approximations of the Truth. That is why the Gnostics were heavily influenced by other traditions like the Jewish, the Persian, the Babylonian, the Egyptian and the Greek

The Essenes in particular had special interests in the texts of other traditions, especially in those that dealt in the well being of soul and body employing herbal remedies and stones to treat illnesses. They taught the importance of knowing the names of the spirits that caused illness, and the healing essences in plants. In their scriptures we find that Jesus had many names and magic incantations, used to dispel demons, which were seen as an obstruction for the soul on its path to the Light. Jesus is said to belong to the Essenes.

The Gnostics considered Jesus as not only a spiritual teacher, someone who gives revelations, but also as an encourager, to seek gnosis for oneself. It’s ignorance, and not sin, that brings a person into painful situations. The quest is to explore ones own self, because within the psyche is the potential for liberation or destruction. Know thyself!

Theodotus (3) explains gnosis as “the knowledge of what we are, what we have been, the place from which we have come, the place into which we have fallen, the goal we are striving for and from which we have been pulled away, and the nature of our birth and of our rebirth.”

Generally, though, the Gnostics shared one belief and that was that they viewed the God of the Old Testament as an evil entity that dominated and suppressed man employing rewards and punishments. He is a God that does not know love, is cruel and tries to keep man in darkness. He is a lesser God, imperfect, because what he created failed in the sense that all his offspring became involved with violence and bloodshed and to set things right he was forced to destroy what he had created with a flood.

Robert A. Heinlein points out that “men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” When the God of the Old Testament is concerned he is completely right, but these tendencies can also be clearly witnessed with most other mythologies such as the Greek and the Norse where Gods drink, cheat, lie, copulate and kill.

The God of the Old Testament is not, according to the Gnostics, the same God Jesus spoke of who is a higher God full of love and ever-forgiving, so they referred to the Creator of the Old Testament as Demiurge.

Another major difference is that instead of seeing God as a man, an idea that the Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam all by and large share, they viewed God’s essence as unknowable of a dual unity between the Primal Father (the Abyss, the Unpronounceable) and the Primal Mother (Mother of All, the Womb, Bliss, Silence). The Gnostics speak about the supreme divinity as the Father-Mother or the Mother-Father. (4)

The Gnostics were extremely heretical when they, not only hinted that the God in the Old Testament is a false god, but that he is also not a man. Bear in mind that Pope Paul VI, bishop of Rome, was still declaring that women cannot become priests ‘because the Lord is a man’ as late as 1977 and even in the early 21st century his views are still agreed on, although heavily disputed, across the world. How far have we come since the time of the Gnostics we should ask ourselves? Are we worthy of peace on Earth when there are still a vast majority of dogmatic individuals who cannot rise above their preconceived views in how things should be instead of embracing knowledge, gnosis, and reason.

This clearly demonstrates that the Gnostics were before their time, still to this day, since they had a system where hierarchy was impossible and gender had no importance.

The Gnostics considered themselves free of hate and evil and were at one with knowledge living in a society of beings who loved each other in wisdom with an atmosphere of a spiritual marriage. They did not create a dominating religious institution and favoured mystic experience.

Who should be priest, bishop and prophet during their gatherings was decided by drawing lots and both men and women were allowed to attend. (5) In this way the Divine would decide who should speak because human choice was not important. Imagine what would happen if a country, as an experiment, would arrange a lottery where all the various roles in society such as governmental posts, teachers and priests were handed out by chance. It can’t turn worse than how contemporary government is managed as it’s commonly known that whoever wants power is in no way fit to wield it.

When the Roman Empire officially chose Christianity as the state religion the Gnostic men, women and children were burned together with their books, sometimes by the hundreds. (6) There was no place for Gnosis in the new world and all religious people should ask themselves, especially those who belong to a Christian or Catholic faith, what you believe in and why?

If it is truly in the teachings of Jesus then perhaps you should turn to Gnosticism and find out what he really tried to say. The heavenly kingdom they preached of could only be reached by casting the Demiurge out, which in itself would mean to turn your back on the Holy Bible, especially the Old Testament, in order to fully embrace the true ideal that it contains, which is an interesting paradox that will, eventually, make a lot of sense.

To some Gnostic groups Jesus teachings meant everything and to others not much at all. The four gospels of the Orthodox Church were not the only ones in existence. There were many more gospels and other texts, but the Orthodox Church frantically destroyed all but four, including those who possessed these documents. This tendency to burn books can be found throughout their history making them no better or worse than the Nazi’s. It would be interesting to calculate, if ever possible, the amount of people who died at the hands of the Christian/Catholic Church in comparison to the fifty millions who lost their lives because of Hitler since the dawn of its founding. The figure could very well be much higher and just as unreasonable.

And it is for due to this frantic persecution of the Gnostics that the thirteen volumes of a book of 52 texts ended up in a large jug, where it had been lying for more than a thousand years, waiting to be re-discovered. One of these texts is called the Gospel of Thomas and in this Jesus clearly states:

“For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.”

Footnotes:
(1) Coptic is the language of the Copts who were native Egyptian Christian of Jacobite sect of Monophysites.
(2) That it was hidden by these monks can’t be verified but it’s the probable conclusion.
(3) Lived 140-160 and was known as Theodotus of Byzantium and Theodotus the Shoemaker. Claimed Jesus was born a mortal man, adopted by God at his baptism and then became God after his resurrection. This doctrine is called Dynamic Monarchianism or Adoptionism. Not surprisingly Pope Victor I excommunicated him after declaring these ideas to be heresy.
(4) Usually they abbreviate it as the Father, but they still kept the idea of the duality in unity that goes with this word.
(5) Women could teach, take part in discussions, conduct exorcisms, practice healing, and baptize. In some Gnostics sects, though, they emphasized the connection of women to sexuality, and sexuality had to be avoided as much as possible because it belonged to the realm of the Demiurge, who hinders the evolution of man’s soul.
(6) Orthodox Christians began to persecute the Gnostics in the 2nd century C.E. because they were seen as a treat to the Church.

© deviadah

Logos: the Divine Word of God

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:45:00 +0000

Logos; it is essentially the Greek word for the logical or reasoning mind of God. Interchangeable translations of logos are spirit, will, word, wisdom, and Sophia. (1) It can also be explained as a word, reason, speech or/and the divine word; Christ. Logos is the divine word of God; the second person in the Trinity (incarnate in Jesus).

In Old Testament terms Logos would be translated Word, in Greek terms it would be Reason. It stands for more than spoken words. Behind all spoken words are thoughts, which are part of the mind, and the mind has an affinity with reason. Reason is the structure of orderly action. That ultimate reality was reasonable was reason itself. Because human beings have the capacity for reason it was believed by Jesus and Gnostic Christians that our destiny is to make contact with divine reason and like God discern ultimate truths.

Logos also means man’s ability to recognize reality, or theoretical reason , man’s ability to reason. In a speech by Philip K. Dick called How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, which he delivered in 1978, he wittily explains:

“Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.”

“God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence I am the word. That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: I am the brand name. Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as: When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.”

But he can’t be more right and it’s horrible to think that what once was something to pursue for illumination has now become a term for a corporate brand, a logo, which is a corrupt language that has come to rule the whole world.

Even Adolf Hitler, whose occult connections will be dealt with in another article, was in some way influenced by the Logos through the Vril Society, of which he was supposedly a member. The English writer Sir Edward Lord Bulwer-Lytton, who gave the society its name, explains that vril was the power that woke up man’s ability to be a Superhuman. (2) A concept that without a doubt greatly inspired Hitler for the wrong reasons, but what can be said of all this is that vril is possibly just another name for Logos. (3)

Footnotes:
(1) Sophia is the functional equivalent of logos or word. In Hellenized Judaism Sophia and wisdom was understood to be virtually identical with God’s will and word.
(2) Some 19th century Atlantis enthusiasts and occultists took his science fiction novel Vril very seriously.
(3) Vril was the supposedly the language spoken by the Atlantians, composed of sounds and clicks.

© deviadah

The Illuminati

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:30:00 +0000

Abolition of All ordered government
Abolition of All private property
Abolition of All inheritance
Abolition of All patriotism
Abolition of All religion
Abolition of the family and the creation of a New World Order.

More coming soon...

© deviadah

Lucifer

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:19:00 +0000

The Fallen Angel

To stamp an order or a person Luciferian or Satanic is the same as saying that they, him or her is in league with the devil. Nothing could be more wrong. It’s time the whole world realize that there is no malevolent force or creature out to deceive and manipulate us. We do that well enough by ourselves and it is ourselves we should fear, and heal. To cast the blame on some other thing only distracts us from coming to terms with what is the true cause of our personal and collective sufferings.

To be direct Lucifer is, in a way, the product of misunderstood astrology and the connection to Satan, or an evil entity, merely popularized by Milton in Paradise Lost into the minds of the masses. But where would the Christian movement be without Satan, or Lucifer for that matter, since it’s the only form of threat that can keep the believers in line?

The story of how Lucifer was cast out of heaven by God is an oral tradition and not represented in the Bible. It’s only in Isaiah 14:12 of KJV and NKJV that the name Lucifer appear:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (1)

Other versions of the Bible such as the NIV, NASB, NLT, RSV and YLT doesn’t use the word Lucifer but instead employ morning star, star of the morning, shining star, day star and shining one.

In Hebrew O Lucifer, son of the morning is O Helel, son of Shahar (HeYLeL BeN-ShaCHaR). The Babylonian god of the dawn was Shahar and his son, Helel, was the morning star that in fact is the planet Venus that at certain times is visible in the morning but not in the evening. Shahar had a twin brother, Shalem, associated with dusk and the evening appearance of Venus. Over time shalem became shalom which means go in peace or peace be with you. Jerusalem actually means House of Shalem from the worship of Venus as an evening star.

Since the planets moved differently than the star stories originated about them such as the one how Venus falls from heaven. Because the morning star Venus was visible before sunrise, and as the evening star immediately after sunset, the ancients have given a number of names to it. At sunset Vesper (2) and at sunrise, as it appears before the sun, the false light, the star of the morning or Lucifer (the light-bearer). (3)

When Helel was translated into Greek for their version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, it became Phosphorus, which was Greek for Venus, and then when translated into Latin for the Vulgate it became Lucifer, which is Latin for Venus. (4)

How ironic is it not that the collective perception of Lucifer is that of evil and Venus that of love, when in fact the two are one and the same in some form of translational Yin and Yang. Jesus himself, expressing the notion of unconditional love, called himself the morning star in Rev 22:16 (KJV):

“I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, [and] the bright and morning star.”

The Rosicrucian scholars called the spiritual sun Vulcan, the sun of the soul Christ and the intellectual sun Lucifer and the material sun Jehovah. Without the spiritual (Vulcan) the intellectual (Lucifer) is not illuminated, and is in fact a false light. When the intellect (Lucifer) is transmuted into the soul (Christ) it’s equates the alchemical process of transmuting base metals into gold. Paracelsus wrote:

“There is an earthly sun, which is the cause of all heat, and all who are able to see may see the sun; and those who are blind and cannot see him may feel his heat. There is an Eternal Sun, which is the source of all wisdom, and those whose spiritual senses have awakened to life will see that sun and be conscious of His existence; but those who have not attained spiritual consciousness may yet feel His power by an inner faculty which is called Intuition.”

But how did the story of the fallen angel come about?
If Isaiah 14 is taken as a whole it is evident it talks about to the downfall of the King of Babylon, in specific Tiglath-pileser III, and not some satanic entity. Isaiah 14:4-15 (KJV):

”That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! The LORD hath broken the staff of the wicked, [and] the sceptre of the rulers. He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, he that ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, [and] none hindereth. The whole earth is at rest, [and] is quiet: they break forth into singing. Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, [and] the cedars of Lebanon, [saying,] Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us. Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet [thee] at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, [even] all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, [and] the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”

An important Christian scholar of the early Greek Church Origenes Adamantius (185 B.C.E. – 254 B.C.E.) and Augustine of Canterbury (d. 6004/605 B.C.E.), founder of the Christian Church in southern England, both interpreted Lucifer as a reference of the Devil, but it was St. Jerome who would apply the name Lucifer to Satan although it was Milton who christened this demon of sinful pride Lucifer in his tome Paradise Lost, which was followed by artistic representation in a negative sense by most artists since then.

The word satan comes from the Hebrew word sathane meaning adversary or calumniator and is the enemy not of god but mankind. In other words the angel god charges with the task of proving that man is an unworthy creation. It was in the Middle Ages that Lucifer became the term for Satan.

Jesus himself, according to the Bible, never preached about a hell. When Judaism absorbed such ideas as Zoroastrian dualism and concepts about angels, the idea of an underworld ruled by an evil power where punishments were acted out on the wicked became part of the Christian doctrine, although the idea of an underworld was nothing new. Satan, Lucifer, Pluto and Hades all merged into one.

In Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma he writes in the third chapter entitled The Master:

“The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed; for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the personification of Atheism or Idolatry. For the Initiates, this is not a Person, but a Force, created for good, but which may serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN; thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent, and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the legend.”

Some people may claim that the Devil’s greatest trick is to make people believe he doesn’t exist, but this form of arguing is stems from the fear of coming to terms with his non-existence, since the whole belief system relies on this dualistic set-up, and by getting rid of one we ultimately loose the other. Because if the Devil if fictitious is not God that too? This scares people who are believers and their already narrow minds narrow even more.

Somehow we have interpreted the concept of the material and the spiritual, the below and the above, the yin and yang as one being good and the other evil instead of realising that one is part of the other and that we can not transmute gold into gold, but it has to be lead into gold i.e. first we have to be born and then reborn. The Gospel of Philip it simply explains:

“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.”

In astrology Saturn is associated with building (or anything to do with the earth) (5) and in alchemy linked to lead. King Solomon built altars to Ashtoreth (or Astarte, Chiun, Kaiwan, Remphan and Saturn). The city of Rome was originally known as Saturnia, or City of Saturn. The Roman Catholic Church retains much of the Saturn worship in its ritual. Saturn is related to Lucifer. In occult dictionaries Saturn is associated with evil and was important to Druids and the religion of Mithra. In this sense Saturn could be seen as Evil.

Now if gold was made from lead, then it could be understood that good (Sun) was made from evil (Saturn). In a Yin Yang terms both Evil and Good is thus essential for complete harmony and the creation of a supreme Third Existence. That which could be called a earthly Nirvana.

(to be continued.)

Footnotes:
(1) In NKJV: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!”
(2) Venus has also been called Hesperus, Cesperugo, Vesper, Noctifer and Nocturnus and equated with the goddesses Astarte, Ashtoreth, Aphrodite, Lilith, Isis, Cemeramis, Mari and Ishtar.
(3) Lucifer as a personification has been called the son of Astraeus, Aurora, Eos, Cephalus and Atlats, and the father of Ceyx, Daedalion and Hesperiedes. Lucifer is also the surname of such goddesses of light as Artemis, Aurora and Hecate.
(4) The Greek version, Septuagint, of the Old Testament (including the apocrypha) is said to have been made about 270 B.C.E. by seventy translators. The Vulgate is the Latin version of the Bible prepared by Jerome late in the 4th century. For clarity the Apocrypha are the books of the Old Testament included in the Vulgate and Septuagint, but not originally written in Hebrew, nor counted genuine by Jews, and excluded from the Canon at the Reformation.
(5) Also included may be government, administration, law and management of large enterprises. Philosophers and practical idealists are ruled by Saturn. They are often giving their occupation a stable and on a long-term set of criteria. Saturn’s workers often have a powerful but carefully planned ambition.

© deviadah

Freemasonry

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:17:00 +0000

Coming soon...

© deviadah

The Assassins

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:16:00 +0000

The Three Schoolfellows

The Seljuqs first appeared at the beginning of the 11th century when they entered the service of Mahmud of Ghazni. They consisted of 24 Turkish tribes known as the Oghuz, or the Ghuzz, that originally came from Western Siberia. Before converting to Islam, when they settled in the area of modern day Kazakhstan, they worshipped the elements.

After the death of Mahmud of Ghazni the Seljuqs set out on their own and when their former employer’s son tried to get them to fall back into line they crushed him and the Ghaznavid Empire forever.

In 1034 Hasan bin Sabbah was born at Qumm, 240 km south of modern-day Iranian capital Tehran. His father, Hasan bin Aly bin Mohammed bin Ja-far bin Husayn bin Sabbah al-Hamari, was an immigrant from Yemen and a prominent leader of the Ashari (1) faith. He began home-schooling Hasan when he was seven and continued doing so for ten years. The boy excelled in mathematics, philosophy and language.

In 1038 the Seljuqs conquered all of northeast Persia and their leader and founder of the Seljuq dynasty, Toghril Beg, proclaimed himself Sultan at Nishapur. For the next half a century they conquered Baghdad, Syria, Transcaucasia, Asia Minor and the coast of Arabia. They reduced Georgia to tributary status creating an empire the size of which the Islamic world had not known since the heyday of the Ummayads.

The Seljuqs utilized archery to destroy the enemy followed by close combat once the enemy were sufficiently disordered and disheartened. Toghril Beg made Esfahan the capital of his domains.

About a decade after the great Avicenna had died, and one year after the first apperance of Upir (2) in written form, Omar Khayyam (3) was born in Nishapur, Persia on the 18th of May 1048. In his most famous poetic verse, translated by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859, he plays on the meaning of his own name:

Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned,
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!

At the time of Omar Khayyam’s youth Persia was in a difficult and unstable military state with severe religious problems due to attempts to establish an orthodox Muslim state. It was not an empire in which those of learning, even those as learned as Khayyam, found life easy unless they had the support of a ruler at one of the many courts.

It was according to Persian legend, when Hasan bin Sabbah went to law school, that he is said to have met the great poet and astrologer to be Omar Khayyam and his future enemy Nizam-al-Mulk. The three schoolfellows made a pact that whoever attained any fame, fortune or political importance first would aid the other two. (4)

Whether the legend of the pact is true or not one thing is certain; Nizam-al-Mulk was the first to reach a position in life that could be deemed fortunate when he became the vizier (5) of Sultan Arp Arslan (6) after the death of the Seljuq Sultan Toghril Beg in 1063.

Events at the Sultan’s Court

Nizam-al-Mulk, destined to become one of the most eminent statesmen in early Muslim history, was responsible for two institutions that led to a massive decentralisation of power, which helped and prolonged the factional fighting which dominated the Seljuqs period of supremacy.

One of these institutions were the offices of Atabeg, military advisers to young princes who often ended up taking over the power entrusted to them. The other was the right of Iqta, which is basically an Islamic form of feudalism based on giving state land to military commanders in return for military service. This led to the development of large hereditary estates.

Hasan bin Sabbah was now an intelligent and industrious man. He was offered an Islamic province to govern but believing he was destined for greater things he declined. In his mind he wanted a post in the Sultan’s court, perhaps even the position of vizier. This of course worried Nizam-al-Mulk who began to spread slandering gossip in the Sultans ear to such a degree that the he ordered Hasan to be arrested. But due to his charm the Sultan did not execute him and Hasan was allowed to flee to the town Rayy (where he had spent his childhood).

Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra

In 1070 Omar Khayyam moved to one of Central Asia’s oldest cities Samarkand in Uzbekistan. It was here he wrote his most famous work on algebra, Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, displaying his outstanding mathematical skills. It fused algebraic and geometric methods, discussing the solution of cubic equations by geometric means and anticipating analytical geometry. Though it is unlikely Descartes knew of Omar Khayyam’s work he nevertheless picked up the thread 500 years later.

In the introduction Khayyam described the difficulties for men of learning in the times he was living, when any patronage would not provide too much stability, since local politics and the fortunes of the local military decided who at any one time held power.

”I was unable to devote myself to the learning of this algebra and the continued concentration upon it, because of obstacles in the vagaries of time which hindered me; for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep, to devote themselves meanwhile to the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who imitate philosophers confuse the true with the false, and they do nothing but deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what they know of the sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see a certain person seeking for the right and preferring the truth, doing his best to refute the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, they make a fool of him and mock him.”

The Conversion of Hasan bin Sabbah

In around 1071 Hasan bin Sabbah converted to the Ismaili sect even though he was hesitant at first because they were considered to be heretics and outcasts. But he was drawn to them because of their intellectual force and religious passion and, after suffering a serious illness, he swore allegience to Fatimid Caliph in 1072 afraid that he would die before learning the True Path to Islam.

The Fatimid leader defined himself not only as caliph, leader of the Muslim world, but as mahdi, the promised leader of the Muslim world. According to old ideas of the caliph, the Fatimid caliphs saw themselves as infallible and sinless, and divinely chosen perpetuators of the true form of Islam.

The ultimate goal of the Fatimids was to replace the Abbasid (7) caliphate of Baghdad with their own, thereby correcting what they considered to have been a grave error back in the 7th century, when the initial schism between Sunni and Shiites had occurred.

The Observatory

Malik-Shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk sent an invitation to Omar Khayyam asking him to come to Esfahan for the purpose to set up an observatory with other leading astronomers. Khayyam accepted and found himself in an 18 year long period of peace in which he produced work of exceptional quality together with the other scientists. One thing he did was compiling astronomical tables and contributing to the 1079 calendar reform. He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days. Which is outstandingly accurate. For comparison the length of the year at the end of the 19th century was 365.242196 days, while today it is 365.242190 days.

The Adventures of Hasan bin Sabbah

Hasan bin Sabbah began preaching and spreading the new faith he had accepted and this resulted in his ousting from Rayy in 1074. He headed for Cairo which was a city built by the Ismaili to serve as their capital and this journey took him several years and it wasn’t until 1078-9 that he finally reached it.

But Hasan soon found himself in prison due to his revolutionary temperament. As soon as he entered the prison at Dumyat a minaret collapsed and this was interpreted as a holy omen and Hasan was believed to be a divinely protected person. The Caliph released and granted him many valuable gifts, which he would use to set up his paradise. Then he was ordered to leave Egypt, exiled once again. Hasan burst out:

“If I had two, just two, devotees who would stand by me, then I could cause the downfall of that Turk and that peasant!”

He was of course speaking of Sultan Malik-Shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk.

Hasan boarded a ship sailing from Alexandria. During the journey a violent storm caught the ship and everyone including the captain fell to their knees and began praying thinking they would soon die. Everyone except Hasan who stood calmly on deck. He proclaimed:

“The storm is my doing: how can I pray that it abate? I have indicated the pleasure of the Almighty. If we sink I shall not die, for I am immortal. If you want to be saved believe in me, and I shall subdue the winds.”

No one believed him until the ship seemed to capsize and a couple of desperate passengers came to him and swore eternal allegiance. Eventually the storm went away and Hasan took full credit for saving the ship and everyone on board from certain death.

When the ship reached the coast of Syria Hasan bin Sabbah disembarked with two of the passengers that would become his first disciples, fulfilling his prophetic words he had spoken to the Caliph. This was the beginning of his career as a wandering missionary, or dais, recruiting and converting people to his cause. Once he got a new disciple he used that disciple to create more disciples just like the pyramid schemes, or cell systems, of modern society. His circle of followers widened like ripples on water and his army of self-sacrificers, Fida’is, was formed from his most loyal and promising followers

Alamut

Hasan bin Sabbah needed a fortress, a kind of headquarters, were he could set up his paradise. Hussein Kahini, one of his lieutenants, found a castle suitable for the purpose. It was located north of modern-day Tehran on the south side of the Alborz mountain range halfway between Teheran and the Caspian Sea. Close to important cities like Rayy and Kazwin, yet lying in the remote and forbidding mountains.

The fortress of Alamut, built in 861, was how it was known an it was under the governance of Ali Mahdi. There are two stories that tell how he retrieved the fortress. In one he Hasan asks Ali Mahdi to be granted all the land that can be covered with the hide of an ox. He then cut the skin up in thin strips and encircled the castle thus gaining it. In the other, and more probable tale, Hasan sent some of his preachers into the castle and converted some of its inhabitants. Then more of his men infiltrated the castle in disguise. Before Ali Mahdi had realised what was going on he was besieged and had to surrender. Hasan paid him 3000 gold dinars and in the year 1090 at the age of 56 he had his fortress secured.

In a flourishing valley below Alamut, also known as Eagles Nest, Hasan bin Sabbah created a ‘Garden of Paradise’. It was perfectly placed in a well-guarded ravine surrounded by a landscape of craggy rocks. Marco Polo wrote the following account in his book Travels in Asia:

”The Old Man of the Mountain dwelled in a most noble valley shut in between two very high mountains where he had made the largest garden and the most beautiful that was ever seen in this world. There were set to dwell ladies and damsels the most beautiful. Their duty was to furnish the young men who were put there with all delights and pleasures. And into this garden entered no man except only those base men of evil life whom he wished to make satellites and Assassins.”

The word assassin is believed to be derived from the word hashassin, or hashish eaters. (8)

It is said Hasan gave young converts a drink spiked with hashish and they slept for three days. During their unconsciousness they were carried into the gardens. When they awoke they saw a beautiful paradise of running brooks, exotic plants and animals and shapely houris (dancing girls). Everywhere there was palaces and pavilions and wine, milk and honey flowed. And the maidens would perform their every desire. After a few days of this they were drugged and removed from this paradise. They also used Opium, poppy.

Now he began to attack the Turks and because the locals hated them he had no problem recruiting more soldiers for his cause. Fortress after fortress and village after village was conquered through any tactics necessary, like infiltration, bribery, poisoning, stabbing, direct assaults and raids. Dressed in white tunics and red sashes and armed with poison and daggers of solid gold they began to spread their terror.

The Assassinations of Malek Shah and Nizam-al-Mulk

After administering the affairs of Malek Shah for some thirty years Nizam-al-Mulk was overthrown at the instigation of Toorkan Khatun. Nizam-Al-Mulk was impeached after he had rashly declared that his cap and inkhorn, the badges of his office, were connected by divine decree with the throne and diadem of the Sultan.

At the age of ninety-three, Nizam-al-Mulk was thus dismissed from office. He travelled to Baghdad from Esfahan in November of 1092 were he met one of Hasan bin Sabbah’s adepts, Bu Tahir Arrani, in disguise as a Sufi holy man. He was allowed to approach the ex-vizier who was then stabbed to death becoming the first man to be killed by the Assassins. (9)

“The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss,” Hasan said after the deed had been done relishing the fact that his greatest enemy was dead, but it would not be the end of the killing. Merely the beginning.
Emperor Malik-Shah died soon after of suspected poisoning having sent troops after Hasan. Then one of Nizam-al-Mulk’s sons Fakhri came across a beggar who said:

“The true Muslims are no more and there are none left to take the hand of the afflicted.”

As soon as Fakhri took the beggars hand he received a dagger through the heart. His brother Ahmed was also attacked and stabbed but managed to survive. Many rival religious leaders were attacked and other political enemies assassinated. But not every attack was a certain victory.

The First Crusade

The First Crusade was called for by Pope Urban II in1095 in order to recover the Holy Land from its Islamic rulers. During a mass meeting in Clermont (south-central France) on the 27th of November 1095 Pope Urban II enthused the crowd with these words, reported by the attending Robert the Monk:

“It [Jerusalem] looks and hopes for freedom; it begs unceasingly that you will come to its aid. It looks for help from you, especially, because God has bestowed glory in arms upon you more than any other nation. Undertake this journey, therefore, for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of ‘glory which cannot fade’ in the kingdom of heaven.”

The following year, in 1096, the campaign was underway with the battle cry Deus le volt! God wills it! (10) Pilgrims became Crusaders and by wearing the cross they became entitled certain privileges and immunities. Any crusader who died were considered martyrs and assured by the Roman Catholic Church their place in heaven. Debts were suspended and exempts from having to pay tax were issued. The crusaders family and possesion fell under the protection of the Church and his only obligation was to fulfill his vow. Failing to do so would result in automatic excommunication.

The most radical response did not come from the class of knights that the Pope had assumed. Instead it came from the poor who ignited at the glorius ideals and the great benefits of becoming a crusader. During the medieval times a man could go to hell for practically anything and joining the crusade was an opportunity to gain a fresh start.

An undisciplined and illarmed army of idealistic degenerates and riff-raff began marching towards Jerusalem with the noble intention to liberate it from the Saracens. It was lead by Peter the Hermit (11) who claimed he had a letter from heaven authorizing the crusade.

The first to be attacked were the Jewish communities by contingents of Germans under a priest called Gottschalk. The real motive behind this was not mistaking them for Muslims, but realising that they possessed valuables that, for some crusaders, would finance their journey.

Peter the Hermit’s army reached Constantinople (12) without major embarrassment to Urban II but there they began to wreak havoc on the city’s suburbs ignoring the order to wait for the rest of the crusading army. Due to their incompetence the Turks wiped them out on the 21st of October 1096. This was the end of the Peoples Crusade, but not the end of the First Crusade.

The Deaths of Hasan Bin Sabbah and Omar Khayyam

In 1118 the Sultan besieged Alamut, but the army returned home when the Sultan drastically died and the fort was left standing.

Hasan bin Sabbah, known as the Old Man of the Mountain, since he had not left his fortress for over 30 years finally died in May 1124. Before his death he had appointed Kiya Bozorg-Ummid (13) as his successor.

The deaths of Nizam-al-Mulk and Malik-Shah had ended Omar Khayyam’s peaceful existance. Funding to run the Observatory had ceased and Khayyam’s calendar reform was put on hold. He also came under attack from the orthodox Muslims who felt that his questioning mind did not conform to the faith. He died where he had been born on the 4th of December 1131.

Kiya Bozorg-Ummid would reign for 14 years and expanded into Syria. It was here that the Assassins fought the Crusaders and thus their stories were brought back to Europe and the word assassin entered into the language.

Two years later in Syria the Grand Master Sinan disguised two of his killers as monks and sent them into the camp of the Christian knight Conrad of Montferrat and he was stabbed to death. This assassination caused the Assassins to figure in every chronicle of the Third Crusade.

Henry Count of Champagne once said he had been demonstrated the obedience of the Assassins when meeting with their Grand Master. Two white-robbed men stood on the rampart of the castle and at the Grand Masters signal they threw up their hands and leapt to their deaths.
“Could you command the same?” the Grand Master then asked Henry.

Such demonstrations were the reason why the myths of the Assassins spread, not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe. And it proved how willingly they would sacrifice their lives and such knowledge eventually broaden the fear of them.

In 1223 Roger Bacon, a now renowned occultist, joined the Order of St. Dominic during a time when Genghis Khan and his hordes (14) swept down from Mongolia to Peking and in the next decades they would conquer an empire that stretched from the Yellow River in China to the Danube in Europe, from the Persian Gulf to Siberia growing to twice the size of the Roman Empire when it covered its greatest mass of land. The Mongols were military geniuses with immense individual courage, but more than anything else they had a cultural tolerance without equal amongst the European rulers of hereditary lines. Without the Mongols the road to China would have been kept closed for all of Europe.

The End of the Assassins

The Mongols, under the leadership of Hulagu Khan, would cause the end of the Assassins. In 1256 the last Assassin Grand Master, Rukin-ad-Din, and 12000 men were put to death in a gruesome manner. There had been more than 60 castles and the Mongols dismantled every single one of the Ismaili fortifications. All the scientific equipment were destroyed and all the libraries burned, and everything of value ransacked. No trace was left and the Assassins became a fairy tale and more important an inspiration for future organisations.

Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati (which history will be dealt with elsewhere), used hashish for heightening the consciousness of the mind and structured his organisation after the Assassins cell system.

This system was also used by the Al-Qaeda consisting of compact action groups within a network of isolated individual cells. These cells were controlled through a chain of blind links making them difficult to trace back to the central command. Just like Hasan bin Sabbah Osama bin Laden would become an Old Man of the Mountain, or more so, an Old Man of the Cave in Afghanistan. Both had high religious motives and Osama’s father Mohammed rebuilt and refurbished, under the bin Laden Corporation, the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina proving his religious zeal. The suicide-bombers of Hezbollah have much credit to give to the dedication of an Assassin and lets not forget the word in itself and what it has come to represent in modern times. Hired gun, killer and murdurer.

Footnotes:
(1) Asharism is the name of a school of thought in Islam that developed during the 4th and 5th, 10th and 11th centuries. The movement attempted to cleanse Islam of all non-Islamic elements and to harmonize the religious consciousness with the religious thought of Islam. It laid the foundation of an orthodox Islamic theology or orthodox Kalam, as opposed to the rationalist Kalam of the Mu'tazilites; and in opposition to the extreme orthodox class, it made use of the dialectical method for the defence of the authority of divine revelation as applied to theological.
(2) Upir is an early form of the word vampire and it appeared in a document referring to a Russian Prince as Upir Lichy or Wicked Vampire.
(3) His full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abu’l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami. Literally al-Khayyami means tent maker and was probably the profession of his father Ibrahim.
(4) This legend, like most legends, is not the truth but holds some of it. For one thing Nizam-al-Mulk was born 30 years earlier than Omar Khayyam and could therefore not have been in school with him. But because they were all three contemporaries and they all lived within the same region of Persia they are connected, not only in what they did and achieved, but also how their lives ended up.
(5) A word used to designate the person and the institution that represented the ruler towards his subject like a modern day prime minister. The word comes from and older form vçir which was used to describe a judge.
(6) Muhammed ben Da‘ud obtained the surname Alp Arslan, a valiant lion, because of his military skills. He was Toghril Beg’s nephew.
(7) The Abbasids were all of one big family that claimed to descend from Abbas, an uncle of Mohammed. They governed from Baghdad, a city the second Abbasid Caliph founded in 762, and Samara for some periods in the 9th century. The Abbasids took the power from the Ummawiyys in 750, and stayed in power until the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, and had the Caliph killed.
(8) They also used the poppy (Opium). The Assasins were also known as the Yezidees.
(9) Nizam-al-Mulk’s guards caught and slayed Bu Tahir Arrani immediately after.
(10) About 900 years after the launch of the First Crusade the President of the United States of America, George W Bush, called the War on Terrorism that would ensue the 9/11 attacks a crusade. Bush also promised to give Iraq and Afghanistan, like Urban II had wanted to give Jerusalem, its freedom back. History always repeats itself to the misfortune of the individual.
(11) He was actually not a hermit, but wore a hermit’s cape, and loved crowds of people possessing a great skill in moving them.
(12) Istanbul.
(13) The Great Hope.
(14) The word hord comes from the Turkish word ordû , which means camp.

© deviadah

Magic

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:16:00 +0000

The Royal Art

The notion of magic as a form of entertainment is nothing but a confusion between the magician and the illusionist, the latter performing parlour tricks, such as the rabbit out of the hat, whilst the former is engaged in an art form more ancient than the pyramids themselves.

In fact magic, to paraphrase Éliphas Lévi, is the science of the ancient magi, and magical initiation represents true royalty and, like alchemy, magic is therefore a Royal Art, and is called so by all adepts. In short magic is the transcendental and absolute science of nature and her laws.

Éliphas Lévi explains, in his great tome The History of Magic, that “magic, therefore, combines in a single science that which is most certain in philosophy, which is eternal and infallible in religion. It reconciles perfectly and incontestably those two terms, so opposed on the first view – faith and reason, science and belief, authority and liberty. It furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certitudes as exact as mathematics, and even accounting for the infallibility of mathematics themselves… [and] if such be the case, how comes it that so exalted a science is still unrecognised? How is it possible to assume that so bright a sun is hidden in a sky so dark?

The transcendental science has been known always, but only to flowers of intelligence, who have understood the necessity of silence and patience. Should a skilful surgeon open at midnight the eyes of a man born blind, it would still be impossible to make him realise the nature or existence of daylight till morning came. Science has its nights and its mornings, because the life which it communicates to the world of mind is characterised by regular modes of motion and progressive phases. It is the same with truths as it is with radiations of light, nothing which is hidden is lost, but at the same time nothing that is found is absolutely new.”

White or Black Magic

When defining magic it’s common to erroneously use the terms white or black, or good and evil, as a way of understanding the purpose of the magician or witch. In Christian tradition it is Simon Magus that embodies all the traits of the black, or evil, magician and he first appears in the Acts of the Apostles:

“But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God.” (1)

Many P. Hall defines, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, ceremonial magic as “the ancient art of invoking and controlling spirits by a scientific application of certain formulæ… [and] while the elaborate ceremonial magic of antiquity was not necessarily evil, there arose from its perversion several false schools of sorcery, or ‘black magic’.” He goes on to explain that the most dangerous form of black magic is:

“...the scientific perversion of occult powers for the gratification of personal desire. Its less complex universal form is human selfishness, for selfishness is the fundamental cause of all worldly evil. A man will barter his eternal soul for temporal power, and down through the ages a mysterious process has been evolved which actually enables him to make this exchange. In its various branches the black art includes nearly all forms of ceremonial magic, necromancy, witchcraft, sorcery, and vampirism.”

Anton Szandor LaVey points out in The Satanic Witch that “in order to pursue the ‘craft’ without harassment and prosecution, the spokesmen for witchcraft attempted to legitimize and justify what they were doing by proclaiming the existence of ‘white’ witchcraft… simply a belief in the religion of the old wise ones, or ‘wicca’. The use of herbs, charms and healing spells was only employed for beneficial purposes. It was believed that the kind of witches that were dangerous to have around were’ black’ witches. These were supposedly evil in their pursuits and worshipped Satan.”

This is a valid point and one only has to draw a similarity with the term peace troops. When something that is considered evil, or bad, is in need of public acceptance, such as army or soldier, a change of name can make all the difference.

Keep in mind that millions of people were tortured and burned by church and public officials on the assumption that they were witches and this behaviour did not seize until the end of the 18th century. It was also a very profitable business since both land and property befell accuser and church officials. Although it was mostly women that suffered charges of witchcraft men, children and even animals were also tortured and murdered.

But magic can be used for ill and although the terms black and white magic may have a lot to do with fear of retribution from the church and the Inquisition, it does also represent two distinct forms of magic. The medieval alchemist Albertus Magnus defined white magic as an art in concord with nature and black magic as an evil art that dealt with demonic forces employing incantations and spells.

In The Elixir and the Stone Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh writes that “the psychological and moral orientation with which one embarks on the process of shaping or transmuting reality will determine whether the magic one employs is, according to medieval and Renaissance definitions, ‘white’ or ‘black’, ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’, ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’. At risk of oversimplification, it could almost be said that humanity, in effect, can be divided into three general categories – ‘sacred’ magicians, ‘profane’ magicians and victims. The magician, whether sacred or profane, assumes an active role in relation to the world he inhabits, and transforms it accordingly. The victim, in contrast, remains passive, a powerless slave to circumstance… these roles are not immutably fixed, nor are they very necessarily consistent… however most human beings, throughout most of their lives, are, in fact, victims.”

Instead of creating reality, the victim accepts the reality that it is given. Few question their lives, even fewer question the environment they are alive in.

(to be continued.)

Footnotes:
(1) Acts of the Apostles [8:9-24] (KJV): “But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done. Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (For as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they [their] hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and [in] the bond of iniquity. Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.”

© deviadah

The Serpent - part 1

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:13:00 +0000

H.P. Blavatsky writes in her book Isis Unveiled that “before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving in the chaos until its breath had incubated the cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth - emblem of eternity in its spiritual and of our world physical sense.”

The serpent is an ancient symbol of wisdom and transformation and can be found represented in most religions and cultures in some form or another, often of a cosmic nature. It’s an important and positive symbol and yet the reputation the serpent has received in the collective mind is that of temptation and evil often connected with Satan.

Those opposed to Freemasonry often raises the point that the use of the serpent in their ceremonial dress is proof of worshipping the devil, but the serpent featured on the belt-hook (1) of Masonic aprons is not at all a big part of Masonic symbolism and ritual, and even if it where it would have more to do with wisdom than evil.

An Ancient Symbol

One certain originator of this negative view of the serpent is without a doubt an event that, at least metaphorically, took place in the Garden of Eden. To quote Genesis 3:1-5 (KJV):

“Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

It is vitally important to remember that the Bible is subject to interpretation and not the law on matters such as creation since the world is far larger and diverse than that tome cause of so many wars and misunderstandings throughout the centuries. Add to that the fact that when scrutinized it seems inconsistent. Manly P. Hall points out one such discrepancy in his The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

“How the serpent came to be in the garden of the Lord after God had declared that all creatures which He had made during the six days of creation were good has not been satisfactorily answered by the interpreters of the Scriptures.”

The Gnostics didn’t think it strange to see a serpent in the Garden of Eden since, in fact, it was a good creature. They viewed that the serpent tried to help free Adam and Eve from their bonds because when they ate from the Forbidden Fruit they would see what God didn’t want them to see; that he actually was a false god, named Demiurge by the Gnostics.

Adam and Eve’s rebellion led to expulsion from Paradise into a world of sufferings. A guardian prevented them from returning to eat from the Forbidden Fruit and, according to the Gnostics, attain immortality and become free from all worldly bonds, where one is greater than the Demiurge. It’s no wonder that the Gnostics were deemed heretic if they perceived that man could become greater than this false God, yet some of their ideas still linger in the Bible, such as the statement Jesus makes in Matthew 10:16:

“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” (2)

In the Orphic Mysteries there is an egg surrounded by a serpent. This signifies the cosmos encircled by a fiery creative spirit. The egg, apart from the cosmos, also represents the soul of the philosopher and the serpent the Mysteries. When initiation takes place the shell of the egg is broken and the man emerges from the embryonic state of physical existence and this of course ties in with the symbolisms of the Masonic initiation where one comes from the dark into the light. (3)

In ancient Egyptian mythology the sun god Amun-Ra emerged from the water in the shape of a serpent and inseminated the Kneph, or cosmic egg, thus creating the world.

H.P. Blavatsky writes in her book Isis Unveiled that “before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving in the chaos until its breath had incubated the cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth - emblem of eternity in its spiritual and of our world physical sense.”

In Greek mythology the symbol of a serpent biting its own tail signifies the unending cycle of nature. This is known as the Ouroboros and often resembles either a 0 or an 8. One of the most ancient representations of the Ouroboros can be found on a bronze disc from Benin. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant describes it in their book Dictionary of Symbols (4) as “doubtless the oldest African ‘imago mundi’, (5) where its sinuous figure, associating opposites, encircles the primordial oceans in the middle of which floats the square of the earth below.”

Although the serpent is not necessarily always single, or serpent-like, sometimes it’s doubled, two serpents entwined or next to each other, other times it possesses wings, arms or legs. The serpent with wings is also seen as a dragon, which is a union of two opposing principles since it lives in water and spits fire. Jeremy Narby writes in his interesting, but disputed, book The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the origins of knowledge: (6)

“Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecs’ plumed serpent, is not a real animal either. In living nature snakes do not have arms or legs, and even less wings or feathers. A flying serpent is a contradiction in terms, a paradox, like a speaking mute. This is confirmed by the double etymology of the word -coatl, which means both serpent and twin.”
“As the creator of life, the cosmic serpent is a master of metamorphosis. In the myths of the world where it plays a central part, it creates by transforming itself; it changes while remaining the same So it is understandable that is should be represented differently at the same time.”

In the serpents physical attributes we can easily see the symbol of the male from its phallic shape and also its female quality when it sheds its skin in a regenerative fashion. Here again we find a duality, but a duality that leads towards unity. This is most obvious in the Ouroboros where the serpent, tail in mouth, represent sexual union with itself that forms an androgynous image.

In alchemy and medicine, which both aims to either transform, regenerate or heal, we find all the qualities that the serpent represents. Therefore it is portrayed in two of the most famous ancient symbols of these sciences: the Caduceus of Hermes and the Staff of Asclepius.

The Staff of Asclepius and the Caduceus of Hermes

In astrology the serpent is featured as the 13th sign of the zodiac known as Ophiuchus Serpentarius (or Ophiuchusm), the Serpent Holder, which lies between Scorpio and Sagittarius. (7) Plato called this 13th sign the God of the Underworld and later the Christians of the mediaeval ages changed it into the figure of St. Paul holding a viper before abandoning it altogether. The constellation of the Serpent Holder is the only sign of the Zodiac which is linked to a real man that lived in ancient Egypt around the 27th century B.C.E., a one Imhotep.

The attributes of Imhotep can also be found in the Biblical Hebrew Joseph, son of Jacob. Imhotep is credited with many accomplishments including the knowledge and use of medicine. It’s said that Imhotep brought the art of healing to mankind. The symbol of a serpent was used to represent Imhotep.

In the 16th century this 13th constellation was called Alpheichius, God of Invocation, named after Asclepius who was a skilled physician, and similar to Imhotep, who practised in Greece around 1200 B.C.E. and described in Homer’s Iliad. If he truly existed no one knows but regardless he, through myth and legend, became part of the Greek family of gods as the God of Healing and the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis. He had several daughters of which Meditrina, Hygeia and Panacea all became symbols of medicine, hygiene and healing.

Rationalism and patriarchy began to be established around the 5th century B.C.E and myths were modified. For instance Zeus who originally was represented as a serpent now defeats the serpent monster Typhon with the aid of his daughter Athene (Reason). This act guaranteed the reign of the patriarchal gods of Olympus and at the same time he brings back Asclepius to life, after having killed him with a lightning bolt, and presents him with the serpent wrapped around a staff.

It’s believed that Hippocrates, a great doctor of antiquity, was a descendant of Asclepius and the oath, which bears his name, (8) was sworn in the names of Apollo, Asclepius and Panacea. (9)

A cult formed from Asclepius and became very popular during the 300s B.C.E. The Asclepions, centres where priests cured the sick, became important in Greek society. The worship of Asclepius spread to Rome, his name changed to the Latin Aesculapius, and continued to the late as the 6th century.

Since ancient times there have been columns, trees and staffs with serpents climbing or twirling around them and throughout the ages it has been the image of the art of healing and not evil. The famous Staff of Asclepius with a single serpent wrapped around it possibly became a symbol of medicine and healing because infections by parasitic worms were common. The filarial worm Dracunculus medinensis (10)crawled around the victim’s body, just under the skin and the physicians treated this infection by cutting a slit in the patient’s skin just in front of the worm’s path. As the worm crawled out the cut the physician carefully wound the pest around a stick until the entire animal had been removed resulting in the symbol of a worm, serpent, around a stick to advertise this service. (11)

The Staff of Asclepius have often been confused with the Caduceus, or Staff of Hermes, and although the former is clearly a symbol of medicine and healing the latter has often taken on this role in the collective mind. The Encyclopaedia Britannica clearly states that the Staff of Asclepius is “the only true symbol of medicine.” It also says that the Caduceus is “without medical reference since it represents the magic wand of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods and the patron of trade.”

Modern pharmacies probably began using the serpent as a symbol for their business because they sold the antidote to snake venom.

In a study conducted by Walter J. Friedlander of the use of these two staffs in logos and insignias in American health and medicine organizations he found that the Staff of Asclepius was a more common symbol for organizations related to health or medicine and the Caduceus for commercial organizations.

The reason commercial organizations favour the Caduceus before the Staff of Asclepius as their symbol/logo could be, according to Friedlander, because the former is a more symmetrical and pleasing symbol to the eye thus making it a greater tool for marketing. (12) Or could it be because Hermes was the God of, amongst many things, commerce and theft?

The Greek Hermes, the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, the Phoenician Taaut and the Roman god Mercury are all the same entity each one having a magic staff wrapped by two serpents. Greek mythology tells us of the origin of this staff, best known as the Caduceus, with the tale of how Tiresias found two snakes copulating. He separated them by sticking his staff between them and was immediately turned into a woman for seven years until he was able to repeat his action and changed back.

The Caduceus can be, in the words of David William Hauck in his excellent book The Emerald Tablet – Alchemy for Personal Transformation: (13)

“…traced as far back as 2600 B.C.E. The caduceus is depicted on the Libation Cup of Gudea, a Sumerian artifact that was made around 2000 B.C.E., and Thoth is shown holding an early Egyptian caduceus in a mural at the Temple of Seti I that dates from 1300 B.C.E. The tall staff, the magic wand of Hermes, is topped by a winged solar disk with two serpents wrapped around a staff three times – a subtler reminder that the owner of the staff is the thrice greatest one. According to the immortal French alchemist Nicholas Flamel, the two serpents of the caduceus are the snakes or dragons which the ancient Egyptians painted in the form of a circle, each biting the other’s tail, in order to teach that they spring of and from One Thing.”

How the Caduceus became linked with medicine is most likely due to its connection with alchemy, which included medicine, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, mining and, by the end of the 16th century, metallurgy.

The Staff of Asclepius and the Caduceus, or Staff of Hermes, were both widely used as printers’ marks in particular as frontispieces to pharmacopoeias, which are books containing lists of drugs with directions on how to use them, in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Perhaps a footnote but it has been noted that the $ resemble the Staff of Asclepius but this can’t be anything but a coincidence. (14) The story goes that the Spanish pesos, also called piastres, Spanish dollars and pieces of eight (the value was eight reales) were so well used and known (like the dollar is today in the world) that when the U.S. issued its own silver coinage (first appearing in 1794) they thus replicated the Spanish weight, value and name. When pluralized pesos was abbreviated ps. This created over time the $ symbol (a p over an s, the p in time reduced to a single stroke).

It was the revolting British/American colonists who first made the transition from ps to $. This is the reason why the $ is written before the number, $1, instead of behind because it mimics how the British use their pound sign, £1.

Regardless of the resemblance to the sign of the dollar, the Staff of Asclepius, together with the Caduceus of Hermes, both portray the serpent in a positive light and they are certainly not the only ones. The ancient mythology of the Chinese viewed the world as surrounded by two entwined serpents that symbolized the power and wisdom of the creator. The Taoists of China used the image of two serpentine forms entwined, one white the other black, to represent two forces which they called yin and yang.

The swastika, as it was initially used by the Hindus, represent two cosmic forces moving in opposite directions much like that of yin-yang, but it’s without a doubt in the wheel of life that we see the two serpents best portrayed and explained.

The Serpent - part 2

Footnotes:
(1) Probably originated from the common belt-hook used by manufacturers of clothing for British schoolboys.
(2) Another reference of serpents is in Matthew 7:9-12 (KJV): “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
(3) The 28th degree of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, the Knight of the Sun (Prince Adept), incorporates the Worm Ouroboros (the dragon, or serpent, holding his own tail in his mouth), into its iconography, representing the immortal and eternal principle as well as both love and wisdom. The 25th degree, The Knight of The Brazen Se, also incorporates this symbol.
(4) Published in Paris, 1982.
(5) Image of the world.
(6) Le Serpent Cosmique, l’ADN et les origines du savoir, published in Geneva, 1995.
(7) About 2000 years ago the Sun travelled from the constellation Scorpio directly into the sign of Sagittarius, but due to the constant motion of the cosmos, the Sun now enters, for a few days of the year, the star constellation Ophiuchus before entering Sagittarius from Scorpio, thus creating the birth of a thirteenth sign of the Zodiac.
(8) The Hippocratic Oath from a translation by Heinrich Von Staden: “I swear by Apollo the Physician and by Asclepius and by Health and Panacea and by all the gods as well as goddesses, making them judges [witnesses], to bring the following oath and written covenant to fulfilment, in accordance with my power and my judgment; to regard him who has taught me this techne as equal to my parents, and to share, in partnership, my livelihood with him and to give him a share when he is in need of necessities, and to judge the offspring [coming] from him equal to [my] male siblings, and to teach them this techne, should they desire to learn [it], without fee and written covenant, and to give a share both of rules and of lectures, and of all the rest of learning, to my sons and to the [sons]of him who has taught me and to the pupils who have both make a written contract and sworn by a medical convention but by no other. And I will use regimens for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgment, but from [what is] to their harm or injustice I will keep [them]. And I will not give a drug that is deadly to anyone if asked [for it], nor will I suggest the way to such a counsel. And likewise I will not give a woman a destructive pessary. And in a pure and holy way I will guard my life and my techne. I will not cut, and certainly not those suffering from stone, but I will cede [this] to men [who are] practitioners of this activity. Into as many houses as I may enter, I will go for the benefit of the ill, while being far from all voluntary and destructive injustice, especially from sexual acts both upon women’s bodies and upon men's, both of the free and of the slaves. And about whatever I may see or hear in treatment, or even without treatment, in the life of human beings - things that should not ever be blurted out outside - I will remain silent, holding such things to be unutterable [sacred, not to be divulged], If I render this oath fulfilled, and if I do not blur and confound it [making it to no effect] may it be [granted] to me to enjoy the benefits both of life and of techne, being held in good repute among all human beings for time eternal. If, however, I transgress and purjure myself, the opposite of these.”
(9) Two of the sons of Asclepius appeared in Homer’s Iliad as physicians in the Greek army.
(10) Other names are the Fiery Serpent, the Dragon of Medina and the Guinea Worm.
(11) Another service pharmacies provide is that they keep antidotes for snake venom.
(12) Friedlander surveyed 242 logos/insignias and found that professional, such as the World Health Organization, were more likely to use the staff of Asclepius (62%) while commercial organizations, like Enigma Publishing, chose the Caduceus (76%). The exception is hospitals where 63% used the Caduceus, but US hospitals are usually commercial ventures. All this information from his book The Golden Wand of Medicine: A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine.
(13) Published in 1999.
(14) There is a possible link, though, with the Staff of Hermes since Hermes himself was, according to Greek mythology, the God of Trade.

© deviadah

Epiphysis Cerebri - part 1

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:12:00 +0000

It has already been established that The Serpent featured in Genesis is not a malevolent creature, but there is more to the story than what has already been told. To quote Genesis 3:1-6 (KJV) again:

“Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

In Hebrew be opened can be translated broadened. The word eyes in Hebrew is not plural but singular and is translated knowledge. So what the Serpent really said was:

“You shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eye shall be broadened by knowledge, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

H.P. Blavatsky writes in the second volume of The Secret Doctrine that the Divine Race of Men fell “not because they had eaten from the Fruit of Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they knew no better.”

The Gnostics, who had a different view from the Christians of what took place in the Garden of Eden that day, perceived that Paradise had been created by the Demiurge, or the creator of the lesser and material world, to keep people happy, content and ignorant. The statement that you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die, was in fact a lie because the Demiurge knew that man would transform when eating the Forbidden Fruit and see that he was a tyrannical god subject to the divine light.

If the Gnostic’s version of the story is taken into account together with the views already expressed then clearly to eat from the Tree of Life, Tree of Good and Evil, or from the Forbidden Fruit (whatever you may call it) would open the Third Eye and reveal the true reality of the Demiurge, the Creator in the Old Testament, that is imperfect just like his creation. So in a sense Demiurge, or the God and Almighty Father of the Old Testament is in fact, by Christian standards, Satan!

The importance here is not, though, good or evil, but the singular eye, which in this famous allegory is not a physical organ, but instead the eye of the mind or the soul. In the Hindu religion the singular eye is called the Third Eye of Clairvoyance, or the Eye of Shiva, and is worn as a dot in the middle of the forehead. In Ancient Egypt there was the Eye of Osiris and Eye of Horus and let’s not forget the Cyclops in Greek mythology.

The All-Seeing Eye

It has been noted that the eye in the pyramid on the back of the one-dollar-bill is a Masonic symbol, and that the image of the All-Seeing Eye (an eye inside a triangle) is an emblem of some Big Brother type of organisation whose aim is to rule us all.

The All-Seeing Eye is an ancient symbol that may have become an signature for conspiratorial orders, such as Freemasonry and the Illuminati is said to be, but it has no more to do with this, originally, than the swastika has to do with anti-Semitism. Recall that the swastika represented two cosmic forces moving in opposite directions much like that of yin-yang, and is an ancient symbol of the Hindus. (1)

In Jesus famous Sermon on the Mount as portrayed in Matthew 6:22 (KJV) he says: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (2) Further on, in Matthew 7:7-8 (KJV), of that same sermon Jesus says:

”Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

” Remember the words (see the chapter The Serpent) quoted by Manly P. Hall from his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages concerning the movements of the Spit Fire through the segments of the spinal column, and how it enters the human skull and where it demands the Sacred Name. He continues by saying that Operative Masonry “signifies the process by which the Eye of Horus is opened.”

He goes on by mentioning that E.A. Wallis Budge “has noted that in some papyri illustrating the entrance of the souls of the dead into the judgement hall of Osiris the deceased person has a pine cone attached to the crown of the head. The Greek mysteries also carried a symbolic staff, the upper end being in the form of a pine cone, which was called the ‘thyrsus’ of Bacchus… the pineal gland is the sacred pine cone in man – the ‘eye single’, which cannot be opened until CHiram (the Spit Fire) is ‘raised’ through the sacred seals which are called the Seven Churches in Asia.”

Recall the Chakras, the Seven Souls of India/Egypt and the constitutions of man and how they all correspond
with each other and Manly P. Hall’s words will be even clearer.

Even more plainly explains Buddha that “the Kingdom of heaven lies closer than the brow above your eye, but yet you do not see it.” In Genesis 32:30 (KJV) is says:

“And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” (3)

In Sumerian El means Brightness. Ellu in Babylonian means Shining Ones. In English Elf means Shining Being. El in Old Cornish means Angel. E l in Hebrew means Shining, Elohim means Gods and Peniel, or Penuel, means Face of God, or the presence/recognition of God.

In Jack Ensign Addington’s book The Hidden Mystery of the Bible he writes:

“The Yogi approaches his meditation by directing his attention to a point in the centre of the forehead just above and between the eyes where the ‘third eye’ or mystic eye is said to be located, to him the centre of light. It is interesting to note that this is the location of the gland that directs the body functions and is called the pineal gland… I believe that the Eastern religions continue today to believe that the third eye is the seat of spiritual insight. Somewhere along the line, the spelling has been slightly altered since the Bible spells the word Peniel or Penuel, but the similarity of meaning suggest that they are related. Peniel means recognition of God. Meditation is for the purpose of recognizing God and the Prayer is the ultimate meditation is a real conversation between mankind and God.”

The word epiphany is defined in most dictionaries as “a revelatory manifestation of a divine being.” The Christian holyday of Epiphany, or the Enlightening, is celebrated twelve days after Christmas – and is therefore also known as Twelfth Day. (4) Can it be a coincidence then that the pineal glands medical name is epiphysis cerebri considering its mystical properties as a tool to achieve illumination and astral travel? What can be more All-Seeing than that?

René Descartes called the pineal gland “the Seat of the Soul” in his Treatise of Man, since, to him, it was a unique because it was not duplicated on the right and left sides, but this is an incorrect observation because it is divided into two fine hemispheres, although without the aid of modern equipment the gland might appear undivided so we can blame Descartes too much for this error.

The Ark of the Covenant and the Hall of Records, the Keys of Enoch, the Holy Grail and the Holy of Holies could all, and probably are, allegories for the pineal gland.

Since the pineal glandsits deep within the brain, and seeing as it was the last gland to have its function discovered, it has an air of mystique about it. To find it represented in most ancient mysteries and occult lore is therefore not so strange adding to the fact that it seems to hold secrets, still, and possesses abilities that possibly affect our dreams.

The pineal gland, melatonin and seratonin

The pineal gland is a small, (5) reddish grey, vascular, conical body of rudimentary glandular structure weighing a little more than 0.1 gram. It’s located near the centre of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thalamic bodies join at the base of the brain. (6) In lower vertebrates it causes aggregation of pigment in melanophores and thus lightens skin.

The pineal gland appears to play a major role in the hibernation of animals and seasonal breeding. In some lower vertebrates the pineal gland has a well-developed eye-like structure and it functions as a light receptor and could be considered the evolutionary forerunner of the modern eye. (7) Webster Dictionary describes the pineal gland as having the structure of an eye “with a more or less distinct retina and lens, and is then called the pineal eye.” The pineal gland is also implicated in seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, and metabolism. (8)

Melatonin is produced, together with seratonin, by the pineal gland that also catalyzes seratonin to melatonin with hydroxy O-methyltransferase (HIOMT), regulates circadian rhythms and helps regulate gonadal hormone secretion. (9)

Melatonin is a natural neurohormone, which we all have that helps us sleep, and when we do the melatonin goes through our blood and cleans our cells up. For example it scavenges out free radicals.

Synthesis and release of melatonin is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light. But even without visual cues, the level of melatonin in the blood rises and falls on a daily circadian cycle (10) with peak levels occurring in the wee hours of the morning. This cycle tends to drift in people who are totally blind often making them sleepy during the day and become wide-awake at night. Giving melatonin at bedtime has proved helpful in a number of cases. Ingesting even modest doses of melatonin raises the melatonin level in the blood to as much as 100 times greater than normal. (11)

The production of melatonin, which is the pineal gland principal hormone, is reduced with the arrival of puberty. This suggests that the abundant levels of melatonin in children hinder sexual development. The failure of the pineal gland to produce melatonin from seratonin each day beginning at sunset and throughout the night may lead to disturbances normally associated with aging as melatonin has widespread integrative and regenerative effects. (12)

Perhaps this hindrance from sexuality is why a child’s imagination is more potent than adults, who are more often disturbed by sexual emotions, and the obligations of society. It has been noted, also, that the pineal gland vibrates…

In Fulcanelli version of the Emerald Tablet it says that “the eternal Will is contained in it. Here, on earth, its strength, its power remain one and undivided.”

Although the powers of imagination, and the force of the pineal gland, may diminish with age it is still always there, sleeping coiled at the root of our being. Would it not be wise, even if it turns out to be false, to place our attention at this gland that sits in the midst of our brain? According to the Emerald Tablet “by means of this one thing all the glory of the world shall be yours and all obscurity flee from you.” Can any person deny such a possible reward? It would certainly be better than winning the lottery. Would it not?

The Wonders of Ayahuasca

In The Cosmic Serpent Jeremy Narby describes a hallucinogenic brew, known as ayahuasca, that he tried whilst living amongst the Peruvian Indians as “the most botanically and chemically complex hallucinogen. It can be thought of as a psychoactive cocktail, containing different additives depending on the region, the practitioner, and the desired effects. Scientists who have studied its composition agree that dimethyltryptamine is its main active ingredient. This highly hallucinogenic substance seems also to be produced in small quantities by the human brain.”

He continues:

“We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain. The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information; the optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, colour, movement, depth, etc.). How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery. This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown.”

How can we understand things which are not there if we don’t even know how we see things that are? Could, is, there more to those things in nature which are invisible than science give credit? Before the microscope people considered the notion of particles, atoms or even germs ridiculous. Should we, with this in mind, let these matters that are not yet proven, or disproved, be ignored? What scientist dares to face ridicule and commence such work?

Of course laziness, or indifference, is not the sole reason why studies into the ayahuasca and other hallucinogenic substances are minimal. Jeremy Narby writes:

“…since the end of the 1960s, dimethyltryptamine (13) has been at the top of the controlled substance list, along with synthetic compounds such as heroin and LSD. This means not only that it is illegal for the average person, but that scientific studies on its effect are discouraged, and rare.”(14)

The TV Keeps You Drunk

Before proceeding there is another area of importance that needs to be discussed and, like hallucinations, it concerns things that are invisible but nonetheless there: electromagnetic radiation. Basically it’s radio waves that emanate from radio and TV towers, cell phones, cell sites, cordless phones and microwave ovens. (15)

Not surprisingly the official position of those who make their money out of producing and using this technology, is that we all know that the only thing that electro magnetic radiation can do is heat and if it doesn’t heat it can’t have any effect.

Now there have been experiments in several laboratories where scientists have taken human breast cancer cells and exposed them to a cocktail of melatonin and then applied a very low level of varying electric field and the oncostatic (16) effect of melatonin was totally eliminated. (17)

The experiment shows that electromagnetic radiation from power lines and appliances can reduce the melatonin ‘cleaning-up’ effect on human breast cancer cells. The strength of the signal they used was two to twelve milligauss, which is a very low level magnetic field magnitude compared, for instance, the safety standard of Europe which is 20 000 milligauss for this kind of fields.

When the cell phone signal is held next to the brain there is a change in the brainwaves of 70% of people. To sleep with the cell phone by the bed results in poor R.E.M. (18) sleep. This causes a reduction in melatonin and thus leads to impaired learning and memory skills. More disturbing than all this is the fact that the TV seriously influence the pineal gland in such ways as harmful to the intellect.

In November 1969 a researcher by the name of Herbert Krugman monitored the brain waves of a person watching TV. He found that after 30 seconds the beta waves, indicating conscious attention, switched to predominantly alpha waves, indicating the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming. When the subject turned away from the TV and began reading the beta waves reappeared.

Further research revealed that the left side of the brain, which process information logically and analytical, tunes out and the emotional and non-critical right side tunes in. In short the TV transmits information that the views does not really think about at the time of exposure. To quote Philip K. Dick’s speech How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later yet again:

“An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour [according to Dick the process takes longer] the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.”

Thus TV synchronizes sound and images into a deadly unity and turns itself into a very dangerous and effective tool for advertising. Have you noticed that the sounds of commercials is just, if not more, important than the actual visuals? Have you ever become stuck in front of the TV with the hours flying by in a comfortable doze, body and mind completely relaxed, till you eventually fall asleep? Do you consider this a good thing?

Epiphysis Cerebri - part 2

Footnotes:
(1) The swastika also represents peace, laughter, joy and good luck and the Nazi’s reversed for their logo.
(2) Matthew 6:19-23 (KJV) “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great [is] that darkness!”
(3) Or Penuel, and Biblical scholars have tried to pinpoint where this place might have been ignoring the fact that it was not a place on Earth, but in the mind.
(4) Twelfth Night is the eve before Twelfth Day, and Shakespeare’s play was supposed to be performed at this time.
(5) In humans 8mm.
(6) More precisely above the superior colliculus and behind, and beneath, the stria medullaris, between the laterally positioned thalamic bodies, and is a part of the epithalamus.
(7) Dr. Harris E. Santee writes in his book Anatomy of the Brain and the Spinal Cord: “In reptiles there are two pineal bodies, an anterior and a posterior, of which the posterior remains undeveloped but the anterior forms a rudimentary, cyclopean eye. In the Hatteria, a New Zealand lizard, it projects through the parietal foramen and presents an imperfect lens and retina and, in its long stalk, nerve fibres.”
(8) SAD has been known to be cured with solar treatment i.e. exposure to the rays of the sun.
(9) melatonin and seratonin controls the neuroendocrine and immune networks and inhibits the development of ischemic heart and Alzheimer’s disease, tumour formation and other degenerative processes associated with aging.
(10) Relating to biologic variations or rhythms with a cycle of about 24 hours.
(11) It is readily available in drug stores and health food stores, and it has become quite popular and can hasten the recovery from jet lag without any yet known dangerous side effects.
(12) There is a pathway from the retinas to the hypothalamus called the retinohypothalamic tract. It brings information about light and dark cycles to a region of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). From the SCN, nerve impulses travel via the pineal nerve (sympathetic nervous system) to the pineal gland. These impulses inhibit the production of melatonin. When these impulses stop (at night, when light no longer stimulates the hypothalamus), pineal inhibition ceases and melatonin is released. The pineal gland is therefore a photosensitive organ and an important timekeeper for the human body.
Retinal research done with hamsters demonstrates another centre for melatonin production. Located in the retina, this centre implies that the eyes have their own built in circadian timepiece. This retinal system is distinct from the brains body clock in the SCN. Biologists found that they could throw the retinal rhythms out of sync with other circadian cycles. They also found that they could set and reset the retinal clock even when the SCN was destroyed. The retinal clock produces (stimulates the production of) melatonin. Researchers are now looking for the exact location of this clock in the human eye. No one yet knows what the separate clock is for or how it relates to the SCN. The pineal gland secretes melatonin during times of relaxation and visualization. As we are created by electro magnetic energy and react to electro magnetic energy stimuli around us so does the pineal gland.
(13) Which is the main active ingredient in ayahuasca.
(14) Certainly legislation varies across the world, but the United States of America, which this refers to, often serves as the model for at least the Western countries.
(15) Microwaves are a minor problem compared to the others.
(16) Means that it helps to prevent the growth or multiplication of cancer cells.
(17) Dr Neil Cherry has done a lot of interesting research on this subject.
(18) Rapid eye movement (REM) is the normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes.

© deviadah

Alchemy

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:12:00 +0000

This article is coming soon...

Click HERE to go to the forum

© deviadah

The Lord Impaler

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:33:00 +0000

“He was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong and aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin reddish face in which very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening. His face and chin were shaven, but for a moustache. The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head. A bull’s neck connected [with] his head to his body from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered person.” Niccoló Modrussa’s impression of Vlad Tepes at the age of thirty.

Dracula is not Dracula

Dracula.
The name has become synonymous with vampires and evil and this is mainly due to the work of one single man. When Bram Stoker published his famous book Dracula, in 1897, it put the nail in the coffin for Vlad Tepes, known in his time as Dracula, simply because Stoker decided to use his name for the fictitious character in his story in addition to placing him in the same region of the world, i.e. Transylvania. But Stoker can’t be blamed if one considers his first option for the name of his villain, Count Orlok, and even the least poetic can agree that Dracula was a much better choice. (1)

But we shall not indulge further in imaginary horror stories and proceed into reality and the events that formed the real Dracula, which is a tale of far worse atrocities and more streams of blood than any vampire could ever produce.

To appreciate the following narrative it’s important to have some knowledge of the historical setting of the region in which a large part of it took place and to be familiar with events that occurred before our ‘dark hero’ was born.

Wallachia Caught in a Political Storm

In the 15th century the social and political forces of Europe tried to gain control of Wallachia. (2) Geographically it was the only thing standing in the way for the Ottoman Empire who were trying to get into Europe and destroy Christianity and politically the Hungarian Kingdom (which included Transylvania) had reached its zenith during this period so the rulers of Wallachia had to appease both the Turks and the Hungarians to maintain their survival, often forging alliance with one or the other depending on what served their self-interest at the time.

In 1290 Radu Negro (Rudolph the Black) founded Wallachia and it was dominated by Hungary until 1330 when it achieved independence. The first ruler of the new country was Prince Basarab the Great, an ancestor of Vlad Tepes. From 1386 to 1418 his grandfather Mircea the Old reigned. Eventually the House of Basarab split into two factions; Mircea’s descendants and the descendents of another prince named Dan (or Danesti). Much of the struggles we shall see for Vlad Tepes throne were between these two competing factions.

The Order of the Dragon

The Order of the Dragon was founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund I in 1387. (3) It was similar to other orders like the Teutonic Order of Knights in their duties of defending, but it was also a secret brotherhood of knights. Its purpose was to uphold Christianity, defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks (4) and protect the catholic churches from heresy in addition to organise a crusade against the Turks, who had invaded the Balkan Peninsula. Not widely known was the undeclared aim of the Society of gaining political supremacy for the house of Luxemburg, and thus only a selected number were chosen for the honour of being admitted.

One of the Order of the Dragon’s oaths was that its insignia, a medallion, had to be worn at all times. It was a dragon, wings extended, hanging on a cross. There was also an inscription: O quam misericors est Deus and Justus et pius. In English: Oh how merciful is God and Just and faithful.

Vlad Basarab, who had fought bravely against the Turks, was invited to the Imperial fortress of Nuremberg on the 8th of February 1431 by King Sigismund I ruler of Hungary, Germany and Bohemia. Here Vlad Basarab laid his oath to the Order of the Dragon, and from this day onward he wore its insignia to the end of his life, even using it on his coinage when a ruler. Sigismund I made Vlad Basarab the military governor of Transylvania, a region directly northwest of Wallachia.

Drac in Romanian means devil or dragon, and ul is the definitive article. When Vlad, prince of Wallachia, returned to his homeland he was to be known as Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Dragon. His family were proud of the nickname, despite the double meaning of devil.

Vlad Tepes Childhood and Education

Vlad Dracul and Princess Cneasna (5) had a child (6) in November 1431 that they named Vladislav Basarab in the Transylvanian town of Sighisoara. (7) For easier understanding, and due to the many various names this child would come to own I will henceforth call him by the name he is best remembered, which is Vlad Tepes. In the Romanian language tepes (pronounced tse-pesh) means the impaler and because of his future obsession with this method of torture he would come to bear the notorious title Vlad the Impaler. (8)

The young Vlad Tepes also had two brothers. A younger one, Radu the Handsome, and an older named Mircea. His father raised Vlad Tepes like a catholic for political reasons (not to offend Sigismund I). His early education was left in the hands of his mother and her family. It was a prosperous neighbourhood in which he grew up, surrounded by the homes of Saxons and Magyar merchants and the townhouses of the nobility. There were plenty of entertainment for him in the form of puppet theatres, acrobats, ball games, quadrilateral swings of red cloth and the hunting of eagles with slingshots. Vlad Tepes also watched with curiosity the condemned walk under his window to be hanged.

Because his father was nicknamed Dracul, he inherited the title Son of the Dragon; Dracula. Vlad Tepes was to be called Dracula during his lifetime, mostly due to its meaning of devil.

Vlad Dracul wasn’t content to serve as mere governor so he gathered supporters for his plan to seize Wallachia from its current occupant Alexandru I, a Danesti prince. In 1436 he succeeded in his plan, killing Alexandru I and becoming Vlad II (there was an earlier prince also named Vlad), and Vlad Tepes earned the title Vlad III. Vlad Dracul moved to the capital of Wallachia, Targoviste, in the winter of 1436-37.

Now Vlad Tepes was trained, typical to that of the son of nobility throughout Europe, in etiquette and command, exposed to the elements on stormy days to build his physical and moral character and taught to be a warrior. His first tutor in his apprenticeship to knighthood was an elderly boyar who had fought against the Turks at the battle of Nicolopolis. Vlad Tepes learned all the skills of war and peace that were deemed necessary for a Christian knight.

He attended the Austrian School of Solomon in Hermannstadt which gave him scientific understanding of the bodily effects of melatonin and seratonin, which enhance longevity and increase consciousness. People with an excessive amount of melatonin are, as we have already established, unfavourable towards sunlight (another clue to the formation of the Dracula of Stokers novel perhaps). Perhaps he even experimented with his pineal gland trying to open his Third Eye in a dark twist of creativity envisaging new forms of torture?

Vlad Tepes would also in time possess an in-depth knowledge of alchemy, kingship and the ancient Star fire customs and one day follow his father’s footsteps becoming initiated into the Order of the Dragon.

In 1437, King Sigismund I died. For six years Vlad Dracul attempted to follow middle ground between his powerful neighbours. He was still a member of the Order of the Dragon sworn to fight the infidel, but the Ottomans powers seemed unstoppable. He became required to pay an annual tribute to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire of 10 000 ducats, just as his father Mircea the Old had been forced to do, but the Turks were becoming suspicious and invited him to Gallipoli for further negotiations. He accepted and, along with his two sons, Vlad Tepes and Radu, made the journey only to be seized and taken to the capital city of Adrianople. Vlad Dracul was released almost a year later, having to make further promises, in addition of the cash tribute, of five hundred young boys for the Janissaries. (9)

Vlad Tepes, about 11 years old, and Radu, 7 years old, were kept at the palace as guests of the Sultan as an insurance of Vlad Dracul’s support. In March 1442 Vlad Dracul allowed the Turks led by Mezid-Bey to pass through Wallachia to attack Transylvania, but they were defeated by the Hungarians under the leadership of János Hunyadi, (10) the White Knight of Hungary, and a possible bastard son of Sigismund I. Vengeful they forced Vlad Dracul and his family to flee Wallachia. But he returned, with Turkish support, and regained the throne in 1443.

The Varna Campaign

In 1444 Hunyadi broke the peace and launched the Varna Campaign in an effort to drive the Turks out of Europe. He demanded Vlad Dracul to fulfil his oath as a member of the Order of the Dragon and a vassal of Hungary to join the crusade. But instead Vlad Dracul sent his oldest son Mircea, perhaps hoping the Sultan would spare his younger sons if he did not take part in the crusades himself.

The Christian army was utterly destroyed in the Battle of Varna. Hunyadi managed to escape the battle under inglorious conditions. From this moment he was bitterly hostile toward Vlad Dracul and his eldest son. In turn they blamed Hunyadi for the loss.

Six Years in Turkey

Radu was a weaker personality and became completely taken by the Turks. Due to the politics of his time he had been forced to grow up in Turkey and became eventually a potential ally of the Turkish Sultan Murad II even ending up in his bed. Vlad Tepes remained defiant still considering himself a prisoner.

For six long years he lived in this strange land, under constant threat of the silken cord his captors reserved for assassination. A threat greatly increased at his father’s eventual allegiance with the Christian forces of Varna.
Vlad Tepes changed during his captive years. For instance he stopped to worry about human nature, knowing that if his father would fail in something he would be dead. He learned early on that in politics morals were foolish. He also learned the Turkish language, and he enjoyed the pleasures of the Sultans harem since his prison wasn’t so restricted.

It was said by his captors that Vlad Tepes developed a reputation of being brute and treacherous. Even frightening his own guards. He had a thirst for vengeance and learned that life is cheap and torture is only restricted by the imagination. No longer would he place trust in anybody ever again.

The End of Vlad Dracul

A factor of political life was the means of succession to the Wallachian throne. It was hereditary, but not by the law of primogeniture. The boyars (wealthy land-owning nobles) had the right to elect the voivode (prince) from various eligible members of the royal family. This allowed for succession to the throne through violent means. Assassination and other aggressive overthrows of reigning parties were thus rampant.

In 1447 Hunyadi led a war against Vlad Dracul. The decisive battle was fought near Targoviste in December. As a result Dracul was killed on the order of Hunyadi assisted by the Romanian Boyars (the ruling elite). Vlad Dracul was beheaded and Mircea blinded with a burning stake and buried alive. Hunyadi placed his own candidate on the Wallachian throne, Vladislav II, a member of the Danesti clan.

Vlad Tepes was after these events released and the Turks supported him as their candidate for the Wallachian throne. Some sources claim that he escaped enraged by the murders of his father and brother. Nonetheless in 1448, at the age of 17, Vlad Tepes managed to seize the Wallachian throne for two months. But Hunyadi forced him to surrender and flee to the Moldavian capital Suceava where his cousin Estevão lived. His father, Bogdan, was the Prince of Moldavia. Vlad Tepes was exiled until 1451 when Bogdan was brutally murdered. With no alternatives Vlad Tepes went to Transylvania and placed himself at the mercy of Hunyadi. As fate would have it Vladislav II unexpectedly instituted a pro-Turkish policy, which Hunyadi found unacceptable. So he forged an alliance with the son of his old enemy to retake the Wallachian throne by force. Hunyadi became Vlad Tepes last mentor, teaching him many anti-Turkish strategies and they got close through politics.

Vlad Tepes received the Transylvanian duties formerly governed by his father and remained there, under protection of Hunyadi, waiting for an opportunity to retake Wallachia from his rival. Perhaps the mutual hatred of the Turks caused Vlad Tepes to lay little blame on Hunyadi for the murder of his father and brother? Or that he put the blame on the boyars? Hunyadi would, regardless, never directly suffer the vengeful spirit that Vlad Tepes would soon come to unleash.

The Fall of Constantinople

Constantinople had stood for a thousand years protecting the outpost of the east Roman Empire. But it was like a head without a body. A poor and largely depopulated city of ruins, and the inhabitants continued to flee in the face of the Ottoman threat. Mehmed II Fatih (11) was a young Sultan who needed a great victory in order to reaffirm his new power and thus in April 1453 he began to lay siege of Constantinople that lasted for 54 days, until it fell on the 29th of May 1453 and all of Christendom was suddenly threatened by the armed might of the Ottoman Turks. The Christian world was shocked and had not experienced a worse disaster since tha fall of Jerusalem more than two centuries before.

Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus rejected Mehmed’s terms of surrender and the latter ordered a general assault and pillage of his new capital, which he named Istanbul, a corruption of the Greek word estin poli or in to the city.

The conquest of Constantinople turned Mehmed into the most celebrated Sultan in the Muslim world overnight. He began to see himself as heir to a worldwide empire, and the 30 years of his reign established the distinctive character of the Ottoman Empire.

Three years later, in 1456, Hunyadi broadened the scope of his campaign against the Turks and invaded Turkish Serbia, while simultaneously invaded Wallachia. On August 11th in the Battle of Belgrade Hunyadi was killed by the plague, and his army defeated. Nine days later Vlad Tepes defeated Vladislav II and he caught up with the fleeing prince and killed him.

But Vlad Tepes was dangerously exposed, even in his own country, so in September he took a formal oath to the Hungarian King Ladislaus V signing a defence pact and free trade agreement with the Saxons of Brasov (Kronstadt to the Germans). A few days later he took an oath of vassalage to the Turkish Sultan, and then he agreed to pay 10 000 ducats to the Turks annually like his father had done and his before that. Wallachia assumed the ancient mantle as defender of Christendom with Vlad Tepes as its ruler. (12) It was during this first main reign that he instituted strict policies and stood up against the Turks beginning his Reign of Terror.

Easter Day 1456

Vlad Tepes built a banquet hall outside his new capital Targoviste (13) where hundreds of the boyars were gathered, five bishops and the most important abbots from the most important foreign and national monasteries, including the archbishop himself. These were the long-established noble families of his country. He had invited
them all in the need to solidify his power and out of vengeance, but none knew of these plans yet.

The legend tells that Vlad Tepes watched closely and scanned their faces. He thought to himself that the murderers of his father and brother could be among them. A sumptuous meal was served and then Vlad Tepes asked:
“How many reigns do you know personally, my loyal vassals, in your whole life?”
“Seven, My Lord,” a young man answered.
“I survived for 30 reigns!” answered another.
“Since your grandfather, my Lord, there were no less than 20 princes and I survived during all of them!” a third man said.

Suddenly Vlad Tepes gave the order to his loyal guards to surround the hall and the approximately 500 boyars. The old and infirm got impaled outside the city walls with their wives, children and employees. The remainder were made to march for 50 miles up the Arges valley, still in their Easter finery, to the village of Arefu. Here they found pre-prepared brick ovens, limekilns and building material. The boyars and their families were put to work rebuilding an extensively damaged fortress some 1200 feet above the village.

It was built so attack was impossible. The large windows were placed above the level that arrows and other object couldn’t reach. The enslaved boyars worked for months until their clothes fell off their bodies and then they were forced to continue naked. Many of the workers died during construction, often from falling. The ones who survived got impaled in front of their creation. (14)

Impalement and Torture

Vlad Tepes learned all about impalement from the Turks during his time in Turkey and it is for this inhuman cruelty that he is best remembered. Impalement was his preferred method of torture and execution since it’s gruesomely slow and painful.

The length of each stake depended upon the ranks of the victim. Then the victim was to be bound spread-eagle (sometime he had a horse attached to each victims legs) and the stake to be inserted through the rectum, through the body and out through the mouth. These stakes were carefully rounded at the end and bathed in oil, to minimise tearing and prolonging the process (if there was time). And they couldn’t be to sharp because then the victim might die out of shock. Sometimes, though, victims were impaled through other body orifices, or through abdomen or chest. Infants were impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down. Often Vlad Tepes had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns, the most common one was the ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that was his target. Often left out for months while decaying, rotting in the sun.

But Vlad Tepes had other ways of torture victims, many of which he had learned in Turkey. He boiled people, skinned them alive, cut off noses, ears, genitals (especially women’s) and heads. Poured honey and salt into wounds and forcing animals to lick them. He strangled, hanged, burned, blinded, amputated, scalped, and used exposure to the elements or to wild animals. He killed women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. He stuck stakes in both breasts of mothers and thrust their babies unto them. The vast majority of his victims came from the merchants and boyars of Transylvania and his own Wallachia.

Cruel as it may seem the Catholic Church and the Inquision were at the same time no better in their treatment of deemed heretics. They might not have possessed Vlad Tepes creative genius in torture but nonetheless one of their techniques was to spread their live victims with fat and roast them slowly from feet upwards. Interesting to note is that Vlad Tepes favourite method of torture would be reversed on his fictional counterpart in Bram Stokers book Dracula where being impaled by a stake through the heart was one of the means to kill the vampire.

Throughout his reign Vlad Tepescontinued to systematically eradicate the old boyar class of Wallachia. He was determined that his own power be on a modern and thoroughly secure footing. In the place of the executed boyars Vlad Tepes prompted new men from among the free peasantry and middle class; men who would be loyal only to the king.

One of Vlad Tepes political rivals at the time was a priest, his half-brother, Vlad the Monk. The German-occupied town of Sibiu was requested by Vlad Tepes to give up its support for Vlad the Monk, because he was getting to be more and more dissatisfied with the German presence in Transylvania. No reply came so Vlad Tepes struck, in an undeclared war, across the mountains. He savagely destroyed the population of a number of villages and towns, and the property of the wealthy merchants and boyars who were patrons to his half-brother. It was the first raid on the country of his birth. When Vlad Tepes armies invaded the Germans of Transylvania he had the people hacked to pieces like cabbage and when his Captain reported that a particular village could not be taken due to the courage of the inhabitants he had him impaled.

Benedict de Boithor, a Polish nobleman in the service of the King of Hungary, visited Targoviste in September of 1458 to meet with Vlad Tepes. At dinner one evening Vlad Tepes ordered a golden spear brought and set up directly in front of the royal representative. He then asked Benedict de Boithor if he knew why this spear had been set up.

The nobleman replied:
“I imagine that some boyar had offended the prince and that you, My Lord, intend to honour him!”
“The spear has actually been set up in your honour,” explained Vlad Tepes.
“If I have done anything to deserve death, then you should do what you think is best.”
Vlad Tepes was greatly pleased by this answer, showered him with gifts, and declared:
“Had you answered in any other manner you would have been immediately impaled!”

On Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 1459, Vlad Tepes ordered 30 000 of the merchants and nobles of the Transylvanian city of Brasov to be impaled. To better enjoy the results of his orders he commanded that his table be set up and that his boyars join him for a feast amongst the forest of impaled corpses. (15)

While dining Vlad Tepes noticed that one of his boyars was holding his nose in an effort to alleviate the terrible smell of clotting blood and emptied bowels. Vlad Tepes ordered the sensitive nobleman impaled on a stake higher than all the rest.
“Stay there far, so the stink will not disturb you!” (16)

The Myths and Legends of Vlad Tepes

Vlad Tepes ruled with a cruel hand. Just about every crime was punishable with death, from idleness upwards. He insisted that his people be honest and hard working. Merchants, for instance, who cheated their customers were likely too find themselves mounted on a stake beside common thieves. The atrocities against the people of Wallachia thus came from Vlad Tepes attempts to enforce his own moral code upon the country.

He was very concerned that all his subjects work and contribute to the common welfare. He once noticed that the poor vagrants, beggars and cripples had become very numerous in his land. Consequently he issued an invitation to all the poor and sick in Wallachia to come to Targoviste for a great feast claiming that no one should go hungry in his land.

As the poor and crippled arrived in the city they were ushered into a great hall where a fabulous feast was prepared for them. The guests ate and drank late into the night. Vlad Tepes then made an appearance and asked them:
“What else do you desire? Do you want to be without cares, lacking nothing in the world?”

When they responded positively Vlad Tepes ordered the hall boarded up and set on fire. None escaped the flames. He explained his action to the boyars by claiming that he did this in order that they represent no further burden to other men, and that no one will be poor in his realm. These people were deemed undesirables, thieves and robbers, threatening commercial trade. During his reign Vlad Tepes murdered both the upper and lower classes of society.

He was known for his fierce insistence on honesty and order throughout his land. Thieves seldom dared practice their trade in his domain, for they knew the stake awaited any who were caught. Vlad Tepes was so confident in the effectiveness of his law that he placed a golden cup on display in the central square of Targoviste, by a fountain for people to drink from. The cup was never stolen and remained entirely unmolested during his reign.

A merchant from a foreign land visited Targoviste. Having heard the reputation of Vlad Tepes land for honesty, he left a treasure-laden cart unguarded in the street over night. Upon returning to his wagon in the morning he was shocked to find 160 ducats missing. The merchant complained of his loss to Vlad Tepes who assured him that his money would be returned. Vlad Tepes then issued a proclamation to the city; find the thief or the city will be destroyed.

During the night he ordered that 160 ducats plus one extra be taken from his own treasury and placed in the merchants cart. On returning to the cart the next morning and counting his money the merchant discovered the extra ducat. He returned to Vlad Tepes and reported that his money had indeed been returned plus an extra ducat. Meanwhile the thief had been captured and turned over to the Vlad Tepes guards along with the stolen money. He then ordered the thief impaled and informed the merchant that if he had not reported the extra ducat he would have been impaled alongside the thief.

Female chastity appears to be s particular concern for Vlad Tepes. Maidens who lost their virginity, adulterous wives and unchaste widows were all targets of his cruelty. Such women often had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off, and were often impaled through the vagina on red-hot stakes. One report tells of the execution of an unfaithful wife. Vlad Tepes had the woman’s breasts cut off, and then she was skinned and impaled in a square in Targoviste. Her skin was left lying on a table nearby.

Once he had a mistress that lived in a house in the back streets of Targoviste. This woman apparently loved him and was always anxious to please. Vlad Tepes was often moody and depressed and the woman made every effort to lighten her lover’s burden. Once, when he was particularly down, the woman dared tell him the lie that she was with child. Vlad Tepes had the woman examined by the bath matrons. When informed that the woman was lying Vlad Tepes drew a knife and cut her open from the groin to her breast saying:
“Let the world see where I have been!”
He left her to die in agony.

Another story tell that one day Vlad Tepes noticed a man working in the fields while wearing a caftan ( a sort of shirt) that he judged to be too short in length. Vlad Tepes stopped and asked to see the man’s wife. When the woman was brought before him he asked her how she spent her days. The poor frightened woman stated that she spent her days washing, baking and sewing. The prince pointed out her husband’s short caftan as evidence of her laziness and dishonesty and ordered her impaled despite her husband’s protestations that he was well satisfied with his wife. Vlad Tepes then ordered another woman to marry the peasant but cautioned her to work hard or she would suffer the same fate.

Vlad Tepes was raised a catholic, but he had more in common with the Roman Orthodox Church and favoured monasteries in Tismana and Snagov. Even though no one knows his exact belief. In the wider area of Christian versus the infidel he saw himself as a crusader against the Turks. He would insist proper ceremony and Christian burial for those he condemned to death, and probably believed that good works such as building a monastery could atone for evil deeds.

But the Roman Catholic Church was expanding with the guidance of the Hungarian King Ladislaus V, and Vlad Tepes wasn’t all that happy about it. He replaced the high-ranking members of new monasteries with his own men and there are numerous stories relating to his encounters with individual catholic abbots and monks, who could either gain favour with wit or flattery or, standing up for their faith, could become a martyr to it.

Two monks, Michael and Hans the Porter, came to visit Vlad Tepes at his palace at Targoviste. Curious to see their reaction he showed them rows of impaled corpses in the courtyard. When asked their opinion Michael responded meekly:
“You are appointed by God to punish evil-doers.”

Hans had the moral courage to condemn the cruel prince. In the German version of this tale Vlad Tepes kills the honest one, but in the Russian version and in Romanian tradition Vlad Tepes impales the sycophant for his dishonesty and rewards the honest monk for his integrity and courage.

Many of these stories about Vlad Tepes are derived from Romania’s oral tradition that have been retelling the events for 500 years. Vlad Tepes is remembered as just a prince who defended his people from foreigners, whether they were Turkish invaders or German merchants. He is also remembered as a champion of the common man against oppression of the boyars, and for his success in standing up to the Ottoman Empire.

A central part of the verbal tradition is Vlad Tepes insistence on honesty in his efforts to eliminate crime and immoral behaviour from the region. What is interesting is that the German and Russian pamphlets written about Vlad Tepes agree on many of his deeds even though they were written from different political standpoints. This is therefore strong proof that most of what has been said happened actually did. (17)

Kaziglu Bey

With the Popes blessing Vlad Tepes did daring raids into Turkey, capturing thousands, and knowing the Sultan would try to avenge his deeds he poisoned wells and burned villages. It was little the Sultan could do. His army could barley scrape a living in the Transylvanian and Wallachian countryside.

Sultan Mehmed II was not a man noted for being squeamish but when he and his army approached Targoviste in 1462 they encountered a 3 by 1 km of impaled Turkish and Bulgarian prisoners (around 20 000) outsider the city. Mehmed II felt sickened at this Forest of the Impaled. The Turks returned home to Constantinople and would from this day onward refer to Vlad Tepes, with mixed awe and hate, Kaziglu Bey (or the Lord Impaler).

Although Vlad Tepes experienced some success in fending off the Turks, his accomplishments were relatively short-lived. Receiving little support from his titular overlord Mátyás Corvinus, the great Renaissance King of Hungary, and son of Hunyadi. Also the Wallachian resources were limited to achieve any lasting success against the powerful Turks.

In 1462 the Turks forced Vlad Tepes to flee Transylvania, reportedly his first wife then committed suicide by leaping from one of the towers of his castle straight into the Arges River rather die than surrender to the Turks.

Vlad Tepes had escaped through a secret passage and fled across the mountains (some say he rode backwards to confuse his enemies) into Transylvania and appeal to Corvinus for aid. The King immediately had Vlad Tepes arrested and imprisoned in the royal tower.

Vlad Tepes was put in house arrest and treated more like a guest than a prisoner. He probably moved seasonally between Budapest and Visegrad. (18) His name is not included on any register of prison names kept at Solomon’s Tower. (19)

During this period he gradually won his way back into the graces of Corvinus, and immediately met and married a member of the royal family (possibly Corvinus sister). He fathered two sons. It’s unlikely that a prisoner would be allowed to marry a member of the royal family.

It is said, according to the Russian Pamphlets, that even in captivity Vlad Tepes could not give up his favourite past time so he often captured birds and mice and proceeded to torture and mutilate them. Some were even beheaded, or tarred-and-feathered, but mostly impaled on tiny spears.

Radu the Handsome was the new successor to the Wallachian throne. He, however, had instituted a very pro-Turkish policy. Corvinus may have view Vlad Tepes as a possible candidate to retake the throne. The fact that Vlad Tepes renounced the Orthodox faith and adopted Catholicism was also surely meant to appease Corvinus. He was released probably in 1466.

In 1475 Vlad Tepes fights the Turks in Servia known as the Summer Wars. One year later, in 1476, he is ready to make a bid for power. He invades Wallachia, with Stephen Bathory of Transylvania, with a mixed contingent of forces. Radu the Handsome had already died by this time and had been replaced by Basarab the Old (a member of the Danesti clan).

At the approach of Vlad Tepes army Basarab and his cohorts fled. Shortly after taking the throne Bathory and most of Vlad Tepes forces returned to Transylvania leaving him vulnerable. Before he was able to gather support a large Turkish army entered Wallachia. Vlad Tepes was forced to march and meet the Turks with less than 4000 men.

Head on a Stake

In December 1476, in the Vlasia forest outside Bucharest, Vlad Tepes is killed battling the Turks. There are many different versions of who killed him. Some say it was a servant paid by the Turks, or that he was assassinated by a disloyal boyar just as he was to sweep the Turks from the field, or that Radu was behind it (he could be alive because the point of his death is uncertain or he gave the order before he died). Other accounts have him falling in defeat surrounded by the ranks of his loyal Moldavian bodyguard. Other reports claim he was accidentally struck down by one of his own men at the moment of victory. One fact remains; his head was severed from his neck. It’s said it was brought to the Sultan, who in turn had it displayed on a stake, as proof that the horrible Impaler was finally dead. (20)

Vlad Tepes was buried at Snagov, an island monastery, located near Bucharest. His family had long been associated with it. There was no marker at his tomb and there seems to have been concerted effort to simply forget the dreaded prince and his Reign of Terror. A richly dressed and crowned body, without a head, was unearthed outside the main doors of the monastery in 1930. If it was indeed Vlad Tepes then he had, perhaps, been moved outside by a priest who believed he was too evil a man to be buried beside an altar of God.

Footnotes:
(1) Bram Stoker was not the only person interested in the vampire myths but the one who firmly established it into the collective.
(2) Now part of modern Romania and location of the despicable Dracula Land.
(3) Sigismund I was the grandson of the blind hero Crécy.
(4) Named after the Seljuq Emir Oman whose fief was to the south of Nicacea in Anatolia. The Ottoman rapidly grew conquering the whole of Asia Minor during the 14th century.
(5) Or Princess Mara of the Tomaj family of Hungary.
(6) Vlad Dracul had another son, also named Vlad, with his lover Caltuna. This Vlad is known as Vlad the Monk. Caltuna later on went into a monastery and adopted the name Euprâxia. She was the sister of Bogdan, the ruler of Moldavia. Vlad Dracul took her as his second wife.
(7) The house he was born in is now a restaurant and like the rest of the town has changed little in apperance.
(8) Vlad Tepes other names were: Vladislav Basarab, Vlad III, Son of the Dragon or Dracula and by the Turks Kazighlu Bey The Impaler Prince or The Lord Impaler.
(9) The word comes from the Turkish yeni çeri, which means new levies. These soldiers were fed and paid regularly by the Sultan and subject to his will. All soldiers in Europe at this time were farmes in the spring and autumn, homebodies in winter and warriors in summer so the idea of full-time soldiers were an innovation. Turkish army corps recruited from non-Muslim families at an early age and given superior education, convertion to Islam, and they could rise to the most important administrative posts, some even becoming grand viziers, in the imperial service meritocracy. By the 19th century the Janissary corps became unbearingly corrupt and Sultan Mahmut II risked everything with a new European-style army that wiped them out ending their 350-year history in 1826.
(10) Iancu de Hunedoara.
(11) Also called Mohammed the Conqueror (1451 - 1481).
(12) From 1456 to 1462.
(13) In 1459 Bucharest is established as the second governmental centre and Vlad Tepes also built the citadel there.
(14) Both Arefu and the ruins of the castle remain to this day and anyone travelling in Romania should pay a visit. The view from the castle is spectacular.
(15) In 1460 Vlad Tepes impaled another 10 000 in Sibiu.
(16) One of the most famous woodcuts of the period depicts this event, showing Vlad Tepes feasting amongst a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brasov, while nearby executioner cuts apart other victims.
(17) Brother Michael and Jacob spread the word of Vlad Tepes doings throughout Europe. Michael Beheim, a German poet, wrote a 1070 line poem after extensive interview with brother Jacob called: Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman called Dracula of Wallachia. It was read several times, accompanied by music, to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III.

It must be remembered than many of Vlad Tepes victims were Germans so they paint the devils face on him. Because of the printing press that was just becoming widespread these pamphlets gained strong popularity reprinted many times over the next thirty years. In Russia Vlad Tepes was portrayed as a cruel but just prince whose actions were intended to benefit the greater good of the people. This just before the autocracy of the czars.
(18) It was here in Hungary that the famous portrait was painted. It now hangs in an Austrian museum.
(19) There is debate on exactly how long Vlad Tepes was confined. The Russian Pamphlets indicate that he was held from 1462 - 1474.
(20) At the time of Vlad Tepes death Mátyás Corvinus of Hungary was seeking to bolster his own reputation in the Holy Roman Empire. He may have intended the early pamphlets as justification for arresting Vlad Tepes in 1462, an event that caused concern for those worried about the Turkish threat, and for his less than vigorous support of his vassal.

© deviadah

Mohammed and the formation of Islam

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:23:00 +0000

“La ilaha illa Allah; Mohammed rasul Allah.” (1)

The Worship of the Arabs before Islam

The object of many of the world’s major religions is the attainment of peace, enlightenment and truth. Things any human being can’t deny. In regards to Islam where the word in itself means obtaining peace through total submission to the Will of God Almighty peace and love is at its core. A perfect Muslim, i.e. an individual who is totally obedient to Allah, does not gamble, use tobacco, alcohol or drugs and is modest, honest, truthful and loving neither false nor corrupt.

The Moslem empire that Mohammed founded, and his successors expanded, exceeded at its height the Roman Empire extending from India in the east to Spain in the West.

The Islamic culture is a compound of ancient Semetic, Classical Greek and medieval Indo-Persian where, apart from the language, the Arabs contributed little. The following can be found in Desmond Stewart’s book Early Islam:

“Emerging from the desert with little but keen curiosity, the Arabs quickly adopted ideas and techniques from older societies, and developed many of their own. Today the West is indebted to Islam for many scientific terms, among them:

ALCHEMY = AL-KIMIYA
The medieval predecessor of chemical science.

ALCOHOL = AL-KUHL
A finely ground cosmetic powder, later a term for any highly refined or distilled substance.

ALEMBIC = AL-INBIQ
Literally, “the still”; a vessel used by alchemists – and today by chemists – for distilling liquids.

ALGEBRA = AL-JABR
The binding together of disorganized parts.

ALKALI = AL-QILI
Saltwort ashes, used in making lye, soap, paper.

AMALGAM = AL-MALGHAM
The alloy of mercury, which are used in alchemy and in the refining of silver and gold.

AZIMUTH = AL-SUMUT
An arc of the horizon used to reckon position.

BORAX = BURAQ
A white, powdery mineral used since early times in soldering, cleaning and the making of glass.

CAMPHOR = KAFUR
An aromatic tree gum often used in liniments.

CIPHER = SIFR
Literally, “the empty”; hence, nothingness or zero.

ELIXIR = AL-IKSIR
Agent for changing metals to gold; a cure-all.

NADIR = NAZIR
Opposite of zenith, that is, the lowest point.

ZENITH = SAMT
The upward direction; figuratively, the acme. ”

The gods of the Arabs pre-Islam had always been stars, idols and sacred stones. The symbol of the worship of the moon god in Arabian culture, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East, was the crescent moon. Allah, or al-Ilah (the god), can be traced to the South Arabian moon god Ilah. Henotheism, or the worship of only one god while not denying the existence of other gods, was part of the pre-Islamic society.

During the 6th century Mecca was the most prosperous and important city in northern Arabia. Apart from its function as a crossroads for the caravan trade where spices, perfumes, silk, metals, ivory and the like flooded in and out of the city on its way north and east to Syria and Iraq, it housed Arabia’s holiest shrine situated in the centre of the town.

Known as the Kaaba (or Cube, because of the shape) this shrine and temple, covered with an enormous cloth of black brocade during most of the year, contained over 300 gods and goddesses with Allah, the Creator of the Universe, as the chief deity. In one of the corners, embedded in the wall, was (and is) a hallowed meteorite known as the Black Stone. This stone is said to have been white originally but blackened by the sins of the world and the tears of the pilgrims. Edward Gibbon writes in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“The genuine antiquity of Caaba ascends beyond the Christian era: in describing the coast of the Red sea the Greek historian Diodorus has remarked, between the Thamudites and the Sabeans, a famous temple, whose superior sanctity was revered by all the Arabians; the linen of silken veil, which is annually renewed by the Turkish emperor, was first offered by the Homerites, who reigned seven hundred years before the time of Mohammad.”

The tribe in control of Mecca was the Quraysh (2) and they established the Kaaba to become so sacred that it was immune from attacks. It is interesting that just like the Christian world and its occult worship of a stone, the Emerald Tablet or Philosopher’s Stone, the Muslim world has a stone of similar importance. All Muslims annually pilgrimage to Mecca, in what is called the Hadji, during the first ten days of the month Dhu’l-Hidja, which is the last lunar month of the Islamic calendar two months after Ramadan.

The Early Life of Mohammed

The Bible, the Torah and the Koran are all religious texts written in an ambiguous manner easily misused for political purposes by its believers, but unlike the former two, which consist of collections of religious narratives, prophecies, prayers and proverbs composed by different people at various periods in time, the Koran (3) has only one source and that is the Prophet Mohammed. (4)

In Islamic doctrine there were six major prophets: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Each of them brought the word of God in his own lifetime, but mankind kept straying from the true path and a new prophet had to be sent to guide them. According to this doctrine there would not be another prophet after Mohammed. He was the last and his words would guide men until the Day of Judgement. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages Manly P. Hall points out an interesting fact/myth:

“The following lines are declared by the followers of the Prophet to have been deleted from the Christian Gospels: And when Jesus, the Son of Mary, said, O children of Israel, verily I am the apostle of God sent unto you, confirming the law which was delivered before me, and bringing good tidings of an apostle who shall come after me, and whose name shall be AHMED.”

Mohammed was born about 570 C.E. into meagre circumstances in Mecca. His father, Abdullah, had died shortly before his birth and although he was not a rich man he did belong to the Quraysh tribe. Because of this Mohammed was sent into the desert to be wetnursed by a Bedouin mother according the custom of the Meccan aristocracy. After two or three years he returned and at the age of six his mother died and he was sent to his grandfather whom also passed away and this finally had him end up at his paternal uncle Abu Talib where he would remain for the rest of his childhood.

Mohammed supported himself doing odd jobs here and one day attained the profession as an agent for a widowed woman named Khadija with considerable wealth. Mohammed had a strong personality and striking appearance with large shoulders, hands and feet and a wide forehead with bushy eyebrows above his deep black eyes and a gentle nature with a lot of integrity. He was nicknamed al-Amin, The Trustworthy, in Mecca and he impressed Khadija to such a degree, both in his looks and how he handled her affairs, that she offered him marriage. Mohammed agreed and although she was many years older than himself he remained faithful to her for the rest of her life. She even gave birth to several children of which only one, Fatima, survived Mohammed and bore him descendants. Khadija must be credited with a lot of the success of Islam in its early stages.

During Mohammed’s early life Arabia fell under a lot of outside religious influence coming in over the Red Sea from Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia), from Syria and from Palestine. Many Arabs were dissatisfied with Arabian paganism and Mohammed himself felt that the desert ethos of sharing the wealth one had with those less fortunate was not present in society anymore. There was a lot of arrogance from the rich and powerful and Mohammed, who himself came from a poor start, was distressed by this tendency towards the belief in money and materialism. He knew about the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians and, like many Arabs like himself, he felt they lacked a coherent faith.

Mohammed becomes the 6th Prophet

One night in 610 C.E, when Mohammed was about forty, he went to Mount Hira to meditate. After some time he fell into a trance and was visited by an angel. At first Mohammed found the experience unsettling and began to climb up the mountain to kill himself when a voice from Heaven told him that he was to be the apostle of God. When Khadija heard about this event she went to a holy man that, after hearing the account, pronounced Mohammed to be the prophet of his people having been visited by the same heavenly inspiration that had descended to Moses. But since no more messages came to him Mohammed began suffering self-doubt until one day a second revelation told him to begin the work to rise and warn the people and, thus, in 613 he started to preach publicly. His wife became the first to convert to the new religion now known as Islam.

His message was that Allah was not one of many gods but the solitary and eternal sovereign of the universe and all of mankind was equal before him, that the rich must share their wealth with the poor and that death was no longer the end of existence, like it had been under paganism, but a Day of Judgement where a man’s deeds are held accountable for and are either rewarded with paradise or punished with hell.

A group of people formed around him and he began preaching openly the message of monotheism. There was only one God and Mohammed was his prophet. Manly Palmer Hall writes in The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

“On the occasions when the various suras of the Koran were dictated he is said to have fallen unconscious, and, regardless of the chill of the surrounding air, to have been covered with beads of perspiration. Often these attacks came without warning; at other times he would sit wrapped in a blanket to prevent a chill from the copious perspiration, and while apparently unconscious would dictate the various passages which a small circle of trusted friends would either commit to memory or reduce to writing. On one occasion in later life when Abu Bakr referred to the grey hairs in his beard, Mohammed, lifting the end of his beard and looking at it, declared its whiteness to be due to the physical agony attendant upon his periods of inspiration.”

Mohammed the Conqueror

Naturally Mohammed’s compassionate and anti-materialistic preaching’s antagonised the wealthy Quraysh tribe, but he was protected by the solidarity of the clan. This ended when both his uncle Abu Talib and his wife Khadija died. Medina’s inhabitants invited him to come and live there so he emigrated, the hijrah, in 622 also seen as year 0 of the Muslim era. Here he grew from being merely a religious leader of a small group to a leader of spiritual and political authority.

One of Mohammed’s problems in Medina were the Jews of Medina who refused to recognize him as a prophet. Ramadan stems from the fact that Mohammed adopted the fasting on the Day of Atonement from the Jews in order to win their support, but since he was unsuccessful with this endeavour he later changed this custom into what is now a whole month of fasting. There were many reasons why the Jews refused to accept Mohammed, but most of them were due to the fact that they saw Islam as a threat to their own political and economic self-interests.

After some time Mohammed began organizing raids against Meccan caravans passing through Medinese territory. One of these raids resulted in the first real battle between the Moslems and the Meccans where he was faced, together with his three hundred men, against an army of almost a thousand. He won.

This victory carried the sign of God’s favour and many uncommitted now accepted Islam. During this period Mohammed forged links with the indigenous tribes of Medina by marrying a number of wives. Only eight years after the move to Medina, and numerous battles, Mohammed returned to the capitulated Mecca with ten thousand followers. He entered the Kaaba and exclaimed: “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished.”

All the pagan idols that filled the place were destroyed and the a tradition was established forbidding anyone to enter the city unless they are Moslem. Thus Mecca became the Islamic worlds spiritual capital with Medina as its political.

Two years later Mohammed fell ill, some rumours say due to poison, and he spent his last moments on this earth with A’isha to whom he said: “Nay [I have chosen] the exalted company in heaven.” And died.

The Formation of the Koran

Piers Paul Read hypothesize on the success of Mohammed in his book The Templars like this:

“How do we account for the appeal of Mohammed? Unlike Jesus he performed no miracles… Mohammed’s success came not from the exercise of supernatural power over nature but from his adroit appeal to both the spiritual and material self-interest of the Arabs of his time. Mohammed promised paradise for those who died in battle and plunder for those who did not. When his forces reached a critical mass, it became advantageous for other tribes to join them; and his straightforward monotheism was easy to comprehend. The authority of the Prophet not only ended the incessant feuding of the tribes, it also gave a sense of identity to the Arabs like that already possessed by the Abyssinians, Persians, Byzantine Christians and Jews. Islam was an Arab religion, not, like the other faiths on offer, an import from abroad.”

Mohammed, as a person, was a humble and reasonable man. He lacked pride. His diet consisting of barley, bread and water. He mended his own simple clothes, in fact according to A’isha he loved to sew, and he cobbled his own shoes. He did duties around the household. He sat at the same table as servants. He hated lying most of all. The alms given to him and his family he never permitted to be used for personal ends. He divided his time into three parts: the first to God, the second to his family and the third to himself, which he later sacrificed to serve his people.
Before he died he freed all his slaves. And at the time of his death the one thing he craved was a toothpick because he was concerned with the cleanliness of his teeth. This is not the man often portrayed by the West or sometimes not even in the Koran. Never forget he did not write it and although his followers did their best efforts to put down his words into writing the possibilities of human error, and in particular, personal and political motives, such as greed and power sickness could, would and did affect the outcome of the final version of the Koran just as Godfrey Higgins explains in his Anacalypsis:

“…puffed up with pride and vanity. The Koran of the eclectic philosopher was not likely to suit the conquerors of Asia. A new one must be grafted on the old, to find a justification for their enormities.”

Since Mohammed was seen as the last prophet his revelations thus became the final Word of God and Muslims took this very seriously. Long before any official written version of the Koran existed many of its adherents memorized the revelations or wrote parts of them down. But fearing that some things might be lost Abu Bakr, shortly after Mohammed’s death, assembled every piece of existing fragment written down of the revelations and compiled them in a book. Several different collections began appearing and since, at that time, Arabic was written in a rudimentary form with no vowels or signs to distinguish certain consonants, this led to disputes.

It wasn’t until Uthman, one of the early converts and husband of two of Mohammed’s daughters, became the third successor of the Prophet and standardized the Koran. (5) He then destroyed all other versions preventing any future dispute or controversy over the text that many other similar holy scriptures have suffered.

The Koran is divided up in chapters, or suras. After a short seven-line introductory sura comes the longest, The Cow, followed by the rest arranged according to length, since no one knew in which order Mohammed received the revelations, with the shortest at the end. All the suras were named after some incident or striking word within them. It is in the second sura that caused most harm for Islam in the eyes of Christianity:

“They say, Allah hath begotten children: Allah forbid! To him belongeth whatever is in heaven, and on earth; all is possessed by him, the Creator of heaven and earth; and when he decreeth a thing, he only saith unto it, Be, and it is.”

In conclusion, according to the Koran and Mohammed, Jesus could only be a prophet preaching the Word of God and not actually his son. Of course this so-called blasphemy is not the only attack on Mohammed and Islam by other religions, and then most notably Christianity, who somehow refuses to see its kinship with it. Two other points are Mohammed’s polygamy and the claim that women are denied a soul and ranked with the animals. But Christianity needs only to look within its own Holy Book and read about the harems of David and Solomon to have proof that they are no better. As to the second point this quote from the 33rd sura is enough to put an end to the argument:

“Verily the Muslims of either sex, and the true believers of either sex, and the devout men, and the devout women, and the men of veracity, and the women of veracity, and the patient men, and the patient women, and the humble men, and the humble women, and the alms-givers of either sex, and the men who fast, and the women who fast, and the chaste men, and the chaste women, and those of either sex who remember Allah frequently: for them hath Allah prepared forgiveness and a great reward.”

The Sunnis, the Shiites and the Ismaili

After the death of Mohammed the Muslim community had to solve the problem of who would succeed him and become their new leader. There were four people that could possibly take on this role: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (during the Prophets last illness he was appointed to take the place as leader of public prayer), Umar ibn al-Khattab (an able and trusted companion of Mohammed), Uthman ibn Affan (a respected and early convert) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law).

To avoid argument among various groups, Umar ibn al-Khattab suddenly grasped, in the traditional sign of recognition of a new leader, the hand of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq’s. Soon everyone concurred and before dusk Abu Bakr had been recognized as the caliph (6) of Mohammed with the responsibility to govern according to the Koran and the practice of the Prophet.

The Sunnis and the Shiites agree upon almost all the essentials of Islam. Both believe in the Koran and the Prophet, both follow the same principles of religion and both observe the same rituals. However, there is one prominent difference, which is essentially political rather than religious, and concerns the choice of the caliph or successor of Mohammed.

The majority of Muslims supported the choice of Abu Bakr as the first caliph. This group is known as ahl alsunnah wa-l-jama‘ah, the people of custom and community, or Sunnis who consider the caliph to be Mohammed’s successor only in his capacity as ruler of the community.

The main body of the Shiites, on the other hand, believe that the caliph must remain within the family of the Prophet thus making Ali ibn Abi Talib the first valid caliph, or imam. (7) While the Sunnis consider the caliph a guardian of the religious law, the Shiites see the imam as a trustee inheriting and interpreting the Prophet’s spiritual knowledge.

The division between the Sunnis and the Shiites continued to develop and was widened in 680 when Ali’s son Husayn tried to win the caliphate from the Umayyads and, with his followers, was killed at Karbala in Iraq. His death is still mourned each year by the Shiites.

When the sixth Shiite imam died his oldest son, Ismail, was passed over and the younger Musa-al-Kazim was appointed as imam. The Ismaili were Muslims who believed that Ismaili was the true imam. (8)

Footnotes:
(1) ”There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.” This Islamic creed is whispered into the ear of a newly born child and should be the first words he/she learns to speak and the last spoken before death.
(2) The Quraysh had great financial and military strength governing Mecca through a council consisting of members of the city’s most influential families.
(3) Koran (also spelled Qur’an or Quran) is Arabic for the recitation.
(4) Mohammad means the one who is praisedor highly praised.
(5) In 652 C.E.
(6) Khalifah, anglicized as caliph, is a word that means successor.
(7) The Shiites call their leader imam, not caliph.
(8) A later split among the Ismaili occurred when a group of Fatimids (descendants of Fatima who was Mohammed’s daughter and the wife of the Shiites first imam Ali) did not believe that caliph al-Hakim had died in 1021. This became the beginning of today’s Druze. While the Druze are not regarded as Muslims by other Muslims, they regard themselves as Muslims as well as carriers of the core of this religion, but the Koran is not part of it. The Druze are monotheists and the main theme of their theology is that God incarnated himself in al-Hakim’s disappearance. They believe that al-Hakim is waiting to return to the world in order to bring about a new golden age to the true believers. Druze claim that the qualities of God cannot be understood or defined by humans. Al-Hakim is worshiped in Druze religion and is called Our Lord and his cruelties and eccentricities are all interpreted symbolically.

© deviadah

Paracelsus - part 2

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:50:00 +0000

On the Origin of Truly Insane People

Paracelsus was a humanist considering his patient as a human being realizing that individualization is necessary, especially with mental disorders, because it is a higly individual phenomenon.

“As long as one wishes to ride all horses with one saddle and recognise not disease in its essence, rather, what comes into each man’s head, is his art, there is yet no experience nor truth established.”

To follow Galen was to be professional and since Paracelsus didn’t he wasn’t considered serious enough. In the matter of mental diseases Paracelsus was centuries ahead. Mental disorder was, for a long time, considered to be a matter for theology and not of medicine. In fact the traditions of treating mental disorders was not abandoned until 200 years after Paracelsus death.

There is a mystery on how Paracelsus received his great knowledge on the illness of the mind. Nothing of what he wrote was practiced in the times he lived. He anticipated the descriptive methods of psychiatry and the clinical manifestations of epilepsy, mania and hysteria. He truly possessed a complete intellectual freedom not afraid to admit whenever he came across something new. In a chapter entitled On the Origin of Truly Insane People Paracelsus lists four kinds if insane people.

Lunatici
The moon does not posses the brain but attracts, like a magnet, reason out of it. The power of attraction is at its height during the full moon and somewhat the same during the new moon.

Insani
Insanity brought from the womb through family heritage.

Vesani
The loss of reason and sense through the use of food and drink.

Melancholici
Those people who lose reason by their own nature by “…driving the spiritus vitae up towards the brain so that it is too much of it there.” (1)

Paracelsus and Religion

The Catholic Church banned Paracelsus ideas and even though a born Catholic he denounced public prayers, church-going, bowing, saint worship and observance of church rules. On an essay on nymphs he clearly expressed his views:

“…there are more superstitio in the Roman Church than in all these women and witches. And so it may be a warning that if superstitio turns a man into a serpent, it also turns him into a devil. That is, if it happens to nymhps, it also happens to you in the Roman Church. That is, you too will be transformed into such serpents, you who now are pretty and handsome, adorned with large diadems and jewels. In the end you will be a serpent and a dragon...”

Paracelsus approved of Martin Luther’s Reformation yet took no part in it. His individualism clashed with the dogmas of the church instead believing in self-reliance. He wished people would realize their inherent Godhood. The divine Wisdom is a greater power than that which saints and gods can give. Only through the abandonment of personal self can man see, feel, the presence of God within rising above illusions into truth.

“Try to understand yourselves in the light of Nature and then all wisdom will come to you.”

Paracelsus and the Hermetic Arts

The Renaissance saw a rise in intrest of science and medicine. Great lenghts were taken to create new translations of such respected authors as Aristotle, Galen, Hiprocates and Ptolemy because the Latin translations of the Middle Ages were no longer acceptable. Some of these translators studied Greek so they could directly do justice to these ancient treasures. But the hunt for original manuscripts led to the discovery of new ones.

The recovery of the Corpus Hermetica was a major event for all intellectuals, especially Paracelsus who found great knowledge in the Emerald Tablet. (2) Scorning his fellow doctors he stated that:

“…the ancient Emerald Tablet shows more art and experience in philosophy, alchemy, magic, and the like, than could ever be taught by you and your crowd of followers.”

Paracelsus tried to apply the principles of the Emerald Tablet everywhere he could and he wrote a great deal on the subject openly preaching the correspondences between the Above and Below careful not to say too much.

“To write more about this mystery is forbidden and further revelation is the prerogative of the divine power. For this art is truly a gift of God; wherefore, not everyone can understand it.”

Paracelsus considered magic to be Supreme Wisdom and not sorcery. A person that is Master of Heaven and Earth by his own free will is called a Magus.

“There is nothing dead in Nature, Everything is organic and living, therefore the world appears to be a living organism.”

According to Paracelsus life exists in every form, moving slower in the mineral kingdom and rapidly in the plants and animal kingdoms. Nature (the universe) is an organism where all things harmonize and sympathize with each other. Man is the microcosm and nature is the macrocosm, and together they are one. The unity of man and nature is the heart through which the physical, astral and spiritual forces manifest themselves.

Paracelsus popularized the notion of these three heavenly forces and was the first to call them Salt, Sulphur and Mercury. (3) When the three substances were in harmony health was the result, if in disharmony disease and if in disruption death.

SALT = the physical body
SULPHUR = the indwelling energizing nature, the astral man
MERCURY = the intelligence, the indwelling God, the Spirit and above Salt and Sulphur.

There is one vital substance in Nature upon which all things subsist. It is called the archæus, or vital life force, and is synonymous with the astral light or spiritual air of the ancients. The vehicle for the archæus Paracelsus called the mumia. A good example of a physical mumia is vaccine, which is a vehicle of a semi-astral virus.

In other words anything that serves as a medium for the transmission of the archæus, organic or inorganic, truly physical or partly spiritualized, was termed mumia. The most universal form of mumia was ether, which modern science has accepted as a hypothetical substance serving as a medium between the realm of vital energy and that of organic and inorganic substance.

To control universal energy is virtually impossible save through one of its vehicles (the mumia). Man does not secure nourishment from dead animal or plant organisms, but when he incorporates their structure into his own body he first gains control over the mumia, or etheric double, of the animal or plant. Having obtained this control the human organism then diverts the flow of the archæus to his own uses.

For example if we eat the flesh of a ferocious animal we would become ferocious ourselves. The mumia of any creature, according to Paracelsus, is closely connected to the bloodstream. Hence any substance taken into the bloodstream makes a direct magnetic connection between the mumia of the person receiving the substance and the mumia of the animal or person whom it was taken.

“That which constitutes life is contained in the Mumia, and by imparting the Mumia we impart life.”

Paracelsus divulges the secrets of the remedial properties of talismans and amulets. For the mumia of substances of which they are composed serves as a channel to connect the person wearing them with certain manifestations of the universal life force.

Paracelsus declared that the mumia of a person may be strengthened by the power of imagination, which is a tremendous force, able to create actual images in the astral light, and to give a kind of consciousness to those forms.

“Imagination is a great power, and if the world knew what strange things can be produced by the power of imagination, the public authorities would cause idle people to go to work.”

Paracelsus saw the mind as the most powerful healing power and he stressed the importance of the patient’s thoughts and emotion introducing the concept of holistic healing. He was certain everything in the universe was good for something.

At his estate in Hohenheim he gathered dew during ceratain configurations of the planets on glass plates, at midnight, discovering the water possessed medicinal virtues absorbing the properties of the heavenly bodies. But as popular as astrology was in his day he did not fully endorse it.

“The stars determine nothing, incline nothing, suggest nothing; we are as free from them as they are from us. The stars and all the firmament cannot affect our body, nor our color, beauty and gestures, not our virtues and vices… the course of Saturnus can neither prolong or shorten a man’s life.”

The magnet appealed to Paracelus and he referred to it as a Monarch of Secrets placing it above all other remedies. He explored magnetism and its relation to the human organism. Later his work would inspire the great, and neglected, Anton Mesmer whose tale shall be told in due course. On the subject he wrote:

“The magnet, like the stars and other bodies of the universe is endowed with a subtle emanation, fluidum, that has a favorable influence on the health and life of man. It assures cure for discharging sinuses of the limbs, for fistulae of the various parts of the body, for fluxes of the eye, ear, and nose, and for jaundice and dropsy. It stops hemorrhagic disturbances in women.”

Poor and Homeless

A high ecclesiastic had promised Paracelsus a large sum if he was cured from an abdominal disorder. When Paracelsus did so with a few laudanum pellets the churchman refused to pay. Paracelsus took him to court and lost.

Not understood by his students at the University of Basel, antagonized by his collegues, squabbling with everybody, infurating many doctors and finally when his only ally Froben died suddenly in October of 1527 he one night fled for his life leaving all his manuscripts behind. (4)

“Why do you throw it in my face if I cannot cure impossible things, when you cannot cure the possible? But rather ruin it, so that I must build it up again. How can I cure a cut-off heart, put a cut-off hand back on?”

Paracelus, poor and homeless, lodged with friends, revising his ideas and hoping for a chance to publish them. His treaty on the disease of miners would become the starting point of a new line of medical litterature and was the first ever monograph written on an occupational disease. He declared, from his extensive experience, that the diseases of miners were caused by dust particles and not by the mountain spirits upset by their mining. As the first physician to realize that the agent that makes a man sick can also cure him if administered in small doses he foreshadowed the modern concepts of vaccination and homeopathy.

Paracelsus saw poisons as chemical compounds and introduced the notion of proper dosage. He brought chemistry into medicine and experimented with hydrogen and medicines containing sulphur, copper and iron even curing syphilis with mercury compounds.

“The preparations of Antimony vary with the diseases for which it is administered. That which is used for wounds differs from that which is applied in the case of leprosy. And so of the rest. To take the same preparation of Antimony both in wounds and in leprosy would be a serious error.”

He discovered Laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of opium, and named it after the Latin laudare, which means to praise, because he found it having great medical value unaware of its addictive properties.

The Death and Legacy of Paracelsus

Bishop Palantine of Salzburg offered Paracelsus asylum in 1541. The town had once expelled him but he accepted the invitaiton without any real choice. Whilst staying in a small room in the White Horse Inn, on the 24th of September, he died poor and alone. (5)

“A man’s death is nothing but the end of his daily work, an expiration of air, the consummation of his own balsamic curative power, the extinction of the rational light of nature, and a great desperation of the three - body, soul, and spirit - a return to the womb.”

After a quick burial at the St. Sebastian Church in Salzburg officials turned up a will that distributed his assets to charity, but made no mention of what was to be done with the many manuscripts spread out across the cities of Europe.

One year later Copernicus published On the Revolution of Heavely Spheres proposing that the sun is at the centre and that the planets, including Earth, orbit around it. (6) Andreas Vesalius, one year later after that, published his work On the Structure of the Human Body. It established a standard for anatomical works for many centuries and was the real beginning of the end for Galen. Thus the understanding of the universe continued.

Like many alchemists before, and after, Paracelsus was reported to be seen in several places after his own death having achived immortality by producing the Philosopher’s Stone.

Three hundred years later his grave was exhumed and the body found was identified as his own, still revealing no true cause of death. Immortal or not his legacy lives on, as he himself wrote:

“Eternal Wisdom is without time, without a beginning and without an end.”

During a cholera epidemic in Austria in the 1830’s hundreds of people visited his grave (7) hoping to be cured, and even today some kneel by his tomb, which is a broken pyramid of white marble, praying for cures. He was ignored by the rich but canonized by the poor.

Independent, self-confident, bold and struggling to break free from the chains of tradition Paracelsus tried to understand and explore the truths of the universe before knowledge or language had come of age to formulate what he sought. Nothing can be harder and therefore the greater the respect should be given to a man who tried to fill the dark with light.

It is extremely easy for us now to see when Paracelsus was right and when others were wrong, but it is even easier to forget, and ignore, those very same kind of people that are shouting loudly in our society at the moment for an audience. All they want is for someone to listen. Give them your ear.

Footnotes:
(1) The list is abbreviated and rewritten, but the whole essay is higly recommended if you can get hold of a copy. Look for Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim called Paracelsus, edited with preface by Henry E. Sigerist, 1941, United States of America.
(2) The Corpus Hermetica became known through a translation into Latin that appeared in 1471, which was before Paracelsus own birth implying the possibility that he could have come in contact with it at an early age.
(3) Rejecting the Aristotelian elements of fire, air, earth, and water.
(4) Having spent only about ten months in Basel.
(5) His friends said that he was murdered by an assassin and his enemies that he died in a drunken brawl, but both of these are probably false since he suffered from rickets and propably died prematurely from the wear and tear of an arduous nomadic life.
(6) No church in the world could punish him since he died not soon after in 1543.
(7)The epitaph reads: ”Here lies buried Philipp Theophrastus the famous doctor of medicine who cured wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy and other incurable diseases of the body with wonderful knowledge and who gave his goods to be divided and distributed among the poor. In the year 1541 on the 24th day of September he exchanged life for death. To the living peace, to the entombed eternal rest.”

© deviadah

Paracelsus - part 1

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:43:00 +0000

“We see in Paracelsus not only a pioneer in the domains of chemical medicine, but also in those of an empirical psychological healing science.”- Carl Jung

“To Paracelsus the world is indebted for much of their knowledge it now possesses of the ancient systems of medicine. Paracelsus devoted his entire life to the study and exposition of Hermetic philosophy. Every notion and theory was grist to his mill, and, while members of the medical fraternity belittle his memory now as they opposed his system then, the occult world knows that he will yet be recognized as the greatest physician of all times. While the heterodox and exotic temperament of Paracelsus has been held against him by his enemies, and his wanderlust has been called vagabondage, he was one of the few minds who intelligently sought to reconcile the art of healing with the philosophical and religious systems of paganism and Christianity.” - Manly Palmer Hall

“God did not create the planets and stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, shoud obey and serve him.” - Paracelsus (1)

The Birth and Education of Paracelsus

Wilhelm was a German physician and chemist and the illegitimate member of the very old and noble Bombast (or Banbast) family of Swabia. His father had been a Grand Master of the Knights of St. John. Elsa Ochsner was from Switzerland and a bondswoman of the Benedictine abbey. These two souls lived in a little village called Einsiedeln near Zürich, Switzerland. Their house was situated near the route of the pilgrims that journeyed year after year to the shrine of the Black Mother God in Einsiedeln. This suited Wilhelm who treated many of them after their hardships on the road.

Two years into the marriage a child was born that they named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus as he would become known. The exact date of birth is not clear. Either it was on the 17th of December 1493 or on the 26th of November 1498, nevertheless the world into which this boy came was changing.

Diaz had reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1486 and Christopher Columbus re-discovered America in 1492 after the Vikings accidental encounter with the continent, much like Columbus did, back in 986. Both ignoring the fact that the inhabitants of America already were quite aware of its existence. In 1496 Vasco de Gama opened up the sea route to India and one year later Cabot reached Labrador, and in China a man used the first ever toothbrush. No longer was the world thought of as a mass of land, but as a mass of water. Still the dogmas of Galen prevailed in medicine and Paracelsus would try, throughout his life, to oppose those obsolete ideas.

Why he would choose to call himself Paracelsus when he became older is a mystery. It is believed he derived it from a great first century Roman physichian by the name of Celsus. Paracelsus, then, could mean greater than Celsus or beyond Celsus. But his name is not important it is the man that is and what he belived and discovered.

It was in his youth that Paracelsus became interested in the writings of Isaac of Holland and as a result he became determined to reform the medical science of his day. This of course also came from the fact that both his parents were interested in medicine and chemistry. His father had taught him to see nature with his own eyes tunring him into a great observationalist. He also learned from his father a great deal about biology, surgery, basics of medicine, alchemy and chemical and metallurgical priciples.

At the end of the 15th century the art of the physician was a secretive and lucrative business. Leonardo da Vinci said on the matter:

“Strive to preserve your health, and in this you will better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines.”

So strong was the dogma that it needed a man of extraordinary stubbornness to topple it. Paracelsus would come to enjoy that quality. When he was nine years old his mother Elsa committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. After this disaster his father moved, in 1502, to Villach in Carinthia where he had accepted a position as municipal physician taking his son with him. Villach was a mining village where Paracelsus would spend the rest of his childhood. He later wrote:

“By nature I am not subtly spun, nor is it the custom of my native land to accomplish anything by spinning silk. Nor are we raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheaten bread, but on cheese, milk and oatcakes, which cannot give one a subtle disposition. Moreover, a man clings all his days to what he received in his youth; and my youth was coarse as compared to that of the subtle, pampered, and over-refined. For those who are raised in soft clothes and in women's apartments and we who are brought up among the pine-cones have trouble in understanding one another well.”

Paracelsus learned from churchmen versed in medicine and occult lore and he trained in a mining school as an analyst but at the age of fourteen he decided he wanted to become a doctor and left home to go to medical school destined for a life of constant squabblings with the dogmas of his day.

Over the next five years Paracelsus attended several prestigious universities throughout Europe. But he found no teacher he could respect.

“How have the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses? The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller, for knowledge is experience.”

The Wandering Physician

At seventeen he earned a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna and six years later he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Ferrara. During the next decade he wandered gaining experience all over Europe visiting most of its countries including Russia. He served as a surgeon in Denmark and Sweden for the Venitian army. (3) Worked in the Fugger mines in the Tyrol. Journeyed to the island of Rhodes and then onto Arabia and Egypt to further his alchemical studies. Paracelsus wrote:

“Therefore I consider that it is for me a matter of praise, not of blame, that I have hitherto and worthily pursued my wanderings. For this will I bear witness respecting nature: he who will investigate her ways must travel her books with his feet. That which is written is investigated not through letters, but nature from land to land - as often a land so often a leaf. Thus is the codex of Nature, thus must its leaves be turned.”

“The journeys which I have thus far made have profited me much, for the reason that no man’s master is in his home and none has his teacher in the chimney-corner. Thus the arts are not all confined within one’s fatherland, but they are distributed over the whole world. Not that they are in one man alone, or in one place: on the contrary, they must be gathered together, sought out and captured, where they are.”

Gypsies taught him about simples and Arabs the making of talismans and the influence of heavenly bodies. When in Constantinople he is said to have met an initiate who instructed him in the secret doctrines of the East and the Hermetic arts, which led to his journey to India where the Brahmins instructed him in Nature spirits and the inhabitants of the invisible world. Later he journeyed to the Mahatmas in Tibet. He stated:

“All Wisdom comes from the East.”

The pre-Buddhist ascetics living in their inaccessible retreat amongst the Himalayas are known as The Brothers of the Snowy Range or The Great Teachers of the Snowy Mountain. Emperor Yu (2207 B.C.) said he aquired his wisdom from these brothers and theosophists call them Mahatmas, Masters of Wisdom and Compassion, who have renounced bliss to remain on Earth for the benefit of the humans and their sufferings. Some exist in physical bodies others in an invisible, astral, form. These later ones are called the Nirmanakayas. (4) The aborigines of modern Tibet are a degraded race and descendants of these wise and mighty forefathers. Paracelsus have been thought of as a member of The Brothers of the Snowy Range but it is a fact that can not be proven.

Wherever he went he practiced medicine learning from any source that was available, studying local diseases and healing the sick, which for Paracelsus was much more important than a medical career serving orthodox medicine.

During his wanderings it has been suggested that Paracelsus met Solomon Trismosin who became his teacher. Solomon was a legendary alchemist that is said to have lived 150 years because of his alchemical knowledge. He claimed to have secured the secret formula of transmutation thus made vasts amount of gold. In a manuscript entitled Alchemical Wanderings dated 1582, now in the British Museum, the following statement can be found:

“Study what thou art, whereof thou art a part, what thou knowest of this art, this is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within, thus wrote Trismosin.”

As his knowledge increased the urge to share it with the world grew, but none wanted to listen, and he became bitter. The more he was ignored the louder he screamed, and the more he was disregarded the more aggressive he became.

A 16th Century Punk

Colomubs was now long dead (1506) and Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis on the church door at Wittenberg in 1517. This was followed by the deaths of such famous people as Leonardo da Vinci (1519), Magellan (1521) and Vasco da Gama (1524). The world had lost many of its discoverers. Around Europe witches were still hunted, accused and burned.

In the town of Basel, in Switzerland, the famous book printer Johann Froben (5) suffered horrible pains in his right foot from an accident and the doctors advised him to amputate. Froben knew of the wandering physician and decided to get his opinion, so in 1526 Paracelsus arrived at Basel and managed to treat, and cure, the patient without the use of a knife.

At this time the office of town physician fell vacant so the municipal council offered Paracelsus the position, which also entitled him to give lectures at the university. (6) But the quiet little town wasn’t quite ready to understand and accept such a freethinking spirit of such a violent temper.

The professors did not like Paracelsus from the start because he refused to take the Hippocratic oath that among other things made the physician swear that he would guard his professional knowledge. (7) Having already declared himself Paracelsus and publicly burned books by Galen and Avicenna, which he threw into a student bonfire on St. John’s Day on the 24th of June 1527, he would not last long.

Paracelsus also, as the first man to do so, wrote scientific books in the language of the common people, which did not agree with the establishment. Everyone was shockingly invited to his lectures, which he gave in German and not in Latin, using the opportunity to make fun at the medical dogma calling physicians couch-sitters not considering the patients needs only his wallet. His cap, he said, had more learning in it than all the heads in the university. He labelled contemporary medicine a whore and declared that the practic of bleeding was barbaric insisting that wounds dressed in moss and dung caused infection and prevented draining.

“If you prevent infection nature will heal the wound all by herself.”

Everything was under his attack. In a sense he could be thought of as a 16th century punk angrily kicking at the heavy tenets of 16th century medicine. He wrote:

“All they [physicians] can do is prudently observe the patient and make their guesses about his condition; and the patient may rest satisfied if the medicines administered to him do no serious harm, and do not prevent his recovery. The best of our popular physicians are the ones that do least harm. But, unfortunately, some poison their patients with mercury, others purge or bleed them to death. There are some who have learned so much that their learning has driven out all their common sense, and there are others who care a great deal more for their own profit than for the health of their patients. A disease does not change its state to accommodate itself to the knowledge of the physician, but the physician should understand the causes of the disease. A physician should be a servant of Nature, and not her enemy; he should be able to guide and direct her in her struggle for life and not throw, by his unreasonable interference, fresh obstacles in the way of recovery.”

It has been said that the word Bombastic, a synonym of self-righteous and pompous language, is derived from Paracelsus surname Bombastus. True or false his enemies took advatage of his behaviour. Many rumours were spread about him.

Paracelsus was accused of being an alcoholic despite the fact that he possessed a stunning mental clarity and produced vast amounts of written material. Whether an exagerrated fact, or a complete lie, Paracelus was the victim of envy. He did bring about remarkable cures that could not be argued. The most common diseases of his day were treated by him and is said to have cured leprosy, cholera and cancer. All but raising the dead.

Yet it wasn’t only his brain that caused ridicule his appearace did too. Paracelsus head was disproportionately large, his torso pear-shaped, his hips were wide and feminine and his lips protruding . Rumours began that he was actually a woman or a eunuch.

He was with all likely-hood riduculed for his looks and his rude and self-praising behaviour was a natural result. Women treated him the same and there is no recorded or known love affair. His hatred of the opposite sex could be explained by how he was treated by them, and it is impossible to know, but the suicide of his mother must have caused him some mental anguish.

It is very difficult for a man, or a woman, that wishes not to belong to the dogma and tradition of their day. Even more so when there is no theoretical or practical body of knowledge that can counter the heavy weight of tradition looming above.

Paracelsus was such a man, ahead of his time, filled with the knowing that he was right but empty of proof that he was. In the same manner that Martin Luther (8) opposed the Pope Paracelsus opposed the Pope of Medicine Galen, or more precise, Galenism.

Claudius Galenus of Pergamum, or Galen, (9) was a Greek physician and his views would come to dominate European medicine for over a thousand years. Most of his knowledge he gained from dissecting animals, some while they were still alive, or from what he saw inside the wounds of gladiators. Even though he changed the view by Aristotle that the mind was in the brain and not in the heart and that arteries carry blood not air his knowledge is mostly flawed. For example he spread the idea that bloodletting was a good treatment, but Galen himself was very much like Paracelsus a man obsessed with finding out the truth.

“…from my very youth I despised the opinion of the multitude and longed for truth and knowledge, believing that there was for man no possession more noble or divine.”

But so revered became his discovery and his knowledge that it turned into a dogma that, for fifteen hundred years, was the main source for European physicians studying the body completely ignoring Galen’s own suggestion:

“If anyone wishes to observe the works of Nature, he should put his trust not in books on anatomy but in his own eyes…”

Paracelsus - part 2

Footnotes:
(1) All quotes of Paracelsus are derived from his numerous manuscripts and I have decided to omit the exact source for the benefit of flow and space (to the frustrating vanity of the translators). If you are interested then not one particular book or manuscript can be recommended. I suggest you try and get hold of anything you can. A lot of it is in German, but there is plenty to be found in English and in other languages as well. The best thing is to read his own words and not books discussing his writings or person apart from this one. Good luck in your hunt.
(3) Many mercenary armies ravaged Europe in endless wars of this period.
(4) Literally meaning a transformed body, yet it is a state not having any objective existence. As a Nirmankaya, the person leaves behind only the physical body, and retains every other principle and it can never be resurrected from this state.
(5) Born 1460 and died in 1527. He founded one of the most influential early presses and published the first printed New Testament in Greek.
(6) Recommended by Froben and Erasmus (1466-1536) whom Paracelsus also treated.
(7) “Give not that which his holy unto dogs, neither cast ye pearls before the swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” from St. Matthew (7:6).
(8) During Paracelsus lifetime he was called, by some, the Luther of Medicine.
(9) Approximately born in 130 and died in 200.

© deviadah

Atlantis

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:23:00 +0000

Once upon a time, long before the rise of contemporary gods, there was a kingdom in the midst of an ocean that was swept up by the waves and dragged to the seabed for its eternal sleep. This disaster would signify the end of the first true golden age of mankind. James Bramwell writes in his book Lost Atlantis that “the name Atlantis has a sad sound. If it is pronounced ringingly, giving the first two syllables their full consonantal resonance and allowing the finial sibilant to fall softly from the tongue, the effect seems to evoke an image of the surge and hiss of huge waves breaking over submerged rocks to spend themselves in white ocean foam. Atlantis is a grand name…”

The only real information we have comes from Plato and he describes Atlantis as a country full of beauty and abundance. A land inhabited by the golden race that lived free from care with nature as its benefactor. There were neither disease nor weakness from age. There were no government and therefore no corruption. Justice lived amongst them, it is said, in the form of Astraea (the God of Justice).

The Atlanteans themselves were tall and of both sexes. They were highly civilised and had a similar resemblance to modern man. Helena P. Blavatsky refers to them as the one of the root race (more about these to come).

Ignatius Donnelly argues in his great work Atlantis, The Antediluvian World that “the fact that the story of Atlantis was for thousands of years regarded as a fable proves nothing. There is an unbelief which grows out of ignorance, as well as a scepticism which is born of intelligence. The people nearest to the past are not always those who are best informed concerning the past. For a thousand years it was believed that the legends of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were myths: they were spoken of as the fabulous cities.”

There are many views on the exact location of Atlantis, with the most obvious one being in the Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal. Here lies the Azores Islands, which could be the mountaintops of the sunken land. And then there was the volcanic explosion that devastated Thera, a volcanic island north of Cyprus, around 1500 B.C.E. which coincides with the time that Egypt entered its prime in the form so-called new kingdom. Another theory is that is was located in the northern parts of the Black Sea.

The Atlanteans who survived the loss of their home and the priestly kings migrated to Egypt, settling in the Nile delta. They were enlightened humans and they passed their knowledge down to the Ancient Egyptians.

Perhaps the Atlanteans were perceived as Gods, or Gods personified into the likes of Osiris, Thoth and Hermes. The knowledge they possessed would become the foundation for the whole plot of world history. It flows through such ideologies as communism, anarchy and the visions of Mahatma Gandhi, in the Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasonry (packed with Egyptian symbolism). The kings and queens of Atlantis would become the gods of mythology such as the Greek and the Norse. Who can deny the likeness of Thor, the god of thunder, to Zeus who was the god of lightning and thunder? (1)

Atlantis was governed without a government. Here peace and harmony reigned. Perfect religion (or devoid of hierarchical religion) and perfect science.

The Old Testament and especially Genesis must be looked at as composed of metaphors and to see what took place as actual events is outright credulous and stupid. This doesn’t mean that there is not some sort of hidden meaning that can either contain important knowledge or an interesting account of what actual events transform into when large aeons of time swallows them up. William Blake said it best concerning the difference of the mainstream view of the holy writ and his own:

“Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white.”

Atlantis could therefore be the origin of the idea of heaven and paradise in the eye of many religions. The materialised Nirvana. A utopia, a place of ideal perfection with perfect moral and social conditions. The Garden of Eden. The race of the First People. Or perhaps a deep memory of something grand that was lost?

According to Ignatius Donnelly (2) Adam, or Ad, is derivative from the ancient form of the word Atlantis. He writes in the introduction of his book Atlantis, The Antediluvian World the outline for a groundbreaking hypothesis that here shall be given in full:

1. That there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, a large island, which was the remnant of an Atlantic continent, and known to the ancient world as Atlantis.

2. That the description of this island given by Plato is not, as has been long supposed, fable, but veritable history.

3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Meditteranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations.

5. That is was the true Antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden, the Gardens of the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the Mesomphalos; the Olympos; the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness.

6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phœnicians, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historical events.

7. That the mythology of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, which was sun-worship.

8. That the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.

9. That the implements of the ‘Bronze Age’ of Europe were derived from Atlantis. The Atlanteans were also the first manufacturers of iron.

10. That the Phœnician alphabet, parent of all the European alphabets, was derived from an Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the Mayas of Central America.

11. That Atlantis was the original seat of the Aryan or Indo-European family of nations, as well as of the Semitic peoples, and possibly also of the Turanian races.

12. That Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sunk into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.

13. That a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and, carried to the nations east and west the tidings of the appalling catastrophe, which has survived to our own time in the Flood and Deluge legends of the different nations of the old and new worlds.

The only problem with Donnelly’s theory is the location of Atlantis placing it in the Atlantic instead of perceiving it, more probable, as the American continent including the Carribean Islands. As in recent time we have seen that it is possible for a deluge, or flood, to destroy cities such as what happened in New Orleans in 2005. But where is less important than the fact that it was!

Ignatius Donnelly not only puts forth proof that Atlantis existed but also that it was of a higher intelligence than latter races, even perhaps our own. He writes:

“The farther we go back in time toward the era of Atlantis, the more the evidences multiply that we are approaching the presence of a great, wise, civilized race. For instance, we find the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Israelites, from the earliest ages, refusing to eat the flesh of swine. The Western nations departed from this rule, and in these modern days we are beginning to realize the dangers of this article of food, on account of the trichina contained in it; and when we turn to the Talmud, we are told that it was forbidden to the Jews, because of a small insect which infests it.”

“In religion the Atlanteans had reached all the great thoughts which underlie our modern creeds. They had attained to the conception of one universal, omnipotent, great First Cause. We find the worship of this One God in Peru and in early Egypt. They looked upon the sun as the mighty emblem, type, and instrumentality of this One God. Such a conception could only have come with civilization. It is not until these later days that science has realized the utter dependence of all earthly life upon the sun’s rays.”

Concerning circumcision Donnelly proposes, interestingly, that is originated from the Atlantean days since most ancient races, such as the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Phœnicians and the Hebrews all practised it. Add to this the fact that circumcision usually takes place due to religious or personal beliefs although not devoid of medical benefits such as lessening the risk of urinary tract infection for male babies less than one year old and some protection from cancer of the penis.

Keep in mind that the chance of urinary tract infection is a very small percentage and so is cancer of the penis circumcised or not. If proper hygienic care of the penis is administered there is no real benefit of having a circumcision. But in those ancient times the notion of germs was perhaps not a reality and therefore circumcision increased hygiene and thereby limiting disease.

But the strongest theory, and proof, of some sort of great ancient civilization is the fact that we find its existence in the collective unconscious. Donnelly explains:

“It is not surprising that when this mighty nation sank beneath the waves, in the midst of terrible convulsions, with all its millions of people, the event left an everlasting impression upon the imagination of mankind. Let us suppose that Great Britain should to-morrow meet with a similar fate. What a wild consternation would fall upon her colonies and upon the whole human family! The world might relapse into barbarism, deep and almost universal. William the Conqueror, Richard Cœur de Lion, Alfred the Great, Cromwell, and Victoria might survive only as the gods or demons of later races; but the memory of the cataclysm in which the centre of a universal empire instantaneously went down to death would never be forgotten; it would survive in fragments, more or less complete, in every land on earth; it would outlive the memory of a thousand lesser convulsions of nature; it would survive dynasties, nations, creeds, and languages; it would never be forgotten while man continued to inhabit the face of the globe.”

The problem with Atlantis is that it’s not considered of having any real historical value. There are extremely few efforts, official especially, that tries to solve the puzzle and search for its location. This is a great shame because if something ever was found it would change the idea we have of our history and ourselves.

Footnotes:
(1) Although Thor wasn’t the leader of the Gods he was the most worshipped and popular. The Greeks most beloved god was Athena and this could be explained by the difference in culture. The Norse looked up to a simplistic and impulsive god and the Greeks towards a wise, strategic goddess, hence the emergence of Vikings in comparison to Philosophers.
(2) Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), albeit a lawyer, land promoter, politician it’s as the author of the pioneering tome Atlantis the Antediluvian World, published in 1882, that he is best known. Donnelly brings together mythological, linguistic and ethnographic facts that when compiled seems to form a solid case. It’s one of the most compelling works on the subject and for those interested a compulsory read.

© deviadah

The Influence of the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:07:00 +0000

Moon in English and its equivalent in other languages are rooted in the base me meaning measure (1) and this of course is the result of the moon’s service to mankind as the first universal measurer of time. And since the ancient Babylonians started following a lunar calendar so do, still, many parts of the world like those of Islam and Judaism.

The moon has always captured our imagination as the only great light in the night sky and this has led to such words as moonstruck, moonshine and of course lunacy, or the lunatic, which concerns the effect the moons gravity has on our brains and the rise in madness that a full moon brings about. (2) Thoth was connected with the moon and so were Isis, Virgin Mary and Buddha. Traits of the moon represent truth, dreams, imagination, justice, psychology, astral travel, spirituality and its colour affiliation is white.

In alchemy it’s associated with silver and the final step of transmutation known as coagulation, which incarnates the Ultima Materia of the soul that the Emerald Tablet describes as Glory of the Whole Universe. (3) The realization of the eternal spirit body can result in an out-of-body experience. This mobile state of consciousness is the Greater Stone, or Philosopher’s Stone from which flows the red elixir.

Apart from all this the eerie correspondence with the cycles of the moon and the menstrual cycle has contributed to a lot of mystical interpretations and put the heavenly body in connection with Women’s Mysteries and it’s seen as the Mother (the Sun being the Father). Humans, also, used to hunt by the moonlight and when the ice age ended animals died and humans turned to farming, which led to private property followed by centuries of wars, and sun worship. There has also been some interesting aspects of sowing seeds during the full moon and collecting dew (more on this will be added later on).

The moon’s orbit is elliptical (or oval) and departs by an angle of five degrees from the earth’s orbit about the sun, explaining why an eclipse of the sun does not occur every month. The Egyptians showed no special genius in mathematics and their astronomy was basic compared to that of the Greeks, and they had no astronomical instruments not already known by the ancient world. Yet they were the first to discover and calculate the solar year. (4)

In 4241 B.C.E. the Nile Year began being used. It was the result of a nilometer, which was a simple vertical scale on which the flood level was yearly marked. It showed it did not match the phases of the moon and since the rising of the Nile was as regular and as essential as the rising of the sun the ancient Egyptians saw this as the guide to go by.

Once a year the Dog Star, Sirius, rises in the morning in direct line with the rising sun. This heliacal rising of Sirius became the beginning of the Egyptian year marked by five days of celebrating the birth of Osiris, his son Horus, his wife and sister Isis and his enemy Set and his wife Nephthys. These five epagomenal days are the five days outside the twelve months that were used to even the year out.

Now we know that a solar year is 365 1/4 days but the discrepancy was so small that it took many years for the error to disturb daily life and in comparison with the lunar calendar it was a much better system thus Julius Caesar adopted it for his Julian Calendar. It survived to the Middle Ages and was used in the planetary tables of Copernicus as late as the 16th century.

In 2500 B.C.E. the Egyptians had managed to calculate and predict when the rising, or setting, sun would gild the tip of any particular obelisk which helped them add a glow to their ceremonies and anniversaries.

At the end of the 4th century C.E. they formally divided their day into two parts: before midday, ante meridiem, and after midday, post meridiem.

Footnotes:
(1) In Greek metron and in English measure and meter.
(2) The origin of such myths as the werewolf.
(3) In more non-spiritual terms coagulation means the conversion of a thin liquid into a solid mixture through some inner change, as with the curdling of milk. This can be accomplished by a variety of means: by the addition of a substance, by heating or cooling.
(4) The measure of time in which our lives are guided by to this day.

© deviadah

An Introductory Epistle

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:16:00 +0000

I have always felt drawn to that region no man, yet, can physically enter. Its doors are eternally shut and we can only glimpse through the keyhole. What has been has been and it is for anyone who lived to see to do justice and not misrepresent or shed prejudice on those past events. Ever since school, though, I have felt very disappointed on the history books I had to study and the older I got the more suspicious I became. Who had written them and for what purpose?

A lot of what I was interested in was never mentioned and when I asked questions I was rarely answered. I realized that there was a whole hidden history that for some reason wasn’t considered worthy to read about. Why?

Why, and I can only speak for myself (hoping others have had better experiences), did we only study the bloodline of monarchs and the reasons and results of war? Why did we concentrate more on the first half of the 20th century than any other part of history? Why, apart from spurious reads on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and the industrialisation, was science completely left out? Where was the mystics? The dreamers? The real revolutionaries? The punks?

This is not an original work in the sense of content, but hopefully in the sense of design and spirit. I see this book as a compilation of the works of many authors and historians that I all salute (regardless of what I personally think of some), and I hope none feel they have been unjustly plagiarized because that has not been my intention.

Comment on: B.C. vs. B.C.E

© deviadah

B.C. vs. B.C.E.

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:11:00 +0000

Instead of B.C, Before Christ, I will employ B.C.E, Before Common Era and instead of A.D, Anno Domini (the year of the Lord), I will employ C.E, Common Era. This I do for the reason that I don’t want time to be designated by a certain religion and hopefully help put a nail in the coffin on these old terms since only one in three on this Earth are Christians. Noteworthy also to point out is that common stands for the fact that the Gregorian Calendar is the most commonly used calendar system. This other system of designating time is suspected of completely replacing B.C. and A.D. and I hope that I can be a part of this.

© deviadah

The Eleusinian Mysteries

noreply@blogger.com (deviadah) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 20:53:00 +0000

The ancient Eleusinian Mysteries (or the Mysteries), are believed to be founded by Eumolpos 1400 years B.C.E, or as legend tells by the goddess Ceres (1), and preserved to modern times through the Platonic system of philosophy. I quote Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

“The initiates of the Eleusinian School were famous throughout Greece for the beauty of their philosophical concepts and the high standards of morality which they demonstrated in their daily lives. Because of their excellence, these Mysteries spread to Rome and Britain, and later initiations were given in both these countries.”

The Mysteries were a recognized public institution, in a way much like modern Freemasonry, in the ancient world and according to Cicero taught men how to live and how to die. Both men, women and children were admitted and the initiates numbered at one point in the thousands which resulted in a necessary division that separated those who showed a superior mental understanding from the those not yet ready. André Nataf writes in The Dictionary of the Occult:

“An initiatory society is an irreplaceable framework for ripening certain ideas in the dark and then distilling them into the fabric of society.”

There were thus two rites of Eleusis, the Lesser and the Greater, the former celebrated in the spring and the latter in the fall. Like most initiatory orders the candidate must swear an oath never to reveal their inner secrets to those not worthy. Since the Mysteries were no different not much information about their rituals and beliefs are available, but what follows is what is known.

Plato called the body of man the sepulchre of the soul and this is precisely what the Mysteries teach. They perceived the physical world as a false and temporary entity out of which all sorrow and suffering emanate. In contrast to that they saw the soul, called the Psyche (2) and symbolized by Persephone (3), as, if freed from the chains of the body, truly alive and self-expressive. In short the dead ruled the living and the birth into the physical world equal only death. The true birth only occurs when the spiritual soul, the Psyche, rises out of the physical state of being.

The Lesser Mysteries, dedicated to Persephone, teaches therefore that man must depart from his desire for material possessions and rise above ignorance or he is doomed to wander forever making the same mistakes again and again. He will pass into death no wiser than how he passed into life and will sleep for all eternity just as he slept through his existence.

The Greater Mysteries, dedicated to their patron Ceres, tells the legend of how Persephone is abducted by Pluto, also known as Hades - or Plouton the Wealthy One, and brought to the underworld to become his queen. Ceres wanders the world in quest for her daughter carrying two torches, one for intuition the other for reason, and when she finally finds her pleads to Pluto, the god of the souls of the dead, to allow her daughter to return to her. Pluto at first refuses because Persephone has eaten of the pomegranate, the fruit of mortality, but then agrees to let her live in the upper world half of the year and in the lower the other half. The solar energy, which in the winter months lives under the earth with Pluto and in the summer returns with the goddess of productiveness was what the Greeks saw Persephone as a manifestation of.

In other words the Soul is abducted and chained to the darkness of the underworld and refused its freedom because it has accepted, tasted, mortality. Freedom can only come if reason and truth is applied to the bondage of material ignorance. The soul need to enter into the light of understanding and, like the teachings of Buddha, end the cycle of rebirth to achieve a nirvana after death and in this life.

It’s only in sleep that we abandon the physical prison and enter a domain where we are free although mostly not in control i.e. we spend our waking hours in the lower world and our sleeping in the upper. Of course dreams and journeys to other worlds and dimensions can be achieved without the need of sleep in a process known as astral travel.

The Eleusinian Mysteries performed many of their ceremonies at midnight because they felt that it was at a time when the invisible worlds were the closest to the visible. Perhaps also because it was at a time when the brain was supposed to be asleep and thus nearer to that state of receptiveness. It is in the dream, and more so in the waking dream, that we are closest to the threshold of our own consciousness.

An initiate who completes the Lesser Mysteries was known as a Mystes, meaning one who saw through a veil or had a clouded vision. Manly P. Hall argues in The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

“The modern word Mystic, as referring to a seeker after truth according to the dictates of the heart along the path of faith, is probably derived from this ancient word, for faith is belief in the reality of things unseen or veiled.”

Interestingly the initiate who successfully proceeds to the final and concluding ceremony in the Greater Mysteries was hailed as an Epoptes, one who has beheld or seen directly, and because of this initiation was termed autopsy. As if the subject has to dissect himself to find the cause of his own death and realise the path towards his rebirth.

Worthy to note is that the Eleusinian Mysteries condemned suicide and warned that only great sorrow would come to those who performed this act since we are all a part of each other the murder of one self is the murder of others.

The official end of the Eleusinian Mysteries came close to 400 years C.E. when suppressed by Theodosius who destroyed all who did not accept the Christian faith. Irony strikes again because Jesus was more a mystic than he ever was a Christian.

Footnotes:
(1) The Roman goddess of grain. In Greek mythology the goddess Demeter, or Grain Mother. Protector of agriculture, in particular corn and poppy, which is sacred to her and represented riding in a chariot drawn by winged serpents.
(2) In Greek mythology a goddess in love with Eros the god of love i.e. a Soul that loves Love.
(3) Goddess and queen of the underworld and daughter of the Roman goddess of grain Ceres. Identified as Kore in Greek mythology and daughter of the goddess Demeter, or Grain Mother.

© deviadah