The Keys To Religion

[alexa]

8 hours ago, pi3141 said:

Comets could be mistaken by ancient people for 'fiery dragons' or 'fiery serpents' and an asteroid or comet strike on earth may have looked like a fiery serpent was cast down from heaven and if landing in the ocean - the bottomless pit - caused tidal waves and fires and the impact winter effects after the strike creating desolation and death that would have taken a few years to recover from. 

 

God doesn't throw rocks at the earth 

[pi3141]

2 hours ago, alexa said:

God doesn't throw rocks at the earth 

 

So...you believe in Dragons?

[alexa]

22 minutes ago, pi3141 said:

 

So...you believe in Dragons?

 

Not at all, I believe the ancient ones knew exactly what they were looking at & were more knowledgeable in astrology than we gave them credit for. Read the book of Enoch.

The cataclysm they experienced was caused by the deluge and not some rock hitting the earth as there has never been a comet or an asteroid to hit the earth.

[pi3141]

6 hours ago, alexa said:

The cataclysm they experienced was caused by the deluge and not some rock hitting the earth as there has never been a comet or an asteroid to hit the earth.

 

Because we're protected by the firmament?

[alexa]

6 minutes ago, pi3141 said:

 

Because we're protected by the firmament?

 

God will destroy the earth once again, when he's good and ready.  I'd say we are on amber now.

[pi3141]

1 hour ago, alexa said:

God will destroy the earth once again, when he's good and ready.  I'd say we are on amber now.

 

Great. That blood thirsty God, destroying his creation over and over.

 

What evil sinners we all, scared of God, judgement and even life itself.

 

What a way to live.

 

This is why I despise Christianity- it twists the mind of its believers.

 

Takes them away from God, makes them fearful, guilt ridden and very judgemental. Puts a divide between believers and non believers. Fills the believers minds with fantasy and diametrically opposed beliefs - Jesus was both God and Human because they couldn't recognise the truth and came down on both sides to appease both sets of believers, who swallow the nonsense.

 

It's a disgrace.

 

[alexa]

2 hours ago, pi3141 said:

 

Great. That blood thirsty God, destroying his creation over and over.

 

What evil sinners we all, scared of God, judgement and even life itself.

 

What a way to live.

 

This is why I despise Christianity- it twists the mind of its believers.

 

Takes them away from God, makes them fearful, guilt ridden and very judgemental. Puts a divide between believers and non believers. Fills the believers minds with fantasy and diametrically opposed beliefs - Jesus was both God and Human because they couldn't recognise the truth and came down on both sides to appease both sets of believers, who swallow the nonsense.

 

It's a disgrace.

 

 

Things will have to be really really bad on earth before God destroys it. You see God is patient and wants as many souls saved as  possible. In Noah's day he gave the masses 120 years to repent before splash down.

It was water the last time, this time it will be fire.

                                &

A thousand years for us is but a day for God.

[Campion]

6 hours ago, pi3141 said:

Great. That blood thirsty God, destroying his creation over and over.

 

What evil sinners we all, scared of God, judgement and even life itself.

 

What a way to live.

 

This is why I despise Christianity- it twists the mind of its believers.

 

Takes them away from God, makes them fearful, guilt ridden and very judgemental. Puts a divide between believers and non believers. Fills the believers minds with fantasy and diametrically opposed beliefs - Jesus was both God and Human because they couldn't recognise the truth and came down on both sides to appease both sets of believers, who swallow the nonsense.

 

It's a disgrace.

 

I try and be a friendly outsider to them, but when I look at the Abrahamic religions, not just Christianity, I can see they all have a massive habit of making predictions and prophecies about the future, which are too broad and open-ended to be pinned down and verified. Instead they wait until something vaguely similar happens and then claim that the prophecy is fulfilled. Or even make up a narrative in which the prophecy is fulfilled, as with the Gospel stories about Jesus.  So my take is that it isn't really about predicting the future, but about justifying their beliefs, and make themselves feel better. 

  

I suppose to be fair, plenty of other pagan religions and new agers also have various divination techniques and oracles to predict the future because it's such a cause of anxiety and insecurity for us. And since we have a strong sense that life should be fair and just and wrongs righted, to appease us powerless ordinary folk we make up stories ("prophecies") that God will intervene with his vengeance, or karma will punish the sinners, or they will burn in hell or whatever. Of course there's never a direct intervention by God, it's always some natural event like floods, pestilence, earthquakes, wars etc, which are interpreted as the fulfilment of the prophecy and prove God's power. 

 

And now in our rationalistic materialistic culture many folks have rejected all the supernatural side but we can still see other elements of this religious fervour in prediction-making of the climate crisis for instance. We have the inculcation of guilt (especially for whites) and the imposition of punishments for sinners against the new religion of political correctness which is fast replacing theological correctness amongst the secularised westerners. 

[Jason57]

God is Evil, not Love.

[sock muppet]

57 minutes ago, Jason57 said:

God is Evil, not Love.

 

How on planet stupid did you arrive at this epic conclusion?

[Jason57]

4 hours ago, sock muppet said:

 

How on planet stupid did you arrive at this epic conclusion?

Simple. If God knows all, created all things and knew that humanity would fall into sin, yet let it happen, then all deaths, illness, tragedies, human evil are ultimately God's fault. He knew this would happen, planned for it to happen. And the whole free will theory is bullshit too, as I had no say in whether I was born/created in the first place. Had God shown me what life was gonna be life I'd have said Nah, no thanks. If this is God's gift, I'd hate to see what he gives his enemies.

[sock muppet]

3 minutes ago, Jason57 said:

Simple. If God knows all, created all things and knew that humanity would fall into sin, yet let it happen, then all deaths, illness, tragedies, human evil are ultimately God's fault. He knew this would happen, planned for it to happen. And the whole free will theory is bullshit too, as I had no say in whether I was born/created in the first place. Had God shown me what life was gonna be life I'd have said Nah, no thanks. If this is God's gift, I'd hate to see what he gives his enemies.

 

Ummmm, with this line of reasoning you have come off the path and taken the absolute wrong turn and by your own words are now quickly becoming the enemy that you speak of.

How can you come to this realisation when only a short while ago you were enquiring about a simple verse in the Bible that you did not comprehend, it stands to reason that you know nothing and are too quick to judge, the Bible also tells us to, judge not, lest ye be judged.

So in conclusion i would ask God, the one who was in the beginning and without whom nothing could be made, to make an exception for your complete ignorance, and you are ignorant, i can ask a very simple question that proves your outstanding ignorance and lay it bear for all to see and witness, and that is, do you know everything that there is to know in the whole of existence?

Correct, you don't, neither do i nor does anyone else, and i can tell you also, to please rethink your position.

From here i doubt i will be able to help further, good day.

[Jason57]

I'm hardly being ignorant. If we're going by traditional religion, and that God can do no wrong, I don't agree with that. If evil is all part of God's plan then so be it, but i still find it rotten. As far as me trying to understand the Bible, It's either all symbolic, metaphorical or just one big lie.

[pi3141]

1 hour ago, Jason57 said:

As far as me trying to understand the Bible, It's either all symbolic, metaphorical or just one big lie.

 

It is all symbolic, metaphorical, allegory and lies, but it does contain instruction and some truth.

[Jason57]

Where I'm at in my journey is that I feel that God isn't all Good or love. I'm sue my views will change over the course of time, as everyone's does.

[Talorgan]

Perhaps there are lesser gods that plan things   in between the Almighty One.

Also groups of people that consider themselves god's  , elite  ,Olympians , sorcerers  channelling  entities etc

 

 

Edited May 17 by Talorgan

[Jason57]

59 minutes ago, Talorgan said:

Perhaps there are lesser gods that plan things   in between the Almighty One.

Also groups of people that consider themselves god's  , elite  ,Olympians , sorcerers  channelling  entities etc

 

 

Oh I definetely agree that there are other entites or lesser Gods. The fact still remains that God either created them, or allows them to do what they do.

[Talorgan]

7 minutes ago, Jason57 said:

Oh I definetely agree that there are other entites or lesser Gods. The fact still remains that God either created them, or allows them to do what they do.

Yes that reminds me of the free will paradox of Thomas Aquinas predestination or free will etc 

I don't know the answer but perhaps not knowing the answer is the answer?

[Jason57]

1 minute ago, Talorgan said:

Yes that reminds me of the free will paradox of Thomas Aquinas predestination or free will etc 

I don't know the answer but perhaps not knowing the answer is the answer?

If predestination is true, and many end up in a state of hell, then God is cruel for creating those souls. The free will paradox I don't buy because none of us were given a choice to come here. So it's not completely free will.

[Talorgan]

35 minutes ago, Jason57 said:

If predestination is true, and many end up in a state of hell, then God is cruel for creating those souls. The free will paradox I don't buy because none of us were given a choice to come here. So it's not completely free will.

Yes I don't remember myself but did get a recurring dream which might have been to do with returning here, not sure,

I don't know if we have a choice or not or if perhaps we are nudged somehow ?

Perhaps we choose by not choosing ?

[Jason57]

4 minutes ago, Talorgan said:

Yes I don't remember myself but did get a recurring dream which might have been to do with returning here, not sure,

I don't know if we have a choice or not or if perhaps we are nudged somehow ?

Perhaps we choose by not choosing ?

It's a complete mystery, right now i don't lik much of it.

[Talorgan]

9 minutes ago, Jason57 said:

It's a complete mystery, right now i don't lik much of it.

Hopefully it will get clearer I hope 

[alexa]

20 minutes ago, Talorgan said:

Hopefully it will get clearer I hope 

 

This is clear enough for me.

 

Luke 8:17 For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.

[pi3141]

The Astronomico-Theological Lectures - Rev Taylor

 

P120
Every nation upon earth had, in like manner, its Book of Exodus, or fabulous legends, which supplied the place of a history of the supposed origination of their line of ancestry. The Odyssey of Homer, the AEneis of Virgil, are each of them Books of Exodus, detailing the supposed wanderings and sufferings, bondages and comings out of bondage, of the imaginary founders or fathers of the Greek and Roman nations,—with the only difference, that they are better Exoduses, more congruous with themselves, more within the limits of poetical probability, though not more true than the Mosaic Exodus.

 

P122
Thus the first man of mind, the first who rose to an intellectual ascendency over the barbarous herd, were driven into priestcraft by necessity of self preservation.
The he was demanded from them, whether they would or not. They were called on to give an account, to the savages, of their ancestry and history, where no vestige, no memorial, had marked a trace of the wanderings and starvations, wars and victories, of generations that had gone by, as traceless as the pathway of the keel through the waves.

But the savages must be satisfied,—and this tomahawk and the scalping knife would have avenged the disappointment of their vanity. Had the truth been told them, or anything like truth, they could not have stood it; they could not have borne it,—they must have a history ; the more marvellous and impossible, the more evangelical. And all the poor priest, who wished to live, had to provide for, was to lay it on thick enough. And hence arose each particular nation's Exodus, or book of marvellous history, in which their priests resolved the natural curiosity which would ask the question : —

 

Where did we all come from ? with such an answer, when no other could be given, as ' O, you all came from a great way off—somewhere beyond the sea.'
Aye, but how did we get over the sea ? Oh, why the sea dried up, and let you through.
Ye see, that was a very particular sort of sea, it was a red sea.
But when we were come over, how did we get any victuals ?
Victuals ! Oh, why it rained victuals. The nicest apple-dumplings and roast mutton you ever ate in your life.
What did you call it ? Yes, that was what we called it. What d'ye call it was the very name of it ; Manna !—they called it.
What d'ye call it. It was angels food.
And how did we do for clothes ? Oh, the clothes that you came out of Egypt with were a sort of clothes that never wore out.
But what did the people say when we came and drove them out of their land, and took possession of it for ourselves?
O, you cut their throats ; and then, you know, they said nothing.
But what right had we to do so?
Ah ! but such religious people as you have no occasion to inquire about right, —God Almighty gave you a right.
And where was God Almighty all the while ? Why you carried him along with you in a box, made of shittim wood.
Such, Sirs, even such, is the natural genealogy of an Exodus.
To which the Exodus of the people of Mexico is so wonderfully similar, that if you had not previously suspected me of drawing from some other picture, you would have felt, assuredly, that it was none other than the Exodus of the Mexicans, that had been the original.

 

P151

We pass now from this analysis of the higher order of abstractions—that is, from the Gods, Devils, Christs, Lords, Angels, and Holy and Unholy Ghosts ; all of which are only so many personifications of the Sun of our system, to the study of the no less entirely astronomical nature, and mythological history, of the demigods, and heroes, such as Adam and Eve, and Moses and Aaron, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which are the Stars of inferior magnitude ; the (Greek text) Beny Yesraile, as they are called,—the children of Israel—that is, the sons of the planet Saturn; Israel being the ancient Phoenician name of the planet Saturn, who, as being the most remote of all the planetary bodies then observed, was considered as the Father of Heaven, and acquired the name of (Greek Text) Av-ro-hom, or Abo-ram—that is, —Father of Elevation.

Note For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Philippians 3:20

 

P154

'And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy posterity and her posterity; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.'

Of which I shall give no further comment, than that of the most learned and truly pious Christian commentator and translator of this sacred book, Dr. Geddes : 'Whosoever thou beest who understandest the first elements of the Hebrew dialect, and the first elements of logic,—say if thou findest in it any vestige of a seducing Devil, or a redeeming Saviour, thou mayest then turn to Calmet's commentary, or any other commentary of the same bran, and keep thyself from laughing if thou canst.' And at the conclusion of his commentary, on this chapter, the same most learned and Christian Hebraist concludes:

 

'We have now got to the end of the Mythos (i. e., the fable) of Moses, or whoever else was the author of the wonderful production. I trust I have done something like justice to its beauties ; and that it will appear, on the whole, to be a well devised, well delineated, well executed piece—nay, that it has not its equal in all the mythology of antiquity : I mean, if it be considered not as a real history, nor as a mere mystical allegory,—but as a most charming political fiction, dressed up for excellent purposes in the garb of history, and adapted to the grose conceptions and limited capacity of a rude, sensual, unlearned, and credulous people.'

 

Well then, Sirs, it is admitted by the most learned of the Christian world, that the story of the fall of man is altogether a mythos, a fable, a political fiction; the most charming fiction in the world, if you please, — but yet no more than a fiction. No such persons as Adam and Eve ever existed, no such creation of the world in such a way, and no such fall of man, as has been pretended, ever took place. And there being no reality in the first Adam, there can be none in the second : no fall, no redemption ; no betrayer of our race into transgression, no Saviour ; and no need of one ; and the whole story,

 

'Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man,
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat/

 

Is a poem, a fiction, a fable ; as far from the sober realities of history and truth as the tissue of a drunkard's dream.

The adversaries of Christianity are justly charged by its advocates with want of candor, in not giving the literal meaning of the words and names of sacred theology ; which, on being understood, would themselves have shown, that nothing like historical truth was ever so much as pretended.

 

These literal meanings, then, of the principle names and terms, I shall proceed to give. I shall show to you the Pagan and idolatrous origination of the story of salvation. Its existence in ages long anterior to any age that has ever been assigned as the age of Moses, even admitting that such a person as Moses ever existed ; and lastly, the real significancy and meaning of it.

 

Now, observe ye, Sirs! all these scenes of the creation, temptation, and fall of man, whether understood literally or figuratively, whether as fable or fact, as false or true, are said to have occurred in Paradise.

And is not that word Paradise, one of the words of which the infidel Celsus, uncandidly kept back the true meaning from the knowledge of his hearers, as well knowing that the meaning of that word, being once understood, none but a stark staring fool would ever have dreamed of the story being meant to pass for truth?

 

It was in Paradise! Now, in the name of God, where is Paradise ? It is the place where so much of a man will go to, as remains of him after the worms have done dinner. It is the 'country from whose bourne no traveller returns,' and where no traveller goes that can stay on terra firma any longer. It is in terra del Fuego. It is in the country that lies on the other side of the grave when the gallows stands on this. You must cross the line to it. As our blessed Saviour said to the evangelical thief, when the thief was in no hurry, 'this day shalt thou be with me in paradise.' It was the third heaven, the place where St. Paul says 'he was caught up into, when he could hot tell whether he was in his body or out of his body ; and where he heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.' Corinth, ii. 12.

 

" The word Paradise, adopted into the English, and other European languages, without being translated, from the Greek, napa deloog (Greek Text), which is the Septuagint rendering of (Greek Text), Gan-be-eden me kay-dem, 'a garden in Eden eastward,' divides itself into its compounds Hapa-dus (Greek), which is literally among the Stars.

 

The very first noun, and first verb which follows it, of the very first sentence ascribed to divine revelation, (Greek Text) has no such sense as that put on the words, 'in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,'—the reference being, not to an original creation, but to a renewal and renovation of the face and appearance of the heavens and the earth: not to any thing imagined to have taken place then for the first time, and not of a nature to be repeated, by referring to the annual and diurnal phenomena of the visible heavens and earth, which take place every year, and every day of our lives. The heavens and the earth, according to the doctrine of the most ancient Jewish Rabbins,' following that of the Pythagorician, and elder Platonists, being co-eternal with God ; as the Sun's rays are coeval with the Sun. And there, in the garden of God, looking eastward among those flowers of the sky, which adorn the beautiful bosom of the night, will be seen depicted in the groups of Stars, the whole drama of Paradise.

 

The constellation, or group of Stars, represented as felling within the imaginary outline of a Serpent rising in the east, and followed by the woman, whom he may therefore, in the most literal sense, be said to seduce, seducere, to lead on, as the woman with extended hand, holding a branch of fruit in her hand, is said to seduce, or lead on her husband, the celestial herdsman, Bootes : till, at the moment when the Virgin and the Herdsman, having run after the Devil through the whole garden, are seen to set on the western horizon, which is literally the fall of man ; and at the moment of their setting on the western side, the constellation Perseus, the cherubim with the flaming sword, will be seen to rise on the opposite side (the east of the garden of Eden), and so to drive them out, with his flaming sword, which turned everyway to keep the way of the tree of life.

 

The representation of this astronomical phenomenon, as if it had been a real scene, and the Paradise as some place on earth, which might be ascertained by geographical description, by the courses of a river which watered the garden, and from thence was parted, and became into four heads, the Pison, which Josephus says is the Ganges : the Gihon, which is the Nile ; the Hiddekel, which is the Tigris ; and the Euphrates, which is as well known as the River Thames, is a grand specimen of the art which runs through both the Old and the New Testament — i. e., the art of dressing up fiction into an appearance of history, which has served so effectually to employ the idleness of learning, and to deceive the simplicity of ignorance.

 

P159

The whole story of the creation of the world, and the allegorical life, character, death, and resurrection of Christ, was acted as a play, or holy pantomime, in the ancient mysteries of Mithra and of Bacchus, from which every doctrine which we now call Christian, is entirely derived : and in the study of which we discover, in a thousand instances, the meaning and reference of passages, which to the Christian ear have no sort of sense at all.

 

P164

It is admitted and well known by the learned in Biblical criticism, that it has been chiefly on the authority of the Jewish Rabbi, Moses Maimonides, who lived in the twelfth century, the middle of the dark ages, that the first chapter, or first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, came first to be taken to refer to a real creation of the world. 

But how deceitful this old Rabbi was, needs but a knowledge of what himself hath written, under the veil of a language not understood by the people as a word to the wise, — his words, being translated, are : — 

 

'We are not to understand, nor take what is written in the book, about the creation, according to the letter, nor to have any such notions of it, as the common people have, — for otherwise our ancient sages would not have recommended us, with so much anxiety, to conceal the sense, and not to lift up the allegorical veil, which hides the truth which it contains. 

 

This book of Genesis, taken according to the letter, gives the most absurd and extravagant notions of the Deity. Whosoever, then, shall perceive the true meaning, ought to take care not to divulge it.' It is a maxim which all our wise men repeat to us. ' It is difficult for any one, either from the text itself, or from lights elsewhere afforded, not to keep off from a good guess at what it means ; but then he ought to say nothing about it : or, if he speak on the subject, he ought to do so only by obscure hints and insinuations, and in an enigmatical way, as I do myself, leaving the rest to be found out, by those who can understand me.'* 

* I translate this from Dupuis, Yol. III., p. 9.

 

This is Jewish honesty ! And shall we wonder that the Jewish Rabbis should alter the text, from the original Samaritan reading, ' In the beginning the Goat created the heavens and the earth,' into, « In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' substituting the word EIETX (Greek), Elohim, for OIUT (Greek), heezim; when we find our English translation changing the earlier rendering : — ' Abel brought the firstling of the Goats,' into 'Abel brought the firstling of his flock' from the same apparent intention of concealing the part which the astronomical Goat sustains, not only as the first creator, but as the first sacrifice, and first type of the redeemer of the world ; and making over his honor to the sheep' who, in the 3d of Revelation, calls himself Amon, the beginning of the creation of God ; and in the 13th is called 'the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world ; — when it is so evident that the first beast that was slain at the foundation of the world was a Goat; and that the Goat was the beginning of the creation of God — that is, as you see -by its place in the Zodiac, the beginning of the Sun's ascension in his annual progress through the signs which follow? 

 

P199

And indeed, what is called the Lord's Prayer, is addressed to Abraham, and not to God: inasmuch as, though Abraham's name be not expressly used, his distinctive astronomical attribute is used instead ; and that, in most marked contradistinction, and opposition to any name or attribute that could possibly apply to God. The faithful were therefore taught to say. ' Our Father which art in Heaven:' because they believed that Abraham was their Father, and that that Father was in Heaven ; whereas God, I hope, is everywhere present. And they prayed, 'thy kingdom come,' because the planet Saturn, being the most remote of all the planetary bodies, his kingdom was the furthest off, and the longest in coming round: whereas the kingdom of God is not a kingdom to come, nor an infinitely remote millennium or golden age, as that of Saturn was supposed to be,—but is, and ever was, present in all places, and existing through all.

 

And they further prayed to Saturn, ' Give us this day our daily bread.' Because the very name of Saturn was derived from the -word Satu, to sow, as corn is sown in the earth, and Sator, the sower : and Saturn it was, who was believed in that happy golden age, to have taught mankind the art of agriculture, and to raise their bread out of the earth ; agreeably to which conceit, they represented him with his sickle or scythe in his hand, wherewith to cut down the corn, and piously pledged themselves to desire from him no more than that vegetable diet, that simple bread, with which the happy denizens of the golden age had been entirely content. And it was to be in a particular sense quotidian, or daily bread as being the especial gift of Saturn, the 7th of the planets, the 7th of the days of the week, and the genius or demon of time. And as the planet Saturn was the Deity addressed in that prayer, called the Lord's Prayer, though neither the name of Lord or God occurs once in that prayer : so his worshippers, in all ages and countries of the world, have steadily continued to keep their weekly Sabbath, on the day over which the planet Saturn astrologically presides, which is Saturday.

And also, they have never ceased to inflict on their own persons a cruel commemorative exhibition of the fabulous suicide of Saturn, in the mythology, and of the real phenomenon of Saturn's belt, the starry ring which appears cut off from the body of that planet in the visible heavens. Thus you see the astronomical phenomena of the planet Saturn, the mythological story of the God Saturnus, and the sacred history of the patriarch Abraham, run in every respect, in every circumstance, in every iota, text for text, and line for line together!

The apostatizing chief of sinners, who forsook the faith of his ancestors, upon passing over from Judaism to Christianity—that is, from the worship of the planet Saturn to the worship of the Sun, exclaims: 1 from henceforth let no man trouble me ; for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. What those marks are, deponents depose not,—but what the marks of the planet Saturn are, you will best learn by going to church, on the first day of January—that is, the day of Janus, who is the same as Saturn, the demon or genius of TIME, whose festival is analogically fixed to mark the first day of the year, and called the CIRCUMCISION !

 

But as Abraham is especially called the Father of many natio?is, we cannot wonder to find his characteristic sacrament observed among many nations : and his name itself, with very little variation, retained in the religions of all nations. He is the original Abram Usrael, or Angel of Death, of the Chaldeans. He is the Israel of the ancient Phoenicians, as the only Phoenician historian, Sanchoniathon, who wrote 1300 years before our era, and whose text is preserved to us by Philo Biblius, of the first century, expressly assures us that the Phoenician, name of the planet Saturn is Israel. And Israel and Abraham are names constantly confounded, and used as perfectly synonymous with each other, throughout the Old and New Testament. The God of Israel, and the God of Abraham ; the children of Israel, and the children of the stock of Abraham are but poetical variations of one and the self-same sense. So He is, the same Abraham in the Brahma (which is but Abraham, with the first letter put last) of the Hindoos, and the Ibrahim, which is Abraham, more delicately uttered, of the Arabs, the Abram Zerouan of the magi, the Abram Zarman of the Persians, the Kronos of the Greeks, the planet Saturn of Astronomy, the God Saturnus of the whole Pagan world, and the personified genius of Old Time, whom you shall see to this day, retained in our Christian idolatry, even in our Christian temples, sitting in all the accompaniments and emblems of his everlasting Godhead upon our clocks, and pointing to the dial plates, in indication that whatever other Gods we may please to address, it is he, and he alone, who shall reign for ever and ever. And to his honor is that anthem constantly reiterated, 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.'

P212 Abraham and Sarah

 

Now ! you read that those personages or personifications, or whatsoever or whosoever they were, this Abraham and Sarah, and their story, be what it may, was of Chaldaic origin : their very definition, in the sacred text itself, is, Abraham and Sarah, of Ur,of the Chaldees. Follow, then, the clue thus put into your hands, and you arrive at the admission, that the—

 

1. People of Chaldea, the first and deepest skilled in astronomical science of all people, professed and delighted in veiling their astronomical science, under precisely such allegorical histories as that of Abraham and Sarah appears to be.
2. That they were followed in the rage for doing this, by the astronomical priests of India, of Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy.
3. That their first drafts and sketches of these imaginary histories, were plagiarised and carried over from one nation and language to another, even when the sense and significancy was entirely lost : and thus have we, in the Book of Genesis (which is a hasty and careless compilation of several versions), those ridiculous repetitions, which betray that the compiler himself did not even cast his eyes back to observe what he had written, nor reck his own read. He tells his tales twice over, and you have two editions of all the leading features of his story.

P214
Hence, as we have a father of the human race in Adam, who is the constellation Bootes ; we have the same imaginary character revived in a second Adam, whose astronomical identity is expressed in his epithet, ' the second Adam is the Lord from Heaven'—that is, the Sun, the name Ad-ham, literally signifying, the Lord, the Everlasting Fire—that is, the Sun.

 

Thus have we seen the Abram, another Universal Father, whose name, compounded of the Hebrew and Syriac words, Ab and Ram, Father of Elevation, is the astronomical character of the planet Saturn ; whose name again, derived from Satu, to sow, and Sator, the sower, expresses that Abraham was 'the sower that went forth to sow his seed ;' and whose Phoenician name was literally Israel, actually renewed again in the character of Israel, as if Israel had been another and distinct personage.

And precisely thus, have we the twelve signs of the Zodiac, allegorized in the twelve Patriarchs, Olsons of Saturn—that is, of Israel, as the inferior and intrajacent stars of our system would necessarily be called. And these, again, re-edited in the twelve Great Gods, or Dii- Consentes, Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, and Vulcan, Juno, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Ceres, and Vesta, of the Pagan mythos.

And these, again, in the twelve apostles of the gospel; in the twelve gates of the Apocalyptic city ; in the twelve Stars of the celestial crown ; in the twelve fruits of the tree of life ; in the twelve legions of angels ;  the twelve foundations, twelve pearls, twelve stones, twelve altars, and eternally-recurring astronomical number twelve, or multiples of twelve, in every relation and reference to the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven: thus proving, with the certainty of arithmetical induction, that it was never any other than the visible astronomical heaven that was to be understood by that kingdom, and never any other than the phenomena of the heavenly bodies that was intended in the imagined histories, and imaginary persons, set before us, alike in the Christian and Pagan mythology.

 

Thus the name itself of Sarah, literally signifies a Star, and is the basis of that self-same Asta/rte, or Ashtoreth, the Goddess of the Zidonians, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, according as it is a single planet or a whole constellation, that is to be designated by that name : just as the name of God is plural with a singular signification, or singular with a plural significancy, according as it is a particular Star, or the constellation ; or group of Stars ; the Sun, or the planet, with his attendant satellites, inclusive, which is meant under that name.

P224 Melchisidec

The Lord hath sworn, and he will not repent : Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.''—Psalm 4.

P225
I propose, however, to consider this matter at all hazards, and by unravelling the clue through the only three passages of the Scriptures in which it is referred to (the 14th of the Book of Genesis, the 110th Psalm, and the 7th of the Epistle to the Hebrews), with such aids of extraneous elucidation as my research has supplied, to lay before your conviction the most ample and irrefutable demonstration of a truth which, thus discovered, like the discovery of the hidden quantity in an equation, will solve all the difficulties of the problem, and bear on all the relations on which the mind can wish for satisfaction, or be capable of certainty, in these interesting studies.

P227
In the curious fragment of Sanchoniathon, a Phoenician historian, who flourished before the Trojan war, or at least 1300 years before our era, whose text has been translated out of the Phoenician into Greek, by Philo Biblius, and preserved by Eusebius, we learn that this Elton, this Hypsistos, this Most High God, was a certain man, who, with his wife Beeouth, dwelt near Buibel, Byblos, in Phoenicia, and begat a son named Adam, because he was formed out of the earth, and that this father of Abraham, this Most High God, was killed by wild beasts. This hieroglyphical language evidently points to the Phoenician astrology ; in which the Sun, literally the Most High, is allegorized under the image of a man, and the wild beasts which slay him are the Zodiacal animals, more especially the wild boar, under whose ascendency the Sun seems annually to expire in the Winter, as he revives in the Spring. And ' the knowledge of the Most High,' which formed the great matter of boast to the prophet Balaam, and gained him the credit of supernatural wisdom, was nothing more than his skill in the science of astronomy, and of the laws by which the highest of the heavenly bodies regulates the succession of the seasons and the motions of the whole planetary system.

 

But whatever sense be given to that manifestly astronomical term, the Most High God, nothing is more obvious than that this Melchisedec, priest of the Most High God, appears as a sort of personage for whom the author of the Book of Genesis challenges far higher respect than for the Patriarch Abraham, and assumes that his readers could have no need of more particular information. A similar abruptness characterizes the introduction of this mysterious personage, in the 110th Psalm: 'The Lord said unto my Lord (or Jehovah said unto Adonis), Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.' On which mysterious passage, the Jesus of Mathew xxii. 42. assuming that Adonis and Christ were one and the same person, enigmatically proves that Christ was not, and could not, have been in any sense the son of David. 'The Lord said unto my Lord,' had been the words of David. 'If David then called him Lord, how is he his son?' is the challenge of the speaker in the gospel, upon those words : 'And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.'

P233
Thus the name which the Chaldean astronomers had given to the planet Saturn, in signification of its distinctive phenomena in the planetary system, as the most remote, most elevated, and most devious, of all the then known planetary bodies, Father of Elevation, Ab-eam, presented at once the name of Abram : and Abram, both in the Arabic and in the Hebrew (which is but a dialect of the Arabic) is none other than the name of the planet Saturn.

 

This same planet Saturn, in the language of the Phoenicians, a people much more ancient than the Hebrews, was called Israel* So that Abram is the Arabic, and Israel the Phoenician name of the planet Saturn. From the never-failing "course, and punctual returns of the seasons of this remotest of the planetary bodies, his physical character became the most expressive emblem of moral fidelity, and liis name of Abram, Father of Elevation, acquired the epithet of Father of the Faithful.

 

* Kpovog Toivvv, ov ol froiVLKeg IcparjX irpoaayev evuot TrpooayopevovoL.(Greek) Saturaus igitur Phoenices Israelem nominant —Sanchon: apud Eusb : itaredit Franciscus Yigerus Rothomgensis, p. 40.

 

P234
The planet Saturn, measuring time by the longest career, and the slowest motion of all the planets, was personified as the genius of Time. The Arabians and Persians called him Esrael, or Angel of Death, and represented him with a scythe in his hand, in signification that it is he who mows down all creatures; that he devours his own children, and puts to death all that he gives life to.

P242
And on this principle of proving, as you would be ashamed not to apply it in the ordinary business of life, a sensible man would pause first, and insist on receiving a perfect satisfaction as to what such words as the Lord and the Apostles respectively mean, and from what sources and authorities their meaning is derived ; and how it has come to pass, that in these mystical and double meaning books, called spells or charms of God, or God's spells, these technical terms, the Lord and the Apostles, are played off upon us with such a flinging familiarity, as if it were a thing to be taken for granted that every body must know who Lords and Apostles were.

 

P245
The words of the original Greek text are — Kai Eltov Ol Atootoyol Tw Kvplw, Elte de Kvplog. Why, then, was not the term o Kvplog naturalized into 'the Curios', as well as the Ol Atootoyol into the apostles ?

It would have sounded as well in the brute ear of uninquisitive credulity.

 

But the meaning of the word o Kvplog, which we have translated the Lord, demands, and would demand, from any man who sincerely loved and sought the truth, the severest sifting and the most unflinching and uncompromising criticism of which his mind was capable. If it were possible that any man on earth could better know what that word meant, whence it was derived, and to what it tended, he would bargain with Omnipotence to forfeit his salvation. ' Were it in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,' thence would he drag it forth, nor live nor die till he had known the Lord ; nor would he suffer that word to be uttered in his ear, by one of woman born who knew the Lord better than himself. O Kuplos, in our Greek Testament, is an adjective ungrammatically used as a substantive : o Kuplos should signify of or pertaining to that which is o Kupos. And Kupoa we shall find to be a God who was worshipped under that name by the ancient Persians.

And that God, so worshipped under that name, Kupos, which is the theme and root of the Greek name o Kuplog, which our translators have rendered the Lord, was the Sun.

'For the Persians,' says Plutarch, in his Artaxerxes, ' calls the Sun Kupos. Kupov yap Kayelv IIepaac Tov Halov. And Cresias, the ancient historian of Persia, informs us that Cyrus, the Mede, who is expressly designated by Jehovah, in the 45th of Isaiah, by the titles given to Christ in the New Testament, received that name of Kuplos, {Cyrus) as derived from the name of the Sun.

 

Kai Tloetau To ovoqa atto tw Haiw. (Greek Text)

' Thus saith the Lord to his annointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden to subdue nations before him :' which is but a repetition of the similar idea of the 110th Psalm.

' Yahouh said unto Adonis,' which our translation renders, ' the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.'

Though we sometimes find this infinitely important word Kupos written Kupic; but still, with reference to the Sun, the Adonis of the East, as Hesychius, the great critic of the third century, expressly states Kupic, o Adwvis —that is, Kupic is Adonis, as that Adonis was the Sun, the name Adonis being compounded of the two words Ad and On, being the title of the Supreme Being, the tpwtoa twv tpwtwv (Greek Text), first of the first, or the Most High, and ON, the Egyptian name of the Sun.

 

even in the Collects of our own Common Prayer Book ; as in that of St. John the Evangelist—' Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light, upon thy church, that it—being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist, St. John,—may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen, —that is, our Lord Jupiter Ammon.

That mystically-muttered word AUMON, through all the variety of intonations and cadences that can possibly be given to it, Ah-men, Aumen, Amen, Omen, never having meant any thing else than Jupiter Ammon, the Egyptian name for the Sun, is retained at this day, at the end of every creed, of every prayer, of every devotional form whatever; to intimate that by whatever other names the Lord may be addressed, they are all included and summed up in the name Amon—that is, the Sun, even 'the Father of Lights,' with whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning ; Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever ; whose sacred emblem you see here on our holy altar, sketched from an entablature found in the ruins of Naki-Rustan, near the temple of the God Mithra, in Persia—the Sun with wings, and the uplifted Serpent—-that mystic hieroglyph, which spake to the worshippers of the Sun a thousand years before our Christian era, none other than the purport of our sacred scriptures, both of the Old and New Covenant. (Greek Text).

' Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise, with healing in his wings.' Malachi 4.

Kai nadog- Mdyarjg vxjjoyae tov ocpiv ev tn eptitw, wtwc vuwovai del tov vlov tw Avopwtw. (Greek Text)

 

' And as Moses lifted up the Serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.' John iii. 14.

Under which you read the appropriate legend, which it would have been impious to translate from the ancient Orphic hymns:

 

" Of all natures, parent of all things, demon of many names."

Which Pope has versified into that truly Catholic stanza:
" Father of all, in every age,
In every clime adored ;
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord."

And understanding now who the Lord is, the unknown quantity is found, and the question is solved.

You can be no longer at a loss to tell why there should be just twelve apostles, through whom the great physician of our souls should diffuse his healing influences through the world ; and that each of their mystical characters should answer, as they do with an astonishing minuteness, to the respective physical phenomena of the twelve months of the year, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

 

P259
We before treated on the mysteries of the name of the Lord, as it is exclusively meant of the Lord of the Old Testament, and presented to the English reader the Hebrew word nnu, absurdly pronounced Jehovah, properly pronounced Yahouh, and synonymous with the very oldest Arabic name of the Supreme Deity, Yagouth, who was worshipped under the form of a Lion by the wild Arabs of the desert; who was the Lion of the Zodiac, or the Sun in the burning heat of the month of July ; who was the Lion of the tribe of nrr (Yahu-dah !) which we call Judah; who was the Sing-Avatar, or Man-Lion, of the Hindu, represented as bursting from a pillar to destroy a blaspheming monarch ; and who, in the sacred text of Hosea, xiii. 8, which is the same picture in words, is represented as speaking in character—'Therefore will I be unto them as a Lion ; as a Leopard by the way will I observe them. I will meet them as a Bear which is bereaved of her whelps, and I will rend the caul of their heart ; and there will I devour them like a Lion.'

The Egyptians, from whom, or unquestionably through whom, both the Jewish and Christian religions are derived to us, were the most refined in their superstitions of all nations, and veiled the whole of their astronomical science under the allegories and emblems of religion. Thus the name of the Lion of the Zodiacal constellations—in passing through the Yewv of the Greek, the Leo of the Latin, Le Lion of the French, and the similarly-formed word in all the languages of Asia and of Europe, even to our own word Lion,—retains in its etymon the original name of God ; El-Eon* — i.e., God, the living one, or the living God.

 

P261
The radical syllable of the word Lion—that is, On-eon, or Aon,—was the Amonian title of the Sun, and expressed that particular idea of eternal and necessary existence which all nations attached to their terms for the Supreme Being, and which is traceable in all his names and titles, even to our own English word one, the first of numbers, as God is one. In the supreme sense, the one and first of all things.

 

P272
Upon our certain knowledge, collected from independent sources, it appears that the priests of Egypt (the religion or astronomical allegory of both the Old and the New Covenant,—that is, the Old and New Projections of the Planisphere) calculated the procession of the Equinoxes with absolute accuracy, even to the same fifty seconds, nine-thirds, and three-fourths of a third of a moment, which is the calculation at this day ; yet we find an entire degree is lost or displaced in seventy-one years, plus eight or nine months : and, consequently, an entire sign is lost in 2152 years.

 

P273
Now, it being ascertained as it is, beyond all question, that the vernal equinoxial point was in the first degree of Aries, the Ram, or Lamb of God, in the year 388 before our vulgar era, (as it is now somewhat beyond the second of the fishes) it results that it was in the first degree of Taurus, the Bull, or Calf of God, exactly 2540 years before that time ; making 4370 from the present time, when the Vernal Equinoctial point, or the Sun's position upon entering into his heavenly kingdom, was in the foot of the calf; and, inferentially, this divine covenant or planisphere of the visible heavens was constructed.* And this is the solution of the sacred enigma, ' the sole of their foot was as the sole of a calf's foot.' Their having but one foot, when reckoning two for the eagle, two for the man, and four a-piece for the Lion and the Bull, there would at least have wanted twelve feet, is farther proof, that the sole of their foot being as the sole of a calf's foot, is a mystical indication of data or time, which being fixed and determined can necessarily be but one.
And as the Lion is the common emblem both of God and the Devil, so the cloven-foot was common to both those parties, as we find the Devil himself was worshipped by the Syrians, Cretans, and Canaanites, under the title Ab El Eon—that is, Abelion—that is, Father, God, the Son, or ' Our Father, which art in Heaven'—that is, the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name, in the Hebrew, says St. John, is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollo.

 

P 275
XVI. MOSES.
" But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their hearts,"—2 Corinthians iii. 15.

 

p296
He tells them, 'Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the Stars of your God Remphan.'

The Tabernacle of Moloch, being most certainly nothing else than the constellation Ursa-Major, the Greater Bear, or the Ass of Typhon, as the constellation was anciently called : and Moloch being the North or Pole Star itself, in the tail of that Bear or Ass, round which the whole heavens seem to revolve, as upon their pivot or imaginary axis.
Thus, as the whole heavens seem to ride round upon this Northern Ass, the ancients represented the God Bacchus as riding in triumph upon an Ass, who was their personification of the Sun.

P302
While the very name of tribes, or twelve tribes, is as technically astronomical a term as the name of the twelve signs of the Zodiac itself,—the word tribe actually meaning, and never having had any other meaning than a path or course, such as that of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac actually is. So the word (Greek), meant not a father or parent. It was a religious term, imported from Egypt, the same as Pator and Patora, the Amonian name of the Sun, whose priests were called Petor or Pator, in honor of the Sun ; and in their religious ceremonies they danced round a large fire, in representation of the Sun in the visible heavens.

Hence the name of Peter, the chief of the apostles of Christ, and the name Patriarchs, or most distinguished Peters given to the twelve tribes of Israel —that is, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, which really do seem to dance round the Sun in the annual revolution of the heavens.

 

P317
We must be heedful, never to confound the Lord with God. There is no necessary connection between them. They are NOT synonymus nor convertible terms, —so that the one might be used indifferently for the other. But far from it, very far. The one is particular, the other general', as we say with propriety, THE Lord, meaning particularly the figment with whom I am now to bring you acquainted, —but could hardly say the God. So that the compound epithet, the Lord- God, is a syncopation, or abbreviated phrase, of which the filling up is 'The Lord, who is a God.' For while all nations had their Gods, individual nations, sects, and clans, have ever had their particular conceits to which they adhered, subordinate to the general notion. So that it seemed but a fair bargain which Jeptha proposed to the King of the children of Amnion : ' Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy God giveth thee to possess ? So whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.' Judges, xi. 24.
Here we see, that Chemosh—that is, the literal Hebrew for the Sun, is synonymus with Ammon, as each nation called themselves the children of the Planet under whose protection they placed themselves : but God was the general term.

 

P319
And the mystical tetragrammaton, or name of four letters, or two syllables, Yahouh, which we absurdly pronounce Jehovah, is found in the 68th Psalm, written but with two letters, and necessarily requiring to be uttered but as one syllable, Yah Jah, or Jack, where certainly no irreverence is meant by that seemingly strange abbreviation. 'Sing unto God, —sing praises to his name. Extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and rejoice before him.'*

The attribute of ' riding upon the heavens,' is so peculiar, so distinctly marked, so incapable of being strained from its one and only apparent significancy, that nothing but that obdurate stupidity which shuts out light, and would say to itself, l I will not see the Sun,' could cause any man to mistake as to what that significancy must have been.
And this abbreviation of the name of Jehovah, into Jah, as peculiarly applied to him ' who rideth upon the heavens' —that is, the Sun, is precisely the same as the AEolic or Latin abbreviation of the name Solus — that is, the Alone, or the one by himself, into Sol— that is, the Sun, abbreviated for the same reason, expressive of the same significancy, and devised to confine the utterance, as well as the thought, to the same strict notion of unity or oneness.

 

P320
As in the beautiful astronomical apologue to which I shall hereafter engage your studies. i Then, spake Joshua unto the Lord in that day, and said, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon.' 'So the Sun stood still, and there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man.' Joshua, 10.

 

Thus may we, through all the modifications of Egyptian, Pagan, and Christian piety, indifferently substitute the name of the Sun for that of the Lord, They are perfectly synonymous : as to this day among ourselves, the Lord's-day, and the Sun's day means but one and the same day : Lords-day being the technical or cant phrase for that weekly marketday of imposture and priestcraft, when honest folks are obliged to shut up shop, that other folks may have all the custom to themselves, and nothing be bought or sold but gospel.

Our annual festival of Easter, when we gratulate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, from his state of declension and decadency, ' to renew the face of the earth,' was never held at any other season but the spring of the year, and never on any other day than on a Sunday, because it is the Sun, and the Sun alone, who is our Lord and Savior.

 

P322
The word Easter has been supposed to be derived from a Gaelish or ancient British Goddess, named Eastre, and analogous to the Egyptian Isis, whose mystical death and resurrection had been celebrated in the spring of every year, by our forefathers from the days of an infinitely remote antiquity : But the East and the Easter is so universal a metonymy for the Sun, which rises in the East : hence called the Orient or the JRiser, that if we are to entertain a doubt as to its being the Sun, and the Sun only, whose rising is celebrated on Easter Sunday, the difficulty would be to tell where the doubt is to come from. Our shrewder divines have expressed their vexation, that that awkward word Easter should have found its way into the text of ourNew Testament. ' Herod cast Peter into prison, intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.' Acts, 12. But Peter made his escape out of that prison in such a hurry as to leave one of his keys behind him.

 

P326
XIX. WHO IS THE LORD?
Part ii.

It is, then, absolutely not true, to represent the ancient Paganism as a system of Polytheism; or to maintain that the intelligent among the ancient Indian, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Grecian people, really worshipped the various emblems of their sacred science.

The very names of many of those emblems contain specific evidence that they held to one God only, and his name to be unutterable, and his nature incomprehensible.
It is Christians alone who have been really and truly Idolatrous and Polytheistical.

P330
I appeared unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as Baal Shadai ; but by my name Yahouh, was I not known unto them. Baal Shadai, our translators have rendered God Alnrghty : a complete admission that Baal Shadai. Belzebub, and God Almighty, are one and the same deity.

Yet so positive a declaration notwithstanding,- we find Abraham repeatedly addressing the Lord by his name Yahouh : a contradiction so gross, as clearly to prove that the writer of the book of Exodus could never have seen the book of Genesis.

The name Baal literally signified THE Lord ; the Sun, as will be seen in all its compounds:
Baal-Ha-mon, the Lord, the Sun.
Baal Berith, Lord of the Covenant.
Baal Peor, Lord of the Opening.
Baal Perazim, Lord of the Divisions.
Baal Zephon, Lord of the North ; aye, and
Baal Zebub, Lord of Flies :
Inasmuch as he, being a God kissing carrion, breeds maggots, and thence flies in putrid vegetable
and animal substances: and hence:
Baal Berith, Lord of Purification, the Sun purifying all things.
Baal Samen, Lord of the Heavens.
Baal Aitun, the Mighty Lord.
Baal Elion, the Lord Most High.

Can we wonder then, that the ancient religionists should have been perplexed and pestered as they were with eternal feuds and controversies, as to whether the Lord were God, or Baal were God—that is, whether they should say Yahouh Alehim or Baal Alehim, when both names had precisely the same signification, and the same reference—that is, to the Sun ; as we find Yahouh complaining of his people, in the 23d of Jeremiah, that their fathers had forgotten his name in that of Baal. Snekchu abutem at shemi be Bole.
While, in the 2d of Hosea—(that is, of Jesus)—v. 16, is the prophecy, c And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi (or Itchy), and shalt no more call me Baal.'

P332
The name Jupiter is precisely the same as that which we so egregiously pronounce Jehovah : for the four letters of which it is composed are J, E, U, E, which, pronounced as one syllable, is Jew, to which the addition of Pater, or father, for the greater reverence makes Jupiter, the Pater being dropt in all the other cases of the noun. The Jeue, or Jeve, uttered in the most solemn manner, became Jove.

 

P346
The true pronunciation of the word which we call Moses is,' says the learned Volney, ' Moushah'*
Philo Judseus—that is, Philo the Jew, tells us that the name is Mws, Mose, which is the Egyptian name for water: and Josephus, in nearly the same way, derives it from Mo, water, and Uses, which he says signifies 'those who are saved out of the water.'

Gregory of Nyssa takes the safer way of telling us, out and out, that the whole word (Greek) signifies water. But if the more careful Philo be to be depended on, Mwc (Greek) is the Egyptian word for water ; and EES, as the learned Bryant shows, is Fire, and was one of the titles of the Sun: the whole together making water and fire, which was the combined name under which the River Nile was worshipped ;

 

P349
When the Egyptians worshipped the River Nile, as they most certainly did, it must puzzle invention to imagine how they could worship the river otherwise than by worshipping the water, or by showing most extraordinary respect, and attaching most extraordinary notions of sanctity and of sanctifying qualities to water, and to that Nilometer or Cross with which they measured the depth of the inundation : which Cross was itself adored in the Temple of Serapis, who was the same as Nilus, and which name Serapis is, in the language of Egypt, the same as Salvator Mundi —that is, the Savior of the World.

 

P357
I showed in my last discourse, that the Christ of the New Testament speaks of himself, and is throughout spoken of in the character of the personified genius of a river. And that the Sanscrit name of the River Nile is Christina: which is absolutely none other than the name Christ And that Serapis, which is another name of the River Nile, is the Egyptian or Coptic for the words Salvator Mundi—i. e. the Saviour of the World. As the very ancient medals of Alexandria exhibit the effigies of the Nile on the one side, and of Serapis on the other, and the legend under each respectively, to the Nile the Holy God, and to Serapis the Holy God. And that Hues, which is another name of the same river, is none other than the very I. H. S. which is inscribed on our Christian altars; and which, read as it should be, as Greek, and not Roman letters, is IHS, which, with the Latin termination us, is Jesus, the common name of Bacchus, as the personified genius of the Nile, and of the Nazarene, the twice-living demon of the Jordan.
 

[pi3141]

Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures

 

 

P150 - 154

The Jews located their temples so that the four corners pointed N.E., S.E., S.W., and N.W., and the sides directly North, East, South, and West, and like all solar temples the main entrance was in the East, so that the rising Sun might illumine its portal and herald each day the victory of light over the powers of darkness; this to bring to the nascent humanity the message that the contest of light and darkness on the material plane is but the counterpart of a similar contest in the moral and mental worlds where the human soul is groping its way towards the light, for the battle of light and darkness in the material world, like all other phenomena, is a suggestion of the realities in the invisible realms, and these truths were given to man as myths by divine leaders who led him until his growing intellect gave birth to arrogance which caused his benefactors to withdraw, and let him learn by the hard knocks of experience. Then he forgot them and has come to regard the ancient stories of gods and demigods as imaginary.

 

Yet, even the early Christian church was imbued with this knowledge of the significance of the solar myth, for the Cathedral of St. Peter at Rome is built facing East, like all other solar temples, telling humanity of the “Great Light of the World” who is to come and dispel the spiritual darkness which as yet envelops us; the Light-bringer who shall bring peace on Earth and good will among men, causing the nations to beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning-hooks.

 

The Jews greeted the Sun with the Morning-sacrifice; and took leave of him at sunset in a similar manner by an evening oblation, offering up on their sabbath an additional sacrifice to the lunar “Race-god,” Jehovah. Him they also worshiped by sacrifice at the New Moon.

 

One great feast was Easter, when they celebrated the Passover; the time when the Sun “passes over” his “easter(n) node; leaving the southern hemisphere where he winters and commencing his northern journey in his chariot of fire, hailed with joy by men as their savior from hunger and cold which would inevitably result if he stayed in south declination always.

The last of the Jewish feasts and the most important is the feast of the Tabernacles, when the Sun crosses it western node in autumn, having yielded to man the “bread of life” wherewith to sustain his material being until the next return of the Sun to the northern heavens.

 

For the above reasons the six southern signs which the Sun occupies in winter are always called “Egypt,” the “land of the Philistines,” etc.—a name for something that is bad for “God’s people”; whereas the northern signs in which the Sun is in the fruitful season are “heaven,” “the promised land,” which “flows with milk and honey.”

 

We see this in such passages as the one where the celebration of the Passover is enjoined “to remember the coming out of Egypt.” This feast is a rejoicing over the emergence of the Sun from the southern signs, also from the recorded fact that Jacob was with Joseph in Egypt when he died. At the winter solstice when the Sun of the past year has completed its journey and reached its lowest degree of south declination it is in the zodiacal sign Sagittarius. By reference to Genesis 49:24 where the dying Jacob speaks of the “bow” of Joseph, it is easy to identify him with the sign Sagittarius which represents a centaur in the act of drawing his bow, and thus the story of Jacob dying in Egypt with Joseph, is re-enacted each year when the Sun dies in the sign Sagittarius at the winter solstice.

 

The story of Samson is another phase of the solar myth. As long as Samson’s hair was allowed to grow, his strength would increase; Samson is the Sun, and its rays represent Samson’s hair. From the winter solstice in December to the summer solstice in June the Sun’s rays grow, and he gains in strength with every day. This frightens the “powers of darkness,” the winter months, the Philistines, for if this Light-bringer continues to reign their kingdom will come to an end; and they counsel together against Samson to discover wherein his strength lies. They secure the cooperation of the woman Delilah, which is the sign Virgo, and when Samson, the Sun, passes through that sign in September he is said to have laid his head in the woman’s lap, and to have confided his secret to her. She shears him of his locks, for at that time the rays of the Sun grow shorter, and lose their strength. Then the Philistines or winter months come and carry the debilitated giant into their prison: the southern signs where the Sun is in winter.

 

They put out his eyes or deprive him of his light and at last bring him to their temple, their stronghold, at the winter solstice; there they subject him to infamous indignities, believing they have vanquished the light completely, but with his last remaining strength the fettered solar giant shatters their temple and although he dies in the effort, he overcomes his enemies and thus leaves the way clear for another Sun-child to be born to save humanity from the cold and famine which would result if he had remained bound in the toils of the powers of darkness, the Philistines, the winter months.

 

The lives of all the saviors of mankind are also founded upon the passage of the Sun around the circle of the zodiac, which pictures the trials and triumphs of the Initiate, and the fact has given rise to the erroneous conclusion that these saviors never existed, that the stories are merely Sun-myths. This is wrong. All divine teachers sent to man are cosmic characters, and the ordering of their lives is in accord with the marching orbs, which contain, as it were, an anticipated biography of their lives. Each came with divine spiritual light and knowledge to help man to find God, and therefore the events in their lives were in accord with the events which the physical light-bearer, the Sun, encounters on his pilgrimage through the year.

 

The Saviors are all born of an immaculate Virgin, at the time when darkness is greatest among mankind, as the Sun of the coming year is born, or begins his journey, on the longest night of the year, when the zodiacal sign Virgo, the Virgin, stands on the eastern horizon in all latitudes between 10 and 12 P.M. She remains as immaculate as ever, after she has given birth to her Sun-child; hence we see the Egyptian goddess Isis sitting on the crescent moon nursing her divine Babe Horus; Astarte, the immaculate lady of Babylon, with her babe Tammuz and a crown of seven stars over her head; the lady Devaki in India with her infant Krishna, and our own Virgin Mary giving birth to the Saviour of the Western World under the star of Bethlehem. Everywhere the same story: the immaculate Mother—the divine Babe—and the Sun, Moon, or stars.

 

As the material Sun is weak and has to flee from the powers of darkness, so all these divine light-bringers are searched for and forced to flee from the powers of the world; and like the Sun, they always escape. Jesus fled before King Herod. King Kansa and King Maya are his counterparts in other religions. The baptism occurs at the time when the Sun passes through the sign Aquarius, the Waterman, and when he goes through the sign of the Fishes in March we have the fast of the Initiate, for Pisces is the last of the southern signs, and all the stores laid by from the bounteous gifts of the Sun of the previous year are nearly exhausted, and man’s food is scant. The fish-food of Lent which occurs at this time is a further corroboration of this solar origin of the fast At the vernal equinox the sun “crosses the equator” and at that time the “crossification” or crucifixion occurs, for then the Sun-god commences to give his life as food for his worshipers, ripening the corn and the grape, which is made into the “bread and wine.” To do that he must leave the equator and soar heavenward. Similarly it would benefit humanity nothing spiritually if their saviors stayed with them, therefore they soar heavenwards as “sons (or suns) of righteousness,” ministering to the faithful from above, as the Sun does for man when high in the heavens.

 

The Sun attains its highest point of north declination at the summer solstice; he then sits upon “the throne of his father,” the Sun of the previous year; but he cannot remain there more than three days, then he is carried downwards towards his western node. Likewise the Saviors of mankind ascend to the throne of the Father, to be reborn from time to time for the good of mankind, which truth is embodied in the sentence of the Nicene creed: “thence he shall return.”

 

 

Edited July 24 by pi3141