© AV Phibes, evilkid.com
This is a great, juicy season for those rooting around in the attic of the Western Mystery Tradition - the Sirian Dog-days from the Solstice through Sinjin's Day (er, the Nativity of John the Baptist); almost as rich as Umbers (October 13) through Halloween, or say the week around Christmas when St. Everybody and His Dog get a Feast day.
Strap in, it gets bumpy: John the Baptist is, for our purposes, not an historic person but rather a job description, being either a Priest of Oannes or the actual Incarnation of Big (mitre-headed) Fish Daddy Himself - a possible Dogon-worshipped alien from Sirius B, who is also Jonah, swallowed by (incorporated into) Leviathan, which is a precursor to Christ's three days in Hell, as is JBap (who is NOT the Beloved Disciple even though it makes a great deal of sense for him to be)'s sacrifice, being the severing of the head (higher self) at the wishes of Salome (the earthy, lustful, belly-dancing self), making him into the archetype of the Dying God and giving the Templars a head to worship later on (even though the Atbash cipher renders "Baphomet" into "Sophia") just as Bran the Blessed who was the son of a sea god had his severed head worshipped and served as the prototype for the Fisher King. Plus, I'm pretty sure you could work a Lovecraft thing in there without a great deal of effort.
See? Archetype-a-palooza. What's really going on here? The mistake is in assuming that there's one, intelligible story. Certainly there are echoes of an Initiatic mystery tradition, and specific ideas about sacrifice, individuation, and the hero's journey. There is also real history, such as the identification of the Templar relic. The myriad myths resonate into actual history before long, and the waters are muddy indeed. This process - the need to concretize the abstract - is an artifact of the idea of Incarnation itself, and the key to all Western religion.
What do we do with this? We go inward, and we go outward.
Outwardly, for our own sanity, we don't need to hunt down "what happened", but rather understand what people "thought" happened, and how that affected their decisions. There need not be aliens crashing into New Mexico to create a UFO panic, or for cultists to overdose in their bunks in hope of hitching a ride (and a weather-balloon ride with Japanese progeria patients with radiation poisoning is probably not what they had in mind). The Merovingians don't need to actually be Jesus' grandkids, but knowing that a bunch of people thought they were explains a few things.
Inwardly, however, the responsibility of the individual Gnostic is to savour these relationships, and learn how they resonate within our own gnosis, test them on the battlefield of our inner landscapes, see how these stories illuminate the heart. It's all a koan, a trick of fullness that can only be solved by emptiness (kenosis).
7 comments:
BTW - I have minted the phrase "spacephibian" to wrap up the whole Dogon/Dagon Sirius B Oannes Merovingian-frogmen Archetype. What do you think? Tim?
oh so that's how it is eh? please forgive my mere historicism. ;) & thanks for another fine post.
heh, spacephibian is awesome!
let's not forget the mayan popul vuh, which also contains a story of a guy who gets baptized in water by trasforming into a fish-man and loses his head in the process.
so what's the iconography for 'st. everybody & his dog'?
BS"D
Food for thought. Altho' using AT-BaSH on one non-Hebrew word to come up with another non-Hebrew word is not meaningful. It's like saying a wrench & pliers are always interchangeable, regardless of the job which needs doing. Any time you use the wrong tool, you'll do a passable job, but not quite the best one.
& it doesn't matter how many Israelite symbols are used to dress up in, that don't make it synonymous, you know. Like, a circ doesn't make you a Jew...
That's absurd - using a cipher, ANY cipher, to encrypt word A into word B to conceal word A is perfectly "meaningful". Remember we're not talking "revealed insight" here, we're talking good ole fashioned deliberate encryption.
The idea is not to confuse a wrench with pliers, or to pretend to make something Jewish. The idea is to call a wrench a snoodleznarp when you don't want outsiders to know you're talking about a wrench.
I am aware that one can employ wonderful Gematrian tricks like the AtBash cipher to analyze Hebrew words and meditate on their relationships. That's not what I'm suggesting is happening here.
BS"D
Ah, good, then. I stand corrected. Thank you.
severing of the head (higher self) at the wishes of Salome (the earthy, lustful, belly-dancing self)
I think that's actually backwards according to the method with which I'm reading this myth now. The head is not the "higher self" at all. It is the illusion of control and the false attachment to identity which must be sacrificed, and that this sacrifice is a good and worthwhile thing is evidenced by the simple fact that Salome comes from "shalom" - peace.
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