 |
| Aboriginal Australia, c12,000 BCE |
The 19th century French philosopher August Comte, the man who invented both the science, and the name of the science, of Sociology, divided the epochs of human development into the "Mythological" (when humans explained the world anthropomorphically, through allegories, as in the earliest books of the Tanach), the "Metaphysical", (when abstract thought began, somewhere around the 6th century BCE, somewhere around the age of 10 in human children), and the "Phenomenological" (the epoch of forensically-evidenced science that we like to think we inhabit today).
To understand the Tanach we need to engage with the Mythological, and not try to see it (and thereby falsify it) through the lenses of its successor epochs; we need, that is to say, to understand the nature of myths and the purpose of mythologising. And to do that requires a leap of the imagination - a poetic leap, and a leap into the poetic.
Imagine, then, the world of primitive men and women ("Daddy, why does the sun always get out of bed on this side of the cave, but get back into bed on that side?"). You live surrounded by dense forests that stretch for hundreds of miles, and which are inhabited by every manner of wild beast ("Mummy, why are all the leaves and fruit falling off the trees?"). You live in caves, or in shelters made of daub and wattle, palm leaves, anything adaptable that comes to hand ("Grandpa, that's three lunar eclipses that we've seen, and always at the time of the full moon; is it possible for there to be an eclipse when the other moons are in the sky?"). You dress, if at all, in the skins of the animals you have hunted, whose meat you have also eaten ("Grandma, why do chickens and snakes and turtles lay their eggs and hatch them outside, but cows and sheep and people keep and hatch them inside?"). You are preoccupied by fear: fear of hunger, fear of wild animals, fear of the elements. All these control your life - all these have power over you, and are the powers that control your life.
You live nomadically, or at least semi-nomadically; you follow the seasons because the animals you hunt follow the seasons, and the fruits you gather likewise. Your technology is primitive, but your science is highly sophisticated. At night there is little else to do around the campfire but watch the patterns of the stars and planets as they move around the heavens, and you know the lives of all the constellations, as well as their effect upon the Earth.
Better still you know the moon, the waxing and waning crescents, the time when the moon is full, the link to the menstrual cycle and the tides. You revere and fear the sun most of all - bringer of light and life but also maker of fires and thirst, and a killer when it blazes in the summer months. In the winter you mourn the sun's absence and long for its rebirth. In spring and summer and autumn you are grateful for its warmth and for the ripening of the fruits, but you also pray for rain to water them.
And you know the herbs, the berries, the leaves, the plants, the ferns, the vines, the trees, and how to clip the vines to help them grow. You know which ones bring intoxication and which can heal, which are poisonous and which make for health-giving food. Your life is dominated by Nature in every aspect, and your knowledge of it is far more intimate and detailed than any modern man or woman's.
Yet you live with it in a relationship that is equally of need and fear. It is more powerful than you, and it bullies you at every moment with the threat of death. In every aspect of it there lives a power which, metaphorically, for want of a better term, you have come to call by a god-name - but not the modern "God", etymologically rooted in the modern dualistic philosophy that separates Good from Evil in a way no primitive would have understood. To him the gods were powers, the kinetic and dynamic impulses that drove the world, and each one was potentially good and bad, beneficent and maleficent; there was no moral side to these powers, they merely existed, and it was your job to propitiate them so that, hopefully, they would work in your favour.
 |
Cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche
c 25,000 BCE
|
Imagine the hunter who is about to set off in pursuit of a wild boar or buffalo. On the walls of the caves in Perpignan have been found paintings, more than 20,000 years old, which depict the hunt. A near-naked man lifts a javelin. A speared boar lies prostrate. A sacrificial fire burns, roasting the boar, the smell wafting heavenwards to allow the boar-god - the divine power that protects all boars - to share the meal, and know you have not killed one of his creatures out of wickedness. Because in killing a boar you have killed a god - for in each creature there lives the force of life, which is precisely what a god or power is. Other boars will take revenge unless the boar-god is propitiated. The anger at seeing the killing causes his nostrils to flare up; only the smell of good gravy will calm them down again. Thus the rite of sacrifice is added to the rite of informing the god in advance of what you propose to do; and with it, the pre-hunt ceremony, the war-paint, and the Maori-like Haka.
Imagine the cave-dweller whose child is bitten by a scorpion or snake. Fear of the child's death leads you to call upon the scorpion-god or the snake-god, to make a deal. Save my child's life and I will sacrifice to you something else of value - a hunted animal, later, once pastoral life was established, the very best animal from the flock.
 |
| Egyptian pyramid carving, c1800 BCE |
And once the boar-god and the scorpion-god have been invented in order to be invoked, there is a need to explain them to the next generation, so tales of their lives come into being, and liturgies for ceremonies that are worth repeating, because on the last occasion they proved successful. So the cults and the myths are born.
The lives of the trees, the animals and plants, the cosmic "hosts", the winds and tides, the catastrophes like floods and earthquakes, especially the lives of those primitively scientific explanations of the working of the universe known as "the gods", all of these came to be described poetically through the mythic tales - what we today call fairy tales and read only to our children, and only as entertainment, blind and oblivious to their real meanings.
The life of the moon is the most often told. A story of constant rebirth and re-dying, the battle between the waxing and the waning halves, the joyous festivals when she is uterus-full. And the moon is almost always feminine (male moon deities are late patriarchal): because of her link to the tides and the menstrual cycle. She is the ultimate symbol of the way life works, though she needs the sun for her consort. Her symbols are all those other creatures who likewise symbolise rebirth - and none more so than the giant serpents and dragons which slough their skins in order to be reborn. The stories of Jesus, Adonis, Tammuz and many others are stories of the moon's life...
So primitive man made his myths, and out of these myths evolved his rites and rituals, his ceremonies. What was the most powerful - intense colour, longevity, extraordinary height or shape, as much as the creature's value as food, clothing, shelter - became the most sacred. Certain trees became sacred at all times - like the oak whose longevity is proverbial and which has the capacity to attract lightning. Others were seasonally sacred, or linked to certain months or days, as were stars and planets.
The world was explained, understood, rendered personal - and as such it no longer frightened [quite so much!]. Life was a simple [?] relationship between Humankind and Nature: the covenant of the sacred bond. I will make sacrifice, I will treat as sacred, I will perform certain ceremonies, I will find human ways to show that my dependence on you is self-chosen; and in return, you, the powers of Nature, will give me a good hunt, a fertile wife, long-life for me and all my family, protection from the animals and elements, security from enemies. The key to this bond (this covenant) was the performing of sacrifices - meaning to give something up that one values in order to receive something else that one values more.
Thus the primitive world, probably starting as much as two hundred thousand years ago. But around 10,000 BCE - see the last pages of Ancestry of the Patriarch 1 - a major change happened in the world: modern civilisation was born in the breaking open of the Emmer Wheat. Man had discovered agriculture, and could cease to be nomadic if he so chose. The first cities rose up, probably in the Gangetic Plain. The world was still largely nomadic, but sedentarism had begun. In Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates offered fertile and arable land, as well as access to water for irrigation. Along the Mediterranean coast from Azah to Byblos. In the green hills of northern Ashur (Syria) and southern Chet (Turkey). Along the Nile Delta. Man the hunter-gatherer could live anywhere, in any climate and upon any terrain - forest, desert, hill or mountain. But sedentary man, city-building man, requires specific conditions. No use marshland, no use desert, no use forest, no use high mountain. Fertile valleys. And in the inhabited world at that time - the Middle East and India esentially - this was strictly limited.
The development of agriculture and the sedentary life led to an evolution in the cults and rites and myths. The needs of the people being different, their means of propitiation changed. But also, having subdued some parts of nature, their view of the gods changed too. The domesticated bull was nothing like so frightening as its progenitor, the wild buffalo. A farm sow was not the same as a wild boar. A river's capacity to flood was not the same as one channeled into irrigation canals and rines and dykes. Dam up a river and you assume dominion over the waters. Lame a billy goat and you are its master. The cults of the cattle breeders and shepherds and early planters form an entirely new layer of mythology, and we can watch - in the Greek myths in particular, but also in the Tanach - the process of change and evolution in their stories. It is still about Nature, still stellar and lunar and solar, but things have moved on. Ouranos has been castrated by Chronos, who in his turn has been usurped by Zeus.
The earliest known cities are Warak in Mesopotamia (Av-Rraham's Ur Kasdim), Nin'veh in Northern Ashur, Yericho by the Dead Sea - all of them dedicated to the moon-goddess rather than the sun-god, all of them dated around 9000 BCE.
Wave upon wave of tribes spread out from the Gangetic Plain and the hills of Urartu - the source of the "common source". They developed personalised anagrams out of the same original myths, evolving variations of the same religious cults and rites and traditions, forming dialects of the same language. Racially they were the same genus. These people had come eastwards out of the deserts of Africa scores of milennia earlier, some stopping to inhabit the Middle East, others continuing on. But at the eastern side of India they reached a stop; to go beyond it meant crossing the Himalayas, and then the Gobi Desert. Few went, though enough did go to create China and later on Japan. But most found the barrier insurmountable, and began to return westwards, into Persia first, then Iraq (Mongol invasions continued for milennia - until today actually). Some went northwards, into Russia, and spread out slowly towards Scandinavia. These people became the Slavs and Nordics. Others went south into Mesopotamia, settling along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, or into the Gulf of Arabia. Some occupied the Jordanian desert to the west, remaining nomadic and Bedouin. But most from Iraq turned in some degree northwards, into Ashur and Urartu, then west again, until they reached Kena'an, Levanon, Mitsrayim.
And having filled up all these areas, having reached the sea and learned the craft of boat-building, they went further west, ocupying Cheret (Crete) and Kaprisin (Cyprus), the Greek peninsula, Italy. And on into Europe, and to Britain.
In all these lands the language root is Unknown (probably a dialect of Ape-Grunt), though 12,000 years of evolution may make it hard to see how Welsh and German and Demotic Greek can be the same as Serbo-Croat and Icelandic and Yehudit (Hebrew). But so they are. And so too are the myths and rites and ceremonies of the religious cults in every way identical - in every way except the personal pronouns. But when we read that Merlin saw a dragon mouthing fire across the heavens, and informed King Uther that the dragon augured the birth of a new king with the most important mission ever for Humankind, he is reflecting the star in the east that heralded the birth of Jesus; when he tells King Uther that the child will only be given him if he agrees to let Merlin bring him up, he is reflecting Eli and Hannah's consecration of Shemu-El as a Nazir; and when King Uther assumes the name Pen-Dragon he is in fact reflecting the Yehudit Ben (בן), the Arabic Ibn, meaning "son of" or "belonging to (see under Og); and when he gives orders for a statue of the dragon to be carried into battle, he is reflecting the brazen serpent Nechushtan that Mosheh carried.
Yet Mosheh was really Osher (Osiris), the earth-god of Mitsrayim, whose ark, itself a reflection of the chariot of Helios the sun-god, which daily makes its journey across the waters of the sky, would later be transmogrified into the very different Arks of No'ach and King David - one a physical boat, the other a sedan chair for the royal Law.
The myths that we know today, and the cults associated with them, mostly belong to the Bronze Age, starting around 3000 BCE and ending around 1250 BCE, when the Iron Age began (see The Ancestry of the Patriarch 3). In this period, beside the bronze itself, we can see two major developments (mutations?, stages in human evolution?): the switch from nomadic herding to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle with stock-breeding (starting in Asia Minor and Northern Mesopotamia around 7500 BCE, Southern Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE; the Semites tamed the donkey and the camel, the Aryans the horse), and the development of human intelligence (writing, mathematics, monumental architecture, systematic observation of the heavens, temple worship, kingship - the fundaments of civilisation). All these are reflected in the multitude of religious faiths and practices of the time.
*
1) THE SACRED GROVE
Belongs to sedentary people involved in tree husbandry: vines, olives, fruit et cetera; especially dates and figs, quince and pomegranate, those fruits which are either very obviously seeds themselves in the way they cluster, or contain large quantities of seeds. In a sense it is derivative of, and connected to, the cult of the oak, since that too is tree-based, but this is about the fertility of the fruit, whereas oaks are about the secondary florescences, the mistletoe, the acorns and most especially the great age of the tree (there is a Californian sequoia at the Natural History Museum in London which is reckoned to have lived fully 1300 years!). So we must consider the cults as separate.
The grove may stand on a hilltop, or it may be a clearing in some larger forest; or it may be a human-constructed orchard or vineyard or garden. It is a combination of many trees, usually of the same type, though not always; other than the sacral trees, which are inside the grove, the remaining trees provide a hedge or fence or boundary. The grove has a BA'AL who must be propitiated first (hence the various festivals, rites, fasts etc of the first fruits, harvests etc). Each tree has its own EL (אל) - the word literally means "power" or "force" which is why the modern Israeli airline is called El Al: "onwards and upwards" - and all the tree ELIM (אלים) together may give us the name ELOHIM (אלהים) as a corruption of the multiple plural ELAYIM (אליים).
The fertility-goddess must also be propitiated, since she is responsible for the fruits of the trees, and the soil in which the trees grow, while the EL rules the tree itself, and the BA'AL rules the whole grove, or rather the land on which the grove is established (as opposed to the soil, which in Yehudit is ADAMAH, and therefore, clearly, belongs to the earth-god Adam himself).
The fruit may be used in the rites, and is represented in pictures, idols and figureens as belonging to the goddess. The cult connects to the sun as much as to the moon - the moon controls fecundity but it requires sunlight for the fruit to ripen - but also includes other ELIM because of the dependence on rain etc at the appropriate times.
Unlike the cult of the oak, the sacred grove cult is seasonal, though different trees have different seasons, and some are evergreen. As with the oak-cult, shrines grow up around or within the grove, with one or more trees considered the most sacred. The principal sacred grove cult story in the Tanach is the Garden of Eden, but we hear about the Asherim, which were probably totem poles cut and designed from the tree trunks, and Ashterot, which may have been statuettes of the goddess hung from the trees like fairies on a Christmas tree, and names like Tamar (date) and Devorah (bumble bee) are connected to the fruits.
The 15th of Shvat is the New Year of Trees. The 6th of Sivan is the start of the season of vine-tending. The 15th of Elul is the starting date for the olive harvest. 15, because that it always the full moon in the lunar calendar, and 15 in Yehudit is written Yud-Heh (יה), which of course is also the name of moon-goddess. Hallelu-Yah.
Different groves of course had different trees, and each tree was sacred to a different deity. The willow (osier), for example, was sacred in the Greek world to Hecate, Hera and Persephone, all of them death aspects of the moon-goddess. The English word "witch" is connected with "wicken" (spelled "wiccan" in Olde and Middle Aenglish), and "wicker", and gave rise later on to the word "wicked"; wicker is made from the dried branches of the willow. Druid sacrifices at the full moon were always made using wicker baskets. In Greek the willow is "helice", in Latin "salix", whence Helicon the abode of the Nine Muses, the orgiastic priestesses of the moon goddess. Originally Poseidon led the Muses, before Apollo took over from him at Delphi. Pliny the Elder says that a willow tree grew by Zeus' birth-cave on the island of Crete.
Hemlock was served to Hecate (white-flowered, mousey-smelling); Apollo began as the Demon of a Mouse-Fraternity; became patron of the arts, finally the sun-god himself; Belinus (Phoenician Ba'al, Cypriot Bel, British Belinus) was the intellectual god of light.
To the Greeks, Maia was the mother of Hermes. The connection here is to the May or Hawthorn.
Aharon's "magic wand" (Numbers 17:8) was a hazel; Menorah sconces were in the form of almonds, representing the rod when it budded open. Yirme-Yahu (Jeremiah) was shown this in a vision to confirm his initiation as a prophet (Jeremiah 1:11).
The oak was sacred to Av-Raham (the sun-god) and the pomegranate to Sha'ul (the god of the Underworld). The alder was banned from the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im (Graves: The White Goddess). The pomegranate was also sacred to Rimmon, a name for Adonis, from whose blood it is said to have sprung - and interestingly the pomegranate-shaped crowns that adorn the covering of every Torah scroll are known to this day as Rimmonim, though it is highly unlikely that most Jews are aware of the connection, any more than they would recognise their pet-name for the deity - Adonai, the Lord - as a Yehudit variation of Adonis, The Lord.
The paschal victim was split on pomegranate wood, and this was the only fruit allowed inside the holy of holies, being sewn in miniature on the High Priest's robes on his yearly entry. The other significant fact about the pomegranate that most Jews today do not know, and which again links it to Adonis, is that the custom at weddings of the groom stamping on a wine glass was originally the groom stamping on a ripe pomegranate, and stamping as hard as he could in order to spray as many people as possible with the hundreds of tiny seeds inside the fruit - like the catching of the bride's bouquet, it was believed that it spread fertility.
 |
| 500-year-old Chinkapin Oak, Oley Valley, PA |
2) THE CULT OF THE OAK
The oak tree in the Greco-Roman world belonged to Zeus/Jupiter and Herakles/Hercules, as well as to The Dagda in the Celtic tradition, Thor in the Norse, YHVH in the Yehudit, El in the Kena'ani. The vestal fires of the Roman world were fed with oak.
Nothing attracts lightning like an oak, unless possibly the ash. Poseidon the ash god and his brother Zeus the oak god are both depicted armed with thunderbolts, but after the Achaeans defeated the Aeolians Poseidon's became a trident or fish-spear, and Zeus ruled the oak trees and the lightning storms alone, just as Wotan did in the world of the Nibelungen.
Oak-oracles came to Europe via the Achaeans (aka the Dana'ans), replacing the beech. An oak-cult, known at Ammon in the Libyan desert, and another of Zeus at Dodona, were coeval, which is to say of the same epoch (these are not the Amonim of Biblical scripture, though they may well be the same Dodanim). The Ammon oak was looked after by a tribe known as the Garamantes, and the Greeks called Garamas "the first of men", an equivalent of Adam and Prometheus. Ammonite Zeus was depicted as a kind of Herakles with a ram's head, like that of Osher (Osiris) and Amun-Ra, the ram-headed sun-god of Egyptian Thebes. Herodotus noted that black doves migrated between Dodona and Ammon.
There are unquestionably more, but essentially there are three types of oak: the kerm, the holly and the terebinth, of which the latter is the most significant, since its branches give the most shade, its umbrella has the greatest expanse, and its longevity may be in excess of five hundred years.
The cult belongs to shepherds and goatherds, and especially to nomads. The nomad fears the sun (שמש - SAMAS or SHEMESH), who is a demon of fire and heat. He cannot travel by day, but does so by night, leading his herds, his wandering journey across the hills and desert being comparable with the moon's across the sky; he travels by light of the moon, whose absence he fears since the cloud-cover of darkness makes it difficult if not impossible to find his way; he uses the stars for a map, and especially the five planets (+ sun + moon = the sacred number Seven).
By day he rests and waters his flock. He needs a high place, to be able to see the flock wandering, and to look out for bandits. He needs a tree for shade. He needs water. And he needs to propitiate all these. Thus he arrives at the hilltop where the oak grows, and knows that the presence of the tree means the presence of water. Oak, hill and stream/well become sacred, and the gods which live in them are honoured. It is here that he performs his rituals to his other gods, especially the moon and stars.
The sacred shrine is made of twelve stones set in a circle - a Gil-Gal, a Stone Henge, a Round Table - symbolising the cycle of the year and the 12 constellations. The Gil-Gal is established and the hill (Chorev, Sinai, Eyval, Gerizim etc) become sacred places. The oak tree is the centre of the cult, because the oak owns the hilltop, and the god of the oak must give his blessing to the worshipper before the other gods can be addressed.
ELON (אלון) is the Yehudit name for a terebinth oak, which is probably derived from EL-ON meaning "the place of EL" or "the place in which the god/force/power of the tree dwells". EL-ELYON (Genesis 14:20) is not etymologically connected (Elyon has an ayin - ע, Elon an aleph - א), but the endless play of homonyms in the Tanach suggests that a connection was probably made anyway; El Elyon after all means the tallest and the greatest of the gods, while Av-Raham was living at Mamre, which hosted the mightiest of all the known oak trees in the region.
Ownership of the land implied ownership of the shrine, the tree, the water, the shade, the existing covenant with the deity, etc. To conquer the tribe implied taking over the shrine, if not also the cult. Examples of this occur throughout the Tanach, but especially in the books of Joshua and Judges.
The tree and shrine enter mythology through their longevity. The shrine becomes a caravanserai. It is known in the family through generations. The five hundred year old tree covers more than twenty generations! The longevity of some of the Bible's characters may in fact refer to tree-shrines and not to the individual person - the chief of the tribe, after all, is also the principal guardian of the tree, the shrine, the god; or the names may indicate tribes or families who "died out" or "begat sons" as and when the tree at last died. In Greek and other myths the chief of the gods is often replaced by his eldest son - this may hint at the growing up of a new principal tree to replace the dead or dying oak which was previously the centre of the shrine.
The terebinth oak (Pistacia terebinthus or Pistacia Palaestina) stands alone and brooks no rivals. This is because it can survive where there is little water, and where other trees could not survive; it may also be because it uses for itself what little water there is, preventing other trees from growing.
The terebinth is thus associated with ELOHIM, who is jealous and brooks no rivals, who is proud and solitary and belongs in the wilderness; who is connected to the moon. The acorns, mistletoe and other seeds and fruit may form part of the rites associated with the tree. The anthropomorphic description of the god comes from the physical characteristics of the cult object - i.e. a tree, for example, acquires sacred value - the tree is known to be solitary, broody, jealous or whatever, so the EL who inhabits the tree becomes the same; hence stormy seas make angry gods.
To a nomadic people, the oasis is as important as the wandering!
The nymph Cyllene was the wife of Pelasgus; the Pelasgians claimed their origins to have been in Kena'an (Canaan). Attis the son of Nana (presumably a variant of Inanna?), the Phrygian Adonis, was metamorphosed into a fir by Cybele when he was dying from the wound of Zeus' boar (clearly a variation of the Osher/Tammuz myth).
Heather was sacred to Venus in Egypt, but to Eshet (Isis) in Phoenicia (examples of people moving about and taking their cultures with them?).
Osher (Osiris) was immured in a heather tree at Byblos, where Eshet (Isis) went to seek him (other versions say a palm tree). Eshet is also known as Latona and Lat (a variation of al-Lat, the daughter of al-Lah?). Lat was the mother of Nabatean Dusares, the vine-god of Egypt - does this then also link us with Biblical Lot? Does it make Lot originally feminine? (I have speculated on this in the commentaries as well).
The Yew tree is univerally associated with death and cemeteries.
Yggdrasil is the World Ash-Tree in Norse mythology, a variant on the Tree of Life, and the same tree from which Siegmund drew Hunding's Sword in the Nibelungen Saga.
4) THE CULT OF THE CROP
The myth of eternal return reflecting the daily round of the sun, the waxing-waning moon with its three days of interlunary darkness, the cycle of the year, the rhythms of birth and death.
All primitive religions have a paradisal early time ("Dreamtime" etc), which ends with the first murder. The body is cut up and planted (i.e buried) in order to fertilise the earth (Remembrance Poppies; sunflowers of Auschwitz). Primitive rituals include cannibal communion, representing the murder scene (Hamlet, Orestes), the sexual act, and a festival meal celebrating the beginning when life and death, male and female were One (Purim, Adam and Chavah, Song of Songs), before they divided and became two.
 |
| Feeding Kali |
The Royal Tombs of Ur confirm that kings were sacrificed in the ritual manner, with courts interred alive, until at least 2350 BCE. In India until as late as 1600 CE, kings in the temple of the Black Goddess Kali (Yisaschar? the Black Madonna?) sliced themselves to bits. Even today goats are slaughtered at the Kalighat, her temple at Kolkata (Calcutta), during the autumn festival called Durga Puja. Rituals of India included human sacrifice until 1835, and the presentation of a human head on a golden platter to the goddess (cf Salome and John the Baptist); this was then eaten.
Should the tale of Kayin and Havel, i.e murder, not then come before the Fall? Indeed, is it not the reason for the Fall?
From 2350 BCE in Sumer, the king ceased to be a god and became his servant (a hugely significant change to keep in mind when we read the story of Av-Ram and Sarai), i.e a priestly role; instead of being sacrificed, he now offered sacrifices. With this came the new idea of a fixed moment of creation instead of eternal creation, and from this the idea of fall and restoration (tikkun).
Restoration mythology really starts with Zoroaster, circa 1200 BCE (aka 1200 years after the Creation, deemed to have happened in 2400 when the change described above took place). Zoroaster will return after another 12000 years as the Messiah Saoshyant, when Ahura Mazda will finally defeat Angra Mainyu - the Beney Yisra-El will have learned all this in exile (586-536 BCE) and brought it back with them, causing fundamental theological modifications that have remained in Judaism ever since. Cyrus (died 529 BCE) and Darius (521-486 BCE), who ruled from India to Greece, the two Persian monarchs who supported and encouraged the return of the exiles to Yehudah and assisted with the rebuilding of Yeru-Shalayim and the Temple, were both Zoroastrians.
5) ONE BECOMES TWO: the mythology of natural cell-division
|
|
|
Brueghel the Elder, The
Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man
|
Which came first, the butterfly or the caterpillar, the chicken or the egg, the male or the female? The first being Adam becomes Chavah as well, though the Midrashim dispute whether she was made from his rib or his tail.
In most myths it is the god himself who bifurcates, and in some Creation myths creation is itself the process of bifurcation (cf Genesis 1:1-2:3 for Tiamat) The idea is obviously linked to the observation of nature and early planting. Yin and Yang are the same - as are good-evil, life-death, male-female, sun-moon, night-day, winter-summer; but crucially different in the Yisra-Eli-Jewish world is the fact that these bifurcations are seen as functions of the One, and not as a description of the Two, which is why Judaism is monotheistic and Christianity, like Zoroastrianism, is dualistic. The planting cults, usually focused on Tammuz, or in the Greek world on Dionysus, are seasonally based and connected to the sun-god. The myths tell in metaphor the life of the crop, usually maize, barley or wheat, following the phases of ploughing, planting, tending, reaping and harvesting. The yellow colour of the crop also connects it to the sun. The principal planting cult story in the Tanach is that of Yoseph, who functions in the tale as an equivalent of the Egyptian corn-god.
Ezekiel 8:14 has women wailing for Tammuz at the north gate of the Temple - the northern quarter of the sky is the one quarter in which the sun, rising in the east and travelling south to set in the west, can never go; therefore it is the darkness of night, the Netherworld, the Moon's domain.
His Egyptian counterpart was Osher (Osiris), though elsewhere he was known, inter alia, as Adonis and Attis. Out hunting a wild boar when gored in the loin, he was rendered impotent; he descended in death to the lower world and was resurrected when the goddess (Ishtar/Isis/Aphrodite) descended to release him. Greek Orpheus, whose tale is reflected in that of Biblical King David, was also a variant of this. So was King Arthur.
Originally Tammuz was Dumuzi-Absu = "the faithful son of the abyss". (Absu yields the Yehudit "ephes - אֶפֶס" meaning "nothing", and the English "abyss"). Tammuz yields Shemesh = sun, whence Shimson/Samson. Dumuzi was elsewhere called Damu or Utu. His mother was Inanna before she became Ishtar.
The pictures of Mother Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb (John 20:11) reflect the rituals for dead Tammuz to the letter (cf Campbell, "The Masks of God", Vol 1,pp 416-8). Just as he was born among the threshed corn in the manger, so he was winnowed on the crosspoles at the shrine of Araunah (sometimes Ornah) in Yeru-Shala'im, the site acquired by David for the Temple precisely because Araunah was the waning phase of the Babylonian moon-cult.
Adonis is the Greco-Syrian equivalent of Osher (Osiris) and Tammuz (and thence the Yisra-Eli sobriquet Adonai for the deity). He was born from a tree which had previously been a maid named Myrrha; Myrrha had seduced her father, for which she was punished by being turned into a myrrh tree. Ovid, in Book X of the Metamorphosis, says: "The tree cracked, the bark tore asunder, and gave forth its living burden, a wailing boy", who was weaned by the goddess of birth, Lucina.
Myrrh in Yehudit is Mor (מור), which may be one of the sources of Mor-Yah, the holy mountain of the Akeda (the non-sacrifice of Yitschak in Genesis 22) and the Temple, as well as the names Mir-Yam (Miriam) and Mor-Yah (Mary) - key to the Jewish and Christian equivalents of the Tammuz-Adonis-Osiris story as Mosheh and Jesus. Mary Magdalene actually anoints Jesus with holy myrrh, and it is one of the gifts brought by the three magi (Mark 2:11). There is also a tale of Daphne being turned into a tree when pursued by the sun-god Apollo, though in her case the tree was a laurel. The tale of Lot contains echoes and similarities: his wife turned into a pillar of stone, his daughters getting him drunk to seduce him and father the Beney Mo-Av (Moabites).
|
Frey
and his golden solar boar Gullinborsti
|
6) THE PIG CULT
A separate heading, or an aspect of the planting cult? The first two domesticated animals, long before sheep and goats and bulls, way before horses and camels, were the dog and the pig, and we have to imagine the long process of hunting followed by taming that made the pig a dominant "deity" (they are, by the way, and I know from having farmed them for several years, one of the cleanest of the domesticated animals, inside and out; which puts a lie to the "hygiene" argument for their being taboo; now read on!).
Domestication probably began in western China (and it would be fascinating to add a paragraph on the genetic links to disease from Chinese pigs if someone has that expertise), thence west through India to the Middle East; Campbell and others dispute this, believing that they were domesticated in eastern Europe, or Siberia. From whatever source, pigs appeared in the Middle East in what is known as the Basal Neolithic age (see Ancestry of the Patriarch 2: Samarra 5,500 BCE); sheep, goats and cows appeared later, though sheep and goats were not always that easy to tell apart back then.
Constellation Capricorn is the goat (are other sacred animals also linked to stars? yes, dog-star Sirius, Aries the ram...); possibly Zeus' brother Aegipan, the kid of the goat Amalthea whose horn Zeus also placed among the stars; Zeus was born at mid-winter when the sun is in Capricorn (but so were Dionysus, Apollo and Mithras, not to mention JC - the link is Sol Invictus, the rebirth of the solar year, and its date today should be December 21st, not 25th).
The pig appears in the Thesmophoria festivities that belong with the myth of Persephone and Demeter, in the tales of Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osher, Odysseus and Circe, and in Éirish
fairy-lore as well; but the myths cease once sheep and cattle are domesticated, whereas in China they continue regardless.
The moon-link lies in the tusks of the boars, which are moon-shaped crescents - the same of course is true for goats and horned sheep and any other horned animal where the horns don't antler.
At an epoch when humans understood that there was a god in every animal (a force of nature with a sexual and a survival instinct: it was, as noted above, that kinetic impulse that was regarded as the god, not the animal itself), then sacrifice, the ceremonial activity through which the god gave permission to be eaten, and with a part of the beast given back to the god and a part reserved for the priests - makes sense. What seems to have happened originally is that the boar was eaten, but not the sow. But to the Beney Yisra-El, who lived when the boar had virtually become extinct, and where pigs were no longer farmed, the tabu was transformed into Kashrut.
Egyptian Set, disguised as a boar, killed Osher as an ivy. Apollo as a boar killed Apollo/Tammuz. Finn McCool (Fionn mac Cumhaill) as a boar killed Diarmuid, the lover of Greine - a variation on Arthur and Guinevere. An unknown god as a boar killed Anceus of Arcadia, the lover of Artemis in his vineyard at Tegea.
Horus' boar-hunt is also of significance. In Mesopotamia the hunt was for a bull, and the myths make clear it was specifically a moon-bull: so the cow becomes the tabu animal in the same way as the sow. In the tale of Persephone it is likewise a pig. Ovid (Metamorphosis, Book 10) says that Adonis was killed by a boar, as was Phyrgian Attis. The boar and the bull thus become symbols of the abyss, Set's kingdom, which carries over into Kashrut and may be an additional reason why pork is prohibited.
The hare and the pig were both tabu in ancient Britain. Yesha-Yahu tells us that the Kena'ani of Yeru-Shala'im held a pig-feast at mid-winter (Isaiah 65:4, 66:17 et al), consuming the boar's head in particular - today Christians do the same, but prefer turkey. Certain fish were also tabu is Britain, as they were in Egypt, and also various birds, generally the same list of birds of prey that we find at Deuteronomy 14:11-18 - but remember that tabu does not mean "forbidden", but only "sacred", and therefore entirely permissible to eat it, at the prescribed times.
7) HUNTING CULTS
Planting cults tend to focus on the group, where hunting cults focus on the individual.
These had all but died out by the time of Av-Raham, though some traces remain. See especially the tabu of the pig, domesticated from the wild boar; also the tale of Kayin and Havel, which appears to reflect the conflict between the hunters and the farmers in the early years of that human transition. But essentially, unlike any other culture anywhere on the planet, there are neither myths nor legends nor historical accounts of the hunting of birds or beasts of any kind in the Yisra-Eli-Jewish tradition (Sha'ul looking for his father's donkeys in 1 Samuel 9 doesn't really count!).
8) FISHING CULTS
Unlike their immediate neighbours the Phoinikim, the Beney Yisra-El were not famously sea-going fishermen (though the blessing of the twelve tribes by Ya'akov in Genesis 49 does at least reference the sea - Zevulun in verse 13 getting what sounds like a holiday apartment on the beach), but note that the history in the Bible is told by Yehudah, which had little association with the sea; the major exception to this, though the Tanach does not mention it, was the tribe of Dan - see the essay "The Leprachauns of Palestine". Fishing cults are therefore surprisingly few and far between among the Beney Yisra-El, although some traces of sea-cults do exist, particularly in Rachav (Rahab) and Tehom (Tiamat), and later in the Yonah (Jonah) story; though of course that isn't a Yisra-Eli/Jewish story anyway.
|
|
|
Minotaur,
Picasso, Vollard Suite
|
9) CATTLE CULTS
The cattle-cult centres on the wild bullock, which was domesticated into the antelope-ox (the letter Aleph - א - is also the name for the antelope-ox, and the title of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges whose "ineffable core" is not irrelevant here).
The bull myths (the tauroctonic myths, to use their technically correct name) such as that of Mithras slaying the bull, which is the central feature of the Mithraic underground temples, need to be understood, especially by Christians, because this was the predominant cult of the Roman soldiers, especially in the Middle East, and not only are the parallels with the Jesus story manifold, but it was because of those soldiers that Christianity was only persecuted, and not completely suppressed, when Tammuz-worship first re-emerged from a half a millennium of suppression in the wake of the fall of proto-Jewish hegemony in Yehudah.
Better known in the west is the legend of Theseus, who slew the half-human half-bovine Minotaur in the Labyrinth at Knossos, a memory which lives on to this day - though probably not for much longer - in what is still the ballet and theatre of the bullfight. In the Yehudit texts, the rejection of Kayin's sacrifice is probably a Bowdlerisation of an earlier bull-myth in which Kayin (his name means "having large testicles", which is a taurine and not a fellahin ascription) was a cattle farmer and not a mere sower of fields.
 |
| Europa and the Bull, Bartolommeo Bellano, c1470 |
Cattle cults are usually centred on domesticated animals, with tabus accompanying them; the point being that a wild animal has been made tame, which is to say that the wild spirit which is the god inside that animal has been made tame; the god, if not carefully propitiated, might just turn wild again and then - look out! That is also why you don't eat the sacred animals except in prescribed circumstances. Theophagy is the technical term for the eating of the god!
Europa was a daughter of Agenor (Achnor in the Yehudit) who rode to Crete from Phoenicia on the back of a bull (which is a mythological way of telling us that Phoenician culture in the form of bull-worship was taken to Crete by Phoenician colonists, and then spread west to become established among other tribes in Europe).
See also, on the "Egyptian Mythology" page, the reference to the Apis-bull (Hapi-Ankh), which was scared to Ptah, the equivalent of Nandi to Siva in the Hindu version. That bull, or at least his inflamed nostrils when he is riled by the human matador, will serve as a key image of YHVH throughout the Torah.
The Beney Yisra-El always travelled by ass or donkey (the word CHAMOR - חֲמוֹר - is used for both in Yehudit) and never by camel, horse or mule, none of which were known in their part of the world until the very late Biblical age. Myths and legends surrounding the animals reflected very different deities however, with the donkey associated with Set and Sha'ul, and donkeys in Egypt buried in graves, with formal funerals - click here.
11) SERPENT CULTS:
The earliest of all the cults, most likely. Just as the Jesus myth pre-dates Jesus by not less than 35,000 years, so the "Serpent of Eden" was already a deity at least 7,000 years old by the time of Genesis.
Ningizzida (possibly Ningishzida), the "Lord of the Tree of Truth", appears in a Sumerian version from 2025 BCE, on a vase now in the Louvre (see illustration, left); it shows two copulating vipers entwined on a staff, much like Hermes' caduceus pole.
The Dragon as the serpent with wings, or the the lion-bird, appears as far afield as the legends of King Arthur, Chinese fables, and the Plumed Serpent Quetzalcoatl of Meso-America. The snake became an important creature because, by shedding (technically it's called sloughing, which is pronounced sluffing) its skin it is "reborn", and thus seen to hold the power of immortality. It can also be cut in half and not die; indeed, it presents a practical illustration of the process of cell bifurcation (please can someone translate the text in the link into simple and comprehensible English and post it in the Comments box below) which is how life in all its forms extends itself: this is why it is a serpent coiled around the Earth that Marduk bifurcates in order to enact Creation.
Of course, the moon by waxing and waning does something like the same, which is why the serpent becomes the symbol of the moon, and what happens in the Chavah-Eden story is then predictable! But before the patriarchal misogynists got hold of it and reduced her to Original Sin, the life-creating rhythms of the womb (the Greek word "oestrus", meaning "egg", which gives us both "ostrich" and "oestrogen", derives from the Babylonian Ishtar, as do Esther, Astarte and Easter, which 500 years ago was spelled Oester), were the fertility-symbols of the universe, and the moon-goddess reigned in equality with her sun-consort, the one by day and the other by night, like Shimshon (the sun) and Delilah (the night).
In her cycles, which are reflected in the tidal and the menstrual, like her serpent's skin-sloughing, birth-death-rebirth is made manifest. The Moon controls the tides and the menstrual cycle, and causes the dew to moisten the grass on which the cattle graze, and in which the crops grow.
The Serpent's motion as it crawls along the ground is also reflected in the movements of the waves, and predicts our contemporary model of the universe as the Genome, as DNA: see the helix "logo" of TheArgamanPress, at the foot of every page of this blog. And of course there is the phallic shape, by which the snake becomes the only truly androgynous ceature.
Fire and water are reflected in the lightning speed of the Serpent's tongue, and in its lethal poison. Biting its tail, the Serpent forms a symbolic circle of Unity. So the Moon manifests the source of the waters of life. And in Moon-worship: the sacrifice of three-year-old heiffers because the Moon has three phases, and the horns ressemble the waxing and the waning moons.
In Babylonian astrology the moon had power over water (gravity, tides, menstrual cycle); in Mosaic Law ritual cleanness for women is achieved by mikveh = separation of waters mixed with the ashes of a red heiffer.
As described by Joseph Campbell in "The Masks of God", an Akkadian seal from circa 2350-2150 BCE depicts the serpent-deity in human form enthroned in front of a fire altar. One of the king's servants has a serpent dangling from his head; the moon hovers above the king's chalice (a crescent moon, as in Islam, not a full moon, as in Judaism).The main symbols in this cult are: human, snake, tree, moon, water of life.
There is also the Axis Mundi, a variation on the World Tree of the sacred grove (which of course is what the Tree of Eden really is), a pivotal pole made of serpent circles (for the ancientness of this, see under "Sudanese Nile 600,000 BCE" in Ancestry of the Patriarch 1). The Assyro-Hittite ones show Gilgamesh, whereas the Buddhist show the Tree of Enlightenment where Buddha sat for seven times seven days (the period of the Omer: Pesach to Shavu'ot! Lent, in the Christian world; Ramadan in the Moslem), and which they call the "Immoveable Spot" at the centre of the world (its "still point" if you are a reader of T.S. Eliot).
The same image also includes the symbol of the sun, plus four other columns symbolising the four rivers that flow into the four quarters of the world (cf Eden and the Mandala of Horus). From the left the lion-bird approaches (the Yehudit Keruv or cherub which is dramatically different from the diapered-baby known as a cherub in the Christian world). Then comes the goddess. Thus are brought together the sacred garden with the serpent, the world tree, the world axis, the sun eternal and the ever-living waters, all radiating grace to all quarters, and from it the mortal guided by divine manifestation reaches knowledge of immortality (or is he denied that knowledge, as in the Biblical version? there is much confusion in the Biblical tale as to which tree precisely is in the centre of the garden, and whether it is one or two: Life, or the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which are adjectives, not nouns).
Another Akkadian seal, also described by Campbell, shows the same Garden of Immortality; all characters on this occasion are female (as always in this cult male and female are androgynously interchangeable), and the Underworld deity is named Gula-Bau (an equivalent of Demeter and Persephone, and always dual in appearance). The Moon is being offered; the receiver is a mortal woman. But unlike the Biblical tale, no guilt is associated. Rather, the knowledge of life and of the world's sanctuary is yielded to any mortal, male or female, who is willing and ready to receive it.
Campbell also directs us to the Goddess of the Tree in the Garden of Innocence, who is always present in the cult of the sacred grove. She is shown with her mythic date palm (cf Tamar) whose fruits are enlightenment and immortal life (see my note about this duality above); the serpent is on her left; one of the other figures is Gula-Bau, the Akkadian underworld goddess; the figure on the right is probably Dumuzi, the "Son of the Abyss; Lord of the Tree of Life" who is both her son and her lover (cf Oedipus); ever-dying and ever-resurrected, he was the archetype of incarnate being (rebirth through death or marriage, i.e through procreation).
Various Gnostic sects, including the Ophites (1st century CE), the Na'asenes, from the Yehudit word Nachash (נחש) = "snake", the Cainites, and the Sethites, believed (with some minor variations) that the world had been generated by a serpent, and that the god of the Tanach was an evil subordinate who had seized power, much in the manner that Christianity would present Lucifer as trying to do, but in this case successfully. These ideas were not theologically Yisra-Eli or Judaic, but they were nonetheless sourced in the Yehudit texts, obviously starting from the serpent of Eden, but also - and the Gnostics were mostly Egyptian - the serpent of the Mosheh legends. Numbers 21:8 has him making a brass serpent named Nechushtan, at YHVH's command. It was revered in the Temple until Chizki-Yah (Hezekiah) destroyed it (2 Kings 18:4). But it confirmed that YHVH was at one time identified with a Serpent-God, as was Orphic Zeus. But a different kind of serpent was already in Mosheh's hands before this; in Exodus 7:10 he turned his rod into a serpent, though the text here says Tanin - תַנִּין - as opposed to the Nachash-serpent of Eden and the brass image of Numbers.
What was the Tanin? Generally the crocodile - Sobek was the crocodile-god of Egypt - though there is scholarly debate over whether Tanim and Tanin are really the same word, and whether one is a great sea-monster, probably the whale, rather than the crocodile. Ezekiel 29:3 clearly intends the crocodile, but uses Tanim, where Genesis 1:21 has Taninim as a great sea-monster, a variant of Tiamat, as does Job 7:12. Isaiah 27:1 has "Liv-Yatan nachash bari'ach - לִוְיָתָן נָחָשׁ בָּרִחַ - Leviathan the fleeing serpent" - and also "Liv-Yatan nachash akalaton - לִוְיָתָן נָחָשׁ עֲקַלָּתוֹן - Leviathan the twisted serpent", both of which are clear enough, but it then adds "ha Tanin asher ba yam - הַתַּנִּין אֲשֶׁר בַּיָּם - the serpent that is in the sea", making a distinction between the dragon Tiamat and the mere whale that is Liv-Yatan.
Is the Tanim of Ezekiel 29:3 merely a scribal error then, the second Nun (נ) having been missed out? Quite probably. Or is it possible that the ancients knew that alligators are fresh-water reptiles but crocodiles salt-water reptiles, and therefore the latter could perfectly well be witnessed both in the Nile and in the Mediterranean, as they still are, very occasionally, to this day?
Liv-Yatan (Leviathan), or in "The Book of Job" Lev-Yatan, is conceived as a many-headed sea-monster, a fleeing serpent, a crooked serpent. In Ugaritic texts he is Lotan "the crooked serpent, the mighty one with seven heads" - no surprise to find the number seven attached to such an important deity. However, he was destroyed, or at the very least captured and tamed, by YHVH, as described in Job 41, which the Orphics regarded as the description of the "coup" by means of which the demiurge seized power from the true serpent-creator.
Tehom/Tiamat is never written with a definite article, suggesting it is a proper name and not a noun. Isaiah 34:11/12 refers to Tohu, Vohu and Ephes directly.
And then, just to make things more interestingly complex, there is another version of the sea-monster, Rachav by name - or maybe Rachav is Lev-Yatan - click here (7-headed Liv-Yatan appears on Hittite cylinder seals, a Sumerian mace-head, a Babylonian seal from 3000 BCE, and in Ugaritic texts; the above illustration is from the cyllindrical seal).
For some of the texts that refer to Rachav (Rahab) and Lev-Yatan (Leviathan), cf Isaiah 27:1; 51:9; Psalm 74:13/14; 104:24/26; 148:7; Job 7:12; 40:15/32; 41:2/26; Ezekiel 29:3/4; 32:2/6; Enoch 60:7/8.
Pre-Creation, Rachav, the Prince of the Sea (how can you have a Sea if you don't yet have Creation?), rebelled against the deity (YHVH, Elohim, other gods in other versions), who kicked him to death and sank his carcass because of the stench; or, alternately, spared his life and made him dive to the bottom of the ocean, in order to bring back the Book of Razi-El, a compendium of divine wisdom ascribed to Adam, which the jealous angels had thrown into the sea (the first link is to the text; see here for more background on the book).
According to this non-scriptural legend, Rachav sided with Pharaoh against Mosheh, and pleaded for him at the Red Sea; for which YHVH destroyed him and his helpers. He is sometimes called "the Celestial Prince of Egypt", and is linked with both Leviathan/Lotan and the Greek Titan Oceanus; also with the Great Dragon, the one that Arthur, among many others, killed in the various local versions of the Creation myth. The text we have already looked at (Ezekiel 29:3/4) calls Pharaoh "the great dragon that lies among the rivers", but in Joshua 2:1 and 6:17 Rachav becomes female, a harlot - Rachav's priestess at Yericho (Jericho) presumably.
Lev-Yatan is to the sea what Behemot is to the land and Tahamat to the deep - is this some residual memory of ante-diluvian/prehistoric, i.e. pre Ice Age monsters? In some versions Lotan resembles a whale; in others a crocodile. Behemot is known as the "Ox of the Pit", which may link back to the Aleph of the cattle-cult. Worship of crocodiles was common in Nile Egypt. The stench of Rachav-Lev-Yatan comes from Tahama which means "stinking" - stranded whales also stink obnoxiously. Generally Leviathan is a hippopotamus. Herodotus, Diodorus and Pliny the Elder pair the hippo and the crocodile; Herodotus says the female hippo was worshipped at Pamprenis as Set's wife, under the name Taurt ("the great one"). The crocodile and hippo were both sacred to Set (cf "The Book of the Dead").
Oceanus, according to Hesiod, was the eldest of the Titans and second in Olympus to Zeus. He girdled the Earth like a serpent, as the Zodiac girdles the sky. He appears as a son of Tsur (Tyre), against whom Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah 23:1-18), Amos (1:9 ff) and Yo-El (4:4 ff) all railed.
The Menorah on Titus' Arch, depicting the loot-stealing from the destroyed Temple, has six panels depicting water-monsters.
Linked to the Ox Behemoth (see under 9: Cattle Cults, above) is the Reym - רֵים - or Reem in most English transliterations, of Job 39:9-10; Remim - רֵמִים - in the plural in Psalm 22:22 and 92:11. Only one pair ever lives, the Bull at one end of the Earth, the Cow at the other. Every seventy years they meet and mate, after which the Cow bites the Bull to death. She bears twin-calves, one male one female, but dies in childbirth after an eleven-year gestation. Exactly which aspect of cosmology this was created to represent is unclear.
In Numbers 23:22 and 24:8 Bil'am (Balaam) refers to the Re'em (רְאֵם), clearly the same creature despite the different spelling; as does Mosheh (Deuteronomy 33:17) - the beast may have been the Arabian Beatrix, though the Septuagint calls it the Monokeros or Unicorn, and I suspect that, like the sea monsters, there are ancient recollections of the Jurassic era inside some of these cults and depictions, so it is just as likely to have been the actual woolly mammoth as the legendary unicorn.
The Midrash also refers to a beast called the Ziz - זז - some kind of a bird it thinks, though any "moving thing" might be a Ziz, from the root meaning "to move", as is the case in Psalm 80:14, which some scholars link to the Akkadian Zizanu = "locust".
All these notions are inverted in Biblical Eden, where YHVH takes over and the serpent - the ancient cult of the serpent, that is to say - is cast out (like the Dragon by St George and the guardian of the Golden Fleece by Jason) and his dynasty overthrown - but also the reason why he slithers without legs aetiologically explained. Immortality and enlightenment become sources of guilt (and therefore it is wise for the priestly rulers to suppress any other form of enlightenment but their own catechism!), and paradise is lost. The apogee of strictest Puritanism!
One last thought. I have wondered on several occasions about the seeming two trees of Eden, the Tree of Life, and the Tree bearing the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. But is "the knowledge of good and evil" not synonymous with Life? And does not the acquision of that knowledge also convey immortality? In the legends of Gula-Bau, the tree of the Goddess of the Tree in the Garden of Innocence is the mythic date palm, whose fruits are both enlightenment and immortal life. In Jewish Kabbalah the Tree of Life is the multi-branched path to Knowledge, just as the Bodhi tree was the source of Buddhistic enlightenment. So there is only one tree, and it is the World Tree.
12) THE CULT OF THE MAGIC ISLAND
In the Arthurian legends it is Avalon, to which Arthur sailed in his "ship of death", and which serves as an allegorical "afterlife" in the Celtic myths. The original was probably the tale of Osher (Osiris) being put out to sea in a wooden chest, and being washed up on the coast of Byblos, where Eshet (Isis) found him.
Though it may have been even earlier. To the Sumerians it was Dilmun, in the midst of the primaeval sea, where "The lion does not kill, the wolf snatches not the lamb... Its old woman says not 'I am an old woman', Its old man says not 'I am an old man"' - this from a cuneiform text of 2050 BCE, and probably a source, or at least very strongly reminiscent, of Isaiah 11:6. The Dilmun myth (see the link above) is of great importance to Jones' lexical "common source", and to its cultural extension, because Dilmun was also central to the civilisation of the Indus valley, which suggests a Hittite origin of both the Indian and the Sumerian.
13) THE CULT OF THE SACRED MUSHROOM
Many modern scholars have hinted at the use of the sacred mushroom in ancient fertility cults, and thereby suggested its usage in the early Yisra-Eli cults as well. If it is correct, the most probable mushroom was the one illustrated here, the "amanita muscaria" ("fly agaric" in common parlance), a raw mushroom which induces hallucinations, erratic behaviour, an increased libido, considerable physical strength and what might best be termed "prophetic insight". A mirror excavated in Tuscany shows the "amanita muscaria" at the feet of Ixion, the son of the Lapith king Phlegyas. Ixion's story is worth telling in this regard:
Ixion agreed to marry Dia, the daughter of Eioneus, in order to lure Eioneus into a trap and kill her. Zeus apparently condoned the murder by inviting Ixion to dine with him, as a consequence of which Ixion planned to seduce Hera. Zeus prevented this, by shaping a cloud into an image of Hera, with which Ixion duly took his pleasure. Hermes scourged him and bound him to a fiery wheel which rolled ceaselessly through the sky. The false Hera, later known as Nephele, bore Ixion the child Centaurus, who later sired the horse-centaurs on the mares of Magnesia, the most famous of whom was Cheiron. Ixion's name is derived from "ischys" = "strength" and Io = the moon-goddess; later it develops into Ixias = "mistletoe", which belongs to the cult of the oak tree. Thus Ixion represents the oak-king with mistletoe genitals, and as such is the thunder-god who married the rain-making goddess Dia, a name for Hera as the Dodonan Oak-goddess, and whose sperm, as rain falling from the cloud, made the earth fertile. The patroness of this cult was Athene, who used the mistletoe for healing purposes. Chylus, Ixion's other name, means "the juice of the berry", which probably signifies the mistletoe-berry.
To the Beney Yisra-El, EL was the oak-god, specifically the terebinth oak, from the word Elon = terebinth oak. Though no evidence of an Ixion cult exists, the possibility of such cannot be dismissed if one compares the Ixion story with the Elohim version of the Yisra-Eli account of Creation.
Alternatively there is the mushroom "panaeolus papilonaeceus", which induces mild hallucinations and is relatively harmless. This may well have been the "nectar" or "ambrosia" on which the gods feasted, and which became the secret element of the Eleusinian, Orphic and other Mysteries associated with Dionysus. The drug known as "haoma" was widely in use in the Middle East at this time, as was incense as a powerful intoxicant. The Beney Yisra-El were abstemious in their use of alcohol - honey-wine for secular purposes, and watered down; grape-wine only for religious - and no specific mention of drugs is discernible.
In his "Greek Myths" Robert Graves noted that he had once tasted the 'psilocybe', a mushroom used among the Masatec Indians of Oaxaca in Mexico. Tlaloc, the god of these people, was then invoked in the lightning; he wore a serpent-crown, had an underwater retreat, and his emblem was the toad. All these are equally true of Dionysus. The Oaxacans do not eat the stalk of the mushrooms, which may explain the custom of tearing off the heads of victims killed in war. No evidence of this practice or cult exists among the early Beney Yisra-El, although it may be worth considering the practice of forced conversion by forced circumcision as a possible variant on this. (cf Graves/Patai p81).
As to the possible use of hallucinogens in the Bible, take a look at 1 Samuel 10, where the Prophet instructs the just-chosen Sha'ul about his cornonation. What exactly is intended by verse 6 is unclear, but it leads to the phrase in verse that will become a proverb throughout Yisra-El: "Is Sha'ul now among the Prophets?"
14) THE HOLY MOUNTAINS:
 |
Ruwanweliseya, the "Great Stupa"
at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka |
Paran, where "the holy one - קָדוֹשׁ" lived, according to Habakkuk 3:3, though it is unclear which holy one he is intending, especially as he also places a deity named Eloha (אֱלוֹהַּ) in Teyman (תֵּימָן), which is in south Arabia, and likely therefore to be a dialect rendition of al-Lah (just one of many hundreds of gods of southern Arabia, of course, in Havakuk's time).
Zecheriah 9:14 ff has the deity riding out of Paran vengefully on the wings of the storm. Presumably a local Temanite deity who became identified with YHVH. But if you look closely at who the Midianites were, and where Mosheh went when he fled his murder of the Egyptian overseer, the wilderness of Paran suddenly becomes more meaningful.
Mor-Yah (Moriah): the rock on which the Sanctuary stood was held in Temple legend to have been the first solid object created. The pythoness stone at Delphi likewise became the "world's navel"; as did Mecca to the Moslems. The name means "the bitter tears of Yah", and the name Mary, or Maria, is a Latinisation of it, though she was weeping for her dead son (cf Ezekiel 8:14), John Barleycorned on the winnowing-cross at the shrine of Ornah, when he was still named Tammuz and not yet Yedid-Yah (David) or Yishai (Jesus).
Gerizim and Eyval are always seen as a pair. Deuteronomy 11:26-29 has Mount Gerizim and Mount Eyval overlooking "the terebinths of Moreh" where Av-Raham performed his first sacrifice (Genesis 12:6), and in this passage Mosheh cursing the one and blessing the other. Moreh was later absorbed into the town of Shechem (today's Nablus), which sits between the two mountains (they are really only hills) and became one of the holiest shrines in Yisra-El: connected to Av-Raham, blessed by Mosheh, Yehoshu'a's altar and covenant renewal ceremony (Joshua 8:30-35), Yoseph's grave (Joshua 24:32) - why, you would think it almost as important as either Chevron or Yeru-Shala'im! It remained central to the cult until Yerav-Am (Jeroboam) cursed it as idolatrous (1 Kings 12:25), destroyed it, and then rebuilt it. Its population was cleansed by Sennacherib and Yeru-Shala'im took over as chief shrine.
Mount Tsi'on (Zion): originally the home of Malchi-Tsedek, king of Shalem (cf Genesis 14:18) and priest of El Elyon, it became the site of King David's palace after the conquest of the seven hilltop villages, and their conurbation as Yeru-Shala'im. Depending on your religious politics, either: a) male and female prostitution were practiced on Mount Tsi'on in honour of Ba'al and Astarte, before the monotheistic reforms of the Temple rites (2 Kings 33:4 ff); or b) the holy ceremonies of the May King and May Queen were practiced on Mount Tsi'on, right up until the time of Chizki-Yahu (Hezekiah - see 2 Kings 33:4 ff), the most famous of the May Kings in the Yisra-Eli tradition being David, who served one 7-year cycle at Chevron before serving four in Yeru-Shala'im; and his son, also named Yedid-Yah, who took the king-name Shelomoh.
Temples were built on raised mounds of earth, to symbolise the "navel of the cosmos", known to the Greeks as omphalos and to the Buddhists in their reliquary mounds as stupa; and probably all three are the origins of the domed roofs of many modern places of worship.
Mosheh (Deuteronomy 34:1–4) and Aharon (Numbers 20:22-29) are both sent to die on hill-tops, and Yehoshu'a receives Mount Ephrayim as his "inheritance", which is to say his burial-place (Joshua 19:50); this may reflect the sacrifice of the king in a watered-down form. In the full version, Dionysus, for example, was disrobed, dismembered and the pieces sewn together and buried in a chest to await resurrection. The Jesus version comes somewhere between these two.
15) THE CORN GOD WHO IS THE PLANET EARTH ITSELF
Let us, this time, tell the human story from the point of view of the god who inhabits the corn: the El, the life-force. You are born when the oestrogen revives, at the festival of Oester in the spring, resurrected from the Underworld of cold and death and darkness which is Winter. Your father was the Earth-god before you, now raised to the temple of the sun; your mother the fertility-goddess who is identified with the oceans and the moon. Grown beside the river, it may be said that you were drawn out of the river (in Yehudit Mosheh, in Arabic Mousa); grown among the red clay of the moist half-desert, you are "min ha adamah", "born of the Earth", and so named Adam.
You grow up through the spring, but no fruit appears yet. You spend the summer in the burning hot wilderness, fasting and thirsting, meditating over life and death, good and evil, tempted in both directions. But you survive the ordeal and, as autumn arrives, you blossom bright yellow like the sun who has nurtured you, and you are ripe for picking. You have yourself become the sun-god.
But the sun-god, like every divine child, is born to die. Whether gouged by a boar, tossed by a bull, eaten by a lion, nailed to a cross, or burned as a Guy Faux on a bonfire, whether named Tammuz, Adonis, John Barleycorn, Yoseph or Jesus, the corn-god who has now become the sun-god must die, and descend to spend the winter as Lord of that dark place beneath the ground where compost is stored and the roots of Nature remain strong no matter what, his death now essential for his rebirth next spring.
And how else can the gods be thanked for the corn that they have given, if the god is not enabled to go down under the earth, and be reborn next year, newly seeded, newly fertilised by earth and moon, the endlessly recurrent divine child?
This is the story of the god, later humanised as the story of the hero. But the intermediate stage between these two is the cultic ritual, the sacred ceremony. Each of the gods has a temple: river, earth, moon, sun, corn. Each temple has its priesthood, some male, some female, according to the gender of the deity and the nature of the cult. The ceremonies of the priests are designed in perfect imitation of the story of the hero-god.
In one version, the rites of Ishtar, a May-King or his equivalent is chosen. In the spring, at the equinox, he sleeps with the May-Queen, but anonymously, impersonally, performing the deed as surrogates for the Earth and Moon divinities - hierophant and hierodule are the technical names. The May-Queen is a Temple Virgin, but on this one day in the year her virginity is technically given up, so that she may surrogate the goddess and mother a child on her behalf, but still remain a virgin. Nine months later, at the winter solstice, the child is born, Sol Invictus, amid the straw on the manger floor where the corn was threshed, the miraculous divine birth, and all come to witness it. But the mother has to remain the goddess, not the earthly surrogate, and so we hear of immaculate conceptions and virgin births, to protect the earthly woman from becoming known; or if known, then to save her from becoming socially outcast, and worse, unmarriageable.
Likewise the father, the anonymous May-King surrogating for the Earth-god - though in most cases the sacred king appears to have served, and added to his harem in the process. Mother and father are always Adam and Chavah (Eve), Mary and Joseph, Hor (Horus) and Eshet (Isis), Zeus and Hera - or more likely, in the Greek versions that have survived, Zeus and whichever mortal victim of his "rape": the late patriarchal variation of the myth. Being a child of the gods, the child is dedicated to the Temple, to be brought up by the temple priestess (i.e his own mother) - as Arthur, Mosheh, Jesus, Shemu-El were. They are Nazirites, dedicated to the god to become in their turn the next progenitors of the divine children.
But the May-King, himself a priest and erstwhile divine child, has served his purpose and must be sacrificed. At the same spring festival, but now a year on, while his successor king is lying with his successor mate, the old king is killed, in primitive times actually, in later times symbolically (the "four lambs" of the King David legends demonstrate this, long before Jesus carried Yitschak's wooden cross to the summit of Mor-Yah).
And in the cults of Moloch, for example, and hinted at in the plague of the first-born as well as the Akeda, the child too. Perhaps on that spring day all the Adamic priests lay with all the Chavite priestesses, and several children were born, of whom one was chosen and the rest given back to the fertility goddess in sacrifice. Or perhaps only the first of those born was sacrificed.
Thus the spring festival. Pesach in Yehudit (the spring harvest festival of unleavened bread, long before it became Egyptian Passover). But there is then Shavu'ot, which commemorates the midsummer solstice, seven times seven days later, at the end of the Lenten period and the counting of the Omer (see my notes about this in this "Axis Mundi" paragraph, above). And soon Tammuz will be at his peak, ripe for harvesting.
So the autumn festival, Sukot in the Biblical world, the third of the harvest festivals which have been in place since agriculture came into being with the discovery of the Bread Wheat (see Ancestry of the Patriarch 2, Kesed 7000 BCE); a Kena'ani (Canaanite) wine-harvest festival too, later identified with the Mosaic desert. The sun is fading, at the end of his time. Fertility is over, leaves falling, harvest being gathered in. We prepare for winter, when death rules - storm, cold, no sun, dangerous tides and flooding rivers, moon hidden by clouds. The time of Hades, or She'ol - T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland", but stripped of lilacs. But not yet: first the corn must be scythed, thanks given for the rich harvest, the nasty creatures who inhabited the corn-stubble chased out (Hallowe'en) and an effigy of the straw-god burned on a bonfire (Guy Fawkes), in hope that the winter will be kind. The sun-god himself is celebrated with the dedication of the first fruits. Sun is more powerful here than Moon or Earth, for this is a summer solstice, not a lunar time, and the Earth lies barren at this time of year. The river, which is snake-like in appearance and filled by the tides, and which belongs to the moon-and-fertility goddess, is probably running dry too. The sun is in his triumph.
To complete the symbiosis of May-King and god, May-Queen and goddess, the king for a year assumes the name of the god, ruling the tribe (sometimes only nominally, like the British monarchy today) as sacred king. He is the god. His life story is magically transformed into the god's life story, or vice versa really, and his own forgotten (this is how Av-Raham and David and Arthur et al "became" historical).
But here confusion sets in. The honour of having a priest-king in the family, of becoming a kingly dynasty, is something no family can consign to the anonymity of oblivion. The man's story is partially remembered, alongside his god-parts, until the two are confused. David was the son of Yishai, and a poor goatherd before he became king, yet the story in the Book of Samuel also suggests royal pedigree - appended later, for obvious dynastic reasons. Yet the uncle of the god Augustus was indeed a mere peasant by origin, and no one gave much credence to the name Caesar before Julius became emperor. In deciphering the myths it is never clear whether it is the god's story, the May-King's story, or the intermediary hero-myth that is being recounted. Were Av-Raham, Yitschak and Ya'akov themselves the gods, or the priests, or simply the clans who provided the priests for the tribes who followed the god? All three, eventually.
What is true of the life-cycle of the barleycorn is equally true of the wild boar and the buffalo, the fish, the tree, the berry.
Copyright © 2020, David Prashker
All rights reserved
