Is the Jesus story an astrological allegory?

[Forum Monk]

So we may read these myths and think that they’re just a nice but obscure distraction, or even complete nonsense, all the while searching for other ‘evidence’ to show a scientific attestation that these ancient writers knew about precession - when all the time, the truth is right under our noses.

But because we can't see it, we call the ancients 'ignorant barbarians'.

I wonder what they'd have thought of us.

What's this? A preface for a book?

The entire text of Hamlet's Mill is online for those inclined to read it. I have tried several times in the past year but I get bogged down in its style and can't seem to make it through the first chapter.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamle ... etmill.htm

It is used today by virtually every author who wants to publish the next great book on ancient, unknown civilizations which knew more than we will ever realize but conveniently all evidence of this existence is lost except for these little clues which must be pieced together from around the world.
Sound familiar?

"Ignorant barbarians"? Who said this? I find it very odd that people will reject the claims of a small band of nomadic hebrews who report to have had an encounter with a living God on the basis of NO PROOF. And yet will readily accept all manner of ideas from around the globe which also have NO PROOF.

No proof does not mean not true. It only means unproven.
Like the ancient knowledge of precession.

[Ishtar]

You can't see the relationship because there is none. Nor did I say there was a relationship. All I said was I found that image. Ironically it also claimed to be greek and like Miller's it was written in english with a roman font and to make it even more obvious, Miller's used roman numerals. Nothing about either appears genuine, in my opinion.

Thanks. That's a lot clearer.

I'll wait until I read his book to come to a final conclusion on that. He may say, for instance, that he added those bits in later to make it clearer, or even that some Romans did! The crucial thing we need to know is whether he added in the cross showing the vernal equinox.

As it says in the Wiki quote posted a few back, all his writings on precession are lost. So I'm wondering what your views above are based on? If none of his books survived, how do we know he discovered it?

Because others, most notably, Ptolemy's writings did survive, in particular the Almagest, in which he describes at length the contribution of Hipparchus who preceeded Ptolemy by 300 years.

Thanks....but Ptolemy was writing 300 years after the event. That's a long time.

I'm now going to conclude that even if Hipparchus (and thus Ptolemy) thought that no-one knew about precession until he 'discovered' it, it's almost certainly not the case - for reasons I've explained above and also will give some more detail about in the next post.

[Ishtar]

The entire text of Hamlet's Mill is online for those inclined to read it.

I have tried several times in the past year but I get bogged down in its style and can't seem to make it through the first chapter.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamle ... etmill.htm

Yes, it is tricky. But one of its authors was a history of science professor at MIT. So whatever you think about who uses it and why (and that's just your opinion - and it's quite a tetchy and prejudicial one at that, I might add! ), it wasn't written by some New Age nutter in sandals knitted out of organic brown rice.

It is used today by virtually every author who wants to publish the next great book on ancient, unknown civilizations which knew more than we will ever realize but conveniently all evidence of this existence is lost except for these little clues which must be pieced together from around the world.
Sound familiar?

Yes FM, it does sound familiar. And the reason that these authors are having to piece together this evidence - much of which is lost - is because your co-religionists, who believe in this 'living God' of Love, did their level best to destroy every last shred of it, even to the extent of burning down whole libraries.

So you're on very shaky ground there - and I'd get off it if I were you!

Anyway, to make what the authors of Hamlet's Mill are saying easier to understand, (even to FM), I've pulled out of it four examples of myths to show how the ancient poets depicted the ending of an age due to the precession of the equinoxes.

You will see that although these myths derive from India, Persia, Israel and South America, they’re remarkably similar in that they are all about a great king or leader who voluntarily renounces his throne and walks to his death. In fact, these stories so closely resemble one another that they must be considered as allegorical stories hiding a deeper truth.

In each story, his citizens and courtiers are very upset at their king's or leader's departing, and try to persuade him to stay. But he is wiser than them, and knows that his time has passed. However, they follow him to the edge of the town and even further. He then tries to persuade them to return, because they are in danger of being killed. Some listen and return. Others don’t and are killed. And what is remarkable is that in three of the stories, they are all buried under snow.

Story of Krishna

When Krishna’s death brought to an end the age of Dvapara, King Yudhishthira realised it was time to renounce his throne and his kingdom, and depart for the Himalayas.

The monarch, well versed with the changes brought about by time, did not listen to their counsel. Possessed of righteous soul, he persuaded the people to sanction his views. . .

Then Dharma's son, Yudhishthira, the King of Pandavas, casting off his ornaments, wore barks of trees. . . The five brothers, with Draupadi forming the sixth and a dog forming the seventh, set out on their journey.

The citizens and the ladies of the royal household followed them for some distance. . . The denizens of the city then returned.

The seven pilgrims meanwhile had set out upon their journey. They first wandered eastward, then southward, and then westward. Lastly they faced northward and crossed the Himalaya. Then they beheld before them a vast desert of sand and beyond it Mount Meru.

One by one the pilgrims sank exhausted and expired, first Draupadi, then the twins, then Arjuna, then Bhima; but Yudhishthira, who never even looked back at his fallen comrades, still pressed on and ... entered Heaven in his mortal body, not having tasted death.

Story of Enoch

In the story of Enoch’s passing at the end of the age, we also have him urging his retinue to return and this is the first of three stories where they die in a snowstorm:

"Go ye home, lest death overtake you, if you follow me farther."

Most of them--800,000 there were--heeded his words and went back, but a number remained with him for six days. . .

On the sixth day of the journey, he said to those still accompanying him, "Go ye home, for on the morrow I shall ascend to heaven, and whoever will then be near me, he will die."

Nevertheless, some of his companions remained with him, saying:

"Whithersoever thou goest, we will go. By the living God, death alone shall part us."

On the seventh day Enoch was carried into the heavens in a fiery chariot drawn by fiery chargers.

The day thereafter, the kings who had turned back in good time sent messengers to inquire into the fate of the men who had refused to separate themselves from Enoch, for they had noted the number of them.

They found snow and great hailstones upon the spot whence Enoch had risen and, when they searched beneath, they discovered the bodies of all who had remained behind with Enoch. He alone was not among them; he was on high in heaven.

Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (1954), vol. I

Story of Quetzalcoatl

In the story of Quetzalcoatl’s walk to his death, we see the same motif of his retinue dying under the snow:

Quetzalcouatl's paladins, "the slaves, the dwarves, the hunchbacked . . . they died there from the cold. . . , upon all of them fell the snow," in the mountain pass between Popocatepetl and Iztactepetl.

[n3 E. Seler, Einige Kapitel aus dem Geschichtswerk des Fray B. de Sahagun (I927), p. 290.].

Quetzalcouatl, lamenting, and utterly lonely, had some more stations to pass, before he took off on his serpent raft, announcing he would come back, someday, "to judge the living and the dead”.

Story of Kai Khusrau (Persian)

This mythical great Shah of Persia stated at his enthronement.

"The whole world is my kingdom, all is mine
From Pisces downward to the Bull's head,"

‘From Pisces downward to the Bull’s head’ refers to three ages: Taurus, Aries and Pisces. So imho this is a clue that we are in a story about ages.

He reigned for 60 years (60 being a precessional number). But even he knew when it was time to go, despite snow being forecast!

And now I deem it better to depart
To God in all my glory. . .
Because this Kaian crown and throne will pass."

The great Shah, then prepares his departure, takes leave of his paladins, waving aside their supplications and those of his whole army:

A cry rose from the army of Iran:
The sun hath wandered from its way in heaven!
What time the radiant sun shall raise its flag,
And turn the darksome earth to liquid gold,
Then is the time when I shall pass away
And haply with Surush for company."

Toward dawn he addresses his friends:

"Farewell for ever! When the sky shall bring
The sun again ye shall not look on me
Henceforth save in your dreams. Moreover be not
Here on the morrow on these arid sands,
Although the clouds rain musk, for from the Mountains
Will rise a furious blast and snap the boughs
And leafage of the trees, a storm of snow
Will shower down from heaven's louring rack,
And towards Iran ye will not find the track."

The chieftains' heads were heavy at the news.
The warriors slept in pain, and when the sun
Rose over the hills the Shah had disappeared.

The five paladins are lost and buried in the snowstorm.

PS Forum Monk - I am not writing a book. BTW, do you use Kenny as an avatar because he gets killed in every single South Park episode?

[Forum Monk]

So you're on very shaky ground there - and I'd get off it if I were you! ...
BTW, do you use Kenny as an avatar because he gets killed in every single South Park episode?

[Ishtar]

[War Arrow]

Versions of the Quetzalcoatl myth which end with his taking to a serpent raft (and sailing away vowing to return etc) make no appearance in the native record until some time after the conquest (I suspect Sahagun's account is the earliest) - older versions of the myth tend to end with Quetzalcoatl being consumed in an act of self-immolation at some vague location in the east, after which he generally rises as the Venus the morning star incarnate as the God Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli.
The serpent raft version seems to be an example of the Mesoamerican tendency to use history as a means of explaining the present rather than recording the past. Later versions went one further and expressly identified Quetzalcoatl's return with the arrival of Cortes - all long after the events described.

[Ishtar]

Play the Kill Kenny game here!



http://www.dan-dare.org/FreeFun/Games/C ... thPark.htm

[john]

Why is the Club having problems in attesting precession? I blame the Age of Enlightenment and its insistence on intellectual reason being the primary authority.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use intellectual reason. Of course not. That would be crazy. But we’ve gone from making it our primary authority to making it our only authority, forgetting that knowledge used to be transmitted in another form, notably metaphor and allegory in the form of poetry, where the sound of the word and the feeling it conveyed was as equally important as its meaning.

Poetry – unlike post Enlightenment thinking – is beyond reason. But it’s not unreasonable. It just reaches further into a more holistic construct that satisfies the heart as well as the head.

The ancients used to orally record and transmit their knowledge in verse, through a priestly class that kept it secret. They hid their truths so that only those trained to have the vision would see the underlying deeper meaning in these beautiful stories created over the top of them.

As Thomas Hardy once said:

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone.”

In earlier days, the poets' words themselves (and not just their meanings) were believed to contain power. That’s why the witches’ books of magic – the Grimoires - contained what are known as ‘spells’.

WB Yeats says that the poets or bards of ancient Ireland were so feared because of this:

“The bards were the most powerful influence in the land, and all manner of superstitious reverence environed them round. No gift they demanded might be refused them. ... A poem and an incantation were almost the same. A satire could fill a whole countryside with famine. Something of the same feeling still survives, perhaps, in the extreme dread of being ‘rhymed up’ by some local maker of unkindly verses....”

But it wasn’t just the Druids and their bards.

When Zoroaster wanted to introduce his new religion in Babylonia, he had to do a deal with the most powerful power brokers in the land. Who were they? They weren’t the politicians. They weren’t the monarchy or aristocracy. They were the Kavis, the ancient lineage of Vedic poets who carried all the lore – from maths and astronomy to astrology and botany – in their orally transmitted verses of metaphor and allegory.

And so that’s why we have hundreds - according to Hamlet’s Mill - of wonderful ancient stories from all over the world that take us into a beautiful realm of rhyme and meter to describe how the stars slowly travelled across the sky, from one age to another. And instead of giving us a cold mathematical formula, they talk of great heroes, like Ilmarinen who has to fix a peg into the roof of the universe to stop it spinning off its axis; or of Atlas who, in classical art, is not supporting on his shoulders the world, but the whole celestial sphere:



And in most of these metaphorical poems, the changing of the age is represented by an apocalyptic end of the world.

Nowadays, we only have fragments of these great poems and because we are trained in post-Enlightenment thinking and reasoning, we hungrily scour them with our well-honed intellects for historical facts or scientific models or mathematical formulae. We live in age where poetry is considered to be a superficial frippery, relegated to the dustbin of St Valentine’s Day. In any case, we’re not trained in how to appreciate it, especially as the sound aspect of the words is lost in translation.

So we may read these myths and think that they’re just a nice but obscure distraction, or even complete nonsense, all the while searching for other ‘evidence’ to show a scientific attestation that these ancient writers knew about precession - when all the time, the truth is right under our noses.

But because we can't see it, we call the ancients 'ignorant barbarians'.

I wonder what they'd have thought of us.

Ishtar -

Right. We have a couple hundred thousand years of oral tradition passed from generation to generation by highly cognitive peoples who just "somehow" had a worldwide culture (boats, hematite, television), just possibly resulting from the ability to "read" in advance both the physical and subliminal worlds, and communicate such, all replaced in the last 5500 years by the real real truth of da word as wrote.

Now we're down to 30 second sound bytes.

The last yammer in is the first yammer out.

Root problem: poetry and/or oral tradition cannot be controlled by politics or religion. Much of written history is precisely and exactly the record of the systematic and merciless elimination of oral tradition, to be replaced by the hard wealth (grain, gold, slaves, etc.; fill in the list ad nauseam) required by politicians and priests.

As a matter of fact, I'd postulate that the birth and growth of the practise of organized warfare mirrors that cognitive (not racial!) genocide to a T.

So much for cognition.

I'd say that the "dumbing down" of Homo s. has reached epic proportions, and shows no sign of slowing down.

On that road lies extinction.


hoka hey,


john

[Ishtar]

I'd say that the "dumbing down" of Homo s. has reached epic proportions, and shows no sign of slowing down.

On that road lies extinction.

john

No argument from me on that.

[Ishtar]

We’ve looked at Exodus and made a good case for it not being an historical event and thus most likely, an allegory.

Some believe that it’s an astrothetical allegory: the story of Moses’s destruction of the Golden Calf representing the death of Taurus, and the celebrating of the first Passover with the sacrifice of the Lamb (Aries) overseen by Aaron and Aaronite priests as the beginning of the age of Aries.

In the Dionysian myth, at the same time, the sacred Lamb or Ram provides water to Dionysus’s army in the middle of the desert, reflecting the same motif in Moses where he strikes a rock with his staff and water gushes forth.

It’s also true that the later revisionist of the OT named P - standing for Priest - was an Aaronite, and P mostly wrote the whole section about the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle.

The end of the age of Aries, and the age of Pisces being ushered in, is said to be represented by crucifixion (sacrifice of the Lamb and Fisher of Men.)

Enoch in his Dream Visions seems to confirm this theory. He refers to Noah, and all the people and events up to the time of Moses, as bulls. From Moses onwards, he refers to them as sheep.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe092.htm

But whether or not the Exodus story really is an astrotheitical allegory, opinions differ.

Freke and Gandy (of The Jesus Mysteries) think it’s more of a spiritual allegory in line with Philo of Alexandria’s and the Gnostic teachings, and I’ll post in more detail on that a bit later.

[Minimalist]

We’ve looked at Exodus and made a good case for it not being an historical event and thus most likely, an allegory.

I don't buy that. The political angle (Egypt and Judah found themselves potential rivals after the withdrawal of Assyrian control) makes far more sense with a lot less hocus pocus.

Also, in yet another attempt to drag the Sumerians back into this, today I was reading through The Quest for the Historical Israel by Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar. On page 44, Finkelstein makes the point that with regard to the Patriarchal tales at Nuzi, in Northern Iraq were found a veritable library of ancient tablets. They date to the 15th century BC and one of them indicates that a "barren wife is required to provide a slave woman for her husband to bear his children-a clear parallel to the biblical story of Sarai and Hagar in Gen. 16." Similarly, also recorded in the Nuzi tablets, slaves were adopted by childless couples. "This is similar to the adoption of Eliezer by Abraham as his heri in Gen. 15, 2-3." Later, Finkelstein recounts that the practice of a barren wife providing a slave girl for her husband if she is barren turns up in a 7th century marraige contract from Assyria. The implication is clear. These were Sumerian concepts which spanned at a minimum 7 and a half centuries which were later written into the Abraham tale.

[Ishtar]

I'm not doubting the Sumerian input, Min.

But the question is why? Why was a story told for which there is no historical evidence that it actually happened?

[Minimalist]

Politics and "expansionist delusions."

[Ishtar]

I know there are many examples in history of the victors writing their own version of it to put themselves in a good light. But these biased accounts are usually pinned to real events. I doubt there are many examples of the making up of a whole story from start to finish - as you're proposing here with Exodus - and especially one upon which the whole nation's identity hangs, and presenting it as literal truth.

It's like why conspiracy theories never seem credible. If the Twin Towers were really blown up by Bush's cronies to start 'the war on terror', too many people would have had to have known about and at least one of them would have talked...!

I think it's the same thing with the Moses story. It's so patently untrue, they would never have got away with it. On the other hand, in an environment where everyone knew it was a story, and it was sanctioned by the priests as such, a complete fiction would be accepted without question.

There are quotes from several Mystery teachers of the time (and even the mythical Jesus comes up with one) about the masses being given the same tale as the Mystery adepts and being satisfied with its superficial meaning, but the adepts having the underlying meaning explained to them. I'll see if I can dig one out ....

And you've also got to remember that what may seem like hocus pocus to us was pretty common currency at the time, among the Mystery schools and the Gnostics.

[Minimalist]

You're making the mistake of assuming that "then" was like "now."

Hitler concocted the "Master Race" theory out of thin air to lead his people to a war they could not win.

Anyone who protested found themself in Buchenwald.

Same principle exists.

Literacy was restricted to a precious few. The tale probably built on the old folk lore of how the Hyksos (Canaanites) were thrown out of Egypt. A few edits and voila! God is defeating the mighty Egyptians if only the people will BELIEVE and do what the priests tell them to. Only no one told the Egyptians.

It's not my theory, btw, it's Finkelstein's. I just agree with him.