Philo's guide to decoding the Hebrew Bible

[Minimalist]

If we know what the old mistakes were, we can correct them.
My beliefs are not “Written in stone.”
I am willing to, with enough evidence, change them.

Good for you, kb. If only more people were open to reason.

[Ishtar]

Yes KB, but there's one big difference between me and these other writers you're quoting (and partlcularly Dan Brown, may he rot in hell if there were such a place) in that I don' t believe that any of these stories are literal.

I don't believe that there was a real Jesus and a real Mary Magdelene who travelled to France after the crucifixion and had a baby called Sarah and that Sarah went on to found the Merovingian dynasty and then the Clovis kings took over .... and the Priory of Sion .... and Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and blah blah blah blah blah.

I really looked into all that a few years ago .. and found it all decidedly wanting. If you read mythology - all mythologies of every country - then you can very easily understand that the Jesus story is a myth and anything put into the Jesus story is not a lie, but part of a teaching story about a deeper spiritual truth.

This spiritual truth may or may not exist - some of you believe it doesn't, but that doesn't matter because we don't have to get into that here. The fact is that all these people over thousands upon thousands of years thought that it did exist, and they used these stories to illustrate it. And the stories they used are remarkably similar in their motifs - it just takes a bit of unravelling and also the ability to drop the propensity to be constantly looking for historical truth in these stories. They were not designed to teach history or even to make up history ... until the Literalists came into it, and then, for the first time in human history (no exaggeration) these myths were suddenly being sold as literal truth.

You are a victim of all that, but you can't see it because they did a very good job.

But one thing I do know is true and literal, out of all that, is that the Knights Templars were burned at the stake for their beliefs in the 14th century under the accusations of heresy and blasphemy by Pope Clement and King Philip IV of France - and this is a historical fact. So the Church of the Anti-Christ struck again - and there was little sign then of this 'increasing light' of yours, KB - or now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar

On Friday October 13, 1307 (a date sometimes incorrectly linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition)[22][23] Philip ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The Templars were charged with numerous heresies and tortured to extract false confessions of blasphemy. The confessions, despite having been obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. After more bullying from Philip, Pope Clement then issued the bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae on November 22, 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.[24]

Pope Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars' guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors' torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris.[25][26]

With Philip threatening military action unless the Pope complied with his wishes, Pope Clement finally agreed to disband the Order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the Order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers.[28]

As for the leaders of the Order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his statement. His associate Geoffrey de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, followed de Molay's example, and insisted on his innocence. Both men were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics, and they were sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on March 18, 1314.

[kbs2244]

You are pigeon holing me again Ish.
I never said I believed any of this stuff.
In fact, for doctrinal reasons, I have to believe Jesus died childless.
To me it is just interesting reading because so many people seem to want it to be true.
My increasing light concept has nothing to do with anything that has been written since John.
(That is one of my doctrinal problems with the Mormons.)

On a historical note, it does seem a lot of the Knights were killed on Fri the 13th, Oct of 1307.
But it also seems none of the gold the French King promised the Pope never showed up.
Kind of strange when you consider the Knights had invented international banking and been in the business since their origin.

[kbs2244]

Min:
The word “infallible” kind of paints you into a corner
I don’t think it was ever used until well after the Papacy was established.
And I, obviously, am not a Papist.

[Minimalist]

?

Papal Infallibility dates from 1870 or so.

Who mentioned that?

[john]

I feel that it would be good to get a new persepctive on what we're discussing - to approach it from another angle, and to look at the question: Whatever became of the Essenes/Theraputae?

This is because if they survived, or went underground, much of what they continued to practice can teach us more about the roots of Christianity.

So I asked myself the question, if they did continue to exist, where would they be? The answer I got was that they would be like a secret society, like the Masons, and so I decided to look into this a bit.

I'm sure many are aware of the American founding father Thomas Paine's essay, "The Origin of Freemasonary". But this is the first time I've read it through properly, and I found so much that ties in both with what we've been discussing here (the Theraputae, the Essenes) and also what we learned in the Jesus Astro thread.

So I'm going to post pretty well most of it and I've added in a few notes and questions to Min and Seeker who both, no doubt, will know this off by heart!

I do apologise for its length (and for that reason, I'm going to put it in the next post without quote marks, to make it easier to read.) But I think you'll find it all makes for fascinating reading - unlike the random auto-generated text of James Joyce on LSD of John's last post.

Ishtar -


Mescaline not acid, thank you very much.


What I am struggling with regard to this semi infinite thread

About "texts"

Which everyone agrees were either plagiarized

Or converted to convenient political use

Concerning a "god-person", who,

Most agree,

Never existed.

(So true understanding, the Shamanic Way,

Worse than sucking hind tit,

Is now dead dead dead.)

We are now reduced to the arguments of reduction

Of the political and religious zealots.

Hosannah!

Let the bomb-maidens of that there other religion

Compete with the Teevee evangelical Christians


By the way, this whole historical number

Turned into a set of political entities which

In one way or another

Now control the globe by means of

Their percentage of possession and use of

Weapons of Mass Destruction.


Sweet jesus christ in the foothills -

I can see it now -

Our descendants will revere the

Bush/Cheney Gospels.

And just who, exactly, will be

The annunciators and editors of said texts?

The Church of the Wholly, Holy Materialism?


- An old poem -

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"



Courtesy of Yeats.


Yes?

hoka hey

john

[Ishtar]

Yes, I love that poem, John ... glad you brought it into this thread ...it says it all.

That 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born' is quite chilling, isn't it?

[Ishtar]

John

The shamanic is not dead ...

I know you think I should 'stop doing' this 'semi-infinite' thread and 'start doing' shamanism ... but shamanism is not like religion, you don't have to stop what you're doing to 'do' the shamanic. It's not like a best outfit that you only put on on Sundays to go to church and 'do' religion.

The shamanic is a state of being that permeates everything you think, say or do ... or even don't think, say or do. It's a state of consciousness which, I believe, is our birthright.

One of the major factors that gets in the way of us being in touch with shamanic consciousness is the road block we have in our heads to perceiving it, which is entirely due to how we've been screwed over by religion, particularly how it's been literalised.

Because what was mythological has become literal, and we've had it drummed into our genetic collective consciousness that way for about 2,000 years, we've lost the ability to think in a metaphorical way. We don't understand that there could be anything else, because we don't perceive it and so we are really locked out of the Garden and the two angels guarding the gate are called Urim and Thummim.

These are not evil angels. They are working on behalf of the shamanic. They are protecting the Garden or the Underworld from the cold and destructive light of Literalism.

So I don't see how unravelling the mental landscape of Literal Christianity - no matter how bogged down we get in the seemingly infinite quagmire of redacted and interpolated texts - is working against the shamanic.

[Ishtar]

KB, you said this, which sounds as if you literally believe it.

(But the, of course, the pregnant Mary Magdalene settled on the south cost of France.)

Because I know that you believe that Jesus really lived, I had no reason to assume that you didn't also mean that about MM literally too. So I'm not pigeon-holing you without reason.

Ish:
That brings me back to you.
Though not on a doctrinal point.
I will need to dig to find it, but I once read that calling Jesus a carpenter was a possible case of miss translation. (Willful or not.)
The Greek word used may have meant “stonecutter” or “builder.”

I said almost exactly that about two posts back, KB. So it's all very well saying to Min that your "beliefs are not Written in Stone" etc ... but then you make sure that they're unlikely to be challenged by not reading our posts.

And this ....

In fact, for doctrinal reasons, I have to believe Jesus died childless.

You have to believe? Are you in a cult?

Why enslave yourself to an idea of someone else who is probably no longer even alive?

[Ishtar]

Min, didn’t I say that Epicurus may be able help us, in Grumpage’s thread on the Villa of the Papyri?

Voila ... in my research on the Freemasons, I've come across the Dionysiac Architects (who the Masonic historians reckon are their spiritual forebears). The earliest one we have a record for is the Roman architect and all-round genius Vitruvius, 80 – 15 BC, whose book De Architectura Libri Decem discusses the principles of symmetry he learned as a Dionysiac Architect, whose temples are said to have been ‘sermons in the stone’ – the most famous being the one to Diana at Ephesus. Solomon also says that Hiram of Tyre employed them for his temples and palaces.

This metaphysical science today is known as sacred geometry. The DAs were considered experts in architectonics, in other words, they were the same ‘tektons’ as Jesus’s father, Joseph, was created to be.

Anyway, in De Architectura, Vitruvius lists Epicurus in a very long list of acknowledgements and Philon, the 4th century DA who designed the portico for the Elusinian Hall of Mysteries. Viruvius also mentions one Anaxagorus (c 500 BC), who, Pliny apparently tells us, ripped out his tongue rather than reveal the secret initiation he underwent as a Dionysiac Architect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philon

Also according to a report written for King Henry VIII on how the masonic order came to England, it was traced back as far as Pythagorus. So here we are back again at the Father of Gnosticism.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta43.htm

[Ishtar]

Also, one last thing .. then I'll shut up.

Why is Luke described as a physician?

This is from the Online Etymology Dictionary

Therapeutic

of or pertaining to the healing of disease, 1646, probably shortened from therapeutical (1605), from Mod.L. therapeuticus "curing, healing," from Gk. therapeutikos, from therapeutes "one ministering," from therapeutein "to cure, treat," of unknown origin, related to therapon (gen. therapontos) "attendant.

Luke is only known as a physician because he is thought to be the person that Paul refers to in Colossians 4:14 thus:

14 Luke, the most dear physician, saluteth you: and Demas. 15 Salute the brethren who are at Laodicea: and Nymphas and the church that is in his house. 16 And when this epistle shall have been read with you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans: and that you read that which is of the Laodiceans.

It would have read: "Luke, the most dear theraputae, saluteth you." Or even, "Luke, the most dear Theraputae, saluteth you."

[kbs2244]

I read your "stoncutter" post Ish.
I was backing you up.

[Minimalist]

Solomon also says that Hiram of Tyre employed them for his temples and palaces.

Solomon, if he existed at all, was at best an illiterate bandit chieftain. Any words he may have "said" were written centuries after the events in question by men with an agenda of their own.

[Ishtar]

Solomon also says that Hiram of Tyre employed them for his temples and palaces.

Solomon, if he existed at all, was at best an illiterate bandit chieftain. Any words he may have "said" were written centuries after the events in question by men with an agenda of their own.

But the point I've been trying to make is that Literalism follows Gnosticism - it steals the clothes of Gnosticism which is much much older.

So while some Jewish Literalists (in this case) may have decided to use these ancient myths at some point to gain or maintain political power, these stories didn't necessarily start off that way. They started off as mythological tales passed down in an oral tradition in order to keep some sort of deeper teaching alive - that's what myths are. And when something is a myth, every idea expressed within the story is meaningful. Every aspect of the plot and the characters is deliberately put in for a reason, unless it is just scene setting.

So when I say something like: "Solomon also says that Hiram of Tyre employed them for his temples and palaces" - I assume most people know me well enough (and are also au fait with this subject well enough by now) to understand all of the above without me having to say:

"In the mythical story about the fictional character Solomon who in the plot of the story in the Old Testament builds a magnificent temple...."

But then we can go on to ask:

Why did the mythologists make Joseph a tekton?

Why did they give a mention to the DAs in the story of Solomon?

Why did they make Luke a theraputae?

Were they trying to tell us something?

This is where myth, to me, is so much more interesting than history. In history, shit just happens. In mythology, everything happens for a reason.

[Ishtar]

I read your "stoncutter" post Ish.
I was backing you up.

Sorry ... it didn't read that like that. It reads like a completely new thought.