Chapter 4: In and Out from Babylon’s Womb

3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

5 And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth. (Revelation 17:3-5)

As noted in the article, Gnostic Exegesis in Revelation 12, the Freemasonic scholar Manly P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, claims the whore of Babylon of Revelation 18 is nothing more than a demonized version of Cybele (p. 188):

Here also is introduced a symbolic figure, termed “the harlot of Babylon, “which is described as a woman seated upon a scarlet-colored beast having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and bedecked with gold, precious stones. Here also is introduced a symbolic figure, termed “the harlot of Babylon, “which is described as a woman seated upon a scarlet-colored beast having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scones, and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations. This figure may be an effort (probably interpolated) to vilify Cybele, or Artemis, the Great Mother goddess of antiquity. Because the pagans venerated the Mater Deorum through symbols appropriate to the feminine generative principle they were accused by the early Christians of worshiping a courtesan. As nearly all the ancient Mysteries included a test of the neophyte’s moral character, the temptress (the animal soul) is here portrayed as a pagan goddess.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Cybele was the Phrygian mother-goddess or “mother of the gods” of ancient Troy, and ancient Rome as well as the royal Imperium and emperors. Her worshipers included priests who castrate themselves (transgender eunuchs) as well as women. She was also the wife and sister of her brother and husband, Saturn/Chronos. Cybele also has strong connections with the “Great Whore of Babylon” of Revelation of St. John the Divine, who is eventually judged and destroyed by God in the apocalypse (17:4) (AKJV), “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. . .”

The Thelemic/Satanic form of the Whore of Babylon is “Babalon” conjoined or fornicating with the “Therion” or “Beast” of Revelation, which also reminds us of the cabalistic legends of Leviathan and Behemoth/Samael and Lilith. The Cybele cult was rumored to be involved with infant sacrifice, orgies, and cannibalism—the very things of which the Templars, certain Gnostic sects, witches, and Bacchus worshipers were accused of doing. Rumors have it that the catacombs underneath Vatican Hill (particularly St. Peter’s Basilica) contain the remnants of forbidden Cybele veneration, including human sacrifice, which some believe continue to operate in secret, even to this day. In part of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (Ordo Templi Orientis)’s “Gnostic” Creed, we read:

I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes.

And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON. And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET.

And I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.
And I believe in the communion of Saints.

And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass. And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom, whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation. And I confess my life one, individual and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.

AUMN. AUMN. AUMN.

Babalon is identified with Mother Earth, as the consort of Chaos, the “Father of Life” and the male form of the creative principle. At the same time, Crowley believed that Babalon had earthly incarnations, filled by actual women—usually as a counterpart to himself, “Mega Therion” (The Great Beast)—whose duty was then to help manifest the energies of the current Aeon of Horus or the coming rule of the Antichrist.

In Craig Hines’ Gateway of the Gods, An Investigation of Fallen Angels, the Nephilim, Alchemy, Climate Change, and the Secret Destiny of the Human Race, he reveals the etymology behind the word “Babylon” as the “gateway of the gods,” deriving from the Akkadian word “Bab-ilim” and the Sumerian ka-dingir-ra, which simply means “gate of god” (p. 125). Babalon’s womb or uterus is also a “gateway.”

According to the church father Hippolytus, the Phrygians passed on their mystery rites to the Naassene Gnostics. Moreover, they also claimed lineage to “Mariamne,” and to the Lord’s brother, James. Mariamne sounds like just another nickname for Mary Magdalene, an earthly counterpart of the Holy Spirit and twin of Helena, the concubine for Simon Magus (Hippolytus Philosophumena 5, 2). This is what Celsus also says in the True Doctrine about Helena.

Let no one suppose that I am ignorant that some of them will concede that their God is the same as that of the Jews, while others will maintain that he is a different one, to whom the latter is in opposition, and that it was from the former that the Son came. To the Church belong those of the multitude; there are, moreover, certain Christians termed Sibyllists, believers in the Sibyl. Certain Simonians worship Helene, or Helenus, as their teacher, and are called Helenians; there are, moreover, certain Marcellians, so called from Marcellina, and Harpocratians from Salome, and others who derive their name from Mariamme, and others again from Martha. There are others who have wickedly invented some being as their teacher and demon, and who wallow about in a great darkness, more unholy and accursed than that of the companions of the Egyptian Antinous.

Moreover, these persons utter against one another dreadful blasphemies, saying all manner of things shameful to be spoken; nor will they yield in the slightest point for the sake of harmony, hating each other with a perfect hatred. Certain among the Christians are called ‘cauterized in the ears;’ and some are termed ‘enigmas.’ You may hear all those who differ so widely, and who assail each other in their disputes with the most shameless language, uttering the words, ‘The world is crucified to me, and I unto the world.’

The Naassene Gnostics celebrate the eunuch Attis because he swore against all carnal procreation and lust, in which many Gnostics thought was evil and derived from the fiery powers of the Demiurge to trap more souls of light in matter. Attis was also celebrated as a hermaphroditic god, neither male nor female, but both at the same time. The Naassenes fused Biblical exegesis from both the Old and New Testament with pagan mystery lore of the Phrygians, the Orphics, and Eleusis.

On account of these and such like reasons, these constantly attend the mysteries called those of the Great Mother, supposing especially that they behold by means of the ceremonies performed there the entire mystery. For these have nothing more than the ceremonies that are performed there, except that they are not emasculated: they merely complete the work of the emasculated. For with the utmost severity and vigilance they enjoin (on their votaries) to abstain, as if they were emasculated, from intercourse with a woman. The rest, however, of the proceeding (observed in these mysteries), as we have declared at some length, (they follow) just as (if they were) emasculated persons. And they do not worship any other object but Naas, (from thence) being styled Naasseni (Hippolytus Philosophumena 5, 4).

Hippolytus also says for the Naassenes and the Sethian Gnostics, the serpent represents the Logos, the intermediary between God and the world, and the very force that binds the universe together and gives it form. Their exegesis was based on the Johannine interpretation of Moses’ brazen serpent as Christ (John 3:14–15), which explains their favor for the snake. While they have many affinities with the earlier Ophite Gnostics (named after the Greek: Ophis for snake), their teaching differs from them since they are entirely positive in its serpent symbolism and the lack of a Sophia myth as well as appealing to a wide variety of classical proof texts.

Accordingly, the Logos took on the form of a serpent, the shape that allowed the Logos to enter the inferior world of darkness. However, the Gnostic seeker, like the Logos, is encouraged to drink the cup from the living waters (a code word for gnosis or salvation), puts away his servile, slave form of the human body and its constraints and assumes the celestial robe or raiment of Glory, close to that we see in Revelation 3:5.

First, then, from the wind— that is, from the serpent— has resulted the originating principle of generation in the manner declared, all things having simultaneously received the principle of generation. After, then, the light and the spirit had been received, he says, into the polluted and baneful (and) disordered womb, the serpent— the wind of the darkness, the first-begotten of the waters— enters within and produces man, and the impure womb neither loves nor recognises any other form.

The perfect Word of supernal light being therefore assimilated (in form) to the beast, (that is,) the serpent, entered into the defiled womb, having deceived (the womb) through the similitude of the beast itself, in order that (the Word) may loose the chains that encircle the perfect mind which has been begotten amidst impurity of womb by the primal offspring of water, (namely,) serpent, wind, (and) beast. This, he says, is the form of the servant, and this the necessity of the Word of God coming down into the womb of a virgin. But he says it is not sufficient that the Perfect Man, the Word, has entered into the womb of a virgin, and loosed the pangs which were in that darkness. Nay, more than this was requisite; for after his entrance into the foul mysteries of the womb, he was washed, and drank of the cup of life-giving bubbling water. And it was altogether needful that he should drink who was about to strip off the servile form, and assume celestial raiment.

According to Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 1, 5.3-4.), the Gnostics taught that angels and demons (including the Devil) were crystallized from the tears of the fallen Sophia:

They further teach that the spirits of wickedness derived their origin from grief. Hence the devil, whom they also call Cosmocrator (the ruler of the world), and the demons, and the angels, and every wicked spiritual being that exists, found the source of their existence. They represent the Demiurge as being the son of that mother of theirs (Achamoth), and Cosmocrator as the creature of the Demiurge. Cosmocrator has knowledge of what is above himself because he is a spirit of wickedness; but the Demiurge is ignorant of such things, inasmuch as he is merely animal. Their mother dwells in that place which is above the heavens, that is, in the intermediate abode; the Demiurge in the heavenly place, that is, in the hebdomad; but the Cosmocrator in this our world. The corporeal elements of the world, again, sprang, as we before remarked, from bewilderment and perplexity, as from a more ignoble source. Thus the earth arose from her state of stupor; water from the agitation caused by her fear; air from the consolidation of her grief; while fire, producing death and corruption, was inherent in all these elements, even as they teach that ignorance also lay concealed in these three passions.

Similarly, in the little-known text called The Paraphrase of Shem, reveals a mythology featuring a “cosmic” Womb which gives births to the cosmos, including both angels and demons. The text is very erotic, with sexual images everywhere, used to explain how this cosmos came into being:

And in order that the demons also might become free from the power which they possessed through the impure intercourse, a womb was with the winds resembling water. And an unclean penis was with the demons in accordance with the example of the Darkness, and in the way he rubbed with the womb from the beginning. And after the forms of Nature had been together, they separated from each other. They cast off the power, being astonished about the deceit which had happened to them. They grieved with an eternal grief. They covered themselves with their power.

The Paraphrase of Shem is one of the few extant Gnostic treatises which contains a three-principled system of origins as opposed to one. The author likens the cosmic catastrophe to sex. Perhaps the author did not like sex very much. The author of this text is probably the same of the same cult of “Sethians” or “Sithians” Hippolytus talks about in Refutation of All Heresies. These Sethians held to three originating cosmic principles, rather than one or two. Shem is a text from one such group. The author of Shem hypothesizes three different principles: light, darkness, and spirit. The Womb is also portrayed as a realm of darkness, in a rare and highly esoteric Gnostic text, the Paraphrase of Shem. It is interesting in that it is the only Nag Hammadi text that has a three-principle cosmology.

And an unclean penis was with the demons in accordance with the example of the Darkness, and in the way he rubbed with the womb from the beginning.

The manifest universe is described as a giant vagina being tickled by an unclean demonic penis. The Paraphrase of Shem speaks about this “Womb” entity without a partner, manifestly androgynous, who copulates with herself, generating the phallic Wind-Demiurge “who possesses a Power from Fire and from Darkness and from the Spirit.” This sounds reminiscent of how Mete-Baphomet is described by both Gerald Massey and Joseph Von-Hammer Purgstall.[1] St. Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.31.2) reports that the Cainites, like another Gnostic teacher, Carpocrates, would engage in all manner of sin to undermine creation or what they called “Hystera,” or the uterus.

I have also made a collection of their writings in which they advocate the abolition of the doings of Hystera. (2) Moreover, they call this Hystera the creator of heaven and earth. They also hold, like Carpocrates, that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintain, attends them in every one of their sinful and abominable actions, and urges them to venture on audacity and incur pollution. Whatever may be the nature (3) of the action, they declare that they do it in the name of the angel, saying, “O thou angel, I use thy work; O thou power, I accomplish thy operation!” And they maintain that this is “perfect knowledge,” without shrinking to rush into such actions as it is not lawful even to name.

Epiphanius in the Panarion, also ascribes the authors of the Gospel of Judas, as the Cainites. They describe creation as the demiurgical “Womb” (the Matrix).

And they say that because of this Judas had found out all about them. For they claim him too as kin and regard him as possessed of superior knowledge, so that they even cite a short work in his name which they call a Gospel of Judas. And they likewise forge certain other works against “Womb.” They call this “Womb” the maker of this entire vault of heaven and earth and say, as Carpocrates does, that no one will be saved unless they progress through all (possible) acts.

For while each of them is doing some unspeakable thing supposedly with this excuse, performing obscenities and committing every sin there is, he invokes the name of each angel—both real angels, and the ones they fictitiously call angels. And he attributes some wicked commission of every sin on earth to each of them, by offering his own action in the name of whichever angel he wishes. And whenever they do these things they say, “This or that angel, I am performing thy work. This or that authority, I am doing thy deed.” And this is what they call perfect “knowledge,” since, if you please, they have taken their cue for venturing without fear on wicked obscenities from the mothers and fathers of sects whom we have already mentioned—I mean the Gnostics and Nicolaus, and their allies Valentinus and Carpocrates.

The Gospel of Thomas and Thomas the Contender have strong anti-woman sentiments; however, they equate all those who are alive in the flesh as fallen and feminine because they are born of earthly mother’s womb. There is also the fallen feminine soul metaphor, which the Simonian text, the Exegesis of the Soul, discusses at length. As the church fathers reveal, many Gnostic groups, like the Naassenes, Barbelites, and the Carpocratians, were led and run by women! Even Cerdon, Marcion’s teacher, is a feminine name.

In Bentley Layton’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 79), it tells us that Jesus considered a virgin, and even barren womb is “blessed,” hence, he came to defeat the works of the womb while Jesus’s Gnostic spirituality as being “male.” In Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (3.IX.63), he writes about the Gnostic text, The Gospel of the Egyptians:

Those who are opposed to God’s creation, disparaging it under the fair name of continence, also quote the words to Salome which we mentioned earlier. They are found, I believe, in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. They say that the Saviour himself said “I came to destroy the works of the female,” meaning by “female” desire, and by “works” birth and corruption.

The Simonian author taught that the Garden of Eden was the womb, according to Hippolytus’s discussion of the Simonian text, the Megale Apophasis, or the Great Announcement. The text applies to various places in Genesis as being applied to human physiology. It tells us that Eden is the placenta, the river coming out of Eden to water the Garden is the navel, and the river splits into four sources: two veins and two arteries. Adam and Eve are the twin fetuses. In Gnostic texts, Yaldabaoth, is, of course, an abortion of Sophia, because she created or orgasmed without her “male” partner, the aeon Jesus Christ. At the same time, there is also an aeonic womb (usually associated with the Sethian Barbelo, an immortal realm or hermaphroditic aeon) that gives birth to the spiritual universe of the Pleroma. Here is St. Irenaeus, discussing Valentinian cosmology in terms of aeonic sex magic in Against Heresies (1.1):

At last this Bythus determined to send forth from himself the beginning of all things, and deposited this production (which he had resolved to bring forth) in his contemporary Sige, even as seed is deposited in the womb. She then, having received this seed, and becoming pregnant, gave birth to Nous, who was both similar and equal to him who had produced him, and was alone capable of comprehending his father’s greatness. This Nous they call also Monogenes, and Father, and the Beginning of all Things.

If the “vault of heaven” is the firmament, which is the same as Ouranos, the Cainites claimed that this “heaven” or the first heaven is also the demiurgical Womb. Saturn/Chronos/YHWH castrated Ouranos/El Elyon for his purposes, and Zeus and his progeny (Apollo, Helios, Minerva) would later take on the role as the Demiurge as well and perhaps even symbolizing a new universe.

For while each of them is doing some unspeakable thing supposedly with this excuse, performing obscenities and committing every sin there is, he invokes the name of each angel—both real angels, and the ones they fictitiously call angels. And he attributes some wicked commission of every sin on earth to each of them, by offering his own action in the name of whichever angel he wishes. And whenever they do these things they say, “This or that angel, I am performing thy work. This or that authority, I am doing thy deed.

One wonders if this means that Epiphanius, like Irenaeus, claimed that the Sethian Cainites claimed that by performing obscenities (i.e., agape love feasts or orgiastic rites) that they were somehow influencing reality, by “weakening” or impressing another reality upon demiurgical Womb, that is the “vault of heaven.” They invoke the names of angels, associated with their ritual ceremonies, supposedly, and somehow use them to engage in magical warfare and to storm the Gates of Heaven. What Irenaeus is describing also matches closely with many later systems of ritual magic associated with King Solomon.

In one of the earliest of all alchemical manuscripts is the fragmentary Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus discovered in the Codex Marcianus, a medieval collection of Greek texts, it tells us that the Egyptian Goddess Isis tells her son, Horus, that while he was away defeating the evil Set, she had been residing in Hermopolis studying angelic magic and alchemy and was eventually initiated into these mysteries by the angel of the sun, Amnael, as rendered in Kyle Fraser’s article, Zosimos of Panopolis and the Book of Enoch Alchemy as Forbidden Knowledge.

In accordance with the opportune celestial moments (tôn kairôn), and the necessary revolution of the heavenly sphere, it came to pass that a certain one of the angels who dwell in the first firmament, having seen me from above, was filled with the desire to unite with me in intercourse. He was quickly on the verge of attaining his end, but I did not yield, wishing to inquire of him as to the preparation of gold and silver. When I asked this of him, he said that he was not permitted to disclose it, on account of the exalted character of the mysteries, but that on the following day a superior angel, Amnael, would come…

The next day, when the sun reached the middle of its course, the superior angel, Amnael, appeared and descended. Taken with the same passion for me he didn’t delay, but hastened to where I was. But I was no less anxious to inquire after these matters. When he delayed incessantly, I did not give myself over to him, but mastered (epekratoun) his passion until he showed the sign on his head and revealed the mysteries I sought, truthfully and without reservation (Berthelot p. 29.2-11, 16-23).

As some Biblical scholars have noted, it is interesting that Eve is depicted as holding converse with a snake in Genesis, but we can understand her being fascinated by one, apparently “an angel of light” (that is to say, a glorious angel), possessing superior and supernatural knowledge, just like what we see in the alchemical text, Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus with Isis having sexual liaisons with the Sun-angel Amnael in exchange for the “mysteries” when he reveals the “sign on his head.”

In the rare Egyptian Hermetic text, Kore Kosmou, Isis is presented as the female hierophant, and teaches her son Horus, the nature of the divine realm and of the universe. She then describes for Her son the creation of the universe, the elements, and nature. Nature is described in feminine terms, like the Greek Titan Gaia as “a being in woman’s form, right lovely, at the sight of whom the gods were smitten with amazement.”

Isis, next, describes how, the souls—which are Divine and share with the Creator the ability to create—were made and how they became too proud of their creative ability, overstepping the bounds the Creator decreed for them. Incarnation in Kore Kosmou was considered a form of punishment for their pride (like Lucifer). Hermes Trismegistus is the demiurge who administers human incarnation on the command of the Creator. However, as a consolation to the imprisoned souls, the creator allows them to forget their heavenly origins, to receive blessings from the deities, and to return to the heavens provided they do good works upon the earth. Isis often concerns herself with souls; an interest continuing from her early function as a funerary goddess and a guide and protector of the dead. In other Isis-to-Horus fragments, Isis teaches about reincarnation and the nature of souls, which relates to the Egyptian Duat or the underworld journey.

In one part of Kore Kosmou, it tells us that mankind descends into their bestial natures and savagery with the angelic “elements” complaining about their barbaric state to the Infinite Creator, reminding us of the Book of Enoch legend where the four archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel) also complain the savage condition of mankind because they gave birth to demonic giants.^[2]

With these words, opening His divine hands, He poured His treasures into the universal font. But yet they were unknown, for the souls newly embodied and unable to support their opprobrium, sought to enter into rivalry with the celestial Gods, and, proud of their lofty origin, boasting an equal creation with these, revolted. Thus men became their instruments, opposed to one another, and fomenting civil wars. And thus, force oppressing weakness, the strong burnt and massacred the feeble, and quick and dead were thrust forth from the sacred places. Then the elements resolved to complain before the Lord of the savage condition of mankind. For the evil being already very grievous, the elements hastened to the Divine the Creator, and pleaded in this wise—the fire being suffered to speak first.

Such lustful angel with human sex stories evokes the themes of the Watchers descending to earth to intermarry with women to breed giants and engender all sorts of chaos on earth as recounted in 1 Enoch. This indicates that there are two strains of spiritual knowledge—one from God through the Logos, and one from the Devil, the “ape” of the Demiurge.

Dylan Burns in Gnosis Undomesticated: Archon-Seduction, Demon Sex, and Sodomites in the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1)^[3], tells us more about the Cosmic Womb, who can be conflated with the Demiurge, as well.

So, why a womb? The womb constitutes an apt metaphor for generation, and was thus used in the ancient Mediterranean world to talk about the origins of the universe. It is then only natural that some Gnostics, having reservations about the goodness of the cosmos and its origins, were known to characterize the evil demiurge not as a male, lion-faced demon, but a womb: Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the later second century CE, accuses the “others”—who, he says, claim kinship with Cain, Esau, and the Sodomites—of pursuing the goal of “dissolving the works of the Womb” (solvere opera hysterae), whom “they call the creator of heaven and earth.” Like the followers of Carpocrates, he continues, these individuals (dubbed “Cainites” by scholars, although the actual existence of such a sect is questionable), consider their unlawful sexual practices to be divinely ordained, implying that they consider antinomian sex a chief means to “dissolving the works of the Womb.”

Irenaeus does not relate how the Cainite womb goes about creating, but the Paraphrase of Shem, the sole extant Gnostic work that identifies a malevolent demiurge as a womb, does. According to the Paraphrase of Shem, Womb produces the world as a reaction to Derdekeas’s effort recover the divine light possessed by Darkness and Womb, or Nature. In the opening theogony, Derdekeas performs this recovery by delving into Darkness repeatedly while wearing robes of fire, resulting in the emission of Light, which rises back up to heaven. At a certain point, though, Derdekeas changes his strategy:

“I put on the (guise of) the beast, and I made a great request of her [Womb], so that heaven and earth would come into being, so that all the light might rise up; for by no other method would the power of the Spirit be saved from bondage, except that I appear to her in animal form. For this reason, she was gracious to me, as if I were her son, and because of my request, Nature rose up, since she possesses (something), from the power of the Spirit, and darkness and fire. For she divested herself of her forms. Once she had cast it off, she breathed upon the water. The heaven was created. And from the foam of heaven, the earth came into being.”

God’s Wife

The Sun Lady also has strong Hebrew and Canaanite roots in their goddess tradition. One can see references to this in the New Testament as well. A case can be made to suggest that the lost Hebrew goddess has its origins in Babylonian myths and legends. For example, the Whore of Babylon’s full title in Revelation 17:5 is Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. This a clear reference to Ishtar, who is also both the “Queen of Heaven” and the “Harlot” among other goddesses like the Ophite Gnostic version of Sophia, who is also called “Prunikos” meaning the “lewd one” as reported by Origen in Against Celsus. In Thunder: Perfect Mind, Sophia paradoxically calls herself “the whore and the holy one.” The Second Treatise of the Great Seth also specifically calls Sophia, both “our sister” and a “whore.” In Catholicism, Catholic priests are basically shamans who have apostolic mojo and turn the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ. The Pope is worshiped as a human demigod like Caesar or Hercules. Mary herself is clearly a goddess and more important in Catholic devotion than Jesus. Even their “Mother of God” title infers that she precedes Jesus in the divine hierarchy. Barbara Walker, in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (pp. 450-451), tells us about more background on Ishtar, the queen of prostitution and war and connects her with all these characters. The Whore of Babylon could be a reference to Lilith, as we will see later.

Babylonian “Star,” the Great Goddess who appears in the Bible as Ashtoreth, Anath, Asherah, or Esther, the Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah 44:19). She was also the Great Whore, described in Revelation 17:5 as Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots. Another of her titles was the Goddess Har, who called herself the compassionate prostitute. Men communed with her through the sexual rites of her harlot priestesses. Babylonian scriptures called Ishtar the Light of the World, Leader of Hosts, Opener of the Womb, Righteous Judge, Lawgiver, Goddess of Goddesses, Bestower of Strength, Framer of All Decrees, Lady of Ishtar Victory, Forgiver of Sins, etc. Much of the liturgical flattery addressed to God in the Old Testament was plagiarized from Babylonian prayers to Ishtar. One example:

“Who dost make the green herb to spring up, mistress of mankind! Who hast created everything, who dost guide aright all creatures! Mother Ishtar, whose power no god can approach! A prayer will I utter; may she do unto me what seems good unto her O my mistress, make me to know my deed, establish for me a place of rest! Absolve my sins, lift up my face!”

A Babylonian prayer that obviously prefigured the prayers and psalms of biblical writers, even the biblical theology, said to the Goddess: “0 Thou art adorable, who givest salvation, life, and justice, vivify my name.” Like the Old Testament God, Ishtar was the Mighty One, winner of battles and overthrower of mountains.

Elsewhere in the same book, she connects the Whore of Babylon with Mary Magdalene (pp.613-614).

Origen showed a mystic devotion to Mary Magdalene, her with the Goddess by calling her “the mother of all of us,” and sometimes Jerusalem, and sometimes The Church (Ecclesia, another title of the Virgin). Origen claimed Mary Magdalene was immortal, having lived from the beginning of time. Thus it seems Mary the Whore was only another form of Mary the Virgin, otherwise the Triple Goddess Mari-Anna-Ishtar, the Great Whore of Babylon who was worshipped along with her savior-son in the Jerusalem temple. The Gospel of Mary said all three Marys of the canonical books were one and the same.

Indeed, the Virgin and Whore were still confused with one another in the 7th century a.d. when, on the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, Pope Sergius instituted an annual procession to the old temple of the prostitute-goddess Libera, changing the temple’s name to Santa Maria Maggiore: Most-Great Holy Mary.

It was not made clear which Holy Mary was meant. A Gnostic poem merged the two of them as a primal feminine power: “I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one.” Magdalene means “she of the temple.” The Jerusalem temple had a triple tower representing the triple deity, one tower bearing the name of the queen, Mariamne, an earthly incarnation of the Goddess Mari. This was the same Mariamne, Miriam, or Mary who took Joseph for her lover. 12 Priestesses of this temple apparently subsidized Jesus and his companions, according to Luke 8:1-3, which says Jesus and “the twelve” were financially supported by Mary Magdalene and a group of women. Latin texts say the women provided for “him” (Jesus), but Greek texts make it “them.”

The Triple-Goddess motif also appears in the Gospel of Philip (36), when it says: “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.” Margaret Barker in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?^[4], connects the Orthodox Infancy Gospel of James with the Sun Lady.

The woman in the holy of holies, clothed with the sun and giving birth to the Messiah, must have prompted the early Church to tell the story of Mary as the story of Wisdom. The Infancy Gospel of James is not easy to date, but Justin in the mid-second century knew that the birth had taken place in a cave, Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, knew that Mary was a virgin after giving birth, and Origen knew that Joseph had been a widower with other children - all details unique to account. A papyrus of the Infancy Gospel of James, dated to the end of the third century, is the oldest known complete gospel text. The Infancy Gospel of James tells how Mary was given to the temple when she was three years old, like the infant Samuel (1 Sam.1.24). The priest received her and sat her on the third step of the altar, and she danced at his feet in the temple. She was fed by an angel, and grew up in the temple until, at the age of twelve and the onset of puberty, she had to leave.

A husband was found for her, Joseph, who was a widower with sons. When a new veil was needed for the temple, seven young women were chosen to spin the wool and to weave. Mary was one of them, and while she was spinning, the angel told her that she would give birth to the Son of God Most High. Mary spinning the red wool as the angel speaks to her became the ikon of the Annunciation. The little girl in the temple, dancing before the high priest, is exactly how Wisdom was described in Proverbs 8: playing and dancing before the Creator. Like Wisdom, Mary is depicted in ikons as seated in the holy of holies, being fed by an angel. She left the holy place to give birth to her child, like the woman clothed with the sun appearing through the opened veil of the holy of holies. Whilst she was weaving the new veil, the symbol of incarnation, she was pregnant with her child, and in ikons, she is shown holding her spindle, the ancient symbol of the Great Lady. The Queen of Heaven and her Son were Mary and her Son, and just as Jesus was proclaimed the Lord, the God of Israel, so Mary was depicted as the Great Lady, his Mother.

Earlier in the paper, she also connects the Mother with, naturally, the Canaanite Asherah the Queen of Heaven and Mother of the gods.

Graffiti have been found on two large storage jars at Kuntillet Ajrud in the southern desert, which seems to have been a resting place for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. ‘I bless you by Yhwh of Samaria and by Asheratah’ says one, and the other ‘I bless you by Yhwh of Teman and by Asheratah.’ There has been endless debate about these inscriptions, and how the name Asheratah relates to the Old Testament name Asherah. Given that Asheratah is a constant form, and Yhwh is defined by his cult centre - Teman, Samaria - it looks as though Asheratah was ‘senior’ figure, perhaps the mother of the Lord?

There are the tablets found at the site of ancient Ugarit, (on the coast of Syria) which describe their great goddess Athirat, the same name as Asheratah. She was their Great Lady, the Virgin Mother of the seventy sons of the high god El, a god who was often depicted as a bull, [6], she was a sun deity, she was the Lamp of the gods, the Bright One, and her symbol was a spindle. She had several names: Athirat, Rahmay and Shapsh, she was the nursing mother of the earthly king, who was known as the Morning Star and the Evening Star (c.f Rev. 22.16), and it seems that she was represented by the winged sun disc over the head of the king, showing that she was his heavenly mother.

It is bad practice to reconstruct the male God of Israel from the biblical texts and the female from archaeological evidence, as this gives the impression that the Lady cannot be found in the written sources. The correspondence between the Great Lady of Ugarit and the lost Lady of Jerusalem is, however, striking, as we shall see that the Lady of Jerusalem was described as a winged sun deity, the mother of the king named the Morning Star, and the Mother of the sons of El i.e. of the angels. The advantage of having archaeological evidence to support a hypothesis constructed from texts is that archaeological evidence is less likely to have been edited, although the archaeological reports from the first half of the last century show that numbers of these figurines were discarded as rubbish, because they had no possible relevance to biblical archaeology.

In Temple Theology: An Introduction by Margaret Barker, she reveals that Yahweh has feminine aspects, which could also refer to the lost tradition of Asherah (but absorbed by Yahweh), the Queen of Heaven, Shekinah, Sophia, which are all avatars of the Sun Lady. Her symbol is also a tree of fire, much like the esoteric doctrines of Simon Magus. And as we saw in the previous chapter, Isaiah 44 describes Yahweh as a hermaphroditic god, giving birth to Israel as well as being a father figure to the angel that rules over the nation.

The Lady’s tree of fire appears in another story, where her demise is the preface to the story of Moses and the Exodus. The burning bush was her tree of fire. The story of Moses learning the new name for God at the burning bush is recognised by scholars as the point at which the compilers of the Pentateuch joined together the two traditions. Abraham, Melchizedek and the patriarchs were joined to Moses and the Exodus, and the God of the Patriarchs was renamed. At the burning bush a voice said that the name to be used in future was yhwh (Exod. 3.15). Later, we read: ‘God said to Moses: I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them’ (Exod.6.3).

Ezekiel had described the voice of the Living One as the voice of Shaddai. Now Shaddai has been translated in various ways, most often by Almighty, but the usual meaning of this Hebrew word is breasts, suggesting that El Shaddai had a female aspect. In the stories of the patriarchs, El Shaddai was associated with the gift of fertility: ‘May El Shaddai bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you’ (Gen.28.3); ‘I am El Shaddai; be fruitful and multiply… kings shall spring from you’ (Gen.35.11); ‘El Shaddai… who will bless you with the blessings of the breast and of the womb…’ (Gen.49.25).

If the story of the burning bush does represent the transition from the older religion to that of the Deuteronomists, then we should have an explanation for the later Christian custom of representing Mary by the burning bush. This fiery tree had been the ancient symbol of the Mother of the LORD; sometimes Mary is depicted literally within the burning bush, sometimes there is simply a fiery tree named ‘the Mother of God’, and sometimes the burning bush ikon depicts Mother and Son surrounded by the angels of the weathers, that is, the angels of Day One in the Holy of Holies.

Elsewhere, in another book of Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (pp. 184-187), she writes how Sophia and the later Gnostic tradition can be traced back to the first temple Judaism, which is fundamentally polytheistic.

The most striking evidence for gnostic roots in the ancient temple traditions is their detailed knowledge of the role of Sophia/Wisdom. Throughout the texts she appears either as the consort or the counterpart or the mother of the second deity, the great archon. She is clearly identical with the Wisdom figure of the biblical and noncanonical texts, and yet her role cannot be deduced entirely from them. The gnostic Sophia is all that remains of Israel’s goddess. Christians know that Christ was the power of God, i.e. the Angel, and also the Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24); he was the incarnation of both aspects, but the female element had been purged from Israel’s cult and from our reading of the Old Testament by the reformers of the seventh century BC. The most enigmatic of Enoch’s histories of Israel says the Wisdom was forsaken just before the destruction of the first temple by those who had become blinded (1 Enoch 93:8), and the refugees described by Jeremiah vowed they would resume the worship of the queen of heaven since neglect of her had caused disaster (Jer. 44.17-19). To say that Wisdom was “personified” in later texts is to prejudge the issue, especially when there are inscriptions from the eighth century BC showing a consort for Yahweh.

…

The separation of Yahweh and his female consort by the seventh-century reformers of Israel’s cult was probably recorded in the tradition that the archon became arrogant and claimed to be the only God when he lost sight of the power of his mother and did not realize that she existed. He claimed the powers of creation for himself alone.

In Ellen Lloyd’s “Lost and Forgotten Goddess Asherah – Queen Consort Of The Sumerian God Anu And Ugaritic God El,”[5] she mentions “Asherah poles,” which sound suspiciously like the healing caduceus poles that Moses once erected in Numbers, and is equated by Jesus with himself in John 3, discussed further onward.

The word Asherah is translated in Greek as alsos, grove, or alse, groves, or occasionally by dendra, trees. Asherah poles, which were sacred trees or poles, are mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible. Asherah poles were also known in Scripture as the “high places.” This is likely due to the connection of worship upon hilltops and mountains. The first mention of the Asherah pole is in Exodus 34:13 (NIV): “Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.” The Israelites were commanded to destroy any Asherah pole they found among the other people in the land.

In Deuteronomy 16:21, the Lord commanded the people of Israel to not make Asherah poles of their own. However, it did not take long for the Israelites to disobey this command. In Judges 3:7, we read, “And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD. They forgot the LORD their God and served the Baals and the Asheroth.” Instead of obeying God’s commands, they worshiped the gods of the people God sent them to drive out. It is believed that many Asherah poles were raised in honor of the mother-goddess Asherah.

The purpose of the objects remains a subject of heated debate among scholars. The whole subject becomes even more complicated due to the discovery ancient inscriptions unearthed at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. The inscriptions are religious in nature, invoking Yahweh, El and Baal. What created an intense debate are the inscriptions that include the phrases “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah” and “Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah.” Who or what was Asherah? The answer to this question depends on scholars’ interpretation of Asherah in relation to Yahweh.

Snakes in the Bible are both good and evil. Pharaoh had evil snakes, but Moses had a good snake (Exodus 7:8-12). Poisonous snakes killed the Israelites in the desert, but a bronze snake named Nehushtan saved them (Numbers 21:5-9). Jesus claimed to be that same bronze snake set on a pole, which also functions like the axis mundi (John 3:14). Interestingly, that same bronze snake was destroyed by King Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4), who had also allowed the Jerusalem temple priests to take over the nation. Hezekiah also tore down the altars of Yahweh and made an unholy alliance with Babylon, upon which the Prophet Isaiah placed a prophetic curse (2 Kings 18:4, Isaiah 39:3-8). Hence Hezekiah was a type of antichrist who brought the wrath of God upon the Israelite nation. Such was his penalty for destroying the snake-god Nehushtan, for Nehushtan was a prototype of Christ! For our purposes, the sacred trees of the garden, serpents, and goddess veneration form a trinity of meaning, which we will continue to unravel in this book. As monotheism evolves through history, these symbols are either inverted, changed, or rejected outright. We will also discuss Hezekiah later in the book.

Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Anthony Van Dyck

Sumerian banquet seal (2200-2100 BC): snake or naga (Gen. 3:15), Tree of Life (date palm), Asherah, and the God of the Bible. The snake eats the plant of eternal life, from the Huluppu Tree, in the Gilgamesh Epic, sloughing its skin and gaining “immortality.”

Bas relief of Asherah.

Baal and Asherah.

[6]

[7]

Jesus and Lucifer are also both snakes. According to the Hebrew numerological system, the word mashiach, which means “Messiah,” calculates 358, as also does the Hebrew word nachash which means “snake” or “serpent.”[8] Nachash is used in Genesis for the snake in the Garden of Eden, and nachash is also used for the snake in the wilderness that represented Jesus. The same was called Nehushtan, which is akin to the Hebrew word—nechash and nechosheth meaning “bronze” or “shiny.” Michael Heiser takes this to mean that the entity which deceived Adam and Eve was not really a serpent, but a luminous, shining being (but appeared to have serpentine-like features).[9]

If this view is accepted, then it provides the basis for calling Satan the Devil by the name of Lucifer, for the name Lucifer is derived from two Latin words—luci is the possessive of lux, meaning “light,” and fer is the root of the verb ferere, meaning “to carry;” hence, Lucifer is a shining one, a nechash, because he is the “Carrier of Light.” Serpents are symbols of knowledge because they bring light—they illuminate. Some might say that Jesus being a new Lucifer is blasphemous because his name infers to carry the light and that Jesus is the light himself. But, if you consider that “carrying the light” also infers “you’re” that light, just means that there is a large degree of hair-splitting.

As pointed out by research colleague, Angela Elwell, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, has another sister also, Ereshkigal, who is unisex and her disciple. Inanna’s husband was Tammuz, and apparently, the sacred marriage begins with their story. Tammuz is mentioned by name in the Book of Ezekiel. He was associated with the snake-god Ištaran. The cult of Ishtar and Tammuz may have been introduced to the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Manasseh, and the Old Testament contains numerous allusions to them. Ezekiel 8:14 mentions Tammuz by name. The cult of Tammuz may also be alluded to in Isaiah 17:10–11. Inanna and Tammuz are the basis for the Greek Aphrodite and Adonis. The Greek name Adonis is derived from the Canaanite word adōn (Adonai), meaning “lord.” The Church Father Jerome once wrote that Bethlehem belonged to these cults prior to Christianity.

In Greek mythology, Soteria was the female Savior, the goddess of safety. Soteria’s male counterpart was the spirit or daimon Soter. Both Zeus and Dionysus were titled Soter, so either may have been her father. Soteria was depicted as a woman wearing a wreath crown, a symbol of victory. This is like what is mentioned in 2 Timothy 2:5. Proverbs 4:9 tells us to turn to Wisdom so that she “give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee.” In the Pistis Sophia, Barbelo is also “a great power of the Invisible God.” She is the mother of Sophia and other beings; from Her Jesus received His “garment of light” or heavenly body. Irenaeus referred to Barbelo as “a never-aging aeon in a virginal spirit.”

The Apocryphon of John lists Barbelo as one of the eternal Aeons and Mother of the Pleroma: The One, Barbelo, the Mother, also called Fore-Thought; followed by Foreknowledge, Incorruptibility, Eternal Life and Truth. The One and Barbelo conceive the only begotten Child who is also called the “Anointed” and the “Good” (Christ & Chrest). Christ was granted Mind or Nous as an assistant. Mind produced Will (Thelema) and Will produced the Word. The other Aeons that follow under Christ are Understanding, Grace, Perception, Thoughtfulness, Form, Reflection, Memory, Love, Idea, Perfection, Peace & Wisdom (Sophia). Ophite sects, however, are said by the church fathers to have held Barbelo as the mother of Sabaoth, so here again, we see this conflation with the Sophia story. In the Pistis Sophia (5:137), Sophia herself is Barbelo’s daughter, as well.

Sophia-Achamoth also relates to Chokmah as exemplified by Milen Ruskov in Little Encyclopedia of Mysteries[10]:

The First Man existed in the beginning, it was actually God, the source of light. He gave birth to the Second Man. There was also a female principle, the Holy Spirit (the Hebrew word for “spirit” – ruah – is of the feminine gender). She gave birth to Christ when the light of the First and the Second Man fell upon her. As the light, however, was too much for one being (and not enough for two), some part of it brimmed over the Holy Spirit as over a cup. This part gave birth to the imperfect Sophia (“Wisdom” in Greek), also called Achamoth, after the Hebrew chokma, which means “wisdom”, but in plural. She fell into matter and was covered by a material body, but she managed to free herself of it and go back to the Mother. Heavens emerged when she fought against matter to free herself, they were part of her former body. Before that, however, she gave birth to the creature Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, who created the seven planet spirits (the Hebdomad) and later created the world and man with them as his instruments. They made the human body, he blew the spirit of life into it.

And so doing, he also imbued man with the pneumatic (from pneuma, “spirit”) element contained within him - because the Demiurge had unwittingly inherited particles of spiritual light, called spinters, from his mother Achamoth. So the Demiurge did this in spite of himself. Afterwards Achamoth, taking the form of a snake, “tempted” man to taste the tree of knowledge, man understood who he was, Yahweh expelled him from Paradise, and so began the spinters’ struggle to go back to their birthplace, the Motherland. Christ was sent from the higher world to teach them how to free themselves, for which reason he united with Jesus who was later crucified. After that, Jesus was resurrected in a spiritual body and over the course of eighteen months, he taught the mysteries of gnosis to his selected disciples: it was the knowledge the Ophites followed, not what the Messiah revealed before His resurrection, even if that is what is written in the canonical Gospels. The Ophites said that afterwards Christ sat in the heavens to the right to Ialdabaoth and gathered unto himself every soul in which the Divine Spark was awakened.

In Tobias Churton’s Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity (pp. 144-145), he tells us Barbelo’s connection with the Barbelite Gnostics, their practices, and their fate.

A potentially magical substance is charged sacramentally. This may be called sexual alchemy, and that might be what is really at issue here; it is hard to say with certainty. However, if we are dealing with magical sacramentalism, and I strongly suspect we are, the question of whether the nature of the Barbelite sexual practices is predominantly erotic or sacred seems beside the point, insofar as, for the magic to operate in the imagination of late antiquity, it would need to be both. Remarkably, perhaps, sects of the Barbelite type survived in southern Asia, Syria, and Armenia, beyond the time of the bishop of Salamis, even when the Eastern Roman Empire had been completely Christianized, from the official point of view, and the state exercised a hand in the condemnation and punishment of heretics. Imperial legislation targeted them in the fifth century when Gnostic heretics were forbidden to hold services or erect churches.

One of the heretics’ late influences may have been connected to the persistent cults to elevate the Virgin Mary. In this regard, we might note that to Barbelites a virgin was someone who related to the Great Mother, rather than the material world, someone like Mary Magdalene, who offered herself to Jesus’s service. The growing enthusiasm for representing the Virgin Mary as a heavenly power or even a goddess for all intents and purposes, suggests a possible fusing of ideas of the Mother of God and the persistent Barbelo, Great Mother whose fruit was Jesus who promised the thieves hung on the tree that they would join the Son in paradise, identified by Sethian Gnostics as the womb, or gateway. Such ideas may have occurred both as a reaction to orthodox Mariolatry, and as an encouragement to it. Either way, Catholic Christianity has not been able to thrive without the woman and many now believe their future to be in her hands.

In Gnosticism, God is depicted as androgynous and containing all potentials and archetypes. The Spirit is also depicted as both male and female, and the Father, of course, male, but they are one united being in the bridal chamber. Therefore, Adam was intersex before Eve was removed as a separate entity. The result of our division brought us death. This is what the Gospel of Philip teaches. The fall of man and the separation between Adam and Eve is also reflected in Yahweh and the Queen of Heaven’s eventual divine divorce, as well, with Israel and the New Testament Church replacing her. Barbara Walker, in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (p. 315), tells us that it was Ishtar that initially sent the flood.

As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal’s library, and discovered the earlier version of the flood myth. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn’t want her earthly children drowned. Mother Ishtar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her “great lightnings.” She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, “since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction.” Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar’s rainbow barrier into a “sign of the covenant” voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13).

The Mandaean Sabians or Gnostics also incorporate Ishtar into their religion through the figure of Ruha. According to a site dedicated to the Sabians, the Queen of Sheba, who married King Solomon, was also the chief ruler over the Sabian people. “Sheba, or Saba, was the ancient kingdom of south-western Arabia (now Yemen). The inhabitants were called Sabaeans. The Queen of Sheba/Solomon connection is mentioned in I Kings 10:1-13.” The author also connects the Sabians as descending from the ancient Sumerians as well.^[11] The connection between the Mandaeans and Sumerians exists, of course, through Ruha. Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion (p. 72) has this to say about Ruha.

For the reader unfamiliar with Mandaean mythology we may just explain that Ruha is the demonic mother of the Planets and as the evil spirit of this world the main adversary of the sons of light. Ruha and the Planets began to forge plans and said, “We will entrap Adam and catch him and detain him with us in the Tibil. When he eats and drinks, we will entrap the world. We will practise embracing in the world and found a community in the world. We will entrap him with horns and flutes, so that he may not break away from us. . . . We will seduce the tribe of life and cut it off with us in the world . . . [G113 f.]. Arise, let us make a celebration: arise, let us make a drinking feast. Let us practise the mysteries of love and seduce the whole world! . . . The call of Life we will silence, we will cast strife into the house, which shall not be settled in all eternity. We will kill the Stranger. We will make Adam our adherent and see who then will be his deliverer. . . . We will confound his party, the party that the Stranger has founded, so that he may have no share in the world. The whole house shall be ours alone. . . .

What has the Stranger done in the house, that he could found himself a party therein?" They took the living water and poured turbid [water] into it. They took the head of the tribe and practised on him the mystery of love and of lust, through which all the worlds are inflamed. They practised on him seduction, by which all the worlds are seduced. They practised on him the mystery of drunkenness, by which all the worlds are made drunken. . . . The worlds are made drunk by it and turn their faces to the Suf-Sea.26 (G 120 ff.)

…

Ruha, literally “spirit.” The perversion of this term to denote the highest personification of evil is an interesting episode in the history of religion, all the more paradoxical in view of the fact that the full title of this anti-divine figure is Ruha d’Qudsha, i.e., “the Holy Spirit.” But this very paradox indicates the cause: the violent hostility to Christian doctrine, whose Founder according to Mandaean tradition had stolen and falsified the message of his master, John the Baptist. But an ambivalence in the figure of the “Holy Spirit,” understood as female, is noticeable also in Christian Gnosticism, as will be seen when we deal with the Sophia speculation.

Beyond the vilification of the Holy Spirit, of the names of the planets Estera (Ishtar Venus, also called Ruha d’Qudsha, “holy spirit”), Enba (Nebo, Mercury), Sin (moon), Kewan (Saturn), Bil (Jupiter), and Nirig (Nirgal, Mars) reveal their Babylonian origins. The sun is also known as Kadush and Adunay (Adonai of the Old Testament); as lord of the planetary spirits, his place is among them—they are the source of all temptation and evil amongst men. Even stranger still, the Zohar 3:69a indicates that YHWH or the Angel of the Lord once took Lilith to be his bride!^[12] Lilith is only mentioned once in the Book of Isaiah 34:14, where she is some sort of hag or night demon. Many legends surround her, but usually as connected to Adam.

One day the companions were walking with Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai. Rabbi Shim’on said: “We see that all these nations have risen, and Israel is lower than all of them. Why is this? Because the King [God] sent away the Matronit from Him, and took the slave woman [Lilith] in her place. Who is this slave woman? The Alien Crown, whose firstborn the Holy One, blessed be He, killed in Egypt. At first she sat behind the hand mill, and now this slave woman inherited the place of her mistress.” And Rabbi Shim’on wept and said: “The King without the Matronit is not called king. The King who adhered to the slave woman, to the handmaid of the Matronit, where is his honor? He lost the Matronit and attached Himself to the place which is called slave woman. This slave woman was destined to rule over the Holy Land of below, as the Matronit formerly ruled over it. But the Holy One, blessed be He, will ultimately bring back the Matronit to her place as before. And then, what will be the rejoicing? Say, the rejoicing of the King and the rejoicing of the Matronit. The rejoicing of the King because He will return to her and separate from the slave woman, and the rejoicing of the Matronit, because she will return to couple with the King.

In the Zohar, there was a confrontation between God and the Shekhinah, provoked by the destruction of the Temple (Shekinah’s home in this world)—and the impending Babylonian exile, that concludes with God’s Bride declaring her intention to abandon her spouse—God—and go into exile with her children (Zohar 1:202b-203a). Nor will she return to God until her home—the Temple—is rebuilt. Of course, the temple was a physical replica of God’s heavenly abode. It is said that when God is separated from the Shekinah, and Lilith herself took the Shekinah’s place, making an unholy union, which offers one explanation of the existence of evil.

According to the text Treatise of the Left Emanation, Samael and Lilith were born in the same hour that Adam and were created as divine hermaphroditic beings, intertwined with one another. The two twin androgynous couples resembled each other, and both “were like the image of Above”; that is, that they are a visible form of an androgynous deity or the “upper Aeons” in Gnostic lingo. However, the unholy union between Samael and Lilith was arranged by another dark force called the “blind Dragon” or the “Tanin’iver.”

This sounds suspiciously like the Sethian Demiurge Ialdabaoth’s physical bestial features, who is also called Samael in the Apocryphon of John. This Blind Dragon acts as an intermediary between Lilith and Samael so that they mate to generate enough demons to infest the universe. In response, God castrates Samael and separates the Satanic couple with the flaming sword that was to protect the Tree of Life in Eden (Bacharach, ‘Emeq ha Melekh, 84b, 84c, 84d.) This idea is like the old Talmudic idea of YHWH slaying the female Leviathan and castrating the male Leviathan. All of this harkens back to Babylonian and Sumerian myths of Marduk, Enki, Enlil, Anu, and the like.[13]

Blind Dragon rides Lilith the Sinful -- may she be extirpated quickly in our days, Amen!-- And this Blind Dragon brings about the union between Samael and Lilith. And just as the Dragon that is in the sea (Isa. 27:1) has no eyes, likewise Blind Dragon that is above, in the likeness of a spiritual form, is without eyes, that is to say, without colors.... (Patai 81:458) Samael is called the Slant Serpent, and Lilith is called the Tortuous Serpent (Isa 27:1). She seduces men to go in tortuous ways.... And know that Lilith too will be killed. For the groomsman [Blind Dragon] who was between her and her husband [Samael] will swallow a lethal potion at a future time, from the hands of the Prince of Power. For then, when he rises up, Gabriel and Michael will join forces to subdue and bring low the government of evil which will be in heaven and earth. (Patai 81:468).

Lucy-fer Unveiled

Titus Groan discusses the Medieval romance Parzival in his essay about the Holy Grail, “The Cup of Destiny”^[14], and links the fall of Lucifer with the creation of Adam and Eve.

The wise hermit, Treverizent, proceeds to instruct Parzival about the nature of Evil that ceaselessly seeks to corrupt mankind. He relates how the spiritual powers of Evil lead men into temptation and deflects them from their proper course. He tells Parzival about the fallen Lucifer, once an Angel of Light, but who had rebelled against God and was cast down from Heaven. The wise hermit also tells the hero how the human soul itself became a victim of this rebellion of Lucifer’s hierarchies and their expulsion from Heaven. Treverizent tells Parzival that at the very moment that Lucifer fell from Heaven into Hell, the human being came into existence.

The Hebrew term he-lel, which means morning star, was translated to Greek, it eventually became Lucifer, which is Venus. Venus in Gnostic systems connect to the seven planetary archons, which govern the cosmos. Among Semitic cultures, in general, the morning star was identified with the god Azizos (Azazel?). The Apocryphon of John tells us that when Sophia accidentally gave birth to the cosmic villain Yaldabaoth, she attempted to hide her bastard offspring from the rest of the Aeons, all except the Holy Spirit, who is called “the mother of the living.”

And she surrounded it with a luminous cloud, and she placed a throne in the middle of the cloud that no one might see it except the holy Spirit who is called the mother of the living. And she called his name Yaltabaoth. This is the first archon who took a great power from his mother. And he removed himself from her and moved away from the places in which he was born. He became strong and created for himself other aeons with a flame of luminous fire which (still) exists now. And he joined with his arrogance which is in him and begot authorities for himself.

The name of the first one is Athoth, whom the generations call the reaper. The second one is Harmas, who is the eye of envy. The third one is Kalila-Oumbri. The fourth one is Yabel. The fifth one is Adonaiou, who is called Sabaoth. The sixth one is Cain, whom the generations of men call the sun. The seventh is Abel. The eighth is Abrisene. The ninth is Yobel. The tenth is Armoupieel. The eleventh is Melceir-Adonein. The twelfth is Belias, it is he who is over the depth of Hades. And he placed seven kings - each corresponding to the firmaments of heaven - over the seven heavens, and five over the depth of the abyss, that they may reign. And he shared his fire with them, but he did not send forth from the power of the light which he had taken from his mother, for he is ignorant darkness.

…

“And the archons created seven powers for themselves, and the powers created for themselves six angels for each one until they became 365 angels. And these are the bodies belonging with the names: the first is Athoth, a he has a sheep’s face; the second is Eloaiou, he has a donkey’s face; the third is Astaphaios, he has a hyena’s face; the fourth is Yao, he has a serpent’s face with seven heads; the fifth is Sabaoth, he has a dragon’s face; the sixth is Adonin, he had a monkey’s face; the seventh is Sabbede, he has a shining fire-face. This is the sevenness of the week.

The names listed by the Apocryphon of John are meant to imply that the Old Testament godhead is divided into seven powers that correspond (like the pagan gods) to the seven days of the week. In Origen’s Contra Celsus, he quotes Celsus’s account of the Ophites, where Astaphaeus is listed as a ruling power of water.

And after Sabaoth they come to Astaphaeus, to whom they believe the following prayer should be offered: “O Astaphaeus, ruler of the third gate, overseer of the first principle of water, look upon me as one of thine initiated, admit me who am purified with the spirit of a virgin, thou who seest the essence of the world. Let grace be with me, O father, let grace be with me.”

Interestingly, Kurt Rudolph in Gnosis: The Nature & History of Gnosticism (p. 173), equates Astaphaeus with Venus. This is a clear indication that the Gnostics also placed Venus as one of the ruling powers of the Demiurge. (Perhaps) not surprisingly, Asherah is also equated to Venus in Jeremiah 7:18 (as the dawn deity Heylel Bar Shachar being one of the twin sons of Ishtar, Meleket ha-Shamayim, the dusk deity). Lucifer was originally a minor Roman god, who was the son of the Greek dawn goddess Aurora, who later became Eosphoros and Phosphoros in Greek myth and culture. Lucifer also becomes associated with feminine Deity (such as Ishtar and Asherah) through Venus, as well. This would infer that Lucifer has both feminine and masculine traits at the least.

The fact that Greeks and Romans identified Lucifer and Phosphoros as the same god can be seen most dramatically in this passage from the famous Roman statesman and orator Cicero, from his treatise On the Nature of the Gods:

The lowest of the five wandering stars, and the one nearest the earth, is the planet of Venus, which is called Φωσϕόρος (Phosphoros –jw) in Greek, and Lucifer in Latin, …it completes its course in a year, traversing the zodiac both latitudinally and longitudinally, as is also done by the planets above it, and on whichever side of the sun it is, it never departs more than two signs’ distance from it. (21) This constancy, then, among the stars, this marked agreement of times through the whole of eternity, though the movements are so various, I cannot understand as existing without mind and reason and forethought, and since we find that these qualities are possessed by the heavenly bodies, we cannot but assign to those bodies themselves their place among the number of divine beings. (De Natura Deorum, 2:20-21)

Cicero identified Phosphoros with Lucifer, whom he presumed to be a “divine” being. Phosphoros is the very name that appears in the Greek text of 2 Peter 1:19:

“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawns, and the daystar (Phosphoros) arise in your hearts. (20) Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. (21) For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

This passage is aimed against Gnostics, and the verse which follows appears to be an attack on them as well. “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who secretly shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them…” (2 Peter 2:1; emphasis added.) 2 Peter portrays “Phosphoros” as a symbolic adversary of the heretics (Gnostics) who secretly brought in heretical teachings. Here “Phosphoros” is the light bearer who symbolizes the true understanding of prophecy, and the proper use of the prophetic spirit of the Holy Ghost.

It is interesting that the title “Phosphoros,” which is also a name used for Satan, is also used as a title for the Holy Ghost. The meaning is that if the Christian reads Bible prophecy in light of the Holy Ghost who inspired those scriptures, then “Phosphoros” will rise in the hearts of the readers. It should be noted that, besides the Mandaeans, no Gnostic text claims that Lucifer/Satan is the same as the Holy Spirit, while an Orthodox Patristic text indeed does! The eventual fate of the Gnostics, Simon Magus, and later Cathars and Templars also follow the fall of Lucifer.

It should be noted, however, that even Orthodox Christians, in the time of Eusebius and Constantine thought that Peter was indeed a later forgery (Church History, 3.3.1). This also connects to Jesus in Revelation 2:28, who cryptically tells his readers among the seven churches that He will give them the “morning star.” Moreover, then, in the end, in Revelation 22:16, Jesus reveals himself to be the “root of David” and the “bright morning star.” This interpretation is confirmed in Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary says of this passage: “He is the fountain of all light, the bright and the morning star, and as such has given to his churches this morning light of prophecy, to assure them of the light of that perfect day which is approaching.”

So, in the Revelation (Apocalypse) of John, “Jesus” is revealing an important secret to this writer: He is essentially saying to him that “I am Lucifer.” Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, has no scruples about using the name “Lucifer”—the name of Satan—in both Isaiah 14:12 and 2 Peter 1:19. This leads to the question of whether, perhaps, there was some Luciferian cabal within early Christianity. On top of this is that there was an “ultra-orthodox” Catholic priest named after Lucifer (i.e., Lucifer of Cagliari). Also, then, later, the Catholic Church adopted “Easter” as the name for its Paschal observance. Easter is believed to originate from the worship of the dawn goddess, who is the mother of Lucifer. We will re-examine Jesus’s connection to Lucifer later in the book.

Isaiah 14 is primarily intended to taunt the Jewish captor, the Babylonian king, following the first temple’s destruction. This historical event followed Josiah’s purging of Asherah from the temple. In Jeremiah 44, people blame the destruction on failure to worship the Queen; Jeremiah responds that it was because of the worship of the Queen that God punished his people. So, when Isaiah 14:12 says, “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn!”, this is simultaneously speaking to the Babylonians, as well as a reflection on Asherah/Ishtar’s fall. This notion of the fall of the female Deity was a carryover of the Deuteronomic reform.

Mother Mary’s veneration ultimately comes from transferring her onto the template of the Goddess Inanna, and later with Hera, Athena, Ishtar, and Aphrodite/Venus. It makes more sense to think of the Theotokos as a Christian replacement of Asherah/Ishtar veneration. The connection between the Theotokos and Ishtar goes back to the threads of anti-Christian accusations made by pagan philosophers like Celsus who claimed she was a harlot or adulterer and Jesus was her bastard son by a Roman soldier, Panthera, and that they were worshiped in the Temple as Mari-Inanna-Ishtar and her Savior son as a demigod. However, the link to this story comes from certain authors like Margaret Starbird and Barbara Walker—the latter of which we saw earlier in the chapter.

Revelation 12’s Sun Lady who escapes the dragon is Wisdom and associated mother figures redeemed. Later in Revelation, the dragon transfers his authority to the beast, which symbolizes the transfer of authority from the Demiurge to the Cosmocrator as Irenaeus of Lyon writes, as we saw earlier. We must consult Margaret Barker’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? once again. Barker suggests that the High-Priest cherub of Ezekiel, Lucifer, also connects to Wisdom, before his fall.

What Ezekiel saw was a wheel within a wheel, (or a ring within a ring), and those rings were full of points of light. In the midst of the rings was a fourfold fiery female figure, the Living One, with hands and wings. Overhead was the firmament, gleaming like ice, and above this, the heavenly throne. Ezekiel was then given a scroll. The Living One whom Ezekiel saw leaving the temple must have been the Queen of Heaven, Wisdom. It is remarkable how many details of Ezekiel’s vision appear in the ikon of the Holy Wisdom.

Elsewhere (Ezek.28. 12-19), Ezekiel described an anointed guardian cherub, full of Wisdom and perfect in beauty, who was driven out of the Garden of Eden. The cherub was the seal, and must have been the high priest, because the Greek version of the list of twelve gemstones worn by the cherub is an exact description of the high priest’s breastplate (Ezek.28. 13; Exod.28. 17-20). Fire came forth from the midst of the cherub - who must have been a fiery being - and consumed the holy place. What is remarkable is that the anointed guardian cherub high priest was female. In its present form the oracle concerns the king of Tyre, but Tyre and Zion are very similar words in Hebrew, and the Hebrew text has already been distorted to conceal the gems of the high priest’s breastplate. Only the Greek has the full list. Ben Sira, writing some four centuries after Ezekiel’s vision, described Wisdom as the one who served in the temple of Zion. She was the high priest (Ben Sira 24.10).

It should be noted that in the Middle Ages, the Gnostic Cathars identified the World Ruler (Rex Mundi) with Lucifer. This is stated most explicitly in the Cathar Gospel of the Secret Supper (which we will see later), where the origin of Satan is paraphrased along the lines in Isaiah 14:12-14 (W. Barnstone, M. Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, pg. 742). It is highly significant that the Cathars regarded Lucifer as the enemy, and as the evil god behind the papal theocracy (Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, pg. 133f.).

Lucifer does not only connect with Ishtar/Innana/Venus but also other Babylonian and Sumerian deities as well. The Babylonian Enuma Elish contains the so-called “panic of the gods,” depicting the battle of the primordial beast Tiamat and her husband Abu-Abyss, against their clamorous progeny led by Marduk and Ea. According to Babylonian myth, the council of gods was being threatened by annihilation by Tiamat and Abu-Abyss. These were titanic chaos dragons of the primordial void—like the Satanic Beast and the Harlot Babylon of Revelation. These two primordial powers are locked and mingled together in a divine androgynous matrix. Their “Tehom” is the same deep abyss where the “Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” per Genesis. In the case of Marduk, the great-grandchild of Tiamat and Abu-Abyss and solar deity of order and vengeance (much like Yahweh who slays Leviathan in Job) agrees to defeat the dragons. His price for this is to become king of the gods, much like how Yahweh storms the divine counsel and is appointed the king of the gods as well through force and divine decree by El Elyon.

The Old Testament is likely, a collection of tales of Yahweh accumulated (and re-attributed) from several sources. The Yahweh of Genesis 2 (the one opposed by the Serpent) appears to have been initially Zeus or, perhaps, Cronos as there are many parallels between Yahweh and Cronos as well. The Yahweh that fought Rahab and Leviathan in various Psalms was probably parallel to Baal and derived from Marduk or that Marduk was one of the Baals. The Yahweh of one of the two major Flood stories was probably taken from Mesopotamian myths while the other may have derived from a similar source but by a very different route. Isaiah 46:1, specifically mentions Marduk, in the form of Bel: “Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy laden; they are a burden to the weary beast.”

Zeus was a storm/war god, equivalent to the Middle Eastern Ba’al or Bel, such as Anatolia’s Teshub, Sumer’s Ishkur, Babylon’s Marduk, Assyria’s Ashur, Canaan’s Hadad, and Moab’s Chemosh. Yahweh was likewise identified as a storm/war god in Psalms and Isaiah under the name Yahweh of Armies, or Jehovah Sabaoth, typically translated as “LORD of Hosts.” King David and his “bromance buddy” Jonathan likewise named their sons after Ba’al, Beel-iada and Merib-Ba’al, which was embarrassing enough that Biblical editors renamed them El-iada and Mephibosheth. However, judging from the picture of Yahweh discovered on a jar at the edge of the Sinai, Yahweh seems to have originally looked exactly like the Egyptian lion dwarf god Bes, who was equated with the volcano gods Hephaestus and Vulcan. This connection is interesting because Dr. Sigmund Freud had long seen the volcano god hidden in the story of Mt. Sinai/Horeb, a quaking mountain with a pillar of smoke above it where Moses first learned the name, Yahweh.

Baal-Hadad is also like Yahweh in his relationship to the chaos monster (Lotan and Leviathan), but also mirroring St. Michael and Satan as explained in the following excerpt from the Lost History site.

In the Ugartic Ba’al Cycle, Ba’al Hadad defeated the seven-headed sea dragon Lotan, just as Heracles defeated the multi-headed Hydra in his 2nd labor and a dragon Ladon guarding the golden apples of immortality from the Garden of Hesperides in his 11th labor, just as Marduk defeated the sea monster Tiamat in the Enuma Elish creation myth, just as Yahweh crushed the multi-headed sea dragon Leviathan in the books of Psalms and Isaiah, just as Michael defeated the seven-headed red dragon in the Book of Revelation. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk split apart Tiamat to create the world, parallel to the splitting of Leviathan, which symbolizes the splitting of the sea during creation, which in Genesis is a “divine wind” sweeping over the “deep,” tehom, believed by many scholars to be etymologically related to Tiamat. The Behemoth from the Book of Job is its land-based equivalent. After Yahweh became equated Elohim and took over El the Bull’s role as the king god in heaven, the archangel Michael took over Yahweh’s role as the subordinate war angel who battles the seven-headed dragon, Satan.^[15]

As mentioned above, it should also be noted that the prevailing view among scholars is that Genesis 1 is derived from a depraved, polytheistic Babylonian myth called Enuma Elish. This is because there are several converging similarities between Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish. However, in the Enuma Elish, the flora and fauna and humanity are mainly derived from the dead body of a goddess! Ea, the deity of dawn, by an incantation, puts Apsu, the male dragon, to sleep in a cave, and then kills him. Tiamat, now ready to avenge her husband’s death, creates a host of monsters to destroy her children, the gods. These demons quickly overwhelm the gods, all except for the mighty Marduk with his bow and arrow and storming chariot.

The gods are faint with despair, but Marduk rallies to battle. As Tiamat opens her mouth to devour him, Marduk’s raging winds rip into her belly and weaken her. His arrow tears through her belly, severs her inwards, and rends asunder her heart. Finally, he splits her into two parts, and with half of her, he makes his own way up to the heavens.

The Enuma Elish also asserts that the assassin god Marduk took the breasts of the dead goddess Tiamat and made mountains of them. Then he ran fountains from the ocean deep through her nipples to make springs, rivers, and lakes. Genesis 1 bears all the markings of a sanitized “G-Rated” version of an earlier “X-Rated” Babylonian myth. Hesiod’s Theogony also contains sexually violent details etched in material creation itself, with deities like Chronos castrating his father, Ouranos, on the wishes of his mother, the titan Gaia. Little wonder how Gnostics like Simon Magus and the Naassenes derived their allegorizing of Eden with the human body. Dr. Mike Magee in the article Babylonian Gods^[16], he compares Babylonian myths with Revelation 12:7, with Michael clashing against Satan and his angels.

Professor Edward Chiera translated the original Babylonian Creation myths from a Sumerian tablet. A serious conflict arose among the gods over whether a slave race (humanity) should be created or not. They disagree. The dragon, Tiamat, was against it, and fought Bel until it was overcome by Bel’s thunderbolts. Then God, Bel, created humanity. The New Testament makes fresh use of the ancient tale in this way (Revelation 12:7).

Here it is plain that Bel, who is also Marduk, is Michael, and Tiamat is the Devil, Satan. He was considered the intermediary between Ea and the human world, advising Ea on what went on, and on mankind’s suffering. By his kindness, he obtained from his father Ea, dwelling in the outer world or abyss, instructions on how to relieve the suffering, and charms and incantations to do it, and restore the sick to health. So he is “the merciful one”, but most merciful was he in that he spared the lives of the gods who had sided with Tiamat. E A Wallis Budge (Babylonian Life and History) says:

“The omnipresent and omnipotent Marduk (Merodach) was the god, who “went before Ea” and was the healer and mediator for mankind. He revealed to mankind the knowledge of Ea; in all incantations he is invoked as the god “mighty to save” against evil and ill.”

It would also make sense if Yahweh were understood as a resurrecting god in some now-lost tradition, much like Jesus Christ. We may see hints of this in the Old Testament. Consider the following verse.

Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth. Hosea 6:1-3. New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Ishtar/Inanna also descends into the Underworld, a tale of which we will examine later. The Medieval kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534-1572) taught that God withdrew or contracted in himself in order to free space for creation, or the “breaking of the vessels”—that is, the interruption of godly procession and the invasion of the spiritual “channels” or “aeons” by matter, which leads to the appearance of Evil: the Qliphoth, shards or “shells” of the lower aeons, fallen down in the void of space.

Each “sefirot” or aeon gives birth to a succeeding lower sefirot or aeon. This relates to the Kabbalistic “four worlds” (World of Emanation, World of Creation, World of Formation, World of Action), where the ten sefirots emanate in a “chain of being.” Each succeeding sefirot progressively becomes denser and grosser—further removed from the consciousness of the Divine, until it is possible to deny any existence of God. This is like how the Gnostics imagined the physical universe as being a result of Sophia’s psychic Anguish as being described as an “abortion” for being the original building blocks of the first universe. Each succeeding “heaven,” according to the Gnostics were ruled over by seven archons or cosmocrators, which the Gnostic initiate must overcome through magical passwords and prayers of Grace in the astral universe (such as Celsus’s Ophite Gnostics).

According to scholars like Ioan Culianu, Hans Jonas, and many Gnostic texts, the universe is an abortive male creature, called the First Archon or Ruler, ignorant of his origins. Sophia conceived without a “male” partner, and her only partner was Anguish, being the ruling spirit of her miscarried son, the Archon, who builds the firmament at the bottom of the universe (commonly associated with the “Foundation Stone” of Isaiah 28:16) and begins producing various powers and principalities, angels, thrones and heavens, and the earth, being his footstool, below it. Sophia is frightened by this activity of her gloomy son, taking refuge in the Ogdoad—an intermediate realm in between the seven heavens of the Archon and the Pleroma. The physical world continues to exist if the souls of God’s chosen are to be saved, that is, drawn out of the Qliphoth or the Womb of Darkness. This can only happen in with the “gates” of birth and rebirth. This means that through procreation and reincarnation, can great souls be recovered from the bitter chaos of the shells since they detain these greater souls of light, as Ioan Culianu writes in Tree of Gnosis (pg. 75):

...the more spiritual a soul, the more she is ensnared by Evil, which is likewise spiritual. More than one soul, or “spark” of a soul, can be obtained by a human being. The number of souls of Israel is 600,000. When all are recovered, the world will end. Many were the speculations on the number of souls, or seats in heaven. They compare nicely with an Augustinian frame of mind, for it was the theologian of Hippo who asserted that the number of seats for the Righteous in heaven is equal with the number of places freed by the fallen angels. Calculations of the kind were current in Bogomilism and Catharism, but not so in Gnosticism.

The flood of Genesis and Enoch is, of course, connected to horny, lustful angels and archons who seduced and impregnated human women. The connections between the flood story of Genesis and the Sons of Seth (being the Gnostics), are made by Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa in Another Seed Studies in Gnostic Mythology (p. 89).

Only the Gnostics, who believed in the final parousia of the Great Seth, the illuminator of Gnosis, could speak a historical language. At the end of time, however, the powers would be so confused or disturbed (77:5)27 that they would be unable to understand how the Gnostics managed to suddenly come to light and subdue them, or how they were able to escape from “this kingdom” (77:25) and reach safety in their land of light. In the hymn the powers try, one after the other, to answer their own question: “Where did it come from?” (77:22-23).28 This question was interpreted by the narrator: “Where did the words of deception, which all the powers have failed to discover, come from?” (77:24-27). The powers, “corrupted by their desire along with the angels” (63:15-17; a reference to the Fallen Angels), belong to Sakla, the lustful demiurge. They are therefore blind to truth, and the hymn reflects their defeat; they are unable to perceive that their own kingdom was coming to an end through the final advent of the savior.

Their choir was composed of thirteen spokesmen, who must be seen as representing the twelve kingdoms of the seed of Ham and Japheth plus “the kingdom of another people” into which the sons of Ham and Japheth had entered, as mentioned in the historical account (73:25-29). In this mythological account, thirteen different versions of the final coming of the illuminator are given. All are incorrect, of course, since the powers are “in error” (77:21-22). In Adam’s account, on the other hand, the illuminator appeared three times in history: once to save the Gnostics from the flood, once to rescue them from the conflagration, and finally to separate the righteous ones from the doomed at the end of time.

…

(pp. 122-123)

Gnostic water imagery also made use of biblical themes: “The water of the Jordan is the desire for sexual intercourse” (Testinr. Truth 31:1-3). Here, again, the savior would radically reverse the trend, the stream of matter, and transform the water of lust into the water of life. Testinr. Truth 30:20-23 describes how “the Son of Man came to the world by the Jordan river, and immediately the Jordan turned back.” Hippolytus, in his report about the Naassenes, related the same tradition about the Jordan flowing backwards. This reversal of the Jordan was considered by the Naassenes to be one of “the three great mysteries.” In their imagery, “the Jordan flowing back” (i.e., “up,” avw) should be seen as the counterpart of the tides of the ocean, that gave birth to gods, according to ancient Greek mythology. Hippolytus further noted that the Jordan, flowing forth or “down,” prevented the Israelites from leaving Egypt, which is a prototype of mixis. Only when Joshua (a typos for Jesus) would make it flow back (or “up”; cf. Josh 3:7-17) could the Israelites (i.e., the Gnostics) enter the celestial Jerusalem, which was the “mother of the living.”

According to Irenaeus in Against Heresies, the Ophites conceived of Sophia as the “left power” whose existence is accounted for by an accident at the summit of the Pleroma. Her “right side” belongs to the living Son, Christ. Sophia is unable to contain in herself all the mass of fertile Light emanating from the universal Father and his Son. As Ioan Couliano summarizes in Tree of Gnosis (pg. 75):

…part of this luminous seed flows out from her left side, producing Sophia, a.k.a. Left, Prunicos, and Sinistra. Sophia descends to the immovable Waters, sets them in motion, and extracts from them a watery body that weighs her down to the point that she cannot discard it any more. In her effort to return to the heights of the Pleroma, she stretches out like a blanket, forming with her body the visible sky. For a while she dwells under the sky, yet eventually she is able to discard her material body, called Woman, and escape beyond the sky. She has a son, Ialdabaoth, who begets the six Archons; together the seven form the Hebdomad of the planets. Against the Rulers of the universe who tyrannize humankind, Sophia does not miss any occasion to cheat the former in order to help the latter. Yet unable to make an end to her son’s despotism, she calls for aid from the Mother of the Living, who dispatches Sophia’s “right” brother Christ to join her. He becomes her partner (syzygos) and saves humankind under the guise of Jesus Christ.

In the Sethian text, the Gospel of Judas, we read that Saklas (the Demiurge) will also send a flood against humanity, once again.

And Judas said to Jesus, “What will those who have been baptized in your name do?”Jesus said, “Truly I say [to you (sg.)], this baptism 56 [ . . . in] my name[ . . . ] will destroy the entire race of Adam, the earthly man. Tomorrow the one who bears me will be tortured. Truly I [say] to you (pl.), no hand of a mortal human being [will] sin against me. Truly [I] say to you, Judas, those who offer sacrifice to Saklas...

Minus the lucuna, what Jesus seems to be saying is, Judas offers Jesus and indirectly, himself, as being sacrificed to Saklas. This is where the scapegoat Azazel/Judas-Goat symbolism comes in. The baptism that Jesus is referring to could be a counterfeit one because it is aimed at destroying the “entire race of Adam,” created by the archons. When it says, “tomorrow the one who bears me will be tortured,” it has an affinity with Paul, who also uses the language of magic to “give over” his enemies to Satan in 1 Corinthians 5:

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. … As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

This also matches how, at the end of the Gospel of Judas, Judas hands Jesus over the authorities, as he does in the Gospels. In the Gospel of John (13:26), Jesus invokes Satan into Judas with a piece of bread to carry out his dirty work! According to Irenaeus in Against Heresies (1.31.1), the Gospel of Judas teaches that Judas’ act of betrayal of Jesus to die on the cross, threw the ordered powers on earth and the heavens into chaos and upheaval:

On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

Similarly, the Gospel of Judas tells us after Jesus tells Judas that he will sacrifice the human being he inhabits, he announces that “the thrones of the aeons have been defeated, and the kings have become weak, and the races of the angels have grieved, . . . the ruler is destroyed.” Even the canonical Gospels, seem to hint at this when Jesus died on the cross and darkness and destruction envelopes Jerusalem, as we see in Matthew (27:45-54) (NKJV):

Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, “This Man is calling for Elijah!”

Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink.

The rest said, “Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.”

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.

Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

In Gnosticism, the crucifixion and passion were symbols of cosmic events, which in turn are directly connected with travails and transformations within the soul. It is also denied that Jesus suffered any passion, and the passion and crucifixion are symbols of the primeval travails of Sophia-Achamoth. Even the utterances in the Psalms that are attributed to Jesus are the utterances of Sophia. Irenaeus and other church fathers report these doctrines (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.7.2., 1.8.2, 2.20.1-5; Tertullian, Against Valentinians, 27; Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, pp. 325, 327; vol. 3, pg. 516).

In Greek Mythology, the Greek goddess Hera in Hesiod’s Theogony (924-29) tries to imitate Zeus by conceiving a child by herself. She produces the lame god Hephaistos, whom she banishes from Mount Olympus to the world below. Hephaistos was also the god of metallurgy and smithcraft—both vocations are associated with the Demiurge and Azazel. Hera was also known as the “mother of all,” much like Eve, as Hera was said to have been married to Zeus in the Garden of Hesperides.

As we saw earlier, prophecy was considered a real trait of the Holy Spirit. John of Patmos was said to have this gift when he channeled the Book of Revelation. For Roman authorities, prophecy belonged to the same categories of magic and astrology—both of which were capital offenses in Rome, as one author writes in Who Was John the Apostle?^[17]

It seems that John then traveled to Ephesus, got arrested, taken to Rome, attempted to be executed but the execution failed, he was then banished to Patmos. Once the Roman Emperor died, he then traveled back to Ephesus where he remained until his death.

According to Tertullian’s testimony (De praescript., xxxvi), John had been thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil before the Porta Latina at Rome without suffering injury. From there he would have been banished to Patmos.

Early tradition says that John was banished to Patmos by the Roman authorities. This tradition is credible because banishment was a common punishment used during the Imperial period for a number of offenses. Among such offenses were the practices of magic and astrology. Prophecy was viewed by the Romans as belonging to the same category, whether Pagan, Jewish, or Christian. Prophecy with political implications, like that expressed by John in the book of Revelation, would have been perceived as a threat to Roman political power and order. [not to mention not being injured by being thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil would have been viewed as magic].

Three of the islands in the Sporades were places where political offenders were banished. (Pliny, Natural History 4.69–70; Tacitus, Annals 4.30). Eusebius (Church History III.13.1) and others we are obliged to place the Apostle’s banishment to Patmos in the reign of the Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). After Domitian’s death the Apostle returned to Ephesus during the reign of Trajan. In “Dialogue with Trypho” (Chapter 81) Justin Martyr refers to “John, one of the Apostles of Christ” as a witness who had lived “with us”, that is, at Ephesus. Irenæus speaks in very many places of the Apostle John and his residence in Asia and expressly declares that he wrote his Gospel at Ephesus (Against Heresies III.1.1), and that he had lived there until the reign of Trajan (loc. cit., II, xxii, 5). God spared John from Roman execution so that he would write his letters and ultimately Revelations.

Finally, the Womb is also associated with the End Times tribulations, as Steve Mosher writes in “The Spirit of Prophecy and the Book of Revelation,” quoted earlier in the book.

Before Christ, the Spirit enlightened Jewish prophets (the twelve stars of her crown) to speak of things that were to come. After Christ, the Spirit will show her other children, especially the foundational elders (apostles and prophets), the things that are to come (Jn. 16:13). Those things to come include their witness on earth followed by their witness in heaven. All who come to share the witness of Jesus and who keep God’s commands will be her children (12:17). They will all be born of the Spirit (see Jn. 3:5). The first child, the one who was born of (the Spirit of) God, will keep everyone else who is born of God safe from the evil one (1 Jn. 5:18). Yet the child’s birth in 12:5 was the child’s new life in heaven, so the birth of the rest of her children (12:17) also would be their new life in heaven, ruling/judging with the child. They will also rule/judge over the nations with a rod of iron, the sword/Spirit, just as Jesus, the eldest child, received power from his Father (see 2:26-27).

Before their birth, they must first keep God’s commands, the word of God against idolatry and immorality. The pangs of childbirth are associated in Isa. 42:14 with crying out. The context portrays God as like that woman, crying out in judgment against idolatry while preparing to bring forth a new creation/exodus. In John’s context, there are birth pangs because the dragon is now trying to deceive or devour the rest of the Spirit’s children. Although they are “in the (womb of the) Spirit” they are also in the world where they will have similar tribulation as the firstborn of the dead (see Jn. 16: 33). As they cry out and continue the witness of Jesus, they will also be hated by the same evil world that hated Jesus (Jn. 15:18-27). The risen Jesus sends the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of prophecy, who will continue to be the Witness of Jesus, and empower the witness of Jesus (Jn. 15:26).

We must end this chapter by looking at Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (pp. 272-273), who tells us that the various pagan fire gods were ultimately corrupted and assimilated into the dark waters in the Womb of Babylon.

According to Thales of Miletus, water was the Arche, the first of the elements, having “mastery” over the others because it represented the abyssal womb. The combination of water and fire as female-and-male signified a very ancient theory that blood, the basic essence of life, was made of sea water infused by magic fire from heaven, which made it warm and red, though it still tasted like sea water. Vedic sages sometimes called the combination Kali and Agni. The Goddess, fructified by Agni’s fire, become the Ocean of Blood at the beginning of the world, source of the vitality of all living things until the day of destruction. “Sacred fire” symbolized sexual passion, its heat engendered by fire-from-heaven gods like Agni, Lucifer, Hephaestus, Syrian Baal, Heracles-Melkart, Thor-Heimdall, etc. The fire god lost his life when he was swallowed up by the all-encompassing Mother of Waters; sages said he was “quenched in her yoni” like a lightning bolt quenched in the sea. This image led to the Roman belief that the feminine water-element was dangerous to men.

In the next set of chapters, we will examine other parts of Revelation and how it connects to the Sun Lady.

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[1] See Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum by Joseph Von-Hammer Purgstall translated by Tracy R. Twyman, if you dare.

^[2] Here is a footnote from Kingsford and Maitland’s translation of Kore Kosmou “In all these accounts it appears that mankind is inspired to wickedness and impiety by the Giants, who are, in Hermetic teaching, explained to be the lower mundane forces, or ‘fallen Angels.’ They are, probably, the first created ‘souls’ mentioned in an early passage of the allegory, and are elsewhere spoken of as Demons. Almost all the poets, whether Hebrew, Hellenic, Hindu, Persian, Norse, or Christian, celebrate the revolt of the Giants against heaven. It is needless to remind the reader that all these sacred fables have an esoteric and individual application, related to the Microcosm within man, as well as to the Macrocosm or world without.”

^[3] Burns, Dylan. Gnosis Undomesticated: Archon-Seduction, Demon Sex, and Sodomites in the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1). Gnosis: journal of gnostic studies 1 (2016) 132–156.

^[4] Barker, Margaret. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/11/1/7.aspx

[5] http://www.ancientpages.com/2017/04/12/lost-forgotten-goddess-asherah-queen-consort-sumerian-god-anu-ugaritic-god-el/

[6] A winged Yahweh on a Cherub, accompanied by a winged goddess, Asherah, hovering over a sacred tree. The inscription is understood to be Hebrew. (cf. fig. 54. p. 222. Martin Klingbeil. Yahweh Fighting From Heaven, God as Warrior and as God of Heaven in the Hebrew Psalter and Ancient Near Eastern Iconography. University Fribourg, Switzerland. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen. 1999) Taken from here: http://www.bibleorigins.net/WingedYahwehElohim.html

[7] Nin-gish-zida, the Sumerian Serpent-Dragon of Heaven, who offered man (Adapa, priest of Enki [the God of Wisdom and Knowledge]) the food and drink that would have bestowed immortality on him and consequently mankind. Langdon alternately calls Ningishzida a “Mushussu” dragon (p. 284). Line drawing from a stone libation vase of King Gudaea of Lagash, Sumer, ca. 2100 BCE. I understand Nin-gish-zida to be one of several Mesopotamian deities behind the Serpent in the Garden of Eden (cf. p. 285, figure 88. Stephen H. Langdon. The Mythology of All Races, Semitic. Vol.5. Boston. Marshall Jones & Co., 1931). Taken from here: http://www.bibleorigins.net/cherubim.html

[8] According to David Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopedia; 358 refers to both “nachash” (serpent) and “meshiach” (messiah). It also lists “mechudash” (restored) and “Chassan” the angel of Air.

[9] Heiser, Michael S. The Nachash and His Seed: Some Explanatory Notes on Why the “Serpent” in Genesis 3 Wasn’t a Serpent. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PYWEb7DOGfIJ:https://www.pidradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/nachashnotes.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[10] http://www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=326&WorkID=11758&Level=3

^[11] Roche, Diana. E. “An Historical Outline of the Word Sabian.” http://sabian.org/sabian_word.php

^[12]Humm, Alan. Kabbalah: Lilith as God’s Consort. http://jewishchristianlit.com/Topics/Lilith/consort.html?fbclid=IwAR3Wuz0kVWg0n0ecJJLrHc1YKE3zI0YxenH-ymQLjk-0VWg0E_A7ZuubaeQ

[13] Please refer to the Zohar for more information on these subjects, including the relationship between God and Lilith.

^[14] Groan, Titus. The Cup of Destiny. http://www.overlordsofchaos.com/index.php/joomla-pages/holy-grail/415-holy-grail-8

^[15]“Ba’al Hadad.” Lost History. https://www.lost-history.com/baal_hadad.php

^[16] Magee, Mike. “Babylonian Gods.” http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/0237Marduk.php

^[17] Who Was John the Apostle? Christ 4 All. http://www.christ4all.com/2017/11/who-was-john-apostle.html