It’s well past time to bring the writing on the wall to its conklusion. So I will end here. And it is fair to ask…Khufu who? Or, perhaps…Who is Khufu? The above framed portraits, available in my new art gallery, are believed to show the head and face of Khufu. Have you ever seen a more pathetic looking guy than the one on the left? But this is what I’ve been waiting for up until now. I have stressed just how enormous is the Great Pyramid. It was the tallest man-made structure on earth for, accepting that King Who is Khufu as its builder for a moment, 3,800 years. That’s amazing! Now only one complete statue of Khufu has ever been found…one…that’s how important he was. Statue? Really? Introducing the World’s Greatest Builder for 3,800 years! Ladies and Gentlemen! Behold the God-King! Is he not the Largest of the Largest of Life’s Largest Megalomaniacs? Let’s have a round of applause for…

Yes! Khufu and his 3-inch tall statuette! One of human history’s most Towering Figures who built one of human history’s most Towering Towers…and I bring him to you in all his glory! All 3 inches of him. Talk about opposites! The littlest pip-squeak built one the world’s tallest structures? Over-compensation? Maybe he and Little Pazuzu should have gone in on a corvette together. But seriously folks, who doesn’t like Spinal Tap? And who doesn’t remember when they got the dimensions wrong for their super cool prop for their super cool stage show! That’s right…Stonehenge! What could be more cool than watching a big Stonehenge monument lowered down onto the stage, and seeing ancient leprechauns dance around it? And here it comes!

Cool! And now…

Oh, dear! As it turned out, when the design of the Mighty Stonehenge was made, the designer, providing the height of the sculpture, was supposed to indicate that it was to be 12 feet tall. But instead of 12’, he wrote…12’’. And so it was that the dancing leprechauns struggled to keep from treading on it as they did the Stonehenge Dance! In our case, I can almost see a 3 foot tall Khufu end up with 3” rather than 3’ stamped on his forehead.

Just look at all the Khufus! Perhaps with a few Raufus thrown in for good measure. It does seem as though it was quite a waste of resources building such a large tomb for such a little guy. So I built Khufu a new pyramid…

3 inch tall Khufu and his 6 inch tall pyramid! Waste not…want not! It would be a shame if…

Be careful, kitty! Don’t step on Khufu! Of course, one might not have a cat, and if that were the case, a Khufu-disaster could still happen…

Oh. I figure that…

Oh, my! That’s embarrassing.

Now young lady! I don’t care what Regan told you to do…

Crush him, Pebbles!

Now it should be said that little guys can cover great distances…if they exercise regularly and are in good shape. Perhaps the Royal Palace of Khufu, which I hear was taller than 3 inches, had a gym. After all, the Biggest Little Man could afford a personal trainer, assuming he didn’t blow all his cash on construction projects. And so it is that the Little Khufu Guy was found…in the Great Pyramid? No. Outside the Great Pyramid? No, not there either. Was he even found in Giza at all?

This map shows Giza, located in the North of Egypt, and the city of Abydos…a considerable distance from his main stomping-ground. So Khufu made his way from Giza and tripped and fell into an archaeological site in Abydos. And the little statuette was found missing something…a head. The archaeologist in charge was afraid that the head got knocked off in the course of the excavation, and so he offered his diggers a reward to find the head. And then…lo and behold! The head of a figurine suddenly turned up! And so it was stuck on top of Khufu’s body. And that’s a good thing, since if he remained without a head, he would be even shorter than he is now. Of course, I’m sure that there was nothing sneaky going on during the desperate search for the head…and the reward. It’s a good thing that someone found the head from some old figurine. It would have been a shame if someone resorted to using…

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…a head from one of his daughter’s dolls. Still, one might think that Khufu would be found closer to his Pyramid. But I would point out something which, if you would even think it possible, makes the whole Khufu-Thing even more puzzling. And it involves a little bit of magic from the Archaeology Bag of Tricks. So many of us want to believe what is presented to us in books…big history books…since although they might be wrong about this jot or that tittle, surely they are never deceitful. Perhaps one is not inclined to question what one sees…to ask hard questions about it. I show one of the world’s most famous statues, one that is so for more than one reason…

That’s her…the Minoan Snake-Goddess figurine, dated to 1600 B.C. And no, guys, you can’t go back to ancient Crete…Minoan women didn’t look like this, and I would imagine that they didn’t go around topless. Well, not actually topless. You could make a statue of a topless woman. But that is not what we have here. She has actually been given a bodice. Why? Apparently, to force her breasts upwards to make them even bigger! The world's first push-up bra! The tiny waist and the overly-large breasts practically poking your eyes out…it almost seems like an overtly pornographic statue.

These were found on the island of Pompeii. Too bad Pazuzu!

Meet Priapus. Now, meet a Satyr…

When in Egypt, which is where we are, do as the Egyptians…

Hello! Look what I’ve got!

Here’s a riddle…why did they carve statues of Min out of stone…it’s much harder and lasts a lot longer! So it is difficult to believe that the Minoan statue is anything other than a pornographic statue. But is there any trickery involved with the Great Big-Breasted Snake Goddess?

That’s what really was found. Still busty to be sure, but missing a bunch of parts. How did we go from there to…

They simply reconstructed it to look like this. It certainly looks better in a museum than the other…the real…artifact. And what is it that they put on top of her head? Yes…a pussy cat. Now for Khufu. Scholars believe that they know who Khufu’s engineer was, and they believe that he was responsible for making the pyramid. He was named Hemiunu, said to be Khufu’s vizier. But much more! He was the son of Nefermaat, and as grandson of Sneferu, he was related to Khufu by blood. And! They found a statue of him in his tomb. Funny…a government official has a statue of himself included in his tomb, and yet the best his boss could manage to do was to leave a 3 inch tall statute in Abydos. Hemiunu’s statue is 5 feet tall…meaning that it is 4 feet 9 inches taller than the builder of the greatest man-made structure on earth for 3,800 years. But there is something about Hemiunu that may historians do not want to discuss. When ancient Egyptians leave statues of themselves, it is because they want them to last…they want people to always picture them, not by what they really looked like…but by an ideal physical presence. Now let’s meet Hemiunu, and then think of Minoan Snake Lady. This is how Hemiunu wanted eternity to picture him...

Side view…

 
I’ll bet you see it…they’re staring you right in the eye. Make no mistake about it, ancient Egypt was a man’s world. But that didn’t prevent…

Hatshepsut from becoming pharaoh. 

The statuette is similar to that of Hemiunu…amazingly so. And we know that Hatshepsut was a woman. What gives it away is the breasts. And Hemiunu’s breasts are bigger than Hatshepsut’s breasts! I have never seen a statue from antiquity of a male who wanted countless generations of people to remember the fact that he had bigger breasts than most women. The image of Hemiunu would be an idealized image of a woman who was rather proud of her Minoan Snake Goddess-esque cup size. And he did it without a push-up bodice! I see no other possible explanation of Hemiunu’s statue other than that…this is the statue of a woman. But the head of the statue may, or may not, be that of a woman…Hatshepsut’s facial features are quite feminine. One must exercise caution with appearances…

This is a statue of the god Pan teaching his beloved, Daphnis, to play the pan-pipes. She does seem to be a pretty-looking thing…

Daphnis was a young male, and the features above the waist certainly suggest that Pan’s beloved was a young female. Still, Daphnis was no Priapus. Now for the hocus-pocus…

It belongs in a museum! Wait, it is in a museum. But what is missing? That’s right…the head. But who wants to look at the statue of Hemiunu without a head? So the statue looks cool…after it was reconstructed. It’s just me I’m sure, but the figure in the statue is a woman. And whoever it was…was he or she really Khufu’s architect? Why does the engineer get a five foot tall statue in his tomb, but all Khufu gets is a 3 inch tall statuette that somehow ended up in Abydos? And I would make one more tedious observation before moving on. Khufu had a daughter named Nefertiabet. She, unlike her father, was actually buried at Giza. How do we know?

A very stylish gal! This is the stela found in her tomb at Giza. It leaves no doubt who was buried there. So the daughter gets this inside her tomb, but Itsy-Bitsy Khufu gets nothing but a bunch of graffiti markings in relieving chambers that are not, conveniently, present in Davison’s relieving chamber? And what is all the writing? Besides being a fashion model, she was also a Big Eater, and much of what is on the stela are her favorite foods. Yes! The menu! She also got this...

Ok, it’s not much. Actually, it looks like a child’s toy. But unlike Khufu’s statuette, this was actually found IN her tomb. So too this…

Perhaps she collected figurines. Khufu, on the other hand, seems to have a received a bunch of nothing. But here is something worse. The stela in Nefertiabet’s tomb is approximately 15 inches tall. And it looks like that, if our Ancient Egyptian Gourmand were to stand up, she would bump her head on the top of the stela. Accounting for the area at the bottom, one might estimate that a standing Nefertiabet would be 12 inches tall, making her 9 inches taller than Daddy Khufu. I will add into the mix…Khafra, believed to have built the second largest pyramid at Giza. If I’m right, that pyramid was actually built by Khufu. Khafra was supposedly the son of Khufu, and successor of his brother…Djedefre. So…

And I suppose that it is only within the confines of a bizarre, historical fiction that the answer to the Sphinxian Riddle of the Great Pyramid may be found. Another important observation, when looking at all the large amount of graffiti, and particularly the fact that Gordons’ graffiti stops just short of the Khufu cartouche, is the observation that the cartouche itself has been damaged. The following statement can be found on a prominent website that discusses the cartouche…

“At least at half a dozen locations paint has been chiseled away. Who is responsible, what happened to the paint, if it has been analyzed, and what the results were is still unknown to this day.”

There was an instance, in 2013, when three Germans apparently paid some, since the event now… imprisoned…Egyptians who were able to take the three men into the relieving chamber, where they scraped paint from the main cartouche and took it back to Germany to be analyzed. Of course, despite the fact that it was illegal, a tremendous benefit could be obtained if the paint were, in fact, analyzed. This was purportedly done, and it was declared that the paint was recent. However, this paint was, apparently, not given to other agencies so as to confirm the age of the paint. This is, of course, suspicious, and makes one wonder just what they tested. But it would seem that the three Germans weren’t the only ones to “chisel away” at the cartouche, as the quote cited above would clearly suggest. This is described as vandalism. I have to say that the fact that the three Germans were able to get up into the relieving chamber certainly supports the idea that it was quite easy to do so in the past, presumably easier and easier as one works back in time, e.g. Gordons (1948) and Sister Mary Martin (1915). The ease with which this was done explains why the relieving chamber has been rendered too compromised to allow me to trust in anything Up There. But even if the claim about the age of the scrapings made by the Germans, which should be disregarded, is, in fact, disregarded, it nonetheless raises a good point. I question that the word “vandalism” is the right one. There are copious amounts of vandalism in the chamber, and Gordons’ vandalism conveniently stopped just short of the cartouche, or, as I suggested earlier, the painting of the cartouche took place after 1948, when the cartouche was painted in the first free area of the ceiling after reaching Gordons’s vandalism. Vandalism? Gordons…yes…but chiseling? Perhaps…no. The reason for the damage to the Not Sarcophagus is tourists taking a small chunk of it home as a souvenir. I get that…something tangible. But to take bits of paint home? I seriously doubt it. So “vandalism” may not be the right word. The only reason to “chisel” at the cartouche is to get a sample of paint. Or to scrape something off and re-do it…maybe even…correct it. And if the Germans weren’t the only ones to take a sample of the red ochre paint…then who else did? The answer to that question is obvious…orthodox Egyptologists and, quite possibly, the agency responsible for the upkeep and control of the monuments in Egypt. Egyptologists share one notable thing with historians, theologians, and various other members of the Intellectual and Theological Establishment. What is that? They have spent their lives within the Great Consensus…they have an undoubted vested interest in not embracing evidence or interpretations that would substantially change the Great Consensus, and so they are not open to New Things. You’ve spent 40 years as a Consensus Egyptologist…writing…teaching…holding seminars…giving scholarly presentations, and then something comes along that would overturn everything you did for 40 years? What do you do? Well, the answer to that is obvious. And the Chiseling Germans’ paint-based escapade does make a simple recommendation apparent…

CONDUCT AN OFFICIAL ANALYSIS OF THE PAINT THAT EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES HAVE CHISELED FROM THE CARTOUCHE, AND SHARE IT WITH THE WORLD.

Why hasn’t this been done? Perhaps it has. But if it has been done, it has not entered into the debate about just how old the cartouche really is. Of course, one would be dependent on the reliability of the conclusion of the Egyptian Authorities and the Vested-Interest-Egyptologists. One writer noted that the red ochre paint used by ancient Egyptians was still in use at the time of Vyse’s Dynamitic Discoveries. I would think it possible that Egyptian Government Egyptologists have samples of that paint in their possession. But I find it puzzling that the Great Consensus Establishment hasn’t performed a basic task such as providing the world with the results of an analysis of the paint…that is very telling.

Too much has been made about markings wrapping around this block of stone or that block of stone. Well, that depends on just how far they wrap. If not by much, then it would be possible to get a long, thin paint brush into the crevice in order to make red markings. And I would also state that sometimes observations one way or the other are too fixed. By that I mean this…if one maintains that the key markings…the Khufu cartouche and the Khnum-Khufu cartouche…cannot be forgeries because some markings wrap around the corner of some of the blocks…that is a forced conclusion. It is possible that some of the markings were made on some of the stones at the time the blocks were put in place, and therefore aren’t forgeries. It is also obviously true that one might be clever enough to realize that forgeries would be less likely to be considered forgeries if you painted the forgeries in such a way as to create the appearance that they must have been painted before the blocks were put into place. How hard is it to paint a cartouche and not round the oval by the time the ceiling hits the wall? One doesn’t have to be too clever to do that. But the cartouches…are forgeries. In other words, authentic markings may be present, but unauthentic forgeries may also be present. The authentic markings would then wrap around blocks, but then forgeries were added to the blocks in such a way as to make them look like they are original. I point that out simply as another possible permutation. And certainly one must ask the question…why are there no such marks in Davison’s chamber?

If one were to hypothetically assume that a Hypothetical Dynamiter was intent on discovering something really big and so he was willing to forge a cartouche or two, he couldn’t forge a cartouche in Davison’s Chamber because it was already known that Davison’s Chamber contained no cartouches…or any other markings. If he knew that there were other chambers above Davison’s Chamber, or at least believed there were additional chambers, then blasting his way into them gave him “virgin chambers” that no one else had ever seen. So if I paint a cartouche in Davison’s Chamber, Egyptologists know that there were no such markings, and they would immediately declare me to be a fraudster. But a chamber that no one had seen before would allow the Hypothetical Fraudster the opportunity to paint whatever he wished on the walls. If the markings in Wellington’s Chamber, Nelson’s Chamber, Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber and Campbell’s Chambers are authentic, then why is it that no such markings are present in Davison’s Chamber? The answer is obvious. Workmen marked blocks in such a way that blocks with relevant cartouches just so happened to make it into the chambers discovered by Vyse, but none made their way into the chamber discovered by Davison? There is no Khufu, much less Raufu or Shoufou, or the Voodoo-that-you-Do in Davison’s chamber and indeed…nowhere else in the pyramid? It has been noted that Khufu’s Horus name also appears in the relieving chamber. Interesting, but the same possibilities exist with the Horus name as any other of the markings.

Of course, if the chiseling noticed on the cartouche goes beyond that which is necessary to obtain paint for analysis, for which only scraping, not chiseling, would suffice, then it would seem likely that the chiseling was done for a purpose other than obtaining flecks of paint…it would suggest that something was…chiseled off…the particular spot, so that something else could be put in its place. But again, the copious amounts of vandalism in the chambers compromises everything present.

These considerations lead one to a possible conclusion, albeit one fit, perhaps, only for a fictional novel. If Vyse did, in fact, paint at least one cartouche in the relieving chamber, which would therefore be a forgery…does that necessarily mean that the cartouche seen so persistently in the photos so readily available in our present day is in fact that cartouche forged by Vyse? I’ve noted that there are those who claim that Vyse’s Cartouche was a forgery, and that it misspelled the name of the king, producing the name Raufu, rather than Khufu. And then there was the name…Shoufou. However, there are images from Vyse’s notebook that could suggest otherwise…

The illustration in the notebook is somewhat confusing. The drawing of the cartouche is interesting in that the oval is complete, whereas the cartouche in the pyramid is cut off. Here is another view of that, which I showed before…

The sieve in question does not appear to have three horizontal lines in it, but a sieve with three horizontal lines is drawn above the cartouche in Vyse’s journal. Vyse may have had a reference book on the subject of hieroglyphics with him, and in that book, the sieve in Khufu’s name is either simply incorrect, or the image simply came out in such a way to create the appearance of being a mistake; i.e. the apparent dot in the sieve was really due to the poor printing quality of the image. It is also possible that Wilkinson stated at one point that the actual name of Cheops or Chemmis was, in fact, Suphis or Saophis, with that king’s successor being named Saophis or Senasophis, names cited elsewhere. However, it has been pointed out that the cartouche for Suphis/Saophis is actually not presented in Wilkinson’s book. A perusal of the book, in particular the plates labelled “succession of the pharaohs,” which presents various cartouches, begins with the 16th Dynasty, specifically with Ramses II…

Where is the relevant cartouche? I don’t know. But I’m just a dilettante, so who cares?  This is the cartouche usually rendered as Khnum-Khufu, which was in Wellington’s Chamber:

The sieve within the cartouche appears to have a dot within it. So it is a fair question to ask…where did the cartouche, drawn by Vyse, showing a sieve which appears to contain a dot and a small line, come from?

One might expect that Wilkinson would have supplied the name Shoufou, or something close to Suphis. Felix’s book, Notes on Hieroglyphics, was published in 1830, and supposedly lists the name of Khufu and Khnum-Khufu as found at Wadi Maghara…

Felix lists 16 unknown kings, and identifies them as possible kings of Memphis, noting the names are also found at the pyramids. If the cartouche in question is the one that the arrow points to, then it appears to have a solid disk. In the case of Ippolito Roselini (I Monumenti Dell’Egitto e Della Nubia), the following is met with:

That is Plate 1, and it is rather difficult to determine what is in the sieve. But Wilkinson published a second work in 1837, called Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. That was the same year in which Vyse found his Valuable Cartouches. This is the relevant page (www.bibliotecapleyades.net):

Here the name is Shufu, or Shuphis; then Numba-Khufu. Here the sieve of the cartouche doesn’t have the three horizontal lines. But would Vyse, who discovered the additional chambers in 1837, have had access to this book, published in 1837? What is significant is that when a third-party requested copies of the markings discovered in the other chambers in order to have ROSELINI review them, Vyse, it would seem, refused.  Samuel Birch was the resident Egyptian hieroglyphics expert at the British museum, and by May 27, 1837 he had received, and reviewed, the markings found by Vyse. And while he did indicate that the cartouche in question could be read as Khufu, thereby apparently validating Vyse’s claims, Birch made other comments that are highly relevant. He commented on the illegibility of the symbols following the royal names. He was also puzzled by the appearance of semi-hieratic, and even hieratic script. It took much learning and practice to write hieroglyphics correctly, and so a script called semi-hieratic was devised for common use, and it wasn’t for quite some time after the era of Khufu that this script appeared. Hieratic script is even later than that. One of the symbols, that used to indicate the “18th Year” of Khufu’s reign, was not actually a symbol that was used in Egyptian as a numeral. There were also symbols that followed the cartouche that could not be translated, and the only other occurrence of the symbols date from the mid-6th century. Some were…unclear, incomplete, out of place, erroneously employed, or completely unknown.

There are various accounts, present on the internet, that go into the fine details about the daily chronology of the events surrounding the finding of the markings, along with various conclusions offered by various commentators. Personally, I find them interesting, but many of the various details I find to be simply academic…no pun intended. I find the following observations to be most important:

1.  Birch’s comments about semi-hieratic and hieratic script

2.  Vyse’s refusal to provide copies of the relevant markings to Roselini

3.  The different names, or variations, noted by some commentators

4.  The confusion involving the sieve from the relevant page in Vyse’s journal

5.  The ridiculous amount of graffiti in the chambers

6.  The apparently, apart from hidden chambers, anonymity of the structure

7.  The “missing” lid for the granite box, which is apparently not a sarcophagus

8.  The graffiti by “Gordons” conveniently stops just short of the main cartouche, whereas with the second cartouche, graffiti in black paint writes OVER previously existing red markings

To these considerations I would add something that I find to be, perhaps, the most important detail…the complete lack of any such markings in Davison’s Chamber. I find it overwhelmingly telling that none of the stones in the one chamber discovered in 1765 managed to have any markings on them, but then the chambers found by Vyse do have such markings, and indeed, the two markings that supposedly establish the identity of the pyramid’s purported builder. Why aren’t there any such markings on the stones anywhere else in the pyramid? One estimate of the number of stone blocks used in building the Great Pyramid is approximately 591,000. Even if we subtract an estimated 144,000 casing stones, we end up with 447,000 stone blocks, with only a few stones in four of five relieving chambers having any markings on them. If we were to take estimates of a whopping 2.3 million stone blocks in the Great Pyramid…it becomes even more strange. This is simply too convenient to be anything other than highly suspicious. And how hard can it be to write the name…Khufu? After all, it’s not like…Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, the prophet Isaiah’s son, whose name is much longer, but, apparently, could be handed down from the 8th century BC without any problems. Putting these things together, and using them for a fascinating historical fiction, the following conclusion is possible. It would have been impossible to present Egyptian gold or silver artifacts to the world as having come from the relieving chambers. If Vyse needed something big as a key discovery, it would not have been the kind of things that museums and collectors most desired…doo-dads and trinkets; in fact museums were craving mummies at the time. The pyramid had been explored enough by Vyse’s Dynamite Visit that he could not have taken items found elsewhere and then “discovered” them randomly in the pyramid…this would only be possible if a chamber or chambers were newly discovered. Since the only such chambers were relieving chambers above Davison’s Chamber, doo-dads, trinkets, and mummies were out of the question. So the only thing that could be “discovered” by Vyse would be markings that would establish the identity of the Anonymous Pyramid Builder. So cartouches suddenly appeared, not on the walls of Davison’s Chamber, which was simply impossible since it was a quantified space, but on the walls of the chambers Vyse blasted into. Other markings were added to avoid two cartouches being the only convenient markings, and anachronisms were created by using two later type of scripts. Then something strange happened…someone in authority became aware that the Khufu cartouche wasn’t written correctly. So did that person, or persons, alter the cartouche written by Vyse? Some say…yes, but I say…no. I think that the relevant person actually erased, obliterated, the key cartouche that Vyse, or one of his associates, had written on the wall…incorrectly. Then the current cartouche, the big one on the ceiling that appears in so many photos on the internet, was drawn from scratch, and held out as the Vysian Cartouche, now written correctly. Well, it apparently wasn’t written correctly initially, as someone had to chisel part or parts of it from the ceiling to get it right. When the second spurious cartouche was drawn, it was drawn just on the other side of Gordons’s graffiti, indicating that it was drawn on the next available area that was free of graffiti, indicating that it was drawn after 1948. To preserve the supposedly convincing appearance that it had been added to the stone before the stones were originally laid, it was drawn so that the oval of the cartouche was not rounded before hitting the wall, with the idea being that it was originally written in the normal form, but the oval tip was then covered by the adjoining stone. No testing of the paint will ever be allowed, seeing how it would simply show that the paint used for the cartouche is not ancient.

So what was the Great Pyramid, if it wasn’t a tomb or a temple? I noted in another posting that I believe that the pyramid was not decorated, or the builder of it identified as the creator of one of greatest monuments ever constructed by the human race, because the pyramid was disposable. The builder constructed it, using technology simply not available in Khufu’s time, with a singular purpose…and if that purpose was met, then the pyramid would have simply vanished. One of the most controversial issues involved with the Riddle of the Sphinx is the apparent presence of notable water erosion on the monument. As is clear to even the untrained eye of a dilettante, such as myself, the current head on the Sphinx is not original to it, and so it may be, since the Inventory Stela indicates that Khufu fixed the Headdress, that some king before Khufu removed the original head and added his own…and did a very poor job of it. What was the original head? This is a sideview of the Sphinx as it exists now, and also, in Khufu’s day…

I think that the following image is an example of the basis for the original monument:

In ancient Egypt…

Bast, the older form of Bastet, was the goddess of war in Lower Egypt, whose worship is attested in the period 2,890 B.C. She was originally a fierce lioness. The above representation represents her being changed into Bastet the cat goddess of later periods. In Upper Egypt…

The lioness Sekhmet served as the counterpart to Bast. Thus the two ancient kingdoms of Egypt each had a fierce lioness as their war goddess. However, it seems like an interesting possibility that both Bast and Sekhmet are actually two derivations from the same thing…from the same lioness. That lioness was much, much older than 2,890 B.C. and, in fact, existed long before there ever was a Lower Kingdom and an Upper Kingdom.  Traditional belief is that…

…Narmer, the Catfish King, shown in the above illustration committing war crimes, united the two kingdoms, and that this took place during the 32nd or 31st century B.C. That is considerably older than Khufu. However, others have maintained that…

King Scorpion II, and one must admit that the name Scorpion is much better for a warrior-king than Catfish, seeing how catfish eat junk at the bottom of rivers, who may have been Narmer’s immediate predecessor and actually accomplished the unification of the two kingdoms. It has even been suggested that this mace-head originally showed Scorpion II as wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, and another scene showed him wearing the crown of Lower Egypt. It is the combination of the two crowns that made the king of Egypt the king of two, originally independent kingdoms…

Local or regional rulers are known prior to Scorpion II. Including KA, King Crocodile, and Iry-Hor. In Upper Egypt there was Scorpion I, Bull, and…

King Elephant. In lower Egypt there was…

…Double-Falcon.

That takes us to the 32nd century B.C. It seems that the further back you go, rulers took animal names when coming to power. The typical-looking Egyptian deities have a human, and an animal, component. This was a strange mix of pre-anthropomorphic deities, or better…elementals, and anthropomorphic deities…gods and goddesses that look like human beings. I think that before it occurred to human beings to convert elementals…aspects of nature represented by certain animals that were NOT deities, certainly NOT as we understand deities to be, into deities that look just like themselves, animals were revered not as gods and goddesses, but rather, as representations of forces in nature. I’ve commented elsewhere than the oldest strata at the House of the Aquifer in Eridu date to around 5,000 B.C. Originally, there was a simple structure at the site…no temple…no priests…and, it appears, that all most people did was to leave fish there. That makes total sense if the oldest stratum was built at a strange location that was believed to be a portal where the fresh water…sweet water…appeared from ABZU. Eridu was situated near the Persian gulf and had an amazing parallel with Ancient Egypt…though it was in the desert, and we are talking about the time before the use of irrigation in Sumeria, the water-table was such that freshwater would simply seep up from the ground around Eridu. In Egypt, the changing levels of the Nile served a similar function. And both regions were dependent upon this divine movement of the fresh waters to sustain life. Eridu was abandoned, possibly because of disturbances in the water-table. But City-States such as Ur were then using irrigation to bring water from the Tigris-Euphrates into the desert. ABZU was not a god, and had no cult built up around him. He was the fresh-water, and when you felt grateful, you left him fish. He was, in short, an elemental…a force in nature, and one who was revered. Then came ENKI, or EN-KI…Lord Earth. Brought by later settlers at Eridu, he also became closely associated with ABZU and fresh water. So Lord Earth becomes God of Water. One might be tempted to believe that the later settlers at Eridu originally living in a region where ENKI, an elemental representing the ground in which food is grown, made their way to Eridu possibly because of disturbances in the agricultural cycle. The tendency in the ancient world was to tenaciously hang on to the existence of deities, even when that deity may seem obsolete. The Hittites were careful to ensure that all the deities of the people they conquered continued to be worshipped. There were so many that the Hittites spoke of their 1,000 Gods. They maintained long lists of them, and many are known to us only in name. One is immediately reminded of a brilliant move on the Apostle Paul’s part while in Athens. He noticed that there was an altar to Agnostos Theos…the Unknown God...

That is a Latin version of a similar concept. In Paul’s case, he told the people of Athens that their unknown god was now knowable…Jesus Christ. Antiquity simply didn’t like to let deities disappear…it is impious…and other deities will see it that way and, perhaps, be rather upset by it. So one former elemental collides with a current elemental and forms Lord Earth, God of Water. Water and earth…ground, are clearly elemental manifestations in the natural world. Anthropomorphic deities came later, when people did what is far simpler and Elemental People would have been horrified at doing…turning elementals into human beings. Egypt made it half-way…the Sumerians made it all the way, except ABZU, who basically stayed as it was. Egyptians in the 32nd Century B.C. and earlier seemed to look to animal names…King Scorpion, King Elephant, King Crocodile, King Double-Falcon, and perhaps even…King Catfish. This may well be a later derivation from a much earlier time, when particular animals represented various elemental forces in nature.

Why two lionesses? Why not lions? I think that there is a good reason for that. If the Sphinx was originally an animal, uncorrupted by the self-absorbed human king who stuck his head on it, then it was protective. With the lioness, one has a fierce killer. But the lioness offers much more…deadly hunter, but who takes only what she, the other lionesses, and the cubs need. Lions are lazy and do very little. But the lioness not only hunts and kills, she is maternal, and shows both a caring, and protective character when it comes to her young. So one could easily see the combination of vital things in the lioness…hunter, killer, fighter, protector, and…mother. Yes! The lioness is, in many ways, a far superior animal to her lazy, male counterpart. War is not an elemental…war is not hunting, it is not using ferocity to get what one needs and only what one needs. War is an exercise in extreme violence for ultimately very stupid reasons. And in antiquity, war became an end in and of itself…war for the sake of war…war as an excuse to kill, maim, rape and steal other people’s stuff. It reached an absurd degree with the Assyrians, where it was believed that the Assyrian king made war simply because it pleased their god…Ashur. Devastation on a massive scale as an act of piety. So I would suggest that Bast and Sekhmet originally were simply representations of the lioness, and in her elemental state, having nothing to do with the human need to kill each other. Before the time she was blasphemed by human beings looking for killers to excuse their killing, there was the image of the lioness that a very ancient society carved as a protective figure.

Prior to 4,000 BC, as far back as 8,000 B.C, it is believed that the region that includes Egypt was not a desert. There are indications that it was a wet and lush, and supported a healthy world of animal life. Why is that important? Because of what some investigators have found when studying the Sphinx…water erosion…in a place with almost no rainfall, and yet apparently, a considerable amount of water erosion. This would suggest that the Great Lioness was constructed during the period of time before Egypt became what it has been since the time of the dynasties and leaders of the pre-dynastic periods. And that is extremely ancient even from the perspective of the guy whose statue makers couldn’t make a decent statue of him…Khufu. One might speculate that the water erosion on the sphinx would indicate that it was constructed around the time just prior to the earliest stratum of the House of the Aquifer in Eridu. And it would be a wild speculation to assert that the original settlers of Eridu were actually peoples who had left Egypt…except, in 5,000 B.C., it wasn’t known as Egypt, and it may have been the center of an empire that had extremely advanced engineering capabilities…an empire that broke apart very quickly as a result of the Great Pyramid’s failure, or, better said, the failure of that empire’s last ruler…who built the Great Pyramid with a singular purpose. Clues to the mystery are found recorded in the Old Testament.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. Yahweh said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So Yahweh scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel- because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole world. From there God scattered them over the face of the whole earth

Yes, the story of the Tower of Babel.

That is the famous painting. And we all know that butts are funny. In another essay, I pointed out that Michelangelo’s version of creation in the Sistine chapel has a strange guy apparently mooning us. And I think that one may see something rather humorous in the above painting as well.

I added the black circle to get down to a more intriguing close-up:

Like I said…we all know that butts are funny, especially to artists. But the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is not well-executed. We aren’t told why the people want to get to heaven, and the story leaves us believing that it was indeed possible to get to heaven by building a tower, necessitating God’s intervention to stop it. And it seems odd that adding a bunch of new languages would ultimately stop such a building project. The story seems to be aimed at explaining why there are so many different languages from one side of the world to the other, and not about the actual building of a Heaven-Bound Tower. The construction of the tower is ended by God confounding the human language. This could be understood as due to the redactors’ use of an older story, the intention being to explain why there are so many different languages. They utilized a much older legend about a structure intended, in very ancient times, to reach heaven. Who sought to reach heaven…and why? That is where the story of Helel ben-Shohar comes into the picture…

How you have fallen from heaven,
    morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
    you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart…
    “I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
    above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
    on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
    I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
    to the depths of the pit.

Those who see you stare at you,
    they ponder your fate:
“Is this the man who shook the earth
    and made kingdoms tremble,
the man who made the world a wilderness,
    who overthrew its cities
    and would not let his captives go home?”

The story of Lucifer (the name appearing in the Latin version, i.e. the Vulgate). In the Septuagint, he is Phosphorus. In Hebrew…Helel ben-Shohar…

Helel means…Bright One, and thus Lucifer is understood to be the Morning Star. The ancients believed in a Morning Star and an Evening Star, both being manifestations of the planet Venus…one manifestation visible in the morning, and one visible in the evening. The Greek version uses the name Phosphorus:

This is part of an ancient Roman altar and is, indeed, accurate. The goddess is Selene…the Goddess of the Moon. She is flanked by Phosphorus and Hesperus…the Morning and Evening Stars, both of whom are sons of Eos…the Dawn. The morning and the evening stars flank the moon. Here is a broader illustration…

In Roman mythology, Hesperus is called Vesper, and Phosphorus is called…Lucifer. Meet Hesperus…

…a cute kid and, surprisingly for a Greco-Roman god, with a sense of modesty. And meet…

Phosphorus, or in Latin…Lucifer…Helel Ben-Shohar. With less modesty than his brother. The common belief that Lucifer is another name for Satan is simply incorrect. First of all, there is no Satan in the Old Testament…there is simply…The Satan, and according to the prologue of the Book of Job, The Satan is associated with the Sons of God. There is no trace of any kind of war or struggle between The Satan and Yahweh. The Satan doesn’t become Satan until the New Testament, where he has been cast in the role of the Opposite of God in the Great Dualism. The Gospel of Mark, when referring to the period of time that Jesus spent in the wilderness after he was baptized by John, and before beginning his ministry after the arrest of John, simply states that Jesus was tempted by Satan. There is no elaborate story as is found in Matthew and Luke…it appears to be an off-hand remark, but one which I believe is a later gloss, that was inserted into the text prior to the appearance of Matthew. I will discuss this further in the final installment of the In Search of the Panther serial essay, but it is worth noting that in two different strands of the Virgin Birth of Jesus story, one where Jesus, as The Illuminator, spends time in the wilderness, and another where Jesus and his mother, driven from their home, spend time in the wilderness, the association with the wilderness is very important. How did Satan end up with the futile task of tempting Christ? The answer to that lies in the Scape-Goat Ritual. In Leviticus 16, a ritual is described involving the sacrifice of two male goats. The first is sacrificed to Yahweh. The second is sent out into the wilderness.. Why?

Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house.

Then he shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting.

And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.

And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering;

but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.

So who is Azazel? In the Book of Enoch, he is a…

...demon, actually one of the fallen angels known as the Watchers. And one can not deny that Satan will take on goat-like attributes, including cloven hooves. Who can forget Judy Johnson’s Diabolical Goat-Man? And if you want a goat-guy demon, you clearly find yourself with someone who has appeared in so many essays on this website…

Baphomet…and a true goat-guy, who, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is portrayed in a Pazuzu-like pose. But certainly by the time of the Gospel of Mark, Azazel was a demon…an evil spirit-being who lived…where? In the desert.

It’s worth taking another look at the relevant material in Mark in light of Azazel. I will work with what I will call Narrative Building Blocks. They are factual events from the life of Jesus of Nazareth, are four in number, and move in chronological order:

As such, they are simply building blocks for the narrative…known events, without any embellishments, interpretations, pertinent details, etc. Now to place them in pre-narrative structure…

Now to flesh it out with a few details:

The story of the Baptism features John as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. The redactors of Mark show the same loose approach to Old Testament passages shown by the redactors of Matthew. In fact, the prophecy cited in Mark is a composite…the combining of two passages…Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3. To create this, two passages are used to create a Composite Passage. Perhaps this can be illustrated in the following way…

Let’s take only what we need, meaning that we will tear the verses out of their larger contexts, then we will disregard the meaning of the verses within the original material out of which they came.

Now we don’t want the entire verse, be it Malachi 3:1, or Isaiah 40:3. And the basic, underlying contexts for the two passages are very different. Malachi uses the name Yahweh of Armies, which signifies the destructive powers of God. The Isaiah passage is part of a larger context dealing with the end of God’s judgment and the return from exile. The Isaiah passages makes no reference to…Armies…Yahweh…as a war-god. That’s good, and necessary, seeing how that image is the very opposite of who Christ is, although in post-modern America, people are expected to like war, worship the military, and, pushing aside the Embarrassing Man from Nazareth, revere the Violent God of the Evangelicals. If only Christ would stay out of the way! Or better, maybe turn him into a war-lord. But not the redactors of Mark, who knew better. So now it’s Make-Your-Own-Prophecy time! We will create a Customized Prophecy for John the Baptist to fulfill…we will cross out the bits we don’t want to use, smash what remains of the two verses together, and finally, change the pronouns...

There we go! And, or so it would seem, the redactors of Mark were NOT fundamentalists. They felt free to break up material, get rid of the bits they didn’t want, and then re-write what was left. This use of Scripture allowed for the creation of...

John as the Great Forerunner. But, returning to our construction of Mark's narrative, we note that Christ receives the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove…immediately after his baptism. The Great Flood in Noah’s time was intended to cleanse the world of the sins of men, which is accomplished with water. John’s baptism was intended to serve as a ritual symbolizing the cleansing of a person’s sin…by water. With the Great Flood, it is the final flight of the dove that indicates that cleansing of the world was over. The Descent of the Dove symbolizes the receipt of the Holy Spirit by the One who would bring a final cleansing of, not the world, but of the sins of all believers. The flood waters have cleansed…the dove does not return. Christ will cleanse…the dove rests on him. The question of the ministry of Christ is fairly straightforward…once John has been arrested, the Repentance Movement receives it’s final, and true, leader.

The tricky building block is that of the wilderness. In Mark 1:13, a very condensed treatment of details is to be found:

1.  Jesus was in the Wilderness for 40 days

2.  Jesus was with wild beasts

3.  Jesus was administered to by angels

4.  Jesus was tempted by Satan

Of course, the flood rains came down for 40 days and 40 nights, and when it came time to test whether the flood was over, after a 40 day period, the dove was released (the crow is probably a duplicate). The dove returned and was then released two more times over a period of 7 days each. So the number 40 is inherent to the story of the Great Flood. Other important uses of the period…40 days…and…40 years are met with frequently in the Old Testament, and is the natural number used to fill otherwise uncertain periods of time (e.g. the lengths of the reigns of Saul and Solomon). Wild animals obviously live in the wilderness. However, many dangerous wild beasts do as well, and none harmed Jesus. And it is exactly this image of the wild beast that will become so important in detail Number 4. The act of administering to Jesus is also important in two strains of the Virgin Birth Story. Both involve the wilderness…

The third kingdom says of him that he came from a virgin womb. He was cast out of his city, he and his mother. He was brought to a desert place. He was nourished there.

And…

The fourth kingdom says of him that he came from a virgin…the virgin became pregnant and gave birth to the child there. She nourished him on a border of the desert. When he had been nourished, he received glory and power from the seed from which he was begotten.

Thus the claim is made that Jesus was actually born in the wilderness. This shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. There was uncertainty among the early Christians as to where Jesus was born, and under what circumstances. One assumes, based on the narrative that is present in Mark, that Jesus was born in Nazareth. Matthew, on the other hand, claims that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and despite the use of vignettes from the Gospel of the Young Jesus, gives no information as to the precise circumstances. This could suggest that in the view of Matthew, Jesus was born under normal circumstances. Luke, who also places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, clearly suggests that Jesus was born in a stable of some kind, since we find the baby Jesus in a feeding-trough, and we learn that local shepherds become aware of what had happened. Luke’s narrative is the one usually depicted in the Christmas Pageant, and is perhaps the one that most readily comes to mind…

Given the subject of the Virgin Mary, I will indulge in a momentary digression, and re-iterate a point made in previous essays about Luke…he is the first great step in helping to create the Veneration of the Virgin. But! He nonetheless says…

So it was that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her FIRSTBORN son…

And it would be unnecessary to use the qualifier FIRSTBORN if there weren’t subsequent sons. James would disagree wholeheartedly. The Gospel of James is perhaps the most important step, presenting us with the Perpetual Virgin…to the extent that Mary was suddenly restored to virginhood immediately after the birth of Jesus…and this was physically verified, the description of which would, and did, shock Rome…although I’m sure that the Pope liked the Perpetual Virgin bit, something that Luke clearly implied was not the case. It would almost seem that one could skip the whole Mary-thing and suggest that Jesus had no human father…AND NO HUMAN MOTHER! And so we meet a very strange belief in the origin of Jesus…

The Fifth Kingdom says of him that he came down as a drop of water from heaven. He was thrown into the sea. The abyss received him, and gave birth to him and brought him to heaven. He received glory and power. And thus he came to the water.

No mother and no father…he arrived as a drop of water from heaven. Another version of this adds some even cooler details…

The Seventh Kingdom says of him that he is a drop of water. He fell from heaven to earth. Dragons brought him down into the caves. He became a child. A spirit came upon him and then brought him on high to the place where the drop had come forth. He received glory and power there. And thus he came to the water.

Caves? I don’t know how Philip would feel about this, but I’m sure that James would agree with the cave element. The dragons? Well, that’s probably a different thing altogether.

I can add yet another belief about where exactly Jesus was born, and exactly under what circumstances. It too features the Virgin Mother. As we progress through the Kingdoms, as has become clear, we find different explanations about how the Virgin became pregnant. This one is the very best one…

And the Sixth Kingdom says that his mother [the virgin] came down to the aeon below in order to gather flowers. She became pregnant from the Desire of the Flowers. She gave birth to him in that place. The Angels of the Flower Garden nourished him. He received glory and power there. And thus he came to the water.

The Angels of the Flower Garden? Awesome! The implication is that these angels nourished him in a garden…the Illuminator’s mother gave birth in a garden. But this story may be somewhat more palatable for Philip. Why? Because the Child’s mother did not become pregnant by a spirit. No! She became pregnant as she picked flowers. Then she gave birth to her son in a garden, where the Angels of the Flower Garden nourished him. Apparently, after giving birth, she left the Child to be nourished by angels…which is exactly what Mark seems to say about Jesus’s time in the wilderness. And so much more! Where did his mother come from? Not born of human parents anymore than the Child was. No! She came down from heaven to pick flowers. The Queen of Heaven, to be sure. Regardless of what one may think of this, it is an amazingly beautiful image. And the really fascinating thing is a story about Mary that is just as beautiful…following her death, the apostles went to Mary’s tomb. When they opened it…it was full of flowers. Based on my belief that the Garden Nativity, as I will call it, is actually very important, I’ll keep going…

This is a Mary Garden; which is a special garden where one plants all kinds of flowers sacred to Mary and Jesus. There is an incredible number of flowers associated with Mary. And such images!

The flower, second row, middle image, is the Assumption Lily, said to bloom at just the time that Mary was taken up to heaven. Or, perhaps, returned after picking flowers. I can’t resist one more…

Our Lady’s Tears. I’m sure it’s just the heretic in me, but one gets a strange feeling about all of this. The story of Mary and the Garden Flowers is not orthodox…I know what Epiphanius the Curtain-tearer would say! But the intimate connection between Mary and Flowers could suggest that the story of the Garden Nativity never truly became lost…it refused to die, finding a way to live on within the confines of Boring Orthodoxy, giving it a beauty that it otherwise…lacks. One is also tempted to look at the Veneration of Mary in a slightly different light. Mary the Mother of God; Mary the Queen of Heaven…if she ultimately takes on characteristics of other Great and Important Divine Female Figures…which I believe is true…could her connection with a particularly important role in heaven owe something to the secret heresy of She Who Simply Came Down From Heaven to Pick Flowers?

But in Mark's wilderness scene, the angels administering to Jesus was clearly a statement by the redactors of Mark that the angels provided Jesus with nourishment. I have noted in other essays that one of the rumors about Jesus that circulated during the time of his ministry was that Jesus was, in fact, Elijah. When that prophet had gone into the wilderness to ask Yahweh to let him die, he fell asleep under a Juniper tree. This happened next…

Then as he slept under the Juniper tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him…Arise! Eat! When Elijah looked up, sitting by his head was bread baked over coals and a jar of water. So Elijah ate and drank, but he fell asleep again. So the Angel of Yahweh came back a second time and roused him from his sleep…Arise! Eat! For the journey is too great for you otherwise! So Elijah got up and ate and drank again. Then he was strengthened enough by that food that he journeyed forty days and forty nights.

The story of Elijah was clearly one of the narratives that formed the basis for this part of the Wilderness Story. And! There is no virgin birth in Mark. This has the effect of making it impossible to draw on either, or both, of unique and varying strains of the Virgin Birth story, which claim that it was not angels who nourished him in the wilderness, but rather…his mother. It is also the case that in these two strains, the apparent story-line of one of them is that the Virgin gave birth to Jesus in the wilderness, and thus nourished the infant there. In the other strain, a similar image is met with, whereby the Virgin and her son were driven out of their city, which is not named, and thus he was nourished by his mother in the wilderness. Thus there is a more than fascinating variance between the Jesus-and-the-Wilderness story-line as it appeared in two strains of the Virgin Birth Story, and the use of that story-line as the intervening episode between the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Ministry of Christ.

Of course, the best bit is the Jesus vs. Satan component. It was, however, not of much interest to the redactors of Mark, who lumped it in with other components within a single passage. But be careful! There is no condemnation of Satan in this passage, and if he were actually tempting Jesus, this could be seen as simply the same role that The Satan played in the Prologue of Job. However, this is the first appearance of SATAN rather than THE SATAN, in the New Testament. What was a title has now become a name. Matthew will build on this to create a much broader narrative detailing this Desert Battle. Since we are dealing with SATAN, and not…THE SATAN, we are dealing with the character who elsewhere in the New Testament will be the Great Enemy of God and Leader of the Forces of Evil Within the Great Dualism. And why would this happen in the Wilderness? The answer to that rests in comments made earlier about Leviticus 16. The community takes two goats…one is sacrificed to Yahweh, the other is taken into the Wilderness to be given to a being known as Azazel. His goat is the scape-goat…the one that suffers for others. Jesus will be the ultimate and final scape-goat for all humanity; well, for those who believe in his suffering, death, and resurrection. So if Ultimate Scape-goat heads off into the wilderness, then a metaphorical battle with the Malevolent Being Known as Azazel must have metaphorically happened. The scape-goat in Leviticus 16 will not escape Azazel and does not die by its own choice. Christ will survive Azazel, and though he later dies, he only dies because he chooses to do so. So why not just name Azazel? Well, let’s see what else the redactors of Mark do on this subject…

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said…He has Beelzebub…by the ruler of the demons He casts out demons.

So Jesus called them to listen and asked them…How can Satan cast out Satan?

Fascinating, since both parties in the debate don’t seem to be speaking about the same guy. In fact, Beelzebub was not the ruler of the demons. Most people would say that…Satan is the ruler of the demons. But even more relevant…Beelzebub wasn’t even a demon. He was Baal-Zebub, the Lord of the Flies, an obscure name in the Old Testament for a god in Philistia. King Ahaziah, the super smart king who fell through the roof of his palace and badly injured himself in the process, sent envoys to ask Baal-Zebub if he would recover. These envoys were intercepted by Elijah who posed the question…

Is there no God in Israel? Why do you seek an answer from Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron?

So they are making an accusation not just against Jesus, but against the man Jesus healed. That man was being cast as the apostate Ahaziah, who shunned the God of Israel, and sought healing from a pagan deity. However, it was believed in the early Christian period that Baal-Zebub was in fact a Malevolent Being, and probably as the result of this story in Mark. So when Christ began his response to the accusation of the scribes, the redactors of Mark switched out Baal-Zebub, and added the name…Satan. This creates the clear impression that the scribes on the one hand, and Jesus on the other hand, are talking theological apples and theological oranges. But there is one more, very strange Malevolent Being who is associated with the desert and Jesus being there that derives from one of the strains of the Virgin Birth Story. Above, I left out that particular part of the quote. Here it is in full:

The fourth kingdom says of him that he came from a virgin. Solomon sought her, he and Phersalo and Sauel and his armies, which had been sent out to find her. Solomon himself sent his army of demons to seek out the virgin. But they did not find the one whom they sought, but they did find the virgin who was given to them. It was she whom they fetched. Solomon took her. The virgin became pregnant and gave birth to the child there. She nourished him on a border of the desert.

If Philip is offended by Matthew’s claim that Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit…what would he say about this? This is king Solomon, who, in some apocryphal books, is turned into the Greatest of Sorcerers…and he didn’t even bring any Christmas gifts to the infant Jesus! Sorry. I will refer again to this bizarre story in the final episode of the In Search of the Panther Serial Essay, but in this case, Solomon commands an army of demons. He has apparently heard about a most unusual virgin, and so he sends out his demons to find her. He doesn’t find her, but he does find another virgin, by whom he fathers the child referred to in the passage. The virgin became pregnant…and, yes! Shades of the Septuagint version of Isaiah. 7:14; a passage I have done to death more than any other. I suggested that the Septuagint translator chose the word parthenos, not because he understood the passage to be referring to a physical virgin giving birth to a child, but because he correctly understood that the woman referred to by Isaiah was, at the moment of the encounter between Isaiah and King Ahaz, still a virgin, but wouldn’t be by the time she was pregnant. This would appear to be the sense of what the Fourth Kingdom is saying. Think of it like this. I am a married woman and have four sons. My eldest son was born of a virgin…I was a virgin when I married, and he was my first born. Not so of the other three. This is poetical and interpretative, not literal. One of several interesting contributions made by the Fourth Kingdom. So Solomon is a Malevolent Entity associated with the desert, and also, if the Apocalypse of Adam is speaking of Jesus of Nazareth when discussing the origins of the Illuminator…the Photor. It is very hard to see it any other way, for obvious reasons, not least of which is the concluding statement that there are three Illuminators…

Yesseus, Mazareus, Yessedeus

This in fact appears to really be one Illuminator…Jesus Mazareus…switch out the M in Mazareus for the letter N, and you end up with Nazareus…Nazareth. If so, then the Great Illuminator is really a Three-fold Illuminator…a sort of Trinity. The conclusion here is that by the time of the early Christians, any other Malevolent Being that one might encounter goes through an immediate process. The Satan was converted into Satan, and then the other relevant beings were merged into him. Take Revelation 2: 12-13…

And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write…These things says He who has the sharp two-edged sword! I know your works and where you dwell…the place where Satan’s throne is.

The writer is referring to the giant altar of Zeus at Pergamum. So the Pagan Father of the Pagan Gods is also…Satan. These considerations strongly indicate that the evil character that modern Christians know by the name of Satan is any and all Malevolent Entities rolled up into one. Except in demonology, where they are all unrolled into their constituent elements. This non-existent and absurd being has nothing to do with The Satan found in the Old Testament, and exists only as a...literary character, an insult, and a convenient person to blame your own misdeeds on. So what happened when Jesus of Nazareth…Yesseus Mazareus, the Once-and-for-All Sacrifice for All Mankind, fresh from his baptism at the Jordan, went off into the desert, with or without his mother? He faced an evil spirit…not one that hung out elsewhere, such as at meetings of the Sons of God, but one who lurked in the Darkest of Places looking for scapegoats to devour…Azazel…the Goat-Demon. By New Testament times, other entities, e.g. Baal-Zebub, who had an evil connotation about them, were subsumed into a Composite Lord of Darkness…the Satan we know is actually made of different malevolent entities…The Satan, Baal-Zebub, and…Azazel.

Leaving aside The Satan, and Composite Satan, there is nothing in Isaiah’s story about Helel ben-Shohar, which is far more ancient than Isaiah’s time, to equate Helel with The Satan. Unlike The Satan, however you perceive him, the Bright One was a mortal man, and thus Isaiah uses Lucifer in comparison to the king of Babylonia. It was not until later that Lucifer became equated with Satan. This is Revelation 22:16…

"I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star."

…although, the Greek word used here isn’t…phosphorus, the basic idea is the same.

Therefore, O Lord,
we pray you that this candle,
hallowed to the honor of your name,
may persevere undimmed,
to overcome the darkness of this night.
Receive it as a pleasing fragrance,
and let it mingle with the lights of heaven.

May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star:
the one Morning Star who never sets,
Christ your Son,
who, coming back from death's domain,
has shed his peaceful light on humanity,
and lives and reigns for ever and ever.

That is the Exsultet, or Announcement of Easter, where, again, Christ is the Morning Star…

Flammas eius lúcifer matutínus invéniat:
ille, inquam, lúcifer, qui nescit occásum.
Christus Fílius tuus

And so here, as in Revelation, Christ is Lucifer. But! Christ is the Morning Star…not…the Helel ben-Shohar of Isaiah. Isaiah’s Lucifer was a mortal man who decided that he was God, and being God, he belonged in heaven. So he devised a plan to get there. He was a megalomaniac, and perhaps the first human to reach the insane conclusion that he was God. And he ruled a vast empire. Isaiah doesn’t say how Helel intended to get to heaven, but he was metaphorically cast down to earth, and then into the abode of the dead. As we know, God doesn’t die. It seems inevitable that the story of Lucifer and the story about the Tower of Babel, ultimately go back to the same myth. Helel didn’t fly to heaven. A later version of the original events made use of the idea that Helel built a structure in order to get to heaven. In Genesis, that structure took the form of something that the ancient Hebrews knew well…a tower.

The Great Pyramid was originally covered, on the exterior, with highly polished blocks of white Tura limestone, referred to as casing stones.

These were, much later, pillaged from the Great Pyramid for use in building other structures. These casing stones were clearly intended to reflect the light of the sun. And as I noted in another post, each of the four sides of the pyramid are concave, creating eight sides. This may have been intended to increase the intensity of the light reflected by the pyramid. With the desert sun shining down on the original Great Pyramid Covered In Mirrors, some have suggested that the light would have been visible from the moon…Selene, if you’re Lucifer and Hesperus. One might describe this, if one were the…

…Man in the Moon, as a bright star on earth. But one might also describe it as a bright sun on earth. And therein lies a most fascinating possibility. The coffer in the Great Pyramid never had a lid. The intention was for Helel to lie down inside. He intended to reach heaven, but not by climbing a tower. What the Great Pyramid was meant to be was…a sun, constructed by Helel who intended to ride it from earth into heaven. Not some rocket ship as the Devotees of Martians would suggest. It is much more simple and, ultimately, more understandable. In the morning, the sun rises…then sets in the evening. If one could build a sun, then one could use it as a means to get to heaven. And had Helel accomplished this, then the Great Pyramid would no longer exist…so it was disposable…no need for decoration…no need for him to put his name on it. It would get him to heaven, where he would reign as the God of the Universe. In the time of Helel, there was a tremendously advanced technology available to the ruler of the vast empire. When the time came, he entered the pyramid, waiting for it to take him to heaven; to climb the sky as the sun is wont to do. He waited and waited…and waited some more. Nothing happened, and the inside of the pyramid would have become lethally hot. And he passed out from the stifling heat…and died. So much for god. The pyramid was built behind the much older Sphinx…the Great Lioness…the ancient elemental, who then, in the mind of Helel, protected his Great Pyramid. Elementals existed before anthropomorphic deities…and someone had to be the first to decide that the anthropos in anthropomorphic, the man who served as the basis of the man-like deities, was actually…himself. And this belief in King-As-God would last for thousands of years in Ancient Egypt. With his death, the Empire of Helel broke apart, sending refugees fleeing far and wide. And some of them arrived around 5,000 B.C. in what would become Eridu, refusing to let go of the far superior notion of the…Elemental. This was prior to the arrival of anthropomorphic Enki. Before that, there was Abzu…an elemental like the Great Lioness, this one representing Fresh Water. And they built a simple House of the Aquifer, where they brought Abzu gifts of fish. Actually, they gave them back to him. Egypt lived by the cycle of the Nile, and so the founders of Eridu lived by the cycle of the freshwater table fed by the Persian Gulf. In other words, they found the closest thing to their point of origin that existed anywhere outside of Egypt. Eventually, Eridu would be supplanted by Ur, the great Sumerian city where Abraham grew up. Following the epic failure of Helel and his Earth-Sun, Abraham’s family had scattered too, wandered the earth, until moving to Ur. Then Abraham, not content with the False Gods he knew so well and destroying the idols in his father’s Ye Olde Idol Shoppe, decided to head off into nowhere seeking the God of his ancestors. Abraham found his God, and God found his friend. So there are many different kinds of strange books, written on paper, scrolls, or even…walls. And many strange books contain very strange things, or so it would seem. And a Great Pyramid in the desert? When they entered it they found…nothing. That’s very different than a truly sacred place, where when they entered, all they could say was…My God, it’s full of flowers!