In Terror of Demons, Episode 3, I decided that there was no more need to discuss the dreaded Fiery Serpent Fiery Dragon Fiery Devil Rishta Guinea Worm Dracunculus. Some people have very long names.
…Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.
Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus…who liked to play dress-up, and in this case…as Hercules. And the importance of names is something that will come up again in this serial essay. The only reason I mention the Great Horrid Worm one last time is because of the statement made by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr about the Guinea worm. It may be remembered…probably not…that I quoted this distinguished gentleman in part 3 of this essay…
…as if these vices which burrow into people’s souls, as the Guinea-worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be more mischievous when seen than out of sight.
I noted that Mr. Holmes has the directionality wrong…you swallow the larvae (in), and the worm actually digs its way out of the foot, not into it. Of course, he needs to refer to something disgusting that burrows its way INTO a person since that is the way he sees vices entering the souls of men. I would contest this view…vice doesn’t need to burrow INTO the hearts and minds of people…it’s already there, and so people, not Metaphorical Worms, are to blame. So did Mr. Holmes not understand what Guinea worms are? Or did he simply reverse the directionality because it suited his mistaken claim about how vice becomes ensconced within the human being? The latter question I would answer…no. To the first question I would answer…it depends. Did he misunderstand the action of infection by the Guinea worm? Yes…unless he is using the wrong term, and therefore referring to the wrong worm. I will show again an image of the Jigger Flea…officially designated as Tunga penetrans…
It may not look so, but the Jigger Flea is the smallest of all fleas. However, once the female has burrowed into the skin, its abdomen begins to swell until it becomes very large.
…on the big toe, obviously, but it shows how big the female becomes.
However, if not removed, a fertilized Jigger Flea will turn into a big, gooey white egg sac in the crater it has created in the victim’s skin…causing that crater to become even larger. The only way to remove them is to cut them out. This is what people in affected areas, with Kenya particularly hard hit by these pests, do…usually with a pin or a thorn. If this is not done, then terrible infestations result. Health workers and charities use scalpels to accomplish to remove them. But if the female flea has turned into an egg sac, it looks like this when it is removed…
And…
As it is pulled out, it can look like a horrible white worm. And since the flea, which you can’t see, does burrow INTO the foot, having seen only the worm-like thing extracted from the foot, I wonder whether Mr. Holmes was confusing the Guinea worm with the Jigger Flea. If Jiggers trump Guinea worms, then the…
Tumbu Fly, which leaves a living Mango maggot in the skin…
…trumps the Jigger Flea. No, that is not an earring. And out it comes…
Fortunately, Mango worm larvae are not difficult to remove, and will make their own way out eventually. The Tumbu fly is trumped by…
…the Left-Behinds of a bite from the Black Fly…Simulium damnosum…emphasizing…damn…which passes on a parasitic worm called Onchocera volvulus. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word trump…
Tumbu flies and those black bugs aren’t more smarter or more stablerer geniuseses than me!
Still, I feel it necessary to get to the grapes of the matter. Onchocera volvulus mature within nodules in the skin, mate, and the female then produces 700 – 1,500 microfilaria per day, leading to Onchocerciasis…African River Blindness. The females in the nodules can grow to 20 inches long, and can live up to 15 years. Prior to the development and wide-spread use of…
…Ivermectin (Mectizan)…humans afflicted by Onchocerciasis lived their lives as giant worm factories, with the parasite in question never leaving the host, and eventually, irreversible blindness resulted.
This was a familiar site in areas where the Black Fly was endemic before Ivermectin, but is no longer. The point of all this is to show that there are…
…big monsters like Ogres…
…and Wodwoses, not to mention…
…pre-Yoda…
…Yodas. I would also include…
…whatever that is. Who doesn’t love dancing Medieval monsters?
These two sure have all the moves! What about…
…trolls? And I suspect that this troll’s eyes look the way they do because he has been eating some of the Magic Mushrooms growing all around.
Whoever said that Goblins aren’t light on their feet?
Who?
Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, my freedom I hold dear;
How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air.
T’was in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair;
But Gollum, the evil one, crept up and slipped away with her…
But I must admit that my favorite monster is the Medieval Killer Rabbit…
Beware of an attack by the Killer Bunny Army…
…also known as the infamous KBA, which, or so I hear, has been designated a terrorist organization. Sometimes, however, Killer Bunnies find themselves on the defensive…
Once more unto the breach, dear friends! These must be the Dogs of War! Someone must have let them slip. And you can see, of course, King Dog in his pup-tent. Perhaps the Dog Army was avenging violent treatment received at the feet of the Great Unpeter-Rabbit Rabbits…
Bad dog! And what can be better than a Medieval Bestiary? Right! A Medieval Drollery…comics from the Middle Ages, and in the case of nuns picking phalluses from phallus trees…erotic ones. Sometimes dogs and rabbits can form alliances…
I would be amiss to miss…
Sea monsters!
Ok, you caught me…the guy in the middle isn’t a sea monster. But he is a Certain Someone.
Which one of you guys is Jonah?
How’d Sigmund get in there? And in case you wanted a Sea Monster Sight-seeing Guide for your next vacation, this might help…
That’s either a travel guide or a menu. But even though the Big Varieties Of Monsters more readily come to mind, the parasites found in sub-Saharan Africa show that it is the Littlest Of Monsters that should be feared the most. And there is a mindboggling irony to be found with Naegleria fowleri…commonly called the Brain-Eating Amoeba. When we look at it, it looks back at us. And, yes…these are real pictures…
…some creatures have a rather morbid sense of humor.
Look out…here it comes! Aren’t those Elton John’s glasses? If the giant Humbaba is a large monster…one that Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed, then how much tougher was his smaller brother Pazuzu! Given what I concluded about him in part 3 of this serial essay, surely I turned Pazuzu into the Largest Smallest Good Guy in the Universe. But in other contexts, he is not…
In this manifestation, there is no Lamashtu…no Horrid Lady. Instead, Pazuzu appears in his own right, and it is not one you would like to encounter…
I am Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, King of the Evil Spirits of the Air, who come forth from the mountains with much violence, wreaking havoc.
Is it Pazuzu who is the King of the Evil Spirits of the Air…or is it his father, Hanpa? If Pazuzu is to be viewed as the Bringer of the Southwest wind…then who brings the winds from the other directions? If Hanpa (Hanbi) is the King of the Evil Spirits of the Air, then he has given Pazuzu command over the wind from only one quarter. And if the Great Wind King is Pazuzu, then the inscription on the back of the Evil Pazuzu statuette presents something as mindboggling as seeing a dreadful killer amoeba with a human face smiling back at you…before it eats your brain. What do I mean? The following quote is from Ephesians 2:2…
In past times you walked according to the way of this world, according to the Prince of the Power of the Air, that spirit who now works through the children of disobedience.
The Prince of the Power of the Air is usually interpreted to be Satan. And although, according Isaiah, Lucifer was thrown from Heaven, though I would reiterate my belief that Lucifer is NOT Satan, I have yet to find any description in the Bible of a character held to be The Devil with such a bizarre title as found in Ephesians 2:2. But whoever the malevolent figure is in Ephesians 2:2, it is hard not to believe that his title does not harken back to the inscription on the back of the Pazuzu statuette…
King of the Evil Spirits of the Air
Prince of the Power of the Air
And if the word in Ephesians 2:2 should really be plural, then…
Prince of the Powers of the Air
And since Ephesians 2:2 is clearly speaking of evil entities, then a re-phrased reading makes both the titles the same…
Ruler of the Evil Spirits of the Air
Ruler of the Evil Spirits of the Air
The plural makes more sense than the singular, and it may be that an original plural was requoted as a singular to avoid the only obvious meaning…wind spirits. I’m not convinced that Prince of the Power of the Air is actually Satan. Ephesians 6:12 says…
For we do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
This does not appear to be a cognate to the Prince of the Power of the Air. Ephesians 6:12 appears to describe earthly sources of malevolent opposition to Christianity, such as political authorities on a local, or more centralized (i.e. Rome), basis. Christianity is also under attack by those who claim to exercise authority within Christianity, but are false teachers. And if you mean…Satan, why not name him? Why throw out the most bizarre title of any spirit-being to be found in the entire Bible? It would be astounding if Pazuzu, or his father Hanpa, actually appears in the New Testament. If so, then Pazuzu has managed to find a way to live on behind the scenes far longer than anyone, myself included, would have given him credit for doing. Could this have manifested itself in another way?
The Roman emperor Octavian Augustus, with the pose seen in his famous statue meant to show him at his most powerful. There are interesting representations of Satan in the Medieval period that would seem to a bit Pazuzu-like…
And in 1856, Eliphas Levi helped Pazuzu to live on into the modern age…
The figure on the far left is an inverted pentacle, or pentagram, and is the symbol that is commonly believed to be satanic. Next to it is the inverted pentagram of Eliphias Levi, the guy who invented the Baphomet image. It is inscribed with the name Samael…a spirit-being who is both a fallen angel and a ruler of demons, but nonetheless has not broken with God. Lilith is a name that appears in the Book of Isaiah in material describing the spooky things that live out in the desolate places in the wilderness. In reality, Lilith is a type of owl, and one that makes a screeching sound that would cause a chill to shoot up your spine if you were stumbling around in some ancient ruins in the wilderness at the dead of night and you suddenly heard one. But Lilith was juiced up a bit, first becoming a female demon, and then becoming the first wife of Adam…his wife before Eve. It is not a satanic symbol. The head of Baphomet is in the middle showing that the pentacle on his forehead isn’t inverted anyway. To the right of Mr. Gorgeous is Eliphias’s Tetragrammaton Pentacle. Tetragrammaton means…The Four Letters, and is used to designate the proper name of the God of the Old Testament. How many Bible-claimers don’t know the name of their own God! It would be a real Lilith Hoot to quiz the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists…what is the name of the God of the Old Testament? But! We will have that hoot in a subsequent part of this serial essay.
The symbol to the right of the Tetragrammaton Pentacle is another sigla found in Eliphias Levi’s work, and is associated with Adam and Eve. That pentacle is also not inverted. It is also reflected in Leonardo Da Vinci’s design called…Vitruvian Man. In reality, none of these symbols is satanic in their essence, and just because some crackpot Devil worshippers who don’t know anything about the real character known as The Satan put inverted pentagrams on the cover of their heavy metal albums with diabolical intent…that only means they’re as stupid as the inverted pentagram isn’t satanic. And Baphomet isn’t Satan, and just because the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple have adopted the Sigla of Samael-Lilith and the image of Baphomet for their own use, that doesn’t make Baphomet and Satan the same guy.
The wings are the same, and the position of the arms of Baphomet is almost identical to that of the Pazuzu statuette, which, being a frontal view, is consequently different, but only because of the perspective, to…
King Narmer (Catfish) on the left, and Pazuzu with the same pose as he comes up behind Lamashtu to deliver the coup de grace. But the pose is more than that…it represents the pose of the All-Powerful One as he is about to engage in the ritualistic killing of his foe...Lamashtu. Pazuzu has the head of a lion, not a goat, and Pazuzu is not depicted with horns. At least, not on the plaque. But there are Pazuzu heads where he appears to have horns…
But clearly, Eliphas Levi gave Baphomet a goat’s head with horns, and cloven hooves. In Medieval times, Satan was represented as being a goat…
…circa 1460, showing the worship of the devil who has assumed the form of a goat. Now it is not too hard to understand what is happening in this picture. It depicts what is known as the Osculum Infame…which I will render as…the Awful Kiss. And as cliché as it may sound, it is nonetheless true, that truth is stranger fiction. What is the Awful Kiss? Here are a couple of other images to help make the answer to this question very clear…
In the Medieval period, people believed that during the Witch’s Sabbath and other Devil Worshipping Events, once Satan had appeared, worshippers would proceed to kiss him on the anus.
Pucker up, baby!
Sometimes, the Devil would substitute another creature to receive the Awful Kiss…
Here the Devil has brought his pet cat, who seems to find the whole thing rather entertaining, and his followers must kiss the cat’s ass. And that’s something I thought cats did to themselves!
Oh, really, your highness? Guess what you can do!
And it was actually the case that the Christian Inquisitors accused the gnostic Christians in southern France known as the Cathars, and declared heretics by Rome, of kissing the anuses of cats as part of their rituals. And the Knights Templar, who will be discussed further shortly, were accused of greeting one another in a manner worthy of the Devil and Catharite Kitties.
That is what it looked like in the 1922 Swedish film…Hexan. The Awful Kiss was a basic element in all late Medieval witch trials.
…the Witches’ Sabbath by Francisco Goya (1798).
It is certainly the case that the Devil came to have Pazuzu-like features. Most people envision the Devil as having cloven hooves…like a goat. And that is a common element in many depictions of the Devil. But it is worth noting that Pazuzu had…
…bird’s feet. And one of the earliest depictions of the Devil is found in an early 13th century bible…prior to 1229 AD. Now you’ve heard of pocket Bibles, and you’ve probably seen some bigger Bibles. But this is the Gigas Bible…
Ok, now for a shot that will give you a better sense of scale…
Perhaps it was made for someone with bad eyesight! And there, on your right, is…
He’s pleased to meet you…hope you guess his name;
But what’s puzzling you is the nature of his game!
Sorry…I couldn’t resist a little Rolling Stones humor, though even as a fictional character, I have no sympathy for him. He has his horns, which do appear to be a Pazuzuian Element as seen on some of the heads. But notice the Devil does not have cloven hooves. He has feet with long talons, or claws. Are they dragon’s feet…or bird’s feet? They nonetheless look very much like the feet of Pazuzu. Unlike Pazuzu, he doesn’t have wings. A similar depiction…
Horns, no wings, and bird-like feet. Wings are, or so it seems, optional…
However, the Devil, and by easily-understood-extension…demons, came to have wings along with horns. And while some images featured cloven hooves, others continue to reflect bird’s, or dragon’s, feet…
Here are some excellent examples of Satan with bird-like feet…
Satan might be able to disguise himself, but apparently…
…there’s no way to hide that bird-like foot
In this permutation, he, for some reason, ends up with webbed hands…
And here he has…
…webbed feet.
Still, it is the case that wings became a standard feature of the Devil and demons…
One of the more bizarre elements that developed in the Medieval period is…
…Satan with a face sticking out of his genitalia.
And he not only had a face on the front of his back…oh, no! He also had a face…
…on the back of his front. This being the case, then Kissing The Devil’s Ass may represent kissing the Devil’s other mouth, as it were…the mouth from which comes defiling things. Now Pazuzu does not have a face on the front of his back, but his brother Humbaba does have a snake-penis, which would have a serpent’s face on it. The other element that became associated with the Devil is what appears to be the Devil and demons eating people…
Of course, the way this is depicted is Satan actually eating people. This suggests the Titan named Saturn, father of Jupiter…
…who had killed his father Caelus. Essentially, the Romans borrowed the story of Uranus and Cronus. Cronus killed his father, and fearing that his own children might kill him, he ate them as they were born. And I do this for what it’s worth, which may not be much..
But we all know that Satan is the Eater of Souls. And it is worth noting that the Devil has been caught in some puzzling situations…
…awkward for Jesus as well. And I’ll bet you didn’t know that the Devil, who’s been everything through the millennia, was also a professional wrestler…
What do you mean I’m disqualified? I haven’t hit him with a chair yet!
Then he took on an opponent who defeated him for the world championship…
So Mary, having handed Baby Jesus to an angel, takes on the Devil and gives him a good thrashing. Take the bull by the horns? Take the Devil by the horns! And we all know that you’re not allowed to punch your wrestling opponent unless the referee is looking the other way…
Oh, my! Mary sure packs a punch…doesn’t she? Quitting professional wrestling, he decided to go into the movie business. He played the lead role in…
…Nosferatu. And some images are mind-boggling…
A little Visine might help, perhaps.
Baphomet has wings and horns, but his feet are clearly those of a goat…
And since he clearly has a goat’s head, he has been called the Goat of Mendes. Mendes was the Greek name for the Egyptian city of Djedet. The chief deity at Djedet was called Banebdjedet, Lord Ba of Djedet…
Banebdjedet is on the left of the image, showing off his goat head. What is particularly interesting is that the goat head with distinctive horns is associated with another, very ancient Egyptian god named…
…Khnum. I briefly mentioned him in another essay where I noted that there was an ancient king known as Khnum-Khufu, whom some equate with Khufu…a short name that no one could seem to spell. Khnum was the god of the source of the Nile, and was also called the Divine Potter…Lord Of That Which He Himself Created. The bodies of human beings are made from clay, and fashioned on Khnum’s potter’s wheel. It will be remembered that in the Genesis creation story, Adam (man) was made from the Adamah (dirt of the earth), with God tracing out the figure of Adam in the dirt. Then He breathed into the clay figure’s nostrils, causing him to become a living being. I have cited the Gospel of Thomas in other postings on this website, and in particular a story set in the Life of the Young Jesus. According to Thomas, Jesus was sitting by a stream tracing the likenesses of sparrows in the clay. It was the Sabbath, and some Jews who saw Jesus doing what they regarded as violating the Sabbath decided to tell Joseph. When Jesus was rebuked, he clapped his hands and the clay sparrows became real and flew away. Khnum also fashioned the bodies of the Egyptian gods. If Banebdjedet takes one to Khnum…the source of the Nile, then Khnum takes us to…Hapi, who I discussed in part 3 of this serial essay. Hapi is the God Who Caused The Nile To Flood, suggesting, at the very least…hypothetically…a close connection to Khnum. And one of the most fascinating things about Hapi is also one of the most interesting things about Baphomet…
…both have female breasts, giving them both male and female reproductive organs. Pazuzu is never presented with breasts. However, strangely enough, our old friend Satan has been portrayed as having female breasts…
In the image to the right, Satan not only has female breasts…he also has an extended, protruding stomach…very reminiscent of Hapi. But!
This is said to be a possible representation of Baphomet…the Knights Templar Baphomet. It is an engraving on the lid of the Coffret d’Essarois. And what is interesting is that if the lower portion of the body were covered with a garment like is the case with Baphomet, than it could be taken to be a male with female breasts. On the side of the coffret…
…one sees on the far left a figure, or statue, that has male and female sex organs, and appears to be wearing the false beard associated with Egyptian kings and gods. One wonders whether Eliphas Levi saw something like this, or was at the very least familiar with the Egyptian god Hapi, and that if Hapi and Khnum are put side-by-side, you have the Source of the Nile and the Flooding of the Nile together, and thus the very thing that made the kingdom of ancient Egypt possible.
Interesting, at any rate. Now Baphomet was believed to have been an image worshipped by the Knights Templar. I think they were set up by Philip IV and Pope Clement V in order to have the most powerful crusading order in the world, and rich beyond the Dreams of Avarice, set for obliteration. To this end, they were accused of idolatry…with an unnamed idol who was, in fact, named by some knights. Despite the strenuous efforts made by the Christian Inquisition to ascertain exactly what the elusive idol was, no specific identification is to be found in the charges officially made against the Templars, nor was it named in papal edicts. However, I think that Baphomet can, indeed, be identified conclusively. And that takes one to…
…the Knights Templar. In fact, I will offer below a very strange interpretation of Baphomet that is rooted in the views of the Templars. Founded as a group of knights who would protect Christian pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land against attacks by the Saracens…Islamic warriors, they grew to be an enormous military-monastic order, the preeminent crusaders, and one of the richest groups in Christendom. And they used some of the wealth for banking and lending enterprises. At one point, they were quite successful at controlling the Holy Land. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded in 1099 by Godfrey de Bouillon in the wake of the First Crusade. In 1118, Baldwin II became King of Jerusalem, and he granted considerable power to the Templars, including giving them the…
…Al-Aqsa mosque as their headquarters. The order referred to it as the Temple of Solomon, and thus they became the Knights of the Temple…Knights Templar. Their tremendous wealth led them into the banking business, and they loaned large sums of money to European rulers. This led to disgruntled, and very powerful, borrowers…some of whom would pursue desperate measures to deal with their debts.
King Philip IV of France, known as Philip the Fair…although I’m sure the Templars would describe him as…Philip the Unfair, basically ran the economy into the ground, and he owed the Knights Templar a lot money; money he had no inclination to pay back. This led him to force…
…Pope Clement V, a creature of Philip for the most part, and he had even been kidnapped and held prisoner by Philip, to ban the order. Philip then ordered mass arrests, and he had the Templars tortured until they admitted to crimes they had never committed. He then had many of Templars leaders burned at the stake…so he didn’t have to pay them back. Some of the false charges were sexual, of course…that’s always been popular when denigrating other people. But many of the charges were religious…in particular, he wanted the Templars convicted of idolatry. The fact that the Templars were extremely secretive about their rituals made it easier to level charges of idolatry against them. The search for the supposed idols worshipped by the order led to…heads. There were some who testified to other items like statuettes, but head-worship was the thing the Inquisition was keen to uncover. There were plenty of Templars who had no desire to be tortured or killed for the order. They attempted to give the Inquisition what they were looking for…the main idol of the Templars. One Templar testified that it was a cat’s head, mummified or otherwise. I’m just glad it wasn’t a Satanic Cat’s Ass just waiting to be kissed! The suggestion of a cat is interesting, since the Templars were great collectors of things from the Holy Land, especially the relics of saints, but, or so I believe, of anything they could get their hands on. The reference to a cat would suggest…Bastet…the Egyptian Cat Goddess…who in her earliest manifestation was a war goddess. Apparently, the Templars located an image of Bastet somewhere during their marches through the Holy Land. But the most common assertion was that the head in question was a human head, with a fierce visage. One witness claimed that it was the mummified head of a man with carbuncles inserted into the eye sockets. Another witness stated that the head was embalmed, and agreed about the carbuncles. It was commonly said among the witnesses that the head had a scraggly beard…either black or silver. Another witness said that the head was gilded in silver, but opened up and contained wood inside. It was even said that it sat on a stand having four feet, and that it was the head of one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. The Templars had a silver head with a woman’s face, and inside it was a small skull of a woman. Not be outdone as far as numbers go, an English friar stated that a Templar had told him that there were four holy heads in England… one in the sacristy of the Temple in London, another at Bristelham, a third at Brueria (Bruern in Lincolnshire), and the fourth at some place Beyond the Humber. It was also stated that the head was human and had three faces. The assertion that the head was that of John the Baptist was probably inevitable, seeing how John had been beheaded. Of course, I should point out that the question of heads is crucial, be it having a good one on your shoulders, or simply…
…keeping whatever quality of head you have…intact and where it belongs. But as we all know, some people have not proven quite so successful in this regard, as I will make clear shortly.