(ScioAgapeOmnis) A new study using synthetic aperture radar from Italians and Scottish researchers claims to have found a vast underground complex beneath the Giza pyramids, including eight vertical cylinders, spiral pathways, and cubic chambers stretching over 6,500 feet and linking all three pyramids. Presented on March 15, 2025, although it could be a fascinating discovery, these findings await peer review and some experts remain skeptical pending further evidence.
(L) Were these legitimate scientists?
(ScioAgapeOmnis) Yeah, they are. Apparently they wrote a very similar paper in 2022, which I mentioned on our thread that is along the same lines, minus the columns and all that crazy stuff, deep, deep, deep underneath the pyramid. But they were talking about additional chambers within the pyramid itself and it was a big paper and these scientists have a bunch of other papers to their names, so they look legitimate, except this time around, it doesn't appear to be a full paper that's published. There's some kind of conference in Italian talking about these findings. So I'm hoping there would be an actual paper at some point. But that's it so far.
(L) Did you look at any of the individual authors of these works to track 'em back to the universities?
(ScioAgapeOmnis) Not that far. I just know that there are known scientists that have a lot of published papers to their name, but I haven't tracked 'em explicitly as to who they're connected to. And there is a thread on the forum I think discussing more so I have to remember more about this.
(L) All right. Oh, the picture's here. Is there anybody who hasn't seen it?
Q: (Chu) Yeah. Can we have the link on the chat?
There's a 'vast underground city' below Egypt's Giza pyramids, scientists' wild theory claims — but experts debunk it as 'fake news'
The pyramids at Giza
(Approaching Infinity) Just a little bit of background... I haven't looked into it too deeply, but this is just what I saw from social media. One of the scientists, some people have been trying to discredit him because he also wrote a paper about alien abduction. I don't know his entire take on it, but at least one of the guys is into weird stuff as well. But then one criticism I've seen is that some people are claiming that the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, they're saying it can't be used to detect things that are underground. I don't know one way or the other, but that's just one of the things that I was reading online. So if that's the case, it sounds like they're almost using this technology in a novel way, and so that would be a hurdle to overcome if they're trying to convince skeptics or to just actually do an excavation to try to verify it. But I just thought I'd throw those two things out there.
(L) So they're saying that this kind of radar can't, synthetic aperture radar...
(Joe) Joe Rogan had somebody talking about it, so that's why it's all...
(L) And that's why it's all... So he had one of the scientists on to talk to him?
(Joe) No, somebody just talking about it, not one of the scientists.
(L) It's really interesting because this picture in here in the questions is better than the pictures there.
(Niall) That's someone's reconstruction, whatever signature they got, it probably looks nothing like that. That's an artist's rendition.
(Andromeda) Creative interpretation...
(ScioAgapeOmnis) Yes. The original actual picture is more like wavelengths. It’s just like green and red blotches and stuff. And personally, I can't make out how they got these details in the rendering because looking at it, it just looks, there's like this something that resonates under the pyramid, but it's like a big blob. You can't really make out the details. So I don't know how they said, "Oh, it's eight columns. They have a spiral around each column". That part of it was confusing to me.
(Joe) So what's the blob under the pyramids?
(Niall) Is there a blob?
(L) The question:
(ScioAgapeOmnis) Is there any truth to these recent claims from some scientists that there are very large structures under the Giza pyramids?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Are they anything like what is depicted in these artists' renderings?
A: No. We have said that pyramids are energy collectors and dispersers.
[....]
(irjO) So can I ask a following question on that? Is it what the picture of the scan was getting is just plasma, like those columns? It was just like, I don't know how to ask the question. Sorry.
(L) Yeah, I don't either. So you're not helping me.
(Joe) They said yes, that there are structures. So what is it... like what kind of structure was being read by this scanner?
A: Energy storage "batteries".
Q: (Joe) Is it correct that these were made at the same time as when the pyramids were built?
A: Yes
Q: (Joe) What's the primary material that these "batteries" are made from?
A: Stone and metals and quartz.
Q: (L) So I guess they're devices.
(Joe) How deep are they?
A: 500 feet
Q: (L) And what did they say that they were seeing?
(ScioAgapeOmnis) 680, I think. (irjO) 720 meters.
For those who may be interested, I receive writer and researcher
Andrew Collins' newsletters and in the latest one he has made some interesting comments about this sensational new find at Giza. For his recent paper on the matter see the Link:
What Really Lies Beneath the Pyramids? The Megastructures of Giza: A Preliminary Report - Graham Hancock Official Website
Why I find Collins' comments of interest is that he makes an intriguing link between the people who constructed the Giza Pyramid complex and the builders of the Taş Tepeler complexes such as Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in modern day Turkey. Quoting Collins:
Is it possible that rock architecture even more elaborate than that recently uncovered at the Taş Tepeler site of Karahan Tepe was sculpted out of the limestone bedrock at Giza? Did these technologically advanced peoples revere Giza as a place of their ancestors? Could this have been because of the presence either on or underneath the plateau of surviving structures belonging to Egypt’s long-vanished Elder culture?"
This is intriguing because the C's confirmed there was a connection between the builders of Stonehenge in England and builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza (who the C's described as Atlantean descendants) both of which complexes would seem to have been built hundreds of years after the circular stone structures discovered at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe:
Session dated 22 August 1998:
Q: (L) Now, on to the questions I have prepared: In a previous session you said that the pyramid was built 10,643 years ago. That would be 8,649 BC. Is that a correct figure, or was there any corruption?
A: Yes. Correct.
Q: Then you talked about the pyramid as a focuser of energy to do ‘all things’ or many things. Later we asked about Stonehenge and you said that Stonehenge was built 6,000 BC by Druids, an early Aryan group, as an energy director to do ‘all things.’ This seems to be that both structures had similar design functions. Is that correct?
A: No. Stonehenge is a vector of energy derived from Solar and Cosmic rays. Pyramids focus electromagnetic energy from the atmosphere ambiently. Stonehenge was built 8,000 BC, by the way.
Q: If it was built in 8,000 BC, and the Pyramids were built 8,649 BC, which is 10,643 years ago, more or less, that means that they were built at almost the same time, or at least within 600 years of each other. If they were built at almost the same time, were they built by the same, or similar groups of people?
A: Atlantean descendants.
Q: Obviously the Great Pyramid is a marvel of engineering - and Stonehenge is as well - yet the two structures are so dissimilar. The Pyramid presents such a finished and sharp and elegant appearance, and Stonehenge might give a person - of course that is based on how it appears today - a more primitive presentation.
A: Was not originally.
Q: Did they work in conjunction with one another and did the two groups that built them in communication with one another?
A: No and yes.
Q: Was it two different groups? One with the Stonehenge business and one with the Pyramid business?
A: Offshoots of same group.
Q: Were they antagonistic toward one another or were they friendly toward one another?
A: No, yes.
This suggests to me that that the builders of Stonehenge and the builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza may have been offshoots of the group who built Göbekli Tepe, the construction of which has been (conservatively) dated back to at least 9,600 BC, which is nearly 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid.
However, Collins goes on to make a further connection with mysterious Sabian star gazer cult whose main base in antiquity was the city of Harran located in modern day Turkey, a city linked with the biblical Abraham and a city which is not a million miles away from the site of Göbekli Tepe:
"Such a scenario might seem farfetched, or speculative at the least, but it is supported by the Edfu Building Texts. These tell us that following the great cataclysm, a new people arrived to re-occupy the primeval island of creation, where the ‘ghosts’ of the Primeval Ones or Eldest Ones still lingered. Was this a memory of the arrival in the Nile Valley of members of the Taş Tepeler culture? Were they responsible for the creation of these megastructures now thought to exist beneath the Second Pyramid? Or did they simply add to monuments and structures already present? Both scenarios could be correct. Certainly, the level of engineering achieved by Taş Tepeler at sites like Karahan Tepe, in particular, indicates that its highly sophisticated culture could very easily have been responsible for the construction of megalithic buildings and large structures in Egypt."
The Tomb of Hermes
Supporting this idea is the fact that medieval Arab Egyptian sources record that Sabian peoples from the ancient city of Harran, in what is today south-eastern Turkey, would embark on pilgrimages to Giza in order to venerate the Second Pyramid as the tomb of Hermes, one of the legendary founders of their culture.
How then did the Sabians come to believe that the Second Pyramid concealed the tomb of Hermes? He, it can only be assumed, was perhaps a Hellenized form of the Egyptian god Thoth, described in ancient texts as the keeper of records. Is it possible that accounts of Hermes being buried at Giza are a distorted memory of structures existing beneath the Second Pyramid?
Elsewhere, the present writer shows that the legacy of the Taş Tepeler culture was inherited by the Sabians of Harran, meaning that their interest in Giza could well have come from their Neolithic forefathers. Was this what caused them to return to Egypt on a regular basis in order to pay homage to one of their divine founders? (Their other legendary founder of the Sabians was said to have been Seth, also known as Agathodaimon, who was thought to be buried in the Great Pyramid.)
It may therefore have been the Sabians who Laura had in mind when she referred to a colony from the city of Harran that formerly resided on the Giza plateau in the following exchange from the same 22 August 1998 session:
Q: They say that there is a subterranean chamber under the sphinx that leads to all the other pyramids. Is this correct?
A: Yes. But more importantly, there is a buried capsule of sorts.
Q: Has this buried capsule been found?
A: Not uncovered, but the evidence exists.
Q: Are those Egyptians over there who are banning all the other people from excavating aware of this?
A: They fear ramifications.
Q: One of the things I noticed in this book was that they said that there was a colony from the city of Harran in what is nowadays Turkey, and that this colony formerly resided on the Giza plateau. Is there any connection between this colony they mention and the fact that you said that the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were composed in Turkey by an ‘Aryan’ source?
A: Yes.
Q: What relationship is there?
A: One and the same.
Does this suggest that the Sabians were a group that originated in the Taş Tepeler culture who seemed to have aligned their stone circle structures to specific star constellations in the same way that both Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt are aligned to the three belt stars of Orion. I would add that the origins of the Sabians are lost in the midst of time but they survived as a distinct culture right up to the 11th century AD when they were finally supressed by Islamic forces and their ancient temple at Harran destroyed. However, if this is the same group Laura and the C's are speaking of, it appears they may have survived in some form or other right down to the modern age and were the group responsible for writing the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion'.
So, just who were the mysterious Sabians that Andrew Collins refers to above?
In June 2022 I posted an article on the Alton Towers thread titled The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and the Harran Colony (see post: Alton Towers, Sir Francis Bacon and the Rosicrucians) in which I discussed the Sabians. I set out the relevant extract below for those who may be interested:
The Sabians of Harran
Who were the Sabians of Harran? Wikipedia tells us:
“The Sabians, sometimes also spelled Sabaeans, are a mysterious religious group mentioned three times in the Quran as a 'people of the book’ (ahl al-kitāb), along with the Jews, the Christians and the Zoroastrians. Their original identity seems to have been forgotten at an early date [MJF: Perhaps they wanted it to be forgotten]. Modern scholars have variously identified them as Mandaeans, Manichaeans, Sabaeans, Elchasaites, Archontics, ḥunafāʾ (either as a type of Gnostics or as "sectarians"), or as adherents of the astral religion of Harran.
At least from the ninth century on, the Quranic epithet 'Sabian' was claimed by various religious groups who sought recognition by the Muslim authorities as a people of the book deserving of legal protection. Among those are the Sabians of Harran, adherents of a poorly understood pagan religion centred in the upper Mesopotamian city of Harran, who were described by Syriac Christian heresiographers as star worshippers. These Harranian Sabians practiced an old Semitic form of polytheism, combined with a significant amount of Hellenistic elements. Apart from the fact that it contains traces of Babylonian and Hellenistic religion, and that an important place was taken by planets (to whom ritual sacrifices were made), little is known about Harranian Sabianism. They have been variously described by scholars as (neo)-Platonists, Hermeticists, or Gnostics, but there is no firm evidence for any of these identifications."
Hence, the Harrian Sabians, as star worshippers, can be seen to share something in common with the
Persian Magi who also placed great relevance on the stars (think of the Magi who attended on Christ’s birth after being drawn there by the appearance of the Star of Bethlehem).
Star or astral worship, also known as
Astrotheology, astral mysticism, astral religion, astral or stellar theology, is the worship of the stars (either individually or together as the night sky), the planets, and other heavenly bodies as deities, or the association of deities with heavenly bodies.
The most common instances of this are sun gods and moon gods in polytheistic systems worldwide. Also notable is the association of the planets with deities in Babylonian, and hence in Greco-Roman religion, viz. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Gods, goddesses, and demons may also be considered personifications of astronomical phenomena such as lunar eclipses, planetary alignments, and apparent interactions of planetary bodies with stars.
Archibald Sayce (1913) argues for a parallelism of the "stellar theology" of Babylon and Egypt, both countries absorbing popular star-worship into the official pantheon of their respective state religions by identification of gods with stars or planets.
The term
astro-theology was first used in the context of 18th-19th century scholarship aiming at the
discovery of the original religion, particularly primitive monotheism. Astro-theology is any "
religious system founded upon the observation of the heavens," and
in particular may be monotheistic. More recently, the term
astrotheology is used by Jan Irvin, Jordan Maxwell and Andrew Rutajit (2006) in reference to "the earliest known forms of religion and nature worship," advocating the
entheogen theory of the origin of religion.
The Sabians and Hermeticism
According to
Seyyed Hossein Nasr:
"
the Harranians who were the principal inheritors in the Middle East of what has been called "Oriental Pythagoreanism" and who were the guardians and propagators of Hermeticism in the Islamic world" practiced "the religion of the heirs of the prophet Idris [i.e. Enoch]
."
[MJF: recall here that the C’s said that the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal work excluded from the Bible, was based on Sanskrit writings from India and might therefore have had an Aryan source.]
However,
Kevin van Bladel has extensively argued that the
Sabians of Harran cannot be associated with Hermeticism in any meaningful way. Although they did regard
Hermes Trismegistus as a prophet and may even have thought of him as
the founder of their sect, there is no evidence that they had knowledge of any Hermetic text or were involved in the writing of such texts in any way (see more below on this).
Recall here though that according to the C’s, Hermes Trismegistus was "
a traitor to the Court of Pharaoh Rana [the Egyptian leader of a spiritual covenant],
having broken a covenant of spiritual unity between all the peoples in the area now known as the Middle East by inspiring divisions within the ranks of the Egyptians, Essenes, Aryans, and Persians etc. You will note that the C’s refer to the Essenes here as if they were a separate people or racial group rather than the monastic body they later became in Judea/Palestine.
So, we learn that the Sabians may have regarded Hermes as the founder of their sect. However, the C’s have pointed out that the real founders of their sect may ultimately have been another group, a Brotherhood, who today we would refer to as the
Illuminati.
From the
Session dated 16 October 1994:
Q: (L) Who did Hermes betray?
A: Himself; was power hungry.
Q: (L) What acts did he do?
Q: (L) What was his purpose in doing this?
A: Divide and conquer as inspired by those referred to as Brotherhood in Bramley book you have read.
Q: (L) Is this the Brotherhood of the snake Hermes formed in rejection of unity?
A: Hermes did not form it; it was long since in existence.
Q: (L) Who was the originator of the Brotherhood of the Serpent as described in the Bramley book?
A: Lizard Beings.
For those who have not read William Bramley’s book ‘The Gods of Eden’, he describes in it a group or brotherhood who throughout known history have acted as power brokers and have been a hidden influence on major political and economic events, acting from behind the scenes. He identified them with the ‘Brotherhood of the Serpent’, the oldest known secret society in history.
The Sabians had a long history and were not eradicated until 1032-33 AD when the temple of the Sabians was destroyed and the urban community extinguished by an uprising of the rural '
Alid-
Shiite population and impoverished Muslim militias. However, in the 9th and 10th centuries AD there were many different religions operating in Harran during this period. Apart from the Sabians, there were also Muslims, Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Zoroastrians, Manicheans and many other religious groups. No doubt this led to a cross fertilisation of ideas and philosophies (including Hermeticism) that may eventually have been carried over into Europe through the Crusaders. Indeed, the Knights Templar and other Crusader groups may have been a major conduit for this process. During this period, there were two prominent Sabian families from Harran who worked at the Abbasid and
Buyid courts in Baghdad as court physicians and astronomers, among them the famous astronomer and mathematician
Thabit ibn Qurra (c. 830–901). This suggests the Sabians may have had a significant influence on the transmission of scientific ideas like the Druids before them or the Rosicrucians after them, at a time when Baghdad was one of the most important commercial and cultural centres in the Middle East.
Finally, it should be noted that the decisive battle commonly known as the
Battle of Harran, which saw a disastrous defeat for the Templars from which the Crusaders never recovered, was fought in the
Balikh River valley on May 7, 1104, near to the city of Harran.
Curiously, Harran is also famous for its beehive houses, which makes one wonder whether there could be a connection here to the Freemasons and Merovingians, who also paid homage to the humble bee, often using it as a sacred emblem in their iconography or decoration.
View attachment 108320
Beehive houses at Harran
Can we link the Harrian Sabians, this mysterious religious group whose original identity seem to have been forgotten, with the colony from Harran the C’s spoke of that formerly resided on the Giza plateau, who subsequently wrote the
‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’? Yes, I think we can. The answer for me came in an article written by
Donald H. Frew, from which I set out extracts below.
Harran: Last Refuge of Classical Paganism
See:
Harran: Last Refuge of Classical Paganism – part I | Wiccan Rede
In his article, Drew tells us that as early as the middle of the second millennium BC (which places it in the late Bronze Age, 1600-1200 BC),
the Harranians established a pilgrimage site at the Giza Plateau in Egypt (Hassan 1946: 34). In later centuries, they would say that the Pyramids were the
tombs of their gods, Idris (Hermes) and Seth (Agathodaimon) (Green 1992: 110, 174, 212).
Drew goes on to state that as:
“An etymological aside … The very early connection between Harran and Egypt mentioned above, while noted by Egyptologists, has been largely ignored by those studying Harran. As a result, a possible source for the name “Sabian” has also been ignored. Most have focused either on the Arabic verb saba’a to “convert”, the Hebrew word saba, meaning “troops”, the Ethiopic word sbh, meaning “dispensing alms”, or the Syriac verb sb’, meaning “to baptize”. I lean towards the Egyptian root sba, meaning “star”, “star-god”, and “teacher”. As both followers of what has been called “astral” religion and renowned teachers and scholars, this would seem to be appropriate and fitting.”
Drew therefore notes that a group of Harrians in the Late Bronze Age established a pilgrimage centre at Giza. This would comfortably place it at the time of Abraham/Moses and Akhenaten. Moreover, we know that Abraham in the Bible was supposed to have come from Harran to Egypt. Does this mean that Abraham and the group he travelled with were Sabians?
Drew set out his premise for writing his article at the beginning by saying:
For many years, I have been researching and writing a book on the subject of the origins of the modern Witchcraft movement. I now believe that a direct line of transmission can be traced from the Hermetic and Neoplatonic theurgy of late antiquity to the beginnings of the modern Craft movement in the 1930s. Of course, any such transmission must be embedded within the wider context of the transmission of Hermeticism in general from the Classical world to the European Renaissance and the beginnings of the Enlightenment.
Anyone looking into this history cannot help but be struck by a glaring gap. At the end of the Pagan world in the latter days of the Roman Empire, so the sources tell us, several Hermetic and Neoplatonic scholars left the Empire to go “to the East”. At the beginning of the revival and rediscovery of Classical knowledge in Europe, Classical texts in Arabic translations, including the Hermetica (the revealed teachings of Hermes Trismegistus), came back to Europe “from the East”. What happened during the 500 or so years in-between? And where “in the East” did classical Graeco-Roman knowledge (and possibly classical Greco-Roman Paganism) survive?
One name comes up over and over again: Harran. Even so, there is relatively little information about this ancient city in Western sources. As more and more of my sources pointed to Harran, and in the face of an almost total lack (in the 1990s) of available information about the city and its people, I resolved to go and see for myself, talk to the local authorities and scholars, and find what I could. Anna Korn and I visited the area in January of 1998. This article incorporates many of our findings.
He goes on:
The city of Harran was founded c. 2000 BCE as a merchant outpost of Ur, situated on the major trade route across northern Mesopotamia (Green 1992: 19). The name comes from the Sumerian and Akkadian “Harran-U”, meaning “journey”, “caravan”, or “crossroad” (Kurkcuoglu 1996: 11). For centuries it was a prominent Assyrian city, known for its Temple of “Sin”, the Moon God.
In this baking, desolate landscape, the Sun was an enemy and the Night a comforter. The Moon, the ruler of the Night, must therefore be the supreme deity and therefore, to a patriarchal culture, male. Sin was the giver of fertility and of oracles. In this latter capacity, he also served as kingmaker.
In the Bible, Abraham’s father Terah was meant to have been an idol maker. Could he have been making idols for the Temple of Sin?
This complex history of Harran is important in order to understand the city’s eventual fate. For much of its history, Harran welcomed any would-be conqueror that came along, switching allegiances at the drop of a hat, and so went peacefully on about its own business.
Drew then goes on to discuss the Neo-Platonists:
…The Neoplatonists were polytheistic monists, understanding and relating to the many Gods & Goddesses as multiple faces or manifestations of a singular, all-encompassing Divine – the One. [MJF: This approach would also seem to reflect the Druids’ beliefs as well, whose chief god was Bel.]
Neoplatonic theurgy used techniques that we would recognize as “natural magick” in rituals designed to facilitate union with the One. Its source material consisted of the writings of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus (as well as earlier Platonists), the Egyptian writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (the Hermetica), the texts collected as the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) and collected teachings (the Chaldean Oracles) “channelled” from Hekate and other deities by two 2nd century Roman theurgists (the Julianii). With these texts as guides, Neoplatonic theurgy focused on two forms of “god-making”: deity possession and the creation of animated statues. The former was very similar, if not identical, to the practice modern Witches know as “Drawing Down the Moon”, and indeed this phrase was used in antiquity to describe this practice. The latter involved techniques that we have all but lost, but vestiges of which remain in certain contemporary Craft traditions.
Neo-Pythagoreanism was a 1st century CE revival of the number mysticism of Pythagoras. Incorporating elements of astrology and Eastern magical lore, it was very popular with Iamblichus and was eventually subsumed into Neoplatonism.
Proclus of Athens (b. 412 CE) was the last major Neoplatonic writer before the closing of the School at Athens and the flight of the surviving Neoplatonic theurgists to safety in the Persian Empire.
The Neoplatonists sought to incorporate and synthesize the practices of all Pagans known to them, believing that all were divinely inspired. In this, they were in tune with the syncretic nature of their age, in which composite, cross-cultural deities such as Serapis and Jupiter-Ammon came to predominate. Accordingly, most Neoplatonists not only continued to practice traditional popular Paganism, but were also initiates of the Mysteries of Mithras, Isis, and others. The 4th century Neoplatonist, Macrobius (writing in Saturnalia), reconciled the mythologies of the many Pagan traditions by asserting that all Gods were actually aspects of a single Sun God, and all Goddesses aspects of a single Moon Goddess, and that really there was just the God and the Goddess – and beyond them, of course, the One.
Harran under Islam
In 717 CE, the Muslim caliph Umar II founded the first Muslim university in the world at Harran. To give this university a good start, Umar brought many of the last remaining scholars (including Hermeticists) from Alexandria and installed them at Harran. A later Harranian author, Ibn Wahshiya, would write about these Hermeticists in the mid-9th century CE:
The Hermesians let nobody into the secrets of their knowledge but their disciples, lest the arts and sciences should be debased by being common amongst the vulgar. They hid therefore their secrets and treasures from them by the means of this alphabet, and by inscriptions, which could be read by nobody except the sons of wisdom and learning.
These initiated scholars were divided into four classes. The first Class comprehended the sect Hara’misah Alhawmiyah, who were all descendants of Hermes the Great. … No man in the world was acquainted with any of their secrets: they alone possessed them. They were the authors of the books commonly called the books of Edris (Enoch) [Hermes – DHF]. They constructed temples dedicated to spirits, and buildings of magical wisdom. …
The second class of the Hermesians, called Hara’misah Alpina’walu’ziyah, the sons of the brother of Hermes, whose name was Asclibianos. … They never communicated their secrets, and Hermetic treasures to anybody, but they preserved them from generation to generation, till our days. …
The third class was called Ashra’kiyu’n (Eastern) or children of the sister of Hermes, who is known amongst the Greek by the name of Trismegistos Thoosdios. … Their sciences and knowledge are come down to us.
The fourth class, denominated Masha’wun (walkers, or peripatetic philosophers), was formed by the strangers, who found means to mingle with the children and family of Hermes. They were the first who introduced the worship of the stars and constellations, … From hence came their divisions, and everything that has been handed down to us, proceeds originally from these two sects, the Ashra’kiyu’n, eastern, and Masha’wun, peripatetic philosophers (Hammer-Purgstall 1806: pp 23-30). In the mid-8th century, the Caliph Marwan made Harran his home and temporarily moved the capital of the Umayyad Empire from Damascus to Harran.
Later in the 8th century, Harun al-Rashid (the Caliph of Arabian Nights fame) founded the Bayt al-Hikmah (“House of Wisdom”) at Baghdad to be a centre for the translation of Greek and Latin texts into Arabic. Scholars from Harran would later be brought there.
The Harrian Religion travels to Spain
In the 11th century, after the Muslim conquest of North Africa and Spain, the Ghayat al-Hakim (“Aim of the Sage”), a book known in Latin as the Picatrix, was written in Spain by “al Majriti” (Pingree 1980; 1986). Considered the basis of the grimoire tradition of Europe (including material that survives down into the Books of Shadows of certain modern Craft traditions), the Picatrix includes significant material about the religion and rites of the Harranians. This same “al Majriti” is also our source for the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity*”), a mystical Muslim order incorporating teachings from Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and even Buddhist sources (Netton 1991). Both books contain material from each other and have a Harranian source (Nasr 1993: 25-104). Whether “al Majriti” was himself a Harranian Sabian is unknown.
David Pingree has pointed out that many of the Greco-Roman magical texts evident in the Picatrix passed into Arabic by way of Sanskrit, picking up Indian magical terms and Sanskrit names for the Gods along the way (Pingree 1980). Truly, Harran deserved the name “crossroad”.
*Could this work be connected to the Cathar ‘Parfait’ (the Perfect Ones) who emerged in the Langedoc and the Pyrenees area during the 12th century?
The Last Days of Harran and the Return of Paganism to Europe
Later in the 11th century, 1081 CE, the Temple of the Moon God was finally destroyed by al-Shattir, an ally of the Seljuk Turks, contemporaneous with the rise of Ash’arism (Green 1992: 98-100). At this point, the “con-job” story became the “official” Muslim view. Also late in the 11th century, c. 1050 CE, the Christian writer Michael Psellus, studying in Constantinople, received an annotated copy of the Hermetica from a scholar from Harran. It is quite possible that these were sacred texts that had escaped the decline and ultimate destruction of the temples (Scott 1982: 25-27, 108-109; Copenhaver 1992: xl; Faivre 1995: 182). Copies of the Hermetica eventually made their way to Western Europe, igniting the interest of Cosimo de’Medici who, in 1462, set a young Marsilio Ficino to the task of their translation. Thus began Europe’s fascination with the Hermetica (Copenhaver 1992: xlvii-l; Faivre 1995: 30, 38-40, 98), a fascination that would help fuel the Renaissance.
During the First Crusade, Harran was often contrasted with its neighbour to the north, Edessa (known today as Urfa). Edessa was the birthplace of the prophet Abraham and the first city to convert to Christianity (Segal 1970: 60-81). Edessa converted after its king, Abgar, wrote to Jesus requesting healing. The apostle Thaddeus came with a cloth bearing the image of Jesus’ face. Abgar was healed and his kingdom converted. The cloth, known as the Mandylion, was an important relic during the Crusades (Segal 1970: 215; Wilson 1998: 161-175). (Recently discovered documents have led some to believe that it is the same cloth that later came to be called the Shroud of Turin.)
In the 12th century, Edessa was the capital of the short-lived Crusader County of Edessa. The Crusaders occupying the city were described as “roaming about the countryside at will”. Their presence might explain an unusual architectural feature that survives at Harran.
In Harran’s Citadel, there is a Christian chapel of Crusader architecture (Lloyd & Brice 1951: 102-103). There is no record of any Crusaders ever conquering the city (Segal 1970: 230-251; Green 1992: 98; Gunduz 1994: 133). The presence of the chapel would appear to indicate a peaceful Crusader presence. The fact that the chapel is side-by-side with the Citadel’s mosque, even sharing an entry hall, is even more striking. It was far more common for chapels and mosques of that time to be built on top of each other or to be co-opted one from the other. Is this another example of the city’s remarkable religious tolerance*?
* One of the aims of the Knights Templar was to promote a union between Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Does this suggest that Harran could have been one of the places where the Templars imbibed the Hermetic philosophy and wisdom, which they subsequently took back to Europe with them?
Drew goes on to add that:
"Harran was a thriving Mesopotamian and later Hellenistic city of some 10 to 20,000 people for nearly 3000 years. Towards the end, for about 500 years, Harran would appear to have been a kind of intellectual refugee camp for educated members of the mystery cults of late antiquity, eventually becoming the font from which Hermetic and Neoplatonic learning returned to Europe.
Many of the Pagans of Harran had fled the triumph of Christianity in the West. All of them, including the practitioners of the indigenous Moon cult, were surrounded by an ever-expanding Islam. The Pagan community of Harran must have lived with a constant awareness of being the last refuge of the old Pagan religions. These “Pagan refugees” would have had every reason to preserve their traditions for future generations. Some were Mithraists, well aware of the concept of turning cycles of ages. Others would have known that their own sacred texts, the Hermetica, predicted the fall of Paganism, and its eventual return."
So, was the colony at Harran which Laura and the C’s spoke of the same group as the party of Harrians who Drew tells us established a pilgrimage centre at Giza in the Late Bronze Age and, if so, were they Sabian star worshippers? If the answer is yes, as I think it is, can we take it that it was their descendants or successors who drew up the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in Turkey? This then begs the question - just how old is this document, which serves as a blueprint for world domination?
