Yesterday, I made comments concerning the possible links between the Templar Cross and the Pyramid:
Speaking of the Templars, the Templar Cross (the Rose Pattee or Rose Croix) might be viewed as forming a 2D version of a pyramid flattened out looking from on top:
You might correctly insist that the four sides of the Templar Cross do not form regular triangles. However, I understand that the sides of the Great Pyramid are in fact concave, which was intended as a function of its operation. The same concave feature is built into modern geodesic radar detectors.
I would like to extend this theme further to embrace the Rose Cross of the Rosicrucians who emerged from cover in the early 16th century and may have numbered Sir Francis Bacon amongst their ranks (indeed he may have been their Master).
Here is what Wkipedia has to say about the Rose Cross:
The Rose Cross (also called Rose Croix and Rosy Cross) is a symbol largely associated with the semi-mythical Christian Rosenkreuz: Christian Kabbalist, alchemist, and founder of the Roscirucian Order. The Rose Cross is a cross with a red, golden or white rose at its centre and symbolizes the teachings of a western esoteric tradition formed within the Christian tenets.
Several different meanings have been attributed to the Rose Cross, depending on the source. Some groups, such as the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, from a non-sectarian or non-religious view, suggest that the rosy cross predates Chrsitianity, where "the cross represents the human body and the rose represents the individual's unfolding consciousness.
It has also been suggested that the rose represents silence while the cross signifies "salvation, to which the Society of the Rose-Cross devoted itself by teaching mankind the love of God and the beauty of brotherhood, with all that they implied." Others saw the Rosy Cross as a symbol of the human process of reproduction elevated to the spiritual: "The fundamental symbols of the Rosicrucians were the rose and the cross; the rose female and the cross male, both universal phallic [...] As generation is the key to material existence, it is natural that the Rosicrucians should adopt as its characteristic symbols those exemplifying the reproductive processes. As regeneration is the key to spiritual existence, they therefore founded their symbolism upon the rose and the cross, which typify the redemption of man through the union of his lower temporal nature with his higher eternal nature."
It is further a symbol of the Philosopher's Stone, the ultimate product of the alchemist.
It must be pointed out here that the Rosicrucians had links with modern Freemasonry (perhaps the Masons being the lower echelons of the Rosicrucians), which some see as having derived from the Knights Templar in Scotland post their dissolution in the early 14th century. Again quoting Wikipedia:
Connections between Free Masonry and Rose Cross exist from times preceding the formation of actual Grand Lodge (Landmarks of Andersen in 1717), as it is proved by the poem Threnodie of Henry Adamson (1638) "We are brethren of the Rosie Crossie, We have the Mason Word and second sight"
Thomas De Quincey in his work titled; Rosicrucians and Freemasonry, suggest that Freemasonry was possibly an outgrowth of Rosicrucianism.
More recently, the Rosy Cross is also a symbol found in some Masonic Christian bodies and employed by individuals and groups formed during the last centuries for the study of Rosicrucianism and allied subjects, but derived from the adoption of a red rose.
Freemasonry
Within the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite concordant body of Freemasonry, the Eighteenth Degree is specifically concerned with the rose cross and confers the title of "Knight Rose Croix". Of one version of the degree, Albert Pike wrote in 1871,
The Degree of Rose Cross teaches three things; — the unity, immutability and goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul; and the ultimate defeat and extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow, by a Redeemer or Messiah, yet to come, if he has not already appeared.
He goes on to give an explanation of what he believes to be the symbolism of the Rose Cross in that degree:
But [the cross's] peculiar meaning in this Degree, is that given to it by the Ancient Egyptians.
Thoth or
Phtha is represented on the oldest monuments carrying in his hand the
Crux Ansata, or
Ankh, (a Tau cross, with a ring or circle over it). [...] It was the hieroglyphic for
life, and with a triangle prefixed meant
life-giving. To us therefore it is the symbol of
Life—of that life that emanated from the Deity, and of that Eternal Life for which we all hope; through our faith in God's infinite goodness. The ROSE, was anciently sacred to
Aurora and the Sun. It is a symbol of
Dawn, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and therefore of the dawn of the first day, and more particularly of the resurrection: and the Cross and Rose together are therefore hieroglyphically to be read,
the Dawn of Eternal Life which all Nations have hoped for by the advent of a Redeemer.
However, it is Pike's reference to Ancient Egypt and the Tau cross which interests me here, particularly as the Great Pyramid is located on the Giza Plateau near modern Cairo and its old name was
Rostau.
The word "tau" means cross but "ros" in most ancient languages meant "dew" or a moisture. To the Rosicrucians the word
ros was connected to "Lux", the menstruum of the red dragon (i.e.corporeal light), and this gross light properly digested produces gold, and dew is the digester. Hence the Rosicrucians are those who used dew for digesting lux or light, with the object of finding the philosopher’s stone.
For the Ancient Egyptians the expression "
rostau" meant something quite different for it translates to something like "
mouth of the passages", an obvious allusion to the entrance to some kind of subterranean realm, perhaps the
Shetayet (literally the "Tomb of God
"). Ancient texts tell us that the dweller of this underground sepulchre was none other that the god
Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, who lies in a secret chamber somewhere north of Memphis, i.e. in the vicinity of Giza. Other texts preserved on the walls of the temple of Edfu in southern Egypt refer to this same chthonic realm as the
Duat n Ba, or "Underworld of the Soul".
Rumours of the existence at Giza of a vast underworld of the pharaohs are as old as the Pyramids themselves. Ancient Egyptian creation texts, as well as an assortment of funerary literature, i.e. books of the dead, speak repeatedly of a realm of darkness existing beneath the earth, guarded by demons and snakes. It was through this confusing labyrinthine realm of the night, known as the Duat, that the deceased, in his (or her) role as the sun-god, had to navigate in order to enter an afterlife among the stars. Only by learning and using a series of different spells outlined in these texts, and left on tombs, sarcophagi or in papyrus form, could he hope to handle a sequence of trials and tribulations, involving pits of fire and venom-spitting snakes, before exiting the Duat via its eastern gate on the dawn horizon. From here the pharaoh's ba, or "spirit", usually represented by a hieroglyph showing a human-headed bird, would be free to journey on into the starry firmament.
Indeed, for opera buffs, example of this tradition can be found in "
The Magic Flute" (German "Die Zauberflöte"), the Freemasonry-inspired opera written by Austrian composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Not only does the hero of the opera have to undergo a series of ordeals within the darkness of an Egyptian "temple", but the Sphinx in the form of a dragon has to be defeated, all very reminiscent of the type of trials that the ancient Egyptians expected of the soul as it passed through the
Duat underworld on its way to the afterlife. Mozart was a Freemason and there are those who believe he may have been killed for revealing too much in this opera.
I would direct you to an article (published on Graham Hancock's website) by one of my favourite investigative research authors
Andrew Collins from which I have quoted above - see:
Giza’s Cave Underworld Rediscovered – It is the Entrance to the Tomb of Hermes? - Graham Hancock Official Website
In the article you will see that Collins in the company of his fellow researcher Rodney Hale (an engineer) followed up on discoveries originally made by
Henry Salt (1780-1827), a former British Consul General in Egypt, and the redoubtable Italian explorer and former sea-captain
Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845), which came to light when British Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner Simpson, had been studying the memoirs of Henry Salt rediscovered in the basement of the British Museum in 2005. Salt was an avid explorer and collector of Egyptian antiquities. What had excited Simpson was the brief but tantalizing mention of Salt and Caviglia entering a vast network of "catacombs" that stretched beneath the Giza plateau, a story he had first seen mentioned, if only briefly, in an old biography of Salt (Halls, 1834). Subsequently, the British explorer
Colonel Howard Vyse (1784-1853) and his colleague, the engineer
John Shae Perring (1813-1869). They would appear to have chanced upon the tomb containing the caves during their routine explorations of the plateau in 1837. After this time no one is known to have visited the rock-cut tomb until American Egyptologist
George Reisner came there with his team in 1939, and designated it the identity NC 2, with two other smaller tombs, also found in the north cliff, becoming NC 1 and NC 3. At least two rough plans were drawn of NC2 by Reisner's team, although neither indicate the presence of the caves, a strange oversight in itself. Nothing was written about the tomb, although a comment on one of Reisner's plans offered the thought that it might date to the eighteenth dynasty of Egyptian history, c. 1575-1307 BC - which would place it within the era of the Pharaoh Akhenaton.
As you will see from the article, Collins investigations of the underground complex provide the first, indisputable proof of a natural cave system extending beneath the plateau that was most likely carved out by the actions of water tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years ago. It stretches beneath the pyramid field, and very possibly follows the course of local faulting. Collins has a thing about the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) and sure enough it appears in this article - "
... for the entrance to these catacombs seemed to lie not far away from the Deneb spot in the Cygnus-Pyramids correlation. It would appear possible that the dynastic Egyptians saw this bright star as marking the navel of the sky-goddess in her role as the Milky Way – her "legs" being formed by the starry trail's bifurcation to create what is known to astronomers as the Dark Rift, or Cygnus Rift".
Sky-goddesses such as Nuit and her great rival Hathor, the mother of Horus, were seen as dynastic personifications of a primeval Cow Mother, whose divine womb was associated not only with the origins of life, but also the destination of the soul in death. According to Robert Graves, these deities were personifications of the great Mother Goddess who he called the White Goddess. For Graves, another manifestation of the White Goddess was
Isis, the queen consort and sister of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld.
[I am also aiming to show that the star Deneb was used by the Rosicrucians (probably Francis Bacon) as a Lodestar for marking the position of the TDARM on Oak Island in an article I hope to post soon on the Alton Towers, Oak Island thread].
I mention all of this because there is another rose connected in antiquity to Solomon, whose temple may have been the Great Pyramid of Giza and that is the 'Rose of Sharon'.
The Rose of Sharon
In the Bible, the Rose of Sharon features in the Song of Solomon, otherwise known as the Song of Songs, which was by tradition written by King Solomon himself. Here is one translation of it from the Douay-Rheims Bible:
The Bride
1 I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys.
Solomon
2 As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
The Bride
3 As the apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow, whom I desired: and his fruit was sweet to my palate.
4 He brought me into the cellar of wine, he set in order charity in me.
5 Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples: because I languish with love.
6 His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me.
7 I adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and the harts of the field, that you stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please.
The Bride's Adoration
8 The voice of my beloved, behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart. Behold he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices.
10 Behold my beloved speaketh to me: Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.
11 For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone.
12 The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle is heard in our land:
13 The fig tree hath put forth her green figs: the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come:
Solomon
14 My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall, shew me thy face, let thy voice sound in my ears: for thy voice is sweet, and thy face comely.
15 Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines: for our vineyard hath flourished.
The Bride
16 My beloved to me, and I to him who feedeth among the lilies,
17 Till the day break, and the shadows retire. Return: be like, my beloved, to a roe, or to a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
What is the
“rose of Sharon” and who is
“the lily of the valleys” as mentioned in the Song of Solomon? Many take the view that the canticle is allegorical and it has been interpreted in many ways by scripturalists. However, having read Robert Graves '
The White Goddess', I can see that there are many elements that seem to link the rose with the Mother Goddess or White Goddess.
The Mother Goddess in Mesopotamia was Inanna (the Akkadian Ishtar) whose consort was Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god
, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, a god of fertility embodying the powers for new life in nature in the spring. In cult practice, the dead Tammuz was widely mourned throughout the Ancient Near East, the mourners lamenting his death at the hands of demons from the netherworld. In the Sumerian myth “The Descent of Inanna,” Inanna (Ishtar) sends Tammuz as her substitute to the netherworld. His sister, Geshtinanna, eventually finds him, and the myth ends with Inanna decreeing that Tammuz and his sister may alternate in the netherworld, each spending half of the year among the living. The Egyptian equivalents of Ishtar and Tammuz are Isis and Osiris.
Originally, the Mother Goddess's consort was ritually killed but in time an animal such a bull (the Golden Calf of the Bible) or a deer or roe was substituted. Moreover, the dove was also a creature associated with the Goddess. As Graves explains:
"The Moon-goddess [the Mother Goddess in one of her guises] of Asianic Palestine was worshipped with doves... . But she was also worshipped as a long-horned cow; Hathor, or Isis or Ashtaroth. Isis is an onomatopoeic Asianic word, Ish-ish, meaning 'she who weeps', because the Moon was held to scatter dew and because Isis, the pre-Christian original of the Mater Dolorosa, mourned for Osiris when Set killed him."
Hence, the Rose of Sharon can be compared to Isis, an archetypal Mother Goddess, which, if Solomon was an Egyptian Pharaoh, makes perfect sense. If you place the rose at the heart of the Templar Cross, this could be viewed as placing Isis/the Mother Goddess at the centre of the 2D projection of the flattened pyramid.
Now according to Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, the Knights Templar possessed the Holy Grail, which they found in the Holy Land - most people think they may have found it when excavating the Temple Mount in Jerusalem but they could also have found it where the Prophet Jeremiah buried it under the Mountain of God (Sinai), which I think may have been located at Petra in Jordan and not Jerusalem. The C's confirmed in the transcripts that the Israelites did have the Holy Grail - stolen from Akhenaten by Nefertiti (Sarah in her guise as Rachel). The question then arises, can the Holy Grail be linked with Osiris and in particular with Isis? I think the answer is yes and it is likely that the Templars and/or the Rosicrucians, as Hermeticists, knew this and encoded that knowledge in the Rose Cross. If Isis and the Holy Grail are one and the same, was the Grail ever based in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Again I think the answer is yes and in demonstrating this I aim to connect the Great Pyramid with the Tower of Babel.