THE ONCE AND FUTURE SKY GOD? – From Göbekli Tepe to The Zodiac – and Beyond…
- Thread starter Michael B-C
- Start date
Started watching these @Bluegazer - only onto the 4th in the series, and see the Pleiades factors significantly alongside Birkeland currents (discussed with Jim Weninger in part III). I don't know what to think regarding gravity (looked at the experiment in space with the gyroscope - so get that) mixed into the electrical, and here Ark receives answers to ponder. This seems to be where the C's amalgamate the two properties.
Gravity is not discussed with the Birkeland business, and in the series (thus far) they seem to dismiss gravity, don't know why, the electrical guys can't find applicable reason for it (the way the think it works). "Emitted by gravity" has to be in all this somewhere ("collected" as the C's said, and in a "perfectly balanced static state.") It seems the C's have described the electrical/gravity relationship i.e. when gravity reduces so does electrical influence (balance) and vice versa, and this might fit with the clockwork of the Birkeland plasma rope - upon the system/sun/planetary spiraling explanations. There is some kind of ebb and flow. Here in Session (March 2021) - although describing a particular, it seems to be describing the same matching balanced oscillations:
and:
Regarding Birkeland, unless missed it, had only found it mentioned once in a 2017 Session:
Here is a capture of our system around the sun within the Gould Belt funnel (within the narrow gap), with Pleiades (and Arcturus) playing a central role, and the discussion on Sirius's (the explanation in the series equates it as a binary to our sun, which contradicts what the C's have said of our binary star, osi-remember) regular heliacal rising on earths horizon, and why others don't, by degree following in time.
Yes, see Arcturus and its positioning now from the series watched, and it is enough to make one feel pretty small.
What happened in the past, with where you might be leading Michael B-C, with the H et cetera (hinted at in the series in the plasma current and shown in your depictions and analysis), it must have been incredibly profound in the eyes and minds of earths terra firma denizens. Some kind of massive window opening up that would impact for a long time to come and featured in the language, a math and art of the days.
Yes, see what you are saying, and in the series there is mention of the timepiece-gear calculating the periods in very small cycling increments out to 26,000 years, and longer in some calendars.
Will hold tight as you continue (as Lennon said “the more I see, the less I know for sure.”), and thank you thus far. Perhaps some good C's questions that can't be discovered may also come up.
The myth and story of orion and the Pleiades feels like the record of a geopolitical (well, more like cosmic in this case) event. Where you have the STS half of the region expanding and conquering and the STO half defending itself. All of this occurring in the entire sector of the galaxy described by the C's. I think our ancestors knew more about this cosmic geopolitics, much more than we know today.
Reading this part of your post, I was reminded of the 19 year metonic cycle:
19 Year Cycle Lunar Standstill Upcoming
Back when Secret History was going through its first edits, Frank J (QFG researcher) was quite fascinated by the discussion of the 19 year cycle. He decided to do some research. The graphs and things he included in his paper aren't included in the following, but they aren't necessary. What...
cassiopaea.org
A bold theory: What if much of the ancient knowledge, cosmic geopolitics corresponded by far to knowing the cycle of gravitational dispersion and collection that allowed the passage or crossing between densities, as even other dimensions! That is, the whole matter of the Pleiades, Arcturus, our solar system, our ancestors knew the exact moment in the cycles where by the action of the electrogravitational interaction of the interconnected system of birkeland currents, the windows were opened.
There would be smaller cycles where the window is limited, and large transition cycles where the window opening is much longer, sustained and stable.
If I remember correctly, the C's had commented that a great cycle was about to end (or begin?). The wave is the primary component of this cycle. Did our pre-fall ancestors know about the periodicity of the wave?
Wandering Star
The Living Force
Xpan just wrote this post and...
There is an H next to the spiral with And a crescent on the spiral
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Wandering Star
The Living Force
Some periods of post-fall certainly seemed to know a great deal about periodicity (language of a wave, don't know). So, the likelihood is good, or perhaps better for pre-fall, too.
In one of Michael B-C's photos (see below), it also came up in one of the video series you provided - Arcturus the Star of Joy section. Thus, they were talking about Arcturus (Red Giant) tracking across the biblical dates of the grand birth - but in the spring/summer months.
dennis
Dagobah Resident
Protogeneia- the first born ?
Physis was a primeval god or goddess of the origin and ordering of nature. The primal being of creation was regarded as both male and female. See Physis (or Phusis).
“O Natura [Phusis, nature], mighty mother of the gods [Gaia (see above) is probably meant], and thou, fire-bearing Olympus’ lord [Zeus] … why dost thou dwell afar, all too indifferent to men, not anxious to bring blessing to the good, and to the evil, bane?” [Seneca, Phaedra 959]
“Then Phusis (Nature), who governs the universe and recreates its substance [after the world-shattering battle between Zeus and Typhoeus], closed up the gaping rents in earth’s broken surface, and sealed once more with the bond of indivisible joinery those island cliffs which had been rent from their bed.” [Nonnus, Dionysiaca 2. 650 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) PHYSIS - Greek Primordial Goddess of Nature (Roman Natura)
Physis was a primeval god or goddess of the origin and ordering of nature. The primal being of creation was regarded as both male and female. See Physis (or Phusis).
“O Natura [Phusis, nature], mighty mother of the gods [Gaia (see above) is probably meant], and thou, fire-bearing Olympus’ lord [Zeus] … why dost thou dwell afar, all too indifferent to men, not anxious to bring blessing to the good, and to the evil, bane?” [Seneca, Phaedra 959]
“Then Phusis (Nature), who governs the universe and recreates its substance [after the world-shattering battle between Zeus and Typhoeus], closed up the gaping rents in earth’s broken surface, and sealed once more with the bond of indivisible joinery those island cliffs which had been rent from their bed.” [Nonnus, Dionysiaca 2. 650 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) PHYSIS - Greek Primordial Goddess of Nature (Roman Natura)
TAURUS THE BULL
Having for long now focused in on the Pleiades, it is time for us to take a step back so we can enjoy a broader view of the great constellation of Taurus in which the Pleiades sits.
I have already proposed elsewhere that Taurus is actually a housing for a far distant memory of THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN, that I am proposing was once a quite different phenomenon dominating the northern sky, which along with a host of other vanished primal aspects from prehistoric times, was eventually transferred and translated (after these wonders departed our skies) onto a constellation that was to become a pivotal player in the zodiac of late antiquity.
The role of the bull (and hence of Taurus) in mythology - and indeed in civilisation and religion itself - is immense. It would take multiple volumes to document its centrality to Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew legends, to name but a few – and I haven’t even looked further east to say India or west to Mesoamerica with this geographic spread (or for example to Ireland where the twin bulls are central to the pivotal Irish mythological text Táin Bó Cúailnge – meaning the driving-off of the cows of Colley - in which indigenous aspects comparable to the Troy mythos comes to the fore as late as the 6th century AD). Who after all hasn’t heard of the golden bull calf of the Old Testament, or of the Minotaur snorting and roaring from within the darkened depths of the Labyrinth on Crete, or that the great Greek god Zeus himself rode across the crest of a wave upon the back of white bull when he kidnapped Europa, or that a horned bovine attended the birth of Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem? And always nearby, yet still central to these stories, is the virgin princess. Osiris, the principle god of Egypt, (husband of Isis), was originally also a bull – as were so many, many other gods of the ancient world. The last outpouring of ancient memory saw Mithras slay the bull whilst a zodiac swirled all about them and who doesn’t know something of Spanish bull fighting where even to this day the hero pits his speed and guile against the ferocious power and blood pumping rage of a charging bull, its horns lowered for the kill? Not to mention our moon as a bull’s horns carved so evocatively in the sky or the fact that startling, lifelike representations of auroch bulls adorned the Palaeolithic caves of France (and are those the Pleiades above the shoulder of the Lascaux bull all those long, long millennia ago...?).
Indeed, it is once again time to apply that repeatedly utilised word of mine – reverence for the bull was indeed ubiquitous.
The ancient Greeks held to a philosophical concept known as Zoe and Bios. Zoe was an eternal string of pearls that was all of life itself in its perpetual state of eternal being and becoming. Bios was its singular offspring, its perpetual child, a single glistening pearl that repeatedly falls to earth and manifests the entire information field of the creative whole in the guise of a singular, material force of nature – and that child (man/god) was a bull calf. The micro in the macro, the macro in the micro. Thus, for the ancients, the pulsatingly charged bull was the very definition of divine life itself made manifest, and it was religion.
It should appear anomalous therefore, that this magnificent symbolic creature appears only in an abbreviated form in the zodiac. Unlike say the ram of Aries or the lion of Leo, Taurus the bull is brutally truncated, with its entire hind and back legs missing and only the front half of the bull making up the body of the constellation (I will come back to this profound mystery anon).
Let’s first head over to Wikipedia for a brief but actually revealing overview of the constellation from an astronomical perspective:
Yes, indeed - most revealing…
As you can see in the above, historically the constellation has long been viewed as having at least three distinct units. Besides the Pleiades and the bull itself, there are also the Hyades which we will touch upon shortly. But it is to the Great Bull of Heaven that we turn first for further clues.
This is possibly the hardest section I have yet composed simply because there is so much information it is tough to know what to leave in our out so as to keep the matter succinct enough to digest. Therefore, I am going to skip all the famous Greek tales for now and go back to Mesopotamia and straight to the bull’s mouth so to speak – because that’s where our story springs to life via some of the earliest texts and images on the matter. It is also the closet geographically to our reference point of Göbekli Tepe.
THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN (PART 1)
Cattle are thought to have been first domesticated in the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia round about 7000 BCE but the wild auroch, which had roamed the plains since time immemorial, was a more massive creature than your docile cow, standing over six feet tall. With near supernatural strength and ferocity, it was likened to gods, kings and heroes. Its broad curving horns played an exoteric role in inspiring the horned headdress that all gods and goddesses wore to signify their divine status (but as we have been exploring, this signature of royalty and deity has even deeper cosmological roots).
The overriding motive for their domestication was not for their meat but for their great strength, which was harnessed by early farmers to provide traction for ploughs and threshing sledges. Most households would only keep one or two beasts, with large herds being much rarer and only being kept by the palace and temple, whose financial and logistic resources were capable of supporting them. Milk, their most valuable by-product, was turned into cheese, butter and ghee.
In the artwork of the 4th and 5th millennium the bull is first combined with an ear of barley. For most mainstream scolastic interpreters today, together these symbolise the wealth and bounty of the renewable land brought about by the Neolithic farming revolution, but I believe this is not what is being principally honoured here (though as we will cover later the undeniable reality that the grimreaper of harvest time also clears the way and brings with it renewal and the potential for new growth, and so I do think this idea is imperative to always keep in mind as we go forward).
An impression from an early Sumerian cylinder seal
A cylinder seal from Uruk/Jemdet Nasr, Circa 3000 B.C.
In the above cylinder seal from Uruk (see more about this culture below), the same idea as with the stalk of barley in the previous seal is being conveyed here by the 'tree'. If we take a closer look at the ear of the barley from the first seal....
Note how the barley/tree (electrical phenomena) goes through the neck region of the bull in both images despite being perhaps up to 1,000 or more years apart. A further 3,000 years later, this is the very place that Mithras will strike, as the zodiac rolls on by.
Also note how in the first image the barley head with its 7 seeds is highly suggestive of a comet cluster. In the same vein note that there are 7 off shoots to the ‘tree’ in the other seal image. Yes, we are likely talking the Pleiades again here… and also likely the Hyades - but is this all they represent? I somehow doubt it. If you look at the picture below of astronomical relationships it suggests that the path to/from Pleiades-to Hyades symbolically mirrors the line of the barley/’comet cluster’ through the bull’s neck.
Very similar ideas about celestial cattle can be found in early mythology the world over. The Egyptian goddess Hathor, (along with Sekhmet, a manifestation as the eye of Ra – that is Chronos, not originally our sun as is repeated ad infinitum today - in her leonine ‘female’ aspect of the divine Chronos configuration), was often also envisioned as a star-spangled cow with a disk set between her horns. However, in very early pre-dynastic images she was often represented as follows:
Hathor the Celestial Heavenly Cow - Egyptian Predynastic
Those following my argument to date will have learned by now how to interpret this complex of interconnected symbols in one.
Comparable ideas can also be found in Vedic literature where herds of cows represent the fertile rains of the heavens (remember the Pleiades and the deluge?) By much later times, long after the knowledge behind its original form had been lost, the golden calf came to represent the new-born sun of spring emerging from the cosmic waters just as the new-born calf emerges from the life-giving waters of the womb.
The role of the bull as a symbol of prosperity and abundant herds is conveyed in a pair of later, contrasting Babylonian omens:
But if its stars are very faint:
These omens expose part of the most straightforward encoding level of the scheme that underpins celestial divination - if a star or constellation is ‘bright’ its meaning is positive, but if it is ‘faint’ or ‘obscured’ the prediction is negative. I believe the Babylonians also knew full well that cattle = the human herd as well.
Beyond their nature as symbols of the land’s prosperity, the bull, cow and calf all have a decidedly celestial quality to their character. Sumerian poetry sometimes refers to rain-laden clouds (here once more are the Pleiades and the deluge?) as the ‘bull-calves of the storm god’ and other texts attribute huge herds of cattle to the moon god Sin (again originally a deity with a quite different meaning once more later transferred onto our moon), their numbers - well over half a million individual beasts - are so implausibly large that the prosaic suggestion by scholars that this represents the stars of the sky is clearly ridiculous with the more likely hint here of a time remembered of a bombardment by the antecedent source or more active later form of the Taurid meteor stream.
Having for long now focused in on the Pleiades, it is time for us to take a step back so we can enjoy a broader view of the great constellation of Taurus in which the Pleiades sits.
I have already proposed elsewhere that Taurus is actually a housing for a far distant memory of THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN, that I am proposing was once a quite different phenomenon dominating the northern sky, which along with a host of other vanished primal aspects from prehistoric times, was eventually transferred and translated (after these wonders departed our skies) onto a constellation that was to become a pivotal player in the zodiac of late antiquity.
The role of the bull (and hence of Taurus) in mythology - and indeed in civilisation and religion itself - is immense. It would take multiple volumes to document its centrality to Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew legends, to name but a few – and I haven’t even looked further east to say India or west to Mesoamerica with this geographic spread (or for example to Ireland where the twin bulls are central to the pivotal Irish mythological text Táin Bó Cúailnge – meaning the driving-off of the cows of Colley - in which indigenous aspects comparable to the Troy mythos comes to the fore as late as the 6th century AD). Who after all hasn’t heard of the golden bull calf of the Old Testament, or of the Minotaur snorting and roaring from within the darkened depths of the Labyrinth on Crete, or that the great Greek god Zeus himself rode across the crest of a wave upon the back of white bull when he kidnapped Europa, or that a horned bovine attended the birth of Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem? And always nearby, yet still central to these stories, is the virgin princess. Osiris, the principle god of Egypt, (husband of Isis), was originally also a bull – as were so many, many other gods of the ancient world. The last outpouring of ancient memory saw Mithras slay the bull whilst a zodiac swirled all about them and who doesn’t know something of Spanish bull fighting where even to this day the hero pits his speed and guile against the ferocious power and blood pumping rage of a charging bull, its horns lowered for the kill? Not to mention our moon as a bull’s horns carved so evocatively in the sky or the fact that startling, lifelike representations of auroch bulls adorned the Palaeolithic caves of France (and are those the Pleiades above the shoulder of the Lascaux bull all those long, long millennia ago...?).
Indeed, it is once again time to apply that repeatedly utilised word of mine – reverence for the bull was indeed ubiquitous.
The ancient Greeks held to a philosophical concept known as Zoe and Bios. Zoe was an eternal string of pearls that was all of life itself in its perpetual state of eternal being and becoming. Bios was its singular offspring, its perpetual child, a single glistening pearl that repeatedly falls to earth and manifests the entire information field of the creative whole in the guise of a singular, material force of nature – and that child (man/god) was a bull calf. The micro in the macro, the macro in the micro. Thus, for the ancients, the pulsatingly charged bull was the very definition of divine life itself made manifest, and it was religion.
It should appear anomalous therefore, that this magnificent symbolic creature appears only in an abbreviated form in the zodiac. Unlike say the ram of Aries or the lion of Leo, Taurus the bull is brutally truncated, with its entire hind and back legs missing and only the front half of the bull making up the body of the constellation (I will come back to this profound mystery anon).
Let’s first head over to Wikipedia for a brief but actually revealing overview of the constellation from an astronomical perspective:
Taurus (Latin for "the Bull")… is a large and prominent constellation in the Northern Hemisphere's winter sky between Aries to the west and Gemini to the east; to the north lies Perseus and Auriga, to the southeast Orion, to the south Eridanus, and to the southwest Cetus... It is one of the oldest constellations, dating back to the Early Bronze Age at least, when it marked the location of the Sun during the spring equinox. ...
A number of features exist that are of interest to astronomers. Taurus hosts two of the nearest open clusters to Earth, the Pleiades and the Hyades, both of which are visible to the naked eye. At first magnitude, the red giant Aldebaran is the brightest star in the constellation. In the northeast part of Taurus is the supernova remnant Messier 1, more commonly known as the Crab Nebula. One of the closest regions of active star formation, the Taurus-Auriga complex, crosses into the northern part of the constellation…This constellation forms part of the zodiac and hence is intersected by the ecliptic. This circle across the celestial sphere forms the apparent path of the Sun as the Earth completes its annual orbit. As the orbital plane of the Moon and the planets lie near the ecliptic, they can usually be found in the constellation Taurus during some part of each year. The galactic plane of the Milky Way intersects the northeast corner of the constellation and the galactic anticenter is located near the border between Taurus and Auriga. Taurus is the only constellation crossed by all three of the galactic equator, celestial equator, and ecliptic. A ring-like galactic structure known as Gould's Belt passes through the constellation. …During November, the Taurid meteor shower appears to radiate from the general direction of this constellation. The Beta Taurid meteor shower occurs during the months of June and July in the daytime, and is normally observed using radio techniques. Between 18 and 29 October, both the Northern Taurids and the Southern Taurids are active; though the latter stream is stronger. However, between November 1 and 10, the two streams equalize.
Yes, indeed - most revealing…
As you can see in the above, historically the constellation has long been viewed as having at least three distinct units. Besides the Pleiades and the bull itself, there are also the Hyades which we will touch upon shortly. But it is to the Great Bull of Heaven that we turn first for further clues.
This is possibly the hardest section I have yet composed simply because there is so much information it is tough to know what to leave in our out so as to keep the matter succinct enough to digest. Therefore, I am going to skip all the famous Greek tales for now and go back to Mesopotamia and straight to the bull’s mouth so to speak – because that’s where our story springs to life via some of the earliest texts and images on the matter. It is also the closet geographically to our reference point of Göbekli Tepe.
THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN (PART 1)
Cattle are thought to have been first domesticated in the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia round about 7000 BCE but the wild auroch, which had roamed the plains since time immemorial, was a more massive creature than your docile cow, standing over six feet tall. With near supernatural strength and ferocity, it was likened to gods, kings and heroes. Its broad curving horns played an exoteric role in inspiring the horned headdress that all gods and goddesses wore to signify their divine status (but as we have been exploring, this signature of royalty and deity has even deeper cosmological roots).
The overriding motive for their domestication was not for their meat but for their great strength, which was harnessed by early farmers to provide traction for ploughs and threshing sledges. Most households would only keep one or two beasts, with large herds being much rarer and only being kept by the palace and temple, whose financial and logistic resources were capable of supporting them. Milk, their most valuable by-product, was turned into cheese, butter and ghee.
In the artwork of the 4th and 5th millennium the bull is first combined with an ear of barley. For most mainstream scolastic interpreters today, together these symbolise the wealth and bounty of the renewable land brought about by the Neolithic farming revolution, but I believe this is not what is being principally honoured here (though as we will cover later the undeniable reality that the grimreaper of harvest time also clears the way and brings with it renewal and the potential for new growth, and so I do think this idea is imperative to always keep in mind as we go forward).
An impression from an early Sumerian cylinder seal
A cylinder seal from Uruk/Jemdet Nasr, Circa 3000 B.C.
In the above cylinder seal from Uruk (see more about this culture below), the same idea as with the stalk of barley in the previous seal is being conveyed here by the 'tree'. If we take a closer look at the ear of the barley from the first seal....
Note how the barley/tree (electrical phenomena) goes through the neck region of the bull in both images despite being perhaps up to 1,000 or more years apart. A further 3,000 years later, this is the very place that Mithras will strike, as the zodiac rolls on by.
Also note how in the first image the barley head with its 7 seeds is highly suggestive of a comet cluster. In the same vein note that there are 7 off shoots to the ‘tree’ in the other seal image. Yes, we are likely talking the Pleiades again here… and also likely the Hyades - but is this all they represent? I somehow doubt it. If you look at the picture below of astronomical relationships it suggests that the path to/from Pleiades-to Hyades symbolically mirrors the line of the barley/’comet cluster’ through the bull’s neck.
Very similar ideas about celestial cattle can be found in early mythology the world over. The Egyptian goddess Hathor, (along with Sekhmet, a manifestation as the eye of Ra – that is Chronos, not originally our sun as is repeated ad infinitum today - in her leonine ‘female’ aspect of the divine Chronos configuration), was often also envisioned as a star-spangled cow with a disk set between her horns. However, in very early pre-dynastic images she was often represented as follows:
Hathor the Celestial Heavenly Cow - Egyptian Predynastic
Those following my argument to date will have learned by now how to interpret this complex of interconnected symbols in one.
Comparable ideas can also be found in Vedic literature where herds of cows represent the fertile rains of the heavens (remember the Pleiades and the deluge?) By much later times, long after the knowledge behind its original form had been lost, the golden calf came to represent the new-born sun of spring emerging from the cosmic waters just as the new-born calf emerges from the life-giving waters of the womb.
The role of the bull as a symbol of prosperity and abundant herds is conveyed in a pair of later, contrasting Babylonian omens:
But if its stars are very faint:
These omens expose part of the most straightforward encoding level of the scheme that underpins celestial divination - if a star or constellation is ‘bright’ its meaning is positive, but if it is ‘faint’ or ‘obscured’ the prediction is negative. I believe the Babylonians also knew full well that cattle = the human herd as well.
Beyond their nature as symbols of the land’s prosperity, the bull, cow and calf all have a decidedly celestial quality to their character. Sumerian poetry sometimes refers to rain-laden clouds (here once more are the Pleiades and the deluge?) as the ‘bull-calves of the storm god’ and other texts attribute huge herds of cattle to the moon god Sin (again originally a deity with a quite different meaning once more later transferred onto our moon), their numbers - well over half a million individual beasts - are so implausibly large that the prosaic suggestion by scholars that this represents the stars of the sky is clearly ridiculous with the more likely hint here of a time remembered of a bombardment by the antecedent source or more active later form of the Taurid meteor stream.
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THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN (PART 2)
The Bull of Heaven was written as Mul Gu-An-na:
Let us here touch briefly upon the topic of cylinder seals.
This immense subject deserves a thread all of its own. I admit here to a personal passion for these astonishing, enigmatic, highly stylised and symbolic world’s in miniature, carved onto minute, expertly realised drums, (typically only about 1 inch or 2 to 3 cm high), before being rolled out on to fresh soft red clay to reveal their relief in full. I am frankly amazed how little regard these miracles of art are held in, for at their best they not only rival the finest of all craftsmanship, they also reveal in great detail a tale of a worldview and a knowledge system entirely at odds with accepted reality.
There are literally tens of thousands of them lying effectively idle in museums across the world, each with its own mysterious story to unfold.
From Wikipedia:
The skill and the technology involved is quite baffling because at the scale of detail realised, especially in the later works, (and considering they were supposedly worked using known tools), the results are seemingly impossible to reconcile.
As noted above by Wikipedia, the tablets are believed to be a precursor to - and indeed a form of - writing and therefore visual storytelling, and can effectively be read as script.
One of the many pivotal seals thus far unearthed dates from the Uruk period and which I will explore now – but first some background, again from Wikipedia, for those unfamiliar with Uruk, founded around 4,000BC:
Unfortunately, I cannot find an original image of the cylinder scroll ‘script’ I want to explore next (it’s in some file or other, but just when I want it, for the life of me…) so we will have to make do for now with an exact line drawing.
We don’t have a precise date for its creation but somewhere close to 3,500BC appears to be the thought:
On the right-hand side, the magnificent Bull of Heaven appears in profile with a series of three stars placed above its back, this being a variant form of the Mul-sign that signifies a ‘star, planet or constellation’. At the bulls front legs rests a large, enigmatic circular object mirroring the same smaller orb resting between its horns. ‘Floating’ before him, we have the sign for the imposing, implacable figure of the goddess Inanna (Venus), her status as a high deity marked by the singular eight-pointed star, with herself represented by the sacred ‘reed’ column that stands as tall as the bull. Above her signature star hovers twin symbolic images, one an inversion of the other, which together scholars claim represent her twin roles as the Morning and Evening star.
It is widely accepted that this seal not only furnishes us with the earliest evidence of a specific, known constellation in Mesopotamia (Taurus) but also represents the first definitive association of a planetary deity with a constellation.
I will make some further observations:
I will leave it for there for now – but I haven’t finished with Taurus yet, not by a long chalk. Therefore, I’ll pick up the further threads of Taurus (part 3) in my next post.
The Bull of Heaven was written as Mul Gu-An-na:
In Akkadian these signs are read together as alû - ‘the bull of heaven’, which occurs in mythic, magical and astrological texts.
The Gu-sign depicts the head of a bull. It only illustrates the most characteristic part of the bull as an abbreviation for the whole animal. Essentially the same symbol lives on in the form of the modern astrological sign for Taurus.
The Sumerian term Anna means ‘of heaven’. The An-sign, which depicts a star, has three distinct meanings - ‘heaven’, ‘god’ in general and the sky god ‘Anu’ in particular.
The final Na-sign functions as a grammatical element, here signifying the possessive case; so the whole name can be read either as the ‘Bull of Heaven’ or the ’Bull of Anu’ (Anu is another synonym for Chronos)
During the course of the 4th millennium the symbol of the bull began to be increasingly associated with a wide range of gods, and it is from this period that the very earliest direct evidence for the existence of any constellations can be found.
Let us here touch briefly upon the topic of cylinder seals.
This immense subject deserves a thread all of its own. I admit here to a personal passion for these astonishing, enigmatic, highly stylised and symbolic world’s in miniature, carved onto minute, expertly realised drums, (typically only about 1 inch or 2 to 3 cm high), before being rolled out on to fresh soft red clay to reveal their relief in full. I am frankly amazed how little regard these miracles of art are held in, for at their best they not only rival the finest of all craftsmanship, they also reveal in great detail a tale of a worldview and a knowledge system entirely at odds with accepted reality.
There are literally tens of thousands of them lying effectively idle in museums across the world, each with its own mysterious story to unfold.
From Wikipedia:
The skill and the technology involved is quite baffling because at the scale of detail realised, especially in the later works, (and considering they were supposedly worked using known tools), the results are seemingly impossible to reconcile.
As noted above by Wikipedia, the tablets are believed to be a precursor to - and indeed a form of - writing and therefore visual storytelling, and can effectively be read as script.
One of the many pivotal seals thus far unearthed dates from the Uruk period and which I will explore now – but first some background, again from Wikipedia, for those unfamiliar with Uruk, founded around 4,000BC:
Unfortunately, I cannot find an original image of the cylinder scroll ‘script’ I want to explore next (it’s in some file or other, but just when I want it, for the life of me…) so we will have to make do for now with an exact line drawing.
We don’t have a precise date for its creation but somewhere close to 3,500BC appears to be the thought:
On the right-hand side, the magnificent Bull of Heaven appears in profile with a series of three stars placed above its back, this being a variant form of the Mul-sign that signifies a ‘star, planet or constellation’. At the bulls front legs rests a large, enigmatic circular object mirroring the same smaller orb resting between its horns. ‘Floating’ before him, we have the sign for the imposing, implacable figure of the goddess Inanna (Venus), her status as a high deity marked by the singular eight-pointed star, with herself represented by the sacred ‘reed’ column that stands as tall as the bull. Above her signature star hovers twin symbolic images, one an inversion of the other, which together scholars claim represent her twin roles as the Morning and Evening star.
It is widely accepted that this seal not only furnishes us with the earliest evidence of a specific, known constellation in Mesopotamia (Taurus) but also represents the first definitive association of a planetary deity with a constellation.
I will make some further observations:
- The script is likely singular in that all the elements go together to form one cohesive narrative, a single highly distinctive interconnected unit.
- The bull itself is the figure we have met from previous posts relating to the original phenomenon of The Great Bull of Heaven. This is witnessed by the orb or ‘star’ resting within the centre of its horns. Whether intentional or not – but I highly suspect it is – this in-profile image brings the persona even more fully to ‘life’ with the orb as the head and the left horn upraised like a curving arm. This ‘figure’ clearly grows out of the muscular being of the bull, its chest and forelegs forming the rest of the ‘pillar’ of the body - like the much later figure of a centaur…!
- This is where I wish I had the original to hand because the large orb at the bull’s feet is clearly very important but its shape may or may not be precisely depicted here. That being said, however, my instinct is that it may represent an egg. The egg from which all life symbolically emerges (in line with the ancient idea of the bull as symbol of the information field’s eternal creative capacity).
- The so called ‘sacred reed column’ of Inanna (Venus) is a well-documented motif and for millennia was used to denote her presence without further clarification required.
What is not well understood of course is that this image is of the goddess as a cosmic body (inner circular ‘head’) from out of which her long flowing hair emerges to form the whole of her ‘body’ in a complex plasma discharge tail. This flowing hair motif therefore signifies her cometary state, a memory that was to last down through the millennia even as far as to the Renaissance where Aphrodite is revealed by Botticelli emerging from her ‘sea’ shell with her red hair blowing wildly in the watery wind.
Inanna/Aphrodite/Venus’ glorious hair was both a symbol of her beauty and magnificence and also of her potential to bring about an state of universal terror – because one minute she could appear as the radiant queen of the sky but at the next turn into a raging Gorgon, her snake hair swirling into a violently discharging horror show as - with tongue extended - she filled the heavens with impending dread.We will no doubt return to the goddess of ‘love’ at a later stage, so I will leave this to rest for now. However, the big take away – apart from the clear depiction of her cometary nature that was fully known and understood at the time, (as witnessed by this landmark seal), is that the ‘bull’ phenomenon and the comet-goddess were intrinsically interlinked.
- Finally, what are we to make of this strange little pair of images?
This is said to depict the twin signs used to represent ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ as an upright and then inverted image of the sun rising between a pair of twin peaks or mountains. As an attribute of Inanna, they identify her with the planet Venus, which is only seen as the Morning and Evening star. Well clearly I think this is nonsense as we have met this concept long before – at Göbekli Tepe on Pillar 18 and on the road up through time since then - together acting as a double symbol for the rotational capacity of the original ‘bull of heaven’. Seeing them both here on this seal is a further confirmation of this long adhered to memory (even if the original cause had been since forgotten or lost).
The idea that the bottom image of the two represents a sunset is laughable and only goes to show what confirmation bias does to your critical thinking skills (it reminds me of all those Egyptians who later worried about the Pharaoh falling out of his inverted boat!)
If we further remind ourselves, the mountain is also the bull's horns which is also a ship with the divine twins and their cradling arms, as witnessed by:
Then we remember just how multi-layered, interconnected yet consistent the message is. Collectively all these elements do indeed provide a complex script – but one that at the earliest time of denoting the constellation of Taurus harks back to the original meaning of the Bull of Heaven now transferred to a sleepy seeming set of stars – but ones that still pack a hidden punch and in terms of their elements in disguise, lead us eventually to the possible secret behind the mystery of precession.
I will leave it for there for now – but I haven’t finished with Taurus yet, not by a long chalk. Therefore, I’ll pick up the further threads of Taurus (part 3) in my next post.
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THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN (PART 3)
The idea of the great god being a sky-bull can be found on artifacts distributed throughout the Ancient Near East. On one such object, a square pedestal stone from Tayma in Saudi Arabia and dated to around 600-800 BCE, we find a most intriguing story.
Scholars assess that this Arabic artifact reveals how - many centuries on from the time we are exploring - both Egyptian and principally Babylonian influences made their way via Syria to Northern Arabia. There, three principle gods were absorbed: Salm, (namely our Chronos, but Anu to the Sumerians), Śangilā (the great on-its-back bull’s crescent aspect associated with the deity Sin); and Ášimā (Inanna namely Ishtar namely the comet Venus). This was the near universal sacred trinity of the time in Mesopotamia.
Present day interpretations by scholars of myths concerning this trinity make absolutely no sense, however – with them agreeing that the myths tell us that Sin (the Moon) was the father of Shamash (the Sun) and also of Ishtar/Inanna (Venus the planet). However, this was not always the case, as for example late 19th century scholar Peter Jensen in his ground-breaking study of Mesopotamian astronomy, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, unequivocally identified the crescentine god Sin as the planet Saturn i.e. Chronos. Thus, if we think in terms of our story – that the Great Bull/Chronos (Sin) was the carrier/cradle for Shamash/Chronos (the orb) who spawned a daughter Venus (the comet), then we start getting somewhere. The stone from Tayma itself makes all this patently clear.
That this fascinating design is cubed is of immediate interest considering how Chronos/Saturn was the ‘cubed god’ (as witnessed by the sacred cubed Kaaba and its black meteorite stone at Mecca).
Of even greater note, all the usual suspects are again gathered together in one meaningful place, albeit at a much later date, and all etched in the traditional Babylonian style – the sacred head of the bull; the orb located in the crescent of its horns; the comet goddess Venus (shown both in her winged and magnificent – if menacing - state when in close proximity to earth and also as an eight pointed star – her more benignly safe distant self); the twin peaked ‘mountain/horns’ with a replica orb in its centre; a pillar below with suggestive levels that climb up to the mountain above; and all this set upon twin supporting feet not dissimilar to an omega sign. However, this time we have a most acute additional detail that likely refers us back to my previous post concerning the Uruk seal of Taurus and Inanna.
If you look closely, you can see that a serpent has emerged from the Bull’s left ear and has eased down to wrap its jaws around the orb held between the twin peaks of the mountain atop the pillar. It appears therefore to be about to consume itself – namely, it comes from the bull’s head and is in the process of eating the creative ‘heart’ of the bull which is what the sacred orb suspended between the horns was repeatedly described as being.
To my mind, the eight-pointed star of Inanna/Venus, suspended above this configuration, gives the game away. The ‘she’ who was part of the ‘he’, the beautiful radiant aspect, the comet Venus, becomes a treasonous serpent that eats and destroys the beauteous ‘god’ who she is a part of. For the ‘heart’ or orb can also be seen as a cosmic egg from which all life emerges and is the source of creation.
That is why the fate of Taurus – the Great Bull of Heaven - is so interlinked with that of Venus – the virgin queen who becomes a dragon and kills her very own lord (state of paradise). This psychological schizophrenia, this split mind and contradictory reality that the ancients lived through, simply could not be reconciled. I believe more than any other source code, here lies the roots of how over time the female came to be seen as both glorious, radiant and much to be desired, whilst also being treacherous, serpentine and lethally dangerous to all ‘mankind’. Talk about ‘toxic masculinity’! The ancients lived a severe dose of ‘divine toxic femininity’! And the sacred bull was their battleground. Something tells me this lies at the root of why Mithraism was seemingly a men only affair…
Unfortunately, I can find no images of the two other sides of this little known stone… but I do wonder what else it might have to tell us…?
It is time to bring out on to our stage the first great hero, namely Gilgamesh.
GILGAMESH & THE BULL
In the Babylonian tradition, the celestial bull figured greatly in the Sumerian poem entitled ‘Hero in Battle’, which forms part of the earliest Gilgamesh cycle.
In the poem, Innana demands the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu so that she can wreck her vengeance on Gilgamesh who has rejected her love. Although Anu isn’t happy to hand over the bull, saying that it would have no food on the earth as ‘its pasture is on the horizon’, and ‘it can only graze where the sun rises’ (this is a mistaken translation of the meaning of Anu as the Sun. Anu is of course Chronos and ‘the horizon’ is a similar mistranslation of the crescent mountain; precisely the same problem occurs in Egyptology with Ra and his horizon in Egyptian myth!) Anu finally concedes to his daughter’s demands when she ‘flies’ into a rage.
Inanna took hold of the bull’s halter and led it down to earth (this will anon lead us into certain precessional issues), where it ravished Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk. In its insatiable hunger it devoured the pastures and palm groves, and drank the rivers dry.
Gilgamesh’s minstrel interrupts his lord while feasting and informs him of the destruction wrought by the bull. After calmly finishing their beer, Gilgamesh and his heroic companion, Enkidu, arm themselves and head out to fight the bull. After sizing up their adversary, Enkidu seized its tail and then Gilgamesh dispatched it with a blow from his axe. The bull’s carcase is then butchered; its meat distributed among the orphans of the city, its hide sent to the tanners, while its horns are made into flasks for pouring oil at Inanna’s temple.
A final crucial twist occurs at the end of the story however. After Gilgamesh and Enkidu had finished dispatching the Bull of Heaven, one of the heroes – it’s unclear if it was Gilgamesh or Enkidu - cuts off the bull’s haunch and throws it at Inanna. In response to this apparent insult, Inanna assembled her courtesans and performed rites of mourning over the bull’s haunch.
This wonderful, evocative story still makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck… because here in black and white we have the greatest example of early cosmic propaganda, in which a fundamental and vital truth about our reality is twisted on its head and covered up by ‘the victors/those of power interest’ and its meaning is both revealed and heavily veiled at the same time; and you thought they’ve only been at it since 1947! The Mythology CIA of its day did a great turn on this one! It was a veritable Gordian Knot – a confusion of apparently contradictory signals that only those equipped with the correct scissors could release and reveal (and yes the later Gordian Knot is a version of the labyrinth signifier which is deeply connected to this story as I will suggest below).
To help us better understand these cryptic clues let us turn to a classic cylinder seal commemoration of this landmark event, now held in the British Museum.
I will take you through this step-by-step.
Let us begin with our cast of suspects (this feels like an Agatha Christie murder mystery!):
‘But surely inspector, you’ve made a mistake!’ I hear you interject. ‘The character being dispatched in between them should be the Great Bull of Heaven…!’
‘Well it is… but he’s here represented in disguise’, replies Inspector Poirot, calmly straightening his inverted crescent shaped moustache in the process.
‘What are you trying to tell us now? That there only appeared to be two murders, whilst in reality there was ever only one…?’
‘Precisely my dear Watson!’ (Oops, my apologies - wrong Inspector!)
I think you get the general idea.
For those of you unfamiliar with the monstrous, legendary figure of Humbuba, the following is from Wikipedia:
Only two scenes from the Gilgamesh epic are ever depicted on Cylinder seals – the killing of the great bull as Innana tries to restrain them (as above), and the killing of Humbuba as a ‘Male Witness’ watches passively by (below, as previous) - and yes, they are the same 'murdered' entity but in two different guises. The second vignette was to gradually replace the first:
At a later date we will likely come back to the whole issue of the entrails of the bull god and their symbolic identification with the familiar concept of the Labyrinth (with of course a hidden bull at its centre). As we will with its undoubted parallels to the Perseus myth so central to the Mithraic practices of later Roman times.
I will now return once more to our 8th century BC crime-scene image above of the two Heroes slaying Humbuba.
We have already noted the presence of the Pleiades and the inverted crescent hovering above Humbuba identifying him with the Great Bull of Heaven (and also with the later installed constellation of Taurus). This could well be an error of this particular impression, but I cannot help being but struck by the strange, chaotic object above the crescent. The museum curators mumble something to the effect that the ‘line borders at top and bottom, [are] rather poorly executed in comparison with the quality of the remainder of the scene’ and then move on. I think this is their way of ignoring the obvious fact that this swirling mass evidentially breaks through the line borders and into the image below and is therefore likely intentional and an aspect of the whole scene (so as to clarify, for such a shape to appear raised above the clay it would need to be carved deeply within the scroll drum itself, and thus does not appear here by mistake). Where the perfectly round orb should be we perhaps have a depiction of chaos and breakdown.
Gilgamesh (on the left of the group of three) wears a conical helmet and an open robe, bordered with a band of squares and a fringe, over a fringed kilt, and has arrow quivers behind his shoulders; he rests one foot on Humbaba's ankle, grasps his hair in his left hand and plunges his dagger into Humbuba’s (the Bull’s) shoulder.
Enkidu (on the right) wearing an eight-pointed star on his chest, places his foot on Humbaba's knee, seizes him by the hair with his right hand and brandishes an axe above his own head.
We now have a perverse inversion of the central pillar/bull/orb god and his supporting divine twins either side. Instead, we have the god at the mercy of the twin ‘heroes’ who instead of cradling him now act as his butchers. All these arms and legs, left and rights, make this abundantly clear. The world has been turned upside down.
As for Humbaba, he is shown frontally (but only from the waist up), hair wild like snakes on end, with an odd half mask that gives the impression of an inverted crescent around his mouth and the pillar/mountain extending beneath his chin taking a form rather like an extended tongue. He kneels on one knee towards the right and with his right hand he grasps Gilgamesh's ankle and his left hand is wrapped round Enkidu's waist.
This highly distinctive pose was later to be precisely replicated in innumerable Greek images of the Gorgon Medusa – which in itself emulates the well-known ancient swastika emblem of a plasma/comet phenomenon in rotation.
As for the ‘witness’…
He stands serenely with one hand raised at an angle and pointing and the other extended out horizontally, palm up (and for those who enjoy such things, forming an angle of approximately 72°… hmmm... precession yet again…); he wears a long, double-belted skirt which is vertically striated at the top with a diagonal line across, below which is a broad band of dot-in-square patterning with a fringe at the hem.
He is pointing directly at the tasselled spade of the god Marduk on a stepped stand side by side with the wedge or stylus of the god Nabu on a square stand (these two often appeared together, each astride their serpent dragon Mušḫuššu.)
This is not the space to speak of Marduk or Nabu other than to say the first was the appointed warrior hero of the Gods (namely Mars) who brought order and creation out of chaos through his trickery, his repeated daring and his violent deeds, whilst the second is comparable to the Greek God Hermes/Roman Mercury, the mystical messenger of the gods. In some way or other Enkidu and Gilgamesh are their symbolic emissaries.
The pointing of the fore finger by the ‘witness’, the outstretched palm and angle they create; the ordered geometric squares on his clothes; Enkidu’s ninety degree left arm with its thumb and forefinger seemingly pointing directly up to heaven… I cannot help but think of Masons and the secret societies of the ancient past. This I think is no mere witness, but rather the figure in control, the manipulator behind the curtain, the orderer of the story to be told and the truth to be veiled, only available to the few in the know. Enlil has a lot to answer for! (That’s effectively him by the way, standing there in plainclothes so to speak, pointing his fingers, giving commands from behind the curtain, waiting to receive the horned head of the bull/Humbuba tied up in a sack i.e. knowledge, especially of the future, hidden from prying eyes other than his and his kind?).
And what of that haunch of the bull, cut off and tossed at the goddess Inanna?
Well, there is an intriguing parallel to this bizarre incident in Egyptian mortuary traditions where a bull’s foreleg is one of the chief offerings made to the deceased. And it can be no coincidence that the Egyptians placed their constellation of the Bull’s Foreleg right at the very heart of the Northern circumpolar stars - which the Babylonians also envisioned as their funerary Wagon – the very location of the original Great Bull of Heaven phenomenon.
Meanwhile we have Taurus cut in half. I will come back to this matter in detail when we look at Ares-Aries. For now, let us merely note that upon the bull’s leg suspended at the northern centre, the small enigmatic figure of a Ram sits silently attached… staring ‘down’ at its larger mirror Aries and that still strangely whole Egyptian Taurus the bull, facing in the ‘wrong’ direction…
How our plot continues to thicken!
For now, I will simply leave you with the suggestion that thanks to the true secret of precession, that the cutting in half of the bull and the change in its orientation may well be a symbolic representation of what happened to it in the past and also how one day, perhaps sooner than we think, this is the way it will return – with no warning - head first out of the darkness!
The idea of the great god being a sky-bull can be found on artifacts distributed throughout the Ancient Near East. On one such object, a square pedestal stone from Tayma in Saudi Arabia and dated to around 600-800 BCE, we find a most intriguing story.
Scholars assess that this Arabic artifact reveals how - many centuries on from the time we are exploring - both Egyptian and principally Babylonian influences made their way via Syria to Northern Arabia. There, three principle gods were absorbed: Salm, (namely our Chronos, but Anu to the Sumerians), Śangilā (the great on-its-back bull’s crescent aspect associated with the deity Sin); and Ášimā (Inanna namely Ishtar namely the comet Venus). This was the near universal sacred trinity of the time in Mesopotamia.
Present day interpretations by scholars of myths concerning this trinity make absolutely no sense, however – with them agreeing that the myths tell us that Sin (the Moon) was the father of Shamash (the Sun) and also of Ishtar/Inanna (Venus the planet). However, this was not always the case, as for example late 19th century scholar Peter Jensen in his ground-breaking study of Mesopotamian astronomy, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, unequivocally identified the crescentine god Sin as the planet Saturn i.e. Chronos. Thus, if we think in terms of our story – that the Great Bull/Chronos (Sin) was the carrier/cradle for Shamash/Chronos (the orb) who spawned a daughter Venus (the comet), then we start getting somewhere. The stone from Tayma itself makes all this patently clear.
That this fascinating design is cubed is of immediate interest considering how Chronos/Saturn was the ‘cubed god’ (as witnessed by the sacred cubed Kaaba and its black meteorite stone at Mecca).
Of even greater note, all the usual suspects are again gathered together in one meaningful place, albeit at a much later date, and all etched in the traditional Babylonian style – the sacred head of the bull; the orb located in the crescent of its horns; the comet goddess Venus (shown both in her winged and magnificent – if menacing - state when in close proximity to earth and also as an eight pointed star – her more benignly safe distant self); the twin peaked ‘mountain/horns’ with a replica orb in its centre; a pillar below with suggestive levels that climb up to the mountain above; and all this set upon twin supporting feet not dissimilar to an omega sign. However, this time we have a most acute additional detail that likely refers us back to my previous post concerning the Uruk seal of Taurus and Inanna.
If you look closely, you can see that a serpent has emerged from the Bull’s left ear and has eased down to wrap its jaws around the orb held between the twin peaks of the mountain atop the pillar. It appears therefore to be about to consume itself – namely, it comes from the bull’s head and is in the process of eating the creative ‘heart’ of the bull which is what the sacred orb suspended between the horns was repeatedly described as being.
To my mind, the eight-pointed star of Inanna/Venus, suspended above this configuration, gives the game away. The ‘she’ who was part of the ‘he’, the beautiful radiant aspect, the comet Venus, becomes a treasonous serpent that eats and destroys the beauteous ‘god’ who she is a part of. For the ‘heart’ or orb can also be seen as a cosmic egg from which all life emerges and is the source of creation.
That is why the fate of Taurus – the Great Bull of Heaven - is so interlinked with that of Venus – the virgin queen who becomes a dragon and kills her very own lord (state of paradise). This psychological schizophrenia, this split mind and contradictory reality that the ancients lived through, simply could not be reconciled. I believe more than any other source code, here lies the roots of how over time the female came to be seen as both glorious, radiant and much to be desired, whilst also being treacherous, serpentine and lethally dangerous to all ‘mankind’. Talk about ‘toxic masculinity’! The ancients lived a severe dose of ‘divine toxic femininity’! And the sacred bull was their battleground. Something tells me this lies at the root of why Mithraism was seemingly a men only affair…
Unfortunately, I can find no images of the two other sides of this little known stone… but I do wonder what else it might have to tell us…?
It is time to bring out on to our stage the first great hero, namely Gilgamesh.
GILGAMESH & THE BULL
In the Babylonian tradition, the celestial bull figured greatly in the Sumerian poem entitled ‘Hero in Battle’, which forms part of the earliest Gilgamesh cycle.
In the poem, Innana demands the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu so that she can wreck her vengeance on Gilgamesh who has rejected her love. Although Anu isn’t happy to hand over the bull, saying that it would have no food on the earth as ‘its pasture is on the horizon’, and ‘it can only graze where the sun rises’ (this is a mistaken translation of the meaning of Anu as the Sun. Anu is of course Chronos and ‘the horizon’ is a similar mistranslation of the crescent mountain; precisely the same problem occurs in Egyptology with Ra and his horizon in Egyptian myth!) Anu finally concedes to his daughter’s demands when she ‘flies’ into a rage.
Inanna took hold of the bull’s halter and led it down to earth (this will anon lead us into certain precessional issues), where it ravished Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk. In its insatiable hunger it devoured the pastures and palm groves, and drank the rivers dry.
Gilgamesh’s minstrel interrupts his lord while feasting and informs him of the destruction wrought by the bull. After calmly finishing their beer, Gilgamesh and his heroic companion, Enkidu, arm themselves and head out to fight the bull. After sizing up their adversary, Enkidu seized its tail and then Gilgamesh dispatched it with a blow from his axe. The bull’s carcase is then butchered; its meat distributed among the orphans of the city, its hide sent to the tanners, while its horns are made into flasks for pouring oil at Inanna’s temple.
A final crucial twist occurs at the end of the story however. After Gilgamesh and Enkidu had finished dispatching the Bull of Heaven, one of the heroes – it’s unclear if it was Gilgamesh or Enkidu - cuts off the bull’s haunch and throws it at Inanna. In response to this apparent insult, Inanna assembled her courtesans and performed rites of mourning over the bull’s haunch.
This wonderful, evocative story still makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck… because here in black and white we have the greatest example of early cosmic propaganda, in which a fundamental and vital truth about our reality is twisted on its head and covered up by ‘the victors/those of power interest’ and its meaning is both revealed and heavily veiled at the same time; and you thought they’ve only been at it since 1947! The Mythology CIA of its day did a great turn on this one! It was a veritable Gordian Knot – a confusion of apparently contradictory signals that only those equipped with the correct scissors could release and reveal (and yes the later Gordian Knot is a version of the labyrinth signifier which is deeply connected to this story as I will suggest below).
To help us better understand these cryptic clues let us turn to a classic cylinder seal commemoration of this landmark event, now held in the British Museum.
I will take you through this step-by-step.
Let us begin with our cast of suspects (this feels like an Agatha Christie murder mystery!):
- To our left we have our ‘Witness’
- Next in line comes Mr. ‘Gilgamesh’, our principle suspect.
- On the far fright, his accomplice, Mr. ‘Enkidu’.
- In between and above them hang the symbols for the Pleiades as well as the ever-present crescent on its back…
- Therefore in between our two partners in crime … (drum roll) … we have the victim of this terrible deed… and he is … (further drum roll) … HUMBUBA (or Huwawa, if you prefer the earlier Sumerian).
‘But surely inspector, you’ve made a mistake!’ I hear you interject. ‘The character being dispatched in between them should be the Great Bull of Heaven…!’
‘Well it is… but he’s here represented in disguise’, replies Inspector Poirot, calmly straightening his inverted crescent shaped moustache in the process.
‘What are you trying to tell us now? That there only appeared to be two murders, whilst in reality there was ever only one…?’
‘Precisely my dear Watson!’ (Oops, my apologies - wrong Inspector!)
I think you get the general idea.
For those of you unfamiliar with the monstrous, legendary figure of Humbuba, the following is from Wikipedia:
Humbaba
In Ancient Mesopotamian religion, Humbaba (Assyrian spelling), also spelled Huwawa (Sumerian spelling) and surnamed the Terrible, was a monstrous giant of immemorial age raised by Utu, the Sun / justice / truth god. Humbaba was the guardian of the Cedar Forest, where the gods lived, by the will of the god Enlil, who:"assigned [Humbaba] as a terror to human beings.Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeated this great enemy."Description"When he looks at someone, it is the look of death.”"Humbaba's roar is a flood,his mouth is death and his breath is fire!A hundred leagues away he can hear any [rustling?] in his forest!Who would go down into his forest!”
In various examples, his face is scribed in a single coiling line like that of coiled entrails of men and beasts, from which omens might be read.Another description from Georg Burckhardt's translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh says,"he had the paws of a lion anda body covered in thorny scales;his feet had the claws of a vulture, andon his head were the horns of a wild bull;his tail and phallus each ended in a snake's head.”However, another description … is more positive about Humbaba. In this version of the story, Humbaba is beloved of the gods and a kind of king in the palace of the forest. Monkeys are his heralds, birds his courtiers, and his entire throne room breathes with the aroma of cedar resin. The tablet goes on to portray Gilgamesh as an aggressor who destroys a forest unnecessarily, and Humbaba's death is lamented by Enkidu.Demise…Defeated, Humbaba appeals to a receptive Gilgamesh for mercy, but Enkidu convinces Gilgamesh to slay Humbaba. In a final effort, Humbaba tries to escape but is decapitated by Enkidu, or in some versions by both heroes together. His head is put in a leather sack, which is brought to Enlil…Depictions
Greek gorgoneion painted in the glazing on the bottom of an Ancient Greek cup, end of 6th century BCE, National Library of France, ParisThe iconography of the apotropaic severed head of Humbaba, with staring eyes, flowing beard and wild hair, is well attested from the First Babylonian dynasty, continuing into Neo-Assyrian art. It fades away during the Achaemenid rule, however, the image seems to have diffused into adjacent cultures.The severed head of the monstrous Humbaba found a Greek parallel of the gorgoneion, the protective amulet depicting the gorgon's head from the Perseus myth. Perseus similarly employed the head of the gorgon Medusa (the original of the gorgoneion) which he kept hidden in a leather sack. Archaic Greek depictions of the gorgoneion often render it bearded, an anomaly for the female gorgon. The Egyptian New Kingdom deity Bes bears a striking resemblance to Humbaba…
Only two scenes from the Gilgamesh epic are ever depicted on Cylinder seals – the killing of the great bull as Innana tries to restrain them (as above), and the killing of Humbuba as a ‘Male Witness’ watches passively by (below, as previous) - and yes, they are the same 'murdered' entity but in two different guises. The second vignette was to gradually replace the first:
- The Great Bull is the once divine heavenly aspect of the great god ‘Chronos’ himself – universally loved and revered.
- Humbuba is the bull in its descended aspect as a monstrous destructive beast that revealed itself to be the hidden aspect and therefore the darker side of ‘Chronos’ with his sickle crescent blade in hand.
At a later date we will likely come back to the whole issue of the entrails of the bull god and their symbolic identification with the familiar concept of the Labyrinth (with of course a hidden bull at its centre). As we will with its undoubted parallels to the Perseus myth so central to the Mithraic practices of later Roman times.
I will now return once more to our 8th century BC crime-scene image above of the two Heroes slaying Humbuba.
We have already noted the presence of the Pleiades and the inverted crescent hovering above Humbuba identifying him with the Great Bull of Heaven (and also with the later installed constellation of Taurus). This could well be an error of this particular impression, but I cannot help being but struck by the strange, chaotic object above the crescent. The museum curators mumble something to the effect that the ‘line borders at top and bottom, [are] rather poorly executed in comparison with the quality of the remainder of the scene’ and then move on. I think this is their way of ignoring the obvious fact that this swirling mass evidentially breaks through the line borders and into the image below and is therefore likely intentional and an aspect of the whole scene (so as to clarify, for such a shape to appear raised above the clay it would need to be carved deeply within the scroll drum itself, and thus does not appear here by mistake). Where the perfectly round orb should be we perhaps have a depiction of chaos and breakdown.
Gilgamesh (on the left of the group of three) wears a conical helmet and an open robe, bordered with a band of squares and a fringe, over a fringed kilt, and has arrow quivers behind his shoulders; he rests one foot on Humbaba's ankle, grasps his hair in his left hand and plunges his dagger into Humbuba’s (the Bull’s) shoulder.
Enkidu (on the right) wearing an eight-pointed star on his chest, places his foot on Humbaba's knee, seizes him by the hair with his right hand and brandishes an axe above his own head.
We now have a perverse inversion of the central pillar/bull/orb god and his supporting divine twins either side. Instead, we have the god at the mercy of the twin ‘heroes’ who instead of cradling him now act as his butchers. All these arms and legs, left and rights, make this abundantly clear. The world has been turned upside down.
As for Humbaba, he is shown frontally (but only from the waist up), hair wild like snakes on end, with an odd half mask that gives the impression of an inverted crescent around his mouth and the pillar/mountain extending beneath his chin taking a form rather like an extended tongue. He kneels on one knee towards the right and with his right hand he grasps Gilgamesh's ankle and his left hand is wrapped round Enkidu's waist.
This highly distinctive pose was later to be precisely replicated in innumerable Greek images of the Gorgon Medusa – which in itself emulates the well-known ancient swastika emblem of a plasma/comet phenomenon in rotation.
As for the ‘witness’…
He stands serenely with one hand raised at an angle and pointing and the other extended out horizontally, palm up (and for those who enjoy such things, forming an angle of approximately 72°… hmmm... precession yet again…); he wears a long, double-belted skirt which is vertically striated at the top with a diagonal line across, below which is a broad band of dot-in-square patterning with a fringe at the hem.
He is pointing directly at the tasselled spade of the god Marduk on a stepped stand side by side with the wedge or stylus of the god Nabu on a square stand (these two often appeared together, each astride their serpent dragon Mušḫuššu.)
This is not the space to speak of Marduk or Nabu other than to say the first was the appointed warrior hero of the Gods (namely Mars) who brought order and creation out of chaos through his trickery, his repeated daring and his violent deeds, whilst the second is comparable to the Greek God Hermes/Roman Mercury, the mystical messenger of the gods. In some way or other Enkidu and Gilgamesh are their symbolic emissaries.
The pointing of the fore finger by the ‘witness’, the outstretched palm and angle they create; the ordered geometric squares on his clothes; Enkidu’s ninety degree left arm with its thumb and forefinger seemingly pointing directly up to heaven… I cannot help but think of Masons and the secret societies of the ancient past. This I think is no mere witness, but rather the figure in control, the manipulator behind the curtain, the orderer of the story to be told and the truth to be veiled, only available to the few in the know. Enlil has a lot to answer for! (That’s effectively him by the way, standing there in plainclothes so to speak, pointing his fingers, giving commands from behind the curtain, waiting to receive the horned head of the bull/Humbuba tied up in a sack i.e. knowledge, especially of the future, hidden from prying eyes other than his and his kind?).
And what of that haunch of the bull, cut off and tossed at the goddess Inanna?
Well, there is an intriguing parallel to this bizarre incident in Egyptian mortuary traditions where a bull’s foreleg is one of the chief offerings made to the deceased. And it can be no coincidence that the Egyptians placed their constellation of the Bull’s Foreleg right at the very heart of the Northern circumpolar stars - which the Babylonians also envisioned as their funerary Wagon – the very location of the original Great Bull of Heaven phenomenon.
Meanwhile we have Taurus cut in half. I will come back to this matter in detail when we look at Ares-Aries. For now, let us merely note that upon the bull’s leg suspended at the northern centre, the small enigmatic figure of a Ram sits silently attached… staring ‘down’ at its larger mirror Aries and that still strangely whole Egyptian Taurus the bull, facing in the ‘wrong’ direction…
How our plot continues to thicken!
For now, I will simply leave you with the suggestion that thanks to the true secret of precession, that the cutting in half of the bull and the change in its orientation may well be a symbolic representation of what happened to it in the past and also how one day, perhaps sooner than we think, this is the way it will return – with no warning - head first out of the darkness!
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Tried to find out if there were depictions (or mention) on the other two sides of the cube. Nothing came up. Perhaps it was a corner stone?
Had once read it described that the symbol identified the right or left hand path depending on the hemisphere it was being viewed from.
Interesting ancient heavenly plot. Thanks for the pieces to sort through.
Very interesting, there seems to be a sort of symbolic understanding across various cultures and time periods, pointing back to a central older universal myth, or, perhaps there was an additional factor of more communication and sharing than we know about.
A main assumption those in the alternative history community have about Gobekli Tepe is that its construction was primarily inspired by the Younger Dryas comet - (circa 10850 BC). I am starting to get the feeling that Gobekli Tepe is more about an understanding of a larger process in which the Younger Dryas comet was just the latest side-effect.
Another assumption is that the construction of these megalithic works is generally directed by Atlantian diaspora from the Younger Dryas event. The story now seems more complex, with multiple diasporas and global disasters in the mix - and who really did the directing?
I am looking forward to seeing what else may be surprising in this exploration.
A main assumption those in the alternative history community have about Gobekli Tepe is that its construction was primarily inspired by the Younger Dryas comet - (circa 10850 BC). I am starting to get the feeling that Gobekli Tepe is more about an understanding of a larger process in which the Younger Dryas comet was just the latest side-effect.
Another assumption is that the construction of these megalithic works is generally directed by Atlantian diaspora from the Younger Dryas event. The story now seems more complex, with multiple diasporas and global disasters in the mix - and who really did the directing?
I am looking forward to seeing what else may be surprising in this exploration.
TIME OUT FOR A TIMELINE
Before carrying on to complete this current deep dive into the Bull of Heaven/Taurus story, I wanted to step sideways for a moment and share with you the beginning bones of a broad-brushstroke timeline I've tentatively constructed. The deeper we dive into this ocean of leads the wider and further out the pool seems to ripple away before us. So if it is not to run off with our core argument, we need some form of broader context to hang some of this upon.
As I have been writing this out step by step, certain repeating patterns and developments following on from other markers in the sand have begun to stand out for me in a really remarkable and I think eye opening fashion, especially the central issue of a slowly emerging struggle for control over that master narrative carried on down the millennia in between:
For example, I have already highlighted the identikit singular story (but with a subtle twist) of the breakdown of the original orb/crescent god as told by the seemingly different tales of 'Gilgamesh & the Bull' and 'Gilgamesh & Humbuba' (both ‘victims’ of a murder but who are actually one and the same figure). Well for example, there’s another really interesting even earlier figure that looms large over long periods of this study, namely a figure called THE ANZU BIRD. As I will show later on, this is again the same persona as the Bull/Humbuba but in perhaps its earliest known story guise – and vitally was known as the protector of the TABLETS OF DESTINIES (also later known as the 50 ME relating to the goddess Inanna) which I am increasingly coming to suspect that in their original guise were actually a real thing – an actual ‘list’ or ‘document’ or collection of formal knowledge at one time or another – and that the information contained within was nothing less than full knowledge of the primal laws of Precession, which as the writings on the matter hint at, conferred upon the owner supreme authority as ruler of the universe….
I know I keep dangling out this issue of precession but I assure you we will get there soon enough once I have worked through and laid out some more layers of this knot. It is to my mind the Holy Grail of this whole extraordinary puzzle.
So let me lay out for you in bite sized chunks the following admittedly extremely thin looking near 13,000 years of Mesopotamian ‘history’ relating specifically to our arch of exploration:
Some preliminary notes:
Lots to ponder on, but I hope you get the picture (which I think is in there). That the primal model never went away (with its overriding message relating to a time that will one day come again) but that down through the millennia was added to and changed and adapted to fit a whole series of mini-eruptions (comparatively speaking) and the game of revealing and disguising involved a kind of pass the parcel and the increasing transference of power from the above to those micro-managing the processes of the earth bound below. And finally we end up with Jehovah/Yahweh - no longer omnipresent but removed, distant, and no longer directly active in the future of humankind. Until Paul that is...
Please do throw in suggestions of events or dates (and corrections) that should be added. I will no doubt be revisiting and revising this model as we go forward. But I hope its of use for those following the plot thus far and maybe in danger of becoming somewhat lost on the way. Including me!
Before carrying on to complete this current deep dive into the Bull of Heaven/Taurus story, I wanted to step sideways for a moment and share with you the beginning bones of a broad-brushstroke timeline I've tentatively constructed. The deeper we dive into this ocean of leads the wider and further out the pool seems to ripple away before us. So if it is not to run off with our core argument, we need some form of broader context to hang some of this upon.
As I have been writing this out step by step, certain repeating patterns and developments following on from other markers in the sand have begun to stand out for me in a really remarkable and I think eye opening fashion, especially the central issue of a slowly emerging struggle for control over that master narrative carried on down the millennia in between:
- The ancient knowledge of pivotal and cyclical, seismic events from the distant past that needed to be remembered and honoured (particularly regarding ‘origins/transitions’ and the real knowledge and import for humanity of precession).
- The waves of similar yet different events that continued off an on – but with regularity - for say 8-9,000 years that over the immensity of time warped and shaped human (or regarding this study here, later Mesopotamian/Anatolian) consciousness as well as political and religious culture and which even later spread out from there around the world. Laura's Horns of Dilemma - earth bound materialism vs cosmic shock and awe.
- The response to this by repeated power elites (religious and political) whereby they attempted to gain ownership and control over the narrative so as to micromanage and contain the implications, and by so doing, further warped and transformed the myths and stories they told regarding what was and wasn’t the state of long term as well as prescient reality – and the place of humans within that matrix.
- How by the time all this had been worked through, when we arrived in the so called classical period so much had gone underground, been wrongly translated/passed down or plain suppressed, that we were effectively in the dark leading into the great transformation that was to be Christianity etc.
- And yet throughout the eons of time, the signal to noise simply could not be finally repressed. It kept on rearing up, it kept on clamoring for attention, a process I believe which continued even during the past 2,000 years erupting as such cultural explosions as the Norse myths, the medieval Grail legends and dare I say it in the writings of ‘Shake-speare’! And then there's also the evergreen story of Troy that has simply refused to die away... As I hope to eventually get to, there is also in late antiquity the not insubstantial matter of Mithraisim – perhaps the one big chance that was headed off at the pass before it could gain long term traction...
For example, I have already highlighted the identikit singular story (but with a subtle twist) of the breakdown of the original orb/crescent god as told by the seemingly different tales of 'Gilgamesh & the Bull' and 'Gilgamesh & Humbuba' (both ‘victims’ of a murder but who are actually one and the same figure). Well for example, there’s another really interesting even earlier figure that looms large over long periods of this study, namely a figure called THE ANZU BIRD. As I will show later on, this is again the same persona as the Bull/Humbuba but in perhaps its earliest known story guise – and vitally was known as the protector of the TABLETS OF DESTINIES (also later known as the 50 ME relating to the goddess Inanna) which I am increasingly coming to suspect that in their original guise were actually a real thing – an actual ‘list’ or ‘document’ or collection of formal knowledge at one time or another – and that the information contained within was nothing less than full knowledge of the primal laws of Precession, which as the writings on the matter hint at, conferred upon the owner supreme authority as ruler of the universe….
I know I keep dangling out this issue of precession but I assure you we will get there soon enough once I have worked through and laid out some more layers of this knot. It is to my mind the Holy Grail of this whole extraordinary puzzle.
So let me lay out for you in bite sized chunks the following admittedly extremely thin looking near 13,000 years of Mesopotamian ‘history’ relating specifically to our arch of exploration:
Some preliminary notes:
- At this stage I have deliberately not put in at the start of this section any suggestion of a ‘date’ when my posited ‘Golden/Silver’ age great cosmic being, the true and only god (i.e. orb/crescent – Bull of Heaven, mountain/pillar, sacred twins configuration) last existed before its final breakdown and removal from human sight. It is however implicitly in there somewhere before the Younger Dryas event – possibly long, long before, but also possibly closer to the 10,900 BC watershed in its final, long drawn out breakdown phase?
- I am working with the basic ongoing hypothesis presented by the C’s that the unholy trinity of comets/comet cluster, Venus and Mars represents a set of interconnected cataclysms that are in some ways near always present throughout our timeline and existed as pivotal agents from the outset.
- We should strongly note the C’s comment from 1994 that Venus was originally an ‘ancient wanderer from near Arcturus’. Those who have been following this thread since the outset to date will recognise this star name and all their alert buttons should be going off at this! For those who have not, you should note that this star came up previously with regard to mistranslations relating to the Pleiades and to the identification of Chronos (Saturn) / Mars and the cataclysmic events associated with the deluge as noted in various biblical/rabbinical sources. I will be referring in future posts to other key markers laid down by the C’s that I now am beginning to think may have some very interesting implications regarding our story which I think may have been previously overlooked.
- That Venus and Mars – as comet that eventually becomes a planet and a planet that regularly became cometary – were ‘at it’ right from the start of this story. I will continually raise the question whenever the 3,600 year comet cluster returned, did these two become more active at the same and each and every time? I think they did in some form or other more often than not.
- That the emergence of Göbekli Tepe is shrouded in the mystery of these pivotal times.
- The C’s state that the unbroken chain of Freemasonry begins as far back as 5,600 BC. I am beginning to see how the society, (whatever that meant back then), may have slowly but surely played an instrumental role in narrative management – whilst also manipulating behind the scenes the public proclamations on the acceptable ‘reality’ of the cosmic gods vs the need to maintain the ancient knowledge. It is interesting to note for example that it is suggested the first official constellations began to be established during the early 5th millennium. I also note Laura’s observation that records in Byzantium hold to creation ‘officially’ beginning in 5,509BC.
- It is also the period when THE ANZU BIRD first seems to have appeared as a cultural marker. I will write more about this fascinating figure in an upcoming post after I have finished with the Bull/Taurus.
- We should note that assuming the Comet Cluster returned circa 5,200 BC - as the evidence of the destruction of such sites as Catlahoyuk suggests - that the understanding of this cyclical repeat terror allied to the knowledge of the past and the Mars/Venus interactions which we may assume (?) reared their head again, all fed into the ‘birth’ of civilisation as we know it in URUK around 4,000 BC and the rising once more of information concerning the origins of the by then ancient Bull/Pleiades relationship I have previously explored. Can we assume there was an STS and STO struggle within the higher ranks even back then? I think so.
- This in many ways is the most pivotal issue of all – how we may have gone from long gaps between Venus’ interaction with earth as a comet to this compressed 650 year period with 7 close passes which Pierre has identified – each of note (in that I assume havoc of some kind, greater or lesser, was wrought but declining over time) – and the ingraining into consciousness that the great SHE – INANNA – now held sway at the behest of her lost ‘father’ and his other offspring.
- The Sumerians seem to have ‘flourished’ through this experience but at the same time were weakened enough to be ripe for take over?
- That the final pass – obviously not known as such at the time – planted the figure ‘50’ into the mythic consciousness thereafter as a key anniversary and watch number for ongoing concern (and the repository of deeper knowledge).
- That from 2,500 BC on ‘they’ felt secure enough that she had settled long term into her current orbit to believe she was now powerless – having lost all her fine ‘jewellery’ and ‘clothing’ - and could no longer return as a comet, and instead started to speak of her as a planet as well as mythologically frame her as the great lion goddess of the ‘underworld’.
- The issue of the Anunnaki is too big and laden with ancient alien baggage to go into here. We should note however that as a mythos it likely dates well before this period but only came to the surface at this time. They again hark back to a time of Chronos but now emerge as a complete and present package – and we get the first real round (one that was to be repeated ad infinitum but with different contemporary characters at each outing) of ordering of the chaos that follows the great god’s (An/Chronos) disappearance from view. This is where we officially meet Enlil who will oversee so much going forward in his ‘father’s’ place (as Zeus was to in much, much later times).
- I note the 2,200 BC comet impact as recorded on Tablet K8538 – was this but one of many ongoing ‘remind visits’ of large flotsam and jetsam inhabiting the Taurid meteor stream? Giving everyone a ‘gentle’ nudge every so often in between the return visits on mass? We have lots of focus on images of gods fighting gods on cylinder seals – and we have the rise of the idea of the HEROIC god – can we therefore also assume that MARS was still up and at it? Can we assume that the local heavenly environment, repeatedly charged, was able also to ‘fight off’ chaos monsters?
- Inanna was by now much loved – her memory of terror replaced by a Stockholm Syndrome love affair.
- I will again come back to the issue of the 11 slain heroes. A very interesting topic which suggests a whole series of older constellations (long vanished from our skies) were replaced perhaps using the localised impact of precession as an ‘excuse’ for their removal from public sight. I believe these 11 were the original comet markers/gates that were used to recognise regular visitors by. The same idea – but much watered down and more esoterically charged - would later reemerge as our present zodiac.
- As the system became more stable (?) and formal sky observatories (Ziggurats) were built and civilisation expanded, we get a more confident narrative of control by man over his environment as long as he acts in line with the HERO and goes to war like a hero and makes due sacrifice to placate the gods. The whole issue of sacrifice making starts to take on a huge formal economy. Good for business all round and good for elites in particular who control the flow of story and money. And of course power over the people and their ‘superstitious’ beliefs.
- Again we get the hero controlling the elements and now in particular the transfer of the TABLET OF DESTINIES to semi-human like hands.
- The double layering of essentially the same story is now passed baton like first to NINURTA and then on to MARDUK. They are reclaiming an ancient story and making it politically powerful for the contemporary order of things. But Anu (Chronos) still haunts the legitimacy background of all.
- Can we assume that MARS was regularly if triumphantly dominating the skies in terms of appearances and driving off all invaders?
- Then crash – the most recent Comet Cluster brings a shattering halt to affairs and the end of the Bronze Age.
- It would appear from the C’s as if MARS played a not unsubstantial role in this process but it somehow did not reawaken VENUS?
- The Epic of Creation replaces NINURTA with MARDUK who again repeats the now truly ancient rite of ordering the skies and separating heaven and earth.
- Was the war with TIAMAT inspired by the most recent visit if the comet cluster? Was she just a rearranging of the character of ANZU BIRD with a lacing of INANNA for feminine blame good measure? But in truth was she again really nothing more than THE GREAT BULL OF HEAVEN in deep disguise?
- An issue I have hardly touched on at all is the mysterious figure of ‘Jupiter’… Zeus… I merely note the increasing importance of this phenomenon for now along with my instinct that this is a 'force' relating to precession and our electrical environment (and the information field?) – an invisible force that from time to time which regularly came out of the void and 'saved the day' and increasingly seemed to have the final say on matters… in other words the original god himself resurrected into an eternally powerful omnipresent figure.... more perhaps anon.
Lots to ponder on, but I hope you get the picture (which I think is in there). That the primal model never went away (with its overriding message relating to a time that will one day come again) but that down through the millennia was added to and changed and adapted to fit a whole series of mini-eruptions (comparatively speaking) and the game of revealing and disguising involved a kind of pass the parcel and the increasing transference of power from the above to those micro-managing the processes of the earth bound below. And finally we end up with Jehovah/Yahweh - no longer omnipresent but removed, distant, and no longer directly active in the future of humankind. Until Paul that is...
Please do throw in suggestions of events or dates (and corrections) that should be added. I will no doubt be revisiting and revising this model as we go forward. But I hope its of use for those following the plot thus far and maybe in danger of becoming somewhat lost on the way. Including me!
Zod
A Disturbance in the Force
Understanding precession leads to greater understanding.
For example, Amos 5:8: "Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of night into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth forth the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name."
If you know the identity of 'The Lord', then, if you understand precession, you'll know what He has to do with The Pleiades and Orion - and what it means for Him to 'maketh' them (and why you should 'seek him').
From The Lord's Prayer you know that Our Father's name is hallowed. You also know that we pray that we are not brought to the time of trial (mistranslated as 'led into temptation'). This connects with Matthew 24 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah*, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man**."
Those 'brought to the time of trial' are also known as 'the fig tree generation'.
* Younger Dryas Event
** Age of Aquarius
So, I lean toward Gobekli Tepe as being antediluvian (not deliberately buried), and Noah's ark being a tad higher up, not so far away.
For example, Amos 5:8: "Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of night into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth forth the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name."
If you know the identity of 'The Lord', then, if you understand precession, you'll know what He has to do with The Pleiades and Orion - and what it means for Him to 'maketh' them (and why you should 'seek him').
From The Lord's Prayer you know that Our Father's name is hallowed. You also know that we pray that we are not brought to the time of trial (mistranslated as 'led into temptation'). This connects with Matthew 24 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah*, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man**."
Those 'brought to the time of trial' are also known as 'the fig tree generation'.
* Younger Dryas Event
** Age of Aquarius
So, I lean toward Gobekli Tepe as being antediluvian (not deliberately buried), and Noah's ark being a tad higher up, not so far away.
When I started this thread I had no formal plan where it was going to lead to, just a persistent itch down the years that there was something worth exploring with an extremely long tail. As I mentioned in my first post, the spur to really get digging again came from reading Laura’s From Paul to Mark, which among other things reignited a long-term tussle with the issues surrounding Mithraism. What was the connection between the manipulations and connivances that Laura so brilliantly exposes around the suppression of Paul/Mark and the rise of formal Christianity plus the strange events in Jerusalem and Rome and the sudden emergence of Mithraism?
I have had more than a hunch for a long time now that one of the esoteric purposes buried in the gospel of Mark is that it is structured around a journey through the 12 constellations of the zodiac (more on this theory in a much later post – if I ever get there!) This isn’t as radical as it may at first sound because it was actually standard literary practice going back millennia to design important epics along heavenly lines, (including such works as the final composite of Gilgamesh and the 12 Labours of Hercules, among many others), with seemingly terrestrial locations and characters actually representing cosmic events that transpired in the heavens among the never ending circling patterns made by the stars. A very ancient case of what is above is below with Mithraism itself sometimes (inappropriately) being termed a religion of the zodiac.
There was also the strange issue of the way in which historically Judaism has been apparently so virulently anti ‘astrology’ whilst the bible itself is clearly riddled with cosmic and astronomical allusions (to the ancients there was no difference between astronomy and astrology, at least up to that point when personalised astrology began to get its fateful grip on thinking) along with the likelihood that the Veil of the Temple, which was most probably brought to Rome by Titus as part of the looted temple treasures, was seemingly centrally adorned with a full realisation of the zodiac.
I really wanted to uncover how the zodiac came about in late antiquity and why/how it played such a central hidden role in underlying thinking – with of course its deep connection to long-term cometary cycles and the clockwork patterns of repeated heavenly chaos.
There was also the matter of precession and the enormously long cycles hinted at by multiple cultures around the world, all centred upon a lost Golden Age/s when there was once a sacred god king that brought an Edenic state to the world, one that was to be eventually overturned by monsters, giants and serpents, but with a long held belief that it would someday return – the once and future king.
In so doing I went back and back in particular to the post Younger Dryas /PPN period – and even beyond that - because I could see that looking forwards from this pivotal stage – no matter how difficult and scant the resources - was way more important than looking back towards it from the perspective and distortions brought to the matter by later civilisations, especially the Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks who have so heavily influenced our perceptions of the very ancient past.
I therefore opened this thread and posted what I posted to date. However, of late I’ve put a break on this because I realised I really needed to take some time out to delve even deeper into many diverse areas that were emerging as I progressed. The further back I looked in both the academic literature and the archaeological data an uneasy sense began to grow that – to quote from the novel Cold Comfort Farm – there was ‘something nasty in the woodshed!’
Pierre has recently opened a thread exploring the underbelly of Mithraism and the STS purposes swirling around the murder of Julius Caesar, the Son of the Bull. I’m now going to come at the matter of the Bull from the perspective of the tail end of the snake that I think began its journey of intent way back in the 11th millennium BC and slithered its way pretty much unseen right up to that time.
My essential current propositions are that:
Among the wides-spread but targeted reading I have been doing is a revisiting of the two luminous offerings by Mary Settegast, ‘When Zarathustra Spoke’ and ‘Plato the Historian’. This is not the time or place to go into any depth on the many ground-breaking propositions she makes (nor indeed to raise questions concerning some of her boldest suggestions which may now be more problematic in light of recent adjustments to carbon dating,). Whilst she does not seem to know of or include in her calculations the constant cosmic battles that overshadowed the periods she explores, she certainly grasps that dramatic, world altering environmental changes did significantly affect the evolution of thought and culture she so perceptively excavates.
I am going to quote in full a crucial section from Plato the Historian (pages 106-116) that I think warrants careful reading:
This is of course all most interesting.
For those who have followed my previous posts, the x 6 dots defecated by the rhinoceros as it leaves the scene of the ‘crime’ should bring forth thoughts of the Pleiades and the role the ancients remember that this cluster – or what was later projected onto this cluster - played over time in the repeat catastrophes and deluges that brought such a shattering end to the Pleistocene. If Mary Settegast is close in her suggestion that the Lascaux scene dates to circa 14,500 BC and it relates – either from direct experience or inherited memory – to events that involved the ‘Pleiades’ in the slaying of the ‘Bull’, then we are talking at least 4,500 years before the emergence of the early PPN in south-eastern Anatolia and signals relating to the Pleiades and catastrophe carved into stone at Gobekli Tepe.
I don’t want to get side tracked here by a detailed examination of the scant cultural records (principally in the form of cave art) left to us by pre-catastrophe cultures such as the Magdalenian, but to reiterate and amplify the suggestion made by Mary Settegast that a number of the spiritual bases of later civilizations retained within them profound memories and beliefs that long predate what is known as the Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN), circa 10-7,000 BC, and the Pottery Neolithic (PN), circa 7,000-3,500 BC. This will be very important to remember as we progress through this next stage of post.
I am going to give here one remarkably obvious stand out example of this phenomenon.
I will be dealing in some detail at a future point with the late PPN into PN site of Çatal Höyük in Turkey (occupation circa 7,300 BC – 5,750 BC) and its famous shrines, wall paintings and sculptures, etc., many of which spectacularly highlight the seminal importance of the Bull to the people over 8,000 years on from the scene in the cave at Lascaux. For now, however, I want to highlight just two of the many wall paintings that have survived on record to this day, taken from J. Mellaart’s seminal study of the site published in 1967.
Plate 41. Central platform of shrine VI.B.8. Two rows of four-fingered black and red, grey and pink hands, the upper row encased in ovals, the lower alternately vertical or horizontal, frame a red honeycomb pattern. On this pattern is depicted insects and grubs on a field of stylized flowers, above… the painting might depict the life cycle of the bee.
Plate 43. Around the north-west corner of shrine VII. 8 there is an earlier panel of red and black hands above and red hands below, framing a set of patterns that probably represent nets painted in red.
I’ve kept the bulk of Mellart’s descriptive for context on how academic archaeology views these designs with plenty of talk of honeycombs, bees, insects, grubs, flowers, nets, all in line with the prevailing mainstream view that Çatal Höyük is a shrine to the great goddess and an integrated relationship between the people and benign, fertile nature.
That is not what I see they represent, however.
Both designs are dominated by the ‘hand motif’, a motif that is also found in dozens of Pre-Neolithic caves and as such is viewed as one of the 32 principle coded designs of the late Pleistocene that have been identified as being part of a unified symbolic language spread right across the wide trail of such sites.
In most academic discourses concerning the use of hands in cave and rock art we get plenty of sociological claptrap around identity, on the role of the artist as a signifier of rising self-awareness, and of the birth of individuality within the community, etc. Basically they claim, a hand print equals humans saying ‘look at me – here’s my mark, I’m a someone and by my hand you shall know me forever’!
Note how the hand prints at Çatal Höyük all show the unpainted circular open palm. You also find this regularly in cave and rock art (see clear example below top right among others below).
A tiny carved clay stamp unearthed at Çatal Höyük (with 2 of the 5 fingers now missing) makes it abundantly clear this is not just a casual matter of palms not being pressed hard enough or some other artistic trope, but is rather a meaningful iconographic signature.
Whilst the front (above left) is abstracted and symbolic, the reverse is clearly a recognisable human style hand with importantly the wrist and start of the forearm included (we see this in many examples in cave and rock art).
I trust the message is coming through loud and clear by now.
The hand motif is a comet motif; we might even go so far as to say this is the very hand of ‘God’, seen flying through the sky
Such an idea survived down the ages, and went on to inform religions and cultures the world over.
So these two wall paintings from late PPN Çatal Höyük ….
… are not concerned with the butterflies and the bees – rather they are showing what the people at Çatal Höyük saw and knew all too well; the many hands of the many gods (or possibly two important gods at different staging points in the sky with the patterns surrounding them - nets and other swirling devices plasma phenomena or other cometary states of being) processing along the horizon or the ecliptic just as their ancestors up to 4,000 years previously also knew that they lived in the very presence of the hand of god. The same idea, the same representation, separated by as much as 8-20+ millennia. How much was passed down orally generation-to-generation and how much was the repeat effect on the human psyche of similar events separated by enormous spans of time, we cannot tell. Nevertheless, what is important is that the ancients repeatedly used human anatomy, as well as recognisable and familiar terrestrial objects and creatures, to symbolically identify with events in the skies above that shaped and determined their lives and their beliefs as well as a means by which to express even deeper states of knowledge. This will become incredibly important to grasp when we get to examine the visual culture at Göbekli Tepe.
Next up I want to take a look at the Younger Dryas and the legacy these seismic events set in motion.
I have had more than a hunch for a long time now that one of the esoteric purposes buried in the gospel of Mark is that it is structured around a journey through the 12 constellations of the zodiac (more on this theory in a much later post – if I ever get there!) This isn’t as radical as it may at first sound because it was actually standard literary practice going back millennia to design important epics along heavenly lines, (including such works as the final composite of Gilgamesh and the 12 Labours of Hercules, among many others), with seemingly terrestrial locations and characters actually representing cosmic events that transpired in the heavens among the never ending circling patterns made by the stars. A very ancient case of what is above is below with Mithraism itself sometimes (inappropriately) being termed a religion of the zodiac.
There was also the strange issue of the way in which historically Judaism has been apparently so virulently anti ‘astrology’ whilst the bible itself is clearly riddled with cosmic and astronomical allusions (to the ancients there was no difference between astronomy and astrology, at least up to that point when personalised astrology began to get its fateful grip on thinking) along with the likelihood that the Veil of the Temple, which was most probably brought to Rome by Titus as part of the looted temple treasures, was seemingly centrally adorned with a full realisation of the zodiac.
I really wanted to uncover how the zodiac came about in late antiquity and why/how it played such a central hidden role in underlying thinking – with of course its deep connection to long-term cometary cycles and the clockwork patterns of repeated heavenly chaos.
There was also the matter of precession and the enormously long cycles hinted at by multiple cultures around the world, all centred upon a lost Golden Age/s when there was once a sacred god king that brought an Edenic state to the world, one that was to be eventually overturned by monsters, giants and serpents, but with a long held belief that it would someday return – the once and future king.
In so doing I went back and back in particular to the post Younger Dryas /PPN period – and even beyond that - because I could see that looking forwards from this pivotal stage – no matter how difficult and scant the resources - was way more important than looking back towards it from the perspective and distortions brought to the matter by later civilisations, especially the Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks who have so heavily influenced our perceptions of the very ancient past.
I therefore opened this thread and posted what I posted to date. However, of late I’ve put a break on this because I realised I really needed to take some time out to delve even deeper into many diverse areas that were emerging as I progressed. The further back I looked in both the academic literature and the archaeological data an uneasy sense began to grow that – to quote from the novel Cold Comfort Farm – there was ‘something nasty in the woodshed!’
Pierre has recently opened a thread exploring the underbelly of Mithraism and the STS purposes swirling around the murder of Julius Caesar, the Son of the Bull. I’m now going to come at the matter of the Bull from the perspective of the tail end of the snake that I think began its journey of intent way back in the 11th millennium BC and slithered its way pretty much unseen right up to that time.
My essential current propositions are that:
- There was once a widespread belief system of some sort (particularly emanating from and relating to the north) that held on to the idea of a genuine existing and potential future paradise state and an ensuing fall from grace when the great ‘god’ abandoned us leaving us prey to the chaos monsters of the deep.
- That this traumatic, contradictory reality (on the one hand perfection, on the other fallen; on the one hand held and loved, on the other abandoned and damned) was used by nefarious forces who managed to take this binary mind set and turn it into a very dark web of psychologically warping propaganda in which the very heavenly forces that were once seen as being the source of nourishment and grace became instead a merciless chaos monster and dark overlord who warranted fear and despairing worship and who was to be fed by endless blood sacrifice.
- That the extraordinary cosmic and terrestrial transformation that took place just prior to, during, and after the Younger Dryas – with what were to be multiple repeat visitations and appearances thereafter continually reconfirming the ideology – led among other significant matters to what has been termed the Holocene/Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck creating what I suspect was a perfect breeding and spreading ground for psychopaths and schizoid anti-social forces to coagulate and begin constructing their power structures which eventual took psychological control over the roost, shaping and manipulating the eventual road to civilisation, their preferred tool of command and control.
- That the ideological imposition of agriculture – with its detrimental long term effects on spiritual, mental, social and physical well being, thus pacifying the herd whilst bringing them under near total control – lies at the very heart of this process, becoming the de facto determinant of the management of resources, both physical and human.
- That over time the power of the heavens, and thus the relationship to the cosmos, was transferred from the above to the below – first to the terror monsters, then to demi gods/warrior heroes and finally to religions and kings, and as it did so it both amplified the negative whilst reinforcing the power of the terrestrial to mitigate the worst through fear, obedience and conformity.
- That at the heart of this STS process was the secret society. That yes indeed, they have very, very ancient roots and in effect have always been with us – especially throughout the Holocene with roots likely in the late Pleistocene - and despite repeated efforts we have never shaken off their claws to this very day.
- That the immensely long, start-stop-start transition from smaller scale, mobile, tightly knit hunter-gatherer communities (the people of the circle), to large scale, sedentary farming and hence the ‘prison’ of civilisation (the people of the straight line/triangle) was at some level a deliberately driven policy of these secret societies and the means by which they became entrenched and dug their claws of co-dependency into humanity.
- That if anywhere has the right to call itself the cradle of this evil beast slouching from Bethlehem to be born it’s the region and cult centres of ancient Anatolia in an area now termed Tas Tepeler, in which the most famous site – but importantly only one of many – is Göbekli Tepe.
Among the wides-spread but targeted reading I have been doing is a revisiting of the two luminous offerings by Mary Settegast, ‘When Zarathustra Spoke’ and ‘Plato the Historian’. This is not the time or place to go into any depth on the many ground-breaking propositions she makes (nor indeed to raise questions concerning some of her boldest suggestions which may now be more problematic in light of recent adjustments to carbon dating,). Whilst she does not seem to know of or include in her calculations the constant cosmic battles that overshadowed the periods she explores, she certainly grasps that dramatic, world altering environmental changes did significantly affect the evolution of thought and culture she so perceptively excavates.
I am going to quote in full a crucial section from Plato the Historian (pages 106-116) that I think warrants careful reading:
The Golden Age and Indo-European Mythology
With the Golden Age of Magdalenian Europe theoretically coinciding with the inspired reign of Plato's early Atlantic kings, a word should be said before we leave this section about the ubiquity of tales of a long-ago age of gold. What was referred to earlier as the old model or the existing framework of thought was not, of course, the first paradigm of prehistory. Like Plato's priest, a great many traditions have depicted human history not as an ascent from savagery to civilization, but as a descent, a descent from a superior humanity or an age of spiritual and material plenty, or both.
Primeval paradises such as that of Hesiod's Golden Race (and of Plato's Statesman), which knew neither arts, crafts, clothing, or governance, are obviously not to be compared with the presumably later and definitely civilized Greek and Atlantic races of the Timaeus and Critias. But another sort of Golden Age, of a more historical nature, was traditionally associated with the reign of a mythical king or god-king, not unlike Plato's semi-divine Atlantic rulers. Indo-European peoples are among those who remember such a time, and the memory is believed to predate the splintering of the Indo-European unity.
The Iranian Yima, for example, who was celebrated as king of the Golden Age throughout Persian literary history, appears as Yama in Indian texts as early as the Rig Veda and as the Giant Ymir of Scandinavian myth. (All of these names are apparently derived from the Indo-European root yemo, "twin.") Typically, death and disease were unknown to the reign of this First King, and both people and herds throve and increased to the point that Yima was required to enlarge the world three times to accommodate their numbers (Vendidad II. 11-19). The fall from grace of this sun like monarch is variously explained. In one Iranian text the evil material existence seems to have been at fault (Vendidad 11.22); another blames Yima for introducing falsehood to his mind (Yast XIX.33).
The oldest source (Yasna XXXII.8) accuses him of giving the flesh of cattle to the people to eat (to make them immortal, according to a later annotation), which some have taken to mean the instituting of ritual animal slaughter or sacrifice. But whatever his sin, or sins, Yima's punishment is generally described as the loss of the kingly Glory (xvarenah), which fled from him in the form of a bird. Caught up first by the god Mithra and then by two legendary Persian heroes (Yast XIX.35-38), the Glory became, as one Iraniologist interprets the text, "the object of contest between Aryan and non-Aryan forces."
Neither the date nor the domain of this Inda-European First King is specified, but the mythology surrounding Yima is believed to derive from an archaic stratum of oral folklore that considerably precedes the time of Zarathustra, the prophet who reformed Iranian religion. And if the Greeks were correct in assigning Zarathustra to the seventh millennium BC (for which we shall find evidence in Part V), Yima theoretically could have lived and ruled no later than the eighth millennium, and possibly a good deal earlier. As for the location of his original rulership (presumably the proto-Indo-European hearth), Herbert Kuhn believed that the Inda-European peoples had already separated by Neolithic times, and that their unity should be sought in Upper Paleolithic Western Europe. If this theory has merit, as suggested in our earlier comparison of Kurgan harpoons and horse reverence with Magdalenian traditions, the Golden Age of Magdalenian culture may have reflected the glory of Yima (Yama, Ymir) himself, and he in turn the benevolence of Plato's early Atlantic (twin) kings.
A rather sweeping proposition, to be sure, but there are one or two themes among the very rare examples of narrative art in the Magdalenian collection that seem particularly reminiscent of Iranian myth and rite. The first is shown at its best in the famous Shaft painting at Lascaux, described by one investigator as "the most striking scene in the entire cave." The Shaft itself is sixteen feet deep and evidently was negotiated by means of a rope. At the bottom a small chamber is dominated by a painted panel some six feet long (fig. 63). Artistically the painting offers no challenge to the magnificent works in Lascaux's Axial Gallery; many of the elements here are no more than sketched, without color or substance. At the center lies a bird-headed or bird-masked man drawn in stiff black lines. Below him a bird, also schematically drawn and with a head precisely like that of the man, is perched on a pole. On the right a bison (i.e. Bull) rendered in an unusual style appears to be badly wounded.
63. Scene painted in the shaft at Lascaux, 15,000-14,500 BC. Early Magdalenian
He too is perhaps recumbent; large black loops believed to be entrails issue from his lower body, and his head is turned back in that direction. A line with a barbed hook, which may or may not represent the Bird-Headed Man's spear, lies across the body of the bison. To the left a rhinoceros is shown moving away from the scene. His belly, chest, and foreleg were never sketched in, and the six black dots under his upraised tail are of uncertain significance. Leroi-Gourhan believes that this animal may be irrelevant to the main drama, but in the opinion of the Abbe Breuil, it was the rhinoceros, and not the fallen man, that was responsible for the goring of the bison (i.e. Bull).
Countless numbers of human beings had apparently descended into the Shaft over the years, wearing and blackening the stone at the lip of the chasm. A great many bone points, all broken, and a number of small dish like stone lamps lay below the painted panel. Presumed to have been ritual offerings, these objects add to the impression, generally shared by prehistorians, that this celebrated chamber played a central role in the religious life of those who visited Lascaux. The most intensive analysis of the cave to date has led its authors to conclude with respect to the Shaft:
Though it is as yet too early to understand the real meaning of it, such consistency between the place, the wall decoration, and the whole assemblage invites us to see in this unity the heart of what was quite obviously a sanctuary.
Too early or not, few prehistorians have failed to offer an explanation of the meaning of the Shaft painting (e.g., hunter slain by bison, shamanic trance; the man's rigid phallus could indicate either condition). None has been found convincing enough for a consensus, however, or for that matter, worthy of enshrinement at the heart of Lascaux. Hunting magic, at one time the answer to all problems in interpreting rock art, also seems to be an inadequate explanation; as Laming-Emperaire pointed out, it is difficult to see how the Bird-Headed Man, if indeed dead or wounded, could further the success of the hunt. She found it more likely that figures such as these represent "mythical beings who were perhaps connected in some way with the history of the ancestors of the group." If Laming-Emperaire was on the right track, the scene portrayed here may find its closest surviving counterparts in Indo-European cosmogony . The composition in the Lascaux Shaft bears a provocative resemblance to the world-creating death of Gayomart (the Iranian First Man) and the Primordial Bull.
As told in the Persian Bundahisn, Gayomart and the bull lived in a state of divine bliss until the evil principle broke into the world, causing the death of the pair. When the bull died, its marrow flowed forth to create all the nourishing and healing plants; its semen was borne to the moon for purification and thence to the creation of all species of animals. From Gayomart's body came the metals (originally perhaps the mineral kingdom as a whole); from his own seed, purified in the sun, sprang the ten species of men.
We shall later find that the creation of the world out of the body of a primeval anthropomorph, or of a slain bull, was not limited to Inda-European traditions. But as Gayomart and the bull have close counterparts in Scandinavian as well as Vedic mythology, many scholars believe that this theme, like that of Yima's reign, was known to the Indo-European unity. (In the Norse myth Ymir, who was also associated with a primordial bovid, is slain and the earth made from his flesh, the water from his blood, the mountains from his bones, etc. [Gylfaginning 6-8]; the sacrifice of the Vedic Purusa, a name which combines the Sanskrit words for "man" and "bull," was similarly generative [Rig Veda X.90.vi-xvi].) It has further been suggested that because of the greater conservatism of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-Europeans, the eastern versions may more closely approximate the original myth. And it is in fact the Iranian account which seems most faithful to the scene in the Lascaux Shaft.
(Some minor text missing from my PDF version) he [the rhinoceros] may well have slain both man and bison. The pronounced ithyphallic condition of the fallen man could signify not only his moribund state but also the release of his seed, while the effluent from the lower belly of the bison may denote his own freed seminal substance, as well as or instead of his entrails. (The barbed line across the body of the bison is in any event oddly placed to be the man's spear and may depict a symbolic line of force.) The Persian association of the xvarenah with bird forms (as in Yima's loss of the Glory, above) suggests that the bird's head or mask on the fallen man and the bird perched below him may represent the immortal Glory which Gayomart himself possessed. Finally, and not of least importance, the slaying of the First Man and the Primordial Bull - the cosmogonic act itself - would have been an eminently appropriate subject for portrayal in the depths of the sanctuary at Lascaux.
The story describing the event depicted in the Shaft may have played a major part in the oral tradition during the Early and Middle Magdalenian periods; artistic variations on the man-bison theme have been found at three other European sites, dating from perhaps 17,000 to 12,000 BC. (Lascaux's paintings were executed in the first half of the fifteenth millennium.) In Persian mythology the death of the First Man did not prevent the celebration of a Golden Age; the resplendent Yima was said to be a descendant of Gayomart, five generations removed (Bundahisn XXXV). However telescoped mythic time may be, if the scene in the Shaft does represent the Indo-European cosmogony, the reign of Yima and the Magdalenian Golden Age may in fact have been one.
Accepting for the moment this hypothetical identity, we would expect the decay of art and culture in Late Paleolithic southwest Europe to have marked the fall of Yima (or of his line). It is in this light, perhaps, that one should view the next, and almost the only other, certain examples of narrative art in the Magdalenian collection, apparently rendered later in the Paleolithic period. Of these two carved bone plaques, the one from Les Eyzies (fig. 64a) shows nine small silhouettes of human figures walking in file toward a bison. They either carry sticks or have been "struck through" by signs of unknown meaning.
64. Magdalenian engravings on bone plaques from (a) Les Eyzies and (b) Raymonden, France (after Marshack, 1972)
The other, from Raymonden (fig. 64b), depicts the head of a bison, still attached to the spine, with the severed legs of the animal in front. On either side human figures have again been schematically drawn, one of which also appears to have lines extending from his chest. According to one prehistorian:
"To regard this scene as depicting some magic rite connected with trapping, or the ritual interment of an animal, is altogether far-fetched. The men facing each other from either side of the animal's spine are obviously 'faithful' present at the ceremony."
What sort of ceremony is not specified; we presume a sacrifice is meant. Nor is the reason why only now, possibly quite late in the Magdalenian day, does it seem to have been pictorially represented. If this is not merely an accident of recovery, these plaques may depict rites that had been newly instituted (or perhaps made public) toward the end of the Magdalenian era. We noted earlier that one of Yima's alleged sins was giving the flesh of cattle to the people to eat, which has been interpreted as the establishing of ritualized slaughter of the bull. If the body of the dismembered bison had been ceremonially consumed by the men surrounding its remains, this was not a dissimilar ritual. Precise dates are lacking , but it is possible that these plaques were carved during the decline of prehistoric Europe's Golden Age. Did the ceremony they depict anticipate the end of Yima's reign?
65. Mithra slaying the bull. Roman statue of coarse-grained marble. The significance of the snake, dog, and scorpion that usually accompany these bull-slaying scenes is unclear; the sprouting of grain from the bull's shoulder (or often the tail) has been compared to the events that followed the death of the Iranian Primordial Bull. (after Vermaseren, 1956) (note: this image she uses contains a restoration fault in that originally the head of Mithra would have most likely been turned away from the bull)
Mithra and the Bull
The ceremonial consumption of a bull would later be typical of many of the initiatory cults of antiquity, among them the mysteries of the Iranian god Mithra, who in the eyes of some Iraniologists was closely connected to the Yima cycle of myth. If, through the institution of animal sacrifice, Yima did intend to confer immortality upon his people, it would agree with the purposes of the mysteries, which aimed at the divinizing, or the immortalizing, of the individual.
The bull sacrifice in the Mithraic mysteries was apparently a re-enactment of Mithra's mythic slaying of the bull that he had captured in the wild. As reconstructed from Roman monuments, Mithra had seized a wild bull by the horns and ridden it until the animal was exhausted. He then carried the bull back to his cave, and, in a scene that was familiar throughout the Roman empire, Mithra slew the bull, grasping its nostrils with one hand and plunging a dagger into its side with the other (fig. 65). From the body of the dying animal emerged, according to one interpretation, all of the useful plants and herbs which cover the earth. The similarity of this sequence to the murder of the Primordial Bull has not gone unnoticed, but it has also been observed that Mithra's deed recalls the eschatology as well as the cosmogony of the Iranians, who believed that the virtuous would be immortalized at the end of time through the sacrifice of a sacred bull by a saosyant (savior). 186 In this case, as one authority points out, "it could be said that initiation into the Mysteries anticipated the final Renovation, in other words, the salvation of the mystes [the participant]."
Franz Cumont believed that the legends of which Mithra is the hero must have been created in an archaic epoch, and that the practice of consecrating mountain caves to the god was the heritage of a time when temples were not yet constructed. It is true that the Mithraic mysteries were famous for the use of painted and decorated caves, a resemblance to Magdalenian traditions that is reinforced by the earlier-noted suggestions of rites of mystical initiation in the Upper Paleolithic caves. Little is known of the prehistory of the Mithraic tradition; the possibility that it was a good deal older than has generally been suspected will be raised later by the several parallels to Mithraic rite and symbol in the 6th millennium shrines of Çatal Huyuk. But Mithra was associated in later antiquity with the Armenian river Araxes, not the French Dordogne, and one contemporary Iraniologist has suggested that the region west of the Caspian Sea - specifically the borderlands between northwestern Iran, Armenia, and the Caucasus - is in fact the most likely homeland of the Mithraic mysteries. If the traditions surrounding this Inda-European god were possibly Magdalenian in origin, how did Mithraic (or proto-Mithraic) rites get from the painted caves of southwest Europe to the lands west of the Caspian Sea?
We mentioned earlier that Yima had found it necessary to "enlarge the world" three times during his reign in order to accommodate the increase in herds and men. If the extension of Middle to Late Magdalenian influence across Europe corresponded to the mythic migrations of Yima's people, they would have spread first into Germanic lands and then as far east as the Russian site of Molodova V by the twelfth millennium BC; the solitary painted cave in the Urals may also date to this time. A thousand years later the Iranian cave site of Ali Tappeh on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea was occupied by people whose excellent bone work included finely eyed needles that the excavator compared to those of southwest Europe. Had Yima's final expansion reached the Caspian Sea?
Let us look again at the first series of rock engravings at Kobystan, the earliest art of its kind in Transcaucasia and, from the masterful quality of its execution (see figure 36), apparently the work of newcomers to this region.
36. Deeply engraved figures of men and bulls from the first series of rock art at Kobystan, west of the Caspian Sea (after Formozov, 1963)
We suggested earlier that Plato's all-inclusive war might have carried these foreign bowmen and their artistic style, comparable in many respects to that of the Spanish Levant, to the shores of the Caspian Sea. The numerous representations of bulls at Kobystan have also been compared stylistically to those of western art, and we can now further observe that the angular lines across the shoulders of the male figures of this first phase are not unlike the so-called "struck through" marks on the men of the Late Magdalenian plaques. If these large and deeply carved Kobystani figures do represent new arrivals in Transcaucasia, might they have been leaders
in the last of Yima’s line- and bearers of the bull-centered traditions of Mithra?
Lying just north of the Araxes river (the modern Aras) and above Iranian Azerbaijan, Kobystan is certainly not far from the reputed source of the Mithraic mysteries. It also falls within the region chosen by one prominent early Iraniologist as the most likely location of Eran-Vej (Airyana Vaejah),the legendary homeland of the Iranian people. (The Persian Bundahisn [XXIX.12] states that Eran-Vej bordered on Azerbaijan, and James Darmesteter felt that the northern side of Azerbaijan best fitted the description in the text.) We shall have a chance to explore these claims later when, in the sixth millennium BC, peoples with ties to this region begin constructing permanent settlements in northern Mesopotamia, the remains of which yield pottery painted with designs (bull, scorpion , snake) reminiscent of Mithraic symbolism. We would only add here that the excavator of Kobystan believes that, whatever its significance, the area around these engraved rock surfaces continued to be held sacred throughout the remainder of prehistory and into historical times. Even today, there are six pagan sanctuaries in the vicinity, at which the Azerbaijanis offer small pieces of cloth in symbolic sacrifice.
Summary
To close this section on myth we might briefly summarize these suggested links between Magdalenians, proto-Iranians, and Plato's Atlantics, again with the understanding that this is clearly an over simplification of what must have been an extremely complex chain of events. As described in Part I, the archaeology of Upper Paleolithic Europe records a series of migratory movements out of western Europe, beginning as early as the initial expansion of Magdalenian culture in perhaps the thirteenth millennium BC. Apparently welcome at first, as early Atlantic visitations would also have been, these migrating groups may have become increasingly aggressive as the decay of western culture set in, until we have the situation described by the excavator of the Ukrainian cemeteries as the forcing-out of native eastern Europeans, leaving Europe's first known collection of violent deaths in its wake. At this point, the sequence intersected the warlike activities elsewhere in the archaeology of ninth millennium Europe and the Near East, theorized as the conflict described in the Timaeus.
In this second section, working backward from parallels to the Magdalenian harpoons and veneration of the horse in the later, apparently Indo-European, Kurgan culture of the Russian steppes, we revived an earlier theory that placed the proto-Indo-European homeland in Upper Paleolithic western Europe. The most important piece of Magdalenian narrative art, the painting
in the Lascaux Shaft, fit the cosmogonic myth of the Iranians without undue stretching. We thus ventured to compare the Magdalenian epoch with the mythological Golden Age of Indo-European Yima, whose people, like the southwest Europeans, increased in number during his reign and expanded their range far beyond the boundaries of their original world. Two carved bone plaques of Late Magdalenian age were then offered as possible representations of the animal sacrifices attributed to Yima's last days. In the context of a cave-painting culture, these Magdalenian plaques seemed particularly suggestive of the traditions surrounding the Iranian god Mithra, whose followers also sacrificed bulls and whose later mysteries are known to have been celebrated in painted caves.
Looking then to Epi-Paleolithic Transcaucasia, and with the mythology of Yima' s threefold expansion in mind, we found that the western connections of the Kobystani warriors and their bulls provided a means by which proto-Mithraic traditions might have been transferred to the region west of the Caspian Sea, believed to have been the homeland of the Mithraic mysteries. As Mithra was in one aspect a warrior god, our earlier proposal that these newcomers to Kobystan were associated in some way with Plato's war (the contest for Yima's lost Glory?) remains unaffected.
It may seem at this point that the theory of an Iranian connection to Magdalenian and Atlantic traditions is peripheral to our main theme. The plausibility of an historical foundation for Plato's tale does not depend on the strength of the Persian component, or on the identification of the Magdalenian culture as proto-Indo-European. But the questions raised here will be helpful later, first in dealing with the Mithraic overtones in the bull cults of Çatal Höyük and then in reconstructing the background of Zarathustra. Furthermore, we are committed not only to trying to see the events of this epoch from Plato's perspective, but also to the construction of a whole picture, however broad and bare, from which future research can coherently develop or depart. If the speculative use of other mythologies seems a radical means to that end, the alternative, it now seems, is to treat the Magdalenian culture as an entertaining curiosity, a persistent anomaly without meaning or relevance to the course of human prehistory. The archaeological sciences have given us
a great deal of valuable technical information but no real sense of the life and thought of these extraordinary Europeans. Indeed, as one authority on Upper Paleolithic Europe recently remarked, the more refined scientific research becomes, the further the Magdalenian experience seems to recede from our comprehension:
"If there is any inherent point to the increasingly precise reconstructions of Ice Age landscapes provided by the pollen and bone specialists, or to the growing thoroughness with which the symbols of prehistoric art are recorded, it may be to bring home how strange and remote this world is to our imagination.”
Strange and remote it will undoubtedly remain, but not necessarily incomprehensible, if the resources of ancient literature are added to those of modern archaeology. The advisability of using both to reconstruct the Paleolithic world is perhaps most clearly perceived in the light of later, Neolithic, developments. As we shall see in the following section, the first great wave of Neolithic settlers appears to have brought to the Near East more than the material bases of the civilizations of the Bronze and later ages: a number of the spiritual bases - the mythologies - of those later civilizations seem to have been known as well to the men of what was, following Plato, the post-deluge period of prehistory.
This is of course all most interesting.
For those who have followed my previous posts, the x 6 dots defecated by the rhinoceros as it leaves the scene of the ‘crime’ should bring forth thoughts of the Pleiades and the role the ancients remember that this cluster – or what was later projected onto this cluster - played over time in the repeat catastrophes and deluges that brought such a shattering end to the Pleistocene. If Mary Settegast is close in her suggestion that the Lascaux scene dates to circa 14,500 BC and it relates – either from direct experience or inherited memory – to events that involved the ‘Pleiades’ in the slaying of the ‘Bull’, then we are talking at least 4,500 years before the emergence of the early PPN in south-eastern Anatolia and signals relating to the Pleiades and catastrophe carved into stone at Gobekli Tepe.
I don’t want to get side tracked here by a detailed examination of the scant cultural records (principally in the form of cave art) left to us by pre-catastrophe cultures such as the Magdalenian, but to reiterate and amplify the suggestion made by Mary Settegast that a number of the spiritual bases of later civilizations retained within them profound memories and beliefs that long predate what is known as the Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN), circa 10-7,000 BC, and the Pottery Neolithic (PN), circa 7,000-3,500 BC. This will be very important to remember as we progress through this next stage of post.
I am going to give here one remarkably obvious stand out example of this phenomenon.
I will be dealing in some detail at a future point with the late PPN into PN site of Çatal Höyük in Turkey (occupation circa 7,300 BC – 5,750 BC) and its famous shrines, wall paintings and sculptures, etc., many of which spectacularly highlight the seminal importance of the Bull to the people over 8,000 years on from the scene in the cave at Lascaux. For now, however, I want to highlight just two of the many wall paintings that have survived on record to this day, taken from J. Mellaart’s seminal study of the site published in 1967.
Plate 41. Central platform of shrine VI.B.8. Two rows of four-fingered black and red, grey and pink hands, the upper row encased in ovals, the lower alternately vertical or horizontal, frame a red honeycomb pattern. On this pattern is depicted insects and grubs on a field of stylized flowers, above… the painting might depict the life cycle of the bee.
Plate 43. Around the north-west corner of shrine VII. 8 there is an earlier panel of red and black hands above and red hands below, framing a set of patterns that probably represent nets painted in red.
I’ve kept the bulk of Mellart’s descriptive for context on how academic archaeology views these designs with plenty of talk of honeycombs, bees, insects, grubs, flowers, nets, all in line with the prevailing mainstream view that Çatal Höyük is a shrine to the great goddess and an integrated relationship between the people and benign, fertile nature.
That is not what I see they represent, however.
Both designs are dominated by the ‘hand motif’, a motif that is also found in dozens of Pre-Neolithic caves and as such is viewed as one of the 32 principle coded designs of the late Pleistocene that have been identified as being part of a unified symbolic language spread right across the wide trail of such sites.
In most academic discourses concerning the use of hands in cave and rock art we get plenty of sociological claptrap around identity, on the role of the artist as a signifier of rising self-awareness, and of the birth of individuality within the community, etc. Basically they claim, a hand print equals humans saying ‘look at me – here’s my mark, I’m a someone and by my hand you shall know me forever’!
Note how the hand prints at Çatal Höyük all show the unpainted circular open palm. You also find this regularly in cave and rock art (see clear example below top right among others below).
A tiny carved clay stamp unearthed at Çatal Höyük (with 2 of the 5 fingers now missing) makes it abundantly clear this is not just a casual matter of palms not being pressed hard enough or some other artistic trope, but is rather a meaningful iconographic signature.
Whilst the front (above left) is abstracted and symbolic, the reverse is clearly a recognisable human style hand with importantly the wrist and start of the forearm included (we see this in many examples in cave and rock art).
I trust the message is coming through loud and clear by now.
The hand motif is a comet motif; we might even go so far as to say this is the very hand of ‘God’, seen flying through the sky
Such an idea survived down the ages, and went on to inform religions and cultures the world over.
So these two wall paintings from late PPN Çatal Höyük ….
… are not concerned with the butterflies and the bees – rather they are showing what the people at Çatal Höyük saw and knew all too well; the many hands of the many gods (or possibly two important gods at different staging points in the sky with the patterns surrounding them - nets and other swirling devices plasma phenomena or other cometary states of being) processing along the horizon or the ecliptic just as their ancestors up to 4,000 years previously also knew that they lived in the very presence of the hand of god. The same idea, the same representation, separated by as much as 8-20+ millennia. How much was passed down orally generation-to-generation and how much was the repeat effect on the human psyche of similar events separated by enormous spans of time, we cannot tell. Nevertheless, what is important is that the ancients repeatedly used human anatomy, as well as recognisable and familiar terrestrial objects and creatures, to symbolically identify with events in the skies above that shaped and determined their lives and their beliefs as well as a means by which to express even deeper states of knowledge. This will become incredibly important to grasp when we get to examine the visual culture at Göbekli Tepe.
Next up I want to take a look at the Younger Dryas and the legacy these seismic events set in motion.
