Off topic discussion on Baptism, among other things (removed from Churches as Radio towers thread)

[Frostychud]

I was inspired to add to this thread after reading the following article by Frederick Dodson:

The Giants lived on Earth much more recently

At one time there was a chapter in the Book of Daniel called "Bel and the Dragon". Apparently this story appears in "some" manuscripts of the Septuagint, with the oldest version dating to the "9th century" according to ChatGPT.

The story is interesting in the context of this thread for a couple of reasons. To recapitulate a little bit, we began by examining the role of the closed cella in ancient temples. Remember, the cella was the "Holy of Holies" where the statue of the god was located. Only the high priest could go in. Konstantin Meyl suggested that the cella was off-limits because this was where radio transmissions took place. It was under tension and potentially lethal. As the thread developed, the idea was floated that the cella's harmonic architecture was not designed to send out mere radio frequencies, but to send and above all receive scalar waves (these cellae were perhaps later repurposed as simple telegraph stations). It was suggested that the statue of the god, perhaps filled or mixed with blood, or some kind of ark containing a living god in a "coherent matter" ball plasmoid form, was placed inside the cella, which, when sealed and made to resonate, provided an electromagnetically appropriate environment in which the god could safely decohere into his flesh-and-blood avatar and eat the food that was left out for him by the priests (and why not bang and impregnate a few temple priestesses while he was at it).

This was my somewhat fantastical attempt to solve the mystery of food left out for the gods. Either the food was eaten or it wasn't. If it was eaten, there are only three real possibilities.

1. The people themselves were eating the food in some kind of hypnotic trance and then forgetting it.
2. The priests themselves were sneaking in and eating the food.
3. The statue was somehow eating the food.

Well, the story of Bel and the Dragon, which for some reason was redacted from most translations of the Bible, appears to be an attempt to either answer those questions, or, more probably in my opinion, cover them up. The story is short enough to include the relevant parts here in their entirety:

1 And king Astyages was gathered to his fathers, and Cyrus of Persia received his kingdom.
2 And Daniel conversed with the king, and was honoured above all his friends.
3 Now the Babylons had an idol, called Bel, and there were spent upon him every day twelve great measures of fine flour, and forty sheep, and six vessels of wine.
4 And the king worshipped it and went daily to adore it: but Daniel worshipped his own God. And the king said unto him, Why dost not thou worship Bel?
5 Who answered and said, Because I may not worship idols made with hands, but the living God, who hath created the heaven and the earth, and hath sovereignty over all flesh.
6 Then said the king unto him, Thinkest thou not that Bel is a living God? seest thou not how much he eateth and drinketh every day?
7 Then Daniel smiled, and said, O king, be not deceived: for this is but clay within, and brass without, and did never eat or drink any thing.
8 So the king was wroth, and called for his priests, and said unto them, If ye tell me not who this is that devoureth these expences, ye shall die.
9 But if ye can certify me that Bel devoureth them, then Daniel shall die: for he hath spoken blasphemy against Bel. And Daniel said unto the king, Let it be according to thy word.
10 Now the priests of Bel were threescore and ten, beside their wives and children. And the king went with Daniel into the temple of Bel.
11 So Bel's priests said, Lo, we go out: but thou, O king, set on the meat, and make ready the wine, and shut the door fast and seal it with thine own signet;
12 And to morrow when thou comest in, if thou findest not that hath eaten up all, we will suffer death, or else Daniel, that speaketh falsely against us.
13 And they little regarded it: for under the table they had made a privy entrance, whereby they entered in continually, and consumed those things.
14 So when they were gone forth, the king set meats before Bel. Now Daniel had commanded his servants to bring ashes, and those they strewed throughout all the temple in the presence of the king alone: then went they out, and shut the door, and sealed it with the king's signet, and so departed.
15 Now in the night came the priests with their wives and children, as they were wont to do, and did eat and drinck up all.
16 In the morning betime the king arose, and Daniel with him.
17 And the king said, Daniel, are the seals whole? And he said, Yea, O king, they be whole.
18 And as soon as he had opened the dour, the king looked upon the table, and cried with a loud voice, Great art thou, O Bel, and with thee is no deceit at all.
19 Then laughed Daniel, and held the king that he should not go in, and said, Behold now the pavement, and mark well whose footsteps are these.
20 And the king said, I see the footsteps of men, women, and children. And then the king was angry,
21 And took the priests with their wives and children, who shewed him the privy doors, where they came in, and consumed such things as were upon the table.
22 Therefore the king slew them, and delivered Bel into Daniel's power, who destroyed him and his temple.
23 And in that same place there was a great dragon, which they of Babylon worshipped.
24 And the king said unto Daniel, Wilt thou also say that this is of brass? lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh; thou canst not say that he is no living god: therefore worship him.
25 Then said Daniel unto the king, I will worship the Lord my God: for he is the living God.
26 But give me leave, O king, and I shall slay this dragon without sword or staff. The king said, I give thee leave.
27 Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and hair, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof: this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder : and Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship.
28 When they of Babylon heard that, they took great indignation, and conspired against the king, saying, The king is become a Jew, and he hath destroyed Bel, he hath slain the dragon, and put the priests to death.

From this link: The Apocrypha: Bel and the Dragon: Bel and the Dragon Chapter 1

Wild, huh?

(After this we get fourteen more verses describing the miraculous way an angel saves Daniel from being devoured by lions after being thrown in prison. This part of the story reads like cheap miracle propaganda to me, and reminds me that the Bible is in many ways an idiotic document that targets gullible illiterates.)

So, there are two parts to the story. First we have the story of Bel (Ba'al), and then we have the story of the dragon. Reading the chapter above, I get the feeling that some serious editing has taken place. The relationship between Bel and the Dragon is not explicated. Did the Babylonians worship each of them separately? Were Bel and the Dragon originally two faces of the same "divine" phenomenon? Or were these originally two completely separate stories that were grafted together by the compilers of the Septuagint?

Let me add that over at the website previously linked to earlier, the author shows a series of old maps in which "Babylon" is located in...Cairo, Egypt. He goes on to suggest that Babylon was not a specific place but a generic description of a type of fortified city. This makes intuitive sense as Babylon seems to refer more to a system than a specific city.

The fake History of Cairo-Babylon

The first part of the story shows us that Bel is fake. The priests sneak in and eat the food at night. Bel is nothing but clay. I suspect there are equal parts truth and falsehood here. I suspect that there was a time when "Bel" was real, and that at some point the real Bel was usurped by a priesthood pretending to be Bel. Where I think the story is misleading is that I believe the priesthood was never murdered. On the contrary, seeing that the theater of simulated idol worship was getting harder and harder to pull off convincingly, I suspect they collectively decided to tank it once and for all in favor of a more centralized monotheism which they controlled. We see the same thing today as streamlined chain stores of all varieties replace mom and pop businesses. Perhaps a mafia war took place in which different clans of priests, all of whom were in on the con, fought each other for control of the new monotheism, while maintaining a strict code of omerta towards the regular people. Individual loser priesthoods were indeed probably put to the sword, but the priesthood system itself remained untouched and eventually set up shop in Rome, with Jesuits functioning as their SS and "Jews" functioning as the financial arm of the operation. I suspect that the authentic original monotheism didn't last very long, just as any movement resembling "authentic socialism" is only ever allowed to exist for just long enough to liquidate the old order before it is in turn murdered and its corpse zombified into some version of centralized Stalinism.

That brings us to Part Two of the story, which is more bizarre. After Bel is destroyed, we get a living dragon that the people worship. Was the dragon the "decohered" avatar of Ba'al, or a completely different character? Here, all Daniel does is poison the monster that is presumably eating the Babylonians. Over at IHASFEMR, @usselo emits a couple of different hypotheses about dragon worship. On the one hand, he presents evidence that humans were indeed chained to stones and left out for monsters to eat. On the other hand, he suggests that "dragons" were mythologized stand-ins for an entire social system based on human farming. Perhaps both existed at different times and places. If you have any input here...

So, were idol worship and "living monster worship" two separate phenomena, both of which had to be eradicated in order for the New World Order, namely a monotheistic structure which at different times and in different places was more or less puppeteered from the shadows by the old priesthoods, to take over?

Is it possible that the story of Bel and the Dragon offers us a glimpse of some immediate post-cataclysmic period when the original coherent matter "gods" had died or been killed due to atmospheric changes, but in which their chimerical offspring, which had more "normal" DNA than coherent matter DNA, could still survive in the new conditions? Did humans only turn to worshiping the dragons when the gods went silent? Did the priesthood that usurped Bel keep the dragon around and feed sacrificial victims to it purely as a hypnotic spectacle?

This is a photo of the famous "Ishtar Gate" of (one) Babylon (now in Berlin). Notice the different animals. We have two "real" animals and one dragon-like chimera, the "sirrush". So the story goes, this thing was real and kept in captivity as a symbol of the city.

Was this sirrush the dragon?

Now, it's possible that this entire Ishtar gate was fabricated by the Germans who "found" and "restored" it (80% of the bricks are admitted to be new) in order to confirm the Bible, but for the moment I am putting that possibility aside. What better way to ground your legitimacy than by trotting out the hybrid pet of the old gods from time to time? Is this where the practice of ferocious team mascots comes from?

I know I repeat myself often, but it helps me to get my ideas straight. We have at least four possible time periods:

1. A time when the "gods" roamed and manifested freely on Earth.
2. A time when the weakened gods could still communicate with humans directly, but now required priesthoods to take care of them, i.e. by supplying them with temples and resonant chambers in which they could decohere, Arks in which they could "sleep", sacrificial victims whose blood they could consume, etc.
3. A time of upheaval when for some reason these gods disappeared, allowing priesthoods to usurp their place. The offspring of the gods, however, remained.

Question: were the cathedrals the motor for this transition? Were these incredible buildings the machines that allowed humans to enter into contact with a different divinity, one who was the same everywhere (the Goddess and her Son), one who did not demand sacrifice?

4. A post-divine period during which "polytheism" and "monotheism" simply became two different styles of government and social management.

Idea: was patriarchy a "non-divine" solution to the problem of the disappearance of the old gods? Was a strict patriarchal social order the only possible management solution to the problem of thousands of horny genetically engineered slaves suddenly released from the remote-control voices in their heads? Is this why Judaism and Christianity were forced into each other's arms -- they were the two most effective social solutions to the same problem?

Was the Bible a compromise between two different "responses" to the disappearance of the old gods, one proto-Christian and worshiping the Goddess/Son, and the other Middle Eastern, worshiping the Father?

Look at Judaism today. This is a multifaceted religion that includes, at one end, basically demon worship, and the other end, principled moral patriarchy with a special hatred for anything reminiscent of idol worship. What's the connection? Well, if we see these two "poles" of Judaism as well as everything in between as a continuum of compromise-formations between the corrupt priestly heirs of the old gods and the righteous "true monotheists" who had the courage to recognize that we were basically alone from now on, and would have to rely on moral and legal codes? Exactly halfway between these two extremes, you have the compromise-formation of "Yahweh": the old demons have been abstracted into one still-ferocious-but-now-fair God, but the final and decisive step has not been taken. In contradistinction to Jesus, Yahweh is still "haunted" by demon-like qualities. Islam here emerges as just an extremely monotheistic variant of Judaism, one that borrowed certain elements of Christianity.

I would even suggest that the word "Judaism" may not have referred to a religion per se, but functioned rather as an umbrella category including different types of patriarchal religious/social/ethical/governmental structures that emerged after the death of the gods, all of which more or less resembled each other.

Compare this to Christianity, which overcame demon/idol/dragon worship in a completely different way, not through legal codes and strict moral orders, but by using technology (cathedrals attached to "living waters") to enter into contact with a radically different universal divinity whose grace was dispensed through baptism, among other sacraments. You don't approach God by observing laws; you approach God by allowing the Holy Spirit to enter your body. Theologically, this has ramified to a (justified) mistrust of ALL forms of human reason, logic, and ethics. The mind, by its very nature, is vulnerable to demonic influence, and only Grace can forestall this. See Kierkegaard's brilliant "On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle". The problem is that Christians no longer have any concrete idea what "Grace" is. As far as I can tell, people that call themselves Christians today are neither more nor less protected from hypocrisy than members of any other religion. (Further down I will suggest what I believe the original, real, physical meaning of "Grace" was.)

I am now imagining a post-cataclysmic world where Jews and Muslims from the Middle East encounter Christians from Europe for the first time. These people recognize in each other that none of them worship the old demons, at least out in the open. At the same time, they do not trust each other. Christians mistrust Jews and Muslims because they suspect that without the divine protection of baptism, they have no real shield against demonic possession, and their laws risk being subverted by demons who are not recognized as such. Jews and Muslims, on the other hand, suspect Christianity is just another version of idol worship, despite the fact that the Christian God desires no sacrifice and has led Christians to adopt a universal morality that in some ways resembles the universal morality arrived at legally and theologically by Jews and Muslims. The crucial difference is that Christianity emphasizes the role of Grace and Mercy whereas Judaism/Islam emphasize the role of punishment and the Law as the principal tool of maintaining the social order and keeping the demons at bay.

Again, the crucial difference between the two traditions is essentially technological: the European Christians possessed a machine (the Gothic cathedral) and a practice connected with that technology (baptism) that the Middle Eastern Muslims and Jews perhaps did not. The Jews and Muslims possessed a different type of "technology", the codified Law and written language more generally, that the Christians did not. Christians had Chartres Cathedral and sacred geometry; Jews had the Talmud and gematria.

Question: do the classical "Greek" temples Meyl focuses on possess underground crypts, tunnels, and chambers connected to living waters, or is this technology unique to Gothic cathedrals?

Note that all groups who follow a tribal Law consider themselves superior to other races by virtue of this Law. Even the ostensibly lawless Gypsies, perhaps the most degenerate and criminal human society on Earth, believe themselves to be better than others because they alone possess what they consider to be the "true law".

The Bible, then, emerges as a tenuous compromise between these two traditions, a forced marriage that denatured both of them.

Question: was Rome chosen in the Middle Ages as the headquarters for the new hybrid/compromise religion for the simple reason that it was geographically halfway between the Jewish/Muslim power center of Jerusalem and the Christian power center of Paris?

Note that Jews believe that Muslims worship the same God as they do (Muslims are considered Noachides), whereas Christianity is considered idolatry (and punishable by beheading in the "World to Come"). The difference between Judaism and Islam is quantitative; between Judaism and Christianity, qualitative.

If the Crusades really happened, and I suspect they did, or at least something like them, it makes a little more sense now. Christianity had always been a strictly European phenomenon. The earliest Gothic cathedrals appeared in northern France (Chartres, Paris, Amiens, Rheims, St. Denis), so I guess that must be the birthplace of Christianity. Christians went to the Middle East to kill convert or kill demon-worshipers. While there, they encountered people who were no longer demon-worshipers as well as people who still were. Everything got mixed up and confused and the result of this unnatural marriage between European proto-Christians and Middle Eastern proto-Jews and Muslims was the Bible. It seems to me the Christians got the short end of the stick, inasmuch as their religion was rewritten to a greater extent, with their God demoted to the son/heir of the Jewish God and relocated from France to the Middle East. I suspect that the underground idolatrous elements in both traditions also met each other and united to form the Synagogue of Satan, which also appears to have a hybrid character today, both Semitic and Druidic, both Templar and Sanhedrin, both Jewish and Swiss.

The torching of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019, presumably by the same Synagogue of Satan, is starting to look more and more sinister. Are they rebuilding it with some kind of weird metals that will channel demons in the very place where God himself once appeared? Is this their crowning act of mockery and sacrilege? Will the "new" Notre Dame communicate with the graphene or whatever it is the went in the vaccines?

I have to pause this post here as it is too long. More on baptism in Part Two.

 

[Frostychud]

(This is part two, please read the previous post before reading this.)

Continuing directly from where we left off...

Let's look at the Wild Hunt. Before going on, please read the following excellent OP from the old SH site: SH Archive - Austrian Legends. Folk Tales and Oral Traditions. A Glimpse Into The Past.

The whole thread is great. My ears perked up when I read the following excerpt from falsehistory.net:

So: baptism protected people from the Wild Hunt. But what is the Wild Hunt? From the OP:

The Wild Hunt or the Wild Hunter and his company, as it is sometimes called, are a mysterious phenomenon of the olden days that puzzles many people fond of folklore and the past here greatly. It was described as an airborne, ghostly company of demonic riders accompanied by all kinds of ghastly animals and monsters that stormed with lightning & thundering, screaming and loud noise over the countryside in full moon nights or at special times of the year (between winter solstice and new years).

The Wild Hunt seemed to follow some very predictable patterns in its course and behavior, that leads me to think of it as some past, misunderstood aerial / electric / electromagnetic phenomenon, and on top has some very clear parallels of this modern day UFO / alien abduction phenomenon:

• It traveled along certain pathways, a meter or more over the ground, oftentimes high up into the air and preferably spiraling around church steeples. Curiously, the old paths of the Wild Hunt are identified as our old countryside roads, called “Hohlwege” – hollowed out ways – that are cut several meters deep into hillsides here in a V-shape, with the actual roadway on the bottom. These were considered haunted up until recently, and people shunned them.
• The people seemingly were able to somewhat modify the prescribed course the Hunt would travel along. For example one story mentions that the building of a chapel or small church prevented the Hunt from crossing through a village it terrorized previously. The ghostly company would simply turn there an go back on the way it came from.
• The wild hunt abducts people and certain animals. They have to fly along through the air amongst the wild company, and return the next morning under amnesia, disoriented, scratched, bruised and battered. Sometimes the people or animals are found dead at very distant locations, or not at all.
• It can strike you dead on the spot upon touch. (Descriptions sound like death by electric shock)
• Abovementioned dangers can be avoided by dropping to the ground and staying there flat until the phenomenon has passed. Throwing oneself into one of the cart ruts in case of being surprised by it on the read is recommended. This way, the Hunt, which passes about a foot or a meter above the ground can’t hurt you.
• Etc.

It’s really fascinating to me how all the accounts of encounters with the Wild Hunt paint a very clear picture of a natural phenomenon, rather than some wild, superstitious devil and demon, spiritual thing. I am thinking about something of electromagnetic nature, although it might be more unconventional than that (I know nothing about ether physics LOL). Electricity seems to have played an important part though. It really makes me think if this had something to do with this often theorized ancient energy grid? As an out-of-control discharge of a failing or gradually being demolished aerial electricity transmission grid maybe? With a brilliant crowd like you I don’t think I need to spell all the thouhgts that could come to mind when reading about the Wild Hunt's behavior above!

My closing note on the phenomenon though: Whatever it was, it has completely stopped and I know no reports of something similar to it within at least the last 100 years. Not even the slight haunting here or there! Ancient energy grid 100% out-of-order over here it seems! ;-)

Okay, maybe we are in a position to add something. The Wild Hunt sounds like a perfect blend of ball lightning and coherent matter cryptids.

The OP brings up that the Wild Hunt behaves more like an electromagnetic phenomenon than a living creature. It is repelled by churches and baptism. Why?

Here I will speculate some more, and invite others to pursue or refute the following line of thought.

It would appear that churches used water as protection against "demons". It appears clear that ancient architecture was technological in essence. A lot of us speculate that the function of this architecture was channeling some form of energy. What if the principal function of architecture was not supplying "power" to communities (we are possibly imposing our own degenerate materialism on the past) but rather protecting them from demons, cryptids, and ball lightning? Was there a time when the Earth was crawling with these dangerous entities? Did living water somehow repel them and allow a different "god" to manifest? It would also appear that being dipped once (!) in the living waters was enough to protect you for life. That sounds wrong to me. Aewar emphasizes the fact that the original baptismal ceremonies took place at dawn, which, remember, is the time at which the rock towers of Ireland recorded the most significant ELF vibrations. Is it possible that baptism was originally a daily protective ritual? Has this ritual persisted in a cargo-cult form in our more or less delusional belief that we need to wash our hands and bodies every day to protect ourselves against possession by invisible corrupting forces (viruses and bacteria instead of demons)?

@Jef Demolder argues on his website that the religion that preceded Christianity was the religion of the Great Prophet, John the Baptist. This is starting to make more sense to me. Was "John the Baptist" the god or demigod who taught humans how to build cathedrals and use the power of charged water to protect themselves from demonic possession? @usselo, you remark that baptisteries spring up out of nowhere all at once in Europe. I don't remember when you situate this, but it could help us zero in on a time frame.

It is worth remarking as well that the very first Gothic cathedral is the Basilique Saint Denis, located just outside Paris in the suburb of St. Denis.

This cathedral is full of images of Saint Denis (the patron saint of the French people) walking around holding his own cut-off head.

The story is that after being beheaded in Paris by "the Romans", he walked all the way to the site of the current basilica holding his (speaking) severed head. From Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt:

Denis and his companions were so effective in converting people that the pagan priests became alarmed over their loss of followers. At their instigation, the Roman Governor arrested the missionaries. After a long imprisonment, Denis and two of his clergy were executed by beheading[4] on the highest hill in Paris (now Montmartre), which was likely to have been a druidic holy place. The martyrdom of Denis and his companions is popularly believed to have given the site its current name, derived from the Latin Mons Martyrum "The Martyrs' Mountain",[1] although the name is possibly derived from Mons Mercurii et Mons Martis, Hill of Mercury and Mars.[6] After his head was cut off, Denis is said to have picked it up and walked several miles from the summit of the hill, preaching a sermon the entire way, making him one of many cephalophores in hagiology. Of the many accounts of this martyrdom, this is noted in detail in the Golden Legend and in Butler's Lives Of The Saints.[7] The site where he stopped preaching and actually died was marked by a small shrine that developed into the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which became the burial place for the kings of France. Another account has his corpse being thrown into the Seine, but recovered and buried later that night by his converts.

...is Saint Denis the original John the Baptist, who was also beheaded? Was his body thrown into the water as a mocking repudiation of his water-based form of worship? Is the sacred Montmartre hill the literal birthplace of the original ball plasmoid "son"? Is it a coincidence that the Jesuit Order was also founded by Ignatius Loyola on the Butte Montmartre just a few hundred meters from where the Sacré Coeur stands today? It is also worth noting that the suburb of St. Denis, which is basically part of Paris, has been absolutely desecrated by the occultists who run France today. You have a good chance of being mugged on your way from the subway to the Basilica and if you dare wander outside of the narrow protected corridor leading to the church, you are in real danger. The area has been entirely, and I mean entirely, colonized by immigrants from Africa. This is what the zone around the basilica looks like today:

I do not wish to engage in rank racism here as I know many honorable people of color from the Paris ghetto suburbs, but I don't know how else to say it. The atmosphere there is hellish, sinister, ultra-aggressive. Christianity is probably the third religion of St. Denis today, after Islam and witchcraft. The entire region has become synonymous with dystopian social engineering in France. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I lived in Paris for a long time. This city, its inhabitants, its way of life, its intelligence, its beauty, its art, is one of the greatest treasures of humanity on Earth, and what is happening there makes the heart sick.

I will add one more tantalizing hint, again from Frederick Dodson. At the following link he describes "Keltenschanzen" or "Celtic Squares", ancient square fortifications that are found all over Europe.

Mystery of the ancient “celtic squares”

These squares are apparently undermined with complex tunnel systems in which objects are strategically buried. Apparently, "ancient Celts" used to perform dance rituals on top of these squares that temporarily charged them up with supernatural strength and allowed them to wield impossibly heavy weapons. Is this the secret of medieval armor? Did the armor channel even more "power" from the Earth above these "Celtic Squares" and transform armored knights into Thor-like supermen for a short time? Is the "Haka" dance performed by the New Zealand All Blacks before rugby "battles" a cargo-cult version of the same phenomenon? Dodson goes as far as to argue that the reason there are so few tornadoes in Europe compared to the United States is because these squares still play an active role in tempering the weather (!). Let me just add that the appearance of ball lightning is strongly correlated with extreme weather, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc., not to mention cryptids...

So, to summarize, we have at least five separate divine figures:

1. "Satan" whom I believe to be a syncretic stand-in for the innumerable individual "demonic" entities that humanity once channeled through sacrifice and worshiped.

2. "Yahweh", a fictional character who is the front man for the patriarchal social order that emerged after the fall of the demons. An abstraction, Yahweh retains characteristics of the syncretic "god" he replaced, namely Satan.

3. "The Goddess" and "her Son", the Earth itself and the shining ball plasmoid entity that emerged from deep underground caves and rivers.

4. "The Great Prophet", the benevolent entity who taught humans how to turn away from demons and communicate with the Goddess and her Son.

What is baptism?

 

[Jef Demolder]

Frostychud, I my opinion Saint Denis is not the original John the Baptist, but it is evident that Saint Denis is one of the many instances "the Head", as John the Baptist was called by the Templars. Compare Saint Denis walking around with his head in his hands, and Berenice, in the gospel of Mark, walking around with the plate on which the head of John the Baptist. Compare the Two Heads of Janus.

The Basilique Saint Denis is also a nice example of a cathedral having a male and a female tower (all ancient cathedrals had). The male tower is the Great Prophet (John, Janus, finally Osiris). The female tower is what you call the Goddess, Mariamme, Myriam finally Isis. And between the towers are the Son (Jesus, finally Horus) and the Daughter (Berenice, finally Hathor). They are symbolised by the Sun (the rose window) and the Moon (the door) and are interchangeable.

 

[Frostychud]

I keep finding things that connect with this thread. It's a little annoying as I don't have the time to research them in depth, but if I don't write them down here, I risk losing the ideas. So here they are, rather superficially researched. Maybe someone here can dig a little deeper.

My starting point was the calendar. It struck me that the names of our months are more mysterious than, for example, the names of the days of the week. According to Wikipedia at least, there is no consensus regarding the etymology of February, April, May, and June. I suspect that much of the history that is presented to us as being "Roman" or Middle Eastern is actually European, and the old stories were simply transposed to that region of the world as part of a larger political/religious compromise that gave us the Bible in the Middle Ages. Following this idea, the function of "Ancient Rome" is simply to explain away all the old structures and serve as a stable background context that would allow Europe and the Middle East to "meet" somewhere. Everything that has no clear place in the story gets "dumped" into Ancient Rome. I am imagining a photoshopped image with two people who never met in real life pasted in next to each other. They can't just be sitting in the void. They need a background. So the reformers looked around at their ruined world and created a half-fake narrative about the Romans to serve as a backdrop against which Christianity and Judaism could be photoshopped together.

While poking around Wikipedia for information about pagan sacrificial practices and the process of Christianization in Europe, I found myself reading about Yule, the pagan predecessor of Christmas. It struck me that "Yule" sounded a lot like "July", especially as it is pronounced in German ("Juli", pronounced "Yuli"). Is it possible that the month of "July" was named after Yule rather than after Julius Caesar as we are taught, especially considering that Julius Caesar was probably a fictional character? Well, a few paragraphs into the Wikipedia entry, we get this:

So, "July" was indeed a month in the Germanic pagan calendar. This is too much of a coincidence for me. The problem is that July is the middle of the summer, and Yule takes place in the middle of the winter. Was July given a fake backstory and relocated to confuse and destroy the old pagan calendar?

Apparently we have a similar potential sleight of hand regarding June. We can read that it is attributed to Juno, the Queen of Heaven, but also to Junius Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. So Junius killed Julius, who preceded Augustus...hmmm. What if June is not named for either? Did they name both of these characters after someone or something else?

Could we find a similar alternative explanation for "August" if we looked?

It gets more interesting. Apparently, Yule was closely associated with the Wild Hunt, which I brought up in the last post. The Wild Hunt was apparently most common at this particular time of the year, which also corresponds with Saturnalia. Not only that, the entities that appeared in the form of the Wild Hunt were called the "Yule-beings".

Here they say the ghostly procession took place in the winter sky, but as we have already seen, there is a tendency on the part of researchers to transpose hovering terrestrial phenomena like the Second Sun to high up in the heavens. Note as well the re-animation of "undead beings". I speculated in an earlier post that in active anomalous zones, the underground cavities in which people were buried functioned as ball plasmoid concentrators. Is this why cemeteries were once called "cities of the dead" (necropolis) and located in walled zones outside of the polis proper? Did the deceased have an embarrassing tendency to return in an undead, possessed form whenever there was a thunderstorm or a full moon? Did the traditional conductive copper coin in the mouth absorb the ball lightning and keep it from zombifying the dead body? I once knew a girl from Madagascar who told me that on holidays, her family would go to the cemetery, dig up their dead relatives, and chill with them. Her eyes lit up when she told me she couldn't wait to go back home and dance with the corpse of her recently deceased grandmother. The tradition is called "Famadihana", check it out: Famadihana - Wikipedia.

Here is an account of exactly what happened at the Yule celebration. This is of interest to us here because it gives us a more concrete look at exactly what it was they did with all that blood.

So basically they just smeared it on everything. It was a real blood orgy. This makes sense if we assume that the blood somehow channeled counterspatial entities. Notice the detail about the chief bearing the sacrifical beaker around the fire. We will see that again. I suspect that the original "fire" was some kind of plasma fire that was later reinterpreted as regular fire. This would explain as well the traditional belief shared by many ancient religions that there is a qualitative difference between fire from the heavens, which must never be allowed to go out, and normal fire. The original "fire from the heavens" wasn't fire at all, it was a plasma fireball that somehow "activated" the blood.

These people wanted to make sure the blood got absolutely everywhere:

I wonder if pinatas are a sanitized cargo cult version of this practice.

The image I am forming of Yule and Saturnalia is the following. When the Sun is at its weakest, the entities, associated with Saturn, are at their strongest. They appear in nature in the form of the Wild Hunt. During this period, humans engage in multiple different types of ritual practices conceived to invite the entities into their dimension and even into their bodies: drugs, alcohol, sex, murder, blood everywhere. The entities reward the humans by energizing the land and making it fertile. Temples are basically painted with blood. I am reminded as well of the interesting data point that most romantic breakups occur during the holiday season. On a purely personal level, I am superstitious about New Year's Eve and generally refuse to leave the house.

We hear a lot about all these ancient mummies and bodies being dug up covered in red powder. Were they smeared with blood after death? Are red bricks red because they were originally made with blood to better channel the entities? Did Gothic architecture favor stones because bricks were associated with pagan sacrificial practices? That's just a hunch, but ChatGPT confirms that the sudden transition from brick to stone is indeed a hallmark of Gothic architecture.

Here's a long description from the Old Testament that suggests a possible relationship between blood and water:

This is valuable. It would appear that living waters at one time channeled enough energy to activate blood. Once you had your blood-filled goblet, all you had to do was pass it over some running water to charge it up. Again, I can only come to the conclusion that our environment was once more charged than it is now. Did the Earth change, or have we inadvertently sucked all the power out of the ground and sky with all the metal we use in everything?

The following comment on the practice is informative:

Wait a second. So the charged blood didn't actually heal the disease. It sounds to me like the function of the blood was rather to invite an entity back into the body of the person who had been excluded due to disease. As is often the case, we need to realize that in the context of a demonic cult, "clean" actually means "possessed".

It is also possible that this passage has been rewritten to confuse water and blood, and there was never any connection between the two.

Going back to the theme of Yule and the de-Paganization of Europe, it occurs to me that the language of Christianization sounds less like social transformation and more like terraforming. It wasn't just the people that were converted, it was the land itself.

It was the land that was heathen, not the people.

So Benedict terraformed the land before trying to convert the locals.

What are these damn groves, anyway?

Here's an image taken from the Oseberg Tapestry, supposedly representing sacrificial victims hanging from trees in a sacred grove:

But if you look at the trees, they have the heads of snakes, and a few of them look like double-helix energy beams shooting up from the Earth. We also get a swastika, another probable symbol for this energy. And is that a headless monster in the bottom left?

One possibility is that the sacred groves were old trees that were located at active sites and which naturally channeled large amounts of "energy". In Ball Lightning: Paradox of Physics, the author cites numerous examples of trees that regularly generate ball lightning (and which are inevitably cut down by their owners). I suggested in an earlier post that giant trees such as the sequoias grew so big precisely because they were located over places of power.

Think about it. This must have been the easiest way for ancient people to locate places of power. Just look at the trees. Huge tree = charged-up anomalous zone.

In Asia they still tie ribbons around certain trees and leave offerings to them.

The trees in Scandiavia were smeared with blood too:

In Gunnar Heinsohn's book on sacrifice, which I review in detail at the following link, he argues that sacred groves were trees or columns to which the dismembered body parts of sacrificed humans and animals were strung up in order that guilt offerings might be made to them. We will come back to that.

Here are two images taken from his book:

My excellent two-part review is here: https://stolenhistory.net/threads/gunnar-heinsohn-1947-2023.6480/post-120847 and here: https://stolenhistory.net/threads/gunnar-heinsohn-1947-2023.6480/post-120851

Another possibility is that the "trees" in the sacred groves were artificial columns. We are given the following image of a possible candidate for the famous "Irminsul" or sacred tree:

What I see here is a circular metal conductor attached to the top of a relative insulator, making this thing a kind of very primitive Leyden jar. I bet this sucker glowed.

Putting all these together: were the body parts of the sacrificial victims that were attached to the trees and columns still animated? Did the legs still kick? Did the heads still speak? Did "the gods" show themselves in this way? Is this how the sacrificial victim became an intermediary between men and gods after death? Is this why victims were often beheaded? Yyprst suggests that beheading began as a re-enactment of the moment the rising plasma ball detached from the "phallic" stone pillar that channeled it upwards. Well, maybe heads were cut off because the entity actually animated them after death. What better proof of the reality of the gods than a demonstration such as this?

I think we can once again extract a grain of truth from this passage. If we stop seeing Christianity as something that has anything to do with the Middle East and begin seeing it as a (water-based?) form of worship that existed side by side with sacrificial paganism everywhere in the world, suddenly this makes more sense. It seems logical to me that the blood-worshipers might look for their victims among the out-group rather than the in-group. Perhaps they even...nailed them to trees, columns, or crosses set up in the sacred groves as they waited for the demons to possess them. Is this where the image of Christ comes from? There was not one Christ, there were thousands of them. Maybe every village in Europe beheaded a water-worshiper (John the Baptist) or nailed one up to a tree or a cross (Jesus) every Yule festival...

Was Christ the "final sacrifice" because a cataclysm had occurred and the usual demon was no longer able to possess his body? Was this gruesome spectacle repeated over and over again, with sacrificial victims waiting for demons to possess them that never came, until people figured out the old rituals were simply obsolete? Is this why Christ laments, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

Following this line of speculation, the conquering religion that arrived in Europe was not Christianity, it was Judaism, which inserted Yahweh and the Law into a strictly European conflict between blood pagans and water pagans. Did Judaism arrive along with trade? Or, to be even more precise, did the original encounter between Judaism and proto-Christianity take place in southern Europe and result in the creation of the Roman Catholic Church, which then spread to Northern Europe? Here we rejoin mainstream history, but with an important tweak.

An analogy might make it easier to visualize. Anyone who has ever eaten at a Taco Bell in the Southwestern United States may have chuckled at the irony that everyone working there is from Mexico and speaks Spanish behind the counter. Not only that, most of the customers are also Mexican. So we have the absurdity of Mexicans selling other Mexicans a completely adulterated and Americanized form of their own food, in a foreign language. Maybe they even have Taco Bell in Mexico. This is Catholicism in the Middle Ages: Europeans converting other Europeans to a partially Judaized version of their own native religion. And then with the Protestant Reformation, we get Europeans converting other Europeans from a one-third Judaized original compromise religion (Catholicism) to a two-thirds Judaized later "upgrade" of it (Protestantism). The specifically "Jewish" elements can be boiled down, in my opinion, to (1) Yahweh and (2) the Law.

I've run out of attachments. To be continued.

 

[Frostychud]

Continued directly from the last post...

Earlier in the thread I shared the big climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in which the ball lightning Lord emerges from the Ark and kills all the Nazis. Well, if we entertain the hypothesis that Spielberg is a high-level initiate who leaves clues in his films, the sacrifice scene from Temple of Doom might also reveal something. The victim's heart continues to beat even after the high priest has ripped it out of the man's chest, remember? The sacrifice is also performed over an underground vortex. They also become zombified after drinking blood...

Incidentally, I hope to start a new thread here dedicated entirely to movie reviews. I would start with Zardoz, Excalibur, Flash Gordon, and Conan the Barbarian. Actually I may get to Conan in this thread.

Speaking of underground vortices...in the last few posts I've explored the idea that ball plasmoids were grown in artificial underground caves. I ran across a few tantalizing clues to this while jumping from one Wikipedia entry to another. First:

So the naos was originally underground. The last sentence causes my BS detector to spike. The naos was surrounded by many different paths and rooms, many used to confuse and divert thieves and grave robbers. Think about this for a second. It's not as if a determined grave robber would be fooled for long. And once one grave robber figures out how to get inside, that's it, game over, the treasure is gone, the building has failed. There has to be another reason. Maybe these tunnels and chambers were designed to funnel the ball plasmoid from point A to point B and somehow modify it along the way? Anyone want to take a closer look at the plans?

Apparently there is an underground temple located directly under the altar at St. Peter's.

We have another church dedicated to St. Peter with a similar structure:

So, the dark underground chamber full of shrines and boxes in which gods live is called an aedes.

That sounds pretty similar to Hades to me.

This is not just some random church. It is the London equivalent of Montmartre inasmuch as it is situated on the top of London's highest hill. It was also redesigned by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666.

The church stands on the highest point of the City of London, directly above the foundations of the great London Roman basilica (built c. AD 90–120). The east end of the church, and its high altar, are also positioned above the area where some basilicas of the period had a pagan shrine room (also known as an aedes).[1]

According to a 1631 transcription of a plaque that was destroyed in the fire, it was also London's first church, founded by the possibly mythical King Lucius (=Light):

Be hit known to al men, that the yeerys of our Lord God an clxxix [AD 179]. Lucius the fyrst christen kyng of this lond, then callyd Brytayne, fowndyd the fyrst chyrch in London, that is to sey, the Chyrch of Sent Peter apon Cornhyl, and he fowndyd ther an Archbishoppys See, and made that Chirch the Metropolitant, and cheef Chirch of this kingdom...[19]

Was St. Peter, the "rock" upon which the church was built, invented to cover up the existence of actual divine rocks located in deep underground chambers? Did the invention of Peter follow the same template as the invention of Julius Caesar? Were the names of these fictional characters chosen simply to cover up similar-sounding words in other languages?

I just ignore the dates and focus on the content.

Here we have another clue that the transformation to Christianity was technological as well as cultural. Idols were replaced with relics. Shrines and temples were simply machines for conjuring up entities. All you had to do to Christianize a temple was swap out the idol for a saint. I am imagining the temple as a slide projector and the idol or relic as the "slide" that is projected on the wall.

Let's take a look at the Temple of Uppsala in Sweden, supposedly destroyed by King Inger in 1080 and described by Adam of Bremen:

The Wikipedia entry for this book goes into great detail about its provenance. We have the classic textual labyrinth described by Kammeier: multiple differing manuscript copies, none original, which were only "rediscovered" in the 16th century, one of which burned in the 1728 Great Fire of Copenhagen. The manuscript on which the 1595 first printed edition is based was also lost. So take anything written here with a giant rock of salt. I was unable to find a copy of the English translation from 1959 online.

(Ignore the truncated first sentence.)

Maybe the Uppsala Temple was still an "original" (non-Catholicized, which is to say non-one-third-Judaized) church, and Adam of Bremen's accusations of paganism were just propaganda. Or maybe it's all true. Both seem possible.

I do wish to draw attention to the fact that sacrifices were held at a spring located at the grove. So once again we have some confusion between water and blood. And once again our source has probably been written and rewritten to serve as propaganda. As a crusading and colonizing economic and political system, Catholicism would have targeted water-based paganism as much as blood-based paganism, and what better way to do so than by accusing the former of the crimes of the latter?

Was it possible to harness the power of the water without using blood? Or were the two technologies always blended to some extent?

So, to summarize this latest entry which is all over the place:

At the most basic level we have:

1. Living waters which generate some kind of scalar and electromagnetic "charge".

2. Sacrificial practices which involve exposing fresh blood to an energy field that activates it.

3. Entities that are summoned by blood, and others which communicate without blood.

4. Architecture which amplifies these phenomena.

5. A conflict between the humans who worship the first group of entities and those who worship the second group.

6. A period of total confusion in which "bad" demon-worshiping pagans and "good" proto-Christian pagans are both confronted by the Catholic power machine, which is less an invading foreign army than it is a comprehensive religio-politico-economic system dreamed up at the frontier of Europe and the Middle East. This system is an irresistible blend of blood paganism, water paganism, and Judaism. It comes prepackaged with a fake thousand-year propaganda history and a Judaized version of conflicts and concepts familiar to Europeans: a crucified martyr, a Goddess, a Great Prophet, all transposed to a faraway fantasy land, Jerusalem. Above all, it is a story propped up with a magical written document. Everyone fights everyone, everyone accuses everyone of paganism and heresy, every possible recombination of elements occurs somewhere. The Church uses its most powerful weapon, printed propaganda, to plunge everyone into a state of confusion that persists today. Meanwhile, the Earth is undergoing regular catastrophes and transformations which affect the ability of the gods to engage directly with humans. As the architectural technology for summoning these entities begins to fail, another "system" emerges, Protestantism, which in some respects is more Judaized than the Catholic system, but in other respects is less so. Over time, the essence of Christianity, which is incarnation, is lost.

That's the current state of my reflections.

 

[usselo]

Over at IHASFEMR, @usselo emits a couple of different hypotheses about dragon worship. On the one hand, he presents evidence that humans were indeed chained to stones and left out for monsters to eat. On the other hand, he suggests that "dragons" were mythologized stand-ins for an entire social system based on human farming. Perhaps both existed at different times and places. If you have any input here...

I suspect English tales of serpents, dragons, basilisks - and perhaps some witch folklore - were deliberately created. Then deliberately planted via pamphlets, poems, ballads, plays and stories for children. This to dilute memories of technologies witnessed or remembered.

Some dragon accounts sound like regular (i.e. scheduled) product pick-ups and deliveries by a flying technology. I presume it was blimp-like. In the same vein, accounts of 'many-eyed basilisks' sound like the windows or portholes of mass transportation technologies.

I developed that idea somewhat messily over Ice Age Sites of Britain's Serpents Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five. I've not been able to work out whether dragons and sea serpents etc really existed or are folkloric artifacts created to disguise past technologies. Or a mixture of both.

@usselo, you remark that baptisteries spring up out of nowhere all at once in Europe. I don't remember when you situate this, but it could help us zero in on a time frame.

What is baptism?

I've posted a collation of images, quotes (and, of course, my commentary) about the changing nature of baptism over time at The Georgian Birth of Christ - Part Three.

I meant to include in it additional evidence for early baptism as a hygiene/sanitation practice by managers of livestock. That evidence is: the timing of the fashion for wigs, chalked wigs and a subsequent fashion for short hair. I'll add it when I get my act together, though it doesn't change the direction of speculation about the technologies involved in baptism.

It's a very interesting idea that The Wild Hunt might be connected with baptism (or lack of baptism).

Eastern England has folklore about a long arm that reaches down the chimney and extracts your baby. It may be planted folklore. It may not be. An allegation to remember when thinking about long-arm-down-the-chimney folklore is that (allegedly)roundhouses had central roof chimneys. Not multi-storey brick chimneys

So I'm playing with the possibility that both the Wild Hunt and long-arm-down-the-chimney folklore are massaged relics of technology used when pruning and harvesting humans. Agricultural technologies of the past, only parts of which survive in modern consciousness:

Steam engine hauling coprolite trucks. Source: Cambridgeshire Coprolite Publications​

There may just be findable traces of a trackway under England's most reported Wild Hunt - the hunt between Peterborough and Stamford. I'd like to find evidence of a trackbed and the technology that ran on or above it. My suspicion is that the trackbed was a very shallow water channel. Though that does not entirely fit with the idea that you could lie on it to avoid being hurt by the passing Hunt.

Edited for sense and image

 

[Birdie]

FWIW, Christian apologist C.S. Lewis was a scholar of mythology. He contends, and he may have gotten it from Chesterton, idk, is that pagan religions and myths may have been the results of misunderstood divine revelation.