BLACK MAGIC WHITE SOLDIER ( BLACK
MAGIC PART 3 )
The
Romans’ allies in suppressing the Jewish Revolt had also included, not only Herod Agrippa, and Antiochus VI of Commagene, but also Sohaemus
of Emesa, the brother to Gaius Julius
Azizus, who was the first husband of
the Herodian Princess Drusilla. In
addition, as noted by Roger Beck, a leading modern scholar of Mithraism, Commagenian military elements
under royal command were also engaged in the suppression of the Jewish Revolt,
and there would have been extensive
contact with Roman legionary and other troops, including those units identified
among the earlier carriers of the new mystery cult, like the Fifteenth
Apollonian. Therefore, according to Beck, “…the
Mysteries of Mithras were developed
within a subset of these Commagenian soldiers
and family-retainers and were transmitted by them at various points of contact to their counterparts in the Roman
world.” 58
Collusion of these Mithraic families with
the House of Herod seems to have
introduced the doctrines of Merkabah
to Mithraism. Despite its claims to represent
the teachings of the Zoroastrian Magi,
Mithraism was ideologically identical to Merkabah, as were all other forms of Hellenistic
mysticism. Thus, a version of Mithras, known as the Leontocephalus, who in his darker aspect—
like the ancient Kronos—was identified with Saturn and/or Hades, the god of the underworld. Also equated with Phanes, the
god of Time of Orphism, the idol was
depicted much like the Cherubim of
Ezekiel’s vision, with the head of a lion or a man, two sets of wings,
body of a man, cloven feet, and standing on a globe with two intersecting
circles, Ezekiel’s “wheel inside a
wheel.”
According to Timo Eskola in Messiah and the
Throne: Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Early Exaltation Discourse, Christian theology
and discourse was also influenced by Merkabah
mysticism. Christian doctrine is
derived mainly, not from the message
communicated from the original twelve apostles, but from Paul, who claimed to have been converted
to Jesus’ mission after having seen him
in a mystical vision on the road to Damascus, on his way to persecute the Christians.
Interestingly, Paul hailed from Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, the acknowledged
birthplace of Mithraism.
Suspiciously, after Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and rescued from a plot against
his life, the local Roman chiliarch transferred him to Caesarea, where he stood
trial before Felix Antonius, who was also closely associated with the Herodians.
Herod Agrippa had given his sister Drusilla
in marriage to Azizus, King of Emesa,
the son of Sampsiceramus II, Priest-King
of Emesa and Iotapa, the sister of
Antiochus IV of Commagene. Drusilla had already been married to her first cousin, Epiphanes, the son
of Iotapa’s brother, Antiochus IV of Commagene.
Epiphanes had failed on his promise to convert to Judaism, while Azizus agreed
to convert and be circumcised. But Drusilla
later divorced Azizus to marry
Felix Antonius, the Procurator of Judea. Felix, who was reputed to be a very cruel and lustful man, was originally
a slave, but was manumitted and promoted
by Caesar, and appointed governor of Judea in 52 AD, where he stayed in office until 58 AD. Felix had first been
married to another Drusilla, the
daughter of Ptolemy King of Mauritania, the grandson of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, before the later Drusilla. In service to Felix, this Drusilla had
been convinced to leave her husband by the notorious Simon Magus who was a Samaritan sorcerer and a convert to Christianity, considered the first of the
Gnostics, baptized by Philip the Evangelist, whose later confrontation
with Peter is recorded in Acts. 59
Felix and his wife Drusilla would later on frequently send for
Paul and talked with him (Acts 24:24-26). According to Robert Eisenman, a
well-known expert on the Dead Sea
Scrolls, these events form part of several suspicious instances that suggest that Paul, originally
named Saul, was an agent of the House of
Herod.60 Eisenman also points out that there is reference in Josephus about a member of the Herodian family named
“Saulus,” which was not a common name in
the period. This Saulus plays a key role in events leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. This Saulus is not
only the intermediary between “the men
of Power [the Herodians], the principal of the
Pharisees, the chief priests, and all those desirous for peace,” in
other words, peace with the Romans,
Josephus also describes him as “a kinsman of Agrippa.” Likewise, in Romans16:11 Paul writes, “Greet
Herodion, my kinsman.” The mention of
Saulus’ relation to “the chief priests” parallels material in Acts, relating to Paul’s commission from the chief
priest to arrest “Christians.”
Hyam Maccoby in The Mythmakerproposes that Paul synthesized Judaism, Gnosticism, and mysticism to create Christianity as a cosmic savior religion. Alan
Segal and Daniel Boyarin regard Paul’s accounts of his conversion experience and his ascent to the heavens as the
earliest first person accounts of a
Merkabah mystic in Jewish or Christian literature. In Paul the Convert,
Segal shows that Paul makes extensive
use of the language of Merkabah, such as
purporting that believers will be change into Christ’s likeness, as
believed by the Jewish mystics, for whom
seeing the Glory of God prepared the way for
the transformation into his image. Thus, Paul understood Jesus as a mystical figure, the Archetypal
Man, or Adam Kadmon. Paul says: “So it is written:
‘The first
man Adam became a living soul’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The
spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the
spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven.” 61
Following the Gnostics, Paul articulated an antinomian doctrine that repudiated
the Law. Valentinus, head of the Valentinians, chief among the early Gnostic sects, claimed that he received from
Theudas, a disciple of Paul, initiation into a secret doctrine of God. This
secret wisdom, which Paul taught to only a select few, revealed that God, the
one whom most Christians ignorantly worship as creator, is in reality only the
image of the true God. According to Valentinus, the orthodox preachers
mistakenly ascribed to God what actually applies only to the Demiurge.62
Whoever achieves this gnosis is ready to
receive the secret sacrament called redemption, meaning “release,” or freedom from moral obligation. Elaine Pagels
points out in The Gnostic Paul:
Instead of repudiating Paul as their obstinate
opponent, the Naassenes and Valentinians revere him as the one of the apostles
who, above all others, was himself a
Gnostic initiate. The Valentinians, in particular, allege that their
secret tradition offers direct access to Paul’s own teaching of wisdom and
gnosis. According to Clement “they say that Valentinus was a hearer of Theudas,
and Theudas, in turn, a disciple of Paul.”63
Paul came into conflict with Jesus’ immediate followers, who composed the
Early Church of Jerusalem. Also known as
Nazarenes, they were headed by James, the “brother of the Lord,” and
strictly followed the laws of orthodox Judaism. Modern research has shown that
there was no such place as Nazareth, but
that the word is a mistranslation of Nazarene, a word used to refer to the earliest followers of Jesus, and the same word used by the Muslims
to refer to Christians, Nassara. There
is still controversy as to whether the
Nazarenes can be identified with the Ebionites, who also existed during the early
centuries of the Christian Era. They denied the divinity of Christ and also
maintained strict observance of Jewish laws, and practiced such sacraments as
the Sabbath, circumcision, and other
Jewish festivals. They used a version of a Gospel in Aramaic called the Gospel According to the
Hebrews, or the Gospel of the
Nazarenes. For their adherence
to Jewish Law, the Nazarenes or
Ebionites are known as Jewish
Christians or “Judaizers.”
According to Hyam Maccoby, “The Ebionites are thus by no means a negligible
or derisory group. Their claim to represent the original teaching of Jesus has
to be taken seriously. It is quite wrong, therefore, to dismiss what they had to say about Paul as unworthy of
attention.” 64
The
Ebionites regarded Paul as a falsifier of Jesus’ teachings, claiming that he abandoned the observance
of the Law mainly in order to obtain the
support of Rome, and that he was mainly responsible for the destruction of the
Temple, since his anti-Jewish propaganda incited the Romans against the Jews.
The Ebionites criticized his Christianity as “Romanism,” blaming him for
converting Christians into Romans, instead of
Romans into Christians. 65
Paul, however, rejected Jewish law, expressing
a particular concern for the requirement of circumcision. Robert Eisenman
speculates that in pushing forward this issue Paul was acting in the service of
the House of Herod, for whom circumcision was a particular impediment to
expanding dynastic alliances with
non-Jewish families. Ultimately, Paul created
Christianity as a religion distinct
from Judaism, and also convoluted the simple mission of Jesus, which
was based on a message of social justice, by preaching an enigmatic
dogma, whereby Jesus came to be equated with the god of the
mysteries, who dies for our sins.
Therefore, since Judaic Law existed only to divert us from our sinful natures, there was no longer any need to
adhere to it. As a result of Paul’s mission,
Christianity grew among non-Jewish communities, referred to as Gentiles,
which became increasingly separated from
the teachings of the Nazarenes of
Jerusalem. Until, the Nazarene community
were eventually treated as a deviant sect.
Additionally, however, early Christianity was also influenced by the thought of Philo the Jew, also known as Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50 AD), who wrote a
treatise on the Therapeutae. According
to Philo, the Therapeutae in their night rituals, “like the bacchic [ Dionysian] and
corybantic ecstatics,” aim to “see” or to
have a vision of the true Being, which is analogous to the Sun. 66
Although a devout Jew, Philo attempted to
rationalize Judaism with his version of
Platonic philosophy. The Bible, to Philo, was compatible with Platonic
philosophy, for according to him, perhaps in reference to the legends reported
by Iamblichus or Artapanus, Plato was a
follower of Pythagoras, and Pythagoras, had been a follower of Moses.
Philo placed the God of the Old Testament above the Monad and the Dyad. Below
the supreme God, the Monad becomes the Stoic concept of the Logos, Greek for “word,” the active principle of God’s creative thought. To
Philo, “… he who drives the Chariot of
the Powers is the Logos, and He who is borne
in the Chariot is He who speaks the Logos, giving commandment to the Driver for
the right driving of the universe.” 67
The
Logosis the mediator between God and creation, which at one point he identifies as a second God. The
Logosis the archetypal man of the mysteries,
and one of a trinity. According to Philo, the
Logos proceeded from God and
Sophia, and is described as the son of God and Sophia, “through whom the
universe came into existence.” Sophia, or Wisdom, is the Dyad. Like the Shekhinah, she is the female life-principle
assisting the supreme God in his work of creation and administration, but also somehow fulfilling the role of
mother to all creation.68 Likewise, the
Gospel of John, also known as the “ Gnostic Gospel,” begins by equating Jesus with “the Word,” which in Greek would
have been the Logos. Additionally, Philo exercised an
important influence on
the early Christian Fathers, like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria
and his student Origen, for his attempt to meld Platonism to Judaism. The Christian Fathers attempted to do
the same for Christianity, by which Jesus came to be equated with Philo’s
Logos as the “first-begotten” of
God, which was an attempt to equate the
dying-god of Platonism with the God of the
Bible.
It was in this way that the occult concept
of Jesus as the “Son of God” became a core doctrine of Catholic Christianity, under the authority of Constantine
the Great, at the Council of
Nicaea in 325 AD. Rather, when Constantine
made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, he completed the project incepted
by Herod the Great, to subvert the emerging Christian movement by corrupting it into disguised Mithras worship. Constantine was the last in a long line of rulers belonging to the
Mithraic bloodline. Constantine’s father
was descended from Septimus
Severus, who married Julia Domna,
daughter of Julius Bassianus, Priest-King of Emesa, who was descended
from Gaius Julius Alexio, the son of Sohaemus of Emesa and Drusilla of Mauretania, from after she had been married to Felix Antonius. Another
descendant of Gaius Julius Alexio was
the Syrian queen of the third century
AD, Zenobia of Palmyra, who led a famous
revolt against the Roman Empire. St. Athanasius, Bishop
of Alexandria (c.328–373), reported her being “a Jewess follower of Paul of Samosata.” 69
Paul of Samosata, the capital of
Commagene, was known as a “Judaizier” and St. Athanasius also accused him of wanting to introduce Judaism
into Christianity. But Paul of
Samosata’s Jewish
influence was of a heretical variety, and likely derived from the Kabbalah, as
he inspired the Gnostic sect of the Paulicians, who believed in a distinction between the God who created
and governs the material world, and the
“God of heaven” who created souls, who alone should be worshipped, in other words, Lucifer. Therefore, like
all Gnostic sects before them, they thought all matter to be corrupt. For
the Paulicians, Christ was an angel sent
into the world by their “God.” Jesus’
real mother was not the Virgin Mary, but
the heavenly Jerusalem, an idea
derived from the “ Shekhina” of the
Kabbalah.
Because they claimed that Jesus taught only that to believe in him
saves men from judgment, their enemies accused them constantly of gross
immorality, even at their
prayer-meetings.
Another famous descendent of the Priest-Kings of Emesa was the noted Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus
(c.245 – c.325). 70 Iamblichus
studied under Porphyry, a pupil of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism. Iamblichus
and Porphyry both wrote
biographies of Pythagoras recounting his
sojourn among the Magi of Babylon. Porphyry was also the author of the
most extensive surviving text pertaining to the Mysteries of Mithras, titled On the Cave of the Nymphs, in
which he describes the symbolism of a grotto mentioned in Homer, in relation to the cave rituals of Mithraism.
Septimus Severus was succeeded by his son
Caracalla. But, in 217 AD, Caracalla was killed and Macrinus ascended to the
imperial throne. His cousin, Julia Soaemias, the daughter of Julia Domna’s sister, Julia Maesa, would not allow
the usurper to stand unopposed. Together with her mother Julia, she plotted to
substitute Macrinus with her son, Marcus Aurelius Antonius, who appropriated
the name Elagabalus. In 218 AD, Macrinus
was killed and Elagabalus became emperor.
Elagabalus replaced Jupiter, head of the Roman pantheon, with the cult
of Sol Invictus, which was harmonized
with the cult of Mithras. Their rule was not popular and soon discontent arose,
as Elagabalus developed a reputation
among his contemporaries for eccentricity, decadence, and zealotry.
With
Elagabalus’ death in 222 AD, his religion ceased, though succeeding emperors
continued to be portrayed on coinage with the radiant sun-crown for close to a century. The emperor Aurelian introduced an official religion of Sol Invictus in 270 AD,
making the sun-god the premier divinity of the empire, and wearing his rayed
crown himself. The worship of Sol Invictuswas
continued by Constantine, who some think never converted to Christianity. In 321, Constantine instructed that Christians and
non-Christians should be united in observing
the venerable day of the Sun (Sunday), referencing the Sun-worship that Aurelian
had established as an official cult. Constantine’s
coinage continued to carry the symbols of the Sun. Even when Constantine
dedicated the new capital of
Constantinople, he did so wearing the Apollonian sun-rayed Diadem.
Immediately before his victory at the Battle
of Milvian Bridge, in 312 AD,
Constantine is said to have had a vision of a radiant cross suspended in
the sky, upon which was inscribed, “by this sign you will conquer.” In response,
Constantine ordered the shields of his troops emblazoned with the Christian
monogram, known as the labarum, a wheel-shaped sign formed by the first two
letters of the word Christos,
an X (Chi) placed in front of P(Rho), the
Greek letters Chi Rho. The letter Chi was used by the Greeks as a solar symbol,
and the abbreviation of the Greek name for
Saturn, Chronos, as was the wheel-shaped sign formed by the first two
letters combined, an X(Chi) placed in
front of P (Rho).71 In Plato’s Timaeus,
Chi is symbolizes the intersection of
the earthly and celestial equators, the “wheel inside a wheel” of Ezekiel’s
vision and the Leontocephalus of
Mithraism. This passage in the Timaeus, known as the Psychogonia, was the
source of much comment by the Neoplatonists
and others, and Justin Martyr in his Apologia, considered that Plato
interpreted his Chi from the brazen serpents that Moses had erected as a sign
in the form of a cross. 72
The creed of
Jesus as Son and God was finally formalized and instituted as an orthodox tenet at the Council of Nicaea, personally
summoned by Constantine on 325 AD. Under pressure of banishment, all but two of
those present signed a revised statement of faith in the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit, a direct appropriation of the pagan trinity through the infl uence of Platonism.
Christian authors, like Justin Martyr and
Tertullian, noted these similarities but claimed that the mysteries were
demonically inspired imitations of the true Christianity. The Eucharist was
modeled was an adaptation of the cannibalism mysteries, where the cup of the
Last Supper is the mixing bowl or cup of the Mithraic and Dionysian mysteries which holds the blood of
the god. Originally mentioned in Plato’s
Timeaus, the cup is found in the Chaldean Oracles, a Neoplatonic text of the
second century AD, and is equated with the Monad in the Corpus Hermeticum, and Zosimus in the
fifth century refers to it as the symbol
of spiritual baptism or initiation. To Justin Martyr: “ Jesus took bread, and… said, “this do ye in remembrance of me,
this is my body”; and, after the same
manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, “this is my blood”; and gave it to them… Which the wicked
devils have imitated in the mysteries of
Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done.”73
In common with Jesus, Mithras was born in a cave surrounded
by animals and shepherds at the Winter Solstice. The later Roman Empire
celebrated the Dies Natalisof Sol
Invictus, the “Nativity of the Unconquerable Sun,” on December 25. It was
preceded by the Roman festival of the
Saturnalia, a ritual of
Babylonian origin, which is the source of Christmas.74 The Saturnalia were celebrated in honor of Saturn, the origin of Santa. Easter, from the
Greek Eorestes, or Astarte, the festival
of death and resurrection, was made to coincide with the spring rites of other
contemporary cults and mystery schools at the spring equinox. Similarly, the
festival of St. John the Baptist in June
supplanted a Midsummer festival of water on the summer solstice. The feast of
All Souls in November, the fall equinox, is a continuation of an old heathen
feast of the dead, which became
Halloween.
THE HOLY GRAIL
The first
successful crusade, known as the Princes’
Crusades, seems to have been a project directly sponsored by a network of
aristocratic families with the purpose of
searching out certain lost doctrines, whose discovery led to the advent of the Kabbalah in southern France in the last
half of the twelfth century. These influences
then produced the lore of the Holy Grail, based on legends of
these families’ descent, and their
association with the Templars, and a Gnostic sect known as the Cathars. The
most extravagant claims purport that the families descend from the Merovingian
dynasty of France, who in turn were descendants
of Jesus, who supposedly fathered a child from Mary Magdalene. However,
any association with Jesus is a
pretense, as these legends have a Gnostic origin, and cannot be associated with Jesus’ true
teachings. Worse still, the idea itself of a
“royal” descend from Jesus is based on a tyrannical and archaic notion
of the “Divine Right” of kings. Even if
these families were descended from Jesus, it would be of no consequence, because it would not
necessarily predispose them to a right
to rule.
Legends that associate Britain with the Holy
Grail begin as early as the eighth
century AD, when Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, stated in the Life of Mary Magdalenethat Joseph of Arimathea,
the man who donated his own prepared
tomb for the burial of Jesus after Jesus’s Crucifixion,
was sent to Britain accompanied by Mary Magdalene, Lazarus and Salome. William
of Malmesbury mentions Joseph’s going to
Britain in one passage of his Chronicle of the English Kings, written in the
1120s. The legend that Joseph was given the responsibility of keeping the Holy
Grail was the product of Robert de Boron, according to whom the grail was not
only the cup of the Last Supper, but the vessel used to capture Christ’s
blood after the Crucifixion. Symbolically, theGrail is the cup that receives
the divine blood of the god, descended from the
sacred bowl of the mysteries. The legend of Arimathea’s travels to
Britain were eventually encapsulated in
the famous hymn of William Blake, “And did those feet in ancient time.” Joseph was to have
concealed the Holy Grail for safekeeping
at Glastonbury Tor, where he established the first church in Britain Isles, which developed into Glastonbury Abbey.
The descendants of Joseph of Arimathea would
eventually culminate, according to legend, in the person of King Arthur. King
Arthur was also purportedly related to
Constantine the Great who was not only descended from
Caesar and Alexander the Great and
the Mithraic bloodline but, according to
British chroniclers of the Middle Ages, from Joseph of Arimathea through his mother Saint Helena, the finder of the “true cross.”
Later medieval legend claimed
that Saint Helena’s father was King Coel, whose mother was supposedly descended from Anna, the daughter
of Joseph of Arimathea, and Beli Mawr. 1
King Coel was the grandson Aviragus, who
married the daughter of Emperor Claudius (10 BC – 54 AD). 2 Constantine was
also descended from the Roman
Emperor Marcus Aurelius.3 Caesar’s
grandson, Gaius Calpernius Piso, had married Mariamne, the sister of Herod Agrippa. Their grand daughter, Pompeia, was the wife of Emperor Trajan, who was the grandfather of Marcus
Aurelius, whose descendants attempted to impose the worship of Elagabalus,
or Sol Invictus, as the religion
of the Empire. It was the use by Trajan
and Marcus Aurelius of the dragon
standard, or Draco—which according to Arrian
was of originally of Scythian origin—that came to be adopted by the Pendragon family. 4 Arthur’s sorcerer Merlin
would have been a Druid, the bardic
class that produced the mythical
literature and the art of the Celts. The enduring association of the British Isles with occult
legend may be attributable to the fact
that, according to Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who wrote in the first century
AD, magic—meaning the cult of the Magi—was so entrenched in Britain that he said it would almost seem as
if it was the British who had taught it to the Babylonians, and not the other
way around. Magian teachings are clearly
discernible among the Druids. According
to several ancient authors, like Diodorus
of Sicily and Ammianus Marcellinus, the Druids inherited their occult teachings from Pythagoras through his student Zalmoxis, who
had ventured among the Celts. Even after Patrick had converted the Irish
to Christianity, the teachings of the Druids were never completely abandoned, but
instead a unique culture developed,
known as Celtic Christianity.
Essentially, the arts of the Druids survived early Irish Christianity, as its abundant
hagiography, steeped in magical ideas,
plainly shows. Saint Columba (521-597), abbot and missionary traditionally credited with the main
role in the conversion of Scotland
to Christianity, after becoming a monk,
lived and studied with a bard in
Leinster, and later defended the cause of the Druids when their schools and teachings were attacked.
Irish legend maintains that the Scottish originate
from Fenius Farsaidh, a descendant of Edom, who founded the kingdom of Scythia
in southern Russia. Fenius’ son Nel married
Scota the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh and contemporary of Moses. A
Swiss genetics company has in fact claimed that up to 70 per cent of British
men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen. Y-DNA testing on some of
the related male mummies of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt revealed
them to
belong to a genetic profile group,
known as haplogroup R1b1a2. It is the most frequently occurring Y chromosome
haplogroup in Western Europe, with its highest concentrations in Ireland and
Scotland, indicating that they share a common ancestor. 5 R1b1a2 arose about
9,500 years ago in the surrounding area of the Black Sea, an area corresponding
to Scythia. This should not be taken as corroborating the Scota legend, but as perhaps pointing to some
underlying truth that has later been embellished in legend.
The
Scythians were related to a legend popular among Medieval Jews who
equated them with the Lost Tribes
of Israel. According to the Bible, the Israelites became “lost” after the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians, who dispersed them among the Medes, who lived in Iran in an area known as Media. The Medes, according to Greek mythology, were
descended from Medea the Colchian
witch from the story of Jason and the Argonauts.
According to the legend, Medea later married
Aegeas of Athens after whom the Aegean
Sea is named. The Medes were descended
from their son Medus of Colchis.
According to a description by Herodotus,
a Greek historian of the fifth century BC known as the “Father ofHistory,”
the Colchians who welt in a land located along the western slope of
the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea, in what is now the state of Georgia,
were black and probably Jewish.
Like the
Jews of Palestine whom he
referred to as “ Phoenicians,” Herodotus
also regarded the people of Colchis as deriving from an “Egyptian colony.” He not
only pointed to the Colchians’ “black skin and woolly hair” as evidence, but
also to their oral traditions, language, methods of weaving, and practice of
circumcision. Saint Jerome, writing during the fourth century AD, called Colchis
the “Second Ethiopia.” Two hundred years later, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, described an “Ethiopian” presence
in the same region. Diodorus of Sicily, a historian of the first century BC, in his Universal History, stated:
They say also that those who set forth with Danaus [Dan, or Tribe of Dan], likewise from Egypt , settled
what is practically the oldest city of Greece,
Argos, and that the nations of the Colchi in Pontus and that of the
Jews, which lies between Arabia and
Syria, were founded as colonies by
certain emigrants from their country [i.e., Egypt]; and this is the reason why it is a long-established institution
among these peoples to circumcise their male children… the custom having been
brought over from Egypt. Even the Athenians, they say, are colonists from Sais
in [the Nile Delta of ] Egypt.6
Although the Ten Tribes are considered “Lost,”
in ancient Jewish sources their location was well-known. According to Josephus, “…the Ten Tribes who are beyond the
Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude, whose numbers cannot be estimated.”7 The Apocrypha
also presume to know their location. In the Fourth Book of Ezra, the Ten Tribes
were said to have been carried by Hosea in the eighth century BC to the
Euphrates, at the narrow passages of the river. From there they went on for a
journey of a year and a half to a place called “Arzareth,” referring to the
Araxes, a river that borders Armenia,
Iran and Azerbaijan.
These migrations would have taken them to the
land of the Scythians, whom Josephus and
others have identified as the
descendants of Gog and Magog, among
whom they would have been absorbed.8
The Scythians first appear in Assyrian annals as Ishkuzai, related
to the modern term “ Ashkenazi,” from Ashkenaz, who according to the Bible was the son of Magog’s brother Gomer. Scholars recognize the Scythians to have been a Turkic people
who had
settled on the northern
shore of the Black Sea. The most significant Scythian
tribes mentioned in the Greek sources resided north of the Caucasus mountains,
at the basin of the Don river, north of the Crimea and east of the Ukraine in
Southern Russia. From there they invaded Armenia and Cappadocia to become allies of the early Mede rulers.
As related by Colin Gow in The Red Jews: Anti-Semitism in an Apocalyptic
Age: 1200-1600, the Lost Tribes came to be known in Jewish lore
of the Middle Ages as “Red Jews.” They were believed to reside in Central Asia, and were expected to come forth to aid the Messiah in his conquest of the world. According
to Gow, the legend of the Red Jews was a conflation of three separate traditions:
the prophetic references to Gog and Magog, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and
an episode from the Alexander
Romance. The Alexander Romanceis any of
several collections of legends recounting
the legendary exploits of Alexander the
Great.
The earliest version is in Greek, produced in
the third century AD. Several late versions attribute the work to Alexander’s
court historian Callisthenes, but the
historical figure died before Alexander. The unknown
author is therefore referred to as Pseudo-Callisthenes. The text was recast
into various versions throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including the
languages of Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Middle
Mongolian.
In the
Alexander Romance, Alexander chases his enemies to a pass between two
peaks in the Caucasus. With the aid of God, Alexander and his men close the
narrow pass in the Caucasus by constructing a huge wall of steel, keeping the
barbarous Gog and Magog from pillaging
the peaceful southern lands. The wall
has been frequently identified with the Caspian Gates of Derbent, Russia, and with the Pass of
Darial, on the border between Russia and
Georgia. An alternative theory links it to the Great Wall of Gorgan, also known
as “Alexander’s Wall,” on the
south-eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, 180 km of which is still preserved to this day.
The accounts of the Alexander Romance are reflected in the
enigmatic figure mentioned in the Quran
, named Dhul-Qarnayn, literally “He of
the Two Horns.” Similarly, on Macedonian
coinage of the third century BC, Alexander was
typically portrayed with ram’s horns. In the account found in the Quran,
DhulQarnayn is not identified with Alexander, but the stories are almost
identical. Dhul-Qarnayn is described as a great and righteous ruler who built
the wall of iron and copper that
keeps Gog and Magog from attacking the
people whom he met on his journey to the
east, “the rising-place of the sun.” 9 According to Hadith, unable to pass the wall, Gog and Magog have been digging below ground ever since, but will emerge at the
time of the return of the Messiah Jesus, to afflict the earth, but Jesus will pray to God to eradicate them.10
Kevin Alan Brook, among others, has speculated
that the legend of the Red Jews was
actually based on vague memory of the
Khazars, the people who were the
descendants of the Scythians who
converted to Judaism in the eighth
century AD. Like the Armenians,
the Khazars were identified with Gog and
Magog, and were also sometimes credited with
Armenian origin.11 This is stated by the seventh-century Armenian bishop and historian Sebeos,
and the fourteenth century Arab
geographer Dimashqi. 12 The Cambridge Document,
discovered by Solomon Schechter in the late nineteenth century, and also
known as the Schechter Letter, the Schechter Text, and the
Letter of an Anonymous Khazar Jew,
discusses how Jewish men fled either through or from
Armenia into the Khazar kingdom in ancient times. According to Eldad ha-Dani, a
Jewish traveller of the ninth century,
the Khazars were remnants of Simeon and Manasseh. Likewise, one version of the Schechter Letterreported that the Khazars had
a tradition that they were descended from
the Tribe of Simeon. The Cochin Scrollalso maintains that the Khazars were descended from Simeon
and Menasseh.
According to ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians “have all deep blue eyes, and bright red hair.” Like
their ancestors the Scythians, the Khazars were also described as blue-eyed and
red-haired.13 In the History of the
Nation of Archers, Armenian historian of
the thirteenth century AD, Grigor Akner,
claimed the Khazars were derived
from Edomites, descended from Esau, whose name was also Edom, meaning red
because he was supposedly red-haired. Red hair is commonly found in regions of Jewish
or Central Asian ancestry. It is fairly common amongst the Ashkenazi Jewish populations, and occasionally
among the Berbers of North Africa. In Asia, red hair can be found sporadically
from Northern India, and the
northern Middle East, such as Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and
Palestine. Red hair can also be found amongst those of Iranian descent,
such as the Persians, Lurs, Nuristanis and Pashtuns. Red hair, of course, is
found at its highest concentrations in Scotland.
The name of Scotland was originally intended
to refer to the “land of the Scythians.”
14 The idea that the Scots came from Scythia is also found in most legendary accounts and also in unedited
versions of the Venerable Bedeof the eighth
century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the ninth century AD,
begins by saying that the Britons, like the Saxons, came from Armenia and the Picts of
Scotland from the south of Scythia. The Pictish Chronicleof the tenth
century mentions “Scithe et Gothi” (
Scythians and Goths), as being the ancestors of the Picts, the people living in ancient eastern
and northern Scotland.
The inhabitants of the Orkney Islands in the
north of Scotland are descended from
Vikings who, like the Saxons, according to various medieval legends, were descended from Scythians who migrated north. Both nations
claimed descent from Uldin, later Odin, or
Wotan, a fifth-century leader of the Huns who had settled in
the land of the Scythians, with whom
they became intermingled along with
Viking traders. By some genealogies, Odin married Frigg (or Freya), the great-granddaughter of King Coel. 15 According
to the Yngling Saga, written from historical
sources available to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson, Odin originally came from Asia. Noted explorer Thor Heyerdahl
surmised that Odin and his people, who
were known as Asir, may have been the Azeris of Azerbaijan. 16 Snorri speaks of
Odin making “ready to journey out of Turkland, and was accompanied by a great number of people, young folk and
old, men and women; and they had with them much goods of great price.” Snorri
here speaks of the land east of the Don
River being known as Asaland, or Asaheim, and the chief city in that land was called
Asgaard, the home of Odin. The
city may have been Chasgar, located in
the region of the Caucasian ridge, “called by Strabo Aspargum, the Asburg,
or castle of the asas.”17 This would have been approximately 450 AD,
when Odin’s descendants were said to
have founded the nations of the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, and in Germany, the Saxon tribes.
Studies have discovered that the genetic component
of the population of the Orkney islands
is characterized by a type not found in other British samples, but one in high frequency in Russia, Ukraine, Bohemia, and throughout Central
Asia, and rare in East Asia and Western Europe. According to a study
titled The Eurasian Heartland: A
continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity, conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, the distribution
of this gene grouping is “…likely to
represent traces of an ancient population migration originating in southern
Russia/Ukraine,” where it is found at a high frequency. In other words, this specific genetic type originated in Scythia.18
R1a1, which is found all over Armenia, Georgia and Eastern Europe in general,
including the Sorbs, the Poles, and many people of central Europe, is also
found in Finland, and many R1a1 people went west to Scotland and Scandinavia.
As noted by David Faux, the largest number of close matches to the rare haplogroup R1a1 Norse signature from
Shetland, just north of the Orkney Islands, was not seen in large and diverse European
samples in which R1a1 predominates, like
Poland, but among the tribal Siberian
Altai of Central Asia. 19
It has also been found that about half
of Ashkenazi Levites possess the R1a1 haplogroup.
R1a1 is almost never found among Sephardic Levites. Interestingly, the R1a1 was introduced only
900-1000 years ago into only the Ashkenazi Levite male population. A team of
geneticists in the September 2003 issue of the American Journal of Human
Geneticsproposed that R1a1 may have been introduced by Slavs, or Khazars who converted to Judaism. 20 Arthur Koestler,
author of The Thirteenth Tribe, had proposed the theory widely popular
in conspiracy circles, that the majority
of Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from the
Khazars, and not the Israelites of the Old Testament. 21 Modern
genetic studies, however, have
proven Koestler’s theory incorrect. Ashkenazi
Jews are a group with mainly
central and eastern European ancestry. Ultimately, though, they can be traced back to Jews who migrated from Israel to
Italy in the first and second
centuries, andwho eventually moved to Eastern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A
1999 study published in the Proceedings of
the United States National Academy of Sciencescompared the Y chromosomes of
Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite,
and Ethiopian Jews with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar
geographic locations. It concluded that:
Despite their long-term residence in different
countries and isolation from one
another, most Jewish populations were
not significantly different from
one another at the genetic level… The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools
of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population,
and suggest that most Jewish communities
have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the
Diaspora. 22
Q, which is found in Norway and its colonies,
is found predominantly in Central Siberia,
Central Asia and among Native Americans. One hypothesis is that Q came to Europe with the Huns in
the fifth century. 23 K, which turns up very
occasionally in Sweden, is typically found at lower frequencies in the Middle
East, and in a significant group of Palestinian Arabs. Approximately 32%
of Ashkenazi Jews are in haplogroup K.
This high percentage, according to Doron
M. Behar and others, points to a genetic bottleneck occurring
approximately 100 generations ago from a
Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool, whose descendants
lived in Europe. 24 As David Faux concludes, the one people among whom
the three Asian genetic signatures
discovered in Shetland correspond most closely with are the Azeris.25
Additionally, as documented by Tejral, the archaeological
record shows new artistic features that manifest
themselves in Scandinavia in the early fifth
century that have been attributed to
Scythian influences. 26 Animal motifs with imaginary beasts and elephants with elaborate decorative
work appear which “points unquestionably to definite Eastern connections.” 27 The
dramatic alterations in artifacts and
burial practices strongly point to a change that would have a signifi cant impact on all aspects of life in Scandinavia by a people “coming from the south around
450 or a little earlier.” 28 As David Faux summarizes, “Basically the archaeological evidence strongly suggests that from the fifth century there was a strong cultural
continuity between the areas in Scandinavia and points south and includes artifacts from as far east
as Afghanistan.”29
Legends about the so-called “sacred lineage”
of the Holy Grail typically pertain to
the influential Scottish
families of the Stuarts and the Sinclairs, who became the hereditary
Grand Masters of Scottish Freemasonry. The
Sinclairs, originally St. Clair,
were a noble family which had its origins in Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in Normandy,
France, in 911 AD. Like the Dukes
of Normandy, the Sinclairs were descendants of Rollo the Viking, the son of Rangvald the
Wise, Jarl of Orkney. According to genetic researchers Elizabeth
Hirschman and Donald PantherYates, authors of When Scotland was Jewish,
the Sinclairs, originally St. Clair,
were secret Jews among the many Sephardic Jews from
Spain and southern France that entered Scotland from around 1100 AD onward. The first group
would have accompanied William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, and assisted
in setting up the civil administration
in England.
The
Sinclairs and the Dukes of
Normandy, through the marriage of
Rollo the Viking to Poppa of
Bavaria, the great-granddaughter of William of Gellone (755 –812/4
AD), were purportedly also descended from Rabbi Makhir of
Narbonne.30 According to Arthur Zuckerman, William of Gellone was the son of Theodoric, or Thierry, the name assumed by
Rabbi Makhir of Narbonne.31 In the Medieval romances, Thierry
is called Aymery and was the father of William of Gellone. Zuckerman based his
claims on a tradition preserved by Abraham
ibn Daud in his Sefer ha- Kabbalah, written about 1161, that Charlemagne (742-814), the founder of the Carolingian Empire,
had appointed Makhir, a Babylonian-Jewish scholar, perhaps the
Exilarch of the Jews of Babylon, at
the end of the eighth century as ruler of a Jewish principality in Narbonne in
Southern France. “Exilarch” refers to the leaders of the Jewish
community who held through the Persian
and Muslim Empires until the eleventh century
AD, an office traditionally assigned to a hereditary family tracing
their lineage to King David.
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