A layer of fat underneath the skin is a much better insulator than fur for a warm-blooded water dweller. No primate has it—except man.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Angel of the Lord—Son of God

The Angel of the Lord: Son of God?

Just as the gentile bishops rewrote the story of Jesus to obfuscate parts that told too clear a story, the priests of the second temple “returned” from “exile” and rewrote ancient Canaanite and Babylonian legends as the Jewish scriptures, known to Christians as the Old Testament, with the aim of depicting the Jews as always having been monotheistic worshippers of their favoured God, to whom the temple would be dedicated—Yehouah. In the second century BC, these scriptures were to be destroyed and again rewritten by Hellenised Jews after the Maccabees had revolted.

Today, Christians remain in thrall to the words of these various “reconstructions” (forgeries might be more apt a description) that over 2,000 years ago projected backwards second temple Judaism into the times of Moses and the patriarchs. All of us have been led to believe that Judaism was always monotheistic—or at least from the time of Ramesses the Great—as the people chosen for God's plan to save humanity. In truth, polytheism and “worse,” Goddess worship, was suppressed only by the Persian priests, Magians who believed in one universal god, Ormuzd, who might take on local habits and colour.

In Canaanite religion, the twin of the original Israelite religion, El is the elder high God, while Baal is his son, the virile young warrior who succeeds his father as divine king. Baal is the Adonis or Adonai (the Lord) of the Canaanites of Palestine. In Deuteronomy, Yehouah (here called “the Lord” which is Adonis) is not the most high God, and indeed is distinguished from him as a local god entrusted with Israel as his province. He is simply one of the seventy sons of Elyon, the Most High.

When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance (Deut 32:8-9).

The father-son, El-Baal tradition, appears in Daniel 7 in its Jewish version, picturing Elyon and Yehouah as the Ancient of Days and the “one like unto the son of man” who is given a kingdom.

Just as Baal had his divine consort, Anath, so did Yehouah—the goddess variously known in the Old Testament as Asherah, Ashtoreth, the Queen of Heaven and Wisdom. Baal, the Canaanite god used to “disappear” for seven years at a time. Interestingly, the pre-Celtic goddess carried off to the mystic Island of Elysium, her sacred king after he had reigned for seven years. The king died, so the goddess is representing death. Elysium is Avalon, the place of dead heroes. In the late medieval romance of Ogier the Dane, the hero returns to continue his expoits with a king who reigned 200 years after the one who employed him originally. Avalon received him because he was dead and his return after 200 years implies that he was resurrected.

A resurrection victory made Baal king of the immortals. Why not Yehouah too? Had the priestly editors cut out this aspect of the Yehouah myth to distinguish their Hidden God from Adonis? If Yehouah was in so many ways parallel to Baal, the Son of Elyon, and this concept was still alive, albeit underground as a glowing spark in Palestine, the death and resurrection of a man supposed to have been the messiah might have rekindled, the glowing ember. How then would Jesus differ from Yehouah/Baal?

Early Christians believed the exalted Jesus had become the same as Yehouah, the Son of Elyon, who had been manifest as the lesser God in the Old Testament theophanies. Yehouah or the Angel of Yehouah, who are synonymous even within the same texts, was the second god, later encountered as the “one like unto the son of man” in Daniel and under the names of Metatron, the Memra, the Logos and the archangel Michael.

The doctrine of the Trinity might not have been derived from Hellenistic Mystery Religions but from native Judaism. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is nonsensical. The Trinity was the father or the Most High God, the Son or the second God, Yehouah, and the Mother or Consort or the Queen of Heaven, Ashtaroth or Venus. The Shekinah, the brightness of God, is female but for the Jews had no independent existence, merely a female emanation of God identified with Sophia or Wisdom. Similarly the breath of God or “Ruach” is feminine—it is the Holy Ghost. No Christian will admit that this spirit is a Goddess.

The archangels, as aspects of Yehouah, were also theophanies of the second God. Various Gnostics pictured one of the archangels with the face of a donkey (Origen, Contra celsum 6:30; Apocryphon of John 2:1:11). If the scriptural Yehouah and the exalted Jesus were equivalent to some archangel, here might be the origin of the Pagan belief that Jews worshiped the head of an ass in their temple, and of the Pagan graffito showing the crucified Christ with an ass's head. Could these reflect lost Jewish and Christian beliefs?

The despised “ignoramuses” who had not been selected by their conquerors and remained behind at the time of the exile and preferred to retain the traditional beliefs were given the euphemism “Am ha-Aretz”, supposedly, Men of the Land” but really a derisive pun on “Mother Earth”, suggesting that they were worshippers of the Goddess, perhaps in a Trinity.

Jeremiah (7:18; 44:15,19) supposedly in about 600 BC, berates the people who are devoted to the Queen of Heaven because she gave them prosperity while the God, Yehouah, sent only trouble. Devotees of the Hebrew Goddess, Wisdom, the Queen of Heaven, bemoaned the priests' rejection of her from the pantheon. A multitude of men and women who had “burned incense to other gods” answered the prophet, saying:

As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil, but since we left off to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine. And when we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven, and poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes to worship her, and pour out drink offerings unto her, without our men (Jer 44:15-19)?

The passage concludes as if only the women were answering, implying that the men were being led astray by the women, but it began with all of the people answering. The patriarchal priests are placing the blame for worshipping the Goddess on the women, but all were in fact worshipping her and the statement shows that the tradition was widespread and long-lived in Judah and Jerusalem. This is one of the fossil passages left in error or retained as a warning against Cybele that gives us glimpses of the suppressed truth.

The attraction of the Goddess survived into Apocalyptic Wisdom traditions as the myth of the descent and reascent of rejected Wisdom, unable to find a dwelling among men who stubbornly rejected her. Was this also the origin of the Gnostic myth of the Fall of Wisdom, poised between an Unknown Father (the old Elyon “unknown” to monotheistic orthodoxy) and an arrogant demiurge who created the world and lied to his creations?

The Goddess was also hidden in the form of the nation of Israel, personified as the betrothed of God (Hosea 2:19) and the Daughter of Zion (Amos 5:2; Isaiah 1:8, etc). She was a virgin (Jer 31:2) but at the same time a wanton and faithless harlot (Hosea). God expressed his love of her in the erotic Song of Songs, according to tradition.

The narrowing of Israelite polytheism into monotheism appears in passages like the Shema:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord (Deut 6:4),

correcting a belief in many gods, and :

I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no saviour (Isa 43:11),

apparently correcting those within Judaism who were already advocating a saviour god, and a passage that Christians might mull over. The priests of Yehouah were keen to nip this trend in the bud—Yehouah was the one and only saviour—but, in Christianity, they failed.

Even at the time of the gospel events, almost 500 years after Judaism had been set up by the Persian officials, there was no clear orthodoxy in the religion. Rabbinic Judaism was not the unchallenged mainstream of Jewish religion, as the Dead Sea discoveries prove. The claim of Josephus and the rabbis that prophecy had ceased in Israel was to suppress the constant arising of new prophets claiming to be “That Prophet” or Messiahs of Israel and causing endless grief. The popular belief seems still to have been in prophecy, and a great prophet was still awaited eagerly.

The priests had conflated Yehouah and Elyon so Pentateuchal traditions of a single god are late priestly innovations. The old traditions had taken the forms of apocalyptic, embryonic Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Philonic Logos philosophising. All seemed to conjure instant complex mythologies out of the air, when they were really drawing on old traditions—those of ancient Israel outside Deuteronomic orthodoxy—and and their effort was in modifying them and giving them new meaning.

In Merkabah mysticism, the fusing of Yehouah with Elyon survived as the punishment of Metatron, the Little Yehouah, when mystics confused him with the ultimate deity, and it survived in Gnosticism as the rebuke of Saklas, the demiurge, whose conceit fooled him into thinking he was the highest god. Perhaps the myth of the fall of Satan who aspired to be like Elyon and ascend to the mount of the divine assembly is another relic of the priestly tampering with popular belief. Satan, Saklas, and Metatron are all the upstart fostered by the priests over the older High God and his court.

Gnosticism might have been a mutation not of early Christianity or even of disillusioned Jewish apocalyptic, but of pre-Deuteronomic Israelite polytheism, the religion of the Am ha-Eretz, driven underground by the foreigners—the Yehudim from Persia. Gnosticism could have a pedigree in suppressed undercurrents in Judaism.

Judaism and Hellenism are artificially distinguished in these mythical matters. Judaism was part of Oriental Hellenism, and despite the efforts of the post-exilic priesthood and their latter day equivalents, to expunge gods other than Yehouah, the interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus as akin to Hellenistic religions of Attis, Osiris, Adonis, and so on, might have their roots firmly in unrecorded and forgotten Judaism. All of these religions had Near-Eastern roots and might have been a common plant, but vigorous pruning over the years has left only a few robust but untypical sports remaining.

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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