It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
We all know about Edinburgh's landmark attractions; we've got the castle, we've got Arthurs Seat, we've got Holyrood House.
What a lot of tourists, and locals, don't know about - is what's lurking underneath our streets.
In Gilmerton, an underground set of hand carved tunnels lay under the suburb, thought to date back to the 18th century.
While the origins remain a mystery, there are rumours the caves were used as a drinking den.
An ex-mining village, Gilmerton now sits right on the edge of the city four miles from the centre.
While the Gilmerton Cove is thought to have been there for centuries, it wasn't until 2003 that the newly restored cave was opened to the public.
The City of Edinburgh Council collaborated with Gilmerton Heritage Trust to open the cove as an educational resource for the community, as well as a visitors attraction.
Despite this renovation, little is known about the roots of Gilmerton Cave after extensive archaeological and historical research.
Scientists from the University of St Andrews and the University of Edinburgh did discover in 2017 that the network of passageways may in fact be far more extensive than currently exposed.
When excavators initially discovered the underground rooms in 2002, they found seven subterranean rooms that were thought to be untouched for over 200 years.
Whoever was behind the cove carved out tables, separate rooms and doorways - making an almost liveable space.
In one section, a circular hole in one of the 'tables' is thought to have been a punch bowl, which alludes to the theory that Gilmerton Cove was a drinking den.
The cove, which is built around a main corridor that stretches over forty feet, has two separate entrances carved from natural sandstone.
Also connected via a secret passage, was the nearby Hellfire Club.
The Hellfire Clubs were a nationwide association of high society members who engaged in 'immoral activities' and mocked religion, dining on 'Holy Ghost Pie' and 'Devil's Loin.'
Another contributing factor to the theory that Gilmerton Cove was an underground boozer comes from George Paterson.
George was an 18th century local blacksmith, who is thought to have lived in the cove between 1719 and 1724.
Parish records from the time show he was reprimanded for allowing alcohol to be consumed in the cove on the Sabbath, though it is not known if George carved the cove himself.
In 1897, an Assistant Keeper at the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh made a detailed study of the caves.
He reported that it was unlikely that one man could have carried out the work in only a few years, and concluded that the Gilmerton Cove went back much further than the 18th century.
Aside from being the Gilmerton local drinking hole, another popular theory argues that it could have been used to house Covenanters in the 17th century.
Covenanters were those who supported the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and were part of a religious movement following disputes with King James I.
The Covenanters took control of Scotland after the Bishop Wars, pushing against changes imposed on the kirk.
They became a persecuted minority after the 1660 Restoration, with death penalties and torture imposed for any Covenanters preaching in public - and many held services in hidden places to avoid persecution.
The cove's use as a hiding place also comes into play in another theory, which argues the tunnels were made in the 16th century at the time of the Battle of Flodden.
After King James VI and his army were destroyed by the English at the Battle of Flodden, many felt another invasion was imminent.
It's possible that locals created a hideaway to stay safe from invasion.
Other theories behind the the passageways include it being a Witches Coven and a Knights Templar Retreat.
Any and all of the speculations surrounding Gilmerton Cove's past could be true, though it's likely we'll never know for sure.
Tuesday, January 09, 2024
The British Empire’s Gnostic Revival of Scientific Paganism and a New World
We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.
— Dr. Timothy Leary (recounting Aldous Huxley’s 1960 demand for a new world religion)
The Science of History: Pregnant Moments vs Linear Chronologies
The study of history can be approached from a number of directions, and using a number of diverse assumptions… but not all of them are equal, and some are extremely destructive.
Some people believe that history is simply associating events onto a linear time line and then adding creative writing to explain away causes of those events. Others presume that history is divided by “ages” with the “causes” of each event explained away by the age in which they occur. Others presume that the events across ages are caused by a never-ending class struggle of rich vs poor while others presume no causality exists behind the events on a time line except for raw hunger, greed or stupidity.
Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that history is best understood as a living process shaped by 1) ideas of good and evil, 2) decisions to act according to those ideas whether right or wrong, and 3) the freedom to embrace error, corruption and lies which often wear the clothing of truth.
When those false ideas are permitted to shape the cultural standards of what is considered “normal” for too long, decay across all spectrums of life can be found.
The physical, mental and spiritual health of people slowly decays, as those creative discoveries needed to meet the challenges of nature fail to be made, and scarcity, hunger, wars, and ignorance grow like a cancer.
The tension caused by this decay, and the better expression of human nature animated by obedience to truth, morality and creative reason manifests in the form of periods of dense potential, comparable to ‘pregnant moments’ where systemic changes for good or evil become ripe.
1866: A World Caught Between Two Paradigms
As I wrote about in The Clash of the Two Americas volume one, the years following America’s Civil War (1861-1865) unleashed a brilliant example of what such a pregnant moment looked like.
During this time, humanity was pulled by two very different paradigms.
On the one hand, an ancient system of hereditary power which aspired to enslave of the masses of the globe was breaking down.
This ancient system of exploitation and suppression overextended itself globally, and like its earlier incarnation in the Roman Empire, the British Empire was collapsing under its own internal contradictions.
The British Empire had expended vast energy and finances in manufacturing wars around the world to weaken and destroy all of her rivals. While these manipulations wrecked vast destruction onto Russia (during the Crimean War), India (suppressing vast rebellions), China (during two Opium Wars), and through London’s orchestration of the Civil War in America. Despite vast bloodletting, the world was quickly awakening to the evil of this empire and the false Christianity promoted under its banner.
On the other hand, the positive example of Abraham Lincoln’s USA, as a nation founded upon liberty, the consent of the governed and the notion of equal rights for all were spreading electrically across the world in the wake of the Civil War.
In Russia, Lincoln’s national system of political economy was transforming an agrarian serfdom into a modern industrial nation with the application of the protective tariff, productive credit and internal improvements like canals, railroads, electric power and schools. Czar Alexander II, Finance Minister Sergey Witte and the great scientist Dimitry Mendeleev spearheaded this reform.
In France,Germany, Italy and across Asia this system was spreading rapidly centered on the notion that scientific progress and technological improvements were caused by a divine spark of reason found in all people elevating humanity above the status of mere cattle, slaves or feudal serfs.
Many had every right to believe that an age of moral reason was on the horizon as nations were breaking free of the shackles of colonialism and ignorance… The defining character of this global movement was characterized by 1) technological progress, 2) leaping over the limits to growth by encouraging new discoveries and 3) recognizing all people as creatures made in the image of a living reasonable Creator.
Lincoln’s leading economic advisor and global grand strategist Henry C. Carey outlined this clash of paradigms in his 1852 Harmony of Interests where he said:
Two systems are before the world…. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of ELEVATING while EQUALIZING the condition of man throughout the world.
Unlike the British Empire’s Theosophists and Fabians- obsessed with uniting eastern and western cultures around Aryanism, eugenics and mysticism, the leading American system strategists around Carey sought to unite the world around the universal aspirations for development, moral goodness and cooperation.
This spirit was expressed eloquently by Lincoln’s former bodyguard, first governor of Colorado, and leading proponent of the international rail corridors named William Gilpin who wrote in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway:
In Asia, a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up from European influence- has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.
Contrasting his concept of a Christianity based on doing the greatest good possible in opposition to the British Empire’s perversity of Christianity, Gilpin described what this new state of human civilization was destined to look like as “win-win cooperation” replaced the outdated geopolitical doctrines of “might makes right” and zero sum thinking prevalent under oligarchism:
The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events.
It was clear that the days of empire were coming to an end.
In the face of this crisis of cooperating nation states breaking out of the cages of empire, a series of new think tanks were created that served to re-organize the dying British Empire using new techniques of psychological warfare, scientific manipulation, and predictive programming. Talent was needed from outside of the ‘elite bloodlines’ in order to figure out how to save systems of hereditary power.
Two of the most important new think tanks that were mandated to re-organize the crumbling system of empire were known as 1) The Fabian Society and 2) The Round Table Organization.
Fabian Society and New World Religion
The Fabian Society called itself a socialist, concerned for the working poor, but in actual fact saw the masses as useful tools to be manipulated by a scientific priesthood who despised them and simply desired the state grow in power not to defend the people but to control them through the science of eugenics, sterilization and murder of the unfit.
The Fabian Society soon created their own school called ‘The London School of Economics’ and established a political party dubbed the Labor Party in 1901.
Historian Stephen O’Neil wrote the following of the Fabian Society’s guiding principle of Permeation theory:
Despite their traditional political image, the Fabians, under the impetus of Sidney Webb, thought that they had a new and unique weapon in the policy of permeation. It was through the utilization of this tactic, according to Webb, that the Fabians, in the spirit of the Trojans and their legendary horse, would enter the ranks and minds of the politically influential by providing them with programs, ideas, opinion, and research heavily documented with statistics which could be conveniently drafted into public policy.
Despite being managed by members who called themselves “Christian” or at least “spiritual”, the Fabian Society’s disdain for Christianity can be gleaned from the logo commissioned by George Bernard Shaw in the form of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
This symbolism was a direct reference to the Apostle Matthew’s warning in the New Testament which read: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
The larger stained-glass window on which the Fabian wolf appears additionally features a large image of Sidney Webb and Shaw hammering the world featuring the line: “Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire”. Below this imagery, are the other 12 leading Fabians praying to socialist texts as new gospels.
Fabian grand strategist H.G. Wells (featured in the stained glass window alongside Theosophist leader Annie Besant), worked extremely hard to outline the need for a new religion for the new age, which he described in his 1928 work “The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution” saying:
…if religion is to develop unifying and directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analyzing turn of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories…The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and mortality of the individual life, is the undying element in every religious system.
The time has come to strip religion right down to that [service and subordination is all Wells wants to keep of the old relic of religion]…The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort…The essential fact…is the desire for religion and not how it came about…The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not “I believe,” but “I give myself.” [emphasis added]
The aim of this new religion and remoulded human nature was outlined in blood curdling detail by Wells in his Open Conspiracy where he stated:
It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go… We are living in the end of the sovereign states… In the great struggle to evoke a westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish…. Countless people… will hate the new world order….and will die protesting against it.
Wells’ remarks were widely held among the leading establishment of the British Empire and were expressed by Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who extended Darwin’s new theory explaining evolution into human systems when he created the new statistical science of eugenics. In 1904, Galton said:
[Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious, tenet of the future, for eugenics co-operate with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races…. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind.
In 1911, Annie Besant- as leader of the theosophists, Indian Congress Party, eugenicist and Fabian spoke of her desires for a new world religion uniting all people under the British Empire stated:
Britain is working in India; how India is re-acting on Britain; until you can see gradually forming, amid the dust and the turmoil of the present, the outlines of a mighty World-Empire, with East and West together; mighty World-Powers linking, and marching side by side, until India shall no longer be a constant menace, a danger in the moment of Britain’s weakness, but shall be a buttress and a strength; the oldest and the youngest branches of the Âryan family joining hands in one mighty Empire, which, by the peace it will make, will offer a fit field for the spread, for the teaching, of a World-Religion.
Besant was explicit that this world religion would be based upon a universal mysticism and help liberate mankind from all concepts of right or wrong, which she attributed to the causes of war and conflict:
The World-Religion of the future will bring out the way again in sight of the people, will show them how to walk; it will lead them into a knowledge of their own Divinity; mystical in its teaching, so that the teaching can be translated by all the religions into the varied dogmas; scientific with the knowledge of the Spirit, so that men may learn to develop the spiritual faculties and then use them for the perfecting of their own nature; with no antagonists, for it will be universal; with no quarrels within it, for it will be all-inclusive. That mighty World-Religion is to be proclaimed by the supreme Teacher, the Teacher of Angels and of Men.
This world religion would not teach its adherents to become humble to God’s will, or find the divine within through obedience to the will of a reasonable god, but rather, Bessant’s World Teacher would help all mystics of the world realize that each of us, is literally, god. Bessant states that this future world religion will “transform man into God.”
While maintaining an outward appearance featuring differences in form, the two new organizations (Fabian Society and Round Table) would work closely together throughout the 20th century- following a very specific formula that was used by oligarchical systems as far back as ancient Babylon (and even earlier).
While one order took on a conservative veneer, the other a socialist veneer. Yet both were united in a commitment to eugenics, elitism, and the creation a new global priesthood to manage humanity which all leading members called ‘Social Imperialism’.
In fact, there were always strong overlaps with Lord Alfred Milner becoming a founding member of Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Coefficience Club from 1902 where he was joined by other Round Table leaders such as Leo Amery, Philip Kerr, Lord Arthur Balfour and Halford Mackinder. H.G. Wells, Shaw and Bertrand Russell were also frequent participants of this so-called ‘dinner club’ which was nothing less than a nerve center of creative planning for the entire British Empire during the early 20th century. Meanwhile five Rhodes Scholars founded the Canadian Fabian Society in 1931- demonstrating that the differences were less than skin deep.
While much has been written about these entities and the evil their members carried out during the last 120 years (namely here, here, here and here), what is less known is that both organizations had directly revived ancient mystery cults that had overseen the transformation of Rome from a republic into an evil empire 2000 years earlier.
In the next installment we will explore the ancient (occult) roots of the British Empire’s Fabian Society, and a small, yet influential array of pagan mystery religions which have permeated society from the time of Babylon, Persia and Rome, through the Crusades, Templars, Franciscans, Inquisition, Jesuits and modern age.
This exercise will help us better understand how the ancient pagan mystery religions have been revived during the 20th century, the origins of today’s drug culture, the mass initiation ceremony being prepared under a new Great Reset.
This story will be continued in the next chapter “The Round Table as Grail Knights of Mithra and a New Gaia Cult of Cybele Revealed”.
The Ancient Occult Roots of the Fabian Society, Cybele and the Mysteries of Eleusis (part 4)
[This is part four of an ongoing series. Part one is here, part two is here and part three is here.]
Although the organization known as the Fabian Society was outwardly materialistic and espoused “socialist” principles to attract the poor, it was rabidly elitist with all of its leaders espousing both imperialism (dubbed ‘Social Imperialism’) and eugenics- the science of eliminating useless eaters.
As outlined in part two of this series, the stained-glass mirror commissioned by Fabian leader George Bernard Shaw and featured prominently in the society’s London School of Economics features the infamous icon of a wolf in sheep’s clothing and leading agents of the organization forging a new world religion.
The name ‘Fabian Society’ was itself indicative of two things:
1) the techniques of warfare used by this sect, and
2) the revival of an ancient mystery religion with modern clothing.
The name Fabian was based on the example of the Roman oligarch Quintus Fabius Maximus (280-203 BC) who became dictator of Rome during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) where he innovated a technique of attrition and psychological warfare to defeat Hannibal.
This period of the Punic Wars with Carthage which saw Rome’s ancient ally back-stabbed by a ‘scorched earth’ program that ultimately annihilated the race of Carthaginians- is extremely important for imperial grand strategists as the central moment of change that set the character of Rome as an empire (although it would take another 150 years before ‘officially becoming’ one).
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) later reflected upon the source of Rome’s demise and located this correctly in the decision to destroy its one-time ally saying: “After the destruction of Carthage and before Christ’s coming, the degradation of traditional morality ceased to be a gradual decline and became a torrential rush.”
Caption: Rome and Carthage prior to the first Punic War (264-241 BC)
While Fabius’ tactic of slow attrition was unquestionably an important factor in the selection of the name “Fabian Society”, and was used to devastating effect by the society bearing his name during the 20th century, a lesser appreciated reason exists which has more to do with the revival of a new system of stasis, earth worship, de-industrialization and anti-humanism under leading Fabians from H.G. Wells, and Lord Bertrand Russell, to Julian Huxley (in the form of transhumanism, ecologism and cybernetics).
Magna Mater Cults Introduced into Rome
This lesser appreciated, yet more important factor is found in the importation to Rome of the cult of Cybele-Attis– sometimes referred to as the Cult of Gaia, or the cult of Magna Mater (ie: Great Earth Mother) in 205 BC.
Caption: The altar of Cybele. 295 AD Roman bas-relief. The goddess drives a chariot drawn by lions.
This event was extremely important, as it involved the most virulent eastern cult (also affiliated with Isis) to become a dominant force shaping Roman customs and the behavior of the elite. Quintus Fabius Maximus didn’t import the Cybele cult alone, but was responding to the commands of the Sibylline priests… who were a committee of 15 who had sole authorization to interpret the writings of the sacred Sibylline books (now long destroyed). By the 3rd century BC, the Sybelline Books were housed in the Temple of Apollo on Palatine Hill in Rome and it was on this same hill that the Temple of Cybele was soon constructed following the prophecy of the Sibylline priests.
The 15 initiated priests were alone permitted to touch and interpret the messages within the Sibylline books which shaped every major decision Rome took in times of crisis, and also oversaw which cults received permission to operate in Rome. It was during the 2nd Punic War that the Sibylline priests told the senate and Fabius that unless the cult of Cybele were imported from Anatolia, then Hannibal was sure to win. Although it took several years to negotiate the new cult, it was finalized in 205, and within two years, Hannibal was defeated.
These elite high priests thus influenced the Senate for nearly 900 years (until the Roman General Stilicho ordered their destruction along with the banishment of the Mithraic Cult in 405 AD).
The Roots of the Sibylline Books
According to the Roman historian Livy, the Sibylline books were acquired by Rome’s last king Tarquinius Superbus during the 6th century BC, although the details are wrapped in mystery.
Mate Marton of Eötvös Loránd University notes that: “By the end of the 3rd century they were connected with Greek rituals, Apollo, and, by association, prophecy.’ As Rome set foot on Greek soil, and with it Roman ambassadors and generals became regular visitors of Delphi, the books slowly began losing their unique monopoly as state oracle and started to be affiliated with a Sibyl or Sibyls.”
A Sibyl is a term for a priestess/prophetess that acted as a medium channelling messages from the Gods to man. Like modern “channelers”, mediums, clairvoyants, or Theosophists surfing the astral plane and speaking to spirit demons and the dead, the Sibyls played a similar role in the ancient world.
As Cynthia Chung outlined in The Ancient Roots of Occult Societies, one major Sibyl of the ancient world was the pythian priestess of Apollo at Delphi which coordinated a network of mystery cults shaping the geopolitical landscape of the kingdoms surrounding the Mediterranean.
The Sibylline books delivered a prophecy in 45 BC, during Rome’s war against the Parthians, that only an emperor would be capable of winning the war.
Since Rome had not had a king since Tarquinius’ disposal in 579 BC, this prophecy was used to justify the creation of the roman emperor with a god-man as Ceasar standing, like Egypt’s Pharaohs, as a godhead. The pressure to accept this emperorship was placed on the war hero Julius Caesar (100-44 BC)… who by all accounts, really did not want the position, turning the offer down three times before accepting. His final acceptance of the position of emperor was used by a group of senators led famously by Brutus and Cassius to justify his assassination.
Brutus’ foolish actions led to a bloody civil war (32-30 BC) followed by Rome’s submersion into an imperial hell managed by mystery cults and war.
These same priests oversaw the introduction of the Persian mystery Cult of Mithra into Rome which every member of the Praetorian guard and Roman legions soon joined. The earlier Phrygian mystery cult of Cybele-Attis which the priests at the Temple of Apollo demanded be introduced into the Roman pantheon coordinated closely with the priesthood of Mithra, with many of the wives, and daughters of the Mithraic (male-only initiates) enmeshed into the rites of Cybele.
As outlined in part 3 of this series, the Cult of Mithra had been introduced into Rome by Pompey the Great in 63 BC, but appears to have faced a setback when Julius Caesar defeated Pompey’s forces amidst a civil war in 45 BC.
Caption: The Palatine Hill, where the Sibylline Books were kept (Herodotus / CC BY-SA 4.0), and also where the Temple of Cybele was constructed
While there are outward differences in the rites of the two cults (Cybele and Mithra), there were also many similarities. Both featured exoteric (outward) teachings for the lower degrees and uninitiated and esoteric (secret) teachings for the higher degrees of initiated. Both pagan cults featured sacrifices, self-denying stoicism mixed with hedonistic release, following Apollonian-Dionysian models of behavior, and something called the Taurobolium.
The Taurobolium were gruesome ceremonies involving the sacrifice of bulls, which bled onto the priests overseeing the mystery rites, which featured prominently in the rituals of both cults.
The early Christian polemicist Prudentius, 348- 410 CE described the rites of Cybele in the following terms:
“There are rites in which you mutilate yourself and maim your bodies to make an offering of the pain. A worshipper possessed thrusts the knife into his arms and cuts them to propitiate the Mother goddess. Frenzy and wild whirling are thought to be the rule of her mysteries. The hand that spares the cutting is held to be undutiful, and it is the barbarity of the wound that earns heaven. Another makes the sacrifice of his genitals; appeasing the goddess by mutilating his loins, he unmans himself and offers her a shameful gift; the source of the man’s seed is torn away to give her food and increase through the flow of blood. Both sexes are displeasing to her holiness, so she keeps a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a man without becoming a woman.” (Prudentius, Perist. 1059-1073)
Additionally, both sects (Mithra and Cybele) featured death and rebirth rituals, involving the shedding of old identities of initiates in favor of new constructs groomed by a higher priesthood.
The priests- dubbed ‘Hierophants’ of the Cybele Cult (called ‘Galli’) were all castrated as part of their initiation which is why the conservative families of Rome ultimately demanded the cult be removed after too many of their sons were given over to ritual castrations. Wasson notes that “Followers of her cult would work themselves into an emotional frenzy and self-mutilate, symbolic of her lover’s self-castration.”
Caption: Funerary relief of a androgynous gallus priest, member of the Magna Mater cult of Cybele, 2nd century AD (Public Domain)
One of the main features of the castrated galli priests were belts of knucklebones used for self-flagellation. This would be a practice adopted by the Benedictines, Franciscans and Jesuits, whose ropes would serve an identical purpose in later years.
Historian Molly Dowdeswell writes: “After their act of castration, the galli wore exclusively women’s clothing. As signs of their positions, they wore a type of crown, maybe a laurel wreath, as well as gold bracelets called an occabus. The women’s clothing they wore was often yellow and accompanied by a turban and earrings. It is thought that these men also bleached their hair, which they kept long, and that they wore makeup. They would have walked around in groups telling fortunes in exchange for charity.”
Caption: A statue Attis, after the emasculation. In his left hand is a shepherd’s crook, in his right hand a pomegranate. His head is crowned with bronze rays of the sun and on his Phrygian cap is a crescent moon. (Dennis Jarvis / CC BY SA 2.0)
Within 200 years of its official acceptance by the Romans, worship of The Great Mother had become one of the three important cults of Rome, though it had few priests, it’s influence was extreme. The other two cults were those of Isis and Mithra and all were united in their common hate of Christianity and Judaism.
Caption: The self-castrated Attis- whose suicide is redeemed by his cyclical rebirth becoming the god of vegetation. Both Attis and Mithra are characterized by their Phrygian caps (later adopted by the Venetian Doge) and the ritual of castration of a bull during ceremonies.
However. by the reign of Emperor Claudius in 41 CE, the Cult of Cybele and Attis was given full support and the rampant orgies, hallucinogenic cocktails and bloodlust sacrifices overseen by elite eunuchs created a culture of insanity throughout Rome.
Temples of Mithra and Cybele (better known as Gaia in our modern age) have been found linked together by archaeologists during the past century implying that where one Cult went, the other always followed.
The famous researcher Jessie Weston who’s 1920 Ritual to Romance demonstrated the Mithraic origins of the Grail Myths, noted this synergy between Mithraic and Cybele/Attis cults:
“Between the cults of Mithra and of Attis, there was a close and intimate alliance. In parts of Asia Minor the Persian god had early taken over features of the Phrygian deity… The union between Mithra and the goddess Anahita was held to be the equivalent of that subsisting between the two great Phyrgian deities Attis-Cybele. The most ancient mithreum known, that at Ostia, was attached to the Metroon, the temple of Cybele. At Saalburg the ruins of the two temples are but a few steps apart.” [From Ritual to Romance p. 137-138]
Eleusinian Mysteries
Medievalist scholar Donald Wasson writes: “Known as the Great Mother or Magna Mater, Cybele, whose chief sanctuary was at Pessinus, was one of the early female deities, first appearing in the province of Lydia as a goddess of the mountains. Arriving from Phrygia, she made her initial appearance in Greece in the 5th century BCE with a temple in Athens (the Metroum); the Greeks identified her with the goddess Rhea (mother of the Olympians) and Demeter (goddess of the harvest). While never achieving great popularity in Greece, the cult reached Rome around the end of the 3rd century BCE.”
Caption: Relief of Demeter / Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, Greece
Manifesting with diverse names throughout the ancient world, in Greece, Cybele’s incarnation as Demeter placed her at the epicenter of the Eleusinian Mysteries which initiated generations of elites into a rite of passage into an initiation process of death, rebirth, and at the end of the process, ultimately ‘discovering’ a mystical deification of the self devoid of moral reason. As Albert Pike writes of the highest initiation: “Those initiated in the Mysteries of Eleusis believed that the Sun blazed with a pure splendor for them alone.”
Mounting evidence has indicated that drugs, sexual excesses, mixtures of torture/radical withholding of bodily needs (followed by release) played major roles in this initiation.
Modern occultist Marina Abramovic’s methods of initiating her students such as Lady Gaga involves a mixture of these techniques, and undoubtedly, occult psychiatrists managing the CIA’s MK Ultra program during the Cold War studied these methods of de-patterning/reprogramming test subjects before extending their findings to cultural programming.
None other than Dr. Albert Hoffman, the chemist who discovered LSD-25 in 1942 which was put to wide use in MK Ultra became the world’s leading authority on the Eleusinian Mysteries, having written a book in 1976 called ‘The Road to Eleusis’ (along with JP Morgan vice-President/psylocibin guru G. Gordon Wasson). Here Hoffman and his two co-writers correctly point out that the roots of LSD-25 (which are derived from a form of blight that grows on wheat called ‘ergot’) was among the sources of the secrets of Eleusinian rites of initiation.
“Ergot of barley is the likely psychotropic ingredient in the Eleusinian potion. Its seeming symbiotic relationship to the barley signified an appropriate expropriation and transmutation of the Dionysian spirit to which the grain, Demeter’s daughter, was lost in the nuptial embrace with earth. Grain and ergot together, moreover, were joined in a bisexual union as siblings, bearing at the time of the maiden’s loss already the potential for her own return and for the birth of the phalloid son that would grow from her body. A similar hermaphroditism occurs in the mythical traditions about the grotesquely fertile woman whose obscene jests were said to have cheered Demeter from her grief just before she drank the potion.”
The priesthood which served the psychedelic beverage during the ceremonies was always performed by eunuchs, and as we will see was also central to the counterparty of Cybele named Attis (the son/husband of Cybele who self-castrated in terror/love of his mother, bled to death and was reborn as the god of vegetation. Hoffman and Wasson write of this:
“As he [the priest] performed the service, he intoned ancient chants in a falsetto voice, for his role in the Mystery was asexual, a male who had sacrificed his gender to the Great Goddess.”
In the 18th century, the ceremonies of Eleusis would be performed by leading figures of London’s satanic Hellfire Club that met in underground caverns located under Medmenham Abbey leased by Sir Francis Dashwood (Chancellor of the Exchequer of England). The Abbey had formerly been a Cistercian Order in the 13th century, and like all Mithraic cults, selected its location based upon the vast caverns located below which had been Mithraic altars built during Roman times.
Above the caverns, Dashwood restored the decrepit St. Lawrence Church in 1751 using as inspiration the Sol Invictus (Mithraic) Temple that had recently been discovered in Palmyra, and he dubbed his occult society ‘The Order of Knights of St. Francis (sometimes called ‘The Medmenham Monks’) as a not-too-subtle reference to 1) his own name, 2) the Abbey above the caverns, and 3) St. Francis of Assisi whom, as we established, created an order which served as a bridge between the Benedictines and later Jesuits.
The satirical painter William Hogarth astutely captured this irony in his biting rendition of Sir Francis Dashwood dressed as St Francis of Assisi, except featuring an erotic novel instead of a bible, a naked woman instead of Jesus, a Venetian masque, and the figure of fellow Hellfire leader Lord Sandwich as a lunar god instead of a hallow indicated the Dionysian orgiastic ceremonies performed at night by the initiated.
Hellfire Club member John Wilkes (Royal Society member, and grandfather of Lincoln’s assassin) stated “No profane eye dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room where the Monks assembled on solemn occasions […] secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea”. Bona Dea was the name for earth mother Magna Mater, whom as established earlier is known variously as Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus and Cybele.
After redesigning the abbey above the caverns under the gothic style, Dashwood placed a banner above the entrance that read “Do What thou Wilt”… which brings us to another initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Caption: The Dashwood Mausoleum with St. Lawrence’s Church tower behind.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), self-professed anti-Christ, occultist, and British Agent famously developed upon his own variation of the Rites of Eleusis while heading the German branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). In Crowley’s Eleusinian working, mescaline was the hallucinogenic drug of choice– which accompanied long days and nights of orgies, sacrifice and other ‘outer body’ experiences. In Crowley’s Eleusinian Ceremony, the same 7 gates of initiation as held by the Mithra Cult are featured prominently.
Even Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), President of the German and Austrian branches of the Theosophical Society, and founder of Anthroposophy, spoke at length about the glories of the mysteries of Eleusis and asserted that it was through this rite that pre-Christian Greeks were able to have communion with the spirit of the unborn Christ: “The Greek disciple learned to understand the Mystery of Christ in a pre-Christian period; again it was in a spiritual way that the Christ was placed before those to be initiated into the Mysteries of Eleusis.”
Steiner went on further to state that “All that is bound up with the Eleusinian Mystery is intimately connected with what we call our anthroposophical striving.”
Not just speaking of his Anthroposophical followers, Steiner went further and stated that “All that is connected with the Mystery of Eleusis, and all that has been achieved by the author in the historical re-awakening of the principles of initiation in the various epochs, corresponds to what is deepest and most intimate in the European soul.”
Satanist high priest and leading general of the confederacy during the civil war Albert Pike (1809-1891) described the rites of Eleusis in his Morals and Dogma (1871): “The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of Ceres [aka Demeter, Cybele], swallowed up, as it were, all the others. All the neighboring nations neglected their own, to celebrate those of Eleusis; and in a little while all Greece and Asia Minor were filled with the Initiates. They spread into the Roman Empire, and even beyond its limits.”
In 1870, one of Albert Pike’s lieutenants in the Scottish Rite named John Yarker (1833-1913) split off from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in order to create a new masonic order dubbed the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis Mizraim. Yarker became a leading theosophist, Martinist Freemason, co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, joined the British Israelite Quator Coronati lodge in 1887, and co-founded the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) where he recruited Theodor Reuss and Dr. Franz Hartmann in 1902.
Both Reuss and Yarker worked closely with Rudolf Steiner in the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim and Steiner speaks at length about his affiliations with Yarker in his Autobiography describing his membership payments to learn Yarker’s rites. Steiner and his wife Marie von Sivers master and adapt the rite to their own lodge called ‘Mystica Aeterna’ expanding membership to women. Pro-Steiner researcher Peter Koenig writes that on June 15, 1907“Reuss sends Steiner an Edict making Steiner a 33, 90 and 96 degree of Berlin and independently acting General Grandmaster of the Sovereign General Grandcouncil of the Mizraim-Rite of Germany. The stationary bears the expressions “Memphis and Mizraim Rite of Masonry, Order of Oriental Templars and Esoteric Rosicrucians”.
Yarker and Reuss also recruited Aleister Crowley to the OTO at this same time, giving the self-professed Anti-Christ full control over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland OTO in 1912. In 1913, Crowley became Grand Master of the Rite of Memphis-Mizraïm, and in 1914 wrote a new constitution and gnostic mass for the international OTO.
For those who may be troubled by the Crowley-Steiner relationship, the work of academic occultist Carl Abrahamsson may prove useful in illustrating the fact that the same occult workings play out in both men’s practices- except modified by Apollonion vs Dionysian approaches.
Meanwhile Dr. Franz Hartman was acting president of the Indian Theosophical Society and in 1907 alongside Annie Besant who became the first female member of the theosophy-infiltrated Indian Congress Party that later collaborated with the Nazis. Hartmann also co-founded the Order of the New Templars (soon to be led by Nazi occultist Herman Goering) and also founded (with Crowley) the Argentum Astrum (A∴A∴). Through Argentum Astrum, the Hellfire Club’s motto of ‘Do What Thou Whilst’ was here re-branded as ‘The Law of Thelema’ by Crowley.
John Yarker also practiced the Mysteries of Eleusis and in his book ‘The Arcane Schools’ describes how the rites continued through the occult underground after Rome collapsed writing: “The Eleusinian, Serapian, and Mythraic Mysteries were all very popular in Rome, and spread into all countries, practising their rites side by side with the aboriginal Mysteries, for the utmost tolerance existed amongst all the priests. All are known to have existed in Britain, flourishing generally until the 4th century of Christianity, and practised long after in secret. Besides the State Mysteries, Alexandria became the centre whence radiated the Mystic schools, the Cabala, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and Arcane Christianity.”
Yarker candidly admits that the Rites of Eleusis always stood in opposition to “their bitter enemies the Christians.”
Reuss, Hartmann, Yarker, Crowley, Steiner, Carl Jung and many other occultists of the pre-WWI era frequented the Ascona Lodge in Monte Verita, Switzerland which Cynthia Chung writes extensively about here.
Masonic priest (33rd degree Scottish Rite) Manley P. Hall (1901-1990) additionally wrote extensively of the Mysteries of Eleusis as a practice that was geared to “initiating” subjects into the belief that the spirits of the dead were shaping reality, and that the true initiate of gnostic knowledge learned to give way to the dark unconscious forces (shaped by countless dead spirits infused within our soul) below our conscious domain.
In his Secret Teachings of All Ages, Hall writes: “An ancient initiate once said that the living are ruled by the dead. Only those conversant with the Eleusinian concept of life could understand that statement. It means that the majority of people are not ruled by their living spirits but by their senseless (hence dead) animal personalities. Transmigration and reincarnation were taught in these Mysteries, but in a somewhat unusual manner. It was believed that at midnight the invisible worlds were closest to the Terrestrial sphere and that souls coming into material existence slipped in during the midnight hour. For this reason many of the Eleusinian ceremonies were performed at midnight. Some of those sleeping spirits who had failed to awaken their higher natures during the earth life and who now floated around in the invisible worlds, surrounded by a darkness of their own making, occasionally slipped through at this hour and assumed the forms of various creatures.”
Jung’s Revival of Mithraism
If this smells at all like Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, then don’t be surprised as Jung was himself a devoted believer in Mithraic initiation ceremonies and a practicing occultist throughout his adult life. Throughout hundreds of lectures, Jung also spoke fondly of the mysteries of Eleusis.
In the next segment, we will explore Carl Jung’s occultism, his obsession with reviving gnostic Christianity as a new world religion and a new Mithraic Cult following the lead of the same Julian the Apostate, whose soul he believed to himself to be the reincarnation.
This will in turn set the stage for the New Age counter-culture overseen by occultists managing the Eranos conferences in Monte Verita and the Esalen Institute, as well as the new Mithraic theosophist revival under the gospel of the coming world teacher dubbed “Maitreya.”
