Om! Blessed be the animal,
With its horns and members.
Om! Tie it to the somber pillar,
That sunders Life from Death
Om! Tie this animal very well,
For it represents the universe.

Markandeya Purana (91:32)

 

[Obs.: We suggest that the readers unused to Hindu sacred terms, consult the excellent: Glossary of Sanskrit Terms, or others they can find on themselves. We also suggest that, when searching the sites linked to here and elsewhere, the Search Box be used as a matter of expediency, as the articles are often longish, though always extremely interesting. A good introduction to most Hindu-Buddhic concepts is often given in the Theosophical Glossary, though we seldom spouse their farfetched connections. Likewise, we have no links, commercial or otherwise, with the sites linked to, including Amazon Books, for we do not want to turn our site into a commercial enterprise of sorts. The readers should also search the Internet on their own (AltaVista, etc.) on any terms or concepts which may be beyond their heads. All learning is somewhat slow and painful. But this one is certainly worth the pain. Know the truth, and the Truth shall make you free. It is not our fault that myths are so confusing and obscure. After all, they were meant to be read by all, profanes included, but understood only by the true Initiates. The readers should also realize that truth, like petroleum, is where you find it, rather than in the voice of authority, religious, political or academic.]

introduction

In Vedic India, the greatest of sacrifices was the Ashvamedha (or Horse Sacrifice). Kings spent fortunes in the elaborate rituals, which sometimes required hundreds of officiating priests and lasted for several weeks at a time. The sacrifice of the horse was often associated with the sacrifice of the goat, as we discuss further below. Both these sacrifices were often associated with Tantric practices, and even today this ritual is often accompanied by the goat sacrifice. In fact the horse sacrifice was a fertility ritual, as it entailed the mating of the queen with the sacrificed horse and had, moreover, connections with the renovation of the cosmos this type of ritual usually represents.

[FOOTNOTE: These connections are well attested in the Vedas and other sacred texts from India. Cf., for instance, the sites linked above and here for the sexual connections of the horse sacrifice in the Rig Veda. Interestingly enough, the Hindu ritual had its exact counterpart — though in a reversed sense — with the Irish ritual of enthronement, where the king ritually coupled with a mare that was then sacrificed and cooked, being then eaten in a communal meal. The Irish, as all Indo-Europeans, had deep esoteric connections with horses which apparently derive directly from Vedic India itself. In particular, the Irish ritual of enthronement of the new king and the mating with the mare it involved apparently derives from the Vedic myth of Saranyu and Vivasvat, who couple in equine shape, breeding of the Ashvin Twins. So in the Irish myth, where Maccha gives birth to twins under quite similar conditions. The Ashvin Twins are extremely important in Hindu myths, as they are responsible for Creation in essentially all its aspects.]

The objective of the present essay is to discuss the esoteric meaning of these strange rituals, which date from Vedic times in India, whence they passed to the rest of the world. Hindu myths are particularly profound and, hence, extremely difficult to penetrate in their esoteric contents. This is due to the fact that the holy tongues in which they were originally composed — mainly Sanskrit and Dravida — are polysemic languages, where words may have several entirely different meanings, depending on the context. So, they often mean different things for different readers.

Myths, symbols and rituals work at several different levels, often simultaneously. As the Hindus say, they function according to the 48 Fundamental Sciences: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Theology, Religion, History, Geography, Astronomy, Astrology, etc.. In other words, myths work not according to so-called Aristotelian logic, but should be interpreted according to "fuzzy logic", where concepts and ideas are somewhat diffuse and vague, as in Quantum Mechanics and other such statistical sciences.

We Westerners are not used to this kind of logic, in contrast to the ancients and to the Orientals, and the Hindus in particular. Our difficulty in understanding myths and their hidden truths derives above all from the essence of our monosemic tongues, which accustom our minds to reason linearly, and to interpret things literally, rather than "diffusely".

We hope that the present essay will shed some light on the way myths work, in order to convey the important revelations concerning Atlantis they often embody. The story of Atlantis is never told in detail, as actual history. The only known exception is Plato who, as is well known, violated the basic rule having to do with the secret of the Mysteries, which prevented them from ever being disclosed to the profanes except as myth, metaphor, parable, enigma, and so on.

and Plato was, precisely for that reason, accused of "impiety" and had to flee Greece in order to escape trial, just as was the case of his master, Socrates, who was condemned to death for the same reason. The story of Atlantis can only be told under the disguise of myths such as those of the Evangels and the religious symbols and rituals of all nations, or in the initiatic sagas and romances or, conversely, in the trivial anecdotes, fables and fairy tales that came to us from antiquity.

The Hindus — who composed the ancient myths which later diffused to the other nations of the world — never speak of these things, except to the Initiates, being bound by a most sacred oath that has never been violated. So, we must all learn to understand their sacred myths through our own effort if we indeed want to understand the secrets of humanity's past and, perhaps, the future as well. Hindu mythology is by far the richest one of all. So is the Buddhist one, which directly derived from it.

The Hindus and the Buddhists have literally hundreds — and perhaps even thousands — of holy books encompassing initiatic novels such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, sacred hymnaries such as the Vedas, collections of myths and traditions such as the Puranas, ponderous treatises on all 48 sciences, and even apparently profane tales and fabularies such as the Jatakas and the Pancha Tantra.

Most of these books date from remotest epochs, and often embody a highly advanced, though often very difficult mode of expression, given that they are addressed to the initiate, rather than the profanes or the public in general. It is our impression that much of this traditional material derives directly from Atlantis itself, having been preserved in oral form, and having been written and rewritten or retold over and over again. This wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans is ours for free, as a heritage, if only we have the moral fortitude required to rescue it from within the often foolish myths and arcanes where it is has been hidden for so many millennia.

We well realize that a wide, sweeping generalization such as this one may seem brash and vaunted to most. But it is the result of over two decades of unswerving dedication to the research of Atlantis. And this quest has been undertaken in all its aspects, and through all of the 48 Traditional Sciences, exact or not, plus most other modern ones, arcane or conventional. During this research we developed the technique of properly interpreting myths, symbols and rites as a coded, highly specialized language conveying the message of the ancients to us, their offspring.

We note that, though non-canonical, our research methodology is thoroughly rigorous and has nothing to do with the one of those interested more in making a fast buck than in finding truth. It is the result of many years of training as a professional scientist of the ordinary academic kind who had the luck to discern the glitter of Truth flashing in the mud of the beliefs, rituals and traditions that most of us endlessly repeat as apes, merely because we are trained to do so and to believe so by our elders and our masters, since our earliest infancy, so as to get indelibly imprinted in our young minds.

It is interesting to note that Science has now replaced the Holy Inquisition in the role of guardian of Truth and the status quo that so interests the bankers and the politicians who control the Academia, the Church and the Media, often occultly. Much as many people confuse the Church with Religion, most people confuse the Academias with Science itself. In fact, these professionals merely appropriated these institutions for themselves, and use them for these inconfessable, though only too real base purposes. They dub of "unscientific" anyone who comes to different conclusions than their, even though using the same formidable machinery that Science has developed along the centuries, in contrast to Religion itself.

Such is precisely the case here. Having come to the conclusion that there is something amiss with the current theories on human prehistory, we started to investigate the cause for that. Moreover, we also noted that there was a great coherence in the myths, rites, symbols and beliefs of all peoples, despite the fact that the current scientific theories and doctrines on our past preach that they all developed in essential isolation from each other.

So, we followed the advice of René Descartes — the true founder of the modern scientific method — and decided to start ab ovo, that is, from the very start, from "scratch". And our find was far more encompassing than we ourselves would ever believe. We found that there was indeed a former civilization — which we name Atlantis, as our ancestors did, or Eden, if you will. And this great former nation created all or most things we now associate with civilization itself: agriculture, city life, religion, science, metallurgy, philosophy, art, and so on.

and, above all, these ancients created Mythology and Religion, where they encoded the important messages — moral or not, and very often only apparently immoral — which they wanted to transmit to us over the huge gap of the millennia that intervened since then. Such is the reason why it is so important to decode this message from under the veil where it is hidden. Perhaps, what they had in mind was preventing us, their children, from committing the same mistakes that led to their doom, the Fall of Man, the one of Lucifer himself.

This is indeed the reason why I so insist in interpreting myths, and in removing the blinders that have been posed over our eyes by the powers that be. In other words, it is high time for us all to stop practicing Religion blindly, as apes, endlessly repeating rites and gestures which we leant form our elders, and which indeed mean nothing at all in themselves. Our holy books are all sheer pseudo-history intended to create an aura of reality for stories that endlessly pass from one hero to the next, along the aeons.

It is high time for us all to grow up, and stop believing in Santa Claus, and that God — as some sort of his adult counterpart — will ever deliver us Salvation in a salver, and lead us into a Celestial Paradise that indeed never was. Our forefathers were neither Ufonauts nor Angels, nor Gods, as some will have us believe, while relieving us of our money. Neither were they the savages most people think they were. Our ancestors were humans like ourselves, only more enlightened, more intelligent and more dedicated to the quest of Truth, rather than merely of Comfort itself. And they developed a masterful civilization and a culture which can teach us a lot of stuff crucial for human survival as a species.

The Science of Symbolism is, though mainly lost, indeed an exact one. More or less like Mathematics, Geometry, Physics, and so on. And this includes religious symbolism, alchemical symbolism, astrological symbolism, mythology, and so on, both figurative and oral. Symbols are created according to strict rules, based on a strict logic, much as they are in Physics and in Mathematics. Of course there are those who misinterpret or misuses sacred symbols, much as many often misuse Religion and even Science for purposes of far lower standards than the lofty ones for which they were devised by their early practitioners.

the cosmogonic hierogamy

The passage of the Markandeya Purana quoted in the above epigraph, discloses the secret relationship of the horse with the cosmos. The sacrifice of the animal represents that of the Universe, that is, the one of Atlantis itself. And the association with Tantric practices is symbolic of the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, another image of the Primordial Sacrifice of the World. Tantra — with its emphasis on sex — is far more than the ritualized orgy that Westerners associate with this peculiar form of worship. In some earlier literature, for instance in the Vedas, the horse is often likened to Purusha, the Cosmic Man who was the alias and archetype of Adam, the primordial man. As such, Purusha is also the archetype of Christ himself.

Tantric practices are a ritual enactment of the Cosmogonic Hierogamy. Far more than a fertility ritual, such hierogamies are a symbolic representation of the dissolution of the World in the Marriage of Fire and Water, the two incongruous principles. The maithuna — the mystic union of the worshippers — is not an invention of modern Tantrism. The ritual dates back to Vedic times and probably to pre-Vedic, Dravidian epochs. Indeed, Tantrism is spurned by the Aryan castes in India, and is only popular in Southern India, where the Dravidian races prevail.

the ritual mating of the king and the whore

However, the Vedic cults often tolerated an erotic union, though disguisedly. As related by the Taitiriya Samhita (V:5:9) and by the Apastamba Shrauta Sutra (21:17:18, etc.), in certain Vedic rituals a young brahman priest mated with a pumchali (hierodule) hidden inside the altar of the temple.

The ritual closely recalls the one celebrated in Sumer and Babylon on the occasion of the New Year Festival (Akitu). In this ritual, the king would ritually mate with a sacred prostitute (hierodule) inside a shrine on top of the ziggurat. This building, a sort of stepped pyramid, represented the Cosmic Mountain, itself a replica of the Cosmos. Hence, the couple united inside the temple or the altar represented the Primordial Couple buried inside the Cosmic Mountain, in Paradise.

[FOOTNOTE: The Greek word kosmos is related to "cosmetics". It means "the beautified earth", and refers to the land which has been tamed and cultivated, in contrast to the wilderness of forests, deserts and marshes. The idea is more or less related to that of the oikumene, the inhabited world of the Greeks, as contrasted to the one inhabited by barbarians and savages. As such, the Kosmos contrasted which the Khaos (or "Disorder"), its antithesis. In a more specialized sense the word refers to Paradise as the primeval land first tamed by humans, and turned into a veritable garden. At a highly esoteric level, the Kosmos corresponded to Atlantis as the true site of the Garden of Eden — or rather, the one of the Hesperides, which is how the Greeks named the place.

The word khaos is related to khasma, meaning "chasm". And this is indeed the Khasma Mega of Hesiod, or the Vadava-mukha of Hindu traditions, the "great abyss" into which Atlantis was turned when it was destroyed by the volcanism which created the enormous volcanic caldera where Atlantis sunk down, disappearing for good. We note that in Hesiod's passage just linked, the Khasma Mega is rendered as "great gulf". Though this translation is in principle acceptable, the real meaning of the word khasma mega (or chasma meg') is the one I just gave, the Greek radix khas literally meaning "chasm", "chaos", that is, a great rift on earth's surface. Hesiod is being purposefully obscure and equivocal, as is usually the case when matters such as those concerning Atlantis are treated.]

and this ritual in turn symbolizes the divine mating called maithuna (or yabh-yun) by the Hindus, the mating of Shiva and Shakti said to occur in Hell, and to last eternally. In fact, this strange union of the Primordial Couple represents the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, the mystic union of Fire and Water which united forces in order to destroy the world in the Flood. This mystic union is endlessly represented in Hindu mandalas and its mystic meaning, though never revealed, is indeed the one just mentioned. It is also the union endlessly represented in alchemical symbolism as the one of the Sun and the Moon, that of the Primordial androgyne, the one of Mercury and Gold, and so on.

According to Tantric doctrine, the ultimate truth consists in the complete interpenetration of Shiva and Shakti. The two represent the very embodiment of the Male and the Female Principles. These two principles are also called Purusha and Prakriti, that is, Spirit and Matter. Small wonder then that the horse of the ashvamedha ritual was often substituted by a human victim, likened to Purusha himself. In Hindu symbolism, the interpenetration of Shiva and Shakti is often symbolically represented by the Vajravarahi Mandala, shown in Fig. I(a) below.

[2 FIGURES TO INSERT HERE: From: A. Roob, Alchemy and Mysticism, pg, 469 and 450, top: Fig. I(a) - Vajravarahi Mandala (Tibet, 19th. century); Fig. I(b) - The Mystic Union of the Sun and the Moon]

Vajravarahi, the "Diamond Sow" is indeed the same as Shakti, the consort of Shiva. But she also represents the Primordial Land (Paradise) destroyed by the vajra, that is, the "Celestial Thunderbolt", also called vajra. In the mandala, the upward-pointing triangle represents the linga (or phallus) whereas the downward-pointing triangle represents the yoni (or vagina). Interestingly enough, this symbol was adopted by Israel as its seal, the so-called Mogen-David.

In fact, the symbolism of the six-pointed star may represent many different things. At one level, it represents the two deities just mentioned. The two are indeed the twofold "facets" or avatars of Shiva himself, or of Shakti, his feminine counterpart, as both the Creator and the Dissolver. These two opposite aspects in turn stand for the two races of Atlantis, the Dravidas and the Aryo-Semites, then still together. The two principles also represent Fire (male) and Water (female), the two elements which united to destroy Paradise, perhaps as the result of the Great War between the two races.

At yet a further level, the two triangles represent the twin mountains of Paradise, Mt. Sumeru and Mt. Kumeru. These two mountains are place at the antipodes of each other, one in north India (Mt. Sumeru or Kailasa), the other one in Indonesia (the Mt. Krakatoa volcano),such being the reason why they are represented as the inverse (or mirror images) of each other. The Hindus equate this mystic union of Fire and Water to the Vadava-mukha, the Submarine Mare. This is in fact the Krakatoa Volcano, where in fact Fire (magma) combines with Water (sea water) in a very fragile equilibrium which becomes disrupted at Doomsday, in order to destroy the world, as described in our page on The True History of Atlantis.

The Meaning of the Mogen David

The mandala itself represents Paradise (Atlantis) encircled by its triple circular wall (or canal), precisely as described by Plato. The colored petals of the "lotus" around the mandala represent the flames of the volcanic fire mingled to the water of its seas, as described in our page on mandalas. This mandala is in fact a variant of the Kalachakra mandalas and the ones such as the Shri Yantra which we discuss there. In other words, it represents the process of creation emanating from the Center, from the site of Paradise Destroyed.

Interestingly enough, the six swastikas engraved at the six prongs of the star also represent the start of a new era of mankind, started by precisely the dissolution represented by the mandala itself. It is quite clear that both the Jews and the Nazis they were fighting well knew the hidden meaning of these dual symbols which they used so freely in their propaganda. Of course they never told anyone as I am doing now, as these things are secret, and the initiates are bound by an oath to which I am fortunately not fettered. In yet another interpretation, this mystic union of incongruous things represents the Millennium which the Nazis intended to bring about, in a very bungling way.

At the center of the mandala, we have two crossed vajras (dorjes). These again represent the two principles, Male and Female, exactly as they do in the Cross. These vajras also represent Fire and Water as the principles of the destruction they effected in Paradise. At the center of these we have Vajravarahi, the feminine, destructive shape of Shiva, dancing the end of the world. This is the terrific counterpart of the well-known figures of Shiva Nataraja, the Dance Lord. This "dance" represents the earthquakes caused by the giant volcanism, perhaps their most destructive aspect.

[Footnote: The earthquakes and the tsunamis they often cause provoke a wide-ranging destruction which extends far beyond the one of the volcanic fire itself. Actually, scientists are now highly concerned with the threat posed by supervolcanoes and megatsunamis which, though rare occurrences, definitely do happen once in a while, destroying the entire world. In Dravida, the words "dance" and "earthquake" are synonyms (tantu, tantavam, etc.). This word also gave the Skt. tandava, the name of the wild dance of Shiva Nataraja, which is in fact, the one of the giant earthquakes destroying the world, as all experts well know. And it is also the same radix as the one of tantra, meaning the waving motions typical of dancing, of the sex act, and of sewing. In Dravida, this base also means the same as "dissolution", "passing away", dying". In other words, the Great Death, that of the world's end and the start of a new era.]

In this mandala, she is represented dancing alone. In others she dances with Shiva, also in his terrible avatar as Rudra or as Kala, (the "Black One"), representing all-devouring time. What this means is that Atlantis had completed its allotted time, and had hence be destroyed, in order to open the way to the new era, the Holocene, which then started, some 11,600 years, precisely the date specified by Plato. All these coincidences are too many and too exact to be due to chance alone, as anyone can see, now that they have been pointed out in detail. We also note that the name of Vajravarahi, the Sow, also implies the idea of a whore like the ones involved in the ritual of the ashvamedha and its counterparts everywhere, including Egypt and Babylon, and even the distant Americas.

Around the central motif we have six further avatars of the Goddess: as Kali riding a yellow horse (like Death, in the Apocalypse), as Durga, riding a lion or tiger, and so on. The idea here is that the seven avatars represent the Seven Isles of the Blest, precisely the seven "Atlantic Islands" so often confused with then. These islands, which figured in most maps of the Age of Navigation, in fact represent the remains of sunken Atlantis, precisely the seven greater islands of Indonesia (Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, Philippines, New Guinea and the Malay Peninsula), as we argue elsewhere in detail.

[Insert link to my article on "Mythical Islands of the Atlantic"]

Turning now to Fig. I (b), the second of the figures shown above. This is a reproduction of an engraving in the Rosarium Philosophorum ("Rosary of the Philosophers (or Alchemists)"), published in 1550. It is entitled Opus Magnum: Conjunctio ("The Great Work: the Union"), and means the conjunctio oppositorum mentioned above. Here the King and the Queen are shown mating in their grave, under the earth. They are identified to the Sun and the Moon, and indeed symbolize the two Atlantises, Mother and Son. In other figures in the book and elsewhere they are represented as the androgyne or as Fire and Water or, yet, as Adam and Eve (mating) or as Gold being dissolved by Mercury.

The verses which accompany the figure in question deserve being quoted. The Sun says: "O Luna, surrounded by me / and sweet one made mine. / You became fine, / Strong and powerful as I am". And Moon responds: "O Sol, you are recognizable above all others. / You need me as the cock needs the hens". These verses parallel the ones of the correspondence between the Sun and the Moon or the ones of Isis and Horus mentioned in Egyptian alchemical treatises, and obviously date from extreme antiquity. The symbolism is the one discussed above, and the interested reader is directed to our works on Alchemy published elsewhere.

The Heb Sed and Related Egyptian Traditions of Paradise

Very likely, the Heb Sed festival of the Egyptians, as well as the initiatic ceremonies celebrated inside the Egyptian pyramids such as the one of King Zozer, were also ritual enactments of the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, the Sacred Marriage of the King and the Sacred Prostitute, the Hierodule of Bastit or of some other similar goddess, as we shall see further below. In fact, Zozer's stepped pyramid, perhaps the first true pyramid of Egypt, centered around the Heb Sed ritual itself, showing that this type of monument had to do with both the Holy Mountain and the death and rebirth of Atlantis, which is precisely what he Heb Sed ritual symbolized, much as we explain in our article on the Egyptian Temples.

Of course, the academic Egyptologists never dream of these initiatic connections, which they hotly reject, perhaps because they prefer mysteries to clarity. Moreover, they feel it is their duty to keep the aura that Egypt has among the public as the first ever of all civilizations on earth, believing that, in this way, tourism to Egypt will be in the increase. But the fact is that the ancient Egyptians regularly made naval expeditions to Punt, their primordial Paradise. Punt is also called Ta Netjer, "the Land of the Gods". But it was an actual place which could be visited, and indeed was as we just showed. In fact, Punt is no other than Indonesia, as we argue elsewhere in detail. Punt was also deemed to be the Isles of the Blest (Sekhet Aaru), much as in the other traditions everywhere.

The Egyptians believed — just as did the Hindus and many other peoples as well — that the cosmos had to be periodically destroyed and reborn in order to reacquire its vigor. This is the meaning of the Heb Sed festival, where the king had, after 30 years of reign, to kill a bull in a torada, much as did the kings of Atlantis, according to Plato. He also had to mate with a whore, as said above, in order to prove his sexual vigor, on which that of the whole community depended, at least in theory. So, the Heb Sed ritual was indeed the alias and counterpart of Tantric (or "fertility") rituals everywhere.

In fact, it is clear, from the produce of Punt — things such as myrrh, electrum, gold, throwing sticks (boomerangs), incense, ebony and ivory, different types of wood, different exotic animals such as monkeys and leopards, etc. — that the Land of the Gods was no other than Taprobane, that is, Indonesia, as we argue elsewhere in detail. The name of Punt derives from the Dravida, and closely corresponds to the one of Bandha (or Setubhanda = "Bridge"), even today the name of the place (Bantam). Though often confused with Sri Lanka, the true site of Taprobane — which the ancient traditions so often equated to the otherworld, the antipodals and the site of Paradise — was indeed no other than Indonesia itself, as we argue elsewhere in detail. [Link to my article: Taprobane, Sri Lanka or Sumatra]

In the ashvamedha, the wife of the officiating priest, or that of the king himself — the mahishi — simulated a ritual mating with the sacrificial horse. The mahishi (lit. "the Great Cow") represented the Earth, much as the horse symbolized the Sun. Indeed, she also stood for the queen as the Primordial Whore, just as her husband (the mahisha) was an alias of the Horse, the Sun, the Primordial Male (or buffalo). The couple also stood for Heaven and Earth and, more exactly, for Yama and Yami, the Primordial Couple of paradisial times. And Yama and Yami, king and queen of the netherworld, indeed stand for Kala and Shakti, which is herself Vajravarahi, the "Sow" (or "whore"). Varahi also literally represents the earth as well as "fertility". As such, she represents an alias of "the fertile earth", that of Paradise itself.¹

After the horse sacrifice was performed, the mahisha mated with the mahishi. And so did the other four couples of priests among themselves. In this they represented the Four Guardians of the World (Lokapalas) and placed around the royal couple. The ritual enacted the destruction of the world (the deaths of the horse and the goat) due to the mystic union of Heaven and Earth (the union of the horse and the mahishi). But it also symbolized the rebirth of Nature, renewed by the drastic event (the union of the couples just after the sacrifice). In other variants which we already commented, the queen herself mated with the dead horse which, having been killed by strangling, normally had a stiff phallus, as is often the case in this type of death.

Interestingly enough, a similar ritual was performed in ancient Celtic Ireland. This ritual is closely related to the Vedic ashvamedha, as we already argued. In the occasion of his enthronement (a "renewal" of the world), the king would ritually mate with a mare, which was subsequently sacrificed. From its remains a broth was made, which was served communially to all. Clearly, the ritual is also an alias of that of Christian Mass and Communion, whose symbolism can also be traced back to the Vedic archetypes, the rituals of Soma preparation and of the ashvamedha.

the far oriental archetypes

In his remarkable study of the Mexican and the Cambodian pyramids (Stufen Pyramiden in Mexico and Kambodscha, Paideuma, VI (1958), 473-517), W. Mueller makes some important observations. To start with, the German archaeologist notes that these pyramids share several features which are also often observed everywhere these enigmatic monuments are found. These generally include:

1. A surrounding wall, oriented along the Four Cardinal Directions.
2. A small temple or shrine at the top.
3. Roads of access along the four Cardinal Directions, forming a Cross.
4. A lake or dam that is referred to as a "sea", and which surrounds the entire pyramid, turning it into an island.

With small differences, the Egyptian pyramids and, in particular the first one of them, that of King Zozer, also obeyed this type of paradigm. Mueller notes that this scheme corresponds to an ancient conception of the Cosmos, where the earth is considered an island or mountain rising from the primeval waters. So in Mexican pyramids, whose strange connections to Atlantis have been noted by some researchers such as Peter Tompkins or others such as Hartwig Hausdorf or James Furia, to name just a couple. These strange connections — which include China, as well as Indonesia, and even the Americas as well — are increasingly being mentioned in the media, including in connection with Edgar Cayce and his widely popularized prophecies.

Even researchers such as Graham Hancock, who formerly asserted that Atlantis lay under the ices of Antarctica as the result of Pole Shift, are fast shifting towards my theory of an Indonesian Atlantis sunk, instead, as the result of the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. In fact, this is a far more palatable theory from a scientific point-of-view, given the fact that it conforms to geological reality and even to the more recent views of the specialists on the events that led to it.

I mention these connections not because I necessarily agree or disagree with these researchers, but because they show that the recent tendency has been towards a convergence, rather than an independence of cultures, as is still the textbook approach to the theme. In fact, my own theory on the construction of the Great Pyramid of Egypt is based not on mystery, but on the mastery of certain simple technologies which were obviously held in secrecy by the ancient Egyptians, for several reasons which we adduce in our article on the Great Pyramid's construction, published in KEMET, the highly reputed German journal on Egyptology.

 

Why Brides Wear White Dresses

In the Egyptian cosmogonic scheme the above features listed by W. Mueller correspond to the one of the Tatenen, the Primordial Hill rising out of the waters of the Nun, the Primordial Abyss. In the identical Hindu conceptions, this mountain is Mt. Meru, the Holy Mountain, rising from the waters of the Primeval Ocean. More exactly, as we discuss in detail elsewhere, this idealized model corresponds to the sacred geometry of Atlantis. It mainly derives from Hindu traditions, but is found in essentially all mythologies, both in the Old and in the New Worlds.

The close parallels between the Mexican pyramids on one side, and the Egyptian and the Cambodian pyramids on the other one — though placed in regions almost antipodal in the world — attest the universality and, hence, the extreme antiquity of the Atlantean paradigm. These close parallels along with the symbolic identity of all such monuments all over the world — can only be the result of cultural diffusion, as they can be explained in no other way. Proposals such as the ones of Karl Jung and Mircea Eliade which attribute such identities to "archetypes" akin to Plato's eideias are scientifically no better than those of the ones of the Jesuits of the Conquest, which attributed them to devilish temptations.

However, such proposals are unacceptable, scientifically speaking. Hence, better alternatives have to be devised, if we are to stick to the scientific canons. And what else but diffusion? Even the "Collective Unconscious" invoked by Freud or by Velikovsky would require an archetypal event impressive enough to become forever imprinted in the human mind. And this is, of course, the same as granting the reality of the event the pyramids and their destruction symbolize: the volcanism that destroyed Paradise in the dawn of times. So, no matter what way we turn, we are inexorably led back to Atlantis, the true archetype of Paradise in all traditions.

[Footnote: According to the current scientific doctrines on human prehistory, the American civilizations got forever parted from the Old World ones ever since the closure of the Bering Passage (Beringia), on the Alaskan far north. This closure took place before or shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,600 years ago. Thus, if this type of cosmogony is indeed common to both hemispheres, it necessarily predates the end of the last Ice age, at about that date. Though the initial entry of the first Americans is currently being revised upwards, no academician worth mentioning contends the validity of the isolationist model, which is held consensually by all or most of them, either actively or passively. However, some specialists have recently contended that the Bering Passage was indeed blocked by the mile thick glaciers of Canada, rendering this crossing utterly impossible.

and they also add that the first Americans, as instanced by the Kennewick Man, may indeed have been Caucasoid Neandertals rather than Mongoloids. Other academic researchers, this time from Brazil, are now arguing that the very first American fossils found to date were indeed negroid Australoids which came in from Indonesia during the Ice Age. As is clear, the current scientific paradigm is fast changing, and is indeed in a shambles, as are most such theories we have been taught in school up to now. Perhaps a paradigmatic revolution is in the process of making. And perhaps the Internet has played a crucial role in that change, given that it bypasses the academic filters, and those of the media, allowing a direct communication between the "maverick" researchers and the public. In time, the majestic edifice built on sand will crumble, and will clear the air for a fresh start similar to those inaugurated by Shiva and Shakti.]

However, what interests us here is the connection between pyramids and the Cosmogonic Hierogamy. The reader interested in more details in this regards should read the magnificent book by my Argentianian friend, Prof. José Alvarez Lopez (El Enigma de las Piramides, Buenos Aires, 1978), who treats the matter more at depth. In the pyramid of Angkor there is, according to him, an inscription in Sanskrit, in the northwestern corner of its wall, which reads: "Angkor is the young bride of the King, who just took her home, blushing with desire, and dressed with the sea".

This beautiful poetic license is closely paralleled in the Book of Revelation (21:1-10), where the Celestial Jerusalem is described in similar terms, as "the Bride of the Lamb, ready and adorned for her husband". The Lamb is the the King (or Lord) of the City that is no other than the citadel of Atlantis itself. In fact, this quaint imagery is taken directly from the Ramayana, where it is applied to Lanka, about to be ravished by Rama and Hanumant. Moreover, the Celestial Jerusalem of Revelation is described in terms which closely parallels the description of Atlantis' capital, as done by Plato. And the "dressing with the sea" — in a white dress of foam that is even today ritually worn by the brides — is in reality an allegory of the Flood that engulfed the capital of Ravana's worldwide empire.

[Footnote: This comparison is not ours, but of Benjamin Jowett, the eminent translator of Plato's works. In a footnote to the Phaedo (110d), Jowett notes that Plato's ecstatic description of the netherworld closely parallels the one of Revelation, "especially 21:18ff", which is where John describes the Celestial Jerusalem as made of translucent gold and gemstones "bright as clear glass". Plato's description is highly obscure, and refers to the Khasma Mega (or "Huge Abyss") which links directly to Tartarus, and which is no other than the Vadava-mukha, as we have been arguing here and elsewhere. As we explain there, the white dress or veil indeed allegorizes the peplos of Hera.

So, the white dress of brides is indeed an ancient Pagan ritual which somehow passed into Christianity, though coming directly from the myth of Hera just mentioned. And, since Hera indeed represents the earth, her peplos symbolizes earth's covering during the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, as disclosed by Pherecydes of Syros and other ancient authorities. And this is in fact the white veil of cinders and pumice-stone which covered both the seas and the land of Atlantis at her destruction. This thick veil of cinders and pumice-stone is actually engendered by the giant volcanic caldera of the Krakatoa, alias Vadava-mukha or Khasma Mega. And this veil is also often allegorized as the Serpent Shesha, upon whose coiled body, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic Ocean, while the cosmic night lasts, during the interval between successive Creations.]

 

The Celestial Jerusalem and the Resurrection of the Dead

Plato, in the above passage is referring an occult tradition in mythical language. And this tradition is precisely the one of Atlantis, which he would later disclose more fully and as reality in the Timaeus and the Critias. In other words, the descent of the Celestial Jerusalem from heaven is a mirror image of the rise of the eschatological Jerusalem from the waves, its true residence. These two complementary events are actually mentioned in Revelation, as can be seen in an attentive reading of the obscure passage. After all, this is to be expected, as the heavens mirror the terrestrial events and vice-versa, according to the well-known aphorism of Hermes Trismegistus ("as Above, so Below").

The descent of the Celestial Jerusalem from heaven may be purely mythical. Or it may perhaps refer, as some will, to the return of the Atlantean children from the stars, which they reached long ago, during their apogee. This could be a fact, according to certain traditions such as the ones of the Hindus and others. But we are not so sure on that. However, as all specialists well realize nowadays, the rise of Atlantis from the waves — that of Sundaland itself, as we have been arguing for two decades now — is fated to happen in an almost unavoidable way.

This has happened over and over again, along the geological past, as the Interglacial Periods come and go, every 100,00 years or so. In fact, since Interglacials last only about 10 to 12 thousand years, the present one is already overstretched, and may indeed end quite soon. But, as Shiva is wont to say, "don't fret, because it won't hurt that much". And the kind god is not being cynical, but realistic, as he needs to cleanse this world for the start of the next era that is forthcoming, perhaps sooner than expected.

No, we do not want to scare anyone. But I think that hiding these facts from the public, as the academicians and politicians do, is sheer cheating. It is playing the ostrich when it sees some danger approaching. In other words, the end of the present era is certain to come soon, in a most unavoidable way. And not from above (asteroids), but from below (volcanism). The Resurrection of the Dead is not indeed a Judeo-Christian doctrine or novelty, as it is embodied in essentially all ancient traditions which far predates the rise of these two religions. This is indeed the meaning of the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead, a very old gradation.

This tradition is reported, for instance by Plato, in his Statesman (268e), and in the Tarot, that magnificent mutus liber of the ancient Gypsy (Arcane no. 20, Judgement). And the Gypsy, as is now known, are Dravidas who emigrated out of India long ago, perhaps in Classical antiquity, as we argue in detail elsewhere. How the ancients knew these advanced geological realities — which only now we are starting to uncover, and which are not even generally accepted by scientists, particularly of the Darwinian kind — is something that should puzzle any honest person who stops to think the matter over.

and this is particularly the case as Plato affirms, quite bluntly, that "these cataclysms will happen over and over again" like a recurrent calamity. How could the ancients possibly know these events, which date from so long ago? All these facts bespeak of the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, of the reality of Atlantis' fate, and of its origin in the Far East, in the dawn of times. These images derive directly from the of the Ramayana, as can be seen by a close collation of these traditions everywhere. And these traditions on Doom and on the return of Paradise and the Golden Age exist both in the Old and in the New Worlds in nearly verbatim form.

One such is that of the Apapocuva Guaranis of Brazil, one which we comment in detail elsewhere. Since the meaning is precisely the same in all cases, and given that these Indians, as now held, became separated for good from the Old World, these highly esoteric traditions necessarily predate the end of the Ice age, some 11,600 years ago. And this can mean one thing: Atlantis, either as a diffuser or as the actual common source of the myth.

The Nagini as the Whore of Revelation

But the connections just given can be carried even further. As Mueller and Alvarez Lopez pointed out, the shrine on the top of the Angkor pyramid was used for a strange Tantric ceremony akin to the Cosmogonic Hierogamy celebrated in the holy of holies of the Egyptian pyramids and temples, and in those of Babylonian ziggurats: the ritual mating of the King and the Whore, the priestess of Bastit. In Angkor, the king mates with the hierodule, the sacred prostitute who impersons the Nagini. And the Nagini is indeed the female Naga, whose role we discuss further below in the present article.

The Nagini is also the fateful blonde of Hindu traditions, the very same "Goldilocks" that we also encounter in the Egyptian myths which we detail below and elsewhere. In Egyptian traditions too, the Whore is connected with the pyramids, for instance in the report of Herodotus concerning the whorish daughter of pharaoh Cheops, or in the one related by Diodorus Siculus and the Arab historians, who ascribe the third pyramid of Giza to Naukratis, to Rhodopis, or to other such courtesans of fair countenance.

[Footnote: Cf. J. Alvarez Lopez, op. cit., and R. T. Rundle-Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London, 1959, pg. 54-5). For Pherecydes, see Kirk and Otmer, The Presocratic Philosophers (London, 1958, pg. 82). On Rhodopis and her mentions by Herodotus and others see this link to Perseus Project. Rhodopis — whose name means "rosy-cheeked" — is indeed an allegory of Dawn, invariably called by this sort of epithet by Homer and others (rhododaktylos Eos = "rosy-fingered Aurora"). Dawn is invariably made an insatiable lover, just like Rhodopis. Even more exactly, Eos-Rhodopis personifies Indonesia (or Taprobane) as the Land of Dawn, as well as the vagina dentata so feared by males. She is also the Whore of Revelation (17:1), the mystic Babylon which is no other than Atlantis-Eden in her decayed state.

In fact, the epithet of "rosy" or "ruddy" derives more from the name of Taprobane (Tamraparna = "ruddy-limbed", in Skt.) than from the correlation with sunrise, as we argue in detail elsewhere. And her fame as a whorish lamia, who devours her lovers actually results from the myth of the "earth which devours its inhabitants" mentioned in Numbers (13:32; 16:30). It is no coincidence that these passages refer to the earth opening up "in a great chasm" to devour people, or that Plato too refers to "this great chasm, vastest of them all" which, as we saw above, is no other than the Vadava-mukha. This voracious abyss, here equated to earth's yoni is also the "voracious Charybdis" of Homer's Odyssey and Orpheus' Argonautica, as well as the Hesiodic Khasma Mega, which we already commented further above.]

All these are, as we just said, Tantric rituals similar to the heb sed and the akitu. They replicate the Cosmogonic Hierogamy, and thus insure the periodic renovation of the Cosmos, after the model of the archetypal one which occurred with Atlantis. Alvarez Lopez notes the essential structural, symbolic and ritual identity of the American pyramids found in Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Bolivia, and Peru, with the ones of Angkor and Egypt.

The great Argentinian researcher even remarks the unequivocal connection of the American pyramids with the Atlantean myth, which had already been noted by Russian archaeologists such as Jaguemeister and others. For instance, one should note that the Egyptian pyramids essentially use three colors of stones with remarkable regularity: the white limestone of Tura and Mokatan, the red granite of Aswan, and the black basalt of the Sinai and elsewhere.

Now, these three colors of stones, obtained at great pains and at great distances, are precisely the ones mentioned by Plato, as composing the walls and buildings of Atlantis. We could believe in a coincidence were it not for the fact that the pyramids of Mexico are also built with these three colors of stones: red, white and black, precisely as in Atlantis. Very obviously, those colors had a ritual significance, probably related to the three races of Mankind, which also have similar colors. Anyone who visits these places, as we have done, will not fail to realize that fact, since it is so obvious.

In fact, the Mexicans often used a fourth color, yellow stones, completing the four colors of the human races. And so do the Egyptians, for that matter. Again, as usual, this motif is Hindu in origin, the four colors being the four varnas ("castes", "colors") of the Hindus and, indeed, of the Egyptians as well. These four colors are precisely the ones of the four human races: whites, yellows, reds and blacks.

All four are represented in the iconographies of the ancient Egyptians and, far more symbolically, in the ones of the Amerindians, who divide the world according to its four corners (or continents), colored precisely thus, as shown on our article on the Holy Mountain of the Navajo Indians. Now, to believe that this series of coincidences, and a myriad others we have been pointing out here and elsewhere can be ascribed to chance borders the irrational. So, what other conclusion can we reach but that of prehistoric contacts and of an Atlantean influence when we consider matters such as the ones argued above in detail?

father sky and mother earth

Far more than a fertility cult based on sympathetic magic, such rituals reenacted the destruction of the world in the Primordial Sacrifice. The mystic mating of King and the Whore or that of the Celestial Horse with the Cow-Mother represents the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth. This union, the Egyptians inverted into that of Mother Sky (Nut) and Father Earth (Geb), an operation permissible according to the "fuzzy logic" of myths.

This ritual mating is the same one as that described by Hesiod in his Theogony (155f.). The Greek bard tells how, in the beginning, Ouranos (the sky) detested his children. He oppressed them, leaving them no breathing space as he clung closely to his wife, Gaia (the Earth). His children were kept in the dark, somber recesses of the Earth until Kronos, helped by his mother, castrated and deposed his father, Ouranos, freeing them all.

The castrated phallus of Ouranos, thrown down into the Ocean by Kronos, became the Primordial Land. From the froth and blood it spilled in the waters, was born Aphrodite ("born of the scum (or seafroth)"). The words of Hesiod are worth quoting:

Inside herself, she posted Kronos, waylaid.
His father's genitals he grabbed with the left hand,
and with the right, the sickle sharp and toothed.
He cut the penis off, and threw it over his back,

Down into the sea, where it floated for long.
From the immortal spoils a white froth arose
and from it a girl was born most beautiful...
Her name Aphrodite, for from the froth she rose.

did hesiod invent his cosmogony?

Hesiod was not inventing this strange Cosmogony which has a typical Oriental

r.In a Hittite myth dating from the second millennium BC, a similar story is told. In the Hittite myth, Anu, the Sky God, is castrated and deposed by Kumarbi, who bites off and swallows his phallus. Kumarbi becomes pregnant, and later "spits" the Tempest God, Ullikumi. In time, the Tempest God, helped by the deposed Anu, defeats and ousts Kumarbi, becoming the new Sky God.

Even more closely, however, we have the myth of Shri — also called Lakshmi — being born from the froth engendered by the churning of the Ocean of Milk during the dispute of the gods and the devils for the Elixir. This Hindu myth is, as we argue in detail elsewhere, indeed an allegory of the destruction of Atlantis during the war of the two parties just mentioned, and who are indeed the two races of Atlantis, the Dravidas and the Aryans.

[FOOTNOTE: This dispute (or war) of the devas and asuras (gods and devils) is famous in Hindu myths, and figures in several passages of Hindu books such as the Mahabharata (ch. 17-19). Heinrich Zimmer has made a magnificent commentary of this profound myth of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk — which he correctly interprets as a mythified account of the end of the world — in his Maya, der Indische Mythos (Insel Verlag, Berlin, 1978). During this churning, the goddess Shri-Lakshmi rises from the waves and the froth or scum which covered them. This "froth" or "scum" is, once again, the same as the "mud" (ilus, pelos), which covered the seas of Atlantis, rendering them "innavigable", according to Plato's relation. We also note that, as we comment elsewhere, the "blue lotus" of Shri is indeed an allegory of the volcanic plume of smoke of the giant volcanism which destroyed Atlantis. This "lotus" is also the same as the Golden Flower of the I-Ching and as the deadly "Tree of Wisdom" which only too late imparted wisdom to Atlas and his peers.]

The Hittite myth is clearly related with the Greek myths concerning the sequential castrations and deposals of Ouranos by Kronos and of Kronos by Zeus. The "stone" swallowed by Kronos is a betyl. This stone is visibly the same as a linga or omphalos, itself identical to the phallus swallowed by Kumarbi. But both the Greek and the Hittite myths ultimately derive from Hindu myths, as we show in detail elsewhere. In the Rig Veda, Indra castrates and deposes his father Vritra, certainly from inside his mother's vagina, where he was forced to live. The myth of sequential castrations and deposals were also recurrent in ancient India. Vritra is castrated by Indra, who is in turn castrated by his own son, and so on. Likewise, Brahma is castrated by Shiva, his son, who is in his own turn castrated, becoming the linga.

Varuna — the archetype of Ouranos as the sky-god — is also castrated and thrown down into the Ocean, phallus and all. In this decayed state, Varuna became the lord of the ocean, the same as Apam Napat, "the Child of the Waters" Varuna is an archetype of Poseidon, and it is likely that Poseidon was the earlier sky god defeated and deposed by Zeus, his dual and elder and enemy. The Vedic myths are unclear, as they are known only from the highly obscure Vedic hymns. But later literature is ample, and these sources detail the earlier Vedic forms. It is clear that the ashvamedha and the ritual Tantric matings relate to these early variants of the myth, and that they symbolize the very same Cosmogonic events which are indeed no other than the tragic destruction of Paradise, of Atlantis-Eden.

[FOTNOTE: As we argue in detail elsewhere, Varuna is in every detail the alias and archetype of Poseidon-Neptune, the oceanic gods of the Greeks and the Romans. In fact, Varuna is Aurva, a personification of the fearful Vadava-mukha, the actual source of the earthquakes of which the god is said to be the lord. Poseidon is both the builder and creator of Atlantis, which he founded. He is also its destroyer, when he became disgusted with the disobedience of its inhabitants.]

poseidon-neptune indeed a hindu god

The names of both Poseidon and Neptune have no true etymology in the languages of the Greeks and the Romans, a fact that shows their foreign origins. The name of Neptune in fact derives from an inversion of Apam Napat > Napat Apam > Napat-Am > Neptun(us). Such is in fact the Dravidian form, from which the Sanskrit one originally derived. Likewise, the name of Poseidon, according to several specialists such as Junito Brandão (Mythico-Etymological Dictionary, Petropolis, 1989), in fact derives from his Sanskrit epithet Pati-Idas ("Lord of the Waters"). Not unlikely, this name also assonates with Pati-Idun or Pati-Edom, meaning "the Lord of Eden". Eden is everywhere celebrated as "the source of waters", so that the connection is not as farfetched as it may at first seem. And Eden is, as we have argued, the same as Atlantis, rendering the strange connection even more likely.

So also with the name of Triton, directly derived from the Skt. Trita, another epithet of Varuna. Triton, often said to be the "son" of Poseidon, is indeed his avatar as the ruler of the dismal Tritonian Marshes, where Atlantis was said to have sunk. The name of Trita means "Third One" or "Triple One" in Sanskrit. The name derives from his connection with the Hindu Trinity formed by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. It is from this Trinity (Trimurti) that the one of Judeo-Christians indeed derives, in a very obscure way. Trita is in fact an epithet of Shiva as the god of triplicities: the three-eyes, the trident, the three-bodies (trikaya), the three-faces, etc.. What this means is that Shiva, as Varuna, his Vedic archetype, is indeed the lord of all three realms: earth, sky and the netherworld.

In all probability, the worship of Poseidon, an alias and contender of Zeus himself, entered Greece and Rome through the Pelasgians and the Etruscans, their predecessors in the Mediterranean region. These are, as we show in detail elsewhere, Dravidian peoples which originally came from the East Indies. Indeed, these myths all visibly derive from a common source. This source can only be extremely ancient, as the concept was already present in an elaborate form in the Sumerian New Year festival of the akitu, which dates from 3,000 BC or even earlier, and which may very well have been brought by the Sumerians from the East Indies, whence they originally came, as their language and their traditions attest, and as we argue in detail elsewhere.

In other words, the East Indies — and, particularly Indonesia, in its sunken region, next to Southeast Asia — were actually the same as the legendary continent of Atlantis where Civilization first sprung. Moreover, as we just saw, the myth and ritual of the Horse Sacrifice was present, in one form or he other, in extremely distant ancient nations of the most diverse peoples: the Hittites, the Irish, the Sumero-Babylonians, the Vedic Aryans, the Persians, the Siberian Mongols, the ancient Greeks, etc.. Its equivalence to the Soma Sacrifice also affords a link with the Eucharist (or Holy Communion) of Judeo-Christianism and with the Persian haoma ritual, to mention just two of an unending series.

Most certainly, the Egyptian myths of the castration and deposing of Osiris by Seth and of Seth by Horus, the son of Osiris, who this avenges his father, belong to the same mythical motif. As we saw above, in a footnote, Osiris, after his castration, was buried inside the Holy Mountain. There, he unendingly celebrates his phallus-less, ritual mating with his consort, Isis, the Great Mother of both gods and men. This ritual mating of the god and the goddess is known in Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism as the Yabh-Yum, the mystic union of the Father and the Mother which we commented above. This union takes place in the innermost room of the Celestial Palace, the one inside the Holy Mountain of Paradise. This motif is endlessly reproduced in their mandalas, particularly in those of the Tibetan Buddhists.

We are now in a position where we can decode the hidden meaning of this strange universal myth of the Primordial Castration. The "froth" or "scum" is indeed the pumice stone shed by the giant volcanism (pumice = pumex = "froth", in Latin). And this slime or scum is indeed the "mud" (ilus, pelos) mentioned by Plato as covering the seas of Atlantis, rendering them "innavigable". The Castration is that of the Holy Mountain, and corresponds to its collapse and fall into the giant caldera caused by the mega-explosion and the voiding of its magma chamber, beneath the earth.

The "devouring" of his own children by Ouranos corresponds to the one done by the earth, as mentioned above. In other words, the two myths correspond to each other, with a sexual inversion. In reality, the two events are different, and correspond to the two such that actually happened in Indonesia, one associated with the Krakatoa explosion of the end of the Pleistocene, some 11,600 years ago, and the other one that of the Toba volcano, some 75,000 years ago. At both occasions mankind almost went extinct, just as did many superb species of "ante-diluvian" animals, as we already argued elsewhere in this site.

the ashvamedha of king yudishthira

Returning to the horse sacrifice and its ritual meaning. As we said above, the Horse Sacrifice (or Ashvamedha) was the main ceremony of the ancient Aryan kings. It was the privilege of great monarchs, as it was fabulously expensive and demanding. Its importance can be gauged from the fact that a full chapter (the 14th, called Ashvamedha Parva) of the Mahabharata is dedicated to the ceremony, of which it bears the name. This sacrifice was performed in order to commemorate the victory of King Yudishthira and the Pandus in the great war of the Mahabharata.

The reason why the ritual was so expensive is that, through it, the King claimed universal kingship, and thereby declared that he would wage war on all possible opponents. The sacrificial horse was released, and roamed freely through all lands for a whole year. It was followed by the royal army, so that the ashvamedha was an act of open provocation to all. Any king who resisted and refused to comply, was forced to fight with the invading army. If he lost or complied, he was invited to the sacrifice, and attended in full pomp and with his full court, at his host's expense.

The whole ritual lasted a full year, and many thousands of persons attended it. And all were supported by the king who was offering the sacrifice. Yudishthira's sacrifice was so expensive that he had to send Arjuna to fetch the enormous treasures of Kubera in the Himalayas, in order to finance the huge expenses. Krishna, another great king, also offered a Horse Sacrifice of no less importance than the one of King Yudhisthira. And, as we argue next, this sacrifice had a cosmic meaning associated with the periodic death and rebirth of the entire Cosmos, much as happened with Atlantis-Eden or as unavoidably will again happen with our own world, precisely as asserted in the Book of Revelation.

In a variant of the ritual, a human sacrifice was sometimes offered instead of the one of the horse. Like the horse, the human was given a year of full liberty. During this year of grace, he was treated like a king with all comforts, lovers included. Interestingly enough, this type of human sacrifice, with the year of privileges was widespread in the Americas, for instance, among the Mayas and the Aztecs. In Vedic India, this type of human sacrifice was called Purusha-medha ("human sacrifice"), and prevailed among the ancient Aryans.

Several hymns of the Rig Veda (RV 10:90; 10:130; etc.) allude to the sacrifice of Purusha, the giant from which all things were created, more or less as was the case with the Germanic Yimir, and the Chinese Pan-Ku, his exact counterparts. Other Vedic hymns (RV 1:163; 1:162, etc.) allude to the Horse Sacrifice in terms which clearly identify the victim to the Cosmos itself, and its dissolution. These hymns are all very complex and difficult to interpret, even by specialists. Several attempts have been made along the centuries by all sorts of scholars, both Hindu and western, all with very limited results.

However, there can hardly be any doubt that all these sacrifices, found the world over, indeed originated from a common source, in the dawn of times. Moreover, it seems obvious that they all refer to the dissolution of the Cosmos, that is, to an era transition such as the one which took place at the end of the last Ice Age, the event that led to the Holocene, the present geological era. Such is also precisely the meaning of Christ's crucifixion, as interpreted at a cosmic level. In other words, all such sacrifices, human or equine, are purely symbolic in character, despite the fact that they are often reenacted in an actual form the world over, particularly among the more barbaric populations.

In fact, a close study of the Vedic hymns just mentioned will disclose the fact that Purusha, the Supreme Man, is a precursor of Christ, immolated at the very Center of the World, of which he himself forms the Four Cardinal Directions. These extend from there as the Cross, just as they do in Paradise (the Four Rivers), in Angkor (the Four Roads), and in other such replicas of the world itself. And, of course, all these images derive from the one of Atlantis and its cross, the Cross of Atlantis. This shape also closely evokes Leonardo's famous drawing of the Measures of Man.

[Footnote: Leonardo da Vinci was, like so many Renascentists, indeed a Gnostic. Of course, these intellectuals closely hid their Gnostic affinities because of the ever watchful Holy Inquisition, ferociously bent on suppressing this type of "heresy". In fact, the Man-in-the-Wheel depicted in Leonardo's famous drawing is Purusha himself, stretched along the four (or five) Cardinal Directions departing from the Center. This type of symbolism is extremely ancient, and is found just about everywhere. In other words, Purusha is the archetype of Christ and of the Cross. Even more exactly, Purusha is an alias of Adam, the Archetypal Man and true precursor of Adam in Mt. Calvary, the Skull Mountain (formed from Adam's skull, according to some occult traditions which date from extreme antiquity.)

Leonardo copied his Man from Agrippa von Nettesteim, who in turn obtained it from alchemical sources. Similar figures are found in China, and even in Neolithic pictographs, as we comment in detail elsewhere. The hidden message is that the Man is the Cross himself, and that this Cross is indeed the same as Paradise. In the Vedic hymns just mentioned, Purusha is stretched out along the Four Cardinal Directions as if in the Cross. The sacrificial horse itself had its four members stretched out along the cardinal directions and was impaled on a spit, where it was roasted and later eaten in holy communion.]

the goat sacrifice

As we said above, the sacrificial horse or its human counterpart represented the entire Cosmos. The monarch who ordered the sacrifice was acclaimed the Universal Monarch (Chakravartin), the ruler of the whole, renewed Cosmos. In other words, he was mythically bringing about the Millennium and the Universal Conquest, just as does the White Knight in the Book of Revelation. This epoch-making conquest would only end with the death of the old Cosmos represented by that of the sacrificed horse and of its often neglected dual, the goat, its humbler counterpart.

In the ashvamedha a goat was also sacrificed, together with the horse. The two animals probably correspond to the two castrated gods of the above discussed myths. Further below, we shall see their exact meaning and their connection with Atlantis and the bull sacrifice that was celebrated there, according to Plato. As the supreme symbol (totem) of the victorious Aryans, the horse looms large in the Rig Veda. Celestial gods are often compared to horses there: Indra, Surya, Agni, Soma, etc..

The horse — often a flying-horse like Pegasus — was also equated to the Sun and to Fire. The humble goat was, instead, the symbol of the defeated Dravidas, who were thereby likened to the infernal asuras. Indeed, the goat was deemed the sacrificial victim of excellence. It was considered the scapegoat for the dead (RV 10:16) and for the horse of the ashvamedha (RV 1:162). This hymn describes the horse-sacrifice in detail and tells how the horse and his scapegoat are processioned in pomp to the sacrificial spot. The goat is the share of Pushan, an early sun-god who fell into disgrace, whereas the horse is the share of the Celestial gods themselves.

the symbolism of the goat and the horse

The Goat and the Horse represent the dual aspects of Creation. They represent, as we already said, the Universe. But, more exactly, they represent the twin Atlantises, as will become clear in what follow below. The Horse is Celestial and supreme, whereas the Goat is Infernal and humble. The Goat represents Capricornus, the Water-Goat. In other words, he is the Fallen Sun, fallen from the supreme position down into the seas, into the infernal depths of the great abyss.

Greek myths tell how Pan, during the war of the gods with Typhon and his hosts, assumed the shape of a goat (Capricornus), and jumped into the Nile river in order to escape the fearful giant. In other versions, the god is substituted by Eros and Aphrodite who become the fishes of Pisces, in the Zodiac. Here, the allegory of the death by drowning of the twin Atlantises commemorated by the goat and the horse is even more transparent. And the story is cribbed verbatim from the myth of Matsya and Matsyâ (the male fish and his female), which is a celebrated motif in India from the dawn of times, as we comment in more detail further below. Matsya is also an alias of Kama, himself the Hindu love god and archetype of Eros himself. In fact, the dives of these twin deities impersons the primeval ones of the twin Atlantises, Mother and Son, sinking under the seas in the dawn of times.

Of course, the fall of Pan is an allegory of the fall of the Celestial God who, from a mountain goat — a dweller in the summits — fell into the seas, and became a sort of fish or marine deity. Capricornus is the makara, the Hindu seamonster that causes the Flood. The makara (or sishumara) is a sort of dolphin or seamonster. It is the same as Matsya, the fish avatar of Vishnu. Matsya personifies Paradise — or rather, Lanka. Lanka is the Hindu archetype of Atlantis — fallen from the skies, from the Celestial heights of Mt. Meru, into the ocean, where it disappeared forever, turned into Hell.

At a higher level, the Fall of Pan is the one of Lucifer and/or of Adam. And this in turn corresponds to the one of celestial Varuna, turned into Trita Aptya, the marine god. As we comment elsewhere in detail, this fall into the waters corresponds to the one of the Twins of all mythologies, the Navajo ones in particular. And, as we comment in the link just given and elsewhere, the fall of the Navajo twins closely corresponds, in both shape and hidden symbolism to the ones of Lucifer (Antichrist) and Christ, their Christian counterparts. This double fall is precisely the one represented in the Tarot arcane of the Tower (Arcane no. 16).

Here, the two personages falling head down from the Tower are said to be Solomon and Hiram, the two builders of the Temple here represented by the Tower. At another level they are Christ and Lucifer or Michael and the Dragon or, yet, the two Beasts of Revelation. The Tower, like Solomon's Temple — which is purely symbolic, and never existed at all — indeed represents Atlantis, often also figured as a twin tower. The vajra, falling down from heaven in order to destroy the twin towers bring us all painful memories of Sept. 11, perhaps the event marking the very start of Armageddon.

[Footnote: The name of Atlantis ultimately derives from the Sanskrit Atala, the name of the Hindu Paradise, sunken under the seas, and turned infernal. Atala was, as we argue elsewhere, the true archetype of Atlantis. The word atala also means "watchtower" in Skt., from which the Portuguese atalaia and the Spanish atalaya (meaning the same) also derive, probably via the Arabic. Hiram (Abiff) was the master architect of the Temple of Solomon, as well as the notorious founder of Free-Masonry, a tradition that dates back to Atlantis itself. The thunderbolt destroying the Tower indeed represents the vajra, itself an allegory of the huge volcanism which destroyed Atlantis, twice in a row (the Toba and the Krakatoa superexplosions).

This symbolism is everywhere infinitely repeated, in quaint variants which complement each other, and which leave little room for doubting they all refer to Atlantis-Eden and its destruction by the vajra. In the Rig Veda this fall of the vajra is represented by the one of Angiras Dadhyanch. And Angiras — whose name literally means "angel" is in fact the archetype of the Fallen Angel. This fall is told in Revelation as the one of Lucifer and Michael, who pursue their angelic, unending war here on earth, now as the two Beasts. This war indeed derives directly from the Hindu one of the gods and the devils (or devas and asuras), respectively led by Skanda-Karttikeya and Ganesha, their respective generalissimos. We tell that story in detail elsewhere, and will not delve into it here except to say that Plato himself equated that memorable war to the one of Atlantis, so as to leave no room for doubting its real meaning: the archetypal Armaggedon..]

But the makara is also Kama, the Hindu love god who was the archetype of Eros-Cupid. Again, Kama is also the son and lover of Rati. And Rati is an alias of Aphrodite, the mother and lover of Eros, the Greek counterpart of Kama, the Hindu love god. As we see, the Greek myths are not only a close copy of the Hindu ones. They also have the same esoteric meaning. These myths all ultimately relate to the death of Atlantis proper, and its Lemurian Mother in the primordial cataclysm that we know by the name of Universal Flood or Deluge. The two animals image the twin Atlantises fallen from the skies — from the summit of Mt. Atlas, the Pillar of Heaven — and subsequently drowned in the ocean.²

In Hindu traditions, the Paradises and their Holy Mountains are two, the Sumeru in the North, and the Kumeru in the far south. In reality, these two mountains represent Mt. Kailasa in the Himalayas, and Mt. Trikuta, where Lanka was built, in Indonesia. One (Kailasa) is identified to the linga (or phallus), to Shiva, and to the northern Meru (Sumeru). The other one is associated to the yoni (vagina), to Parvati (Shakti) and to the southern Meru (Kumeru). In an earlier, more factual symbolism, the two Holy Mountains were two volcanoes, and corresponded to the twin Pillars of Hercules, the true markers of Atlantis' position, according to Plato and others.

Avienus describes the two pillars of Hercules, one as a lofty pillar, the other one as a sort of cup or caldera. So do the Hindus, who identify the twin Merus, one to the Cosmic Yoni (or Vadavamukha), the other to the linga (or icy phallus of Shiva). These two features also correspond to the two perils of Homer's Odyssey (12:73), Scylla and Charybdis, described precisely thus. In fact, the two Pillars of Hercules correspond to the two volcanoes of Indonesia, placed next to the Malacca Strait and the Sunda Strait, the two passages leading into Paradise (Atlantis), in the opposite hemisphere of the earth. One corresponds to the Toba Volcano, in north Sumatra, the other one to the Krakatoa Volcano, between Java and Sumatra, in the southern end of the paradisial island.

the goat represents atlantis as the fallen sun

The goat is also often identified to Indra in India. Indra is also called meshanda ("whose testicles are those of a goat"). This epithet is due to the fact that Indra once made love to his guru's wife, a most grievous sin. In consequence of his incontinence, Indra was castrated and covered full with yonis, which he could not resist. Later, he was restored with an implant of a goat's testicles, earning the above epithet of meshanda.

In reality, this allegory represents the fact that the Aryans (Indra) appropriated the creative role (the Phallus) of the Dravidas (the Goat), claiming that the second Atlantis was greater than the first one, the Great Mother (Amalthea). The goat is a symbol of the Sun in India, where the day star is called Aja Ekapad ("the goat of the single foot"). Aja means not only "goat", but also "unborn" (a-ja). As such, it is the symbol of primordial, unorganized matter, the same as Prakriti. The goat is also associated with the vajra, an image of the Fallen Sun. Interestingly enough, this association prevailed not only in India, but also in China, Tibet, and even Greece.

At an even more realistic level, the yoni stands for a volcanic caldera, just as the phallus stands for a volcanic peak. When the volcano erupts with violence, exploding and collapsing and turning into a gaping caldera, we have what mythographers allegorize as a castration. The many yonis of Indra sahasraksha ("he of a thousand yonis") in fact allegorize the endless succession of the eras, triggered as they are by giant volcanic explosions such as the one of the Toba volcano of 75 kya (kiloyears ago) and the one of the Krakatoa volcano, some 11,6 kya, when the second Atlantis, the "Son", went under, and the Pleistocene Age ended, according to the most recent finds of expert geologists and climatologists.

the aegis and aja ekapad

The association of the goat with the Devil is too well known to require elaboration here. The Aegis — the shield of Zeus and Minerva — was fashioned by Hephaistos from the unpierceable skin of the she-goat Amalthea. The word "aegis" derives from the Greek aigis ("goat skin"), related to the Sanskrit aja and to the name of the Aegean Sea. Allegedly the name Aegean derives from Aegeus, the father of Theseus, who drowned there. Aegeus, the father of Theseus, was deemed to be a son of Poseidon.

Aegeus is indeed the same as Poseidon, who was actually so named in Euboea. Far more likely, the name of Aigaia derives from the one of Aja Ekapad, who symbolized the sacrificial pole or, alternatively, the sun itself. In fact, Aja Ekapad (or Ajaikapadi), "the single-footed goat" is a facetious designation of the male's penis. The god is figured as the emblem of ithyphallic Shiva himself. But the figure of the one-footed capriped was widespread, and is encountered even in the Americas, where the Mayan god Hurakan is depicted as a unipedal deity.

No matter what, the Aigaia, the golden submarine realm of Poseidon is no other than sunken Atlantis itself. And the Ekapad, the "single-footed one" is indeed an allegory of the fierce submarine volcano which destroyed Atlantis, the Krakatoa. In Hindu myths, as in those of other nations, volcanoes are often identified to the phallus, to the sacrificial pole (often fiery), to the Sun, to Agni, to Shiva, to the Pole Star, the Morning Star, and so on. The idea is that the submarine volcano is indeed the same as the Fallen Sun or the fallen Morning Star (Lucifer, etc.), just as described above.

According to Homer, the submarine golden palace of Poseidon — the very archetype of the Eldorado and of the sunken Atlantis — was called Aigaia, meaning the same as "Aegaea" or "Aegea". What these legends are hinting at is that Aegeus — who was a marine god himself — is the same as Poseidon or Neptune and, more exactly, as Atlas, the son of that god that personifies Atlantis. And Poseidon, the Lord of the Earthquake is, again, an alias of Varuna, also called Apam-Napat (that is, Napat-Am = Neptune).

More likely the name of the Aegean sea has to do with the legend of the Golden Fleece and the drowning of Helle. Helle drowned there when she fell off the Golden Lamb while flying over that sea with her brother Phrixus, mounted on it. This lamb seems to be the same as the she-goat Amalthea. Its skin is also the Golden Fleece quested by the Argonauts, itself an allegory of Atlantis.

The drowning of Pan, of Aegeus, of Helle, of Atlas, of the she-goat Amalthea, of the Pleides, and so on, all seem to be an allegory of the sinking of Atlantis. As we just saw, myths tend to repeat themselves ad infinitum, under different forms, each more fascinating than the previous one. The word aigis also means "tempest", "flood", and thus again tends to identify the Atlantean cataclysm with the one of the Flood. And the true Aegean Sea — the Sea of Aegeus (or Poseidon) where the Golden Lamb (or Eldorado) sunk away — is indeed the Indian Ocean, rather than its Greek counterpart.

This sea, the Sea of Atlantis, should not at all be confused with its Greek replica recreated by the Greeks in the Mediterranean when they moved into that region of the world, having come from the distant Indies. The true "Atlantic Ocean", the primeval "Ocean of the Atlanteans", was originally the Indian Ocean, as we argue in detail elsewhere.

The specialists consensually hold that nations such as the ones of the Mediterranean Basin developed in essential isolation from the other ones say, from the East Indies and of North Asia. But this doctrine is shortsighted,and fails to account for parallels such as the ones we have been pointing out for over two decades now. In fact, the present scientific paradigm on the birth and evolution of Civilization in the Mediterranean rim is somewhat stupid, as it is not founded on fact, but on ethnocentric reasons, and indeed dismisses the vast contrary evidence.

Humans can move, either on foot or on ships, from one of these distant places to the other in under one year, let alone in a few centuries. And this they indeed do, particularly when pressed by famine, draught, diseases, wars and other such calamities. And these mass movements are thoroughly documented in essentially all places on earth since the earliest epochs. So, why insist in the fixity of humans, when history, traditions and many other anthropological evidences converge in showing precisely the contrary?

Yes, the Amerindians too, like indeed all of us humans, are also "Sons of God" or rather, "Sons of the Gods", that is, of the Atlanteans. This is what their traditions say, just like ours. And this is what History and Archaeology, as well as the other sciences, human or not, are fast starting to show to all of us humans. Humanity, as well as Civilization itself, first arose in the East, just as our myths all say. And by that they mean not the Near East, as some think, but the Far East, the Land of Dawn, where both the sun and the humans first rose above the animal stage, if at all.

[FOOTNOTE: As we argue in detail, this biased view that the Amerinds and other such natives developed in essential isolation from the other nations -- or, rather, failed to do so remaining "primitives" -- is not only stupid, but also the result of an enduring preconception that the Aryans are somehow better than the "inferior" natives they find everywhere. In fact, this omnipresent white preconception dates from the Victorian Age, and the days of the Conquest, when its philosophy was highly useful, as it provided the impetus for the "Christianization" of the "savages" they met everywhere.

Of course, while carrying on the "white man's burden", the conquerors felt it was their right to alleviate the natives of their life and property as well. The main idea was that of R. S. Coon and other polygenists, Darwin and Lyell included, who insisted in somewhat Nazist dogmas such as the "survival of the fittest", and their need of Lebensraum. After all, the natives had to be fundamentally different from the white colonists, since they were only sub-human. And the invaders, in turn, were the summit of creation, and hence automatically entitled to supersede the less fit, all in accordance with the divine will,which commanded the whites to remove both their sins and their land, their freedom, and their property.

Being isolated and hence inferior, the natives — deprived of the vivifying contact with the whites which would cause them to evolve — had not partaken of divine salvation, and had to be rescued by the whites. The proof of that lack of contact with the whites was their brown skin — which was indeed a result of their living in the Tropics, and hence a mark of superiority, at least under such conditions, rather than of some shameful mark imposed by some racist God, as some will, even today, witness the story of Cham, which goes on unabashed.

In time, all whites got used to this paradigmatic idea of their inherent superiority as the result of indoctrination by both the Church and the State. And bad habits die hard, and are difficult to cure. Such is particularly the case with ethnocentric biases, which are particularly blinding. In fact, if anything, the whites are "inferior" to the browns, as their genes such as blue-eyes and fair hair and skin are recessive, and tend to get swamped out when crossbreeding with darker skinned populations. and such isthe reason these populations are usually rather dark, but for a few exceptions.]

the true origin of the cross

Both sacrificial victims of the ashvamedha — the horse and the goat — were killed, impaled and roasted. Then the worshippers communially ate their roasted meat and the broth prepared from their remains. Before their sacrifice, the victims were tied to the sacrificial pole, called skambha or stambha or, yet, stavara or ekapad. As is clear,the word ekapad here assumes its fescenine meaning of "phallus, spike, spit, impaling pole".

The skambha (lit. "prop", "pillar") was considered a replica of the Pillar of Heaven, the axis or support of the skies. It was identified with Brahma and with Shiva, the two world-supporters, as well as with Purusha, the Primordial Sacrifice himself. The skambha had the shape of a cross or, also, of a Y, precisely that of the Cross or Rood. To the crossbar were tied the victim's forelegs so as to prevent it from slipping around in the spit as it was rolled over the fire.

Like the Cross, the Skambha was also equated both to the Pillar of Heaven and to the Tree of Life. Many authorities, such as F. Max Mueller, have pointed out the fact that the name of the Cross in the original Greek is stauros, and that this word derives from the Sanskrit stavara (pronounced "stawara"), its Hindu archetype in the ashvamedha sacrifice.

Naturally, all such parallels are the result of diffusion, rather than random coincidences or some inherent feature of the human brain, as we have all been taught and conditioned to believe. And we thus see how the Evangelic notion was derived from Hindu archetypes. This is further rendered plausible by the fact that, in the earliest iconographies, the crucified Christ had a horse's head like that of the Ashvins and other Solar gods burnt at stake, in some sort of a primordial ashvamedha. In fact, the very first iconography of Christ's crucifixion shows Christ as a horse-headed god hanging from the Cross (Fig. II(a)).

[INSERIR FIG II(a) (A. Martigny, Dict. Antiq. Chretiénnes, pg. 95) AND II(b) (F. du Portal, Los Simb. Egip. pg. 27)]

 

So did Typhon-Seth, the Egyptian god who was also crucified or impaled, and who also had an ass' head. The same is also true of the Ashvin twins of Hindu mythology, despite the fact that this event is never told clearly anywhere. And this primordial sacrifice of the equine god is no other than the one of Atlantis, as we just said. The above iconography of Christ's crucifixion was found as a graffito, on a wall of the Palace of the Caesars, in Rome, whence it was taken to the Kircher Museum. The inscription is in (broken) Greek and reads: Alexamenos sebete theon ("Alexamenos worships his god"). And the personage is shown kissing the hand of the crucified one, the ancient manner of worship.

This type of belief of the early Judeo-Christians is hard to believe. But it is one supported by a series of further facts. Tacitus (Hist. 5) affirms that "the Jews, while wandering in the deserts of Arabia, were guided to a spring by an ass, which they followed to it. Subsequently, they built an image of the animal, and worshipped it". Tertulian (Ad. Nat. I:14) reports that a Jew falsely accused the Christians of worshipping a donkey's head. In order to prove his accusation, he produced the image bearing the inscription: Deus Christianorum ("the God of the Christians").

According to experts such as the Abbé Martigny (Dict. des Antiq. Chrét., pg. 95), the accusation derives from the passage in the Gospels that tells of the triumphant entry of Jesus in Jeruslaem, riding a donkey's foal (Mat. 21:2; John 12:14). We believe that the connection is even deeper than this. Several sources which we comment elsewhere tell of Medieval Black Masses where the donkey figured centrally. One such source is the erudite A. Gubernatis (Myth. Zool., Paris, 1874), who lists many instances, all duly referenced. The persons interested in this theme should read his book, which is also available in English. In fact, de Gubernatis refers a great of interesting Hindu traditions on equine deities.

Typhon as a Half Personified Volcano

The second of the above figures is also remarkable. It shows Seth-Typhon, the Egyptian god often associated with evil as illustrated in the Leyde Papirus. The name on his breast is written in Coptic and reads "Seth". The legend means something like "onocephalus". The two staffs he holds are related to the two Pillars of Hercules. They are topped by two feathers whose meaning in Egyptian hieroglyphics is "wind". What this means is the fact that the two Pillars of Hercules are indeed volcanoes, from which issue plumes ("feathers") of smoke which indeed reach up to heaven. The connection of Seth-Typhon with volcanoes is apparent in Hesiod's account of the war of the gods against Typhon mentioned further above.

Typhon is a half-personified volcano, who spits fire and is deemed to be buried under Mt. Aetna, the famous volcano in in Sicily. Its volcanic fire is attributed to the giant, burnt up by Zeus' thunderbolt (Apoll. Lib. 1:6:3). The masterful description of Typhon's duel with Zeus done by Hesiod (Theog. 820) is clearly one of a huge maritime volcanic eruption of sufficient size to destroy the entire world. In fact, this duel seems to have been taken up from the Rig Veda and its own accounts of the duel of Indra and Vritra. And this conclusion is reinforced by Pausanias (Descript. 9:35:1), who affirms that the poem is not possibly Hesiod's creation. Well, we agree with the erudite geographer insofar as the essentials of the titanic duel were somehow copied from the ample Hindu mythology on the subject which indeed dates from far earlier times.

We also note that the name of the ass in Hebrew, HEMR, means "to be red or fiery". Once again we have the connection with fire and volcanoes, as well as with the Chams or Chamites, whose name means the same, as we saw further above. The obvious conclusion is the fact that the ass represents the totemic animal of the red peoples such as the Phoenicians, the Himiarites, the Amorites and other such "reds", among whom we also count the Tocharians and related nations of the ancient Far East (China and Indonesia), whose name also means "red", as we show elsewhere.

In other words, the ass represents the decayed ruddy Atlanteans, just as the horse represents this people in the undecayed, noble status. Some Egyptian iconographies of Seth-Typhon show the god as an ass-headed deity impaled on on a pole or on the prow of the divine boat of Ra. This has, of course the same esoteric meaning as the portrait of the ass-headed, crucified Christ just discussed.

These representations also evoke the fact that Dadhyanch-Angiras -- the Vedic god commented further above -- also had an ass' head. This head was decapitated by Indra, because he told the secret of the amrita (Elixir) to the Ashvin Twins, likewise horse-headed. Angira's decapitated hed fell into a lake or sea, becoming the Primordial Land. This fable is connected to the one of the phallus of Ra emerging from the Nun; to the one of the fall of the vajra (which Angiras' head became), to the Tarot arcane of the Tower Struck by Lightining, and several others such. Here, the "head" is obscurely identified to the glans penis, often called by that name everywhere.

In brief, the myth of the ass-headed gods impaled or crucified at the two poles or the two Pillars of Hercules in fact corresponds to the one of Atlantis destroyed by terrible volcanic cataclysms at two different occasions, one by the Toba, the other by the Krakatoa volcano. The motif is also connected to the Vadavamukha, itself a mare's or donkey's skull, in all probability the one of Dadhyanch-Angiras fallen down from heaven. This motif also brings to mind the myth of Lucifer's Fall, and the emerald that, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach, having fallen from his crown, was carved into the Holy Grail.

[FOOTNOTE: It is interesting to note that none of the several theories on the Holy Grail circulating in the Internet or in the many books on the subject, ever comes even close to the mark. But this is no surprise, for this is the case with essentially all esoteric matters such as the ones we have been discussing here. The true key is given by Wolfram von Eschenbach himself, as commented in the above link on the Holy Grail. First of all, we note that the name of the Grail derives from the Provençal grazale, via the French gradale meaning "a dish (scutella), wide and somewhat deep, in which costly viands are wont to be served to the rich in degrees (gradatim), one morsel after another in different rows. In popular speech it is also called "greal" because it is pleasant (grata) and acceptable to him eating therein", etc.

This word is also related to the French gradale or cratale, itself derived from the Latin crater and the Greek krater meaning a shallow vessel or plate where sacrifices were offered to the gods in ancient Greece. The second clue is also afforded by Wolfram. The bard conceives of it as "a precious stone, lapsit exillis (i.e. lapis or lapsi ex caelis) of special purity, possessing miraculous powers conferred upon it and sustained by a consecrated Host", which is indeed the blood of Christ, with powers to act as the Elixir. This precious stone fallen from heaven is both the emerald fallen from Lucifer's crown, as well as the "diamond skull" of Angiras-Dadhyanch which is also the vajra and the skull of Adam forming Mt. Calvary, etc..

When we unite the two above clues -- the connection with craters and with meteoritic stones fallen from heaven -- the solution becomes obvious. It also explains the ancient worship of meteorites everywhere: in the Caaba of Mecca, in the pyramids of Mexico, in Asia Minor (Pessinunte), etc.. So, the Grail is indeed the meteoritic crater opened up by the palladium which fell from heaven. In Hindu traditions, this object became the Holy Mountain, and the lake around, full of soma or amrita, that is, of the Elixir. With this, we have traced the legend of the Holy Grail back to Vedic India and, indeed to Atlantis and the cataclysm that destroyed it, the fall of the vajra thunderbolt. But we note that, rather than a meteorite, "the stone fallen from heaven" (lapis lapsi ex coelis) indeed refers to the volcanic cataclysm and the volcanic bombs and ejecta shed by it during the conflagration that destroyed Atlantis-Eden.

For completeness' sake, we note that the splendid castel of Montsalvat (or Munsalvaesche) where the Holy Grail was kept, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach, is neither the Cathar fortress of Montsegur, nor Glastonbury in England, nor the crypt Jesus' birth in Jerusalem, nor the church of the Ark of Covenant in Ethiopia, nor the interior of the Great Pyramid, where some think it is, but indeed the true site of Eden, where the great heroes such as Hercules and Dionysos invariably went questing it. Otto Rahn (1904-1938) the great, tormented German occultist, believed that he had found the location of the Holy Grail Mountain, the Montsalvat of legend, in the Cathar mountain fortress of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees.

Otto Rahn was largely responsible for the widespread belief that the Holy Grail was somehow in the possession of the Cathars and, later, of their heirs, the Knights Templars and the Knights of Christ. Well, there is indeed a connection with the Gnostics and their traditions, as we explain in detail elsewhere. But it is one connected with the Atlantean mythology, and the mysteries attending it. As we saw above, this connection derives from the East Indies, whence the Celts originally came, bringing along their holy traditions on the Holy Grail and its true location, there, on the opposite hemisphere. Montsalvat is not to be interpreted as the "Mountain of Salvation", but as Mont Calvat, that is, Mt. Calvary. And this is not the mountain in Jerusalem, but its true archetype, the "Bald Mountain" (Monte Pelado) which is no other than Mt. Meru, the Holy Mountain of the Hindus from which all such traditions ultimately derive.]

Lucifer, the Twin Elder Brother of Michael

It is easy to see -- now that the uncanny parallels have been pointed out in some detail -- that Typhon-Seth, alias Purusha or Adam, is no other than an archetypal Lucifer, the fallen angel himself. Before his fall, Lucifer was a magnificent angelic figure, a veritable god worshipped by all. In fact, he was the alias and counterpart of the Supreme God everywhere, his dual and twin. It is no coincidence that gods come in pair, as the Twins of all mythologies: Aryman and Angra Manyu in Persia; the Ashvin Twins, or Mitra and Varuna in India; Zeus and Poseidon, or Hercules and Atlas in Greece; Lucifer and Michael or Elohim and Jahveh in Judeo-Christianism, and so on. And in all cases they fight, and often end up castrating or somehow disfiguring one another. Such was the case of Horus and Seth. In their duel, Horus succeeded in castrating Seth, but also lost an eye in the dispute. In certain variants, these losses assume a very fescenine character.

Even in the Americas we have the same story. The Navajos speak of the Twins, whom they call "Little War-Gods", a name which closely evokes that of the Ashvin Twins of Hindu mythology. Even more exactly, these little gods evoke the figures of the two brothers, Skanda and Ganesha, respectively the generalissimos of the gods and of the devils in Hindu mythology, and who are generally described as two children, as is so often the case with the twins.

In other versions, they are one huge and brutal, the other one small and effeminate. Such is the case, for instance, of Amphion and Zethos or Atlas and Hercules in Greek mythology, or of Krishna and Balarama, in Hindu religion, and so on. The Aztecs of Mexico make of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, his twin, the all-creators of their religion. So do the Mayas, with Tepeu and Gucumatz, the twin creators of the Popol Vuh or with Hunahpú and Ixbalanqué, their human counterparts there. The story is obscure and confused, though highly interesting. This is particularly the case of its esoteric aspects, whose analysis does not fit here, however. It is interesting to note that one of the twins is beheaded by the bats, but is revived later. This beheading probably relates to the one of Angiras-Dadhyanch and his many peers elsewhere.

In the sacred traditions of the Apapocuva Guarani of Brazil,