Читать книгу King Solomon's Goat - George Willard Bartlett - Страница 6

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When the sun entered the sign of Capricorn, it was reborn as, or christ came as the goat, that individual on whom the Jews used to load all their sins and then drive him forth into the wilderness. They sacrificed goats on the altar because the goat was one of the ancient redeemers. Caesar says of Egyptian sacrifices: “Imprecations were uttered over the head of the expiatory victim, around whose horns a piece of byblus was rolled. The animal was generally led to some barren region sacred to Typhon. It is in this custom that lies the origin of the scapegoat of the Jews, who, when the ass-headed god was rejected by the Egyptians, began sacrificing to another deity, the red heifer.”

It was claimed by Madam Blavatsky and Elephas Levi that the hermaphrodite Goat of Mendes, or Baphomet, was anciently an object of worship and adoration by the mystic societies and at the Witches’ Sabbath. In Mysteries of Magic, 7 and 75, the author thus describes a Witches’ Sabbath: “Approach stealthily this cross roads among the rocks. A hoarse and funeral trumpet is heard, lurid torches burn on every side, a disorderly assembly surges around an empty seat. All look around in expectation, then suddenly fall prostrate and mutter: ‘He is here, ’tis himself.’ A goat-headed prince comes forward with bounds, he ascends the throne, turns around and stooping presents his back to the audience, which everyone approaches, black taper in hand, to salute and to kiss. Then he stands up with a discordant laugh and distributes to his favorites gold, secret instructions, occult medicines and poisons.”

The Goat of Mendes is pictured by Elephas Levi as a regular god. He wears the male emblem on his head like all gods in good standing and holds up three fingers, and has the double triangle in his forehead, and the caduceus, or male and female emblems, on his stomach. With one hand he coagulates or creates, and with the other he dissolves or destroys.

“Let us say boldly and loudly that all the inferior initiates of the occult sciences and the betrayers of the Great Arcanum have adored, do and will always adore that which is signified by the frightful figure of the Sabbatic Goat. Yes in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the ancient orders of the Templars adored Baphomet.”—Elephas Levi. It will be seen by the chart that the Masonic coat of arms, consisting of the four zodiacal beasts, is supported on either side by the goat god Pan.

Pan, the Good Shepherd, the son of Deus, with the horns and feet of a goat, is the same as the Devil or christ. At the Witches’ Sabbath in England, the women made manikins, or images of men, of clay or wax, and these they worshipped and played with. And when these images were properly magnetized, they could perform miracles therewith and summon up demons from the abyss. If they possessed sufficient will power and knew the occult and secret form of words to use, they could play that the manikin was an enemy, and then stick him through the heart with a needle, and the next morning the enemy would be dead. If their magical power was sufficiently potent, they could summon a satyr or subordinate goat god to take the place of the manikin and consummate the Sabbatical marriage ceremony. Their spells were said to be sufficiently powerful to reduce a human being to the primordial protoplasm, and then cause it to again pursue the path of evolution through the cell, the blastoderm, the devil-fish and all the other beasts constituting eternity’s great highway by which the soul walks down. This is similar to the unavoidable cycle, the circle of necessity, the inexorable doom of the sacred mysteries of the Serpents’ Catacombs of Egypt.

The countersign of the Witches’ Sabbath was the closed hand with the thumb between the first and second fingers pointing downward to the abyss. The meeting place was lighted only by the altar fire, where the human sacrifice sizzled to attract the phantoms and ghosts. And the devotees, singing mystic songs, danced hand in hand in a circle around the god Pan. They used the holy grail like the churches and mystic societies, and the drafts from this poisonous cup, the singing, the whirling dance and the incense from the altar brought on the oft-times fatal frenzies in which the victims fell shrieking to the ground, as they do among certain Christian sects. They were seized and possessed by foul fiends from the Pit, or elementary spirits, and sometimes by the spirits of serpents that materialized themselves in the writhing human victims and crawled out of the prostrate bodies in plain view of the audience. There in the blackest hour of the night the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water. And each one that drank found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream.—Machen’s House of Souls, 438.

Similar to these convulsionaries are the miserable creatures in Russia afflicted by strange disorders, which people attributed to possession by the Devil. They throng the entrance of cathedrals without daring to enter, lest their controlling demons cast them on the ground. At the Elevation of the Host, these half maniacs, half mediums begin crowing like cocks, barking, bellowing and braying, and finally fall down in fearful convulsions. They prophesy and see visions. Paracelsus, the magician, could cast the demons out of the persons so possessed by the power of a stronger demon which he carried around in his pocket. That reminds us of the Salem witch that fled from a mob of Christolators who were intent on burning her, but when they were about to seize her, she crawled into a bottle, and nobody ever saw her afterward.

In the Devil’s Mass of the Yezdis, or Devil worshippers and sorcerers of Mesopotamia, the Jakshas or aerial spirits carry their prayers to the Devil and the Afrites of the desert. In their prayer meeting they dance in a ring about their high priest and whirl and leap in the air and cut each other with daggers until they are soaked with blood for the purpose of attracting the ghosts. The mystic circle induces Satan to manifest himself in miracles. Enormous globes of fire appear and assume the shapes of monsters.

The Sabbath was the Sunday of the Hebrew Kabalists, the day of their religious assembly, or rather the night of their habitual meetings. This festival, surrounded by mysteries as it was, found its safeguard in the very fright of the vulgar and escaped persecution through the terror it occasioned. The early Christians celebrated the pagan Mysteries of Jesus and probably held a Witches’ Sabbath.—See Mystic Christianity, 212.

One should trim his finger nails on Friday, never on Thursday, otherwise the nails will commence growing on the Sabbath, and it is very wicked for the nails to grow on the Sabbath.—Kabala. The Israelite, after the endless Sabbath observances, should fold up his veil, but if he forgets to do so, he is to shake it thoroughly the next morning, so as to shake all the devils out of it. And the reason is known to the Lords of the Kabala.—Kabala Kitzur Sh’lh. It is a very pious act to say a prayer to the moon at the close of the Sabbath, for the moon is a symbol of Jacob, the lesser light, (who was a christ). The full moon, the Queen of Heaven is his mother, and the sun is his father. The new moon is Jacob or Christ.—Ibid, fol. 72, col. 2. You should learn these things together with all the other profound wisdom of the Talmud, for Rabbi Yochannan says that it is lawful to split open an unlearned man like a fish.

Constantine, the Roman Emperor and canonized saint, the superstition-besotted, the assassin, the fratricide, the parricide, the uxoricide, the filicide, the regicide, chosen from Heaven as the murderer-in-chief of the world, according to Eusebius, “held up by God to the human race as an exemplary pattern of godliness and destined to share the Empire of Heaven with Christ,” this was the bloated, red-faced profligate who established Sunday worship in 321 A. D. and compelled the Christians to worship the sun-god on Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun, because his own god was Apollo.—See First Council of Nice, 28. Constantine was the founder of Christianity, and, like father like son, it followed in his footsteps. He could not obtain absolution for his crimes from pagan priests, but Eusebius washed them whiter than snow. Some said that Constantine had to sacrifice an infant to obtain the blood for the absolution.