Nero
Redivivus
Chapter
One
THE
RETURN OF THE SERPENT
The Evil is Usury, neschek
the
serpent
neschek
whose name is known, the defiler,…
Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without
let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms,
Wart of the common-weal,…
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all
things,
Passing the doors of temples, defiling the Grove of
Paphos,
neschek,
the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature’s increase,
Against beauty…
– Ezra Pound, Cantos
Hell
on Earth
In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton envisions a
future time when a bridge will connect Hell with our World, uniting them in one
Realm over which Satan will reign supreme.
Upon the completion of this veritable “highway to Hell”, the poet
portrays the triumphant Serpent being acclaimed by his infernal offspring in
these words:
Thou hast achiev’d our liberty, confin’d
Within Hell Gates till now, thou us impow’r’d
To fortify thus far, and overlay
With this portentous Bridge the dark Abyss.
Thine now is all this World
… here thou shalt Monarch
reign.[1]
After the devil’s brood
complete their bridge over the Abyss and arrive on Earth, they are greeted by
the sight of a resplendent Satan soaring through the sky overhead:
… when behold
Satan in likeness of an Angel bright
Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering
His Zenith, while the Sun in Aries rose[2]
Using the astronomical
information from this passage, we can actually indentify the date of Satan’s
accession as the Monarch of the World. The
Centaur and the Scorpion are the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, and
between them lies the constellation Ophiuchus, the
“Serpent Holder”. If the zenith of
Satan’s dawn flight takes him through Ophiuchus, then that constellation must be
at the Midheaven when the Sun is climbing over the horizon. Since Milton informs us that the Sun is
rising in Aries, we can take that to mean that the Sun is at 0° Aries, which
marks the spring equinox. So we must
look for a date when the constellation Ophiuchus is culminating at the
Midheaven at sunrise on the vernal equinox.
In astronomical terms, this means that, by precession of the equinoxes,
at least one of the stars in Ophiuchus has arrived at 0° Capricorn.
Of the stars which form
the figure of the Serpent Holder, the first to reach 0° Capricorn was an
unnamed star referred to by astronomers as τ (tau) Ophiuchi, which was at
the Midheaven at sunrise on the spring equinox in the year 1944. We will have more to say about the
significance of that date later. The
first named star in Ophiuchus to approach the cusp of Capricorn bears the
ominous title Sinistra and is known
to astronomers as ν (nu) Ophiuchi. Sinistra will arrive at the Midheaven as
the Sun rises on March 20, 2018, thus fulfilling Milton’s astral tableau. The Latin word sinistra literally means the “left hand”, which is quite odd considering
that the star Sinistra actually marks
the right hand of the Serpent
Holder. Due to its name, this star has
obvious “sinister” associations, and its astrological influences include
immorality, depravity and death by poisoning.
It is perhaps no coincidence that 2018 is also the year of another major
cosmic event, as the Sun completes its two-decade transit across the plane of
the galactic equator.
Elsewhere in the poem Paradise Lost, Milton suggests that
Satan’s zenith flight through Ophiuchus will appear as a brilliant nova or
comet in that constellation – an astral portent of “pestilence and war”.[3]
Later in the epic, when Satan assumes
the form of the Serpent to seduce Eve, he appears to her not as a lowly snake
crawling on its belly, but as a beautiful upright creature, with his head held
high above magnificent spiraling coils:
So spake the Enemy of Mankind, enclos’d
In Serpent, Inmate bad, and toward Eve
Address’d his way, not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that tow’r’d
Fold above fold a surging Maze, his Head
Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes;
… pleasing was his shape[4]
In the same passage,
Milton likens this captivating Serpent to the “God in Epidaurus”, referring to
the Greek god Asclepius, son of Apollo, whose
principal temple was in the ancient Peloponnesian city of Epidaurus. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Asclepius
voyaged from Greece to Rome in the form of an imposing upright serpent “like a
celestial presence”, very much resembling the infernal Serpent of Paradise Lost.[5]
In his youth, Asclepius was mentored by
the Centaur Chiron, who taught him the healing arts. According to the myth, Asclepius was summoned
to Crete by King Minos, whose young son Glaucus had drowned in a vat of
honey. While examining the body, Asclepius
noticed a snake slithering toward him and killed it with his staff. To his amazement, another serpent soon came
crawling toward the dead one and revived it with a magical herb it carried in
its mouth. Asclepius took some of the
herb and, placing it on the body on the dead boy, resurrected him.
Having discovered the
secret of immortality, Asclepius became the most celebrated and sought-after
healer of Greco-Roman mythology. From his insignia – a staff with a serpent
entwined around it – originated the caduceus
symbol of the medical profession. He
went on to resurrect several more eminent persons, but when he revived the
youthful charioteer Hippolytus, Asclepius fell afoul of Hades, the god of the dead,
who demanded that he be stopped. Zeus
obliged by striking the young healer down with a thunderbolt, but he appeased
his father Apollo by making Asclepius a god and casting his image in the sky holding
a serpent – the constellation Ophiuchus.
Serpents and Dragons
The mythical story behind the constellation
Ophiuchus reveals an archetypal link between the Serpent and the idea of
reincarnation and rebirth. In nature, a
snake will each year shed its skin and be apparently “reborn” as new snake. For that reason, serpents were believed to
possess a sort of chthonic immortality – much like that of Satan and his
brood. The serpent’s ability to
regenerate itself was also thought to be the source of its oracular powers –
the ability to see into the future. In
fact, the Greek word for serpent drakon
– whence comes the English “dragon” – is derived from the Indo-European derk “to see”.
This last point reminds
us that the archetype of the Serpent is also closely intertwined with that of
its cousin, the Dragon. In German and
Old English, the words for “serpent” and “dragon” are the same – worm and wyrm, respectively – and Norse/Saxon mythology describes its
fantastic dragons as a particular type of serpent. These dragon-serpents of Norse lore are both intelligent
and articulate – like the Serpent of Eden – with a fascinating gaze that
enthralls their prey. They are also
associated with a treasure hoard, which they typically guard in subterranean
cave or cavern, as in the Old English epic Beowulf. In the medieval German epic poem Nibelungenlied, the treasure-hoarding dragon
Fafnir appears as a lindworm – a kind
of wingless bipedal serpent that lives inside a linden tree and has a
particular affinity for gold. The lindworm was also a symbol of war and pestilence,
as was Milton’s satanic comet in Ophiuchus.
In Richard Wagner’s
grand operatic cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen, which is based on the Nibelungenlied
and inspired J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings, the giant Fafner slays his brother Fasolt to get sole possession of
a golden hoard, and he is transformed by greed into a dragon guarding the
treasure in a cave. Fafner’s treasure
was amassed by the power of a magical Ring of gold that was stolen from the
Rhine River by the evil gnome Alberich.
Alberich renounces Love to arrogate to himself alone the fecund potency
of the Rhinegold, which had hitherto been the common patrimony of mankind and
the foundation of the ancient gods of Valhalla.
With the removal of the sacred gold from the free circulation of the
Rhine and its transformation into a hoarded treasure, the World falls under a
curse which ultimately destroys the Tree of Life Yggdrasil and brings about the downfall of the gods.
Further insight into
the nature of the avaricious Dragon-Serpent can be found in Dante’s Inferno.
As Dante and Virgil prepare to descend the terrible precipice that will
take them into the lowest depths of Hell, they encounter a malignant beast
named Geryon, having the face of an honest man and the body of a serpent with a
deadly venomous sting. The benign face
of Geryon reminds us of the alluring charm of the Serpent of Eden – the future
Monarch of this World, according to Milton’s vision. But lurking behind the façade of
righteousness is the vile body of treachery and fraud:
“Behold the beast with the pointed tail,
that passes mountains and breaks walls and weapons!
Behold him that infects all the
world!”
… And that foul image of fraud came onward…[6]
Dante and Virgil climb
onto the back of Geryon in order to
plunge into the deepest reaches of the infernal Pit. The serpentine beast is an emblem of the
wretched souls who inhabit the brink of that awful precipice – those who in
life practiced usury. As Virgil explains
to Dante, usury is here punished as one of the most pernicious of all sins, in
the same class as homicide, an offense against both God and Nature.[7]
Pulling all of this
mythological background together, we begin to realize that the hellish
serpentine regime that Milton foresaw is close upon us,
and that the millstone that is rapidly dragging our World down into the Pit has
a lot to do with debt. More
particularly, the source of our society’s expanding misery appears to emanate
from the same type of Dragon’s hoard that brought down Valhalla – the excessive
concentration of wealth brought about by the ever more dominant role of usury
in our lives.
The Sting of Usury
Now, it bears noting
that the word “usury” had a different meaning in Dante’s time than it has
today. Nowadays, the common
understanding of “usury” is the practice of charging excessive interest on
loans, usually in violation of legal limits.
This is an example of the ongoing corruption of language in our times in
the interest of legitimizing the existing order of inequity. But the original meaning of “usury” was the
exacting of any interest on a
loan. How that kind of usury could, not
so long ago, have been considered among the blackest of transgressions is a
good indicator of how much our World has changed in the last few centuries –
and not for the better! We “free people”
of the 21st Century are the virtual slaves of Geryon, compelled to
incur debt constantly, even to put a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs,
and clothes on our backs… and all the while not even suspecting that something
is terribly wrong here – until, perhaps, at last we join the growing legions of
the homeless, hungry and humiliated.
The nigh universal
acceptance of usury as the “norm” is even more incredible when one considers
that the most important ethical teachers of human history – Moses, Aristotle,
Jesus, Mohammed, Aquinas – are unanimous in denouncing
usury. Of all the vile sins that Christ
witnessed during his sojourn here on Earth, the only one that drove him into a
violent fury was the usury of the moneychangers in the Temple. The fact that almost all of us today are
totally clueless as to what could possibly be bad about charging interest on
loans is an example of the most extreme form of mass amnesia – a testament to a
system of thought control so effective that it surpasses the Orwellian as much
as the year 2012 surpasses the year 1984.
So, among the few of us
who actually read the kind of stuff I’m now writing, let’s try to undo some of
that amnesia. If we look back into
history, it teaches us that the end result of usury is to concentrate wealth in
fewer and fewer hands. Money
increasingly ceases to be the means by which I exchange the fruits of my labor
for the fruits of yours, and instead it becomes the Dragon’s hoard of a coterie
of bankers and financiers. Those not
fortunate enough to be members of this parasitic oligarchy must access the
money hoard by “renting” it from those in control of the cash spigots. And the price of that “rent” is interest, and
interest compounded upon interest ad
infinitum – or at least until the whole house of cards collapses, as it
does from time to time.
When the widespread
practice of usury first took hold in ancient Greece, the class of small
independent farmers who had formed the backbone of Greek democracy vanished,
their lands swallowed up by the oligarchs.
The growing burden of debt reduced the farmers to peons and ultimately
to slaves, until Solon’s reforms in the 6th Century BC finally reined
in the usurers. Drawing upon this
experience, the Greek philosopher Aristotle discerned that usury is an
inherently unsustainable system which plunders mankind’s collective wealth and
engenders an intolerable hierarchal accumulation of wealth and power at the
top. Aristotle understood that money is
a type of measurement, a unit of value, just as a meter is a unit of distance
and a pound is a unit of weight. In
order for humans to live together as a community, such common units must be
adopted, either by convention or by law, so that they can function as a sort of
social “glue”. But Aristotle also
appreciated, as we moderns apparently do not, the imperative to distinguish
between things that exist only “in law” and things that exist in fact.[8]
We citizens of the 21st
Century are now seeing what can happen, for example, when the law creates an
artificial “person”, aka a “corporation”, and then accords that “person” all of
the rights and prerogatives of a natural person. Result?
The priorities of society quickly shift toward the interests of the corporation,
to the detriment of the people; the artificial “person” comes to dominate the
natural person. And we fall into the
same trap when we begin to treat money, which is an artificial measure of
value, as if it were value itself. In reality, we can no more buy, sell and rent
money than we can buy, sell and rent liters or
miles. But if we insist on doing so
nonetheless, then the unfortunate consequences are very much like what ensues
when we endow a corporate entity with “personhood”: society’s priorities increasing tilt toward
the speculative interests of the money manipulators and away from the
production of actual wealth. The nominal
value of money comes to dominate the real value of goods and services.
And so, both the rise of corporatism and the
growth of usury cause the social “glue” to become unstuck, so that true
“community” based on shared interests virtually ceases
to exist. The free association of
individuals is replaced by the compulsion of a corporate-dominated State, which
increasingly becomes nothing more than an instrument of indoctrination and
repression. Indeed, the very State whose
laws created the corporate creditors increasingly surrenders the people’s
sovereignty to those very same private interests. In America, the usurers long ago usurped the
essential core of national sovereignty – the power to issue currency – and the
last two Presidents with the temerity to try to wrest that authority back both
wound up with bullets in their heads.[9]
Getting back to
Aristotle, he also recognized that money, being an artificial creature of the
law, is “sterile”, which is to say, it can neither produce any other thing nor
reproduce itself. A cow can beget
calves, a lathe can fashion furniture, a blast furnace can make steel, so that
there is a natural increase associated with real productive assets. But the same is not true of money, as
Shakespeare’s Venetian merchant reminds the moneylender Shylock:
Antonio. …
Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or
is your gold and silver ewes and rams?
Shylock. I
cannot tell. I make it breed as fast.[10]
The same theme is echoed in Aristotle’s Politics, where he writes:
Money is intended to be used in exchange and not to
increase at interest… this term “tokos” [interest] means the birth of money
from money… Wherefore, of all modes of
getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.[11]
But, alas, the lessons
of Greek history which informed the views of Aristotle were soon forgotten by
the Romans, whose patrician class increasingly turned from agriculture to usury
as a source of wealth. As had happened
in Greece, the independent farmers of Italy eventually fell into debt
servitude, and their lands were absorbed into the great latifundia worked with slave labor.
Following a pattern that has been repeated over and over in history, the
Roman Republic eroded along with its middle class, ushering in the autocracy of
the Caesars. Augustus, the greatest of
the Caesars, was sired by two generations of moneylenders.[12] Once having allowed usury to decimate its
productive economy, Rome devolved into a parasitic Empire, dependent on imports
to feed and clothe its population and on foreigners to fight its wars and do
its manual labor. My readers doubtless
recognize the parallels with modern America.
During the Middle Ages, the wisdom of Aristotle was revived by the
Scholastics, who observed that usury not only undermines the function of money
as a means of exchange, but also seeks an increase which has no finite
limits. This contrasts sharply with
increases from real productive assets, which have natural limits. The propagation of cattle is limited by
available fodder and pasturage, and the output of a blast furnace is limited by
the availability of iron ore and coal, as well as by the market for steel. Eventually a cow will become too old to breed,
and the blast furnace will begin to crumble.
But the multiplication of money by interest requires nothing but money
itself, which never “dies” or becomes too old to “breed”.
Interest makes money
“self-augmenting” – a recursive incremental loop without end. We can perhaps better understand this by
considering the analogy of amplifying an electrical signal. If we feed the amplified signal from the
output side – let’s say a loudspeaker – back into the input side – let’s say a
microphone – we soon hear a piercing squeal as the amplification explodes
beyond the acoustic range of our equipment.
Compound interest works precisely the same way: interest is paid on the principal, then on
the principal plus interest on the principal, then on the principal plus interest
on the principal-plus-interest, and so on.
There is the famous example devised by American lawyer John Whipple in
1836, which goes like this: If 5 English
pennies had earned 5% compound interest from the year 1 AD to the present
(Whipple’s, that is), it would amount to 32,366,648,157 spheres of gold, each
as large as the Earth.
This helps explain why
the practice of usury was once considered so heinous – and why it should still be
shunned today. Not only does the credit
system prey on society’s most vulnerable elements – those who are poor, in ill
health, or victims of misfortune – but it engenders a unsustainable “bubble
economy” which ultimately collapses, producing mass misery, loss of livelihoods,
lands and homes, famine, want... and ultimately war. In a very true sense, the 180 million deaths
from war and genocide during the 20th Century can be laid at the
doorstep of usury.
As the prophet Ezekiel
recognized, the crime of usury lies at the source of every abomination that man
commits against his fellow man.
According to the prophet, murder, theft, rape and rapine are all
subsumed in the abomination of usury:
Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken
increase: shall he then live? he shall not live: he
hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon
him.[13]
The Jewish Midrashim
teach us that the Scripture regards all who take interest as if they had committed
all the evil deeds in the World.[14] For that reason, the usurer will not take
part in the great Resurrection at the end of Time,[15]
and he has forfeited his right to inherit the New Jerusalem.[16]
Come and see: Anyone who lends on interest
transgresses every prohibition in the Torah and finds none to plead in his
favor. For when a man transgresses any of the prohibitions and then stands
before the Holy One, blessed be He, in judgment, some of the angels plead on
his behalf and others accuse him…; but when one lends to an Israelite on
interest, then not one of the angels pleads in his favor…[17]
To much the same effect, an anonymous
prophet of our own times has written:
There
is no greater crime than a crime against humanity. There is no greater crime against humanity
than usury. The greatest violence, and the greatest threat to humanity is the growth
of money.
You are judged many times more by what you
do in groups than for what you do as individuals. If one thousand of you participate in the
murder of one child, then one thousand of you are a thousand times guilty. You
are judged many times more by what you give assent to others doing than what
you do yourself.[18]
If I am a tailor and
sew a coat, I will sell the coat for X dollars, and the value of the coat will
be balanced by the value of the money paid for it, so that the money and goods
will freely circulate, and I can continue to make and sell more coats. But if I am a banker, what do I have to
sell? I sell money itself, and I get
paid in interest. But where does the
interest come from? I have added no
goods to the stream of commerce, my labor produces nothing that anyone can use
or consume. So when I extract my
interest from the borrower, I create an imbalance between the money in
circulation and the value of goods offered for sale. The only way to restore that balance is to
lend out the interest again. But that’s
only a temporary fix, because when the interest-on-interest comes due, there’s
an even bigger imbalance created. So the
usurers must ceaselessly drag in new borrowers or push more credit on existing
debtors to keep the system going. It operates
exactly like a Ponzi scheme, with the payout at the top of the pyramid always
depending on the influx of new suckers at the bottom.
But eventually, the
burden on the debtors at the bottom of the pyramid reaches the trigger point of
pervasive default. The flow of credit
then gets abruptly cut off; there is not enough real money in the system to pay
for the goods in circulation, and production itself comes screeching to a halt
– the syndrome of periodic business crisis known variously as “depression” or
“recession”. Mass anxiety, misery and
want soon follow, not because society lacks the means to produce enough to
satisfy human needs, but because society cannot keep pace with the insatiable appetite
of the Dragon of Usury. The only
solution after all social wealth has been sucked into the Dragon’s hoard is to
take a wrecking ball to what’s been produced thus far and start the Ponzi
scheme all over again. That wrecking
ball is called war – a regularly recurring event in the boom-bust cycle of
usury. And as the usurers achieve
complete dominance of the World economy, as is happening now in our times, the
ever-shorter intervals of peace disappear, and war becomes an unending state of
affairs.
Usury converts social
wealth into private wealth. It promotes
the idea that all wealth should be in private hands, and that “social wealth”
is per se illegitimate – an
imposition of the weak and idle upon the strong and productive. But let us consider for a moment the real
origins of our society’s wealth. Its principal
sources are not individuals, as the Ayn Rand devotees would have us
believe. The productive capacity of any
individual, no matter how talented, pales in comparison to that of a community
of individuals. To whom does the surplus
generated by our communal cooperation belong, if not to all of us? An individual has no continuity: he lives his life and dies. Unless that individual belongs to a
community, his knowledge and skills die with him. Therefore, who is entitled to the benefits
associated with the accumulated knowledge of our civilization, if not all of
us? There is a social surplus that far exceeds the productive contributions of any
individual or group of individuals, and no one man has any greater claim to it
than any other. It belongs to the
community as a whole, and to “privatize” it is to plunder our collective
patrimony for the benefit of the very few.
The Midrashim show us
the linkage between this plunder of our collective patrimony and the Serpent
who caused our Exile from the Garden of Eden.
The Hebrew word for “interest” is neschek,
derived from the root verb naschak,
which means to “sting” or “bite”, as a serpent does.
Neschek, ‘interest’, is literally ‘biting’. The
serpent's enticement of Adam to disobey God, whereby he and his descendants
were uprooted from their home in the Garden of Eden, is figuratively designated
biting. Similarly, the creditor, by exacting interest, eventually seizes the
debtor's lands, thus driving him out of his home.[19]
We began this
discussion with Milton’s vision of a Hell on Earth, brought to us courtesy of a
resurgent Serpent from the pages of Genesis.
We now see that the Serpent’s “sting”, so aptly portrayed by Dante, is
actually neschek – interest on debt –
that unsustainable burden beneath which our society is now groaning, and
beneath which it is perhaps fated to collapse in the year of the ascendancy of
the constellation Ophiuchus, 2018.
The Impending Collapse
The ancient Jews
likened the consequences of usury to neschek,
the bite of a serpent. The snake is not
alarming or threatening in its approach, but subtle and unnoticed. Its bite initially is but a minor discomfort,
and the victim obliviously carries on while the deadly venom spreads through
his body. Just as neschek slowly but inevitably poisons the body of an individual, so
does usury subtly but surely poison mankind’s social body, so that society’s
productive capacities become instruments of impoverishment, injustice,
oppression, violence and war. The very
processes meant to expand and sustain life are perverted to promote death. Culture ceases to be an avenue of
self-expression and fulfillment, and becomes instead a channel of
indoctrination and conformity, a media-driven juggernaut, beneath which the
human spirit is crushed as never before in history.
Usury
means that the mere fact that I have money entitles me to have more money. Money is meant to be a measure of value, but
in the practice of usury, money is created out of nothing. The usurer produces nothing of value, and his
money, being lifeless, lacks the inherent capacity to augment or reproduce
itself. Then where does the money come
from to pay the interest on debt? Since
it cannot come from new value, it must come again from nothing, which is to
say, from new debt. So usury is
essentially a type of Ponzi scheme. As
soon as the flow of credit stops, the debtors must inevitably default en masse, because no real value has been
created upon which to support their interest payments.
This
explains why every economic system based on usury has experienced periodic
financial crises, in which the fonts of credit suddenly seize up, debtors
default, banks fail, and money becomes suddenly scarce. Society’s productive resources lie idle while
human needs go unmet. This recurring crisis
syndrome is inevitable because the economy’s ability to absorb new debt is not
infinite, and when the limit is reached, the flow of credit must cease,
bringing the Ponzi scheme to an abrupt halt.
In
the world of classical economics, upon which Karl Marx based his theories,
these recurring and worsening cycles of financial crises would ultimately lead
to the undoing of the usury-based systems.
But, beginning in the 20th Century, a new phase of usury
developed, known as “leveraging”. The
financial elite learned that the creation of illusory money had applications
beyond merely extracting wealth from debtors.
It could also be used to buy productive assets and suck the wealth out
of them, too. Thus was born the age of
the “leveraged buyout”.
How
this works is something I can explain from firsthand experience during my brief
career as a corporate attorney is the 1980s.
The group of corporate “raiders” I worked for used credit “leverage” to
buy out a Fortune 500 chemical company.
The idea was to make the company appear to be more profitable, in the
short term at least, thereby boosting the stock price long enough for the
raiders to cash in their stock options and move on to the next corporate
target, leaving the hollowed out carcass of the raided company behind them.
Before
the usurers took over, the chemical company had been run in a traditional way,
with the aims of satisfying customers, offering good value, expanding
production and market share. All of
these priorities were reversed by the raiders.
Managers who understood production were let go and replaced by
accountants. The company’s funds held in
reserve for maintenance and upgrade of its chemical plants were re-designated
as “profits” in order to juice up reported earnings. After a few years of this, many plants had to
be shut down and their employees laid off. But even the plant closings were converted to
book “profits” by the bean-counters’ manipulating the depreciation
accounts. As for the company’s
customers, the operative rule was to give them “less for more”, always pushing
for price increases, even if that meant losing market share.
At
the same time, the so-called “Reagan Revolution” had turned the Federal
government into an active accomplice of the corporate raiders. Monetary policy was used to drive up interest
rates rapidly and give a sudden boost to the value of the US dollar. These monetary policies left America’s
manufacturing industries unable to compete with cheaper foreign goods and made
them easy targets for the raiders. The
Reagan administration also partnered with the usurers in a nationwide
union-busting campaign, so that an ever increasing share of corporate earnings
could be diverted from productive workers to parasitic financiers.
While
most of America’s manufacturing base was being hollowed out and/or bought up by
foreigners, the one sector that was expanding was the so-called “defense”
industries. As the usurers progressively
destroyed America’s ability to dominate the world economically, it became all
the more imperative for her to dominate militarily. In place of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”,
the US would increasingly rely on the “visible fist” of military might. But the shift toward military production came
at a time when the actual “threats” to US hegemony were disappearing,
especially with the rapid decline and fall of the Soviet empire in the late 80s
and early 90s.
To ensure ever
expanding markets for its military hardware, America needed to embark upon a
policy of unending warfare and had to create a bogeyman to replace the
now-defunct Red Menace. When a nation
desperately wants to start a war, one way to justify it is to launch a “false
flag” attack on itself, making it appear to be the work of a foreign
enemy. America’s own history offers
several precedents of such “false flag” operations, from the sinking of the
battleship Maine on the eve of the Spanish-American War, to the Gulf of Tonkin
incidents at the outset of the Vietnam War.
In 1962, the CIA formulated a plan called “Operation Northwoods”, in
which a series of terrorist attacks were to be carried out within the US to
justify an invasion of Cuba. President
Kennedy at the time refused to authorize this false flag operation. A year later he was dead. This was a lesson apparently not lost on George
W. Bush, who did not dare to oppose the false flag operation that unfolded on
September 11, 2001.
And so we see that the slow-acting venom of
usury inexorably transforms the government itself from a protector and guardian
of the weak and vulnerable to the ally and promoter of a
tiny predatory elite. This systemic
social poison also diverts the economic sectors from production responsive to
human needs to pure unbridled plunder.
In his Inferno, Dante symbolically represents
the development of usury as beginning with near-fraud and ultimately descending
into outright fraud. And this is the
ugly face of usury that is now emerging in the 21st Century. Usury begins by demanding value in
transactions where nothing of value is given.
It then proceeds, by usurious “leverage”, to cannibalize productive
businesses so that they too become parasitic and predatory, seeking commercial
advantage not by fair trade, but by bilking their customers and cheating their
employees. Under the domination of
usurers, the goal of business is no longer to provide something of value, but
to minimize the value furnished to customers, and, if possible, eliminate it
entirely.
No better example of
this can be found than in the modus
operandi of the so-called health care industry in the US. The operative principle of this business is
something called “capitation”, which means that profits are based on providing
less health care to their customers while charging higher premiums to do it. The same principle is at work in American higher
education, where obscenely high fees are extracted even as academic rigor is
cast aside.
Like all parasites,
however, usurers must ultimately fall victim to their own success. Once having cannibalized a society’s
productive base and left it mired in debt, what can be left to feed the Ponzi
machine? As we approach closer to the
end of Age of Usury, there is truly only one thing left to “sell”, and that is
debt itself. And this is where, just as
Dante foresaw, the usurers must come out from the shadows of quasi-fraud into
the open daylight of outright fraud.
Worthless “subprime” debt is bundled into “derivatives”, for which the
rating agencies are suborned to issue “AAA” imprimaturs. Not content with peddling worthless debt
instruments, the usurers then go out and purchase insurance policies – called
“credit default swaps” – betting that these same debts will default. This is no different than selling someone a
car and then wagering that the car will fall apart.
At this juncture, the
degree of iniquity engendered by usury becomes almost surreal. When the inevitable mass default of the
“subprime” lenders occurs, driving the insurers on the “credit default swaps”
into insolvency, as happened to AIG in 2008, the usurers are actually able to
call upon their lackeys in the “government” to use taxpayer money to assure
that they receive the full payoff on their bets – 100 cents on the dollar, no
less! Not only does the swindler escape
jail, but the “government” underwrites the full payoff on his illegal wagers.
In the final death
throes of usury, then, the usurers raid the public treasury and drag the
government itself into the abyss of insolvency in order to keep their Ponzi
scheme running. Over the past several
decades, this scenario has repeated itself in dozens of other countries, with
the same basic outcome. The cabal of
“creditors” – the same usurers who raided the public treasury and drove it into
insolvency to bail out their bad loans – demand “austerity measures”, a
euphemism for expropriating the pension and health insurance funds paid into by
working people and dismantling all regulations which in any way restrain the
plunder of the predatory elite.
In the special case of
America, however, this scenario becomes even uglier. When the vultures attack a foreign currency,
as they did the Mexican Peso in the 90s, they collapse the economy of a single
country. But the US dollar serves as the
“reserve currency” of the entire World, so when it collapses it’s
truly a case of “all fall down”. At the same time as the World races toward
that economic Armageddon, it simultaneously races toward the precipice of an
unprecedented environmental catastrophe, brought on by half a century of
government abdication of its protective function as it fell captive to the
short-term interests of a tiny elite.
The ultimate
consequence of an economy which tolerates usury is an economy dominated by
usury and an economy that must ultimately collapse under the weight of
debt. When economies collapse, history
teaches us that the civilizations those economies support inevitably collapse
as well. Now we are talking about not
just a local or regional civilization, but a World civilization imploding. And at the same time global climate has been
pushed by inaction and indifference into a chaotic mode featuring increasingly
violent extremes of temperature, winds and precipitation. We have no precedent for this in recorded
human history, and perhaps there is a reason for that. Because, if it has happened before, it likely
brought an end to whatever previous cycle or cycles of civilization that had
existed on this planet before our own.
The reign of usury has
corrupted everything, bringing with it every conceivably abomination, as the
ancient Jews knew it would. It has even
corrupted science, suborning certain “scientists” to “dispute” such fundamental
truths as human-caused climate change and biological evolution. The ultimate irony may be that their reign of
folly produces a deadly convergence of the very truths they would deny – an
evolutionary “bottle-neck” of mass extinction that may soon threaten the survival of the human species. If our prophetic sources are correct, in the
midst of the impending chaos, as humanity’s survival hangs in the balance, a
false savior will come forward – one who will deceive the whole World, but one
whom we may still recognize by his distinguishing mark: the Sign of the Serpent. Let us return now to Milton’s theme of
Serpent’s triumphant return, to be heralded by the ascendancy of the Serpent Holder
constellation Ophiuchus in 2018.
The 13th
Sign
Earlier we mentioned
that an unnamed star in the right hand of the Serpent Holder actually arrived
at the Midheaven at dawn on the spring equinox of 1944. That was the year when the Portuguese nun
Sister Lucia dos Santos recorded a prophetic warning that had been entrusted to
her by an apparition of the Blessed Virgin 27 years earlier – the Third Secret
of Fatima. While the actual words of Our
Lady of Fatima still remain concealed by the Vatican, Sister Lucy herself,
before her death in 2005, revealed that
the Third Secret deals with the same subject matter as the chapters of Revelation
that describe the Time of Tribulation.
The biblical scenario
of the Tribulation initially proceeds through the opening of the Seven
Seals. A good idea of how far into the
Tribulation we are today can be gleaned from the following verses:
And
when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and
see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse;
and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And
I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A
measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny…[20]
At the time St. John
wrote these words, a penny or denarius
was a full day’s wage for a laborer. A
measure of wheat, equivalent to about a quart, was only enough to provide one
meal of bread. During John’s lifetime, a
denarius could buy about 20 measures
of wheat. So what is being prophesized
here is an extreme inflation in the price of basic commodities. Isn’t this exactly what we are seeing in our
own times? As the prices of food and
basic necessities skyrocket, the poor of the World, whose incomes are spent
almost entirely on the bare essentials of life, are being driven over the
edge. This is in fact the spark which
has ignited the wave of revolution that began in the Middle East in the spring
of 2011 and has since been spreading like wildfire through the rest of the World.
And
the cause of this explosion of commodities prices? Our old nemesis, the Dragon
of Usury. Commodities are the
latest “bubble” in the revolving Ponzi economy that unbridled usury dictates. Speculators like Goldman Sachs are pouring
their interest-generated money into wheat futures to drive the prices up, just
as they previously did with real estate during the “housing bubble”. The result is something the United Nations
has described as “a silent mass murder”, as 250 million people now face
starvation.
So we are already quite
far along on the road to Hell on Earth.
What still lies ahead of us, according to the Third Secret of Fatima, is
the scenario described in the 12th and 13th chapters of
Revelation, in which Satan returns to the Earth in the guise of a Red Dragon
and attains complete dominion over the Nations of the World as the False
Messiah – the Antichrist.
And
there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having
seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
And
his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the
earth…[21]
Again, we should remind
ourselves that, in the Greek language of St. John, a “dragon” drakon is a particular type of serpent,
so that we could just as well refer to Satan’s avatar as the “Red Serpent”. And in fact, in subsequent verses of
Revelation 12, John repeatedly describes the Red Dragon as a “serpent”.[22]
The Red Dragon was a
symbol of the Imperial Roman Legions, who often carried it as a battle standard
in the form of a wind-sock. A more
explicit linkage of the Red Dragon with the Roman Empire appears in Revelation
17, which discloses that the seven heads of the Dragon represent the seven hills of Rome, and the seven crowns stand for seven
Caesars of the Julian dynasty:
And
there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet
come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short
space.[23]
Based on this verse, St.
John’s vision apparently occurred under the reign of Nero (54-68 AD), who was
the sixth and last ruler of this dynasty.
With Nero, the line of the true Caesars – descendants of Julius’ nephew
Augustus – became extinct. Yet here John
is describing a seventh ruler in this line, one who “is not yet come”. This seventh Caesar of the future is
apparently a resurrection or reincarnation of one of the others, as is
suggested in Revelation 13:
And
I saw one of the heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was
healed…[24]
Since Nero died from a
self-inflicted wound to the neck, he seems to fit the bill. And then, of course, there is the infamous
number 666, which encodes the name “Nero Caesar” in Hebrew gematria. In depicting the Beast as Nero redivivus, St. John was drawing
upon a popular legend that had arisen soon after the death of Nero. According to this legend, a reborn Nero would return at the “end of Time” to lead a huge
army from the Middle East against Rome.
In fact, as reported by Roman historians, several imposters appeared in
the years following Nero’s death claiming to be the fallen Emperor. As we shall learn in the next chapter of this
book, the roots of the Nero redivivus
legend go even further back to a much earlier era at the dawn of Roman history,
shortly after the fall of the ancient city of Troy. In subsequent chapters, we will also uncover
the many aspects of the life of Emperor Nero that relate to the archetype of
the Serpent, thereby making the Serpent Holder Ophiuchus a fitting herald of
his rebirth in our time.
If we are to appreciate
the role of Ophiuchus in the end-Time scenario of Nero redivivus, we must consider some of the esoteric lore
surrounding this most mysterious of constellations. Perhaps the most puzzling enigma involving
the Serpent Holder is its exclusion from the Zodiac. If we go back to the myths of ancient Babylon,
where the Zodiac originated, we find that the constellation Ophiuchus was seen
as representing Tiamat, a dragon-like sea serpent which represented the Chaos
that prevailed before the World was created.
Since the mythical struggle between Tiamat and the Babylonian sun god
Marduk is an early prototype of the Judaeo-Christian saga of the Fallen Angels,
there is an archetypal kinship between Tiamat and the Serpent of Eden. Hence, the expulsion of Ophiuchus/Tiamat from
the Zodiac parallels the expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven. It may also relate to the transition in
ancient Babylon from a calendar based on 13 lunar months of 28 days each to a
12-month solar calendar.
Be that as it may, the
Sun in its annual progress along the Ecliptic actually spends about three times
as many days passing through Ophiuchus (November 29 to December 18) as it does
in traversing Scorpio (November 23 to November 29), which has led some
astrologers to suggest that the Serpent Holder be restored to the Zodiac as the
13th Sign.[25]
Interestingly
enough, in their 1967 manifesto Le
Serpent Rouge (“The Red Serpent” – a clear reference to the Red Dragon of
Revelation 12) the Priory of Sion also recognizes Ophiuchus as one of the Signs
of the Zodiac. The Priory traces its
roots to the Knights Templar, the usurers sans
pareil of medieval France, to whom we owe many of the modern methods of
banking and money-lending. Readers of my
first book may recall that the Priory promotes the idea of an elite “royal
bloodline” – the Sang Real – based on
lineal descent from King David and Jesus Christ.[26] As I also discussed in that book, the Sang Real has also been associated with
the allegedly “Trojan” lineage of the first six Roman Caesars[27]
– another theme that we will pursue further in ensuing chapters.
Moreover, the insertion
of Ophiuchus as the 13th Zodiac sign between Scorpio and Sagittarius
seems to inform the composite beast Geryon, which Dante created as the symbol
of usury in his Inferno.
His face was the
face of a just man,…
and all his trunk was that of a serpent;…
… his tail… had the point armed like a scorpion’s[28]
Justice is the primary attribute
of Sagittarius, who is the “just man” of the Zodiac, while the scorpion’s sting
is an obvious feature of Scorpio. And
sandwiched between the face of the Centaur and the tail of the Scorpion, we
have the trunk of the resurgent Serpent, returning to the Zodiac after its long
exile. In this context, it’s worth
recollecting that the Sign opposite to Scorpio/Ophiuchus in the Zodiac is
Taurus the Bull – cattle being the oldest of all forms of money. Accordingly, in Greek mythology Geryon was
the owner of a magnificent herd of red cattle, which Hercules was tasked with
stealing in his Tenth Labor. The
mythical Geryon had three bodies joined at the waist, similar to the tripartite
beast of Dante’s imagining. Most
significant, perhaps, is the fact that Geryon ruled a distant western island
located beyond the Pillars of Hercules – a location to which Hercules had to
sail in golden goblet shaped like a water-lily.
These details seem to resonate with the lore of Atlantis and the legend
of the Holy Grail – the Sangraal,
which is the heraldic emblem of the Sang
Real royal bloodline. With a nod
toward the Priory of Sion, we also note that the lily was the heraldic emblem
of France’s ancient Merovingian dynasty, in whose veins this royal blood
supposedly ran.
As for the antediluvian
overtones of the Geryon story, they
should remind us of the many indications, both in fact and legend, suggesting
that there have been cycles of human civilizations antedating our own. As to these prior civilizations, mankind is
in a condition of post-traumatic amnesia, perhaps best described in the works
of Immanuel Velikovsky. One of the
likely vestigial memories of antediluvian culture is the stigma attached to the
practice of usury. While this stigma was
quite strong and the attendant prohibitions strictly enforced in the ancient
world, the underlying rationale has gradually been forgotten, until today the
very meaning of the word has been obscured.
As the poet Ezra Pound observed in his Cantos:
All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.[29]
The theft of Geryon’s
cattle by Hercules (whose connections to Moloch and the Antichrist I have
explained elsewhere[30])
serves as a paradigm of the seizure of mankind’s collective patrimony by a ruthless
cabal of financial cutthroats. In a
later chapter, we’ll continue with the tale of the Tenth Labor to learn about
the places where Hercules drove the stolen herd and the intriguing role those
places were to play in the life of Emperor Nero. Not coincidentally, many of those same
locales show up in Ovid’s tale, which we alluded to earlier, of the migration
from Greece to Rome of Asclepius, whom the Serpent Bearer constellation
represents.
The Cult of
Transmigration
Ovid’s 15-book narrative poem Metamorphoses was composed shortly after
the birth of Christ, during the reign of Augustus Caesar. In it he masterfully weaves together a series
of mythical stories so as to reveal their archetypal links. Perhaps the most insightful of these are
reserved for the last two books, in which the poet intertwines traditional lore
surrounding the founding of Rome by Trojan exiles with reputed teachings of
Pythagoras concerning reincarnation and the fables of Hippolytus and Asclepius. The latter is the penultimate tale of the
poem, followed only by the account of Julius Caesar’s deification and the
prospective deification of his successor Augustus. Taken as a whole, this last segment of Ovid’s
narrative appears to suggest a supernatural nexus between the Julian dynasty of
Roman Emperors, with their pretensions of royal Trojan lineage, and the themes
of transmigration and resurrection. In
drawing these prescient connections, the poet was likely to have known
something of the ancient oracles concerning the last Emperor of the Julian line
and his rebirth.
The final book of the Metamorphoses begins with an account of
how Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, travelled to the southern Italian city
of Croton, where he studied the doctrines of Pythagoras:
Our souls are deathless; always, when they leave our
bodies, they find new dwelling places… All things are always changing, but
nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes,
is housed wherever it will, shifts residence, from beasts to men, from men to
beasts, but always it keeps on living.
As the pliant wax is stamped with new designs, and is no longer what
once it was, but changes form, and still is pliant wax, so do I teach that
spirit is evermore the same, though passing always to ever-changing bodies.[31]
According to the story,
Numa also heard Pythagoras’ prediction that Rome would someday conquer the
World under the leadership of rulers descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas.
Ovid’s tale continues
with Numa’s return to Rome from Croton and his subsequent death, leaving his
widow Egeria to mourn him in the Temple of Diana Nemorensis, located deep in
the wooded valley of Aricia. In the
sacred oak grove surrounding Diana’s Temple, her priesthood preserved the
archaic ritual of the rex nemorensis,
in which a runaway slave could become “king” by breaking off an oak branch –
the “Golden Bough” – and challenging the reigning “king” to mortal combat. As explained by James Frazer and Robert
Graves, this ritual was a vestige of a primeval matriarchal era when sacred kings,
consorts of Diana’s priestess, actually did undergo periodic mortal combat in
which they were slain by a youthful challenger, who would then succeed them as
king and the priestess’ consort. Part
of the ritual involved enabling the dead king, in serpent form, to pass through
a labyrinthine afterworld to be born again as a future king. As the patriarchal era took hold, the sacred
kings extended their rule by preemptively sacrificing their would-be successors
and themselves enacting a mock death and rebirth. Under the patriarchal regime, moreover, the
priestess was no longer allowed the freedom to chose her own consort and
thereby create a potential challenger to the king’s extended reign.
Continuing with Ovid’s
story, Egeria encounters in the Arician grove young Hippolytus, who died in a
chariot crash after being banished from Athens by the king, his father Theseus,
whose young wife Phaedra had tried to seduce him. This corresponds to the patriarchal pattern
we have just described, with Phaedra in the role of the priestess and
Hippolytus as the youthful would-be successor to Theseus. It also sheds light on the mythical escape of
Theseus from the Cretan Labyrinth as an enactment of the mock death and rebirth
of the king that accompanied the sacrifice of his young substitute. Recalling our earlier discussion, Hippolytus
himself was revived, thanks to the skill of Asclepius, and he became known as
Virbius, the “Twice-Born Man”.[32]
All of this sets the
stage for Ovid’s telling of the voyage of Asclepius, the god of healing and
rebirth, to Rome from his temple in Epidaurus, Greece. He travels in the form of an upright Serpent
to stem a deadly plague that had broken out in Rome. His voyage takes him past Juno’s temple near
Croton, where Numa had studied Pythagoras’ transmigration creed, and northward
along Italian coast past the Bay of Naples, by the temple of the Cumaean Sibyl,
the hot springs of Baiae, and Circe’s island, to disembark at Antium, the future
birthplace of the Emperor Nero, where a shrine was erected in the god’s
honor. After sailing up the Tiber and
entering Rome, Asclepius chooses as “his proper habitation” the small island in
the River known as Isola Tiberina, the
Tiber Island, which became the site of his temple.
During a recent trip to
Italy, I visited the Tiber Island in Rome and saw what remains of the Temple of
Asclepius there. On the surviving marble
blocks from the base of the ancient temple, one can still make out a portion of
the face and shoulders of the god, holding aloft his insignia – the serpentine
staff. One of the photos that I took
there appears below as Figure 1.
Figure
1
What immediately struck
me as I gazed upon this artifact was how much the staff of Asclepius resembles
$, the US dollar sign! At the time, I
was inclined to dismiss this as a mere coincidence, but, upon researching it
further when I returned from my trip, I discovered that the dollar symbol $ is
indeed derived from the serpentine insignia pictured above. Apparently, there was a German silver coin
called a Thaler, which circulated
widely in Europe and America during Colonial times. In Britain and its colonies, the name of this
coin was pronounced “Dollar”, and it bore an inscription of a serpent entwined
around a staff, very much like the staff of Asclepius. When the fledgling US issued its own
currency, it adopted the familiar name and insignia of the German coin. How ironic it is, then, that the legacy of
Usury, which is so engrained in the $ emblem, has emerged in our times to take
control over the US currency and pillage America’s vast collective wealth! Quite unexpectedly, we have stumbled across
the symbolic root of what we may truly call “USury”.
After coming upon this
serendipitous connection, my curiosity was piqued about the odd history of the
tiny Tiber Island, so I looked into it a bit further, and it led me to the
story of Simon Magus. For my first book,
I had done quite a bit of research about the sorcerer Simon Magus and his considerable
influence among the Jews and Christians of First Century Rome.[33]
Simon Magus – or Simon Magnus, “the Great”, as he was once
known – started out as a magician in a city in Samaria called Sebaste, so named
in honor of Emperor Augustus, whose name translates in Greek as Sebastos. After watching the Apostle Peter impart the
Holy Spirit to converts through the laying on of hands, Simon offered to pay
Peter to give him the power to perform this miracle.
But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of
God may be purchased with money.[34]
In spite of his sketchy
background, however, Simon really came into his own as a master illusionist
when he immigrated to Rome. Calling
himself the “Standing One”, he convinced many that he possessed supernatural
powers that made him immortal. He backed
up his claims by staging elaborate performances in which he would levitate
himself high above the multitudes and seemingly resurrect the dead. Simon’s performances were particularly
popular with the Emperor Claudius and his successor Nero. Claudius showed his appreciation by erecting
a statue of the “Standing One” on the Tiber Island, with the dedication Simoni Deo Sancto, “to Simon, the Holy
God”.
Simon Magus preached a
dualistic creed which sees demonic powers as having total dominion over the
material World. According to this
heresy, which eventually evolved into Gnosticism, Man is not made in the Image
of God, but is in fact a thoroughly corrupted, inverted rendering of Divinity,
as symbolized by the Tarot’s upside-down “Hanged Man”. Accordingly, Simon taught, at birth a human
baby enters the defiled material World head down. This concept that the material World is
morally upside-down inexorably leads to an inversion of good and evil, so that
what is considered good in this World is, by definition, evil, and
vice-versa. The “Standing Man” is a man
standing on his head, with his left hand where his right hand should be, and
his right hand where his left should be.
In fact, the Gnostic scriptures interpret the inverted crucifixion of
Saint Peter as a symbolic affirmation of this principle.[35]
The interchange of
right and left hands may ring a bell with some of my readers, as well it
should. Earlier we spoke of the apparent
paradox in the naming of the star in Ophiuchus which will cross the Midheaven
at dawn on the spring equinox of 2018, as envisioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Named Sinistra,
meaning the “left hand”, this star actually marks the right hand of the Serpent
Holder. So the answer to this puzzle is
an ostensible identification of Ophiuchus with the inverted “Standing Man”
Simon Magus, who was the first of the False Messiahs who Jesus predicted would arise after his death.
As we’ve said, Simon
Magus was a particular favorite of Emperor Nero, who for a time treated him as
if he were a member of the royal household (his second wife Poppea Sabina was
fascinated with Jewish mysticism) and even permitted him to wear imperial
purple robes. But as happened with all of
Nero’s favorites, Caesar’s embrace ultimately proved fatal. When one of Simon’s levitation acts
miscarried, precipitating the shattered magician to the ground at the embarrassed Emperor’s feet, Nero refused him medical
intention. Displaying his cruel, puerile
sense of humor, Nero let him expire, then waited three
days for Simon to raise himself up from the dead. Maybe he didn’t wait long enough…
The Final Mutation
In the 13th
Chapter of Revelation, we find a strange passage that talks about life being
breathed into the statue of a Beast, who had been mortally wounded by a sword,
yet still lived. Based on the 666
numerical equivalent of his name given at the end of this passage, the
identification of this Beast as Nero redivivus
is all but incontrovertible.[36] But what is the significance of the
“statue”? The image certainly resonates
somewhat with the statue of Simon Magus, the “Holy God”, on the Tiber Island,
but there must be more to it than that.
After Simon’s untimely
demise, the next major expositor of the dualistic Gnostic creed was a would-be
prophet named Mani, who lived in Parthia (modern Iran), where legend has it
that Nero will reappear. Mani’s teaching included the doctrine of
reincarnation, which he borrowed from Pythagoras. In fact, Mani, who was born in the year 216
AD, contended that he himself was the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, since
Pythagoras had taught that the interval between a soul’s successive
incarnations is 216 years. One of the
surviving fragments of Mani’s doctrine sheds some light on the mystery of the
“statue”:
The
fourth time, when they shall weep, is the time when the statue shall raise
itself up on the last day …[37]
As I have explained in
my first book, the “fourth time” is a reference to the astrological “Great
Year”, which consists of 12 “Great Months” of 490 years each, with a 20-year
overlap period between Great Months.
These Great Months are based on the Zodiac signs in which the Great Conjunctions
of the planets Jupiter and Saturn occur.
The Zodiac signs are divided into four “triplicities” – Fire, Earth, Air
and Water – and when the Great Conjunctions shift from one triplicity to
another, it’s known as a “mutation”. For
example, when Christ was born during the Great Conjunction of 7 BC, it occurred
in Pisces and marked the beginning of the mutation from Water signs to Fire
signs, with the next Great Conjunction (14 AD) located in Sagittarius. Thus, the Nativity coincided with the
Water-to-Fire mutation that inaugurated the 8th Great Month.
Consequently, the
“fourth time”, or fourth Great Month from Mani’s time, would be the 12th
Great Month, which began during the interval of the Water-to-Fire mutation of
1603-1623. The cosmic fireworks that
accompanied the beginning of the 12th Great Month all but proclaimed
that it would be both terrible beyond belief and wonderful beyond
imagining. Following the Great
Conjunction of December 1603 in Sagittarius, a series of triple conjunctions
between Mars, Jupiter and Saturn the following year culminated in the appearance
very close to these three planets of a brilliant Supernova in early October
1604. Blood-red in color, “Kepler’s
Star”, as it was called after the astronomer who first observed it, soon
outshone everything else in the sky and continued to do so for 17 months.
What’s of particular
relevance to our theme is the location where Kepler’s Star appeared, near the
star θ (theta) Ophiuchi, which marks the right foot (or is it really the
left foot?) of the Serpent Bearer.
Interestingly, this star was known to the Coptic Christians as the
“Magician”, which reminds us of our old friend Simon Magus. Supernova SN 1604, as it’s now known, was a
“Type 1a” supernova – the most powerful and potentially deadly of its kind,
exploding with the energy of 5 billion suns!
Fortunately, it was far enough away from the Earth – 13,000 light years
– that it did us no damage. But the
second most devastating of our five great planetary extinctions, which wiped
out two-thirds of all living species and ended the Ordovician period some 440
million years ago, is now thought to have been caused by the explosion of a Type
1a supernova within 10,000 light years of the Earth.
The leading candidate
for the next Type 1a supernova in our galaxy is a binary star known as RS
Ophiuchi, located slightly above the star Sinistra
– the “left-handed right hand” of the Serpent Bearer. Located 2,000 to 5,000 light years from
Earth, RS Ophiuchi consists of a red giant star circling a massive white dwarf,
which is gradually drawing off the gas from the red giant into itself and
becoming yet more massive. Observations
from Earth – which see these stars as they were two to five thousand years ago
– put the white dwarf very close to the critical mass that would trigger a Type
1a supernova explosion. So this is
something that may have already happened a thousand or more years in the past,
with the enormous burst of gamma rays already on its way to our planet. If so, we’d know when it did arrive, because
the entire atmosphere would turn brown, as nitrogen was converted to nitrous
oxide – commonly known as smog – and the ozone layer disappeared. This would cause the ultraviolet radiation
from the Sun striking the Earth’s surface to increase 50-fold, enough to kill
off everything except the deepest denizens of the oceans.
Could it be that the 12th
Great Month – Mani’s “fourth time, when they shall weep” – will end just as it
began, with a spectacular supernova that outshines even the Sun? Even the ominous blood red color of Kepler’s
Star may be repeated, since RS Ophiuchi has been observed, in its previous
periodic flare-ups, to be what one astronomer characterized as “the reddest
star I have ever seen”. All of this, of
course, connects with the imagery of the Red Dragon of Revelation and Milton’s
vision of a warlike astral portent in Ophiuchus. Be that as it may, we are nonetheless
approaching the end of the 12th Great Month, as the mutation from
the Earth to the Air signs has already begun with the Great Conjunction of May
28, 2000, in the 23rd degree of Taurus. This “final mutation” will be consummated by
the Great Conjunction of December 21, 2020, in the 1st degree of
Aquarius, which will mark the end of the Great Year that began some 6,000 years
ago.
If John Milton’s cosmic
reckoning is correct, this would make the period of Tribulation, when Satan’s
viceroy will reign on Earth, extend from 2018 to 2020. It’s noteworthy that the Great-Year-ending
mutation that we’re now in the midst of began with a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction
in the 23rd degree of Taurus, which astrology associates with a
false, usurping king. And the final
mutation will end with a Great Conjunction in the 1st degree of
Aquarius, for which the astrological symbol is a pair of crossed swords, with a
laurel wreath encompassing their juncture.
The Zodiac image of a
usurping king clearly conjures up the Antichrist, and we can leave it at
that. Even so, the laurel-wreathed
crossed swords are a bit more enigmatic.
At first glance, the swords may be taken as alluding to conflict or war,
but what are we to make of the laurel wreath?
In the ancient World, laurel was used in certain religious rituals for
its intoxicating effects. Most notably,
its leaves were chewed by the prophetic priestesses of Apollo known as Sibyls,
of whom there were ten during Roman times.
Chewing laurel leaves would induce a trance in which the Sibyl would
have visions of the future. Those among
you who have visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome may recall the enormous figures
of five Sibyls forming the border of the ceiling. Why should pagan priestesses be so honored at
the pinnacle of Christian devotion?
Because the Sibyls were actually the first to foretell the virgin birth
of a Savior – long before even the Old Testament prophets.
So the laurel element
of the Zodiac image for the Great Conjunction of December 21, 2020, at 1°
Aquarius points us in the direction of the Sibyls and their ecstatic
visions. But what about the two crossed
swords? In puzzling over the meaning of
this image, I suddenly thought of one of the cards of the Tarot deck, the Two
of Swords, which actually depicts two crossed swords. While I did not initially recall the meaning
of the Two of Swords, when I looked it up, I immediately knew that I had struck
on something. The card represents Equilibrium: Peace and Justice achieved through the
balance of opposing forces. Crossed
swords relate to the sport of fencing, in which balance and equipoise are
all-important.
I spoke quite a bit
about Equilibrium in my last book,[38]
and I will have occasion to revisit some of that analysis as our discussion
proceeds herein. Suffice it for now to
note that the culmination of Evil and Injustice which appears to lie before is
the product of extreme imbalances – imbalances in the distribution of social
power, wealth and privilege, mirroring imbalances in the human psyche which leave
us unaware of our communal Being. The forces that produce and sustain this
systemic Inequity must remain hidden to avoid incurring the indignant wrath of
Mankind. But the time is upon us when
the malefactors must emerge from the shadows and be seen for what they
are. Before the financial crises that
began in 2008, how many people were aware of the role of the financial sector
in undermining the common good and despoiling the general welfare of our
society? Now, a few short years later,
their trading floors all over the World are besieged by legions of youthful
“occupiers”, whose eyes have been opened to the unconscionable domination of
the “one percent”.
Before Inequity can be
totally defeated and forever cast aside, it must reveal itself completely and
definitively on the stage of World history.
The road back to the Equilibrium, Peace and Justice of the Crossed
Swords must take us through the rise and fall of the Serpent, of whom the
laurel-inspired visions of the Sibyls were perhaps the most prescient. It makes sense, then, before we proceed to
our next chapter, to “set the stage”, so to speak, with a dramatic interlude in
the Cave of the Sibyl in Cumae.
Notes