TABLE OF CONTENTS    

Part I: El and Baal, the Shepherd and the Hunter

14. The same prehistoric religion in Egypt

The Gerza culture in Egypt is a period with a rapid rise in population, thought to be the result of irrigation techniques introduced from Mesopotamia (3600 B.C.). Here we find once more the lion dangler on the ivory handle of a flint knife:

There is also a very interesting scene of a ritual hunt on a palette for make up. Lions are shot with arrow and goats are caught with ropes. At the top of the scene a small temple with two large beams dominating the facade (the gate of the sun). Besides the temple the double-ox as the symbol of the divinenumen of the temple. The cow seems to be introduced in Egypt from "some Asian centre" which can be seen from its name Sumerian: (n)gu(d), Egyptian:ka, coptic: ko, old Indian: gauh, Awesta: gaus, English: cow, Danish: ko^[1]. The picture is from Müller-Karpe, II, t. 25:

The sem-priest ruling over the opening-of-mouth ceremony was wearing a leopard skin and many coffins from the oldest dynasties have a leopard skin painted on the lid. On stone monuments the dead are now and then seen dressed in leopard skin when receiving offerings from the living^[2]. The leopard skin is part of a very archaic death symbolism.

When a bull was offered to Osiris it was with the following formula: "I hit him who in a bull's shape hit you" (i.e. Seth). The wild antelope was an animal representing Seth. From this can be seen that the bull or buck was Seth, and Osiris was originally Orion (his soul is in Orion, his wife is Sirius), but the raising Dog-star (called Sothis in Egypt) brings the flooding of the Nile instead of the hot season drying out the vegetation. Osiris becomes the bringer of life fluid instead of being the hunter, and Seth is the great hunter and magician. This strange change in functions could be called the Egyptian somersault.

But still Seth is now and then pictured with a bull's head. Apish is the soul of Ptah, the creator.

Another bull-god is Min, who is called "his mothers bull", i.e. he who bred his own mother, the first and universal father (Lurker, ad "bull").

That Osiris is originally the great hunter can be seen from the atef-crown. It is the high pointed hat of Resheph-Mithras combined with the two feathers adorning the head of El Cronos in Byblos as well as the prehistoric hunter in Susa, Sumer and the lion-hunters of prehistoric Egypt.

Jah is in Egypt the name of a moon-god shown as a man with the royal kilt and the moon-disc on the top of his head.

The moon is called the eye of Horus and is born from the scull of Seth as the result of a homosexual crime committed by Seth against the young Horus. As in the teaching of the Magi the heavenly light is born as the result of a sexual act of a typical tantric character: Sperm is ejaculated and this means creation of the outer world, sperm is released, mystical power is lost and light is born in the outer visible world in stead of being sublimated into inner mystical light. This connection between "light-eye" and sexuality is explained by de Velde, Seth, the god of Confusion (p.51) and de Velde has even dared to compare with Tantric-Tibethan religion, and he quotes M.Eliade: "Acc. to these beliefs are the Light and the Sexuality two antagonistic principles: When one of them dominate, the other can not manifest itself and vice versa."^[3]

Horus is the divine falcon. By Philo it is even more clear that the divine falcon is the kundalini/the snake power raised to mystical vision: Philo 1,10,49 has a description of the primordial creature," a very beautiful snake having the shape of a falcon,- when it opened its eyes there was bright light everywhere and when it closed its eyes there was darkness".

The hieroglyph for Osiris was an eye on a throne; it seems that the symbolism of the Horus-eye belongs to the oldest layer of the Osiris-religion. de Velde quotes papyrus Berlin 3055,VIII,3: "Thou art Horus, who illuminated the two lands with his two eyes, when the sun had not yet originated". This symbolism is very old and very important for the understanding of the Osiris-faith. In the Horus-myth a sexual sin makes the light disappear from the eye of Horus, in Greek myth Orion, the great hunter is blinded (by the girl's father) as the result of a sexual transgression.

Both Horus and Orion are stung by a scorpion. The mortal sting of this animal is a symbol of ejaculation.

Lucian de syria dea tells that a man climbed one of the big phallic pillars outside the great temple in Mabbug in Northern Syria. On top he tried to build a nest and stay in this nest for some time. During this period, he had to keep awake for otherwise a scorpion would creep up the pillar and sting him.

How are we to explain this strange belief? During the meditation on the top of the pillar the ecstatic tries to be one with the bird of ecstasy. But this mystical unity with the sun-bird is brought to on end if he falls asleep and has involuntary ejaculation during his sleep.

Woodhenge, England.

Ascending snakes and scorpions from Early Egypt:

From the early Gerza-culture in Egypt we have rows of dancing wading-birds and men carrying the curved club, and even the scorpion (Müller-Karpe, II, t.25, the first picture above) and snakes rising are part of the scene. The result of the dance is water, as seen from the stream coming out from beneath them and giving life to sprouting vegetation. One of the men carries feathers in his hair, and he and his partner stand together with a pole with horns at the top (a bucranium?). From Tepe Siyalk we also have the footprints of many birds dancing in a spiral-pattern^[4]. The motif is also known from Tepe Gawra^[5] and Halaf^[6]. That the scorpion is an early symbol also in North Iraq is seen from a potsherd from the Sammara culture, a culture perhaps a little earlier than Halaf^[7]. Other bowls from Sammarra carry the picture of a stag at the bottom surrounded by symbols of vegetation and even with symbols of vegetation in stead of horns and coming out of the mouth, cf. from Tepe Gawra a stag with vegetation as its horn^[8].

The spiral-pattern is the symbol of ecstasy seen as a circling in the cosmic circles of the sun (the running Sandan is the sun or the sun warrior running his course) until one reaches the cosmic summit. The row of dancers is often seen as a row of cranes dancing round and round until they reach the summit of ecstasy. The so called "dance of cranes" known from Delos imitated the walking of Theseus round and round in the labyrinth until reaching the centre, where Minotauros was killed: The purpose of the dance was originally to bring forward rain, therefore the dancers are seen as birds with a close connection to water (cranes), and therefore the dance has to culminate in the killing of the bull god, the incarnation of life-fluids.

Homer tells us that Daedalos made a dancing-ground for Ariadne, of course the famous labyrinth. We meet this prehistoric symbol, the labyrinth, all over Europe. We have chosen to show the ground plan of Woodhenge, not far from Stonehenge. The spiral design is very typical of jars from the Badarian civilisation in Egypt and has also been found in Early Mespotamia (Ubaid, Tepe Gawra) and in The Copper Age temples of Tarxien, Malta^[9], where the double spiral marks the way to the holy of holies. Zeus Lykaios was pictured on coins from Cyrene with an eagle flying towards his throne or sitting behind the throne on a curved device, a branch acc. to A.B.Cook, but the motif on coins from Punic-influenced Sicily shows that it is a spiral. (Late coin from Panormos, Sicily Cook I, p.90 fig. 61.)

The spiral is the sun´s journey round and round until it finally reaches the paradise mountain, the center of the world (or the underworld, the way deep into the den of Minotauros, the divine bull). The Spiral also adorns the crown of Nether Egypt. It marks the king as an ecstatic.

A Mesopotamian seal shows the hunter as a lion-grabber. Behind him a god with the spiral threatened by a scorpion. Note the wild locks of the hunter and his journey in the boat with the bird of ecstasy on the stern^[10]. Just like the circling round the Kaaba and the altar of holocausts in Jerusalem, so also the top of the Hermon mountain seems to have been the object of a circling ritual^[11]. There is a cave in the top, just like at the top of the rock of Mt Moria in Jerusalem.

   

The weapons, the tail, the waving feather are identical on these two hunters, the first from pre-Dynastic Egypt, the second from a rock carving in south-western Arabia, possibly the fifth mill. B.C^[12]. This seems to prove that the fathers of at least the most important group of pre-dynastic founders of the Egyptian high culture came from Saudi Arabia to Upper Egypt. The high feather on the top of the scull is a symbol of ecstasy and is found also on the oldest stamps from Susa and on a picture from early Sumer.

Michael Rice, The Power of the Bull, 1998 is the latest attempt to give a comprehensive view of the prehistoric cult of the bull from Catal Hüyük down to the Minoan culture in Crete. Of greatest value are the chapters on Egypt and Arabia and the "Islands of the Bulls". He draws our attention to the strange fact that the small islands in the Persian Gulf, Bahrein, Failaka, Umm an-Nar, although they are certainly not suited for cattle-breeding, hosted a religion strongly centred upon a cult of the holy bull with "horned-altars" which anticipate by several hundred years the "Horns of Consecration" in Crete. On the prehistoric stamps dug out by a Danish expedition we find bulls and bull-men and ascending snakes together with the typical world pillar-symbol. On one stamp two bull-men are standing on the back of two horned beasts (perhaps bulls). They are both holding a standard set up between them. At the top of the standard a crescent moon. Two snakes are ascending to the top of the headgear of the bull-men (or the brim of the moon-bowl). On another stamp the centre of the stamp is dominated by the mystical 8-petalled rosette at the top of the world-pillar held by two bull men. Two men are seen standing on the back of two bulls, but the men are not normal human beings but monkeys and on the top of the stamp is shown a table carrying a big fish(?) and two men (acrobats?) hanging upside down from the table or alter. The rosette at the top of the world pillar is a sign of mystic vision, but the means to reaching this vision is the orgiastic fishmeal and man turned into monkey with morals and everything turned upside down. This interpretation of the message of the stamps is our interpretation. Rice has not seen that the cult of the bull is often closely connected to the orgiastic cult of the great hunter who stands for the chaotic side of man and ecstasy reached by most unclean methods. In a chapter called "The Bull and the Boys" he tries to see the strong tradition for homosexual love in classical Greece as rooted in the prehistoric cult of the bull and the naked or almost naked boys somersaulting over the back of the bull on Minoan wall-paintings. He seems to think that the naked or almost naked hunters surrounding the big black bull in the wall paintings from Catal Hüyük are not so much hunters as boys in orgiastic dance and leaping over the back of the bull. The leopard's skins waving from their loins are to him a sign of undressing, of dropping the loin-cloth. In our opinion he fails to see the continuation of these old rites in the cult of Dionysos driving his maenads to ecstatic frenzy, to the point where they hunt through the woods like panthers only clad in panthers' skins, tearing up all living souls on their way, eating the raw flesh. The point of the matter is this man-being-changed- into-panther (wolf) symbolism.

In our opinion the orgiastic and homosexual behaviour is not so much linked to the epiphany of the bull as to the serving of the Great Hunter, in Greece personified in Apollo and Heracles, in Egypt Seth, in Mesopotamia Gilgamesh, all four well known for their homosexual inclinations. In Israel this practice is linked to the so called "dogs and male-harlots", obviously ecstatics serving the great hunter, Baal-Astarth.

P.Kjærum, Failaka/Dilmun, The Second Millennium Settlements,vol 1:1: "The Stamp and Cylinder Seals", 1983. 43, 143.

 The bull man of these stamps has the long coiling lock of hair hanging down from his neck as seen in some Mesopotamian pictures of the bull-man, in West Semitic pictures of Melqart, Kemosh, Mkl from Beth Shan, Resheph, and in some representations of the bird of ecstasy or the composite animal, the griffin. The long untamed lock is the sure sign of an ecstatic with his hair whirling in the air as his consciousness transcends the top of the scull. The long hair of Samson is the symbol of ecstatic strength.

Rice also has a very good chapter about the bull in "the making" of Egyptian religion: the god" whose name is hidden" is called "Bull of the gods" and "Great Bull". The sun god is called "Bull that renews his youth". In the hieroglyphic system the bull is the symbol of the Ka the "etheric double". The deceased is covered with the hide of a bull to secure some kind of rebirth in the next world.

The most important motif is that the bull made ready for sacrifice is identified with Seth, i.e., the bull who is killed in the ritual is in reality the god being killed, the god symbolising wild nature.

---

^[1] Hrozny, Ancient History,p.56

^[2] M.Lurker, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt,1980,ad "leopard"

^[3] Mêphistophélés et 1' androgyne,1962,p.49

^[4] R.Girshman, Fouilles de Tepe Siyalk I, 1938

^[5] pl.CXVII,no.61

^[6] I,t.LVIII

^[7] E.Herzfeld, Die Ausgrabungen von Sammarra 5, 1930, pl.III

^[8] CLXIX, no.126

^[9] T.Zammit, 1980, p.21

^[10] Frankfort, XI, m

^[11] Clemont-Ganneau, Recueil d´Archéologie.V, 1903 pp.346ff., "Le Mont Hermon et son Dieu"

^[12] Journal of Saudi Arabian Archaeology 5, pl. 34A & B

    TABLE OF CONTENTS    

About | Contact | Privacy Policy | Site Map | Search