Saturn’s Kingdom Transformed Into the Golden Age
By Tracy R Twyman On March 16, 2011
As I join the world in watching with awe the revolutions unfolding throughout the Middle East, and the spirited revolt that seems to be spreading across the West, I can’t help but think that we are really witnessing the dawning of a new era. The revolution that is spreading is spearheaded largely by the disenfranchised youth of the world. Educated and hard-working but unable to obtain a job, feed themselves, or raise a family, and with no future prospects whatsoever, the present generation has no choice but to fight for survival. Moreover, the elder generation of ruling class, grown fat on the blood of their subjects and dependant on their servants for everything, have laid upon this generation an enormous, unpayable debt burden that has been built up over the last several generations, and demanded that the youth of today now pay the full price for the sins — the laziness, selfishness, and neglect — practiced by their forefathers. Not surprisingly, the answer to this call has been a resounding “Hell no.” The elite, who weren’t expecting such an insolent reaction, are now attempting to bomb, shoot, and bludgeon their young slaves into submission. It won’t work. We have reached the nadir of a historically repeating cycle. This is a moment born of destiny.
Whitney Houston sang “I believe the children are the future,” but throughout history, the prevailing attitude has been that the sacrifice of the future of children, and the children of the future, is the predominant source of sustenance for the present population. Indeed, as I point out in my book
Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge, our own civilization has been built around the concept of stealing the wealth of the future, in order to manufacture artificial wealth to be enjoyed by ruling class adults in the present. In this book, I demonstrate that this is analogous to the story in Greek mythology of Chronos eating his own children to eliminate rivals and assure the continuance of his rule.
Saturn with his scythe, leaning on a cane
In alchemical studies, this myth is used as a metaphor for the production of gold from lead. In the book I demonstrate how the entire economy is built around alchemical processes, and that the central mystery of alchemy is child sacrifice. The alchemical process is a metaphorical formula for transformation that can be applied to all manner of different things. This includes the turning of the ages: the evolution of man, both physically and spiritually, through the passage of lengthy aeons of time.
In that book I talked about the concept that the Greeks and Romans had of the Golden Age. Their poets wrote of a four-step cycle of aeons that life on Earth went through repeatedly. Each age was named after a metal, and each was considered a devolution from the previous era. Some Roman writers said that the races which ruled each era were actually made of these metals. Sometimes these are said to be different races of “men,” although the accounts make it clear that the earlier races were not ordinary men, but gods, and the later races were the hybrid children of gods mating with humans.
The race of the Heroic Era (from which Hercules, Jason and Odysseus came) was such a hybrid race. Sometimes a fifth age was added, that of Stone, said to be the present age. The men of the present age were said to have been produced when the heroes of the Greek Deluge myth, Deucalion and Pyrrha, washed up in their Ark on Mount Parnassus. Allegedly, they pulled a cloth over their heads to blindfold them, and then threw stones behind their backs, which magically turned into human children, our ancestors. Ours is said to be a devolved version of the race of heroes, the divine DNA of our forefathers watered down with too much human blood.
Deucalion and Pyrrha creating the Stone Race after the Flood
However, what they all seem to agree on is that first was the Golden Age, in which, allegedly, the Earth was peopled by Gods, and Chronos (Saturn) was chief among them. But strangely, although he was Lord of the Earth, this was seen not as a time of autocratic rule, but peaceful anarchy. Saturn was thought of as the Lord of Unrule, and during this epoch, his subjects wanted for nothing. There was no money, nobody had to work for a living, and all things were held in common. It was a paradise in which everyone was free to do as they wished because there no lack, and therefore no need for involuntary compulsion through violent force. Or so it is implied.
Illustration from Goltzius based on Ovid's description of the Golden Age
Because of this, Saturn was associated with the Liberty Cap (also known as the Phrygian gap), a soft red floppy hat like Santa Claus wears (without the fuzzy cotton ball at the end). In the Roman empire, the Liberty Cap was worn by slaves who had been set free, either temporarily or permanently. When the Romans celebrated his festival at the end of the year (Saturnalia), no work was done, public drunkenness was encouraged, rules against gambling and prostitution were temporarily suspended, and slaves were given furloughs from their duties, let to run about as free men, with the red cap of liberty on their heads. A temporary sovereign was elected to represent the Lord of Misrule, who would eat and drink like a king until New Year’s Day. He would give out gifts to children, and receive many gifts himself. In the earliest times in which this festival was observed, this king would “reign” (ritually) for a year, then be sacrificed at the end of next year’s Saturnalia. In Plutarch’s Lives, we read:
The Saturnalia was a feast celebrated on the 14th of the kalends of January Betide the sacrifices in honour of Saturn who upon his retiring into Italy introduced there the happiness of the golden age. Servants were at this time indulged in mirth and freedom in memory of the equality which prevailed in that age. Presents were sent from one friend to another and no war was to be proclaimed or offender executed It is uncertain when this festival was instituted.
Many aspects of these rites have survived into modern times. There are obvious parallels with our Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, as I discussed in
Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge. The character of Saturn or the Lord of Misrule is obviously now played by Santa Claus. During the season, children stay home from school and most people take significant time off work. They drink, overeat, and kill each other stampeding in competition for the opportunity to purchase toys (and not always to give to children). As I discuss in that book, the alchemically-designed economy is built to be dependant upon this annual display of excess consumption to fuel the financial machine for the coming year.
Saturn riding in his chariot
The New Year celebrations, with their drunken orgies, definitely stem from Saturnalian origins as well. This is proven also by the symbolism used in modern times to depict New Year’s time, with Father Time representing the old year and the New Year’s Babe representing the coming annum. We make “New Year’s resolutions” and sing “should auld acquaintance be forgot,” just as our ancestors used this time to wash their hands of their past sins by laying them instead on the heads of a sacrificial victim. This role was played by Chronos and Dionysus in ancient times, with the latter being referred to as the “Child in the Harvest Basket” — the basket in which the sun god was said to make his annual voyage through the heavens This is also the traditional time at which the birth of Chronos’ patricidal son Zeus was celebrated, “born at midwinter when the Sun entered the house of Capricorn” the goat, according to Robert Graves.
Santa Claus riding a goat, representative of Capricorn, the sign that rules the time of Saturnalia, with a child in a basket tucked under his arm
But there are other examples as well of the continuing celebration of Saturnalia. There is Childermass on December 26th, discussed in a previous article of mine, on which the Massacre of the Innocents is observed — a story linked by European alchemists specifically with the Greek story of Chronos eating his children. Then there is the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th, and the related celebration of Mardi Gras which begins with that feast. This is the day on which the “festival of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles” is celebrated, and is traditionally the day on which the three magi came to the bedside of the baby Jesus bearing gifts.
On this day it is customary to bake “epiphany cakes” (or “king cakes”, as they are called in New Orleans), into which a tiny bean or token has been buried, representing the Christ child. Often it is a an actual plastic baby. Sometimes the cake itself is also made out of marzipan and formed into the shape of a baby. Each guest at an Epiphany party will get their own cake, but only one of them, chosen at random, will contain the baby token. Whichever guest gets the baby served to them is the “King” of the party, and will be treated to special party favors. (They literally shout “I’ve got the baby!” to everyone in the room when the token is discovered.)
A marzipan Epiphany cake in the shape of a baby
The downside, however, to being chosen is that the King has to clean up the mess at the end, or is responsible for hosting the party next year. The parallels to King Saturn eating his children, and the practice at Saturnalia of a temporary king being chosen for sacrifice, are obvious. So too are the connections between Saturnalia and Carnival, which is celebrated in New Orleans from January 6th until Ash Wednesday in March, when we begin to celebrate Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. These traditions all date back to the 18th century. But it is said that the sacrificial king of the Roman Saturnalia was chosen in a similar fashion. The implication hidden in the rite is that the king chosen by lot is the one who eats the baby, just as Saturn did, but in so doing he seals the fate of his own doom. The fact that in Europe a sabot (a device used in firearms) was used for the token in the cake makes the implied threat even more obvious.
Mardi Gras king cake with plastic baby token
Another similar modern-day celebration is that of Vasilopita on New Year’s Day in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The word literally means “King Pie,” although the holiday has in modern times been associated with St. Basil, who’s feast day is celebrated on that date also. There are many different versions of his story, but they all involve distributing cakes amongst the townspeople in which coins of various values were hidden at random. “Basil” means “king” in old French and Greek, so the choosing of this Saint to represent this day and this ritual cannot be a coincidence. The date is celebrated much like the Feast of the Epiphany, with a coin being the traditional token in the cake.
The details of the rite are rather interesting. A single cake is used, cut into slices, with one of them containing the cake. The cutting of the cake takes place at midnight on New Year’s Eve and involves everyone in the household. The sign of the cross is etched onto the top, and then slices are given out to everyone, the eldest receiving theirs first. It is also traditional to slice a piece to sacrifice to the Kallikantzaroi. They are described as having hairy bodies, hooves for feet, and sporting enormous erect penises, like tradition satyrs in Greek mythology. The name is said to mean “beautiful centaur,” named after the legendary creatures described as horses from the waste down but with the heads of men.
The Kallikantzaroi were believed to live underground at the center of the Earth, at the bottom of the World Tree, in Greek tradition. This is described as being a pole that holds the heavens apart from the Earth. These demons are said to be constantly trying to saw down the trunk of the tree so that it will collapse. But just as they are about to succeed each year, tradition states that on Christmas day, the sun “stops moving” temporarily. The Kallikantzaroi are released from their underground prison and come to the surface to torment human beings, which they do until the 6th of January. Then, on the Feast Day of the Epiphany, the sun is said to start moving again, and the demons become trapped underground once more. There they find that all of their work sawing the World Tree has been undone, and they must start over again.
The World Tree, where the Kallikantzaroi do their evil deeds.
So here we have a few interesting connections. For one thing, this information confirms my speculation in an earlier article that the tradition of leaving cookies for Santa Claus might be reminiscent of an older folk tradition in which food sacrifices were laid out to satisfy the Saturnian child-eating entity represented by Santa Claus, in hopes that he doesn’t eat the children instead. Indeed, the concept of a token representing a baby is being hidden inside of a cake specifically brings to mind the subterfuge of Rhea, Chronos’ wife, who substituted a stone for the baby Zeus when Chronos came to devour him as a newborn infant. Secondly, we have a connection between these bizarre Saturnian rituals at Christmas and the concept of global cataclysm, specifically the destruction of the Earth’s present polar configuration. I will get into this in more detail later on.
An ancient celebration of the Saturnalia.
The alchemist Fulcanelli wrote in The Mystery of the Cathedrals
about the connections between the Epiphany Day rituals and the symbolism of alchemy. The child in the cake stands for the gold hidden within the lead (represented by Saturn), which must be divulged and refined through the alchemical process, like a soul being extracted from a human body. He writes:
As for the common subject of the Work, some call it Magnesia lunarii; others, who are more sincere, call it Lead of the Wise, vegetable Saturn. Philalethes, Basil Valentine and the Cosmopolite say Son or Child of Saturn. ….Therefore, brothers, if you pay attention to what I have said about the Epiphany cake (galette des Rois)… you will no longer have any doubt about the subject which you must choose; its common name will be clearly known to you. You will then be in possession of this Chaos of the Wise ‘in which all hidden secrets exist in potential’, as Philalethes asserts, and which the skilled artist will not hesitate to actualize. Open, that is to say decompose, this matter. Try to separate the pure part of it, or its metallic soul as the sacred expression has it, and you will have the kirmis, the Hermes, the mercury dye which has within it the mystic gold, just as St. Christopher carries Jesus and the ram carries its own fleece. You will understand why the Golden Fleece is hung on the oak, like the gall and the kirmis, and you will be able to say, without violating the truth, that the old hermetic oak acts as mother to the secret mercury. By comparing legends and symbols, light will dawn in your mind and you will know the close affinity which unites the oak to the ram, St. Christopher to the Child-King, the Good Shepherd to the lamb, the Christian counterpart of Hermes Criophorus (the ram bearer), etc.
Later on, Fulcanelli describes an image inside a cathedral involving a dragon which he says is, in code, depicted as using its flaming breath to cook a child inside of an athanor. This child is said to be a king, and the son of the dragon himself, through the rape of a human female, a princess. He says:
This monstrous beast, with the grace of some great lizard, used to embrace the athenor, leaving in its flames the triply-crowned little king, who is the son of its violent acts on the dead adultress. Only the face of the mineral child appears as it undergoes the ‘baths of fire’ mentioned by Nicholas Flamel. It is here swathed and tied up like the figure of the little ‘bather,’ still found today in Epiphany cakes.
Fulcanelli says that the child Mercury, the Philosopher’s Stone, shut up in the prison of the athanor, is like the baby imprisoned within the epiphany cake:
Even the very pastry of the cake obeys the laws of traditional symbology. This pastry is flaky and our little bather is shut up in it like a book marker. This is an interesting confirmation of the matter represented by the Epiphany cake. Sendivogius tells us that the prepared mercury has the aspect and form of a stony mass, crumbly and flaky. ‘If you look at it closely,’ he says, ‘you will notice that it is all flaky.’ Indeed, the crystalline layers, which form this substance, lie one above the other like the leaves of a book….
He then goes on to say:
The popular expression to take the cake means to be fortunate. The one who is fortunate enough to find the bean in the cake has no further need for anything; he will never lack money. He will be doubly king, by science and by fortune.
Drawing depicting the Feast of the Epiphany with king cake ritual.
So the message is that the fortunate one is the one who eats the baby, because he gets to be king. But his luck is soon to run out, because as we know, at the very earliest roots of this ritual, it is the king who pays the price at next year’s Saturnalia rite. This is the central mystery upon which all of our social institutions are based. This pattern can be found within society in numerous ways, and can even be measured over the course of vast aeons of time.
As I stated in
Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge, there is a moral dilemma implied in the story of Chronos/Saturn. Saturn is associated with liberty, and a Golden Age of peaceful anarchy. Yet we know that in order to maintain this form of rule, he killed his own children to prevent them from growing up to overtake him. The only reason the Golden Age was so golden was because Saturn’s children were paying the price of the sacrifice.
But this is par for the course. Chronos himself had overthrown his father Ouranos, castrated him and imprisoned him in the depths of the Earth. Chronos too had narrowly escaped death as a child, since his father had also tried to kill all of his children at birth, for the same reason. In some versions of the myth, Ouranos tried to keep them from being born by imprisoning them within the mother’s womb.) Since their mother was Gaia (Earth), this meant that they were shut up in Tartarus, the lowest chamber of the underworld, called “the prison of the Sons of Earth,” this is also where the Titans were jailed by Zeus after he overthrew them.
The mutilation of Uranus by Saturn
Here is the meaning of this myth. Chronos (“Father Time”) had lived and ruled (or “unruled) for untold aeons in a timeless realm before the coming of Zeus. In this realm, there could be no begetting of offspring, or else there would also be death. Thus the birth of children had to be prevented, either by confining them within the womb — as Ouranos did — or by swallowing them at birth — as Chronos did, attempting to negate their existence by confining them to another womb of sorts: his gullet.
This is exactly what the story of the Garden of Eden indicates. Adam and Eve live in happy, timeless ignorance. They are the children of a god who remains, to them, invisible, and they are still shut up inside the womb, or within their father’s gullet. There, they live as parasites, forming a symbiotic relationship with their host, who provides them with all of the sustenance they need. Then one day, a foreign fruit is introduced to them from outside. They are told by their father, the unseen god, not to eat it. But they do anyway, and it initiates in them an awakening to the reality of what they are involved in. Their eyes are opened. They wake up from the dream and realize that they are slowly being digested. At that moment, they are vomited out into the cold, cruel, outside world, forced to work for their daily bread, fighting for survival. With their birth, or perhaps, their second birth, the passage of time is finally allowed to begin.
As we read of the passages of the various ages, from Golden to Silver, then to Bronze, Iron and (some say) Stone, we understand that the transition from one aeon to the next is always marked by a revolution of a similar sort, in which the disenfranchised son of the king, the rightful inheritor to the throne, escapes death and overtakes his tyrant father. If the father is a divine god-king (as in the oldest myths), he doesn’t really die, but instead falls into a death-like sleep and is imprisoned in the center of the Earth. There he waits to be avenged and reincarnated in a new king, reigning over a new age.
Another depiction of the Golden Age
What these myths of the Golden Age, Garden of Eden, and other primordial paradises really point to is the concept of a cosmic center: a kingdom that doesn’t really exist, except in the Otherworld, in potentia. But it is said to be at the heart of our own existence, and its essence can be felt everywhere. It is a place where there is no time as we know it. Rather, all points of time exist simultaneously, and all space as well. This is why the people who live there are said to never grow old. Presently, in our own time, we perceive it as fallen, like Eden, Atlantis, or the sunken R’lyeh of H.P. Lovercraft’s stories. But the legends state that that there will come a time in the future when a new age will dawn, and the hidden, sunken kingdom will rise again, the old king reborn to rule again, instantly transforming our own mundane world into the timeless paradise formerly relegated to the Otherworld.
This is exactly how the relationship between Osiris and Horus was viewed by the Egyptians. There was never a time when Osiris was really alive ruling his kingdom on Earth. From the earliest times he was thought to be in the center of the Earth, in his tomb at the center of the World Mountain. His son Horus ruled on the surface as his reincarnation. But it was the existence of the undead Osiris in the underworld that gave Horus’ throne its legitimacy.
This is also how the realm of the Fisher King is described in the Grail romances, who, like Ouranos, has been castrated, and now rules over a kingdom out of time. He can never die, but isn’t really alive. Only the food from the Grail keeps him alive in this in-between state. His wound will never heal, but continually festers, and grows worse whenever Saturn is ascendant in the heavens.
We also find hints in the romances that the food of the Grail, which keeps the king alive and the rest of his subjects in perpetual youth, is in fact the flesh and blood of children. That this is what the “Elixir of Life” is made from is hinted at also in the alchemical texts of Europe, and in many myths from throughout the world. I explore these ideas at length in
Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge. This is the fruit of the Tree of Life that the gods of Genesis sought to prevent man from obtaining, lest we “live forever.”
In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the knight Gawain is sent on a mission by a hermit who looks young, although he is 75 years old. The mission is to find the sword that John the Baptist was beheaded with, which he will need to enter the lands of the Fisher King. The sword belongs to a pagan king named Gurguran, who promises Gawain that he can have it if he will rescue the king’s son from a giant who has kidnapped him. Gawain kills the giant, but the boy is strangled to death in the process. Then, in a strange rite, Gurguran chops his sons body into pieces and distributes them to his subjects to eat. Gawain then receives the sword and is led to the Grail banquet at the Fisher King’s court, where 12 knights who are hundreds of years old (reminiscent of the 12 Olympian gods) sit around a banquet hall, all looking youthful except for their grey hair.
The Golden Age, with Saturn or Chronos shown flying overhead in his chariot, eating a baby
The reason why the hidden kingdom always exists, but never really, except in potentia, is because it is the place where time began. Yet if there is no time, how can there be a beginning? Therefore through paradox and logical fallacy it negates its own existence. Such is the case with the land of Nod, the wilderness land where Cain was exiled to, and where he built his kingdom. His descendants shared the same names as those of his brother Seth, save for a single letter, indicating their non-being. The chronology of their birth is slightly different than that of Seth’s descendants because time has no meaning where they are.
Cain, like Saturn, lived in perpetual fear of being killed by one of his descendants in revenge, as it had been prophesied, according to tales recounted in Louis Ginzberg’s book Legends of the Jews. Thus in Genesis Cain cries out to God in lamentation that he must forever remain in hiding, a “fugitive and a vagabond,” because “Whosoever findeth me shall slay me.” This eventually transpired when he was killed by his descendant Lamech in a hunting accident, since Cain’s horns, given to him by God supposedly as a protective mark to keep him safe from murder, caused him to be mistaken for an animal and shot — yet another dirty trick from Jehovah. Then, having killed his own ancestor, while hunting in the wilderness of the timelessness of Nod, Lamech, and all of Cain’s descendants, ceased to be, or to have ever been. From that moment on the Bible acknowledges them no more.
This is exactly how Edith Hamilton summarizes Homer’s description of the underworld of the dead, Hades, in his epic The Odyssey,
( Read more... )http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=1596Regnum в Potentia, Часть 1: Царство Сатурна превращенных в Золотой век
По Трейси R Twyman On 16 марта 2011
Как я присоединиться к миру, наблюдая с благоговением революций, разворачивающиеся на всем Ближнем Востоке, а также энергичное восстание, которое, кажется, распространяется по всему Западу, я не могу не думать, что мы действительно наблюдаем начало новой эры. Революция, которая распространяется возглавляют в основном бесправных молодежи мира. Образованный и трудолюбивый, но не в состоянии получить работу, прокормить себя, или создать семью, и без каких-либо дальнейших перспектив бы то ни было, нынешнее поколение не имеет никакого выбора, кроме как бороться за выживание. Кроме того, старшее поколение правящего класса, растолстела на крови своих подданных и зависит от их служащих за все, положили на это поколение огромное, неоплатном бремя долга, который был построен в течение последних нескольких поколений, и потребовал, чтобы молодежь сегодня теперь платят полную цену за грехи - лени, эгоизма и пренебрежения - практиковали их предками. Не удивительно, что ответ на этот вызов был оглушительный "Ад нет". Элита, которые не ожидали такого наглого реакции, теперь пытаются бомбить, стрелять, и дубасить своих молодых рабов в подчинение. Он не будет работать. Мы достигли надир исторически повторяющегося цикла. Это момент, рожденный от судьбы.
Уитни Хьюстон пела "Я считаю, что дети будущее", но на протяжении всей истории, преобладающее отношение было, что жертва будущего детей, а также детей в будущем, является основным источником средств к существованию для нынешнего населения. В самом деле, как я доказываю в своей книге Деньги растут на дереве знаний , наша собственная цивилизация была построена вокруг концепции кражи богатства будущего, с целью производства искусственного богатства , чтобы быть доступными правящий класс взрослых в настоящее время , В этой книге я показываю, что это аналогично истории в греческой мифологии Хронос едят своих собственных детей, чтобы устранить конкурентов и обеспечить продолжение его правления.
[сатурн-бог]
Сатурн с косой, опираясь на трость
В алхимических исследований, этот миф используется как метафора для производства золота из свинца. В книге я демонстрации того, как вся экономика строится вокруг алхимических процессов, и что центральная тайна алхимии ребенок жертва. Алхимический процесс является метафорическим формула для преобразования, которые могут быть применены ко всем образом разных вещей. Это включает в себя поворот веков: эволюция человека как физически, так и духовно, через прохождение длительных эоны времени.
В этой книге я говорил о концепции, что греки и римляне имели Золотого века. Их поэты писали о четырех этапов цикла Эонов, что жизнь на Земле прошла через несколько раз. Каждый век был назван в честь металла, и каждый считался деволюция от предыдущей эпохи. Некоторые римские авторы сказали, что расы, которые правили каждой эпохи были фактически сделаны из этих металлов. Иногда они называются разные расы "людей," хотя счета дают понять, что более ранние расы не были обычными людьми, но боги, и более поздние расы были гибридные дети богов спаривания с людьми.
Гонка Героической эры (из которого пришел Геркулес, Ясон и Одиссей)
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