Chapter III

The Great Dragon

 

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels. And prevailed not; neither was there place found anymore in heaven. And the Great Dragon was cast out (exposed), that old Serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him... (Revelation 12:7-9).

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The heart of fools is in their mouth; but the mouth of the wise is in their heart. WHEN THE UNGODLY CURSETH SATAN, HE CURSETH HIS OWN SOUL... (Ecclesiasticus 2l:26,27).

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Do ye not understand…Those things which proceed from out of the mouth come forth from the heart (see Revelation 13:4-10); and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceedeth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies (deceiving others, and being deceived), ALL THESE THINGS COME FROM WITHIN... (Matthew 15:18,19; Mark 7:21).

To grasp the meaning of the relationship between Satan and humanity (and particularly Western humanity), one must understand the process of human evolution (and particularly the process of spiritual evolution), from the formation of the material planet, to the eventual creation of the human species (Genesis 1:14-19), and finally to the ongoing creation of the mind of Man itself in our very own time. (The mind of Adam is still being created…Genesis 1:26). Thus to perceive the countenance and the nature of the Dragon (the Devil, Satan), is to engage the Dragon in battle. To not perceive the nature of the Dragon (the Serpent), is to be overcome and devoured by it. Because the Western powers cannot perceive the Dragon's countenance, or understand its nature (in themselves), or the overwhelming effects of its presence in the collective affairs of the world (and Western civilization in particular), they too are preparing to engage it again, but in the wrong kind of battle again (for the third time in this century), and to be overcome and destroyed by it in the end. (See Daniel 2:44,45; Joel, chapter 3)…

THE GREAT DRAGON, Job 41.

"The Golden Fleece was nailed to an Oak Tree guarded by a sleepless dragon..." The Golden Bough, p.338.

"The Seven Heads of the Serpent of Eternity..." Tibetan Book of the Dead, pp.2-7

"Merlin's Dragonbreath. The land and the dragon were one..." The Movie Excalibur.

"The Red Sea became a mountain…" Sura XXVI. 64.

"The Serpent who swallowed the Sun..." (Tales of Jerusalem), Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, pp116,117, notes 107-109.

"The dragon is called 'Jormungand, the terrible World-Serpent who lays in the ocean.'" The Norse Myths, p.xxi.

"Thor (the Soviets) against Wodin (America)..." The Norse Myths.

"Its roaring was like that of a terrible storm, from its mouth came not only flame but coughed up rocks. When it belched forth its fire even the gods of Olympus were forced to flee. Finally Zeus turned on the monster and slew it. The carcass was eventually buried under Mt. Etna, which even today occasionally sends forth smoke, suggesting that the creature did not die after all BUT IS ONLY WAITING FOR THE RIGHT TIME TO RISE AGAIN…" Dragons and Unicorns, a Natural History, by Paul and Karin Johnsgard.

WHO CAN OPEN THE DOORS OF HIS FACE? His teeth are terrible round about... (Job 41:12-14)…FOR A GREAT DOOR AND EFFECTUAL IS OPENED UNTO ME, and there are many adversaries... (1 Corinthians 16:9).

The Dragon in this sense represents the broad powers of the earth. And specifically is Europe the head of this great creature, and therefore is European civilization at the head of those events that have been unfolding in the world throughout the 20th century, and which are now unfolding again. We are witnessing in the Balkans, and in the ongoing breakdown of the Russian state of affairs, a continuation of those conditions that led to the First World War, which in turn led to the Second. These in turn are not only leading to the Third, they bringing the 20th century as well as the history of the entire age of Adam to its present and foreordained conclusion. (Revelation 20:1-3; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12). Every Judaeo-Christian nation and institution that does know or sense these things has been caught, as it is also written: For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth... (Luke 21:35).

HOW JIMMY CARTER AND I STARTED THE MUJAHIDEEN

An Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, January, 1998..

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American Intelligence services began to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet Intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is this correct?

BRZEZINSKI: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military invasion. (See 2 Esdras 12:18),

Q: Despite the risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

BRZEZINSKI: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

BRZEZINSKI: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

BRZEZINSKI: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

BRZEZINSKI: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites Christian countries. (Excerpted from Bill Blum's Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II).

The whole of it has initially to do with those events that began in the lower garden of Eden six thousand years ago when the first Adam (those who received the initial revelation of God's Singular Presence in the Universe), went out to convince those around them of the sublime implications of this new insight, concerning the actual--not merely abstract--idea of the Unity of God's Presence in all things. They (Adam--the first Christs) told the people (who were now becoming their church--the first church…Ephesians 5:22-32) that they had nothing to really fear in the world, because in reality nothing really exists in the world but God. (Adam was the first monotheists). They told the people that this One God dwells majestically in every thing, as well as in every living being, and among all the families and tribes of humankind. They explained that there was a creative plan afoot, and as such there was nothing to fear in Nature at all--if only they would bring themselves into conformity with the Mind of Nature itself--with the unfolding revelation of God's Creative Will. (These are the teachings of the Great Tao--the Way of All Things). When is one in conformity with these teachings? with God's Will? When we willingly enter into the process of transformation; when we grow as Nature is teaching us; and when we finally change the garments of fear and doubt that we naturally wear for the garments of faith and trust in the process itself. Thus when we become the living vehicle--the New Body--the New Lodge--through which God is able to carry on the great work of human transformation itself.

Adam instructed this first church that this God (the One God) is, indeed, a God of War, yes that is His Name...(Exodus 15:3), which is why they must be fearless and faithful in this new endeavor. This was evident by studying the nature of the people and the tribes of people everywhere around them. It was obvious by studying themselves and their own natural inclinations. (Adam's was the first course in spiritual anthropology). But also that they could now change those around them (conquering them as it were, recreating the world as it were), thus alleviating all their own natural fears--not by might and power, however, but by first changing themselves, by humbling themselves before Nature and all others, and by becoming servants and teachers to others instead of adversaries (wise as serpents and HARMLESS as doves they said). The One God who dwells in all would recognize them when they appeared, and would lay down His arms and welcome them. And yes, what if they were killed in the attempt? There is a hidden world, Adam told them, an upper world, reserved for all of those those who have entered into this process of human transformation. Be of good courage, Adam told them. (The Sermon on the Mount is rooted in these very concepts; as is the great allegorical account of Israel's wars that we know as the Book of Joshua).

Adam instructed this first church how they should also inform others about the paradox of war, how it was through the very process of war itself that God would transform the world, and create "man". (Which is why all the sacred texts of humankind are about war, and about the secret and spiritual nature of warfare). And thus how all who ceased from the physical and mortal aspects of war would not only enter this new order of humanity but they would also inherit the age to come and the world to come, which God was also creating, and which was already set aside in the heavens of human comprehension for all those who overcame the ways of the lower world. The process would be complete, they said, when man finally arrived at the end of the age (six thousand years later), and when he finally came to the vision of the Most Terrible Countenance of God, THE GOD OF WAR, and when he realized that this God, indeed, will have no other gods before Him... (Exodus, chapters 19 and 20), (Psalm 82:6-8). The process would be complete when man realized at last what God was creating out of the course husk of the human nature (indeed, out of Themselves)--a new creature, born from above, and for above. Out of the Darkness of the human condition God is creating Light. Out of Chaos God is bringing forth Order; Out of ignorance, understanding; Out of injustice, justice; Out of war, peace. (Isaiah 2:1-4; Micah 4:1-5). But the process would be long. It would be complete when the great Circle was complete, and when man fully realized that all these things, the Light and the Darkness, had to be brought to perfection in what would eventually unfold upon the world in the dimensions of the Mystery of Christ, and that in Christ both the Messiahs (the perfected Adam), and the anti-Messiahs, would finally be revealed.

O Lucifer, son of the Morning (Isaiah 14), Prince of the Power of the Air (Ephesians 2:1-8...KJV)

For by him were all things created, THAT ARE IN HEAVEN (beyond our comprehension) AND THAT ARE IN EARTH (within the field of our own natural perceptions), VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE, whether they be Thrones, or Dominions, or Principalities, or Powers, all things were created by him, and for him...(Colossians 1:12-20).

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities, against Powers, AGAINST THE RULERS OF THE DARKNESS OF THIS WORLD, AGAINST SPIRITUAL WICKEDNESS IN HIGH (political, economic and religious) PLACES...(Ephesians 6:12).

The whole process began in Eden when Eve, the church of that age, gave birth to two kinds of sons, or two kinds of spirits--those who were like Cain, the natural man, and those who were like Abel, the spiritual. The spirit of Cain is of this world, and of this world it speaks. It has grown powerful in the earth, masterminding and manipulating the world in its own darkened interests. It hears the words of the prophets but does not benefit from hearing them (see 2 Corinthians 4:3,4). If anything it perverts the word, bending what it hears to suit its own earthly ambitions. It is presently ruling over the affairs of the whole lower, Western order of things…or imagines that it is. (Jeremiah 50:23,24). The spirit of Abel is from above, and will inherit both the age to come and the world to come.

The Dragon cult reached its peak during the days of the Roman Empire and disappeared with the advent of Christianity. Gradually the concept of the Mother Goddess (see Galatians 4:26), often in Serpent form, was replaced by a Father figure who was distinctly anti-dragon. Well before the time of Christ, when dragons were still common in Northern Europe, they began to compete with primitive man for caves to live in. One type of caveman who inhabited the Neanderthal Valley, had a particular mystical association with dragons…THEY REFERRED TO THEIR LEADER AS THE GREAT DRAGON, and every spring they gathered on hillsides and made great bonfires to imitate dragon fires...

Son of man, set thy face against Pharaoh king of Egypt (the world ruler), and prophesy against him, and against ALL EGYPT.

Speak, and say, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, THE GREAT DRAGON THAT LIETH IN THE MIDST OF HIS RIVERS, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself...(Ezekiel 29:2,3).

...As far back as the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., the dragon was believed to be a hoarder of Great Treasure (please see Deuteronomy 32:34), as is indicated in the Old English epic of Beowulf. In many cultures, as mentioned earlier, European dragons were believed to carry a magical Stone imbedded in their foreheads…Dragons and Unicorns, A Natural History, by Paul and Karin Johnsgard.

As we follow the living metaphor from the beginning we see that the Dragon, or the Serpent, is actually those elements of the earth with which God formed life itself, and finally human life. The Dragon, the Serpent, or Satan, lies at the base of every natural drive and human instinct. (Genesis 3:19). It rises up in man along the pathways of his own lowest impulses, to govern the structure and the pattern of all his collective thoughts and activities:

"Standing in the flesh, we were gazing by the spirit upon the Tree of Life--feeding our minds upon the fruit of its branches…Our focus is on Messiah as the expressed image of the invisible Presence of Elohim. (See 2 Cor.4:4).

But our upward momentum toward that focus is slowed, as is demonstrated by the creation parable of gravity. As we approach the height of our ascent, we begin to examine the vision not purely in terms of itself, but also to its relevance to our condition in this world-in the flesh. As we begin to define our perceptions in terms of the needs and desires of the flesh we place a limit on the infinite according to our own finite capacities.

As we looked intently upwards the serpentine spirit traveled upwards with our intelligence to meet and join with our thoughts in the righteousness of Elohim. As it coils itself among our thoughts of Elohim, our focus shifts from the Tree of Life to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we begin to fall.

It is One Tree, the difference between them is in the orientation of our thoughts. When our understanding of the living reality of Elohim is clouded by the perspectives of the flesh we partake of the lower tree. As we eat from this tree our faculties can only serve strange Elohim-only the idols formed by our misunder- standings and deceptions-our approximations upon the righteousness of Elohim and our assumptions about their application in our lives. Robert Finton.

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For the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things... (Wisdom of Solomon 9:15).

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"CAPTIVITY OF THE ISRAELITES…A symbol of the enslavement of the mental qualities (Israelites) by the desires, sensations, and lower emotions--the "Egyptians" or "Babylonians" as related in the Hebrew scriptures. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. (Romans 7:22-25)."

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"In the Zohar too it is implied that the evil in the universe originated from the leftovers of worlds that were destroyed (THAT IS, FROM THE UNPERFECTED NOTIONS LEFT OVER FROM ADAM'S OLD NATURE, WHICH ENTERED INTO HIS NEW PERCEPTIONS AND EVENTUALLY OVERCAME THEM).

The power of evil is compared to the outer bark of the Tree of Emanation (OR THE OUTER MEANINGS OF THINGS, BEHIND WHICH ALL INNER MEANINGS ARE CONCEALED).

The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge were bound together in perfect harmony until Adam came and separated them, thereby giving substance to evil, which had been contained within the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and was now materialized in the evil instinct. (THIS OCCURRED WHEN ADAM LAPSED FROM THEIR ORIGINAL REVELATION CONCERNING THE UNITY, AND THE ONENESS OF GOD--WHICH INFORMED THEMTHAT ALL THINGS FLOW FROM THE SAME SOURCE: BOTH DAY AND NIGHT, AS WELL AS BOTH GOOD AND EVIL). Thus it was Adam who activated the potential concealed within the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by separating the two Trees and also by separating the knowledge from its fruit, which was now detached from its source. This event is called metaphorically "the cutting of the shoots" and is the archetype of all the great sins mentioned in the Bible, whose common denominator was the introduction of division into the Divine Unity.

The essence of Adam's sin was that it introduced "separation above and below" into what should have been united, a separation of which every sin is fundamentally a repetition--apart, that is, from sins involving magic and sorcery, which according to the Kabbalists try to join together what should have remained separate." (SUCH AS TRYING TO JOIN TOGETHER THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DOCTRINES OF THE AMERICAN NATIION WITH THE UNIVERSAL PRECEPTS OF THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS…SEE REVELATION 13:14). The Kabbalah, by Gershom Scholem, p.124.

We employ a metaphor when we think of God as being above and the Devil, or Satan, below (even though God is the sum and substance of all things above and below), but not entirely incorrectly. The Devil, or the Dragon, is below. It is even below ourselves, as Paul, speaking of the day wherein the Great Dragon is revealed, says: The God of Peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly... (Rom.16:17-20). Every child from here on, being able to see the World Serpent with their own eyes, will be able to make a pilgrimage (if not to Europe itself, then at least in mind), to ritually crush its head beneath their feet, signaling their own conscious determination not to return to these same natural elements from which they came. Dust to dust, but the mind to the Lord of Eternity...

But as each grows and matures, and as each soul comes to understand the nature of the relationship between themselves and the earth, they will see that the earth is not evil at all, or the body, or any aspect of human experience that leads the soul, or the thoughts of the mind upwards or inwards. They will see that the World Serpent is also, in reality, and when it is revealed, a guide which leads the mind out of the Darkness to a higher state of spiritual consciousness.

"The dragon is concealed, because he is not called into action until justice requires Him…" The Kabbalah Revealed, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, pp.50-52.

We have often used the example of a hot stove in the corner of a room to comprehend the meaning of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden. We say to our children, "Do not touch the stove or you will get burned." The child stands obediently apart from the stove, wondering about the concept of "hot," and what it means to be burned. The wise parent says "Do not touch," but knows that somehow, and in some way, if this child is intelligent, and if it is to grow up with wisdom and understanding, it must touch that stove. It must "disobey" (even unintentionally, or unselfwillfully). It must find a means to touch that stove, if it does not it will never personally know the meaning of hot. It will always have to rely on the experience of others, on others' say-so. (Yet this is also a means. Someone in the group can touch it for all the rest). Without the experience, however, such a soul can, and no-doubt will, remain youthful, and perhaps become a dreadful tattletale, always condemning others for their experiences. It might never, in the greater spiritual scheme of things, come to really know the difference between good and evil, for what is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but a metaphor for human experience itself. Thus humanity had to partake of it, it had no choice, for the simple reason that experience is the only pathway to spiritual understanding. (See Hebrews 5:10-14). Thus having returned full-circle to the Tree of Life, we now have the ability to look back into history to see both good and evil coming to perfection in our own times. Without the experience we could never have known the difference. We would know nothing of our own propensities for evil, of our own dark side. We would never have known what murder and violence looks like, and our complicity in it; or injustice and oppression, and our complicity in that. Or what the empire of man in its most sophisticated and vainglorious state looks like, thus what WAR is, or its causes and effects. Then having these inclinations still latent and unexposed within us we could never attain to a state of Christ-Consciousness, and therefore could never inherit the age-to-come or the world-to-come.

Thus in the most personal, and in the very deepest sense, the war against Satan is the war against Self, and against all the lower thought-forms and mental complexities that tend the soul downwards, toward a state of ignorance of the Creative Power, thus toward darkness and death. For we see now that only the children of Darkness, and those who are caught in their sway, make war in the literal sense. They go out in their ignorance to make war against the other powers and principalities of the earth, which are the very same that God has reserved for Himself against the day of battle and war. (Understand Romans 13; Micah 3:5-7; Micah 5:1-5).

These are the physical and psychological dimensions of the Tree of Life, and, along with other systems of tantric thought, they are related to the Seven primary levels of human consciousness. They are channels into and out of this realm, and connect the central points of interaction that exist between the individual soul, the outside world, and the presence of God who inhabits all. The soul's task, once it has entered into the mystery of Life, is to explore the darkness, that is to go down into the empire of its own existence, and to engage the lower thought forms (the enemy) and to overcome them wherever they are found. The soul must spend its entire lifetime bringing the faculties of the body and mind into subjection, and in the process illuminating or opening up the chakras to the light of higher reality. When the lowest chakra is subdued--brought under subjection, illuminated--the whole body is full of light, and the mystical union between the Mind of God, and the mind of the individual soul is completed. (Or rather can be completed with the proper alignment of concepts and the right revelations.) The soul's descent into the lowest parts of its own existence is directly analogous in the interior world to the Holy Nation's descent on the historical plane to the lowest, most Western parts of the earth, as it is written: ...that they might be called Trees of Righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He and She might be glorified... (Isaiah 61:3). It is to fulfill the words, 'as above so below', On earth as it is in heaven.

The angels are the higher thought-forms that permeate the universe and that dwell in the earth (and, more than just metaphorically, in the East), which when enlisted by the soul not only reveal the presence of the higher realities, but call them into existence when the time requires it. (Understand 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9). Satan's angels are the lower thought-forms, but more importantly they are all those who embody these thought-forms, who give them expression, and who we find exercising lordship over the earth in the name of Christ in our time, all in violation of the highest as well as the deepest precepts of Christ. We are referring here to the leaders of the Western world. If they, however, would yield totally to the spiritual implications of our times, and be transformed accordingly by a spiritual renewal of their own minds, they could avert the judgment that is preparing to descend upon them, and upon those who yield to them. If they could repent of their plans to subdue the world, and of their violent attempts to recreate it their own great and colossal fallen interests (and that in the very face of the God of Nature Themselves), and if they would yield to the presence of Adam (the Messiahs who will be revealed to the world in our time…uderstand Ephesians 4:13), they could turn the tide of events that is about to inundate the Western world. (See Ezekiel 33).

The Mind of God--Pure Thought--the invisible driving force of the Universe--fills up the whole of reality, above and below, within and without. (Mass =Energy=God). Yet how could Pure Invisible Thought reveal itself to its own creation without also creating a mediator, or a matrix of sensual awareness between itself and the created? Something capable of transmitting the essential concepts of light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, life and death? That mediator is Nature, and more specifically for us in our time, all of Nature as it is expressing itself in the cosmic dimensions of the Tree of Life--the Mystery of Christ. In gnostic terminology it is called "Pleroma," or the "Fullness"...

Which is his Body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all... (Ephesians 1:23).

Just as the spoken word gives intellectual form to the invisible thoughts concealed in the mind of each individual, so the entire Universe, the Word, is the cosmic and visible expression of the invisible thoughts of the Invisible Creators. The "Big Bang" (the Great Emanation), is the beginning of this Divine Expression. Every visible, or comprehensible form is an expression of some inner, or invisible principle of divine reality. It is contained in the Law of Correspondences. Every thing means something else. Thus Paul says, Study to show thyself approved. The more one studies the more one understands. If such contemplation is accompanied by reverence and devotion to God (that is, to all of Life itself), God will be revealed. God is all that exists. God did not merely create the Universe, but transformed Him and Herself into the Universe itself. (And bah to those who contend that such ideas devolve to nature worship, leaving God beyond our true focus. As someone once said, the children of God shall be one with God long after the material universe has disappeared, after all things have been transformed back into their spiritual essence). Instead, such ideas bring about a deep and awesome reverence for the very earthly environment in which we live and breath, and have our being. Such a realization--for realization is the fruit of our spiritual existence--brings about the changes that are necessary for the healing and restoration of both our own souls and the world at large. (See Revelation 22:1-5). In fact we absolutely cannot attain to the truly spiritual life without also seeing that all things are of the Spirit, or that all is God, or rather that God is All).

We will have more to say of the Divine Mother, the Feminine Principle of the Godhead, but suffice it to say here that when the Universe as we perceive it came into existence, that which was united in Itself before the event was now divided in Two: that part of God which remained hidden beyond the vail of Creation, and that part of God that is revealed in Creation. The gravitational force, transmitted via the gauge particles of time itself, is an expression of this reality, the attraction of matter to a universal, invisible center. The electro-magnetic field (light) is another expression of this reality, with its constant negative and positive interaction. We can understand the meaning in the true, life-giving, loving relationship and attraction every Male and Female has for each other (that is, in the relationship they should eventually have for one another when they are finally made in the image of God…when She is his goddess, and He is her lord). We, our minds and our bodies, were born in that moment of Creation. We are made of the same forces, the same particles of matter, and the same dimensions of reality as everything else in the universe, as the stars and planets, as the wind and waves, as the trees and the plants, as all the rest of life on earth. We are those things. As we penetrate deeper into the structure of reality we can see it. Just as the Universe itself is a Divine Living Being, whose entire form we can only speculate about at the moment, so we ourselves (our true selves), are made up of the same. All we can see of each other is the form, the image of the Higher worlds, in which each of us are presently clothed. But we can not see our true selves yet (or what we really look like) not here in these dimensions anyway.

Nor was there any more economical way for God to instruct us in these things, and achieve the same results, than to show them to us, and to let us experience it all for ourselves. That is, there was no more efficient way to create "man," and preserve heaven intact, than to set these dimensions apart from the higher world, so that we could see what heaven is not. But also to show us how the material world, which is filled with nothing but God, will rise up again, and again, if humanity decides (after it has been set free from this present state of reality) to exercise again the unrighteousness and injustice that it is capable of, which has been clearly demonstrated to us throughout the history of this age. This great spirit of Darkness has been demonstrated not only to us but in us.

And then, just as Satan is not, in the human sense, one single individual being who ever walked the earth at any one particular time in history, we must come to the corresponding realization that the Mystery of Christ, as it is expressed on the cosmic limbs of the World Tree, and in the Gospels, is not an account of the life of any one single individual human being either. But rather it is an epic and archetypal account of God's Presence in the sum of all human events. One that, though it has made itself known to humanity at various other times, and in various other ways, has made itself known in a vivid way, with great historical effects, over the course of this present age. It is the expression of the Universal Higher Consciousness, the counterpart of the darkened, lower state of mind. The two have been traveling together in the same Body. The Scriptures are stories, not about individuals but about principles and ideas, about archetypes, about God/Nature revealing Him and Herself/itself in the context of historical events. And only after that is it about certain individuals who have entered the story, and who for historical reasons have become one with it--in ways, however, that are common to us all, with all the same infirmities and shortcomings as ourselves. In other words, individuals who are not to be thought more highly of than any other, as Paul himself lamented, chief among sinners.

Nevertheless, by nature of their calling, those who were called up into the mystery (being possessed by it as it were--avitars as they are elsewhere called), became able to interpret the oracles of Nature. They also learned how to seal up their interpretations, or revelations, until the last days. See how the Feet of the mystery lie here in the West, in the lower regions of the earth, below the Navel of the World.

THE EAST

THE WEST

Eurigena was an 8th century mystic and adept of Kabbalah. In a commentary on his sense of John the Baptist's saying: He it is who coming after me, is preferred before me, whose Shoelatchet I am not worthy to loose, it is stated:

"One may say the Christ's shoes signify (both) visible creation and scripture, for in these he has fixed his traces as though with his feet. Visible creation is truly the garment of the Word since, manifesting his Beauty to us, it makes him known openly; and sacred scripture has also become his garment because it contains his mysteries. Of these two realities- creation and scripture-the precursor considers himself unworthy to loose the latchet, that is, the subtlety. The Two Feet of the Word are, on the one hand, the natural ratio of visible creation and, on the other hand, the spiritual meaning of sacred scripture. The first is cloaked by the sensible forms of the sensible world, the second by the outer shell of the divine letters, that is, by sacred scripture. In two ways, then, have commentators on the Divine Law unveiled the incarnation of the Word of God. According to the first they teach that he was incarnated in the Virgin (the undefiled mind), joining himself to human nature in the unity of his substance. According to the other they assert that this same Word is as if incarnated, that is, thickened, by letters and shapes and lines of visible things. The latchet of the Double-shoe, which the precursor felt unworthy to loose, is diligent research and minute investigation of the truth in this two-fold manner.

Thus there is an equivalence between nature and the scripture. The Word is equally present in both, and both are in equal measure the Word of God. Both are signs of God or gestures evoking divine principles. Both evoke meaning and permit its realization." Eurigena, The Voice of the Eagle, The Soul of Keltic Christianity.

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"In Laurianic Kabbalah too the exile of Israel is connected to the sins of Adam, the outcome of which was the scattering of the holy sparks, both of the Shekinah and of Adam's soul. When the sparks became diffused even further in Adam's descendants, the mission of gathering them and raising them up, that is, of preparing the way for redemption, was awarded to Israel. The exile is not, therefore, merely a punishment and a trial but is a mission as well. The Messiah will not come until the good in the universe has been completely winnowed out from the evil, for in Vital's words 'the ingathering of the exiles itself means the gathering of all the sparks that were in exile.' The exile may be compared to a garden that has been abandoned by its gardener so that the weeds have sprung up all over it (see Matthew 13:34-43)…The restoration and reintegration (the Tikkun) progresses in predetermined stages from one generation to the next and all the transmigrations of souls serve this purpose. As the exile draws to an end, the reintegration of the Human Structure of the Sefirot reaches the Feet; thus the souls that go forth in the Footsteps of Messiah are unusually obdurate and resistant to Tikkun, from whence stem the special ordeals that will occur on the eve of redemption. The Kabbalah, Scholem, p.167.

We will employ the same means of interpretation to reason the epic meaning of the Crucifixion, and the Descent of Christ into the realm of the Dead, into Hades. (See 1 Peter 3:18,19; 4:6). Again, visualize the form of the Mystery of Christ on the World Tree:

"The career of any remarkable person is remembered in oral tradition precisely by being mythicised, connected with almost universally known patterns. Mercia Eliade Gives us an example of Dieudonne de Gozen, a medieval Grand Master of the Knights of St. John at Rhodes who, according to legend, slew the dragon of Malpasso. 'It makes no difference,' writes Eliade, 'that the genuine historical record concerning him is innocent of dragons; the mere fact that the man was, in popular imagination, a hero, necessarily identified him with a category, an archetype, which entirely disregarded his real exploits, equipped him with a mythical biography from which it was impossible to omit combat with a reptilian monster.'

We may say much the same of Jesus of Nazareth…Moreover, I shall use the word 'fiction' rather than the word 'myth' to refer to the study contained in this book, of the fictional aspects of the Four Canonical Gospels. BY FICTION I MEAN--TO PUT THE MATTER IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS AT THE OUTSET--A NARRATIVE WHOSE PURPOSE IS LESS TO DESCRIBE THE PAST THAN AFFECT THE PRESENT.

Of course, all works of fiction have an element of history, all works of history have an element of fiction…And it is not my purpose here to articulate a quarrel with Christian faith, or to call evangelists liars, or to assert that the Gospels have no historical content. I write as a literary critic, not as a debunker. THE GOSPELS ARE, IT MUST BE SAID WITH GRATITUDE, WORKS OF ART, THE SUPREME FICTION IN OUR CULTURE…

The canonical gospels exist as a sequence of narrative and dramatic scenes. This is not surprising; how else would one tell the story of Jesus? What is surprising is the great differences among the stories…For example, according to Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' According to Luke, Jesus' dying words were, 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.' But according to John, they were, 'It is accomplished.' To put it another way, we cannot know what the dying words of Jesus were, or even whether he uttered any; it is not that we have too little information, but that we have too much. Each narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional…

The matter becomes even more complex when we add to it the virtual certainty that Luke knew perfectly what Mark had written…and the liklihood that John also knew what Mark and perhaps Luke wrote, but both Luke and John chose to tell the story differently. AS IT HAPPENS, ALL THE DEATH SCENES WERE CONSTRUCTED TO SHOW JESUS DYING THE MODEL DEATH AND DOING SO IN FULFILLMENT OF THE SCRIPTURES…

What this means I shall discuss later, but for now suffice it that the scenes have a religious and moral purpose disguised as a historical one; we are, with these scenes, in a literary realm known as fiction, in which narratives exist less to describe the past than to affect the present. In De Quincy's phrase, THE GOSPELS ARE NOT SO MUCH LITERATURE OF KNOWLEDGE AS LITERATURE OF POWER.

As in the case mentioned above, the content of the Gospels is frequently not 'Jesus' but what certain persons in the first century wanted us to think about 'Jesus.' In the language of the Fourth Gospel, 'Those (narratives) here written have been recorded in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.' (John 20:31). In the language of literary criticism, the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about their own attitudes concerning Jesus.

That reflexive aspect of the Gospels is one of the main themes of this book. I deal with the effort of the evangelists to present their works to us as self-conscious literary documents, deliberately composed as the culmination of a literary and oral tradition, echoing and recasting that tradition, both appealing to it and transcending it, while using it in multiple ways.

The Gospels are Hellenistic religious narratives in the tradition of the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which constitutes the 'Scriptures' to those Greek-speaking Christians who wrote the Four Canonical Gospels and who appealed to it, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every paragraph they wrote." Gospel Fictions, The Art of the Gospels, Theology as Fictional Narrative, by Randel Helms.

THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE CANONICAL GOSPELS

A symbol of the final anguish of the incarnate soul as it reaches perfection, and the lower nature drops away from it.

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice saying, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.? (Matthew 27:46). The 'ninth hour' refers to the period of attainment of perfection on the three lower planes…(KETHER-HOKHMAH-BINAH REFER TO THE THIRD HOUR; KETHER-HESED-DIN REFER TO THE SIXTH HOUR; AND KETHER-NETSAH-HOD REFER TO THE NINTH HOUR)…The crucifixion not being yet completed, the cry of mental distress signifies that the soul is temporarily agonised by this transition state, for it is not yet entirely alive to the nature of the highest conditions of being.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, the dying Christ cries, My Power, My Power, Thou hast forsaken me, the Power being the Heavenly Christ, who for a time has been associated with the earthly person(s) of the Redeemer. The 'heavenly Christ,' or Higher Self, is to be understood as always associated with the struggling Lower Self symbolized by Jesus. This cry of the lower to the Higher indicates the lower consciousness on the verge of union with the Higher, but still perceiving its separateness from it…

And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit... (Matthew 27:50). This signifies the consumation--the ultimate suffering, and then the triumph over the ultimate ills of the lower planes--the soul's liberation and final withdrawal from the lower manifestation.

Although redemption as a whole is one, the process is manifold and consists in a series of acts, spiritual and mental. Of this series, the part wherein the individual finally surrenders his own exterior will, with all its exclusively material desires and affections, is designated the Passion. And the particular act whereby this surrender is consummated and demonstrated is called the Crucifixion. (See 1 Corinthians 1:18-24; Galatians 2:20; 6:14-17). This Crucifixion means a complete, unreserving surrender--to the death if need be--on the part of the natural man. Without these steps there is no atonement. The man cannot become one with the Spirit within him, until by his passion and crucifixion, he has utterly vanquished the 'old Adam' of his former self. Through the atonement made by these means of self-sacrifice he becomes as one without sin…and is qualified to enter as his/her own high priest into the holy of holies of his own innermost." The Dictionary of Scriptures and Myths, by G. A. Gaskell.

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"If to die as a human sacrifice for human beings deserves the highest reverence, the Christs of the world are to be numbered by the millions. Almost every land on the globe has drunk their annually (daily) shed blood…Nameless men and women have done millions of times what is credited to the fabulous Jesus of the Christian Gospels. They have laid down their lives for the sins of many." J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs, p.54.
The scriptures speak of two deaths, and two resurrections. (See Revelation 20:6). The first death is the death of the old nature, the old intellect, the old logic, and the old way of interpreting the scriptures and the designs of Nature. It is as Paul wrote: Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? (Rom. 6:3). And then, If ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above. (Colossians 3:1). The Scriptures also say: The kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it. (Gospel of Thomas, 113). Seeing it now, and how it is coming to perfection in the hearts and minds of all the children of Light in this age, and more specifically here at the Western ends of the earth, we can also see that "hell" is not a place that the soul can go to after the death of the physical body, but rather it is a place, and a state of mind, one recognizes after submitting to the first death. Hell is right here in this world. It symbolizes the whole lower state of mind into which we have fallen, and more particularly the Western state of mind into which we have fallen in our own time…

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works... (2 Corinthians 11:14).

For the hell of the Scriptures (the Hades of ancient times) was also a place located here in the West, where the Sun set at the end of the day; and where the evening sky was ignited by what was seen in the East as the very flames of Divine Judgment that would fall down upon the wicked at the end of the age.

 

Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church: and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it... (Mathew 16:17-19)

"The abode of the dead where the Sun finishes its course igniting a flame in the heavens." Herodotus

"When the seventh seal is opened Hades shall be uncovered..." The Revelation of John, Vol. VII, Early Church Fathers

The wicked are estranged from the womb (from the very beginning of their religious profession), they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies. Their poison is the poison of a serpent… (Psalm 58:3,4).

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"For there will, indeed, come that period of time when the gold-faced sky will split apart the treasury filled with fire, and the nurtured flame will in its rage consume all things on earth and in the heavens.

And when the universe gives out (its mysteries) the whole wavy deep will be gone, the land will be empty of dwellings, the air in flames, will not bear winged flocks. FOR WE BELIEVE THERE ARE TWO PATHS IN HADES, ONE FOR THE JUST, THE OTHER FOR THE IMPIOUS. Then will He preserve all things which previously perished." Fragments of the Pseudo Greek Poets, the Old Testament Pseudipigrapha.

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But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up... (2 Peter 3:10-12; Revelation 18).

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For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the Foundation of the mountains. (Eden-America)...(Deuteronomy 32:22).

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"For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither will thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. (Psalm 16:10).

The 'Holy One' is the spiritual ego-immaculate and eternal in every human soul. This will not always be captive to the lower nature, but will rise in glory at the cycle's end. The supposed scriptural authority for places of post-mortem everlasting torment for human beings is simply misinterpretation of texts. The symbol 'man' or 'men' signifies mind or mental qualities, and these qualities, as long as they are wicked have to be purified in the eternal 'fire' of the Holy Spirit. The purification takes place in Hell…

Earth and Hell interpenetrate--there is no doubt about it. Earth is full of Hell--full of mental and moral and social disorders, and wretchedness and suffering. Earth is full of Hell--and countless souls are there; and unless the fires of Hell could purge and purify and refine mankind, we might well doubt whether life were worth while. But they can. Earth is full of Hell. But it is not all Hell…We realize Hell only by what is opposed to it. I mean the thought of Heaven…and this too exists on Earth. The Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths, p.352.

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But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve (the first Church) through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. (It is as simple as this: The whole epic is fulfilled in love, and in the precepts of absolute non-violence).

For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received from us, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might bear with him... (2 Corinthians 11:3,4).

By following the allegorical and archetypal methods of scriptural interpretation to their conclusions we see that Eve (who in the Genesis account is not a figure of the female gender at all, but of the entire congregation, Adam's church…see Ephesians 5:30-32), was not beguiled by some extraterrestrial spirit fallen from heaven, or even some exterior force (not exactly), but was overcome by "her" (and we mean "their") very own nature. It rose up in them in the symbolic form of the serpent. They (the church of that time) were beguiled by their own rationale, by their own earthly concerns, their fears and doubts, and by their own lack of direct knowledge, that is, by their own lack of a direct experience of God. They were beguiled by the sum of their own natural impulses, the impulse they all shared for physical well-being and self-survival. How could they fully understand what Adam was trying to tell them? How could they trust such a notion--the idea of non-violence--in the face of others who did not share such an idea? Adam was asking them to abandon the lower side of the Tree--that side of the Tree which presented them with prerogatives reserved for God alone, not simply judgments between good and evil (which most men are clearly incapable of...see Isaiah 5:20-25; Malachi 3:15-18...KJV), but the exercise of corporal power in such matters, resulting in the life or death of other men. In essence, Adam was directing them to give up the thought of their own self-defense, as well as the exercise of authority over others, something that Adam's God was not requiring of any other people on earth but them...

Now the serpent (the Self) was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. (See Ecclesiastes 3:18-21). And he said to the woman (the people), Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

But of the fruit of the Tree which is in the midst of the garden (the Tree that ultimately leads to Divine realization), God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die:

And the Serpent said unto the Woman, Ye shall not surely die:

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil...Genesis 3:1-5.

Having returned full-circle to this first experience in the garden, we see that the account of it in Genesis is a prophecy of our own times. We see that Eve (the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, church), is still beguiled (although she has brought forth many children who are not…see 1 Timothy 2:15). She is still listening to the voice of the serpent, entangled as she is in the age-ending affairs of this world, and more particularly in the age-ending affairs of the American nation. She imagines that America is the most righteous nation of all, not because the true Light is being born out of the American experience but because it offers her, beyond all other nations, a sense of material prosperity and well-being, and the military protection that assures it--but who is, as we shall see, the Eighth and last world-empire to hold the oracles of God and the mind of the people of God captive. (See Revelation 13:10; Rev.17:9-11), (see Luke. Chapter 12).

In the main, and in its confusion, the church believes in another Jesus than the one that was revealed in the context of the Hebrew-Druid-Greaco-Eastern world mysteries, one that was given to it at the Council of Nicea in 367 AD and afterwards. This Council was presided over by one of histories most noted sons of Darkness, Constantine the Great. When Christianity endeared itself to this earthly champion, it endeared itself to the spirit of antichrist itself, a spirit which has grown up in the church, and with the church, to finally occupy the office of the Presidency of the United States in the 20th century. In so doing the church paid no heed at all to the words which said: Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God...(James 4:4), or to those which said:

Little children, it is the last time, and ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists; whereby ye know that it is the last time.

They went out from us (in other words, they called themselves Christians, and still do...open the Book of Jude), but they were not of us, for if they had been of us they no doubt would have continued with us. But they went out, that they might be manifest that they were not of us... (1 John 2:18,19; Jude 12,13).

Nor can the church fully understand how the term beast in the scriptures is a symbol of the political powers that have risen up successively in the earth, and, by association, the religious systems that support them. Thus it can not realize that where it says: And they worshipped the dragon which gave power to the beast, and worshipped the beast, saying, who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him? (Revelation 13:4), that it refers, first of all, to themselves, to Western man's worship of the collective will, of the common intellect of the people themselves, which in one great misguided way or another gives it power to the beast--in this case the American government). How? Simply by participating with it and its institutions (in direct violation of the precepts of Christ). Thus it cannot see how by nature of its historic participation in the world order (or dis-order), that it refers in our time to the church's relationship with the Western, and more particularly the American political and economic system of things. And even more specifically to its relationship with the office of the American Presidency. The United States of America is the Mystery of Iniquity fulfilled. (2 Thessalonians 2:7). It is the final realm of the spirit of Antichrist.

Pharaoh, the Assyrian, the king of Babylon, Haman, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and the Holy Roman Emperors...and finally the Presidents of the United States of America...THE GREAT DRAGONS... (Ezekiel, chapter 29...KJV).

The spirits of Christ and Antichrist have traveled one with the other, in the same Body, as it is written: Let the two of them grow together until the harvest. (Matthew 13:30). The two have come across the sea together in the same Mystery. The Mystery represents, or bears in itself, the collective higher and lower states of consciousness of the whole human family, each working itself out to perfection at one place and at one time, here in America.

Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

Verily I say unto you, Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast payed the uttermost farthing... (Matthew 5:25,26).

The adversary is the mind, as it is written: A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. The judge and the officer are the lower faculties of the mind that imprison the thought processes, binding them to the outer realities of the physical plane. Once imprisoned we begin unknowingly to call good evil, and evil good...(Isaiah 5:20-23). We lose our ability to perceive the Presence of God in all things, and begin to serve the spirit of antichrist within ourselves instead of Christ. We endear ourselves to the lie instead of the truth, to darkness instead of light, to ignorance as it opposes knowledge, to death instead of life, in other words to the spirit of Cain instead of Abel...

Are they not both sons of one Mother--the Church? But Cain is marked...(Genesis 4:9-16). Cain is everyone who, in the name of God, can find it in their hearts to kill another human being, or who encourages or allows others to kill human beings on their behalf--no matter what the reason. The more Cain kills, the more God kills back. The more Cain steals, the more God steals back. It is as simple and as terrible as that. To stop the killing, stop killing. To end injustice, end injustice. To end war, end war. But Cain is incapable. So the drama continues, onwards to the plains of Armageddon. (See Revelation 16:16). Armageddon is not some place or event that is confined to the Middle East, but an event of world-wide proportions, one that will culminate in the fiery judgment (one way or another) of the United States of America. (See Revelation, chapter 18; also Luke 12:49,50). It will signal the end of this age and the beginning of the age-to-come. It will be accompanied by a shift from the present paradigm, symbolized by our situation at the Seventh Sefirot on the Tree of Life, to the emerging state of consciousness, symbolized by those events that will take place around the Eighth Sefirot named Majesty. The true Messiahs will be revealed there in our time. But presently the office of the President of the United States, and those who have occupied it, and the whole earthly order over which it presides, stands in the way and takes the place of the true Messiahs in the hearts and minds of the people. See it in the Oracle. (Understand Isaiah 4:1,2).

The children of Light were not intended to have any king, or president, or any earthly power ruling over them in this age other than the Spirit of God. (See Deuteronomy 17:14-20; Judges 9:7-15; 1 Samuel 8: 1-22; Luke 20:26; Romans 6:12-16). The American experience was the opportunity God provided to fulfill these commandments. The true Remnant in every age, though recognizing the reason for the presence of earthly powers--so that in them the Darkness itself could be revealed; so that through them God could keep the Darkness in check; and so that in them God could reveal how He rises up in the world to overthrow the Darkness (see Romans 9:17-23)--never recognized any as ruling over them. They never swore by them, or payed allegiance to them. Nor did they ever participate in the political processes of these nations, as it is written: All nations before Him are as nothing, and are counted to Him as less than nothing, and vanity...(Isaiah 40:15-17). It is the Lord who sets up kings and removes kings, or presidents, even though here in the West the people may be under the illusion that it is themselves. (Daniel 2:21). Thus the Remnant in every age has always walked apart from the confusion, the calamity, the violence, and the illusions of the world, balancing as best they could, when they could, the command to be separate with the other commands to be involved, to instruct the world, and to both serve and rescue the poor and oppressed from the hands of the oppressor. They have always known, however, that to be a friend of this world-order is ultimately to be an enemy of the things that God is bringing to pass in the earth.

But if thine Eye be evil,thy whole body shall be full of Darkness. If therefore the light in thee be Darkness, how great is that Darkness...(Matthew 6:19-24).

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

The Remnant also knew that they were not to endear themselves to the laws and constitutions of any other nation on earth, as it is written: The earth is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances, and broken the everlasting covenant... (Isaiah 24:5). They frameth mischief by law... (Psalm 94:20).

Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do so in the land whither you go to possess it.

Keep therefore and do them, for this is your Wisdom and your Understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear of all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all the things that we call upon Him for?

And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day... (Deuteronomy 4:5-8; Matthew 5:17).

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Beware lest any man (or any nation), spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ... (Colossians 2:8).

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Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of men for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme;

Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well.

For so is the will of God, that with well-doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

As (already) free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as servants of God.

Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.

For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.

For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? But if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.

For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow in his Footsteps... (1 Peter 2:11-21).

Peter is not instructing us not to resist governmental oppression, or to be docile in the face of injustice, because he says in another place: But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye; and be not afraid of their terror, neither be ye troubled...(1 Peter 3:14), but rather to choose our weapons carefully, our means of resistance. Because in our studies we find that Schimeon (Peter) himself was among those who were resisting the authorities in Jerusalem. Peter is instructing the church here to abstain from taking up arms, or from doing violence, or from returning like treatment for like treatment, knowing that vengeance belongs to God alone. (See 2 Thess. 1:4-9). We must not remove the Scriptures from their historic and prophetic context. Peter, looking into the future, is instructing the Church to abstain from the great transgression that shall occur in the last times--the great American Revolution:

To The Deists.

"He can never be a friend of the Human Race who is a Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion; he is a flatterer who means to betray, to perpetuate Tyrant Pride & the laws of that Babylon which he sees shall shortly be destroyed, with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword. He is in the state of Rahab, which state he must put off before he can be a friend of man.

O ye deists, profess yourselves to be the enemies of Christianity, and you are so: you are also the enemies of the Human Race & of Universal Nature. Man is born a spectre of Satan & is altogether an evil, & requires a New Self continually, & must be continually changed into his direct counterpart. But your Greek Philosophy--which is a remnant of Druidism (in its fallen state)--teaches that man is righteous in his Vegetated Spectre; an opinion of fatal and accursed consequences to man, as the ancients saw plainly by Revelation, to the entire abrogation of Experimental Theory; and many believed what they saw, and prophecied of Jesus.

Man must & will have some Religion: if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan & will erect the Synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of This World, God, and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the name of God. Where are they? Listen! Every Religion that teaches Vengeance for Sin is the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger and not the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, named by the Divine Name. Your Religion, O Deists, Deism, is the Worship of the God of This World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of the Natural Morality of Self Righteousness, the Self Virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the Religion of the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Deism is the same and ends in the same…

Those who Martyr others or who cause War are Deists, but can never be the Forgiver of Sins. The glory of Christianity is to Conquer by Forgiveness. All the Destruction, thereof, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion." William Blake.

James Toler, a feisty local columnist, and free lance writer, said it another way, in an article in the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette:

"This nation was founded by a bunch of money-grubbing colonists who nearly exterminated the native population because the Indians would not live like 'civilized' white men. They built the South on the backs of black slaves and poor whites.. The North built its commerce on children and immigrants who worked from daylight to dark, were poorly fed and paid, and whose only reward was to die young.

In West Virginia, mineral rights were swindled away and the citizen's reward was spending the biggest part of their short lives underground breathing coal dust and dodging slate falls, if they were lucky, and owing their souls to the company store.

Jesus Christ was the same fellow who threw the money changers out of the temple and said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. If he were walking the earth today, I doubt that he would have any truck with the likes of...that gang of thugs who run Washington, nor do I think he would embrace the so-called 'Christian principles' (they all) seem so fond of…" (Nov. 95).

In a work of inestimable value entitled Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic (which we shall open alongside of the pages of the book of Isaiah), Lydia Dittler Schulman--in her treatment (from a Miltonian world-view) of the rise of English capitalism in America; the glorification of individual initiative, ingenuity and inventiveness; Adam Smith's cult of self-interest versus the real common good; the subsequent and wholesale disregard for the natural and social environment; and the complete privatization of resources, capital and the means of production--encompasses the entire meaning of the verses which say: For the Mystery of Iniquity doth already work...(2 Thess. 2:1-7). "The story," Schulman says, "encapsulates the problem of corruptibility, the choice between good and evil, and the question, or the illusion of free will." (Please see I Corinthians 15:53,54).

For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.

For if they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning... (2 Peter 2:18-20).

The connection between Schulman's work and the book of Isaiah, which we shall begin to open up during the events of the America Revolution, must be emphasized again. And as such we will see that the story of Lucifer's fall from heaven at Isaiah, chapter 14, is not simply a cosmic myth, or a tale of some time in the way-distant past when Satan and his minions were cast out of some extra-terrestrial realm, but rather it is a prophecy which culminates in the events of our times. It is a proverb to be taken up against the world-ruler, the king of Babylon, in the last day. (Please consider the chapter in the Addendum entitled The Mystery of Iniquity). Is he not called the Son of the Morning?...

It is a proverb to be taken up against the sons of Darkness who have come across the times with the children of Light in the Mystery of Christ--all of whom will be exposed, and cast out for all the world to see, along with the Great Serpent itself. (Open the Book of Jude). Those who cannot see the Serpent, are of the Serpent; and those who are ready to rush head-long into the events that are at this moment unfolding in the Balkans, (and now in Central Asia), are rushing head-long into the great wide-opened mouth of the Dragon itself, to be devoured at last in the age-ending events of our time.

Schulman writes:

"If Eve is easily beguiled by Satan's appeal to the law of nature, and by his seemingly rational arguments, perhaps fear of God will dictate greater caution. But Satan has already convinced Eve that eating (of the forbidden fruit--the dark side of the Tree of Life) can have no consequence, for God has predetermined her fate…

This Satan is a Calvinist…Strict Calvinism (WHICH PRODUCED A DARK TWIST ON PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION--UNAWARE THAT IT WAS THESE CALVINISTS THEMSELVES, AND THOSE WHO FOLLOWED IN THEIR PATRIOTIC FOOTSTEPS, WHO WERE PREDESTINED TO FILL THE EARTH WITH THEIR OWN DARK DEEDS), while de-emphasizing individual responsibility for the consequence of actions, may render its adherents susceptible to manipulation by evil-intentioned Satans. The appeal…of Satan to Eve's sensual desires and his insistence on the inconsequentiality of her actions in the larger framework of the universe is suggestive of the way a demagogue might manipulate a crowd, playing on its sense of political impotence and unjust treatment, while promising to gratify its immediate desires.

Satan's rhetorical skills are an even more prominent feature in Lucifer, Vondel's drama of rebellion in Heaven. Lucifer at first conceals his own rebellious intentions while drawing out the festering resentments of the more egotistical members of the angelic population. When the incited mob finally demands that he lead them in rebellion against the tyrant God, Lucifer showers them with false-republican speeches…" (p.23).

"Lucifer is a familiar type: a self-serving political leader who camouflages his egotistical aims behind altruistic rhetoric. His flaws are the typical satanic ones: pride, envy, ambition, jealousy. He stirs up the rebellion in Heaven with 'cunning hatched from subtlety.'…" (p.24).

"But if Lucifer's rebellion is portrayed as egotism parading under the pretext of selfless public service and respect for the law, (Lucifer's grievance against God is that he has violated his own celestial hierarchy in creating and elevating 'man'), God is not portrayed as a 'conservative,' nor is the universe he created a static hierarchy…Lucifer rebels, not because he wants change, but because he wants to preserve his original place in the celestial hierarchy, which God himself is changing and perfecting…" (p.24).

"Lucifer, the stateholder, clings to the old order even if it means war, while God unfolds his infinitely complex, changing, and self-perfecting universe…" (p.26).

"Moloch, the furious king of the battle in heaven, declares for open war, unmindful that the rebels will only be setting themselves up for greater defeat…" (p.78).

"But Belial opposes any war, open or concealed. Mammon concurs…and he proposes that the devils adopt the work ethic, and apply all of their industrial skills and arts in founding an empire to rival the gods..." (p.79).

"He proposes that the devils either waste God's new creation or 'seduce them to our party.'…" (p80). Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic.

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"Meanwhile Belial will be rampant in Israel, even as God said through Isaiah, Terror and the Pit and a Trap shall be on thee O inhabitants of the land. (Isaiah 24:17)…These are Whoredom, Lucre, and Desecration, concerning which Levi said that by making them seem like three kinds of righteousness Belial ensnares Israel in them. He who escapes the one gets caught in the other, and he who escapes that gets caught in the third." The Zadokite Document, The Dead Sea Scriptures.

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"And when Cain had traveled over many countries he, with his wife, built a city named Nod, (Sleep), where he also had children…However, he did not accept his punishment in order to amend, but to increase his wickedness. For he only aimed to procure everything that was for his own bodily pleasure, though it obliged him to be injurious to his neighbors.

He augmented his household substance with much wealth; by rapine and violence he excited his acquaintances to procure everything by spoil and robbery, and became a great leader of men in wicked courses. He also introduced change in the way of simplicity wherein men lived before; and was the author of weights and measures; and whereas they lived innocently and generously while they knew nothing of such arts, he changed the world into cunning craftiness.

He first of all set boundaries about lands, he built a city, and fortified it with walls, and he compelled the family to come together to it, and called the city Enoch after the name of his oldest son Enoch. (Which tells us the sons of Darkness were already adopting ideas, and using names that belonged to the righteous, confusing everyone afterwards)." Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews I..II.2.

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Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds; when the morning is light they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand.

And they covet fields and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away; so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.

Therefore thus saith the Lord; behold against his (Cain's) family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks, neither shall ye go haughtily for the time is evil... (Micah 2:1,2).

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Woe to them that join house to house, that lay field to field (and town to town, and county to county, and state to state), till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth... (Isaiah 5:8).

But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.

And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor:

And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage (see John 8:33-36), in mortar and brick, and in all manner of service in the field; all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor... (Exodus 1:8-22; Revelation 12:5).

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So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the Sun; and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of the oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter... (Ecclesiastes 4:1; Amos 5:7-20).

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Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven…Thy crowned are as the locusts and thy captains as the great grasshoppers that camp in the hedges on a cold day. But when the Sun ariseth they (will) flee away, and there place is not known where they are... (Nahum 3:16; Revelation 18:11-17).

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Forasmuch as your treading is upon the poor…Ye have built houses but ye shall not dwell in them, ye have planted vineyards but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins; they afflict the just, they take a bribe, they turn aside the poor from the gate of their right.

Seek good and not evil that ye may live, and so the Lord God shall be with you as ye have spoken. Hate the evil, love the good... (Amos 5:11-14).

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If thou see the oppression of the poor, and the violent perverting of justice and judgment in a province, marvel not at the matter; for He that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be those who are higher than they.

MOREOVER THE PROFIT OF THE EARTH IS FOR ALL; the king himself is Served by the field.

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied…nor he that loveth abundance with Increase; this is vanity.

When goods are increased, they are increased that eat them; and what good is there To the owners thereof, save the beholding of them with their eyes…

There is a sore evil which I have seen under the Sun, namely riches kept (back) for the owners thereof to their own hurt... (Ecclesiastes 5:8-13).

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Shall I count them pure with wicked balances, and with a bag full of deceitful weights?

For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouths... (Micah 6: 11,12).

It seems that almost anyone coming away from seeing The Patriot (or the movie Braveheart before it, which relayed the same message), almost helplessly filled with a sense of national pride at the outcome, of being part of some great and historical destiny, could hardly be convinced that the American cause in the Revolution against the British was not justified. (Unless one's thoughts are being governed by the oracles, and by the universal precepts of Christ, it is very difficult to think otherwise). Nor could those who are particularly vulnerable to the religious context in which the events took place and the scenes were shot, be easily convinced that the heroic figure of Benjamin Martin--conflicted, as he is portrayed to be, by the very idea of violence and warfare itself--did not afterwards receive direct permission from God (his god) to join the revolt, and to exact a full measure of righteous vengeance against the English soldiers for their atrocities. We are convinced that he did (and that the god he prayed to for guidance was naturally the same God that Jesus prayed to; for after all, haven't we been told all this time that America is a Christian nation)? Thus the message, relayed so effectively through the wonders of the motion picture arts (and, of course, through newspapers, pamphlets, and American history books for the last two centuries), is that the American nation, and the American military establishment to which the nation owes its existence, were both born in righteousness, and that violence in the cause of "justice" (in the name of God that is), is violence well-born. It is pardonable and it leads to greater glory...

Show them the king that shall reign over them...(1 Samuel, chapter 8...KJV).

This assault on the impressionable mind, (on the very deceived, childlike, and misplaced patriotic Christian mind, and not to fail to mention the otherwise impoverished mind of minorities and other captive peoples), is three-prong. It flows from a constant barrage of media images (billboards, magazines, television, the movies--"Be all that you can be...in the Army." "The Marines--the Few, the Proud, and the Brave." "Let the Journey Begin...In the Navy"). It is reinforced in the public schools, and in the ever-presence of military recruiters who are given access to the students, and who offer them adventure and romance, money for college and a chance for a secure and happy future. The young people are sealed and delivered into their hands, and then into the hands of Caesar to be sent away to die on the battlefields of the world--and by the Church no less, who has abandoned almost every last vestige of the doctrines of Christ (Hebrews 6:1-8). We witness it in the film where the pastor of the Carolina congregation abandons the pulpit to take up arms in the colonial militia himself...

He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him...

He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked...(1 John 2:4, 6).

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Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.

But exhort one another daily, WHILE IT IS (STILL) CALLED TO DAY; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end...(Hebrews 3:12-14).

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But he that shall ENDURE to the end, the same shall be saved...(Matthew 24:13).

Which have forsaken the right way, and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness...(2 Peter 2:15).

Who can the leaders of the American church imagine these verses in the Prophets apply to in this age if not themselves and the American economic and political order they support? It is written in the Prophets that the Lord is our Judge, our Lawgiver, and our King. (Isaiah 33:22). The Lord is our Judicial, Legislative, and Executive branches all in one. The founders of the American government created, in all of their earthly deliberations, a dark corporate image of this spiritual reality, and the people have been stooped down to it ever since. And the God of History has been rising up to destroy it ever since. See it in the opening pages of the Book of Isaiah as the words progress from the events of the American Revolution to the final chapters and the events of our own time.

Thus the church, because of its gross entanglement in these affairs, does not realize that where the Scripture says: …And the dragon stood before the Woman, which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born... (Revelation 12:4), that it refers to the Western order's on-going attempt to keep that which is striving to be born in it from coming to the birth. What is coming to the birth is a whole new state of Consciousness, one that is leading to a new age--an age of Righteousness, Justice and true Peace. It is being born in the hearts and minds of millions of individuals in our time (throughout the whole world now). It is being born in the same way as this present age was born two thousand years ago, in the minds of those who could perceive the Signs of the Times in their generation. (See John 16:20,21). Everything, therefore, that the church does in support of the old order of things (even more so when it refers to itself as a New World Order), intensifies the meaning of the text.

As we see how the "skull," or the "mind" of the Dragon lies under, or rather how it comprises the continent of Europe, thus how it is intricately connected to the history of Western man, we can begin to understand the comment in the Zadokite Document from the Qumran scrolls:

"The serpents are the kings of the nations, the chief among them is the king of Grecia…" The Dead Sea Scriptures, by T.Gaster, p.76.

Who is this king of Grecia? One might imagine it to be some past reference to Alexander the Great (see Daniel 8:21-227), which it is, but only in part. One must interpret every prophetic text in the light of the growing and unfolding dimensions of the World Mystery (all of which will culminate in America where all the books will be opened in the last day). One must understand how the Seven heads of the World Serpent are the Seven world empires that span the earth from one side of the Mystery to the other, from their origins in Eden, to the East, and back to Eden again; whose center, however, is the city of DaViD itself, situated in the center of the World Tree in the center of Europe...

The Seven heads of the Great World Serpent...Psalm 74:12-14.

We speak of these things in the chapter on the Nature and the Mark of the Beast, but one must begin to see how the spirit of each empire was assimilated into the one that followed it (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Media-Persia, Grecia, Rome...see Revelation 17:10), each rising in its turn to take the mind of the Holy Nation captive, and then falling under the rise of the one that followed. They arrive at the collective peak of their political, economic, military and social development at the center of the Mystery with the Holy Roman Empire and the modern nation-states of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire, the Seventh Head of the Dragon, was brought to ruin before our very eyes as God rose up against it in the World Wars of the 20th century--but not before the mind of Europe sailed away to the West, to America, carrying the spirits of all Seven with it back to the beginning again (see Matthew 12:43-45), to become the Eighth and last, and the greatest empire to enslave and entangle the Word of God in it own service. (See Revelation 17:7-14)…

Behold, the eyes of the Lord are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord.

For, lo, I will command and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth.

All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say the evil shall not overtake or prevent us.

In that day I will raise up the tabernacle of D.V.D. That is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof, and I will raise up the ruins, and I will build it as in days of old... (Amos 9:8-15).

The epic is complete as the children of Israel finally learn what it means to overcome the world. It begins with the Self, for the war against Self is the only battle the children of Light have ever been commissioned to engage in. And then only after that may the children of light make war against the world, and only then in the most strictest, non-violent and allegorical way. (See 2 Corinthians 10:3-6). The epic is complete as Israel learns how to lift its eyes above its own fallen condition, to view the terrible panorama of spiritual reality--the history of the world--in a single glance, and when it realizes that what the natural mind has mistaken for good, God has set aside for evil. (Understand Malachi 3:18; Luke 16:15). It is not that America acts in completely worse ways than the other nations, it is just that all the evil it has worked in the world it has done in the name and in the spirit of Christ (and conversely, the good that America is noted for in the world, the idea of Freedom for instance, it has stolen, or conscripted from the Word of God that inhabits its shores). God has warned, and warned, and warned through the voice of all the prophets that They will have none of it. For two-thousand years They have warned. From the beginnings of the American nation God has been warning. Through the voice and the songs of the oppressed everywhere throughout the earth They have warned. America has been saturated with warnings. And now They must act, or rather the Father must act, as He rises up in all of the Powers, as well as in all of the conflicts of the East as it is written:

For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, NOW WILL I ARISE, saith the Lord; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.

The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tries in a furnace of earth, purified Seven times...

The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted...(Psalm 12).

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For thus saith the Lord of hosts (of all the peoples and nations of the earth), Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry lans;

And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts...(Haggai 2:6,7; Hebrews 12:11-29).

God demands social and economic justice, not just talk of it; and They demand it most of all of those who are being brought to perfection here at the Western ends of the earth. They demand that those who take the name of Christ walk in all of the ways of Christ, in the absolutely non-violent ways of that Name itself. When the church came to these shores it was already "free" (free to do good, and free to live apart from the sons of Darkness as servants of the Word of God...1 Peter, chapter 2). It needed no other laws, and no other champions to set it more free than it already was. Anything more was evil. The epic will be complete when the Holy Nation discovers how it has been bowing down to images all these centuries, to idols and images of the truth but not the truth itself; and when it learns to lift up its voice with the remnant of this generation, decrying the spirit of Antichrist that surrounds and rules over it.

Deliver me O Lord, from the evil man, which imagine mischief in their hearts, continually they are gathered for war…They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent. Adders poison is under their lips... (Psalm 140:1-3).

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And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away with the flood. (Which means, with the flood of wars that are sweeping the earth)... (Revelation 12:15).

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When the waves of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men made me afraid... (2 Samuel 22:5-8).

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For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me. They have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They compassed me about with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause... (Psalm 109:2,3).

Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues have they used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; whose feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the ways of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes... (Romans 3:13-18).

The epic is complete as we realize how the history of the 20th century and the Theophany of Exodus, chapter 19, are fulfilled in one another. For the Lord is a Man of War: the Lord is His Name... (Exodus 15:3; Revelation 15:1-3). As one reporter wrote several years ago, that Ronald Reagan (and, of course, now George Bush), must be made to sit and watch the movie Platoon over and over again until he understands it. Or perhaps that all of us must be made to watch the movie Gettysburg over and over again until we understand it (Ezekiel 20:45-49), or the recent movie Saving Private Ryan, until we understand it; or we must be made to watch reruns of CNN, and read the daily headlines over and over until we understand it...until we realize that There is only One God--One Reality--and that the judgments of God are already being poured out upon the whole earth, and that they will culminate in the judgments of America herself.

"Religion's quest is to find the One behind the many, the absolute reality of the Universe beyond all opposites. In ordinary life all things and experiences have opposites--life is opposed to death, night to day, pleasure to pain, light to darkness. But in truth Reality has no opposite. It is non-dual, and the soul is delivered from suffering when it realizes its identity with reality. In the Upanishads this reality was given the name Brahman. (From which we have attained the name of our father Abraham). Not to realize Brahman as the essential One manifesting as oneself, is ignorance and suffering; to become aware of it is true enlightenment and hapiness--a happiness which does not fade because it has no opposite."

It is the spirit of Satan in us that keeps us from coming to terms with the fulness, and the sublimity of this realization--that God is all that exists. Thus it is Satan in us that energizes us to wrong action, such as America's growing and fated involvement in the Balkan crisis (and now we see the picture even more clearly as God invites the the present Bush administration and all its allies up to meet Him in the heart of Eurasia itself...Isaiah 30:25,26; Joel 3:9-16...and now in the Middle east). It is Satan in us that will convince us to break through the bounds that God told Moses to set between the Mountain and the people, that they go not up into the mount when the Lord descends upon it…for they shall surely be put to death... (Exodus 19:11-13). It is Satan in us that goes out to meet God in battle. Of course it is God, but it is Satan in us that we must overcome.

The Dragon was bound at the end of the Second World War (although its tail continued to thrash about in the Pacific--Korea, and Vietnam…see Rev.12:4), but is being loosed again, for the Third time in this century. God is preparing to conclude the works of Darkness (which He himself set in motion six thousand years ago), by gathering the forces of Darkness against Himself--against themselves that is, it is all the same. (See Joel 3:9-14; Haggai 2:7,22; Isaiah 34:1,2; Revelation 19:11-21). What began with the First World War, which led directly to the Second, will conclude with the Third. (Please consider Ezekiel 33). It is understood in the words:

And I saw an Angel (a manifestation of the higher Intelligence), come down from heaven, having the key of the Bottomless Pit and a great Chain in his hand.

And he laid hold on the dragon (the lower minds of men), that old serpent, which is the devil, and satan, and bound him a Thousand years.

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled.

And I saw thrones, and they that sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were Beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

But the rest of the dead lived not until the thousand years were finished. This is the First Resurrection.

Blessed and holy are they that have part in the first resurrection: on such the second death (the death of the body itself) hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ (at the time of Wisdom, Love and Endurance), and shall reign with him a thousand years.

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of prison.

And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them... (Revelation 20:1-9).

The bottomless pit, or the abyss, is the very depths of the consciousness of Nature itself (the Jungian depths), out of whose own living reality has emerged all the events that have emanated into the world from the Center of Europe in the 20th century (see Revelation, chapter 9), as it was also written: and when the Sun was going down (at the end of the age), a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him...(Genesis 15:12)…

Oh that we were wise, that we understood this, that we had considered our latter end... (Deuteronomy 32:29).

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And they shall know that I am the Lord, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them... (Ezekiel 6:10).

That which was above summoned that which was below, and even called out of the abyss the very Angel of Death and Destruction himself, Adolph Hitler, and we beheld him with our very own eyes. (Revelation 9:11). And then the God above loosed the forces of Asia against the Western world (see Revelation 9:15), and still men have not repented. (See Revelation 9:20,21)…

But how could they, for the Great Chain was prepared for them, for the leaders of the earth, and for all who follow them in all their warring ways:

Make a great chain for the land is full of bloody crimes... (Ezekiel 7:23).

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God has cast them down to hell (these are the great men of the Western world, and the religious leaders who have supported them), and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be preserved unto judgment…(2 Peter 2:1-4).

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And he answered me, saying, they (the chains) are prepared for the kings and potentates of the earth, in order that they may be destroyed thereby...(I Enoch 53).

The souls of them that are symbolically (and not literally) "beheaded" for the witness of Jesus in this text are not merely the Remnant of our time who must still lay down their lives in the Mystery of Christ...

....but represent all those who have gone before, and who have ever offered their lives as witnesses to the unfolding Mystery of God--from the time of John the Baptist and Paul (who we are told were both beheaded) to our own. All of these together, and the great multitude of others who have passed into heavens along with them, comprise the First Resurrection, as it is also written: From the rising of the Sun until the going down of the same

"And the Lord answered, and said, Do you not know that the Head of prophecy was cut off with John? But I said, Can it be possible to remove the Head of prophecy? And the Lord said, When you come to know what the Head means, and that prophecy issues from the head, then understand the meaning of "its head was removed." The Apocryphon of James, The Nag Hammadi Library.

The rest of the dead are the millions in America, and throughout the earth, who shall rise up in this Mystery in the wake of these age-ending events. They are the Seven Women (the entire congregation--the Church), who shall take hold of the garments of the Anointed Ones who shall be revealed at the Eighth Sefira named Majesty on the Oracle. (See Isaiah 4:1-3; Ephesians 4:13; Genesis 5:1,2). (Please see the subchapter entitled "Come Out of Her My People).

The Four Quarters of the earth pertain to the entire social, economic, political, and military realities of our century, all emanating outwards from the center of the Oracle onto the plain of human consciousness, touching and ordering the affairs of the entire world. And the symbolic period of the Thousand Years are complete, even as the Angel of Death himself said: "My kingdom shall last a Thousand Years:" Just as a literal period of one-thousand years transpired between the time of David and the time of Christ, so a figurative period of One Thousand years has transpired between the time that God began to bring the judgments upon the City of David during the First and Second World Wars (Isaiah 29), and the manifestation of the true Christs in our time:

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world; even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest men to destruction; and sayest, Return ye children of men.

FOR A THOUSAND YEARS IN THY SIGHT ARE BUT AS YESTERDAY WHEN IT IS PAST, and as a watch in the night...(Psalm 90:1-4).

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Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.

And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the parents fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.

For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water (above and below...revealed and concealed)...

The Great Dragon, hiding above the Waters and below the Waters.

Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water (with the wars of that Atlantian Civilization...see Revelation 17:15), perished.

But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same Word are kept in store, reserved unto Fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

BUT BELOVED, BE NOT IGNORANT OF THIS ONE THING, THAT ONE DAY WITH THE LORD IS AS A THOUSAND YEARS, AND A THOUSAND YEARS AS ONE DAY.

The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance...(see Ezekiel 33).

But the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up...(2 Peter 3:3-10).

The Coming of Christ is the coming of the next state of spiritual consciousness (not in just a few this time, but in the many). It is the manifestation of the Anointed Ones whose presence was also hidden in the dimensions of the sacred oracles. (See Chapter 5 of this work, and Joel 2:15-17). And it is the revelation of that land, and that city which was also concealed in the center of the earth (Isaiah 27 to 29; please see Chapter 2).

And it shall come to pass when all is accomplished...THAT MESSIAH SHALL BEGIN TO BE REVEALED.

AND BEHEMOTH SHALL BE REVEALED FROM HIS PLACE, AND LEVIATHAN SHALL ASCEND FROM THE SEA...(2 Baruch 29)

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For, behold, the days come, and it shall be when the signs which I have foretold you come to pass, THEN SHALL THE CITY WHICH IS NOW INVISIBLE APPEAR, AND THE LAND THAT IS NOW CONCEALED BE SEEN. And whosever is delivered from the predicted evils shall see my wonders...(4 Ezra 7:26,27).

The sages have related that Gabriel is the angel of the East, and of the nations, and that Michael is the angel of the West, and of Israel. The name Gabriel, or GBRY-El, derives from two Hebrew terms, GeBeR and El (or Al--the Name of God, the Lord of Hosts). It implies "a valiant man," or "warrior." It appears from the root meaning "to be strong, to prevail, act insolently, be great, be mighty, strengthen, be stronger." It is indicative of God's revelation of Himself in the East. It is a revelation of God's power and might. God revealed Himself in this manner to all of the adepts of the Eastern world in ancient times:

I swear by the Star when it goes down.

Your companion does not err, nor does he go astray;

Nor does he speak out of desire.

It is naught but revelation that is revealed,

THE LORD, MIGHTY IN POWER (Gabriel) has taught him.

THE LORD OF STRENGTH; so he attained completion.

AND HE IS THE HIGHEST PART OF THE HORIZON.

Then he drew near, then he bowed,

So he was the measure of Two bows or closer still.

And he revealed to his servant what he revealed…

And certainly he saw him in another descent,

At the Farthest Lote Tree;

Near which is the Garden, the place he resorted to... (Sura 53.1-15).

However, it is also written: Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit saith the Lord...(Zechariah 4:6). God may rule by Power, but we may not. But who can understand it? Who can interpret it? Those who have completed the spiritual pilgrimage, not only to the West in these times but at last to the perfected spiritual state of mind. It is those who can perceive the awesome Presence of the Lord stretched out upon the limbs of the Cosmic World Tree, in the present sum of all human events. It is those who can understand the words: And they shall look upon me (the Lord of All) whom they have pierced...(Zechariah 12:10); and those which say: I am he that liveth, and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and death...(Revelation 1:18).

And he said, Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience Death. (Their light shall not go out). Let them who seek continue seeking until they find. When they find they will be Troubled. When they become troubled, they will be astonished, and will rule over all...(The Gospel of Thomas 1).

The name Michael, MYK-El, derives from three Hebrew terms, Miy, Kiy, and El. Miy is a general pronoun used for persons (not things), any (person), he, him, her, who(soever) would to God (who is El). Kiy is a prepositional prefix (linking one thought to the next) indicating causal relationships of all kinds ("forasmuch, inasmuch, nevertheless, since, surely, then, therefore, though, until, when, whether, while, yet.") Thus the term is subjective in nature. It indicates a transformation from outer forms to inner. It leaves the literal sense of things by qualifying every interpretation with "therefore, then, though, yet." "Though it says that, yet it means this."

THE NUMBER 666

We have treated the subject of the Number and the Mark of the Beast in another chapter in this book, but we do not want to pass out of this chapter without associating it with the words: Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field...(see Genesis 3:1). The Beast and the Serpent are, in the earthly sense, the same spirit, both a description of the political and religious realities of our own time, but neither of them are so foolish as to literally imprint or otherwise encode a number upon the Foreheads or the Right Hands of its subjects. (Revelation 13:16,17). The Beast has plenty of christian counselors explaining to them that this is a big taboo. But few are wise enough to see that this Mark is already imprinted everywhere, in the thought patterns and in the works and political deeds of the whole American populace. Its presence is so pervasive that we do not even see it and accept its affects as normal social and religious behavior. For as the kingdom of God comes without observation, so has the realm of Antichrist. (see Luke 17:20; 1 Thessalonians 5):

And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and so that day come upon us unawares.

For as a snare shall it come upon all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth... (Luke 21:34,35).

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Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that you might do them in the Land whither ye go to possess it

Because the spiritual nation of Israel was given no actual land in this age (nor in any age past, present, or future), but was made to wander in types and images through the wilderness of the other nations until the real Promise should dawn upon it on the Day of Redemption (see Genesis 17:7,8; Hebrews 11:8-16; Deuteronomy 8), we must interpret the term land to mean state of mind: for the human body itself is the only "land" over which a child of Light is allowed to rule with authority, and this means "one's own mind, and one's own body, and not another's."

That ye might do so in the (State of Mind) that ye go over to possess...

Such a journey has carried the Nation-church to the end of this age, and to the borders of the Promised age to come, but also to all of the terrible lessons of our own time:

That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son's son (be very wise to interpret the word "son," not literally, but with a mind that is as Universal and perceptive as is the Presence of God itself), all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.

Hear therefore O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers (be wise...remember that this the Divine Mother Herself who is inspiring these words) hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey. (Milk for the babies, and honey for those coming to a full age)

Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is One Lord:

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might (which means that we must love all that God is, and all that God has created--the Earth, the forests, the waterways, the sky, the living environment, and all the people who dwell within it).

And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart;

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

AND THOU SHALT BIND THEM FOR A SIGN UPON THINE HAND, AND THEY SHALL BE AS FRONTLETS BETWEEN THINE EYES.

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house (upon the posts of thine own heart and mind), and on thy gates (they shall govern thy senses).

And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which He sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildest not,

And houses full of good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggest not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full;

Then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage... (Deuteronomy 6:1-12).

The Mark of the Beast is everywhere. It is the mark that God placed on Cain because of his violence to his brother Abel. One, in fact, cannot find legal employment in Cain's empire, America, if they cannot produce two forms of documentation proving that they are either citizens of this country (thus participants in its social, political, economic and military world view), or otherwise allowed to be here. If one does not have the commandments and precepts of God emblazoned foremost in their minds they will rehearse the precepts and the philosophies of fallen men instead, and they will participate in them. Likewise, if one does not greet another with the word of God, or with their hands perform the work of God (and if one has become unable to interpret the meaning of the Right Hand of Power), then one will not only extend the hand of ignorance and error to others at every meeting, but they will find themselves subject to the power of violent men instead, and will perform the works of men, as the children of Israel are in America today. My people are in captivity because they have no knowledge... (Isaiah 5:13), translates into "My people do not even know they are in captivity." Such is the subtle nature and the influence of Satan.

"All love emotions are expansive, all emotions of hate are restrictive…Hope and faith are of the nature of love and expand the soul, while fear and doubt are of the nature of hate and contract the soul, making us feel uneasy and unhappy. While men fight and quarrel with each other they always resemble the old snake, each drawing to its side, anxious for self preservation. Freedom from the snake's anguish can only be had by ceasing from the snake's ways, and learning to obey the laws of love, the first dictate of which is self-sacrifice." Mysteries of the Kabbalah, by Elias Gewerz.

 

Please see:

Powers and Principalities

The Mystery of Iniquity

Give Unto Caesar?

The Number of the Beast

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

James Earl Carter

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