String Theory & Judaism

“And the serpent said to the woman, you shall not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as God knowing good and evil.”  Genesis 3: 4-5

                                   Ogdoadic Science and the Formation of Judaism

                                              Fourth Edition, November 20, 2014

                                                            Introduction

     Ogdoadic science refers to the apparent presence of the knowledge of string theory, quantum physics and astral physics resident among the Libyan/Amazigh peoples reflected in the culture and tradition of the Dogon tribe, Egyptian tradition, and Judaism as well as among the sisterly Sumerian/Mesopotamian/Canaanite traditions.

     This essay is an effort towards cosmic consciousness while chasing down the trail of the ancients and will require the reader to shift frequencies frequently between quantum reality, an historical study, and astral physics.  I received my B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth from professors who didn’t care what you believed as long as you had good reasons for it and understood the arguments of opponents.  I received my Master of Divinity degree at the University of Dubuque, Theological Seminary studying under Richard Drummond who wrote a profound book on the Buddha because he could read commentaries in Japanese and who, also, wrote an appreciative book on Edgar Cayce. With this spirit of open-mindedness and whether agreeing with all the opinions of the author or not, it is my opinion that readers will learn more from this essay than they ever conceived was possible concerning, especially, the Libyans, the Egyptians, and Judaism.

     So, what does simple, monotheistic Judaism have to do with the mythological labyrinth we are about to pilgrimage through?  Judaism is the template or platform with its long-running history and having its own labyrinthian influences from which to examine the human condition.  Aside from discussing scientific knowledge embedded in some Hebrew practices of circumcision, the Jubilee, the prayer shawl and the tefillin, this essay will prove using the scholarship of Laurence Gardner that the Patriarch Isaac was the son of a Pharaoh, the scholarship of Osman and Gardner that Pharoah Akhenaten was Moses with a corollary finding through my own research that Tutankhamun was not the son of Akhenaten as is widely thought but the son of Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III through one of his two daughters that he made a ‘Great Royal Wives’.   Finally, using the African/Arabian scholarship of Leeman and Salibi I found that the Jewish holy land was really in Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia rather than in Palestine.

                                           1.  Judaism’s Quantum Context.

     It is commonly conjectured that if a superior intelligence wanted to communicate over vast distances or through time that mathematics would be a common denominator used to impart knowledge to other budding intelligences or civilizations.  Probably the prime example of a repository of scientific knowledge formulated mathematically in Judaism could be their humble prayer shawl—possibly as ancient a lineage as to be related to the Dogon prayer shawl.  In fact it is hard to conceive of its complexity being explained in any other method than as an explanation of quantum reality.

     The following description of the prayer shawl is an original re-interpretation of Laird Scranton (‘The Science of the Dogon’) quoting from Leo Trepp in ‘The Complete Book of Jewish Observance’:

     Each of the four corners of the shawl must have a symbolic tassel.  These would each correspond to the four quantum forces: strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity.  The four tassels are four long strands looped through a hole in the center of the shawl and knotted.  This represents the primordial divine perception creating the universe out of un-manifest divine energy.

     One strand will be much longer and wrapped around the others—symbolizing primordial unity—put through the hole so that we have a tassel of eight strands with seven strands of equal length and one much longer.  This represents the seven unseen dimensions of string theory: called the Calabi-Yau space/Amma’s Egg/ the Egyptian Tuat or Underworld and the one long string which is the physical universe. 

     Next, a loop is made large enough for the corner of the shawl to lie on it only.  This loop is made with a double knot which can represent polarity in the beginning of the expansion of the seven unseen dimensions. 

     After the double knotted loop, the long strand is wrapped seven times around the others and double knotted.  The Dogons have a diagram called the Nummo fish which shows these seven dimensions with Amma/God residing in the sixth dimension (‘God rested’) and with two swirling vortices or polarities in the seventh.

     The long strand, then, is wrapped eight times around the others with all of them double knotted together.  This represents the expansion into the physical world.  The Dogon say the first two emergent beings were the perfect Nummo pair.  Their description matches the first atom, hydrogen, and the second, deuterium.  This viewpoint of eight dimensions represents the viewpoint FROM the seven wrapped up dimensions.

     Next, the long strand is wrapped eleven times around the others and double knotted with them all.  The number eleven represents the seven unseen dimensions plus the four physical dimensions (including time) and is the viewpoint of creation from our side of the veil and inside of time. 

     Lastly, the long strand is wrapped thirteen times around the others and double knotted with them.  This represents all eleven dimensions aligned with the perfect Nummo pair.  It represents all eleven dimensions, the consciousness from time, and the consciousness of the timeless.

                                                       2.  Soul Travel

     Indigenous peoples have utilized a multitude of out of body techniques for thousands of years to address their personal and universal concerns.   The Libyan/Amazigh tribes (called ‘Berber’ from ‘Barbarian’) inhabiting the area from the Nile delta to Libya would construct little sleeping ‘incubation chambers’ as part of their cemetery.  When they had a question needing answers, they would crawl in to sleep near their ancestor to receive a reply.  They did this despite having more universal deities in Amun and Nit (See Helene Hagan ‘The Shining Ones: An Etymological Essay on the Amazigh Roots of Egyptian Civilization”)

     Ancient and modern shamanic practices are well known for inducing out of body states.  Shamans in the area of the Nazca lines in Peru even today take budding shamans into a certain circle within each of the various animal diagrams which can be only seen by air.  When the would-be shaman can rise above his body to identify the diagram he has passed an important test to be a shaman.

     Related to cemetery chambers are the techniques of lucid dreaming where one who is proficient recognizes they are dreaming, is able to guide their dreaming state, and awaken having remembered the dream.  Meditation modes exist also involved with visualizing meeting one’s guide in a pleasant meadow or beach and being taught by them.  Closely related are other world -wide practices of long standing such as fasting and ecstatic song, chant, and dance such as Sufis practice.

     Shamanic practices and the early mystery cults of the Middle East are well known to have utilized psycho-active plants to induce out of body states such as a white barley brew the initiates of the Eleusian Mysteries used.  In fact, G. Gordon Wasson asserts sacred plants are the basis for all religious experience going back to Paleolithic times.  (see John Lamb Lash, ‘Not In His Name’)  Even in the more recent Middle Ages in England a whole set of Christian iconography shows Jesus in proximity to very obvious and lush mushroom imagery.  (See www.metahistory.org) 

     In Morocco there are caverns where people have been licking the stalactites and stalagmites for their salty secretions for thousands of years.  The Tuaregs of Niger still chew a substance called ‘natron’ made from this secretion which is at the base of what is known as ‘laughing gas’.  Hagan believes the early Pillar People of the Nile surely new about this from the ecstatic and trance states recorded on rock art hieroglyphics.  Hagan demonstrates that the Egyptians were using niter and natron for mummification but also for mind-altering activities such as sacred dancing during funeral ceremonies called ‘Hathor’s or Neith’s Love Feast’.

     Probably the most obvious Biblical reference to psycho-active plant use is registered in Genesis 30 14-16 in the story of Jacob’s wives, Leah and Rachel, who are extremely jealous over the sexual rights to their husband.  Leah’s son, Reuben, finds some mandrake root—which has psycho-active properties—and gives them to Rachel in exchange for sleeping with Jacob. 

     Later on in the Christian era, Peter Levenda (‘Stairway to Heaven’) documents that the Mithra cult, which was a competitor to Christianity and probably absorbed to a certain extent, has a liturgy thankful for ‘herbs’ revealed by an archangel “so that ‘I alone may ascend into heaven as an inquirer and behold the universe’”.

     Laurence Gardner in ‘The Genesis of the Grail Kings’ tries to makes the case that the pharaohs actually had a factory at their temple at Mt Serabit in the Sinai where there was discovered “a metallurgists crucible and a considerable amount of pure white powder” which might have involved high spin metallurgy of the platinum group such as iridium and rhodium which makes up five percent of our brain by dry weight and increases serotonin and melatonin in the pituitary and pineal gland.  This would have been used to induce out of body states as well as to lengthen the life span with enzyme activity.  Gardner relates all of this to the ‘smoke’ and furnace references in Genesis and Exodus.                  

     The marriage of Moses to the daughter of Jethro in Midian also denoted a period of time which saw the merger of several cults to become Judaism—which then went through several editions itself.

                               3.  The Aten Cult: Life Force versus Demi-gods

      Laurence Gardner in ‘Genesis of the Grail Kings’ ably demonstrates the debt Judaism owes to Egypt.  He believes the over-arching deity worshiped by the peoples fleeing Egypt was Aten, the imageless deity whose worship was imposed by Pharaoh Akhenaten on all of Egypt.  This may be reflected in the term of ‘Adonai’ meaning ‘my Lord’ and ‘Adon’ meaning ‘Lord’ from ‘Aten’.  Circumcision was an Egyptian custom as was the temple-priesthood system which was unknown to Abraham and Sarah.  In fact, large swaths of literature were lifted from Egyptian sources.  The 104^th Psalm, for example, was taken from the tomb of Aye who was a pharaoh related to Akhenaten.  It was called ‘Great Hymn to the Aten’.  The Ten Commandments were also taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Many other psalms are Egyptian hymns and the Book of Proverbs has Egyptian sources. 

     The Aten originated far off in ancient Sumer with the goddess Inanna who represented the life force.  Legends had her drag out young men from bars for sex and then turn them into toads or wolves.  However, those who rejected her advances risked being destroyed, becoming infertile, or cursed—the downside to the upside of the life force! These stories also represent typical age-old slander against females as well.

     The story goes that Inanna wanted to visit the Underworld which was thought of as a drab and depressing place.  She dressed up wildly for it wearing mascara, a wig, a turban, a necklace, beads, etc.  These represent all the life experiences one takes to the sub-atomic Underworld.   She was allowed through the seven gates (representing the seven unseen dimensions of String Theory) but had to leave an article of clothing at every gate.  When she arrived at the end she was naked and saw her sister, the Queen of the Underworld, sitting on her throne.  Inanna boldly ordered her sister off the throne and proceeded to take her place.  This really made the seven judges or gatekeepers of the Underworld angry!  So, they struck her dead and hung her on a hook.  The hook can represent the string or coil of string theory which vibrates different ways and creates all that is in the visible universe. 

     Fortunately, Inanna had foreseen just such a course of events and had importuned her minister that if she wasn’t back in three days to visit the temples of the gods and request to be rescued.  So, the minister went to the temples of the chief god, Enlil and her father god, Nanna, who was the Moon god.  Both declined, commenting that was all of her own doing, but Enki, a mentor god, had compassion and conjured up two spirits (these could represent the male and female energies of the soul) to go and sprinkle her corpse with food and water.  Inanna was brought back to life but was pursued by two demons who demanded that if she returned she would have to send a replacement back to the Underworld.  She encountered her friends and beautician who were all mourning her so she couldn’t send them.  When she got home she found her husband well dressed, enjoying himself, and not at all concerned that she had been missing for three days.  So, she sent her husband, Dumuzi, to the Underworld.  Fortunately for Dumuzi, he had a sister who felt compassion for him and so they rotated one half year each.  This could represent reincarnation people are subjected too.

     The Babylonians transformed the story of the spiritual boldness of the goddess, Inanna, into a story of the male god Tammuz (Dumuzi) and Astarte (Inanna) who represented fertility of the earth.  The life force became materialized, male, and humans were enjoined to invoke it rather than express it.   The fourth month of the Summer Solstice was named after Tammuz when all crops had dried up under the power of the Sun.  In the Spring Tammuz would be celebrated as returning to life and to earth.  In the late summer drought a mourning ‘festival’ would take place with great weeping for Tammuz dying and departing Earth.  These festivals continued on into Old Testament times late enough to even have been mentioned in Zecharia 12:2 and Isaiah 17:18.  The equivalent Phoenician deity was Adonis—meaning “Lord’ which then transferred to the Nile Delta as Adon or Aten.

     The first Aten cult went back to at least the 12^th Dynasty—pre-dating the Hyksos invasion.  The first known temple, though, appears to have been at Zaru which was an Egyptian stronghold built on the site of a Hyksos city.  Gardner suggests that after Mt Santorini erupted in 1624 BC, Trojans brought their horses, chariots, improved bronze weapon technology, and compound bows into Syria and Phoenicia, mixed with Mesopotamian royalty, and invaded the East Nile delta establishing independent kingdoms from 1663 BC with their superior warfare technology.

     The Hyksos were defeated and assimilated beginning about 1550 BC but not before bringing Semitic religious stances in a substantial way into Egypt.  The head of the Canaanite pantheon and their war god was El Elyon who had his origin as Anu, the original head of the Sumerian Annunaki.  Anu/El Elyon was considered strong, powerful, wise, and remote.  He had a wife and children.  This is reflected in Deuteronomy 32: 7-9 where El Elyon apportions out to Jehovah the sons of Israel/Jacob as Jehovah’s portion or inheritance. 

     After Anu retired among the Sumerians, it was his son, Enlil, who took his place as the most prominent Sumerian deity.  Enlil had a darker mythology as one who was exiled from the original ‘home of the gods’ for raping an under-age girl.  He was, also, assigned responsibility for the Biblical Flood about 4000 BC (verified by the up to twenty feet of mud in the Tigris-Euphrates area.) and the destruction of Sumer in 1960 BC.  Some evidence for the popularity of the El/Enlil cult among the Hyksos is in some of their names which use ‘el’ or ‘baal’ as endings. 

     When the Hyksos arrived in Egypt the local deity they chose to sponsor for their conquered population was the ancient god of the desert, Set.  He was similar to Baal and El in being war-like and a god of storms: called ‘great of strength’, ‘His Majesty’, ‘one who dazzles’ and became the patron of soldiers, appearing also on the power scepter of pharaohs. Mythologically, he accompanied the sun god, Ra, on his nightly journey through the Underworld spearing the serpent, Apep, who would attack them.  The demonizing of the serpent also would have played well with the Hyksos since the competitor-half-brother of Enlil was Enki who used the serpent symbol as his own and had cults all over the Middle East, also.  The hieroglyphs for the name of Set according to Laird Scranton (‘Sacred Symbols of the Dogon’) mean ‘bends matter’.

     Set, also, corresponds to a number of demi-gods through Middle Eastern mythologies which seem to take it as their roll to repress the life force.  So far, we have seen Enlil refuse to bring Innana back from the dead.  Set is the jealous younger brother of the ancient Egyption god and ‘Lord of the Dead’, Osiris, who Set traps in a box (representing the material world), and throws it in the river.  When the female side of the life force and consort of Osiris, Isis, finds her male counterpart growing in a tree downstream, she retrieves him and hides his body in the desert (representing the ascetic spirit).  Set, not to be out-done, finds the body, cuts it up into fourteen parts, and scatters them around the planet (This represents our attachments and various energy investments).  Isis collects every part except the penis which was eaten by a fish (This can represent the idea that our true creative abilities lie in the realm of the Underworld of the seven unseen dimensions which the fish represents that swims in the sea of divine energy.)  The fourteen parts can represent the up-side and the down-side to the life force flowing through the seven unseen dimensions—just as Inanna represented the up-side and down-side, collecting experiences, then distributing them in the Underworld.

     The ‘fourteen parts’ undoubtedly go back to the pre-pharaonic religious matrix from which the Dogons descend from.  Peter Levenda interprets their seven dimensions as having both a ‘heavenly’ or astral and Underworld or quantum component for fourteen actual divisions: “The diagram shape of these fourteen worlds is actually a spiral shape of seven ovoids, one atop the other, like a strand of DNA or the serpents in a caduceus.  Each half of each ovoid represents a world.  Should we superimpose a typical yoga diagram over the Dogon glyph, we would see the chakras and the sushumna line up quite neatly.”  (Stairway to Heaven, p. 106)

     The Dogon counterpart to the story of the repression of the life force is contained in the story about the seventh ancestor who was the master of speech and was jealous over the speech of humans. He turned himself into a giant serpent who tried to steal the “heavenly grains from the granary”—the spiritual and earthly birthrights given to humans.  A friendly deity advised humans to kill the snake (‘The Science of the Dogon’, Laird Scranton).

     The great Gnostic drama of the later Nag Hammadi Codices (www.methistory.org) describes the demi-god, Ialdabaoth, who arises from a great,  Galactic mother energy and has a powerful, controlling influence over subsequent creations in his domain—easily likened to El, Enlil, Jehovah, Set, and the seventh ancestor. 

       Clearly, the war god worship would not have been one the Egyptians would want to have encouraged.  Fortunately, there was an alternative—a more comfortable Mesopotamian one—the Aten cult.

     The Aten festivals were popular ones of rural people and women. The Egyptian elite would have seen them as a handy safety valve to siphon off Hebrew religious expression.

In the Nile delta with its abundant water and rich soil it would not be surprising to see the Aten worship begin to focus on the god behind all nature rather than the one who needs to be mourned for over half the year.  Aside from the animal sacrifice, how much the original Aten worship would have differed from the current Gaian and Sophia mythos can only be conjectured.  How much the Hebrew each identified their own tribal deity such as El Shaddai with Aten can only be guessed as well.  Things continued peaceably enough for the Aten worshippers through Pharaoh Amenhotep III who named his yacht after the Aten.

                                                 4.  Akhenaten/Moses

     Several scholars such as Ahmad Osman (‘Moses and Akhenaten’) and Laurance Gardner make a very convincing case that Pharaoh Akhenaten was Moses.  The father of Akhenaten was Pharaoh Amenhotep III who had a royal bride that was his half-sister but she was too young for a full marital relationship so he married the daughter of his vizier (who herself was probably descended from a previous pharaoh and a foreign bride several generations back), Joseph or Yuya, who was the second most powerful person in Egypt as the right hand of the pharaoh.  Yuya was a Hebrew, however, and there were fears of his group becoming too powerful and fears that a son would be assassinated.  Akhenaten, born Ca 1365 BCE, and his mother were sent away to live in the summer palace at Zaru near Hebrew relatives and the Aten temple, as well.

     Gardner theorizes that after being educated by the priests of Ra in Heliopolis, Akhenaten was married off to his royal, full-blood half-sister, Nefertiti.  The prominence (or propaganda-value) of Nefertiti is shown in that 67 cartouches were found of her but only three of Akhenaten.  Very oddly, one of them shows Nefertiti in a classic male pharaoh role of grabbing the hair of a prisoner in one hand and about to smite him dead with the other.

     DNA analysis done by the Zahi Hawass team in 2010 tends to bear out Gardner’s theory in part.  Nefertiti is a perfect match to be descended from a supposed grandmother named Tuja but not at all from her husband Yuya who was the vizier of Amenhotep II.  However, she does have DNA in part from both parents of her husband, Akhenaten.  This would definitely lead to the supposition that her real grandfather was Amenhotep II.  In addition her high status could have resulted from her probable father, Aye, having wed a half-sister whose father was Amenhotep II so that she was descended from two royal children as well as a previous pharaoh through Tuja who was, perhaps, a royal child, herself.  

     In contrast, the Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep III, Tija, does show a perfect match for being descended from both Yuya and Tuya.  Her brother, Aye’s, DNA was not examined but he very likely was descended from Amenhotep II since he not only inherited all the properties and powers of his father but apparently had the royal blood to qualify to be the last pharaoh in the dynasty.  Nefertiti, logically, would be his daughter and why he was trusted with the most important military and administrative post in the Empire.

      Osman (‘Moses and Akhenaten’)  makes a very convincing case that Amenhotep served a long co-regency with his son, Akhenaten, because of the stiff resistance of the Amun priesthood to installing the Akhenaten as pharaoh.  Akhenaten’s ancestor Tuthmosis III had had the same problem—being the son of his royal father but a mother considered non-royal.  The problem of Tuthmosis was solved by a simple ceremony where Amun ‘adopted’ Tuthmosis as his son.  Akhenaten’s religious stance, however, was co-opting the Amun cult in seeing Aten as the one god behind Amun.

     Osman documents a number of observations indicating there were probably attempts or serious threats on the life of Akhenaten.  When Akhenaten was installed as co-regent with his father he assumed the name of Amenhotep IV when there was still hope of getting along with the Amun priesthood.

                                                    5.  The Amun Cult

     The Amun cult with its temple in Thebes probably had no inclination to be co-opted again by a half-royal prince and his half-baked theology.  It had happened earlier that the powerful Ra cult of the Nile Delta had co-opted Amun’s historical dominance in North Africa.  But, at least Ra was also an ancient North African deity though not described as self-created like Amun was.  The state god of Egypt became known as Amun-Re.

      Ra would be considered the more manifest ‘Lord of the Universe’ Sun god signified in ancient times by a circle with a dot within—perhaps signifying the god within the Sun.  The female aspect of Ra was known as Rat.   Amun is the ‘hidden god’ to be identified with the original impulse to create the universe—the spiritual essence-- whose female side is the lady of Amenhet. A popular worship of Amun involved dancing and feasting over tombs.  It was understood that both the masculine and feminine aspects were represented in either formulation of the names. The ram was the most ancient symbol of Amun.  The curled ram’s horn is also a recognizable counterpart to the string or coil of string theory.  The Amazigh term for ‘waters’ is still ‘aman’ which has an appropriately close correspondence in meaning to the god of the uncreated sea of divine energy.  

     The great North African center of the Amun cult going back to 7,000 BCE was in an oasis named Siwa still in Egypt but in the middle of the Libyan and Egyptian deserts. Its’ Oracle was so famous from ancient times that even Alexander the Great visited there to obtain a confirmation of himself as King of Egypt.  ‘Amma’ is still the god of the Dogon tribe in Mali.  In Saudi Arabia, the most ancient monotheistic god was ‘Rahman’ which Muhammad had originally tried to convince his followers to use.  There is a famous stone in Libya with a list of the one hundred and twenty Libyan kings which preceded the First Dynasty of Egypt.

       Evidence that Amenhotep installed his son very early as co-regent is much evidence showing them alive and reigning at the same time as well as Amenhotep shown appearing with Akhenaten alive and at Amarna—the new capitol Akhenaten had established. 

     Prior to establishing his new capitol, Akhenaten had thrown down the gauntlet to the Amun cult by building two new Aten temples at Karnak and Luxor—one right across the river from the Amun cult. The view of Osman, however, is that it was the rejection of Akhenaten by the Amunists which precipitated the new building and, finally, the closing of the Amun temples.

                                           6.  The Aten of Akhenaten

     The official name of the Aten had changed over the reign of Akhenaten.  Osman documents that in Year 1 of his reign the Aten was called “Re-Harakhti, Rejoicing-in-the-Horizon, in his name the light (Shu) which is in the Aten”  Re refers to the sun god and Harakhti to the god, Horus, meaning that he still had a decent relationship with the Ra cult in Heliopolis if not the Amun cult.  The key phrase, however, is “in the Aten”.  The Aten was actually shown in human form at this point with a falcon head (Horus) with a solar disc or wing disc on top.

     In Years 4-5, the Aten is shown as a disc shining its rays on the King and Queen—never anyone else.  In the Great Hymn to the Aten found in the tomb of Aye, the Aten is credited with the creation of all that is and the sustainer of earth’s creatures through the energy of the Sun.  But, what really must have made the Amunist blood run cold was the sense of exclusive royal priesthood reflected in the Aten hymn:

          “Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, O Living Aten, Beginner of Life…

           There is none who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten.

            Thou has made him wise in thy plans and thy power.”

     The worst fears must have coursed through Egyptian blood with the icy thought that something in the likeness of El had staged a palace coup from the anonymity of Aten.  The friendly nature religion which had embodied the monotheistic proclivities of those worshipping their various tribal deities of El, Elohim, Enlil, and Ya had been co-opted by the state—the one man, dictator-priest, Akhenaten.

     In fact, in form, Akhenaten had reverted to just a more grandiose form of the simple outdoor altars Abraham and Sarah had made sacrifices upon.  The dark, enclosed, mystery school temples of Re Amun had given way to large, open aired enclosures hosting enclosures of animals to be sacrificed and large numbers of tables for sacrifices to be prepared upon.  A large bakery adjoined the temple in Amarna.  Aside from the large statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the locus of the holy seemed to be stelae which were stone monuments with a rounded top upon which were listed the sacrifices to Aten. 

     Intentional or not, these stelae harken back to the ancient Egyptian creation myth of a primal sea in the beginning called Nun—the primal un-manifest energy of creation.  The first ground was the Ben-ben stone which was a broad, short obelisk with a pointed top in a four sided pyramid.  On it stood Atum who coughed and spit out the first manifest deities--which was the Big Bang.  The stelae, the Ben-ben stone, and the Dogon Granary all represent the seven rolled up dimensions of string theory and the shape of the event horizon of the Big Bang.

     The interior and transcendant inspiration of the Libyan cemetery ‘incubation chambers’ which had given way to the interior illumination of the Amun temples and been co-opted by the syncretistic but balanced Amun-Re cult had now been crystallized into the questionable glory of the divine immanence expressed exclusively through the royal son: the triumphant return of Tammuz/Dumuzi to life, year around, and 24/7.

     By Year Nine, the title of the Aten had slimmed down a mite: “Re, the living Ruler of the Horizon, in his aspect of the light, which is in the Aten”.  The gods Horus and Shu had been removed.

     Akhenaten established his new capitol in Year 5 at Amarna which is 200 miles North of Thebes far away from the old Amun center.  Amarna derives from Im-r-n which is part of the name of Aten.  Osman explains that Amran or Imran also happens to be the name of the father of Moses in the Bible.  One reason for establishing the capitol in Amarna is that a city called Mallawi (Mallevi) meaning “City of the Levites” is across the river.

     A reason for the connection is that the Levites may have been serving as the priests as well as a standing army to protect Akhenaten.  The name of the High Priest at the Amarna Aten Temple was Meryre II.  The Hebrew form would be Merari.  Merari, in Genesis 46:11 is described as one of the sons of Levi.

     The chief Servitor at the Amarna temple was Panehesy.  The Hebrew form is Phinehas.  In Exodus 6:25 Phinehas is the son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron through whose genealogical line the priesthood was given (Numbers 25:12-13).

     Osman notes another Hebrew link in an archeological discovery of 1989 in the tomb of Aper-el, a vizier to Akhenaten who, most apparently, was a worshipper of El.

     The second but, probably, the most important reason for the Amarna move was because Akhenaten knew that he needed a large, permanent, loyal army force to keep him in power.  Egyptians, as a whole, feared joining the army because they feared dying on a foreign battlefield without access to standard funerary practices that would guarantee them safe passage in the afterlife.  The military was, also, the only means of social advancement aside from the various priesthoods—most of which were out-of-bounds to the Hebrews.  The Israelites among the Hebrew, having royal connections and having been hundreds of years in Egypt would have gravitated strongly to the military and been the strong backbone of support for the monotheistic Akhenaten and the Aten.  Amarna had a military garrison of both foreign and Egyptian units.  From the tomb reliefs, Amarna was an armed camp with guard towers and military everywhere.

     From the reckoning of Osman, Amenhotep died in Year 12 of the reign of Akhenaten. Soon after the temples of Ra and all the others were closed—although people still worshipped at home their tribal or personal deities.  Year 13 is when work on the Amarna tombs comes to an end.  This may mark the beginning of an army revolt which forced the co-regency of Smenkhkare with Akhenaten.

          It was probably General Horemheb, a later pharaoh, who finally engineered an army revolt due to the closure of all the temples, Hebrew favoritism, the unwillingness of Akhenaten to wage successful warfare in Syria against the encroaching Hittities, and the inattention of the Vizier Aye caused by the building of the new capitol.  The army was made up of not only Hebrews from Egypt but some Egyptian units, some Libyan, some from Ethiopia, and many prisoners from past campaigns.  The Vizier Aye, uncle of Akhenaten, was probably forced into brokering a deal to prevent a civil war.

     What happens next is in hot dispute.  The Zahi Awass DNA analysis done in 2010 is pretty conclusive that the un-named mummy in KV 55 is the father of Pharoah Tutankhamun and both are descended in a direct line from the father of Akhenaten who was Amenhotep III.  In addition, the mother of Tutankhamun has been identified as the mummy KV 35YL which stands for ‘Young Lady’.  Much scholarly thinking, assumes, therefore, that Akhenaten is the body in KV 55 and ‘It’s a wrap!’  

     There are several big problems with the above assumption.  Akhenaten did not have a son to make the seamless male Y chromosome transmission from Amenhotep to him to King Tut.  He had six daughters who are all well known.  If he had had a son he would have bragged about it.  He didn’t.   An even more daunting problem pointed out by an on-line commentator name Kate Phizackerley that is holding up well (“DNA Shows that KV 55 Mummy Probably not Akhenaten”) is that in studying the DNA sequences of two fetuses buried with Tutankhamun that Akhenaten cannot be both the paternal and maternal grandfather simultaneously.  Tutankhamun was known to have only married a daughter of Akhenaten.   

 A number of commentators have recognized these problems and solve it by identifying the mummy in KV 55 as Smenkhkare who served a co-regency with Akhenaten in the last years of his reign to mollify the military by reversing the religious revolution and who possibly could have been a younger son of Amenhotep and Tiye—a full blood-brother of Akhenaten.  However, this runs in to the same problem as we have with Tutankhamun.  Amenhotep and Tiye had two sons and four daughters which seem to be accounted for without Smenkhkare.

       This leaves us with a real conundrum of accounting for a young man who was buried as a pharaoh who was descended somehow from Amenhotep III and Tiye since he had DNA from both their families and who married what seems to be a full sibling and gave birth to a pharaoh.  How could this possibly be?

     One scenario that no one seems to have considered is that Amenhotep III made at least two of his daughters Great Royal Wives and evidence is that maybe he married his third daughter.  His daughter Sitamun became his wife in year 30 of his reign and his daughter Isis became his wife in year 34 of his reign.  He may have become alarmed at the lack of male heirs being produced by Akhenaten and was trying to help out.  There was a mythological counterpart for him in the goddess Hathor who birthed the god Ra and successively became his wife and daughter.

     It should not be at all surprising if a man like Amenhotep in his forties who had already proved his fertility should produce more children by two or three young and, presumably, fertile women with the odds about  50% that one would be male.  If Sitamun had produced a son at year 31 of Amenhotep’s reign.  It might not be surprising that the news was kept quiet so as not to embarrass Akhenaten and Nefertiti.  After all, the son would be a threat to the line of Akhenaten. 

     The son would have been seven or eight years old when Amenhotep passed away and twelve or thirteen when Akhenaten and Smenkhare fled into exile.  At this point there was a little-known queen for two years and one month who was named Neferneferuaten and who had a really interesting name.  She shares her ‘throne name’ with Smenkhkare but shares her birth name with Nefertiti.  It would make sense, then, if she were Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti who was the Great Royal Wife of Smenkhkare and who stayed to pick up the pieces after the men fled.  Nefertiti is also a candidate but she was part of the previous regime and would not have been quite as acceptable to the military as Meritaten.  Meritaten was accustomed to being in the prime limelight as eldest daughter of Akhenaten and then the queen of the Pharoah Smenkhkare.  She had probably learned well from her mother how to wield the power and influence of a high profile queen.

     After several years in a reign where real power was held by the military who had overthrown Akhenaten she may have decided to cede power to the sixteen or seventeen year old son of Amenhotep III or taken him on as a co-regent.  At this point the military may have felt threatened by the reinvigoration of the dynasty that may very well have continued with its Aten worship and killed them both.  The ‘Younger Lady’ who was originally entombed with the male in KV 55 apparently died with a lance through the jaw.  There is no indication, though, that the Younger Lady was the Queen and probably wasn’t but was sister/wife of the new and briefly pharaoh in KV 55 who we could call with the place-holder name of Pharaoh Ahmose II? since that is the only dynastic name left that had not been used.  She would be the mother of Tutankhamun.

     There is only one problem with the above scenario.  One allele pair of DNA does not match Tutankhamen with Amenhotep as his father at the D185S51 locus where Tutankhamun has 19 and 19 but Amenhotep has 16 and 22.  Amenhotep could not be Tutankhamun’s father unless some jump of DNA took place.  This is not a good bet.

     Fortunately there is another scenario.   We know that Tutankhamen is a perfect genetic match of his father to be in KV 55 and his mother to be the ‘Young Lady’—both of whom were also a perfect match to be brother and sister. 

     It also happens to be true that that Ahmose II? in KV 55 and the Young Lady are perfect genetic matches to be both children of Amenhotep III and Tiye.  So, we really need to search no further.  It isn’t surprising that the Young Lady would be a daughter of Amenhotep but the historical background needs to be explored to see where another son could have been born but not known by the modern world.  

     We cannot assume that Ahmose II? was named Smenkhkare since Smenkhkare was named as a co-regent to Akhenaten.  We have to assume the co-regency was forced by the military to reverse Atenist policies and to put another young Atenist in charge of that would not make sense.  It would only make sense if Smekhkare was a mature man who had been involved with the other cult centers but who had some royal blood as possibly a sibling of Nefertiti or of Aye who was descended from Amenhotep II.  Since we don’t know the name of the daughter we could call her Nebetah? as a placeholder since she was the fourth daughter and the others became Great Royal Wives of Amenhotep.

     Amenhotep was said to have had eight daughters yet we only know the names of about four for sure.  The reason for this might be the embarrassment that some were daughters of his daughters.  None of them are attested after the lifetime of Amenhotep even though Tiye we know lived for twelve years after his death.  Even Nebetah has only one attestation.

     It is estimated that Tiye was born around 1398 BCE which would have her turn 40 about 1358 BCE and married Amenhotep III about 1390-1393 which was two years after he became Pharoah at an early age.  It is thought that Prince Thutmose died in the 1360’s.  This was soon after the young Amenhotep IV who became Akhenaten became co-regent with his father. 

     Akhenaten was already serving as co-regent at his father’s 30^th jubilee ceremony who lived eight years longer.  We know Akhenaten served seventeen years as Pharoah.   If Amenhotep died in Year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign, then Akhenaten became co-regent in Year 26 of his father’s reign which would have been 1365 to 1362.  This would have meant that Tiya would have been about in her late 30’s.  It would be then in the early middle 1360’s that Prince Ahmose II? could have been born when it was no longer politic to advertise competitors to Akhenaten’s future line of succession.  (This is when Ahmose II? also could have received a dynastic name before the Atenist names took hold.)

     Prince Ahmose could have been born even earlier.  Plans could have been established immediately upon the death of the Crown Prince—say 1370 or after—to make Akhenaten the co-regent.

     The age of Ahmose II in KV 55 has been a subject of controversy.  All the early testing showed him to be 18-21 years old.  The 2010 DNA testers arrived at an age of 35-40—which would put him as too old for the Amenhotep scenario.  There is no clear and definitive answer to this point currently.

     Of course, the age of this young son of Amenhotep would seem to put him as pretty young to father Tutankhamun.  However, if Ahmose II had been born right after the death of his oldest brother about 1370 and the planned co-regency of Akhenaten then he maybe could have been  about five years old when Akhenaten became co-regent, twenty-two when Akhenaten ended his reign, and twenty-four when he ascended the throne and was murdered.  Tutankhamun was nine years old when he became Pharaoh and would have been born when Ahmose II? was fifteen.

     I find Osman’s case convincing that Smenkhkare served a three-year co-regency with Akhenaten beginning only about three years after Amenhotep died but served no more than a year by himself.  Aside from the draconian closure of all other temples, an army revolt necessitating the co-regency might be intimated in the Bible story of Moses killing the Egyptian and fleeing.  In addition there is correspondence from the Egyptian King of Jerusalem to Akhenaten complaining that two Egyptian officials were killed by Hebrews.   Akhenaten’s inaction to this matter could have signaled to the army that the religious revolution was also an ethnic one with Hebrews in the ascendancy.

     The identity of Smenkhkare, of course, is in hot dispute.  Osman thinks he is a half-brother of Akhenaten.  Laurence Gardner identifies him as a first cousin of Akhenaten and son of Aye.  When the DNA of Aye is tested  it should bear out the correctness of Gardner.

     A very strong argument in my view against Smenkhkare being in KV 55 is that the Army revolt would not have settled for putting a young man of unknown qualities in to ride herd on Akhenaten who had been a pharaoh for fifteen years.  ‘Smenkhkare’ means ‘Vigorous is the soul of Ra’.  Much more likely it is that Smenkhkare was the son of Aye and was serving as a high priest in Heliopolis and could be trusted by General Horemheb to reverse the Akhenaten revolution.  Smenkhkare did just that by opening up a new temple to Amun in Thebes during his short reign.

     Osman quotes a very strange version of the Moses story from the Talmud.  In this one Moses flees to Ethiopia and fights against an army insurgency for nine years.  When the King of Ethiopia died, Moses married the Egyptian Queen who eventually wanted her son to be King so Moses voluntarily left with great honors and gifts. 

     There was a budding insurgency that Akhenaten fought for many years with Amenhotep.  He did move his capitol TOWARDS Ethiopia—looking from the Nile Delta where Akhenaten grew up.  The rebels were led by an Egyptian whose base was the army which did then or later build great fortifications against Akhenaten.  The Queen was named ‘Adonith’ which Osman translates in Egyptian as ‘Aten-it’!  Moses in the Talmud also officiates as the high priest in Ethiopia as Akhenaten did at Amarna.  And, perhaps, it was the Queen Mother Tiy’s idea that Akhenaten should voluntarily abdicate and allow her other son, Ahmose II, to become pharaoh.

 

     ‘Moses’ means ‘Divine Son’ or ‘Divine Son of Egypt’—which is how Akhenaten’s followers thought of him still.  ‘Smenkhkare’ meaning ‘Vigorous is the Soul of Ra’ officiated before or during his reign—or both—at The Temple of Ra in Heliopolis which was called On.  So, shortening Smenkh-ka-ra-on, the first cousin of Akhenaten’s name becomes ‘Aaron’.          

                                                 7.  El Shaddai                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

     Despite the approved state religion of the Aten after the Hyksos, it can be presumed that the Hebrew populations maintained in good measure their allegiance to the Caananite pantheon of gods headed by El Elyon.  Abram and Sarai had been scions of elite families in Sumer who had to flee with its destruction, but had maintained their allegiance to ‘El Shaddai’, meaning ‘Lord of the Mountain’—or Enlil.  Enlil was, also, called Kur Gal: “Great Mountain”.  His names may have come from his chief temple in the city of Nippur which was called ‘E Kur’: “House of the Mountain’ His temple was probably a very large, stepped tower.  He was reputed to have been born by a union of heaven and earth.  He separated them and carried off the earth as his own. 

     The various myths regarding Enlil are reminiscent of the later Gnostic seers describing the demi-urge, Yaldabaoth.  In common, they describe a demi-god with parentage, who is of neither heaven nor earth, who violates a virgin nature, is exiled from ‘the home of the gods’ (Enlil is described as being banished to Kur which is a hell or void space between the primeval sea--Abzu--and earth), who assumes the earth to be his own private possession, wants to keep its inhabitants ignorant, and approves of the use of violence and genocide,.  In fact, the Gnostics identified Yaldabaoth with Jehovah/El Shaddai who was Enlil.    The scenario where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son for El Shaddai shows he knew his patron deity was no one to fool with. 

          Although ‘El’ is a generic name for God in the Bible, but no embarrassment about its past usage is evident.  El Elyon,”the most high God” is seen in Gen:14:18.  as well as ‘El’ in Gen 33:20, Josh 3:10, Ps 18:31, Ps 48, Ps 68:21, Job 8:3, Ps 82, Ps 29,Nu 23:10 and Nu 24.

      Gardner shows with some genealogical detail that Sarai was not only the half-sister of Abraham but, also, the half-sister of the Egyptian pharaoh.  He makes the point that Genesis 12:19 in Hebrew is, actually, correctly translated: ‘Why did you say, she is my sister, so that I took her for my wife?’  That she was the actual wife of Pharaoh for a time would explain why her name was changed to ‘Sarah’—meaning ‘Princess’, why the sojourning family took up circumcision from the Egyptians, and why the descendants of Sarah and Isaac were promised “this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” (Gen 15:18)—the exact later expanse of the Egyptian Empire—assuming Isaac was really the son of the Pharaoh rather than the son of Abraham! 

     That Abraham picked up circumcision in association with Egyptians is clear.  It is not clear why they and the Dogons practiced it except as a mark of a covenant.  The Dogons explain that circumcision reflects the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A.  The Egyptian god of circumcision is also connected to the Sirius star system so there is some connection but not an entirely satisfying one.  The Dogons have various layers of initiate understanding so there very well could be more to the story than they tell to the neighbors and the kids.

     The circumcised penus looks remarkably like Amma’s Egg, the ben-ben stone of the Egyptian creation story, the Dogon granary, and—the event horizon of a black hole, which is what the original Big Bang was.  For ancient peoples who had thousands of years of out-of-body experience mediated by shamans and mind-altering substances, circumcision was a billboard proclaiming their spiritual attainment by cutting away the physical world to reveal the source of all.  Jewish babies are still circumcised on the eighth day which perfectly represents the piercing of Amma’s Egg and creation of materiality after the first seven dimensions into the eighth which was the Big Bang. 

     The people which populated the Nile Delta before the Egyptian dynasties for thousands of years were called the Pillar People.  The constellation of meanings surrounding this term includes “the Pillar of Immortality and Eternity” (which would be the seven rolled up dimensions), the central pillar around which their buildings were constructed, the stalactites and stalagmites in the caves from which they obtained mind-altering salts, the papyrus plant which was a symbol for the region, and with possibly some phallic worship rolled in.

     The Pillar, or Djed, as depicted by these early peoples had four plates or terraces or rings on the upper part of it which would reflect the four quantum forces (strong, weak, gravity, and electromagnetic).  The Djed, itself, would reflect the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.  This is clear from the later development identifying the Djed with Auser-Osiris who represented the life force on earth.  The closest event horizon to life on earth would be our Galactic Center.

     Originally in the Mesopotamian tradition, El Shaddai sat in council with the other gods to decide matters by majority vote as well as having a wife and children. The Sumerian tradition reflects the context that their ‘gods’ were an amphibian extra-terrestrial race which lived with them, taught them the arts of civilization and agriculture.  Traditions of these ‘annunaki’ show them with tails, living in marshy areas, and coming out of the sea as well as utilizing aircraft. In the North African context, one concept of the Underworld was phrased as “The Field of Reeds”.

     Just as Aten was viewed as the imageless god behind other Egyptian deities such as Amen, Ra, and Horus, there would not necessarily have been a conflict between El Shaddai seen as a tribal god in a greater context.  Alternately, the Aten in Egypt may have been seen as the stalking horse of El or El Shaddai—the acceptable hypostasis, so to speak.

     The ancient lineage of another aspect of the Hebrew that may go back to Egypt is revealed in the tefillin practice which are four boxes tied with leather straps to the head.  Scranton has an excellent analysis of how the skull cap represents the Big Bang and how the square boxes tied to the forehead and arm can represent the creation of space/time.  The leather straps wrap around the arm seven times and wrap around the fingers to form the Hebrew word ‘shin’ which means seven—all referring to the seven rolled up dimensions.

     Scranton quotes Marc-Alain Ouaknin (‘Symbols of Judaism”) that the four boxes use the mysterious word ‘totafot’.  Both ‘tot’ and ‘fot’ mean ‘two’ in an African language.  What Scranton, apparently, misses, though, is that the archaic term ‘El Shaddai’ is referenced in the tefillin practice.

     The character of Anu—the original El Elyon before Enlil took over his spot---is key to understanding the tribal god concept.  El/Anu was understood as being very aloof up on his mountaintop.  To receive favors from El, one needed an intercessor—which would be another god—such as his consort, or one of his children.  This, no doubt, gave rise to the ‘Elohim’ which is the plural of the noun ‘Eluah’—a feminine form of ‘El’!  This would refer to El’s consort or daughter working with El as in the sense of the Christian Holy Trinity working together.

                                                8.  The Yahweh Cult

     When Moses went into exile in Midian—which is East of the Sinai, he married Keturah, the daughter of Jethro.  Eusebius quotes Keturah: “One man is ruler of the land. He is both King and General.  He rules the state, judges the people, and is the priest”. The in-laws of Moses were the Kenite branch of the Midianite tribes who were actually descended from Abraham, as well, but through his wife, Keturah (Gen. 25: 1-6).  They settled in Northwest Arabia and worshiped ‘Yah’ or‘Yahweh’. The conjecture is that Yahweh was the worship of ‘Yah’ which was equated with ‘Ea’.  ‘Ea’ that was an Akkadian-Babylonian term, actually, for the brother of Enlil in Sumerian tradition named Enki.  Enki was the ‘good cop’ in the ‘bad cop, good cop’ duo.  He was in charge of the bio engineering program of the Sumerian elites, was a master engineer of canals and ships, and renowned as a teacher and protector of humans, It was Enki who warned ‘Noah’ about building an ark to survive the Flood.  Ea/Enki was called ‘the fish of heaven’ reflecting his amphibian character—also called Oannes among the Greeks who told about him climbing out of the sea to jump-start civilization and who has a tail in several depictions. It was Enki who told the truth as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

     Supporting evidence that the Kenites, at least, among the Midianites worshipped the brother of El Shaddai comes in the ‘burning bush’ scene (a very important point which Gardner has totally missed).  Yahweh is traditionally quoted as referring to himself as “I am that I am”—which, actually doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The “Eyah asher eyah” is more correctly translated ‘I am he who is called Ea’. The hypocoristic or familiar form of Eyah is Ya which equates to Ea (because it is pronounced like ‘Eyah’). Moses was having the revelation that the tribal god the Hebrews had been following all these many generations was actually his brother, the tribal deity of the Kenites! Since the Kenites were descended from Abraham it would not be surprising to see them follow a very closely related and parallel Sumerian tradition.

     The worship of Enki/Ea was widespread throughout Babylonia and Assyria thanks to the great Akkadian Empire and patronage of Sargon the Great a thousand years prior who had ruled from the Fertile Crescent all the way to the Mediterranean.  Excavation of Ebla in Syria shows the personal names using the ending ‘el’ had all of a sudden been changed to ending in ‘a’.  Also, along the coast in Ugarit, Ea was equated with El.  

     A striking correspondence showing that Sumer had some influence in creating the Moses story is the myth which Sargon promulgated concerning his youth:

          “My mother was a high priestess, my father, I knew not…My city is

          Azupiranu,which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates.  My high

          Priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.  She set me in a

          Basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.  She cast me into the

          River which rose over me, the river bore me up and carried me to Akki,

          The drawer of water.  Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and

          Reared me.  Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener…”

     “Akki”, his mentor, is Ea/Enki.  The verse goes on to describe how the goddess Ishtar made love to him which validated his right to rule as king.  This story of Sargon revealing the high regard in which Ea was held would still have been reverberating in popular culture throughout the Middle East at the time of Moses.  Akhenaten would have easily identified with many elements in it—the religious tradition of his mother, living on the banks of a great river, the spiritual mentorship of not a human but the Aten, the sense of being the only heir of the god, and the divine right to rule given by a female goddess (Nefertiti).

        The revelation of Moses that El Shaddai was actually Enki, perhaps, flew in the face of the Hebrew and Canaanite understanding of whom El Shaddai was and current thinking but was not inconsistent with Moses/Akhenaten’s history and context.  His grandfather, Yuya, the vizier, was actually a follower of ‘Ya’—who was Ea/Enki.  This can be seen from his tomb of Joseph/Yuya which, very oddly, only had references to ‘Ya’.  Aside from Akhenaten’s family sub-culture, it is interesting to note that the Aten derived from the Phoenician Adonia which derived from the Mesopotamian Tammuz whose father happened to be Enki!

                                                  9.  Exile and Exodus

     When Akhenaten departed into a vulnerable exile among the Kenites he had every familial and practical reason to have a mystical experience which affirmed Yahweh/Enki as identical with the Aten.   The ‘burning bush’ scene lends itself easily to the thought that this was a psycho-active plant based experience.  Many psycho-active plants have been identified as growing in Southern Judea and the Sinai.

     The next event in Exodus is that Moses is inspired to return to Egypt.  Gardner goes along with the conventional time-frame of the Ramesses period for this event but there is no reason to delay it past the reign of Horemheb.  

        With the abdication of Akhenaten and Smenkhkare, it was General Horemheb who became  the real power in the Empire with Aye staying only the figurehead, most likely. Some of the titles of Horemheb under Tutankhamun, for example, include: ‘Regent of the King’, ‘Sole Companion’, ‘Overseer of the Generals’, and ‘Overseer of all the Works of the King in every Place’!  Tutankhamun probably died of a broken leg and fall related to having temporal lobe epilepsy and ensuing infection.  His diagnosis can be seen from his feminized, enlarged breasts, depictions of him walking around with a walking stick, and his family history.  His uncle, Akhenaten, at the institution of the Aten cult apparently had powerful religious visions that could have been epileptic fits as well.  A number other young relatives of Tutankhamun also died young for no apparent reason which indicates the disease could have run in the family. (See on-line article ‘Mystery of King Tut’s Death Solved?’ Matthew Rosenbaum, 9-14-2012.)  Alternately, though, the Plague that afflicted Egypt in this transitional period could have inspired revolt against Akhenaten who the deities could be seen to be angry with.  With Tutankhamun there would have been no reason for Horemheb to have assassinated someone he could so easily manipulate.

     When Tutankhamun died, Aye became the pharaoh for four years until he died.  Aye was seventy years old when he became Pharaoh and had no male heir so Horemheb could bide his time.

     When Aye died, General Horemheb announced his ascension to the throne in 1335. This may have taken a little time because he may have been out of the country on a military campaign fighting the Hittites in Syria since he also played little part in the funeral of Tutankhamun for possibly the same reason.  He, also, needed to make plans for his marriage to a royal wife since he, himself, was a commoner.   This course of events would have been outrageous to Akhenaten and Smenkhkare.  Not only had Horemheb engineered their family’s ouster, but he had downgraded their religion, and assumed power himself as a commoner!

     The return of Moses and Aaron to Egypt was an attempt to beat Horemheb at his own game.  Moses and Aaron were planning on appealing to the warrior class and elite officer class most probably ousted or down-graded by Horemheb which spoke Hebrew.  This is why Moses feared he was ‘slow of speech’—in Hebrew!—and why Aaron was designated to speak.   Aaron, though Hebrew, had royal Israelite blood in his own right.  According to Gardner, Aaron and Aye were royal in descent through Isaac—who was probably the son of a pharaoh by Sarah and through Isaac’s son, Esau, whose mother was an Egyptian princess, as well as in descent, probably, from Tuthmosis III, and other Mesopotamian royalty.

      When Moses and Aaron heard the news of Aye’s death they most likely first headed to the city across the river from Amarna, ‘The City of the Levites’ where his old, and, no doubt, purged officer corps had a residence: to ‘all the elders of the Israelites’, where they spoke, and performed ‘the signs’.  These were, actually, rituals of pharaonic ‘rejuvenation festivals’ noted by Gardner involving throwing down a scepter topped with a brass serpent and a gesture of holding the right hand limply on the chest supported by the left.  Gardner ignores the sign of the water pouring which turns into blood but that probably involves a ritual from the Kenite Yah/Ea/Enki divinity--best known as the god of the sea and fresh water.

     Moses and Aaron with the ‘Elders’ who were, no doubt, a class of military officers who had lost favor with the Horemheb regime, then would have marched North up the Nile to Memphis where the capitol had been established since the reign of Tutankhamun. Possibly, they beat Horemheb there, performed the pharaonic ceremonies and called for popular support—hoping at least the Ra cult up the Delta in Heliopolis could be swayed. Aaron actually did the signs in an obvious attempt at the compromise of re-installing Aaron as Pharaoh.

      Unfortunately for the ousted monarchs, Horemheb had had thirteen years to consolidate his power among the military and the priesthoods and to replace the Israelite officer class with loyal Nubians, Libyans, and captured enemy soldiers who made up the bulk of the military.  Once Moses and Aaron had decided they were out-gunned, negotiations turned to the terms of retreat.  Horemheb would have been in no mood for compromise knowing he had by far the superior force.

      However, the Egyptian military was, primarily, made of foot soldiers.  The chariots were high quality, mobile fighting machines but small in number and used defensively to protect their ground forces from enemy chariot divisions.  Moses, Aaron, and their loyal officers and troops were left with the only option of beating a fast retreat back to exile. Many of them being relatively wealthy, their horses were loaded down with silver and gold: “Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold (The Lord made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and Moses himself was highly regarded in Egypt by Pharaoh’s officials and the people.)”—Ex 11:2-3.  They would have had to sell off their herds and flocks quickly or leave them behind.

     The escape from Egypt could have happened in several ways.  The officers of Moses still would have had access to horses from either Amarna or brought up from their land holdings in the Delta by their supporters.  They could have crossed into the Sinai, gone to the Hathor temple in the middle of it then on to Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aqabah.  There is a shallow land bridge where horses could get across but chariots would be bogged down.  Perhaps Moses and his troops on horseback returned and butchered the bogged down chariots until the Egyptian army arrived on foot.  Or, the Israelites could have fled South away from Horemheb’s on-coming troops and gained passage at various Red Sea ports on Midianite vessels or commandeering Egyptian ones.

                                        10.  Who Will You Serve—the Goddess?

     What virtually all commentators have missed on the parting-of-the-Red-Sea story is that the most important part was not how it happened or where it happened but WHO did it.  The human agency may very well have been the Lord Jethro rather than THE Lord who told Moses to just wave his royal uraeus for entry to Midianite territory.  But, the power of the story is that it was the Kenite water god, Yah, who performed the miracle and through whose good graces the Israelites were able to arrive in Kenite territory to impress the associates of Jethro with their divine providence.

     The story of the exile could also have been a conflated account.  The main body of Israelites could have made a dash for the Sinai in a partially diversionary tactic to allow Moses and his elite officer corps time to make their escape South to a Red Sea port. The bogging down of the chariots happening in one scene and Moses using his authority to cross in the other could have been combined in one story since you have specific and diverse locations named such as Pi-hahiroth and Baal-Zephon for camping areas.

    The‘death of the first-born’ scenario in Exodus really only fits the situation of Pharoah Horemheb. His first wife, Amenia, died during Ay’s reign and was buried with a foetus or a newborn.  The second wife of Horemheb, Queen Mutnedjemet, died during the thirteenth year of his reign and was also buried with a foetus or unborn child.  Horemheb died without a male heir.

     The plague aspect may have some basis, as well, since Moses had to send back from the Exodus some who had ‘leprosy’ which may have been a communicable disease leaving pox marks (which Moses recovered from).  Egypt was also probably like Southeast Asia with its water fowl and abundant varieties of farm animals in being a perfect incubator for what we know as ‘bird flu’.  During the reign of Akhenaten word had been received of the Black Plague sweeping through Asia as well.  Spores of it were found at Amarna so they were affected at some point.

     The Israelites, having left their herds of farm animals behind, were reduced to eating ‘manna’ in the Sinai—which Gardner explains is a well-known resin from the tamarisk plant.  Gardner believes. They made it to Mt Serabit which was a magnificent Egyptian temple built to the goddess Hathor (with turquoise mines nearby).  This necessitated an interlude where Moses went ahead to negotiate entry of the Israelites into Midianite territory.  It was one thing to enter as a deposed monarch with his retinue.  It was another to bring in possibly several divisions of heavily armed warriors looking for a place to settle.

     Moses wouldn’t have been strong enough to take Midianite territory by force against a confederation of Midianite tribes over a wide area—and from such a desert base as the Sinai.  He had no choice but to take Jethro’s terms of assimilation.

  When Moses had not returned in a timely manner for the Israelites there was possibly the fear that he had been waylaid and killed.  The forging of the golden calf from donated gold jewelry was consistent with the worship of the goddess Hathor who as the sky cow goddess gave birth to the sun each day as the golden calf.  The golden calf was also representative of the pharaoh who would dance in the lead of a Hathor celebration as the golden calf.  Although it is clear in several places only one golden calf was made, in two places plural gods are referenced: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt”—Ex 32:8.  Also in Ex. 32:23 we read: “They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us.’”  A dead pharaoh was often conceived of as a calf of Hathor.  The making of the golden calf would invoke both Hathor and their possibly dead pharaoh along with Ra and Aten or the multiple calves would have represented both Akhenaten and Smenkhkare.

     The ancients had a graduated sense of divinity.  The most ancient, Libyan-Egyptian goddess was Neith, the goddess of the hunt and weaving, who wove matter into existence on her loom.  An ancient symbol for her was a shield with crossed arrows since she was the goddess of the original hunting cultures.  This, actually, can represent one of the three ways strings in string theory can interact. She was also represented strongly by the bee—another insect known for building.  The context of making honey is not a bad reference to the light of the original creation. She was almost beyond sexual differentiation and is to be identified with the string or coil of string theory and the first seven dimensions. Helene Hagan interprets her as being the goddess of love, love-making, magic, prophesy, and sooth-saying but she was Queen of the ultimate Hall of Feminine Wisdom, or Hall of Nit or Neith.  The ultimate expression was Net-Djer which referred to Neith with Djer/Pillar/Osiris—who all could be taken to refer to the life force emanating from the black hole of the Galactic Center in the context of the rolled up dimensions of Neith.

     Hathor originated from the moon god, Ha, and goddess form, Hat who came to prominence as agricultural developed on the Delta and oases of North Africa and women’s menstrual cycles became important in determining agricultural dates.  The other important calendar derived from the star, Sirius, which could determine a year of 365 ¼ days from very early times.  The god of Sirius was Her, the ‘shining one’, Son of Neith.  ‘The strong arm of Her’ designation may indicate the knowledge of the invisible Sirius B around Sirius A and the extremely powerful gravitional pull it has as a white dwarf.  In addition, the hawk or Horus is associated with Her.  Horus was the first to land on the Ben-ben stone in the creation story.  Horus refers to the intelligent e.t.-human population of the Sirius star system and the galaxy.  Inheritance of agricultural land was more certain through a developing matriarchal culture and the merger of Hat and Her became Hathor, who, came to assume many of Neith’s functions as time went on.  Hathor can be seen as the embodiment or light of Neith and is identified with the Milky Way Galaxy, as well—the Nile of the sky. The stars represented the milk from her udders. She can be identified with the life force as well.

     Isis, under the Greek Ptolemy’s, usurped much of Hathor’s role when Alexander conquered Egypt—especially in being identified with Sothis-Sirius A from which some extra-terrestrials reportedly have come to us  in our neighborhood of the stars.  Sirius A is the brightest star in the sky and was useful in determining the flooding of the Nile, as well as having a yearly calendar function. 

     Where Neith is called the Divine Cow, Hathor is called the Celestial Cow.  Hagan describes that in the Book of the Dead there are seven beatified beings who are seven forms of Hathor—which would seem to represent the seven unseen dimensions of string theory.  In order for the deceased to gain access to the “Last Shrine of Truth and Right, the Hall of the Great Goddess” he would in the Seventh Hall have to address all the twenty-one pillars as feminine powers.  Then he would be able to pass by the double lions which represent the past and future—in other words, be in the eternal now—and pass by the Shrine of Her.  Her represents the manifest light, so the deceased would be able to access un-manifest being. 

     Hagan points out that “’Mothers’, in the Western African geomancy has the meaning of primary matrices”.  The deceased address all the gods as ‘mothers’ in their journey towards the Hall of Maati and, in so doing, it would seem, reveal that they truly know the inner nature of the gods. 

     The Hall of Nit or Neith or Maati corresponds well with Dogon Tribes diagram of the Nummo Fish.  The Fish (swimming in the ocean of divine, undifferentiated energy) has seven sections with the dot representing God residing through the sixth segment.  The seventh is where duality is created with two swirling vortices through which matter explodes into the material world using the string/coil of string theory and the four quantum forces.  The Gnostic work called ‘The Great Pronouncement’ (Apophasis Megale) attributed to Simon Magus (a typology of Jesus) brings these two concepts together: The Great Power Silence ( the ocean of divine, undifferentiated) divides into the male divine Mind which works through the first, feminine Thought (the Nummo Fish and Hall of Maati) which gives birth to all things.

     The Cosmos is created according to Magus by Fire working in Silence through six aspects of three syzygies or pairs—which could correspond to the six sections of the Nummo Fish.  This creates ‘The Middle Way’ (seventh segment) out of which all the lower angels, archons/aliens/authorities are created.

     Magus identifies the First Thought as The Holy Spirit.  In like manner, the seventh dimension of the Mother could be conceived of as ‘The Son’ or ‘the Primal Androgenous Adam.

     Hagan explains the twenty-one pillars of the Hall of Maati as being three times seven.  Laird Scranton in ‘Sacred Symbols of the Dogon: The Key to Advanced Science in the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic” explains from Egyptian hieroglyphs that within each of the seven unseen dimensions there are three functions.  One is that of the Watcher which creates mass—just as Amma did to create the seven dimensions in the first place from the divine sea of primal energy.  Another is the Gatekeeper who transitions from one dimension to another.  The third is the Proclaimer or Herald—who repeats or recapitulates each dimension from the other dimensions.

     When one does make it to the Last Shrine and Hall of Maati (Double Truth) this is where the Divine Cow and Celestial Cow are truly named and where the forty-two gods and goddesses live.  Forty-two is twice twenty-one.  This doubling correlates well with having the awareness of both the seven hidden dimensions and the four space/time dimensions.

                                               11. Life Force or Death Wish?

     The true Egyptian ‘vegetation god’ was not Aten but Osiris who originated as Andjeti or Aziri among the Pillar People of the Delta.  The terms referred to the reeds in the Delta marsh, the central pole around which their dwellings were built, and, theologically, the pillar of immortality and divinity central to their worship: the Djeba.  Andjeti became the fertility god, Auser, whose myth of death and resurrection was the oldest story on the Delta and is that of the familiar Osiris, Lord of the Underworld.

      Hagan identifies Osiris with the concept of ‘Paut” considered the eldest one of the primeval matter.  But, if paut can be related to the atom (as Laird Scranton does), then Osiris could relate more to a local dynamic such as the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy: the ‘pillar’ is the event horizon.  The Libyans used a term ‘Net-Djer’ which seems to unite feminine and masculine but also could express the string of string theory working through the local Galactic Center and ‘Hall of Reckoning’.

     The myth of Inanna/Dumuzi represented the wild, irrepressible life force expressing through humans searching for cosmic unity with abandon—and which can be evoked and felt in the heart.  The myth of Tammuz/Astarte represented the life force expressing through nature similar to the pathos of the Sophia/Christos myth where the light and life can be evoked by humans.  The Osiris/Hathor (Isis) myth represents the life force evoked in a wide sphere similar to the Sophia/Christos myth including after death journeying and connotations of involvement by beings of the Sirius star system.

     However ancient, Moses was in no mood to be accommodating with a theology which had booted him out of Egypt and put him between Jethro and a hard place.  Osman makes the astute conclusion that the compromise reached between Moses and Jethro was to use the name Yahweh—which was written in only consonants: YHWH….but verbalize it only as ‘Lord’ (Adon or Aten).   In addition, the Egyptian remnants of early speech would remain such as ‘El’ and ‘Elohim’, and prayers could be ended with ‘Amen’—underscoring that prayers are to an Egyptian conception of the divine.

     These compromises did not go down well with the Egyptians happy with their ‘love feasts of Hathor’ probably replete with ecstasy-inducing cakes of natron who were not expecting to have to merge with the Yahweh cult of Jethro in order to leave Egyptian territory and many wanted to return to Egypt.  Moses, however, still considered himself their king and military commander and would brook no dissent—probably fearing a wholesale route of his troops back to Egypt:

         

          “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword

          to his side.  Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other,

          each killing his brother, and friend, and neighbor.’  The Levites did as

          Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died.

          Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were

          against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.” 

                                                                                                                Exodus 32: 27-29

     Whether the massacre ever happened or was a later interpolation by Davidic and Solomonic scribes in an attempt to justify their own massacres (who, perhaps, first transcribed oral traditions), it is clear the birth of Judaism was mid-wifed by a dark, totalitarian strain that was rejected by Egypt, but continued on in Hebrew history.

                                    12. The ‘Promised Land’ in Arabia

     Research since 1985 by Arabic and African scholars such as Kamal Salibi (‘The Bible came from Arabia’) and Bernard Leeman (‘Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholarship’) has proven that the Israelites did not go North into Palestine but South in Western Arabia to, later, establish the Kingdoms of David and Solomon. 

     Since the 1990’s it has been clear that there is no archeological evidence in Palestine for the attack of Joshua on Jericho or the presence of the large and wealthy kingdoms of David and Solomon—and that of Oman which was actually richer than that of Solomon in a later Northern Kingdom of Israel .  This has been affirmed by even Israeli and Jewish archaeologists such as Ze’ev Hertzog, Israel Finkelstein, and Neil Silberman. 

     Jericho was abandoned from the 15^th to 11^th centuries BCE when Joshua would have been active.  Thomas L Thompson makes the point that Jerusalem wasn’t even a city big enough to be the ‘City of Judah’ until the destruction of Lachish in 701 BCE.  One could well wonder why the Israelites would spend forty years in such a small area such as the Sinai which can be crossed in a week or two waiting to enter such a poor, drought-stricken area as Palestine was.

     Since Hebrew only used consonants and it had not been a spoken language for a millennia before the translations of the Sixth to Tenth Centuries AD, it is Salibi’s position that the language was “consistently mistranslated”.  One can easily see if there are only a handful of consonants representing a place name the interpretation could be like a Rorschach test.

     Jethro was not only a priest but a powerful warlord being leader of the Kenite tribe and having a ceremonial role among what maybe could be considered the Midianite confederacy or family.  The most logical place for ‘Mt Sinai’ in light of the Israelites homeland in Arabia is the ‘Mountain of the Prophet Jethro’ (Jebel al-Nabi Shu-ayb) in far Southwestern Arabia (Although, Salibi makes the case for Mt Sinai being farther North at Jobal Hadi in Southwest Arabia.)  It is the highest mountain in Arabia at over 3500 meters in height and an easy landmark for sailors. This is the general area which controlled trade routes of luxury goods coming in overland through Arabia from India and China or into the Red Sea and is directly East of the very major ancient port on the Red Sea in Eritrea called Adulis.  Bernard Leeman makes the point that this Mountain overlooks the city of Kushm where, probably, “Moses took his ‘Cushite’ wife”, Zipporah.

     The area around the Mountain of the Prophet Jethro is very volcanic with thick lava flows well reflected in Exodus 40: 36-38:

          “In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the cloud lifted from above the

          Tabernacle, they would set out; but if the cloud did not lift, they did not set

          out--until the day it lifted.  So, the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle

          by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of

          Israel during all their travels.”

      The Kenites were metal workers and usually called “itinerate blacksmiths” but this is where the Israelites gained access to Iron Age technology.  The Kenites could have acquired this technology from anywhere—the Persian Gulf, from Northern empires like the Hittites, or from their trade relations with Africa.  Nigeria had been making iron weapons and implements from 1500 to 2500 BCE. Quoting from Leeman: “Most authorities agree that the Israelites were an Iron Age people who invaded Bronze Age Canaan.”  Today isolated groups in Africa claiming an ancient Hebraic origin - the Inadan (Niger),  Beta Israel (Ethiopia), Yibir (Somalia),  and Lemba (southern Africa) – are all associated with metalworking; and Islamic traditions hold that David and Solomon were both great armorers.”

    Running North from the Mountain of the Prophet Jethro is a ridge or escarpment sweeping up from the Red Sea and running parallel to it up the Peninsula along which the lucrative trade routes ran was called H-yrdn in Hebrew which was mistranslated later as ‘the Jordan’.  

     On the coast near Jethro’s Mountain was the large port of Jizan across from the Port of Adulis but on the trade route from Southern Sheba or Sabaea connecting the North to three cities: Kush, Sheba, and Msrm/Msr.  The former and the later were mistranslated in the Bible to refer to Ethiopia and Egypt which were reported to have attacked David and Solomon’s Kingdom.

     Inland is the city of Najran on a parallel trade route.  These cities mark the Northern boundary of the Arabic part of the Queen of Sheba’s domain but the area contains Hebrew forms of speech in their Arabic speech as noted by Chaim Rabin in “Ancient West Arabian” and has an ‘Ark’ culture as noted by Leeman.

     Both trade routes meet up at Medina, but just North of Jizan are the three cities nearer the coast of which two of the cities Salibi calls Gaza and Jerusalem.  These mark the farthest Southward extent of Judah proper which David conquered and Solomon consolidated. 

     North of Jerusalem is Taif, then Mecca—which feeds into the port of Jeddah but also continues on to ‘Shiloh’, then Medina where the route from Najran meets it.  This joint route then meets at Khaybar with another trade route coming from the Persian Gulf.  Khaybar has a large Black population.  The word for Samaritan and Black African means the same thing in Hebrew so it is possible this became the home of what may have been loyal Ethiopian troops of Akhenaten.

     The route from Khaybar leads to Taima which marks the farthest Northern extent of Solomon’s Kingdom and what later would be the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  One trade route from Taima goes to Babylon.  The other goes to Syria and Egypt. 

                                           13. The Holy Land Conquest

     The forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness was most likely spent as a mercenary force employed to guard the trains of luxury goods wending their way through Arabia from nomadic raiders who frequented them.  The odd prohibition of God against Moses entering the Promised Land for using his staff to get water from a rock when his people were thirsty could have referred to a violation of Midianite or Amalekite territory by using his Pharaonic status to gain entrance to a fortress carved out of rock in the desert.  The Israelites were sponsored by Jethro in the Arabian Peninsula and had to abide by his treaty obligations with neighbors.

     The greatest arch-enemies of the Israelis in the Old Testament beyond even the Egyptians are the Amalekites which they were finally able to exterminate almost entirely.  The prophet Samuel, later, demanded that Saul complete the job.  When Saul waffled, Samuel killed the captured King of the Amalekites himself.  The Amalekites were the original Arabian inhabitants of the Hijaz province and called “First among nations”.  They were very wealthy.  The excuse for extermination the Israelites gave was that the Amalekites had harassed them in their desert wanderings, killing the trailing women and children.  Of course, any nomadic band robbing the caravans the Israelites were guarding could have been called “Amalekite”.

     Pulling from both the Arabic text Kitab al-Aghani (Book of the Narrative Poems) having an account of the earliest history of Arabia and from Jewish rabbinical traditions, Leeman describes how the oldest tradition is that Moses sent an Israelite army that “annihilated” the Amalekites in the Hijaz area and settled in Medina.  Medina not only was centrally located but was called Yathrib which was an Egyptian name meaning it probably had been an Egyptian military outpost and possibly still had Egyptian populations.  In a confirmatory tradition, Leeman notes that the Bwala Bedouin claim an Israelite ancestry saying the Israelites inhabited the Hijaz mountains and were the first to domesticate the camel—even when only the Arabs were desert nomads. This would fit with the 1300 BCE date for camel domestication.

     Leeman quotes Salibi in finding about thirty place names throughout Western Arabia reflecting Egyptian gods or names of Egypt.  The Israelites could have found a base of support when they arrived among various ethnic groups.  Salibi locates six of the ten tribes of Israel in the Hijaz area while putting Judah and Benjamin farther South and a little bit inland on the escarpment and river valleys South of Mecca and Taif. 

     The roughly three hundred years between Moses and Solomon gave plenty of time for great growth of wealth and extensions of trade missions into far reaches of Africa, the Middle East, and even India.  DNA testing of the priestly clan of the Lemba tribe which is spread throughout southern Africa shows that 53% of the men share the kohenin chromosome with 45% of Ashkenazi (European) Jewish priests and 56% of Sephardic priests.  They also practice “a kosher diet, circumcision, and ritual purity” according to Leeman.  The Cochin Jews of India, the Lemba, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia show no evidence, however, of later editions of the Torah which include central temple worship and priestly support.  Leeman believes Zadokite priests in the time of Solomon and, later, after Babylonian Exile added these.

     The ‘Bible’ of Ethiopia is called the Kebra Nagast.  In it is the ‘Sheba-Menelik Cycle which has an early version of the Torah which many of these early trade missions would have utilized.  The early Torah includes beautiful social justice and fairness regulations probably deriving directly from the Kenites and their Yahweh worship.  Chapter 41 of the Kebra Negast speaks of treating the poor, orphans, and outcast well while dealing harshly in court with violence against people.  Chapter 42 deals with a long list of sexual prohibitions which certainly do not come from the Egyptian elite but reflect nomadic Bedouin practice.  Chapter 89 involves prohibitions against using magic, deceit, and fraud.  Chapter 90 is a long list of social justice issues such as not harvesting your entire crop so strangers can glean some food, not using violence to settle disputes, defending the rights of the poor and orphans, not killing innocent people, and “don’t cause death by perverting justice for aliens”

     Aside from the Ten Commandments which are a negative formulation of a positive formulation of the same thing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, one ancient and vestigial institution from Egypt it would seem is the Jubilee—for which there is no evidence it was ever carried out.  In concert with the Sabbath every seven days and the Sabbath Rest of the Land every seven years is the Jubilee which was supposed to have occurred every fifty years and to have forgiven all debts.  The Dogon have a celebration every fifty years as well which represents the time it takes for Sirius B (and Sirius C) to orbit Sirius A.  It is called the Sigui festival which is related to the Egyptian word for festival which is ‘skhai’ and the Amazigh tribal name meaning ‘Celebration of Amma’.

     By contrast to the Ethiopian Torah, the Jewish Torah is detailed by Leeman:

          “The Jewish Torah emphasizes racial purity.  It accepts slavery.  It has highly

          detailed rituals and has laws relating to personal matters, urban bureaucratic,

          centralized government, and the priesthood.  It calls for respect for prophets

          but death for those who dissent.  It gives a privileged role to hereditary priest

          clans, the Levites and Kohenin, and sanctions taxation to maintain them.”

     Hundreds of years after Solomon the book of Deuteronomy was miraculously‘found’ in the temple and used to massacre the Samaritan priesthood.  Aside from the admonitions to bring all offerings to the temple and obey authority the violence speech is draconian about destroying idolators, burning their cities, destroying the seven Canaanite nations, hindering no one from killing a false prophet, never showing mercy to idolators, and never offering peace to Ammonites and Moabites in time of war.

     The times of David and Solomon were a time when the major powers such as Egypt, Assyria, and Persia were preoccupied with their own problems which allowed for the expansion of the Israelites North to Taima and South as far as Jerusalem.  The Israeli’s utilized the great juniper forests of the Tehama mountain ridge for ship building but even more so for making iron (with iron deposits being found near Jeddah).  Large amounts of charcoal are needed for iron-making meaning that vast forests needed to be cut and burned.  In Colonial America, too, Colonists who needed a cash crop would cut down virgin forests, burn them up in big piles of logs, and transport the small amount of charcoal left to the nearest iron smelter.

     Leeman describes how the vast, desolate areas of Sudan across the Red Sea in Cush used to be heavily forested until it was called the “Birmingham of Africa” because of all the iron smelters turning it into a desert while the ruling elite built their own pyramids and tombs.

     As old King David lay dying his eldest surviving son, Adonijah, gathered together the nobles and the levitical High Priest and had himself installed as King in a ceremony in a holy spring.  Bathsheba (“girl of Sheba”) informed David who designated her own son Solomon as King.  Solomon had his own initiation ceremony at his own holy spring.  Adonijah fled to an altar and appealed for clemency from Solomon who spared his life.  Later when Adonijah appealed to Solomon through Bathsheba to marry one who happened to be from David’s old harem,  Solomon had Absalom executed using the excuse that a move on the royal harem can be viewed as a kingly claim.

     The use of sacred springs reverberates back to Enki/Ea/Yah, the fresh water god and, esoterically, relates to moving water as being effective in dissipating negative psychic entities.  The Levite High Priest who had supported Adonijah was exiled and the Zadokite High Priest was left to build the temple, establish the priestly bureaucracy, and edit the Torah.  The Zadokites had been, apparently, granted priestly offices as a reward by David to a local tribe in his efforts to capture Jerusalem.

     Solomon began building his famed temple several years after assuming power.  This entailed using slave or enforced labor from Northern Israel—very possibly the Black population of Khaybar, the guardians of the Northern trade route. 

     The gold to build the Temple came from ‘Ophir’—Mahd ad Dhahab—which has been discovered to be a vast and ancient gold mine with millions of tons of waste rock, old stone hammers, and grindstones located between Mecca and Medina.  It is thought to be as comparable to Biblical accounts and the source of most of the gold of the ancients.

     The Temple was modeled after the Caananite temple of Baal-Hadad at Hazor with a porch, a main hall, and a ‘holy of holies’ running North-South.  The Temple of Solomon ran East-West—which would correlate better to the rising sun.  It has been conjectured that the Temple represented ‘the womb of Astoreth’ who was openly worshipped through the Sixth Century as the consort of Yahweh (just as she was the consort of El).  The three divisions of the Temple represent her hymen, vagina, and uterus with the priest anointed with saps and resins representing the penis.  There were daily sacrifices, feasts of the new moon, New Year, and for the Day of Atonement.  There were the pilgrimage feasts of Passover, Weeks, and Tabernacles. 

     Zecharia Sitchin observes that in the terminology used for the three rooms: Ulam (anteroom), Hekhal (ritual hall), and Dvir (holy of holies)—that the latter two terms are Sumerian/Akkadian terms. 

     Another striking feature of the Temple resonating back to the worship of the god Ea/Enki is a huge copper basin called ‘the sea’ which stood in the Courtyard.  It was 15 feet in diameter, seven and one-half feet deep weighing 30 tons and capable of holding ten thousand gallons of water.  It wasn’t just for the priestly ablutions because King Hiram made ten smaller ones for this purpose.  It most obviously derives from the Kenite, Yah (Ea/Enki)—the water god of Mesopotamia.

     Correspondingly, during the Crusades, it was discovered that several Mesopotamian cities had sacred pools with stone altars standing out of the water in the middle.  Priests would swim out to them for their daily devotions surrounded by leaping sacred fish.

                                             14. The Queen of Sheba (Saba)

     There are many and varied accounts of the Queen of Sheba from Arabic, Ethiopian, and Biblical source.  What is clear is that Northern Ethiopia had a tradition of Kings and Queens ruling jointly and that Makeda (the Queen of Sheba) originally ruled both in Ethiopia and across the Red Sea South of Israel in Sheba.  She was of mixed parentage from both sides of the Red Sea. 

     The growing wealth and expansion of Israel along with the ‘invitation’ to visit Solomon was at least an implicit threat if not an overt one to come do obeisance or risk the consequences.  Makeda tried to put it off but finally arrived with 797 camels worth of tribute.  She left pregnant with the child of Solomon and, in the process, lost control of Saba as well to Solomon—whether due to the internal politics of Saba or Solomon’s pressure.

     Wisdom of Solomon is famous but it was Makeda who tested him with riddles and received none in return.  Makeda was very impressed with the administration system of Solomon (bequeathed from Jethro) and was amenable to worshipping Yahweh as the god behind the sun god which her family worshipped in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of King Solomon and the varied worship practices of his wives and harem. In 1Kings11:5 we read: “He (Solomon) followed Astoreth the goddess of the Sidonians.”

     The son of Makeda and Solomon was Menelik who visited Solomon when he came of age.  This is a very odd story of how Solomon wanted him to stay (and become his heir).  Menelik refused but was sent off with the eldest son of the Zadokite high priest and other eldest sons of the elite.   The elder sons, then, conspired to steal the Ark of the Covenant.  Menelik wasn’t told of the theft until half way home but celebrated when he found out.  Solomon discovered too late and gave futile chase.

     The Menelik story descends straight from Menelik who had incentives to save face for both his mother and his father and himself.  Possibly, the deal was a quid pro quo.  Makeda agreed to abdicate and allow her son to establish an Israelite state if she got the Ark of the Covenant and a priesthood to run things.  Solomon called her bluff thinking he could cover up the loss of the Ark hidden under cloth in the Holy of Holies. 

     Up to one-half of the population of Aksum, Ethiopia remained Jewish up to Christian Orthodox conversion in the Fifth Century CE (Leeman)—which, then, absorbed many ancient Jewish traditions from Arabia like using the menorah, calling the priest the ‘kahen’, and two specifically Jewish feasts, as well as sacrificing animals. They, also, use the three divisions model of a sanctuary instead of the basilica model. 

     Evidence of the ancient Jewish lineage of Ethiopia is detailed by Leeman commenting on the Kebra Nagast (The ‘Bible” of Ethiopia):  The Kebra Nagast  contains the ‘Holiness Code’ of Lev: 17-26 which is considered among the oldest Biblical parts.  It, also, contains the only story concerning what might have happened to the Ark and to the Zadokite priesthood which disappeared for three hundred years.  It uses the ancient form of Ark terminology: tabot.  The Kebra Nagast has none of the later Biblical history in it.  The geography in it is totally inaccurate for Palestine but works for Arabia.

     German archaeology recently has discovered what they believe to be the altar that Menelik used.  They claim to have found worship of the Sirius star system.   This knowledge of Sirius would have been useful to synchronize calendars for agricultural purposes but had dynastic implications.  Where Solomon with his reputed ability to talk to the animals was the successor to Moses who demonstrated his god-like abilities in parting the Red Sea, it was Makeda with her riddles of the jinn who was the Queen representing the goddess, Hathor, that was associated with Sirius and all manner of magic, prophesy, sooth-saying: “star knowledge, divination, and mantic powers” (Hagan).  Sirius was, also, the star of the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, who, also, could have been the patron of Makeda.

                                                    15. Exile

     While agricultural Ethiopia quietly flourished, Solomon’s Kingdom divided after his death into Israel and Judah and its wealth quickly attracted larger, vulture states.  Judah in the South declined but Israel in the North prospered—probably due to changing trade routes connecting through from the Persian Gulf instead of through the Red Sea area.

     It was King Hezekiah of Judah, an Assyrian puppet, who destroyed the ‘Nehustan’ of Moses (2Kings18:4) which was a bronze snake on a pole.  With the plural ending there is thought that it could have been a double snake or caduceus—like the double helix.  This destroyed an Egyptian symbol of royal power but also was an ancient reverberation coming from Enki/Ea/Yah as his symbol.  Copper statues of serpents have also been found with Midianite ware at the Temple of Hathor at Timna. 

     In fact, in some parts of Arabia from 1250 BC to 550 AD there have been found elaborate temple complexes of snake cults—either descending from Ea or coming from India—with indoor and outdoor altars, incense burners, vessels and objects decorated with snakes, and pools of water.  Aside from its identification with the string or coil of string theory, the snake is a symbol of transformation with its molting skin from one form to another and of the life force with its venomous power of life and death.

     The snake, serpent, or dragon was a symbol of immortality for the peoples living prior to 3942 BCE because of the constellation around the North Pole area resembling a serpent that revolved around it without ever going below the horizon.  When the bright star, Thuban, became the Pole Star from 3942-1793 BCE it would have diminished the power of the serpent symbolism but enhanced the pole symbolism of the ancient Libyan North African civilization.

     Pagan and syncretistic worship was still permitted in Judah (still in Arabia) until the reign of Josiah (640-609 BC) when the Zadokites came to power after three hundred years.  They, supposedly, discovered a lost book in the Temple which was Deuteronomy.  The reading of it so inspired Josiah that he not only destroyed pagan shrines and massacred pagans but destroyed the Samaritan Temple at Bethel in Israel.  Within decades, however, Jerusalem was sacked and looted, and ten thousand of the elite were taken into Exile.

                                           16. Ezekiel and Jewish Mysticism

         Five years into the Exile in 593 BCE it is Ezekiel whose vision resulted in a book that is part ufo abduction scenario, several parts of the threatening of genocidal violence against idolaters and sinners, and part vision of a new and united theocratic state with a king and a state-supported Zadokite priesthood—but which functioned as a rationale for the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem seven years later in 586 BCE as the righteous judgment of God.  Leeman astutely notes that the Levites were to be demoted to secondary helpers in the new Temple with only Zadokites serving as high priests.

     Peter Levenda (‘Stairway to Heaven’) demonstrates the usage of Babylonian imagery by Ezekiel.  The throne imagery corresponds to the idea of the Babylonian King ascending up the levels of the ziggurat on special days to commune with his god.  The chariot imagery recapitulates the practice of the Babylonians wheeling out the stone statues of their gods in chariots to a local body of water for a ceremony to enliven the statue.  The many winged cherubim of Ezekiel resemble not only the adornments of the First Temple but also the half-man, half animal griffins which adorned Babylonian gates.  Ezekiel constantly refers to “North”.  Levenda takes it as a reference to the ‘chariot’ of the Big Dipper which the Sumerians and Babylonians conceived as the locus of immortality and divinity since it is always a visible constellation because it rotates around the North Pole.   It also could stand, however, for something like ‘Babylon, the avenging instrument of God’s will in the North’.

     Very little was written historically on Jewish mysticism.  It was considered an oral tradition but Levenda quotes the leading authority, Gershom Scholem (‘Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism’):  “No doubts are possible on this point: the earliest Jewish mysticism is throne-mysticism”  Levenda goes on to suggest what a common idea this was in going back to Enlil in Sumer:

                         “He sets up his dais in the mountain mist.

                         He rotates it in heaven like a rainbow,

                         He makes it roam about like a floating cloud”

     One of the earliest commentaries on Ezekiel is the Re’iyyot Yehezkel which brings in the repetition of the number seven.  There are seven heavens and seven chariots—one in each heaven.  But, interestingly this work brings in the idea that there are seven levels to an Underworld as well as to heaven.  This corresponds with Sumerian and Egyptian belief and Levenda finds this belief also in the archaic, shamanic traditions of both India and China. In the case of Re’iyyot Yehezkel, it is even from this mountain under the sea that the sacred vessels of the new Temple will be restored from.  This imagery reverberates with the Sumerian god, Enki, who is the god of this primordial sea of divine energy where the ‘mountain’ could be conceived of as an event horizon of a black hole such as the Galactic Center.

     Levenda discusses Haitian Underworld ideas surviving from their African heritage.  Their ceremonial center has a central pole reaching down into the Underworld.  This is a heaven called Vilokan from where the gods and the life force are invoked.  There is also an astral plane-type ‘land of the living dead’ that is a cold watery abyss conceived as being under the earth called Gede.  The soul divides several ways.  The higher self departs into a higher vibration or “higher than the sky”.  The other parts go to the astral plane until they are invoked back to earth and gradually through their service work become divinized.

     Levenda finds the Dogon from Mali, West Africa which descends from the pre-Egyptian pharoanic North Africa tradition also holding to the ‘seven above, seven below’ formula resulting in their diagram of these fourteen worlds:”in a spiral shape of seven ovoids, one atop the other, like a strand of DNA or the serpents in a caduceus.  Each half of each ovoid represents a world.”  This, even, corresponds with the body of Osiris being chopped up into 14 parts.

    

                                            17. The NEW Jerusalem

     Leeman notes a number of passages from Isaiah and 2 Kings such as “Virgin daughter of Zion”, and “daughter of Jerusalem” showing that the new theocracy would be a NEW Jerusalem—not the same as the old one.  Forty thousand exiles began the new beginning in Palestine in 520 BCE but it was the arrival of Ezra as a Zakokite priest and as a Persian bureaucrat in 400 BCE which gave final definition to the new theocracy in Palestine.  Ezra mandated that the province be only for the exiles, foreign wives be abandoned, and women denied religious training even (Leeman).

     Ezra founded a school to edit and canonize the Old Testament.  Consequently, most of its language is from 400 BCE.  The indigenous Samaritans rejected the edit, holding only to the first five books.  History soon repeated itself and the new homeland of Judaism became the pawn of larger powers, the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty destroyed the Samaritan Temple again, and Zadokite attitudes of exclusivity resulted in factional fighting until the Romans finally massacred all the Jews in and around New Jerusalem who didn’t flee in 135 CE.

     The Zadokites who had usurped the Levite priesthood under Solomon, re-written the kind, social gospel Torah of Jethro to support a vicious, sectarian bureaucracy, regained power under Josiah for murderous intent, and piggy-backed off of Persia under Ezra to re-write history as the conquerors in their little pond, and were stopped only by their own death in many cases.

                                                18. “The Virtual Temple”

     Throughout much of the New Jerusalem period there was the crisis of interfacing with a dominant Greek culture.  The Sadducees in control of the Temple in the time of Jesus claimed Zadokite descent as the closeness of their names implies but were heavily compromised by their Greek patrons’ wealth and philosophy.  This is reflected in the issue of them not believing in the resurrection of the physical body, for example.  The Pharisees were the conservative, rural ‘push-back’ to the Greek culture.

       It was the Qumran sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls who considered themselves the legitimate Zadokite descendants of the Ezekiel mystical tradition.  Considering the First Temple’s purity to have been corrupted and the Second Temple’s ritual purity to be non-existent they found their locus of the holy in Ezekiel’s vision of ascent to the throne of God.  Levenda coins the term ‘virtual temple’ for their focus on visualizing details of its structure, priesthood and vestments, sacred creatures, angels, and ritual.  The Qumran literature bears a striking resemblance in literary style and content to later Jewish ‘throne’ and ‘palace’ mystical literature utilizing the number seven repetitively,  chains of ecstatic phrases rather than sentences in a non-narrative style, and focusing on the Temple of God.

     Levenda well describes the ritual purity demanded by the Qumran sect in their analogy of pure water being poured into an impure vessel.  Even if the water and original pitcher are pure, if the pure water is poured into an impure vessel then the impurity from the impure vessel will travel up through the pure water and contaminating all the pure water!  New members were not allowed to eat with the sect for years before their purity was ascertained.  Then, there was another year novitiate before they could actually drink with the group.  This was all in preparation for association with the ‘angelic’ forces who they believed would return with their armies, destroy all their enemies, and re-establish God’s Kingdom on earth.

     John Lash Lamb (‘Not in His Name’) well describes the vision this small sect had for a messiah that would lead the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness in a global apocalypse where they would ultimately be rescued through intervention by angelic warriors.  Not to worry if one was killed early in the struggle:

          “Behold my people, I mean to raise you from your graves, and lead you

          back to the soil of Israel.  And you will know that I am the Lord Yahweh,

          when I have opened your graves and raised you from the graves” (Ezekiel 37)

     John Lamb Lash mentions how this cult re-enacted this drama over seven or eight generations with different people taking different roles in their imaging of an e.t. war with a legion of chariots filled with warrior angels coming to the rescue.  The Qumran sect failed but the tentacles of their vision passed on into Christianity and Islam which included the doctrines of the resurrection, the Rapture, Armageddon, Judgment Day, heavenly rewards and divine retribution.

                                        19.  The Nag Hammadi Codices

     The pushback to the Qumran sect is in the form of the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) which is a true library of different authors from different periods hidden by monks of the fourth century fearful of the increasing control the Roman church was asserting over faith and practice.  Many of the works are considered ‘gnostic’ and a corruption of original Christian doctrine.  However, books like the ‘Dialogue of the Savior and the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ show that many of these books originate in the first century.

     The general storyline of many of the manuscripts of the NHC speak of Sophia as a divine being—who Lamb Lash and I tend to identify with a divine consciousness in and  from the black hole at the center of our galaxy—who decides she wishes to create like God does: from herself without any consort. 

     She could be thought of as a swirling arm of the Milky Way Galaxy in its primordial, raw, chaotic formation having no particular humanoid-type higher consciousness attaching identity within it.  All of a sudden came the first consciousness deciding to arise within it.  Ialdabaoth is described as lion-like and serpentine arising in what could be thought of as the astral plane, a plastic foam of consciousness adhering to condensed matter, so to speak.  If Ialdabaoth arose in any multiplicity, he would seem to have a group mind at least.

     Ialdabaoth arose, looked around, found himself alone, and declared himself the lord of all he surveyed.  Subsequent evolutions arose which could be likened unto the current ‘grey’ and ‘reptilian’ ufo phenomenon.  These were convinced by Ialdaboth that he was the top of the food chain.

     This chaos, ego, and forgetfulness of divine origins horrified Sophia.  One of the ‘sons’ of Ialdabaoth turned from the dark side as the divine consciousness of our Sun and aligned himself with Sophia.  Humans were bio-engineered from a whole melting pot of alien DNA as a supposed ‘service project’ by Ialdabaoth and his minions but really to serve as hostages against being overthrown by higher Sophianic forces.  But, this was all in Sophia’s divine plan!

     With the help of her consort from the Galactic Center, the Christos, the earth and humanity were given a higher potential than Ialdabaoth and his ‘archons’ possess. 

     This mythology corresponds well to the Mesopotamian story of the theft of the goods of civilization from the god, Ea (later Yahweh).  While the Inanna story in Chapter 3 details the ascent back to primal unity, there is a story of her descent from it.  It all begins with going to visit Ea in his Temple and getting him drunk.  This represents the state of divine ecstasy where everything is possible and everything is permissible.  She gets him to agree to give her all the gifts of divine energy and utility to take home (to lower dimensions).  She takes off in her ship with the gifts.  Ea comes to his senses and tries to intercept her but fails.  This demonstrates the awareness the higher dimensional reality can’t actually be thieved or translated, but all individuals have God-given free will and ability to create their reality in lower dimensions.  After seven trials and tribulations representing passing through seven dimensions down to material reality, Inanna arrives home and throws a big party—representing the divine ecstasy that can be had in material creation.

     The story of the Egyptian Osiris is another ‘descent’.  He is tricked into getting into a box by Set (Ialdabaoth) which represents material creation who throws him into a river.  The box grows into a tree—which represents the growth of the life force in material creation.  Isis finds him and buries him.  Set digs him up, cuts him up into fourteen parts—representing the Dogon fourteen divisions of the seven dimensions, and spreads him around the world in a divine game of ‘hide and seek’.  Isis retrieves thirteen parts but not the penis—which is eaten by a fish.  This represents the truth that true procreativity happens in a higher plane.  The fish—like the Nummo Fish diagram of the Dogon—represents the seven unseen dimensions.  Isis still gives birth to Horus from Osiris using some magic---again demonstrating things really come from a higher plane.

     The Gnostic seers writing many of the manuscripts of the NHC really had a completely opposite approach to Qumran.  They had no desire for re-embodiment—let alone an earthly divine kingdom established by violence.  They saw Jehovah as identical with Ialdabaoth who was infesting Jerusalem and Rome with negative archons and had definite advice for those who happened to end up ‘abducted’ by aliens.  In the voice of Jesus they suggested they tell the archons: ‘I am from the pre-existent father and I am going back to the pre-existent father. (‘That’s my story and I am sticking to it’) in order to avoid further snares.

     The god of the Hebrews in derivation is quite the mythological mess of Ea-- representing the life force, Enlil and Jehovah--the demigod, the Aten—the perversion of the life force, and Yahweh—maybe, the un-moved mover to some—all of which represents well the mixed world we inhabit.  The Gnostic seers had a sense of value, however, which could be perceived.  Ialdabaoth, his archons, and their “inorganic” tentacles (in the terminology of Lamb Lash) can be perceived in qualities and modes of violence and in control methods, in hierarchical thinking, in sexist orientation, and in escapist, phantasmal allegiances.  A tree is known by its fruit.  The message of the seers was that the demagogic tree of Ialdaboath and the archons will eventually be pulled up and destroyed or dissipated like a phantasm—like the plastic substance out of which it is created.  Saying #11 of the Gospel of Thomas, in fact, reads “This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away.”

    

     The Hebrew altar is called a ‘bimah’.  An Egyptian counterpart is ‘bu maa’ which means ‘place of truth’ and relates, for Scranton, to the seven rolled up dimensions of string theory.  Scranton also relates it to the Dogon word ‘bummo’ which is the conceptual stage of creation.  Upon the bimah is the Torah which is housed in an arc in the shape of a spiral coil.  In this case, ‘the medium is the message’.  It is the coil in the place of truth, the serpent in the garden, the goddess in the life force, the weaver of all life and all that is which is the divine mind that we all partake that underpins everything.  This can be the inspiration to perceive all of creation as our mother—or divine matrix—out of which we have sprung to celebrate the love feasts of Neith with the earth, with each other, with ourselves, with the mythologies and herbs of yore, with the laughter and wisdom that helps dissipate the bad dreams and phantasms we find ourselves intertwined with, and with the ineffable light from Above which is also within.

November 20, 2014—Fourth Edition

October 30, 2014--Third Edition

April, 2014—Second Edition                                                                                             

 July 2, 2008—First Edition   

                                                         

 John Munter, Warba, MN