The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (9 page)

From about 400 BCE to 1100 CE the God of Judaism was a lone and lofty father-figure, and whatever female divinity was allowed to exist in his shadow was either relegated to a lower plane, or her femininity was masked and reduced to a grammatical gender, as in the case of the Shekhina 46

Too like Christ for comfort

With the spread of Christianity, the old gods - both male and female - of the Mediterranean and Middle East were rapidly and hysterically demoted to the rank of demons, often because their legends were too similar to Jesus' story for comfort. The dying-andrising god Tammuz, whose consort was Ishtar-Mari, had reached Jerusalem via Babylon and before that, Sumer, as `Son of the Blood' or `only-begotten Son'. As a dying-and-rising god with a major cult centre in Jerusalem, Tammuz is believed by some to be one of the prototypes of Christ: his cradle was made from a grain basket, similar to Jesus' manger, for example 47 He was the sacrificial Lamb of God, Heavenly Shepherd, Man of Sorrow, and sometimes bore the name `Usirir', a variation of `Osiris', the hugely influential dying-and-ri sing god of ancient Egypt, who was dismembered by the evil Set, who in turn was arguably the prototype for Yahweh. Osiris, together with his consort Isis and son Horns, formed the great Egyptian Trinity of Father, Mother and Child, revealing a much more psychologically balanced psyche that the Church's apparently all-male `Father, Son and Holy Spirit' - although the latter was in fact the feminine Shekhina, or Sophia. (This is yet another example of a fact that theologians have long known and seminaries taught generations of priests, yet the average church-goer remains in ignorance of what would no doubt prove a comfort in a largely male-dominated organization.) The Egyptians sought balance above all things: the beneficent Isis was balanced by her dark aspect, the goddess Nepthys, while opposite to the `Good Shepherd' Osiris was Set, Yahweh's apparent prototype.

Ruler over the afterlife and human and agricultural regeneration, Osiris possessed over 200 divine titles, including `King of Kings', `Lord of Lords', 'the Good Shepherd' (a title shared with his consort Isis), and `the Resurrection and the Life'. The great Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge wrote: `From first to last, Osiris was to the Egyptians the god-man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They believed that they would inherit eternal life, just as he had done.'4' According to ancient Egyptian writings: `As truly as Osiris lives, so truly shall his followers live; as truly as Osiris is not dead he shall die no more; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated he shall not be annihilated.'49

Disconcertingly for Christians, the ancient god Osiris' advent was heralded by the sound of an angelic choir and by the Three Wise Men, although they took the form of the stars Mintaka, Anilam, and Alnitak in Orion's Belt, pointing to Christ's equivalent of the Star of Bethlehem. Originally the Israelites acknowledged this as `Ephraim', or the `Star of Jacob', whereas to the Persians it was nothing less than the Messiah - Messaeil. As Barbara Walker notes, Osiris'

flesh was eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat, the `plant of truth'. Osiris was truth, and those who ate him became truth also, each of them another Osiris, a Son of God, a `Lightgod, a dweller in the Light-god'. Egyptians came to believe that no god except Osiris could bestow life on mortals 50

Like the rites of Tammuz, the annual Osirian mystery plays required the priestess playing the widowed Isis to lament his murder on the Egyptian Good Friday, setting the scene for the miracle of his resurrection two days later. Bizarrely, Osiris as Un- nefer, `the Good One', was actually canonized as a Christian saint.

In Ezekiel's day, women sat by the northern gate of the Temple weeping for the annual death of Tammuz, the `Christos' (simply `Anointed One'), the sacred king ritually sacrificed each year at Jerusalem. The women first dedicated him to his mother/bride Ishtar-Mari, Queen of Heaven,51 another manifestation of Asherah.

As his female devotees gathered annually at the temple gates they raised ritual howls that the Greeks called houloi, crying `AllGreat Tammuz is dead!' and lamenting:

`For him that has been taken away there is wailing; ah me, my child has been taken away ... my Christ that has been taken away, from the sacred cedar where the Mother bore him. The wailing is for the plants, they grow not ... for the flocks, they produce not; for the ... wedded couples, for ... children, the people of Sumer, they produce not .. '5z

(The concept of the death of the god causing the land to be infertile resurfaces in the quasi-Christian legend of the Fisher King.)

Like all the other `Good Shepherds', `Saviours' and `Fishers of Men', Tammuz was diabolized by the Church, even becoming Hell's ambassador to Spain, where he was still worshipped by certain Moorish sects in medieval times.53 (His name, which means `twin', transmutes into Jesus' disciple Thomas, suggesting a cultic link with the ancient dying-and-rising god - and possibly, an intriguing clue to a secret about Christ's family.)

Tammuz and Osiris were not the only much-honoured ancient deities to be assigned to Hell with the coming of Christianity. John Milton in his epic poem Paradise Lost exults over their demise, declaring:

Old gods confused with incubi/evil spirits Of Baalim and Ashtaroth [sic], those male, Those Feminine. For spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their Essence pure 54

Milton lists the names of the fallen gods with some relish, including: `Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians call'd/Astarte, Queen of Heav'n, with crescent horns', together with Adonis and 'Thammuz yearly wounded', and not forgetting `Osiris, Isis, [H]Orus and their Train/With monstrous shapes and sorceries abus'd/Fanatic Egypt and her Priests' S5 Together with the golden calf of Moses' apostate followers and a huge tribe of gods and idols, they are all swept away into the infernal regions with the coming of Jesus Christ.

Et in Arcadia Ego

Astarte's horns, representing the new moon - as they did in the iconography of many other lunar goddesses, including Isis and Diana - were important evidence of devilish influence to the later Christians. However, it was a male deity of the ancient world who was to provide the physical model for the medieval Satan - horns, tail, cloven hooves and all the trappings of Hell. This was the once `all-great Pan', the king of Greek satyrs, the ultimate woodland god - perhaps Arcadian - whose limitless libido, once so admired and envied among his devotees, became a source of terror for Christian women. The Goat-God, sometime mate of various forms of goddess such as Selene, Athene and Penelope - and, apparently, all the ferocious Maenads - his furry thighs, curly hair growing luxuriantly around budding horns and lascivious, almond-shaped eyes, was seen as the epitome of lust. Many of his idols were even impressively, and shamelessly, ithyphallic. No fig leaves obscured Pan's proud masculinity, probably because no fig leaves could possibly cover it.

In his essay on the Tarot card `The Devil', Aleister Crowley notes tellingly `... the card represents Pan Pangenetor, the AllBegetter . . . the masculine energy at its most masculine .156 He describes the function of Pan, even in his less-than-acceptable mode: `All things equally exalt him. He represents the finding of ecstasy in every phenomenon, however naturally repugnant; he transcends all limitations; he is Pan; he is All.'57 Undoubtedly the worship of Pan required a strong stomach and a feverish libido, but as challenger to the staid and small-minded he exemplified a true Luciferan spirit, while never being, as so widely believed, the embodiment of Satan. Horns and hooves alone do not the Devil make.

The Greeks believed the Egyptian solar god Amen-Ra to be another version of Pan - the Masculine Principle being almost universally associated with the Sun, just as its opposite and equal Feminine Principle was usually (but not exclusively) personified by the lunar goddesses - calling his sacred city `Panopolis', city of Pan. Its sacred processions became our modern English panoply, meaning `Any imposing array that covers or protects,'"' such as complete armour worn ceremonially. `Panoply' comes from `Pan' and hoplon, meaning weapon. Pan's own name in turn possibly derived from paein, pasture, and also carried the meaning of `bread' (as in the modern French pain) and `all' (as in `Pan American Airlines'). Other `all-fathers' such as Osiris and Tammuz were symbolized by sacred bread, eaten in order to ingest wisdom. In their sacramental meals, the bread also represented the flesh of the god, and wine symbolized their blood. In an ancient legend concerning the dying-and-ri sing poetic divinity Orpheus, finding only water to drink, he turned it magically into wine.

Like those of his brother gods, Pan's holy drama of death and resurrection was celebrated annually, providing the original Greek tragoidos, or `Goat Song', as he fertilized the land. Pan-inspired sexual revels lasted well into the Christian era, together with elements of worship from the cult of the Maiden, as the May Day festivities where maidens danced around the phallic maypole before coupling - perhaps indiscriminately - with the local lads, much to the Church's impotent disgust.

Cromwell's Puritan Protectorate banned maypoles, along with virtually everything else that made life worth living. To the Puritans, the sexual licence involved in the festivals was bad enough, but in some areas the `Mai', or Maiden who gave her name to the month, was even associated somewhat confusedly with the Popish Virgin Mary! The crude symbolism of the maypole was understood, if not accepted, by Cromwell's co-religionists, such as the writer Philip Stubbes, whose detailed description of the festivities seems a little fevered:

Young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding overnight to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of trees to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, Satan, prince of hell. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration . . . two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And this being reared up . . . they strew the ground about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbours hard by. And then they fall to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself 59

May Day was so indelibly associated with ancient pagan rites across Europe that in France church bells were rung all that month `to protect the city from flying witches'.60 And although May itself is still regarded by the superstitious as unlucky, it is especially inauspicious to marry on a Friday in May, Fridays traditionally being sacred to goddesses such as the Nordic Freya, who gave her name to the weekday.

The goat-footed one also gave his name to our `panic', 'originally the terrible cry of Pan, who dispersed his enemies with a magic yell that filled them with fear and took away all their strength.'61 True panic is believed to be only experienced in wild woods or the wilderness, a theme that was portrayed in the haunting Australian movie Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),62 in which schoolgirls and a teacher disappeared mysteriously on a trip to Hanging Rock (a thinly-disguised Ayers Rock) amid a heady atmosphere of repressed sexuality, simmering neurosis and something darkly paranormal lurking subliminally under the plot - something elemental and lusty ...

Pan is also intimately associated with satyrs, originally so timid that their animal totem was the hare, but later widely seen as a rapacious goat-like being, with hooves, hairy legs, bare human chests and horns. That they have assumed archetypal qualities of challenging sexual repression can be seen from the description of the `deep, secret wound' in the mind of Dorothy Hare, the eponymous heroine of George Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), who found `that sort of thing' exceptionally distasteful after witnessing `certain dreadful scenes between her father and mother' as a child:

... And then a little later she had been frightened by some old steel engravings of nymphs pursued by satyrs. To her childish mind there was something inexplicably, horribly sinister in those horned, semi-human creatures that lurked in thickets ... ready to come bounding forth in sudden swift pursuit ...The satyr remained with her as a symbol ... [of] that special feeling of dread, of hope less flight from something more than rationally dreadful - the stamp of hooves in the lonely wood, the lean, furry thighs of the satyr. It was not a thing to be altered, not to be argued away.

Orwell adds with a touch of irony - and perhaps vivid memories of personal frustration: `It is, moreover, a thing too common nowadays, among educated women, to occasion any kind of surprise.'

Artemidorus (whose name suggests a link with the cult of the goddess Artemis), the late-second-century dream interpreter, implies strongly that Pan makes regular appearances in the dreams of humankind, and is most often glimpsed at night. The classical poet Horace wrote with pride and gratitude that Pan protected his farm, and occasionally even visited him, although he never saw him properly 63 Occult lore has it that Pan is perceived at `crossover' places and times - the edge of the wood at noon or midnight, for example - and should never be conjured immediately after lunchtime, because he will be enjoying his afternoon nap and, ominously, will be rather cross.

In his Pan: Great God of Nature (1993), the occult scholar `Leo Vinci' notes that `In the Authorized Version of Isaiah the word "satyr" is used to render the Hebrew se'rim ('hairy ones') a demon or supernatural being ... that lives in uninhabited places.'64 He cites Isaiah: `But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall lie there, and satyrs shall dance there.'65 Again, Isaiah repeats the satyr/desolation leitmotif. `The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow.'66 Vinci points out that the allusion to `devils' in the following passage from Leviticus refers to satyrs: `And they shall no more offer their sacrifice unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring .161