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Leonardo's John The Baptist - Feast Day - Day after the Summer Solstice. Head tilted at the Earth's tilt angle |
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James Abram
Garfield 20th US President "The truth shall set you free, but first it will make you miserable" He was assassinated. |
The earliest worship
was that of a Deity as exhibited in nature, and the study of religion
was the study of nature, and the priests natural philosophers, and
hence astronomers, at first, honest; but having obtained power or
influence by knowledge, the people gave them credit not only for
what they did know, but also for what they presumed they knew :
and because they could foretell eclipses by calculations based on
laborious observations and apparent astronomy, they also presumed
that priests could foretell other events, and hence urged on the
astronomical priests the character also of astrologers. The priests finding such professions a profitable source of revenue, drove these studies to extremity, and made 'mystery where none existed, as this enhanced the priestly character in the conception of the people. To preserve this influence and power, the profession or trade of the priest was made difficult. The Druids, or Priests of Apollo, (at first missionaries from India, of the order of Buddha,) had no books, taught the aspirants to the priesthood by memory only ; and gradually initiated them into the mysteries, making all manner of austerities necessary qualifications, so that none among the Druids of Britain, Gaul, Spain, and toward the East, were of an inferior character; all, by their training, were superior men in mind and body, fit to command, and like other men in power turned that to their own aggrandizement; so that, except the sovereignity [sic], this order filled every station of profit and honor ; their itinerant poets directed the common people, stirred them up to war or lulled them in superstition, while others directed the education of the wealthy, and served the offices of priests, lawyers, physicians, teachers and statesmen, and all banded in a secret order. Such as were the Druids in the West, were also the Magi of Persia and the Priests of Hindoostan and Egypt ; one system, in substance, governed them all ; and the worshippers of Fire in Persia, of the Sun and Moon in India and Egypt were substantially the same ; each worshipped God under the symbol of Fire, or the Sun, as the most prominent object in Nature, effecting being, life, animal and vegetable, and performing the offices of a good and wise Deity. The blessings of Nature were personified, and its qualities, the same as those of Deity, taught by every symbol which Nature affords or priests could imagine. The heavens and stars were divided into hosts, with all imaginable qualities, in proportion as facts were really unknown, and natural phenomena were exhibited in fable ; a conjunction of the Moon or Planets was called a marriage, and the Sun assumed every garb according to the season and constellation in which it was ; a raging lion in midsummer when the Sun was in Leo, an ox in spring when the Sun was in Torus, and in later times " The Lamb of God" when the Sun took the cross and passed the equator in Aries the ram ; a noxious scorpion in autumn when the Sun is in that sign descending below the equator and becoming the harbinger of winter and desolation; and the Sun became a man in the sign Aquarius, or watery season, and in that character was so worshipped ; and these four signs form the celebrated Cherubim which ornamented the columns equally of the Jewish and Heathen temples, and have come down to our times, and associated with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ; for one of these signs are attributed to each, and are thus painted on the windows of the Cathedral (Trinity Church) Broadway, New York, built in imitation of an old European church, who copied it from a Roman church, who copied it from a Heathen temple, thus showing the connexion [sic] of Christianity with the ancient worship, and throwing some doubt on the reality even of the existence in flesh and blood of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, for here on the windows of Trinity are they represented as emblems of the seasons, and of the seasons too as they were five thousand years ago. To make these subjects plain we have introduced a cut, Vale's globe and sphere would be better, the ancients had something of the kind, so as to follow their pursuits in their studies as well as in their temples or astronomical towers |
Ezekiel
1 5 Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. 6 And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. 7 And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. 8 And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. 9 Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. 10 As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. |
And for this reason,
sirs (and if you cannot bear the reason you must go to the other
shop), that we hold that when a man has got the credit of having
written a gospel, which we are bound to take for gospel, under peril
of eternal damnation, the man who would leave any stone unturned
in the way of picking all possible acquaintance with him, would
be a fool. Now the first place or passage in any writing, book,
or part of any book, or record, profane or sacred, history or romance
in which the name of the man named Matthew occurs, is in our text,
this same ninth verse of the ninth chapter of what is called "The Gospel according to St. Matthew." And here it [Mat Thew] occurs in the accusative case, Mat θαιον, governed by the verb ειδεν, he saw, and in conjunction with the noun under the same grammatical government, ανθρωπον, which is translated, a man, that word, so translated, attracting its participial adjectives, καθημενον, sitting,—that is, a man sitting, and λεγομενον named, or, more literally, called,—thus throwing up so much information as a man sitting Mat Thew, with the further predication of what he was sitting on, or at—that is, his chair or επι το τελωνιον , which the best Latin versions render Sedentem in Telonio, which in English should be ''sitting in a Telonium" ;and which, for all that can be shown to the contrary, might mean sitting in a wheelbarrow ; but which our English translators, taking an audacious liberty with the sacred text, instead of confining themselves to the business of translation merely, have presumed to interpret for us, which they had no right to do ; they have added to tlie text the gloss of their own impudence, and rendered what should have been sitting in a tolonium, in the long periphrasis, sitting at the receipt of customs. |
Luke 22:10 (KJV)10 And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house where he entereth in. |
Matthew – a former tax collector. Sitting in a Toll Booth tolonium, collecting taxes. Mark – a follower of Peter and so an "apostolic man," Luke – a doctor who wrote what is now the book of Luke to Theophilus. Also known to have written the book of Acts (or Acts of the Apostles) and to have been a close friend of Paul of Tarsus, John – a disciple of Jesus and possibly the youngest of his Twelve Apostles. |
Revelation 7
1
And after these things I saw four angels on
the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that
the wind should blow not on the earth, nor the sea, nor any tree.
2
And I saw another angel ascending from the
east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice
to the four angels, to whom it was given hurt the earth and the sea,
3
Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have
sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.
The Secret Gospel of Mark is a putative non-canonical Christian gospel mentioned exclusively in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, which describes Secret Mark as an expanded version of the canonical Gospel of Mark with some episodes elucidated, written for an initiated elite. In 1973, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, reported having found a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba on the West Bank transcribed into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to another monastery, and the manuscript is believed to be lost. |
The four stars with their modern names, and their ancient Persian names (in brackets) were: |