Fiction often arises from truth. What is the fiction and truth of the Abrahamic religious (Judeaism, Christianity, etc.) terms144,000? 666? Anti-christ?
Keep in mind, that today’s Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all sprang from the same germ: the story of Abraham, an Aryan migrant, who was probably from south central Asia in what is now Pakistan (see Jos. 24:2–3), perhaps the Swat Valley. Abraham (meaning multitude) appears to have fancied himself as Brahma (the root meaning of which is to expand). The similarities between Abraham and Brahma, the Hindu god born from Vishnu’s navel, are striking. For example, Brahma’s consort was his sister Sara, and Abraham’s wife was his sister Sarah (Gen. 20:12). It was through Sarah’s mendacity that Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, father of the Arabs, was swindled out of his inheritance, a fraud being perpetuated today by Sarah’s descendants upon the Palestinian people.
Now fast forward a few thousand years. John the Evangelist was the last of the canonical gospels in the Christain Bible. Note: Yeshua Ben Stada, the locally notorious Yeshua [Jesus] the Notzri [Nazarite] of the Talmud was a Jesus, born in 7 BCE during a Jupiter–Saturn conjunction, had a stepfather known as Joseph and a mother named Mary. On the eve of Passover in 28 CE, he was convicted of sedition by Pontius Pilate and subsequently hanged. His hanging was not the planned means of death, but proceeded because those who were to stone him were late. Since the end of the day was near, which would have postponed his burial until after Passover, the soldiers allowed the alternative death by hanging. Following his death, his followers dubbed him the Passover Lamb.
Theophilus of Antioch appears to be the first person to mention the existence as a gospel of John (during the later half of the second century). However, the Rylands Papyrus, which could be part of a copy of John, has been paleographically dated to 150 CE, fifteen years after the Bar Cochba revolt. John’s gospel resonates more with the Jesus of the Talmud than the Jesus in the synoptic gospels. For example, John has his Jesus dying on the eve of Passover, as the slaughtered lamb, not following the Passover meal as the Jesus of Matthew and Luke. Actually the documentation of the time points to the so-called crucifixion as actually a fabricated cruci-fiction, invented along with the resurrection story after 95 CE. Rabbinic law called for criminals to be stoned, not to undergo a Roman-style crucifixion, although hanging was acceptable for lesser offenses. Jesus was killed “by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30 & 10:39); Jesus was “hung on a tree” Galatians 3:13; his “body [was] on the tree” 1 Peter 2:24.
The so-called Evangelist John and the John who authored of the Book of Revelation were surely two different persons. Unlike the Gospel According to John, written in traditional Greek style, the Apocalypse (Revelation) is characteristically Semitic. The Apocalypse is said to have been written while John was in exile on Patmos, one of the Dodecanese Islands about a hundred kilometers southwest of the city of Ephesus.
Although evidence shows that the New Testament is a subterfuge of zealously crafted myths, letters, and sayings, the last entry is somewhat different. The Apocalypse or Revelation of John reportedly was admitted into the canon of the New Testament in the late fourth century by one vote. That one vote margin of acceptance is said to have been attained only after the addition of the first three verses, which is quite humorous, considering that the last verses of Revelation say, “No man shall add unto these pages.”
The Apocalypse might be considered a quite informative, multilayered prophetic disclosure. That is not to say that the Apocalypse predicts future calamities for humanity, but rather appears to reveal intrahuman animating principles written through subconscious symbolism, woven together with the messianic events associated with the forty-two-month Bar Cochba revolt. The Bar Cochba revolt occurred circa 135 CE, when Jewish towns and temples became Gentile, as per Rev. 11:2 & 13:5.
Coming to terms with the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation was one of my tremendums or direct transformational experiences that dissolved another layer of beliefs into which I had been indoctrinated during childhood. I came to terms with that book in Bozeman, Montana, in 1983 after a discussion on anti-Christs and the predictions of apocalyptic catastrophes with a friend, who had been traumatized by a group of Russellites. Russellites are followers of Charles Taze Russell, who like to be called Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was saddened by being unable to answer her questions, so in my empathy, I withdrew to a windowless bathroom and cried. Then, as my supplication diminished into surrender, I pondered what if the story of John’s Revelation was dreamlike in composition.
Normally, to decipher one’s own dreams is formidable enough, yet interpreting the vision of this eighteen-hundred-year-ago dead guy was not that difficult. I simply put myself in his sandals, that is, into the first half of the second century CE, when Ephesus was the capital of the Roman province of Asia Minor, which historians say was founded by Ionian settlers in the eleventh century BCE.
As a center of mysticism, Ephesus was famous for its great metaphysical colleges, where Gnostic and Platonic philosophies like the Logos were expounded and where priests at the Temple of Diana were said to recite the mystic words Aki Kataki Haix Tetrax Damnameneus Aision. Even Apollonius of Tyana, the ardent Pythagorean, had an esoteric school in cosmopolitan Ephesus. One could imagine this city as something like present-day New-Age towns of Sedona, Santa Fe, or Tepoztlan, where a variety of philosophies converge, but in Ephesus, perhaps this occurred on a grander scale.
Serpent or Kundalini worship is prevalent in the records of the era. There were Naasenians, a serpent-worshipping Gnostic sect, the Ophis-Christos, the Serpent Christ, the Nabians and Nabatheans, a sect almost identical with the Sabeans, whose secret rite of baptism, according to the 1918 Theosophical Glossary, was taught by the Buddhist Boodhasp. In fact, Buddhists and Nagas, or Tibeto-Burmese wise men, had already been traveling into the area for a few hundred years along the Egypt–India trade route.
Naga, meaning wise serpent, is one of the few words that span both centuries and continents. For instance, Nargals were Chaldean chiefs of the Magi, and Naguals were and are brujos of some tribes of Mexican Indians, dating back at least to Quetzlcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. The Nagualist community, at least until a few years ago, had an annual gathering at Lake Catemaca, where intimate discussions of duality’s multifaceted reality were held.
Ephesus was indeed a happening place. John must have had a grand time there. At least he probably did before the ante-Nicene Fathers may have instigated his arrest and exile. Polycarp of Smyrna and perhaps Irenaeus were irritated by any dialogues with Gnostic sages or spiritual travelers, like the Buddhists or Tantrics. Just imagine the likes of today’s faith-driven evangelists hearing of John learning how to raise Kundalini, unsealing the chakras, and discussing the old-style spiritual vortices count. The Kundalini vortices were described as petaled flowers. In the old-style, the first six chakra flowers, or energy wheels, had petals that added up to one hundred and forty-four. When those were combined with the thousand-petal lotus of the crown chakra, it was endearingly called the 144,000, a number known to readers of the Bible as the number of the elect (those who shall be saved because their names are written in the Book of Life).
Once the circumstances of John’s life before the Revelation narrative can be seen, the Apocalypse is no longer viewed as a scripture of eschatology (end times). When viewed as a dream-inspired discourse, the clarity of the symbolism, interlaced with the ominous Bar Cochba period, the Book of Revelation is a guide for personal awakening through the Tantric practice of Kundalini.
In the Kundalini model of Revelation, the seven churches denote the seven chakras that are associated with the seven human endocrine glands. The seven seals, angels, candlesticks, head and crown, lamps, mountains, spirits, etc., have to do with the various levels in our continuum of awakening. In Tantric philosophy, the chakras are commonly discussed as being sealed or unopened. The mark of the beast represents the ego expressing itself through the physicalness of the hands or the mental activity of the forehead. This is to say, 666 on the hands symbolizes a physical self-centeredness, whereas the 666 on the forehead symbolizes a mental self-absorption. These are common Buddhist/Gnostic ideas, filtered through dream metaphor. If the ante-Nicene or subsequent church fathers had any idea of the Gnostic nature of John’s vatical writing, it would have been consigned to the flames, like the other compositions that they felt threatened their neo-Christian viewpoints.
Any relationship of the Book of Revelation with an anti-Christ is in regards to those like Bar Cochba, the Jews’ messiah and “prince of Israel,” whom the new Christian leadership rejected as the their “messiah returned.” To the neo-Christian leadership at the time, Bar Cochba was an anti-Christ. As for the false Christ of Matthew 24:24, that, as noted above, seems to be in connection with the Gnostic Christ, whose followers Hadrian (71–138 CE) called “bishops of Christ” in his letter to the Consul Servianus. A false Christ or anti-Christ was anyone at that time not chained to the new orthodoxy. Where and when the author of the Gospel According to John has his Jesus say, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except by me” is in response to the Bar Cochba period.
The Gospel According to John commences with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He [Jesus] was with God in the beginning.” Although some argue that this was a later, fourth century interpolation, the idea of the Word or Logos is not a Christian conception. The Western idea of Logos can be found among the fifth century BCE writings of Heraclitus of Ephesus. At the time of the Jewish Messiah’s revolt (132 –135 CE), Buddhists were known to be traveling the region, and those visitors would surely have been queried about the Logos or inherent order in the universe. In response, they would have presented the principle of Sabda, the Unmanifested Logos. Pinda Kacha, Sabda Sacha - the Body is Perishable, the Word is Eternal. From a different perspective, the Hindu, in accordance with Sabda Brahman, would say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Brahman, and the Word was Brahman.” Or the Tibetans of the time may have said, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Padmapani (the first divine ancestor of the Tibetans), and the Word (the Unmanifested) was with Padmapani (the manifested). The author of John however, wanted his Jesus, his messiah, to be the first manifested from the Unmanifested, so that his fellow faithful would not follow the followers of Simon Bar Cochba, the Prince of Israel.
In addition to the influences of Eastern and the Greco-Egyptian Sarapic philosophies, neo-Christianity integrated other cults into its new myth as well, just as Romans meshed the beliefs of those they subjugated. The Christmas story, for instance, is closely related to Mithraism, which Plutarch said was practiced in Asia Minor during the first century BCE. Mithras, who was also called Chrestos, was born of a virgin in a cave at the winter solstice, and his birth was celebrated during the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invictos. The tradition of giving Christmas gifts appears to have been partially adapted from the Pasque Epiphany, the goddess cult of Bari. On the other hand, Easter and the resurrection story are another neo-Christian modification, in this case an appropriation of the spring Eostar celebration of the death of Attis, who, three days following Black Friday, was resurrected. Attis, the savior, was often represented with a shepherd’s staff. One traditional theme of the Attis cult is said to have been “as our Lord was saved, so we shall be saved.” Salvation is, ironically, a belief that leads to disempowerment because it places the idea of redemption outside the self.
The cult of Attis, whose priests were called Gallaens, strongly influenced the invention of modern Christianity. In fact, the Vatican, named for mons vaticanus or Vatican Hill, which antedates Christianity, was the place of worship of Cybele, and her fertility rites with her youthful lover Attis were performed on Vatican Hill. In other words, Vatican City sits atop the most sacred place of the Phrygian religion.
Today’s Christianity, the Christianity founded in the second century CE, did not arise from the teachings of an historic Jesus/Yeshua. In fact, many contemporary scholars suggest that the majority of the words attributed to Jesus/Yeshua in the gospels could not possibly have been said by him, even if he did exist. Neo-Christianity was formed through the schemes of Roman aristocrats, along with the ante-Nicene and latter Church fathers, who rejected gnowledge, Gnothi Seauton, that is, to “gnow thyself.” Instead, they opted for a conditional cerebral process dependent upon, and serving, the human ego, that is, to “know thyself”. The salvation cults that make up neo-Christianity, whose hideous cross became their symbol in the third century CE, was designed to perpetuate control of the masses. Christianity is a religion that separates us from our direct experience with the source of who we are. Christianity is a religion contrary to gnosis and understanding through sapience, in that it neither contains, nor points to authentic love, through which our true mystery is understood.
JV Marco 1988, 1999, 2007