At Dodonathe Priestesses of Zeus lay their heads on the trunk of the Sacred Oak and hearing the whispering of the Gods gave oracle. At Delphi the Priestess of Apollo descended alone to the lower cavern where she received oracle, then ascending to the shrine above where she sat on her brass tripod and pronounced His will.
The oracle of Amen (Amun)1 in the desert west of Egypt sought the solitude of the "inner chamber" beneath the desert's floor where visions of the past and future came like a cool sea breeze. Near Mallus in Asia Minor the shrine of Amphilochus and Mopsus gave prophetic dreams to those who slept overnight in the inner chambers. At the roaring waters of the Nile in Upper Egypt the High Priestess of Hapi received her oracle from the "Bull of Heaven", while not far away at 2Dendra the High Priestess of Hathor saw the visions of the heavens sweep before her while in a state of ecstacy. At Memphis, Sais and three dozen other temples in Egypt the High Priestesses of Isis worked divination through magic, and conducted the souls of the righteous dead to the afterlife. In Rome only the Senate could command the Committee of 15 to unlock the sacred stone box in the Temple of Jupiter to consult the Sibylline prophecies.
Throughout the ancient world, in Çatal Hüyük3, Gobekli Tepe3a, in Sumer4 and Egypt, in Greece and Thrace and the land of the Amazons5, in Libya6 and the Atlas7, the Hyperborean8, the Isles of the Britons, in Iceland and the land of the Norse, in Scythia9 and beyond, in every land, on every continent, the fate of world was controlled by unseen forces. And once, long ago, at the beginning of time, those unseen forces were controlled by Pagan Goddesses and the Priestesses of The Goddess.
Wherever the Gods of the Golden Age ruled, Priestesses commanded the spiritual forces of nature, knew the seasons, brought rain to the crops, fertility to the land and prosperity the people; and when men died, the Priestess conducted their spirits to the World of the Dead where their spirits could be raised to immortality. For whatever purpose the Priestess was imagined, whatever ritual she performed, her power was always to raise the human spirit to immortality and make the Soul live again.
Through the Great Cycle of Ages10, Priestesses have gained the spiritual power of the Vortices which, in their natural cycle, waned and were lost only to be replaced with darkness and ignorance. But cycles repeat and time after time a new Order of Priestesses would rise above the profane to regain what was lost, only to lose it again over the centuries.
The ancient Priestess was not a mediator between man and the Gods, as priests of the impotent modern gods of the Flat Earth now claim to be; she was the embodiment of the "Earthly Power" of The Goddess, the Power to compel the forces of nature and control the spiritual. From the power to move huge stones and monuments across the desert sands, to the power of the psychopomp11 to the power of descent into the world of the dead and return to mortality, dead and return, and with the High Priests return the soul to live again. The Priestess controlled the forces that men could only conceive as mysterious; and which, in time, became a fleeting shadow in our imaginations, or a phantom's glimpse of what once was.
What was it that gave ancient humans the ability to transcend the physical world? To see the future? To commune with the divine? To known the unknown? And do we as Socrates said, see "through a glass dimly12?" Is it possible that we refuse to see what the ancients saw, fearing that by seeing, our minds might be opened and understand? Or is it as Pindar13 said,
"Whatsoe'er Zeus loveth not,
Flees in panic when it hears
The Muses Call."
To the esoteric seer who hears the Muses Call, the cosmos is a whirlpool, a maelstrom, the cosmic Vortex which encompasses our boundless universe. Like wheels within wheels that turn in every direction, giving order to chaos.
The mystic looks into the night sky and sees the maelstrom of creation, while the astronomer looks with rational eyes and sees our own spiral galaxy. The mystic sees in Andromeda the vortic monster which menaced the Ethiopian princess at the dawn of time; the astronomer finds only another spiral galaxy. In Orion the mystic sees an undefined esoteric energy controlled by the Giants of Power, in Cancer is seen the cage of the spirits, the haunt of the dead; the astronomer focusing on either constellation will see only a cloud nebula. The higher mystic sees in Sirius the confounding of worlds where the lesser rules the greater, the vortex of unseen fateful change which encompasses them both; the astronomer sees twin stars, the smaller one being greater in mass than the larger and never comprehends the unseen force which surrounds them together. Looking inward the mystic sees the shadows of a variable vortex; the physicist grasps a fleeting moment of the atom's sub atomic particles. From the microcosm to the macrocosm the esoteric mystic understands the Vortices as patterns of the universe and man - like above, so below; as in heaven, so on earth; while the turning of the Vortex in Spiritual Fluid produces the ebb and flow which is the origin of cause and effect for all phenomena in our terrestrial and every system.
The Great Mysteries of Isis, Dionysus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Eleusinian and the later Hermetic Mysteries all taught that the swirling of cosmic matter was the eddying and flux of Spiritual Matter, the "cosmic fire" which in ancient myth was seen to circle the earth from the heavenly realms of the North to the dark realms of the South. It is this Cosmic Fire by which the earth is destroyed and renewed with the passing of each age by which is born a new heaven and a new earth14. This Cosmic Fire is the mythical Vortex of change emanating from Spiritual Fluid which gives rise to the "Vortex of Emotions" with its increasing round of excitement or pleasure; and the "Vortex of Fate", which is the situation into which persons or things are steadily drawn, and from which they, like ships pulled into the Maelstrom, cannot escape.
The Jews and later Christians who were ignorant of mythical symbolism did not understand the destruction of the "Ages of Man" and the "passing of the world by Cosmic Fire". Instead they interpret the destruction of the Earth to be by actual, profane fire. They do not realize that before the introduction of Christianity there was already a new heaven; and, the new earth is about to evolve, leaving them in their own world of ignorance. But this is to be a Mystical New Earth.
The world is not coming to an end. It will continue the slow wobble of its orbit that we call the precession14b of the equinox, just as it has for four billions of years. The new heaven the ancients predicted was not to be one caused by some celestial catastrophe15, but one formed by the slow movement the stars out of their places, as the earth sways around its celestial pole. It was the fire, of the heavens change16. The stars and the Gods are moved out of their places. The Earth, along with humankind is altered. Nations rise, decay and fall, but the earth continues. There is no utter destruction. No end. No world consuming flood. No all-consuming fire. No Apocalypse. No rapture. No second coming of a dead god who promised to destroy the earth and bring salvation only to those faithful who await his illusionary Rapture.
I do not claim to be a prophet. Rather, my calling is to reestablish the worship of the Goddesses, Gods and Demigods and to restore their oracles as heralds of the Twilight of Christianity, which The High Priestess proclaimed on October 7, 1986, just as twenty-one hundred years ago, the darkened skies the spring equinox20 announced the Twilight of the Gods.
It is with that period, and what led to the Twilight of the Gods, that one must begin a search for the Gods. That was the close of the Arian (Aryan) Age, when the sun moved from the constellation of Aries (the Ram) to the dawning of the Age of Pisces (the Fish). Now, two thousand years later we are entering a New Dawn. By its very nature the New Dawn is the Twilight of Piscean Age, that age of darkness that was to become the touchstone of Christianity. But the rising of the new age sun21 is not yet, just as the twilight is not the new day.
This may be shocking to some and a confirmation to others, yet what I write is no different from that which can be found in the dusty, forgotten writings of antiquity. The difference is, I reveal the Gods and Goddesses the world has forgotten and whom I, a religious scholar and historian, had never imagined.
As we look back, we may rightfully be led to question, "where is Zeus, that great Head of the Greek Gods?" Has he gone away, Is he asleep? Did He die? Or did He never exist? Where are Apollo, Dionysus, Hermes and Prometheus? Where are Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis and the other ancient Gods of the Greeks? Christians will smugly tell you that they were false gods who were destroyed with the coming of their christ. But the Pagan Gods had disappeared long before Jesus was born. Asteria22, the last Goddess to rule on Earth, left for the Heavens nearly 1300 years before the earliest concept of christianity.
But lest the Christians rest securely in their smugness, they too must answer, "Where is Jesus"? He promised to "come quickly". His disciples taught he would return in their own life time. So where is he? Where are the miracles reported 1900 years ago, but which none but dead Christians have claimed to have seen? Where is Jesus? Has he go away? Is he asleep? Or did he die to only live on in the memory and imagination of his followers?
These are not a new questions. Twenty-five hundred years ago, when Zeus ruled supreme over the Greeks, they too asked themselves, "where is Chronus, and His Father, Uranus? Where is Gaea and Rhea, Phoebe and Tethys? While those who had knowledge of the ancients would also have asked, "where are the Goddesses Ki and Nammu, Ninlil, Ningikuga, Ningal and Inanna? Where are An, Enlil, Enki, Nanna and Utu and the other Gods and Goddesses of ancient Sumer?
However, those who understand the nature of the Gods would never ask such questions. They understand that nothing is permanent, not even the Gods. The Gods and Goddesses, like the pitiless stars, had moved out of their places and new Gods and Goddesses stood in their stead.
Today the Gods and Goddesses of the ancients are gone. They have progressed to new domains - a fleeting moment in eternity. The Gods and Goddesses who have replaced them are unknown to the world, just as the world is without knowledge of the ancient Gods. Yet They are the same and control the spirits.
Modern religions are without Spirit. They are without Soul; and they certainly are without knowledge of the Spiritual forces that control the Vortices. The world is not, however, without hope, as the Gods and Goddesses wait patiently for those who have the knowledge to lead them to the Vortices where they can find them.