Who is Hermes Trismegistus? Occult Roots of Globalism

Johfra Bosschart, The Vision of Hermes Trismegistus, 1972

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Occult posts like this one - posts on the history and meaning of occult images - have their own menu page above. All  posts are in the archive on the right. 
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It's been a while since an occult post. Time for a look at a mythical fiction that is a direct predecessor to the deceit and moral inversion of globalism.







In 1463 Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) translated the Greek Corpus Hermeticum into Latin, launching something of a Renaissance craze for the shadowy ancient figure. It's not that Hermes was forgotten during the Middle Ages - the notion that classical knowledge was "lost" and suddenly restored is self-serving Renaissance myth. But a Latin version of the full Corpus plus the Humanist movement that was in full swing by the 1460s combined to make him one of the most important "thinkers" in Europe.

Top and bottom left: Hermes Trismegistus, De Potestate et Sapientia Dei, translated from Greek by Marsilio Ficino, published in Treviso vy Gerardus de Lisa, 1471

Bottom right: Il Pimandro di Mercurio Trimegisto translated from Ficino's Latin by Tommaso Benci, publishedin Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549

The first published versions of Hermes in Latin and Italian. Ficino's translation circulated in manuscript form from it's completion in 1463 to publication in 1471. Benci was a humanist and friend of Ficino who did an Italian translation that wasn't published until the following century.

More than 20 editions were published by the 1640s.











To put Hermes' importance into perspective, consider the circumstances around Ficino's document. He made his translation for Cosimo de'Medici of the famous banking family - the man who established Medici dominance of Florence by subverting the republican government in the early 1400s.

Medal of Cosimo the Elder, around 1465-1469, bronze

Cosimo was a champion of Renaissance art and culture - he was a main figure in establishing Florence as the center of that movement. Cosimo's cultural activity included support for humanist scholars - he even revived the Platonic Academy in Florence under the leadership of Ficino. 

Commemorative medals made to look like Roman coins and medallions with Renaissance humanists and their aristocratic supporters. 






When the Greek manuscript copy of Hermes turned up in 1462, Ficino had been working on a translation of Plato - the first into Latin - under Medici patronage. Hermes was considered so important that Cosimo had Ficino put Plato on hold and translate this one first.

The backbone of the Hermetic tradition is made up of two works. The longer is the Corpus Hermeticum - a collection of texts from late antiquity that were brought together in one volume by the Byzantines and translated by Ficino as De Potestate et Sapientia Dei (The Power and Wisdom of God). The Asclepius or Perfect Sermon had been translated into Latin in late antiquity and was was known through the Middle Ages.

Occultic leather binding and title page to The divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, translated by John Everard from Ficino's Latin translation, 1650

If you've looked into Hermeticism, you've probably seen the name Pymander or Poemandres or some variation on these. This was the name of the first English translation of Ficino's Latin Corpus but is technically the title of the first tract in the Corpus.

Tabula Smaragdina (The Emerald Tablet of Hermes), 1606, colored engraving

If interested in the texts themselves, click for a link to the G.R.S. Mead translation from 1906. It's probably the best at capturing the stilted weirdness of the prose. The site also includes the Hermetic texts found in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi discovery. 

The Emerald Tablet was supposedly written by Hermes, but the oldest evidence comes from medieval Arab manuscripts.





The Hermetic works were written in the late antiquity and belong to the same context that gave us Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. The Gnostic Gnonsense site with the text link next to the picture up above calls the Hermetic tradition a non-Christian lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism. This is a fair assessment, but Renaissance people like Cosimo and Ficino believed Hermes was way older - a sage of greatest antiquity. They associated him with the Egyptian god of knowledge Thoth and claimed he invented theology among other things. He supposedly even foresaw the coming of Christianity, like the Old Testament prophets. Hermes was a centerpiece of Renaissance prisca theologia - a humanist notion of the 'unity of all religions' idiocy that we looked at in one of the Prometheus posts.

Hermes Trismegistus, 1480's, floor inlay in Siena Cathedral, Italy 

That's why this inlaid image of Hermes is in Siena Cathedral. The Renaissance humanists were fully invested in the idea that pre-Christian revelation was given to pagan seers as well as Hebrew prophets. Hermes was the beginning of a tradition that was compatible with and foretold the coming of Christianity.

The Renaissance 'unity of all religions' focused on tying together all the ancient "wisdom" into one big Christian prehistory.















Hermetic philosophy was known in the Middle Ages through different sources. The ignorant claims that it wasn't is part of the b.s. Renaissance myth that the medieval period was an ignorant Dark Age. What actually changes with Ficino's translation is that Hermes goes mainstream. Renaissance culture is filled with Hermeticism - religion, literature, art, science, and what we would call the occult.

Today, Hermes Trismegistus is a central pillar of occult and esoteric thought, although in a more diffuse form known as Hermeticism.

Johfra Bosschart, Gemini, 1975, print

The baboon in the center of this picture is a symbol of Thoth, the Egyptian god associated with Hermes Trismegistus. The rest is a collection of occult, esoteric, and religious symbols  - Zodiac, Babylonian astrology, alchemy, Adam and Eve, the Tarot, the Kaballist Tree of Life, Freemasonry, the natural world - that repeat the same theme. 

Male and female attributes are a fall from original, primordial Oneness. And the point of all this inverted tripe is to restore ourselves to that state. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same tiresome satanic inversion. It collapses the spiritual into the material - a saved soul reuniting with God is not something that happens in the created material world. Ans it tries to reverse Creation by denying the distinctions that are necessary to exist and devolving back into formless chaos.   

Sculpture of the Wiccan Horned God, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall

Quick note - we've takeb up the occult-esoteric relationship in earlier posts [click for link]. Both basically mean the same thing - secret knowledge. If we have to differentiate based on how they're normally used, the occult seems more linked to magic, especially supernatural entities. 

The esoteric tradition in the West includes knowledge of the occult and other supernatural "sciences" - the alchemy-kaballah-astrology-etc. crowd. Consider the three parts of Hermeticism - astrology, alchemy and magic (theurgy). And it's secret - the word hermetic today means closed off or sealed from the world.











Put it bluntly - Hermes Trismegistus is a big deal in the history of Western culture. A lot bigger than is generally realized. We are going to do a few occult posts on Hermeticism - it is big enough and central enough to the Western occult to deserve it. We've already touched on it in a lot of occult posts because it is so important. So might as well address this fraud in one place.

This post will introduce Hermes himself - the poster child for the incoherence and obfuscation that the occult thrives on. Because there really is no "Hermes Trismegistus". Or whoever was the author of the Corpus Hermeticum - the main collection of Hermes' work - is not the ancient figure that the Renaissance thought.

Manuscript copy of Marsilio Ficino’s introduction (argumentum) to his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 21.8, f.3r. 1491

Illuminated hand-copied manuscript versions of published books were common among Renaissance humanists. These presentation copies would be given to the patron - in this case Cosimo's son and heir, Lorenzo de'Medici "the Magnificent". 

Hermes is a bit like Prometheus, if it had generally been believed that Prometheus was real. This made him more authoritative until   quickly fell out of "respectable" circles. The meaning of Hermes and Hermeticism changes depending where and you are. 














To make it worse, the published version of Ficino's translation was so filled with errors that it was almost incoherent. Hermes Trismegistus really was the sort of Procrustean chimera that could be applied to almost anything. To understand him, we have to do what we usually do - look over his long history for patterns. And what we find is that Hermes covers the whole symbolic gamut that we saw in our obelisk posts - the life, spray, and churn of symbols.

The Life of Symbols [click for post] describes how symbols can carry ideas through time long after the groups that started them died out. Anyone can read the Corpus, take up the "wisdom", and claim to be Hermetic. The perpetuity of this symbolic life is why occult movements never seem to go away for good.

Striding Thoth, Ptolemaic Period 332–30 BC, faience, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hermes was mainly associated with a pair of ancient gods - the Egyptian Thoth, and his assumed Greek counterpart Hermes. This put him at the beginning of the whole esoteric Egyptian wisdom tradition that was considered ancient by the ancient Greeks. Since then, countless "adepts" have taken up the symbolism. 

Faience was similar to enameled pottery and was an old Egyptian art. This piece is from the Hellenistic era - worship of Thoth was already millennia old.






The Spray of Symbols [click for post] described how the occult piles up all kinds of different symbols. Bosschart's Gemini from up above is a perfect example. A spray of esoteric symbolism from unconnected traditions all hammering the hermaphroditic oneness message. They can do this because context doesn't matter - all the Western occult movements share the same the gray sludge/no borders/unity of all religions spiritual inversion. They want to break down distinctions - pretending different things are really the same is the foundation of the entire belief system. It's why we find the occult and the Postmodern so similar.

The Hermetical Triumph: or, The Victorious Philosophical Stone..., published in London by P. Hanet, 1723.

Symbols are a huge part of occult and esoteric "wisdom". They are easily read by initiates but are opaque to outsiders. Illustrations like this - Bosschart's art is a more modern version - are supposed to be meditated on. They're like diagrams, with arrangements of symbols communicating a message about the secret true nature of the universe. `

One claim was that Hermes invented Egyptian hieroglyphics as a form of pure symbolic wisdom. 

This book is a translation of 17th century European texts on Hermetic alchemy. Alchemy was one of the three main components of Hermeticism. 

















The Churn of Symbols [click for post] describes how they change with use over time. It's inevitable that really old symbols used over and over to pretend different contexts are all the same will get fuzzy. New associations are added and outdated ones drop away. There's a push-pull between the life and churn of symbols - the continuity claimed by the life is a fig leaf over the real historical changes of the churn.

The name Hermes Trismegistus is part of the churn.

J. Augustus Knapp, Emerald Tablet of Hermes, 1895, print

Thoth was associated with the Greek Hermes in late antiquity - Infogalactic says both were gods of communication, writing, and magic, and both guided the souls of the dead. Hermes Trismegistus is the hybrid of the two repackaged as an ancient sage and Egyptian king who lived before Moses. Trismegistus means "thrice great" - priest, king, and god. 

He appears to have been a late a Hellenistic Greek invention, but his followers claimed he was the the inventor of writing who first transmitted divine knowledge to mankind. The Pymander - the first part of the Corpus Hermeticum that Ficino translated - was said to contain divine wisdom. Hermes is central to alchemy and astrology - esoteric knowledge of heaven and earth.  











There is a natural comparison between Hermes and Prometheus as primordial mythic figures connecting humanity to divine knowledge. But they differ is in their natures. Prometheus was a pagan supernatural being rejected by Christianity and turned into a symbol. Images like Prometheus bringing fire or chained to the rock symbolize occult ideas like do what thou wilt and be your own god. But he was never considered a philosopher or theologian or thought to have left a written record. Prometheus represents an inverted attitude or orientation, not a detailed program to follow.

Hermes was considered a real human who became mistaken for a god for his age and wisdom. He wasn't a symbolic image like Prometheus - as we just saw, he doesn't even have a set visual appearance. Hermes is less an occult symbol of human enlightenment than its content creator.

It's the same twisting vagueness that keeps rebooting occult symbols for new users. The life, spray, and churn means that they can never really be pinned down and debunked. Hermes and Hermeticism can be taken up and tapped into over and over. Plus Hermetic thought appeals to different types of occultists differently - the Corpus has astrological, alchemical, and magical branches. New versions of Hermes and the Hermetic tradition keep turning up, adding more layers to this symbolic onion.

Paracelsus (1493/1494-1541) - real name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim - was a Swiss physician, alchemist, philosopher, esoteric prophet and Renaissance polymath. He's best known in mainstream accounts as an innovator in medicine and toxicology, but he's even more important in occult and esoteric circles as an alchemist. Hermes' philosophy was so important to him that his ideas are sometimes called Hermetic medicine with him as a second Hermes.

Title-page to Paracelsus, Opera, published in Strasbourg by Zetzner, 1603.

This title-page shows Paracelsus with personifications of different kinds of knowledge. On the left are sciences based on observation with Virgil - the poet who expresses nature perfectly. On the right are the occult sciences - secret divine wisdom behind the visible world. Hermes is the champion of these. Matters related to heaven and earth are at the top and bottom. The bust of Minerva on the Masonic-looking cube has a common motto that means unchanging or timeless truth. That is, exactly what you won't find here. 

What you will find is the spray and churn that make up the life of symbols. 














Some accounts - like the introduction to an 1884 edition of the 1650 English translation of the Pymander from Ficino's version - claim there were two Hermes. One who lived before the Flood and recorded the divine wisdom and another after the Flood who received the knowledge and wrote the Corpus. For all his historical importance, Hermes has no single identity. In some ways he's the perfect Postmodern hero - a fiction created entirely from texts referencing other texts.

It seems a good rule of thumb that whenever we see a spray of symbols thrown together, we're dealing with a gray goo, unity of all religions, dyscivic servant of the Father of Lies.

Engraving of Hermes as Mercury or Filius Noster from Baro Urbigerus, Besondere chymische Schrifften, published in Hamburg in 1705.

The Hermes part of Hermes Trismegistus is also Roman Mercury, who in unity-of-all-religions inversions is also the Holy Spirit or the Word.  This Swedenborgian blasphemer explains that this lie originated in Greek myth. Hermes is the Divine messenger and therefore god of oratory, logic, and interpretation of mysteries.

Alchemists like Urbigerus used Hermes or Filius Noster as symbols of the “Universal Self" - the mind enlightened through the alchemical knowledge of the transformation of opposites. The caduceus was the Greek sign of a herald or messenger transformed into the Hermetic symbol of divine wisdom. The Holy Spirit - as in the Christian orb and cross symbol.

The spray of symbols.






So we'll start by looking at what Ficino and the Medici thought they were getting, and then we'll look at what they got. After that, some outlines of Hermeticism after Hermes.


First the context. In practice, Renaissance Humanism was centered on ancient texts. The word means "rebirth" in French and most everyone is familiar with the idea that the Renaissance revived ancient knowledge. Philosophically, the movement claimed absolute truth value for the works of man and sent us down the path to de-moralized Modernist materialism. But practically, the rebirth mostly meant gathering, translating, and interpreting ancient texts.

Jean Le Tavernier, The Siege of Constantinople, from after 1455 in Bertrandon de la Broquière's Voyage d'Outre-Mer, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9087, f.152v.

This started with Petrarch's 14th-century revival of ancient Latin letters. But the Fall of Constantinople - one of the truly great historical failures of Christendom - in 1453 brought a flood of exiled Greek scholars and texts that hadn't been available in the West. Ficino's translations of Hermes and Plato were part of this.

















In this world, older meant better. Humanism started with the assumption that ancient culture was superior to more recent medieval culture. But "Classical Antiquity" was itself a mess of texts with long histories of their own. So much Roman stuff was built on Greek sources - getting the older Greek originals seemed like purer truth. And many Greek texts referred back to the even older culture of Egypt. Like we saw with the obelisk post, Greco-Roman antiquity saw Egypt was the quasi-legendary origin of culture.

The claim that Plato studied in Egypt is apocryphal - legends of his supposed travels grew well after his death. Unity-of-all-religions morons take it at face value, but if they were capable of critically analyzing texts, they wouldn't be unity-of-all-religions morons. What it does point to is the connection between Egypt and primordial wisdom in Greco-Roman antiquity. 






Hermes was supposed to have been the ancient sage at the dawn of Egyptian wisdom. All sorts of implausible claims have been made about the source of the Corpus without much concern for consistency. The consensus seems to be that Hermes seems to have transmitted some sort of true, divinely inspired knowledge from the beginning of history that survived until the present in secret form. This is why he is so appealing to so many occult branches. Anyone who can mix Hermes into their spray of symbols can claim their tripe is divine wisdom from the dawn of time. He's the ultimate secret king - the king so secret that he never existed.

The Renaissance humanists like Ficino took what was already a mess and filtered it through their own ideas about knowledge and history. Remember - older is better, and Hermes was supposedly much older then the Greco-Roman texts that started the Renaissance. The Humanists' take was different from the ancient one. They weren't reviving the old cult of Hermes the god. Their goal was to build universal understanding out of "lost" knowledge from a Christian starting point. That's Christian as in late medieval Christianity - not the early Christian concepts that influenced the late Antique Hermeticism that the humanists were reading.

Florence Cathedral, begun 1296, Brunelleschi's dome completed 1436. 

The symbol of early Florentine Renaissance ingeneuity and cultural leadership - Brunelleschi's amazing dome of the Florence Cathedral - was a church. 

Right next to the bell tower designed in the preceding century by the father of the Florentine painting tradition Giotto.








By the Renaissance, European Christianity had developed over a thousand years into the dominant belief system. It was universal in scope, with a clear structure and comprehensive dogma. The ancient pagan world was the opposite, with lots of different cults coexisting - competing, merging, splitting. Christianity was exclusive. Renaissance Christian Humanism was looking to modify the existing Christian system by incorporating pagan "wisdom" rather than setting up an impossible alternative.

Agostino Steucho, De perenni philosophia, around 1540, Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 6377 f.17v.-18r

Later humanist compilation of extracts from Greek philosophers, Chaldean sages, and the sibyls that teach the importance of religious devotion by a humanist Vatican librarian. Steucho presented these "flowers picked from all of philosophy that give off the scent of divinity" to Pope Paul III directly. 





This is what makes the humanists forerunners of globalism. They claim to want to "improve" or "modernize" Western culture, when what they are doing is inverting it's basic values. The sibyls and sages come from systems of thought that diametrically contradict Christian metaphysics. The fact that they happen to agree on some point is irrelevant to the logical impossibility of both being true. The Ficinos and their afterbirth - like Steucho - follow a formula.

1. Find an ridiculously simple point of agreement between Christianity and a contradictory concept of reality.

Michael J.B. Allen's translation of Ficino's Platonic Theology, Harvard University Press, 2006

Emphasis on ridiculously simple - Ficino's magnum opus - the "synthesis" of Neoplatonism and Christianity shown here - was based on the immortality of the soul. Steucho's is that piety is a virtue. 

We've mentioned prisca theologia before - the humanist prototype of the Unity-of-all-Religions. It means primordial theology -  all belief systems are different refractions of the same original Truth. Prisca theologia is this step applied to a bunch of different contradictories. 









2. Claim that the contradictory concept of reality therefore has an element of Truth because it "predicted" Christianity. This bestows the status of Old Testament prophecy on anyone who said anything that resembles any bit of Christianity.

Facsimile edition of Giulio Clovio's Farnese Hours, 1537-46 for Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), Pope Paul III's nephew

One of the most impressive Renaissance manuscripts. It was made for the nephew of the same pope that Steucho made his Perennial Philosophy for. On the right is the legend that the Tibertine Sibyl  predicted the coming of Jesus to Augustus. She's pointing to a vision of the Madonna and Child. On the left, the angel announces the birth of Jesus to the shepherds. The implication is that Biblical and sibylline prophecy are comparable.

The argument for prisca theologia goes like this: Humanists found some things in common in a bunch of ancient texts...
...

...

That's it. 








3. If you accept contradictory concepts as also True, you have to change basic Christian metaphysics to accommodate the contradictions. 

Gustave Doré, The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism,1868, oil on canvas. 118 x 79 in, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario

This isn't a problem when Christians reject beliefs that contradict the fundamental pillars of their faith. But once you include them, those pillars that disagree with them have to go. 

Humanists blathered on about Hermes claiming one God and brush aside the metaphysics of salvation. Sometimes salvation is treated like a metaphor for a new "golden age"















4. This is the Gnostic switch - replace grace with "knowledge".

Title page to Athanasius Kircher's Arithmologia, published in Rome by Varesij, 1665

Like the Jesuit polymath connecting non-Christian forms of number mysticism to an image of the Trinitarian Christian God. You'll notice the lack of Jesus or even a Christ-symbol in this "Christian's" occultism.

The Old Testament becomes incomplete if there are other revelations to be added elsewhere. This shatters the integrity of the Bible, just drops the whole concept of the Fall and God's covenants, and turns truth into something you have to sniff out and piece together. That's the esoteric approach of alchemy and Gnosticism - erasing distinctions to return to a primal unity. The gray entropic goo of anti-Creation.










5. It anticipates the do what thou wilt unity-of-all-religions gray goo peddled by globalism and its satanic collectivist fellow travelers. 

The Aleister Crowley throw blanket. 

Putting the search for "truth" in your hands means you ultimately decide which of the spray of symbols you think is correct. You literally make your own truth. 

Note the Egyptian headdress. 

















From Christian humanism to luciferian postmodernism in a few easy slips. Once you pretend that the different is the same, you've entered into a world of lies. And once that threshold is crossed, there is no standard to make moral judgments against. At this point it's do what thou wilt, with whoever controls the money and apparatuses of power calls the shots.

Looking past the spray, we can see that Hermeticism in the Renaissance combined Christianized prisca theologia with the older is better school of knowledge.

Christianity also had an primordial "Golden Age" in the Garden of Eden that humanists churned into their belief that ancient learning is purer and closer to truth. In a recent regular Band post we mentioned how prelapsarian - before the Fall - Adam showed his true knowledge of Creation when he named the animals. After the Fall, reality gets less clear and language turns arbitrary and subjective. If we could just stop here, you can see how clever interpreters could fit this "lost wisdom" account to an older-is-better approach to knowledge.

Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve Are Driven out of Eden, from Doré's English Bible, 1866

Pretend this is like a pagan golden age that they're forgetting.




















There's an ancient legend that Adam  retained some awareness of this pure truth. Josephus (37-c. 100 AD) wrote that this passed to his grandchildren through his son Seth, who inscribed it on two columns for posterity. This is where Hermes' extreme antiquity comes in. According to some, Hermes is the one who transcribed the wisdom of the columns after the Flood in a hieroglyphic language that he invented. Some claim he passed this on to Abraham. Others churn in another Hermes as the person who supposedly made the columns before the Flood - this one is also Thoth.

Whatever the details of the spray, the outline of Renaissance Hermes is a central figure in the prisca theologia.

This one lingers on in Freemasonry. Consider H. L. Haywood's 2020 The Two Great Pillars of Boaz and Jachin published by something called the Lamp of Trismegistus. The Mason's Boaz and Jachin are the two columns of Hermes with the Adamic knowledge. The idea here is that the Freemasons are the one who have it. 

They can even twist the Bible and make it occult. Adam's "secret knowledge" that isn't contained in Scripture? Cool story, but the complete inversion of Christian revelation.

It's the life, spray, and churn of symbols.

The problem for humanists and occultists is that it doesn't just stop here. It's important to identify how this prisca theologia deception inverts the Christianity it claims to enrich.

Prelapsarian Eden was a place of true knowing, but the rupture created by the Fall goes way beyond losing some knowledge. It's an existential change - a change in our nature and in the nature of the world around us.

Thomas Cole, Expulsion: Moon and Firelight, circa 1828, oil on canvas, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum


The only way to cross over this divide is salvation through faith in Jesus' sacrifice, and even that faith doesn't bring the clarity of the unfallen. This is what makes Christianity diametrically opposite Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Luciferianism, alchemy, and all the other occult inversions. It recognizes that as limited, subjective beings, our grasp of the universe around is finite. The occult is the complete opposite. It pretends that we can somehow reach timeless absolute truths through manipulating arbitrary man-made symbols.

This gives Renaissance Christian humanism and Hermetic Christianity a bit of a problem. They aren't Christian. They'r the first stage of satanic inversion.

Mercurius Trismegistus, engraving from Pierre Mussard, Historia Deorum fatidicorum, Venice, 1675.

Hermes with a bunch of his symbols. The one he's spinning like the first Globetrotter is an armillary sphere. This is symbol of his astrological knowledge of heavenly things - see the opening through the clouds to the divine name and golden light. 

Gaspar Schott, Athanasius Kircher being guided by an archangel to the celestial spheres, engraving by F., 1660, Wellcome Library

And Jesuit "Christian" Athanasius Kircher with a bunch of esoteric symbols - including old friends the compasses. The armillary sphere is held by an angel, certifying the validity of the knowledge of the heavens. Here too, the astrological knowledge opens a cloudy window to the divine. The Hebrew lettering indicates that this is specifically the God of the Old Testament. The Christian God. 













Note the lack of Jesus in the Hermetic Christian vision. The pathway between man and God isn't the Incarnation and Resurrection, it's esoteric knowledge. The same esoteric knowledge that can be found in a fictional pagan occult archetype. Hermeticism is like Gnosticism because it based on overcoming a "Fall" that is described in terms of forgetting. It's the symbolic erasure of logical and natural distinctions that can return humanity to a state of perfection. This utterly contradicts the entire metaphysics of Christian Fall and salvation, and easily eliminates the need for Jesus at all.

Hermes, engraving from J. A. Siebmacher, Das güldene Vleiss, published in Nurnberg, 1737

Real treasure and paper wealth are among the opposites balanced here. The arrangement of the symbols is familiar now - Hermetic enlightenment through balancing opposites. 


















So that's what the Renaissance humanists thought they were getting. An originator of the Egyptian mystical and beloved Greco-Roman traditions with matchless older-is-better cred - including ties to Christian pre-history. That's a pretty terrible thing to rearrange your faith around, but they really do seem to have believed they had stumbled onto philosophy from the dawn of history.

The reality was that "Hermes Trismegistus" was a late Antique fraud - the Corpus dates to around the 3rd century AD. The next post will look at what Hermes really is, and why Hermeticism is such an occult plague on the culture of the West.

Click for part 2

Click for part 3

Johfra Bosschart, The Vision of Hermes Trismegistus, 1985

The Churn of Symbols - Obelisks and the Occult Pt. 3

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Shorter posts on the history and meaning of occult images have their own menu page above. All older posts are in the archive on the right. 

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.

Robert McCall, Apotheosis of Technology, 1970, oil on canvas, private collection

Time to wrap up the occult obelisk. This was supposed to be two parts, but the second one wound up going deeper into the meaning between ancient and modern times. So we made the whole thing a three-parter

Part one looked at the origins of the obelisk in the ancient world and how it evolved as it left Egypt for Rome. 

Part two looked at how this got taken up and repackaged up with a bunch of other ancient ideas in the Renaissance. 




This one will see how the incoherent garble of symbols attached to the obelisk carries into modern times. It runs a bit long, but we didn't want to have to add another post.


Two important ideas that have come up that are relevant to occult symbols.

1. The Life of Symbols. Signs of any kind pick up different connotations and shades of meaning over time - just through real-world use. Times change, words stay the same, so when you read a sentence in an old book, the details that come to mind reflect your world, not the author's. Read something as simple as "store" and you each picture different types of shopping experiences. You can study the past and get an idea of what a store would have been like in Shakespeare's time, but the sights, sounds, smells - the instinctive mental picture of going shopping - is modern. But at the same time, the general meaning - a public place where goods are purchased - stays the same. If the story involves a dispute with a merchant, we can relate to the personal dynamics perfectly well. Differences in detail don't prevent us from grasping the general meaning. Symbols are like this.

Sun Temple of the 5th Dynasty Pharaoh Nuserra, 2445 - 2421 BC, 

The obelisk got its general meanings in ancient Egypt well over 4000 years ago. Scarcity of records from that far back makes it impossible to recreate much in the way of detail, but the shape picks up associations with the creative, life-giving energies of the sun and the gods. The pyramid and tapered shaft represent the primordeal site where the gods created the world and a ray of the sunlight that manifests that power in our world. 

This is the best preserved of the 5th Dynasty sun temples. They generally features a squat obelisk on top of a tapering pyramidal structure. 

Shape and symbolism point out a connection between heaven and earth - solar and divine. This leads to placement in front of temples and royal tombs. Places where heaven and earth meet. 

It was believed Egyptian pharaohs became gods, so there is huge overlap between temples and royal tombs in their minds. The 5th Dynasty pharaohs were buried in their sun temples. Eventually, pharaoh's tombs become temples.







Rome adopted the general symbolism of the obelisk to their own society and added another general meaning - power and cultural supremacy. By conquering Egypt and moving the imposing obelisks, they sent the message that the ancient center of civilization had moved. This came with a lot of Egyptian religious "mysteries" filtered through the weird Hellenistic mix of philosophy, religion, and occultism that flourished in Ptolemaic Egypt. The general meanings of the obelisk hung around, but picked up new specifics from this new environment.

Obelisk of Montecitorio, erected by Psametik II in Heliopolis, 594-589 BCE, moved to Campus Martius by Augustus, 10 BC

Ara Pacis Augustae, or Altar of Augustan Peace, 9 BC, Campus Martius, Rome

The Ara Pacis was erected by the first Roman emperor Augustus as a symbol of peace and prosperity under his divine rule. The obelisk was put up a year before it was unveiled. Today the obelisk in in a busy square and the altar in a museum, making it hard to see the relationship.

It was aligned with the obelisk to create an horologium or sundial where the shadow would fall on the altar on certain dates. It was assumed that it would strike the center on Augustus' birthday, but computer modelling shows this wasn't the case. When it did strike was on the festival of the Temple of Palatine Apollo. The temple that Augustus built beside his home to his patron deity. The obelisk was also dedicated to Apollo.

Apollo was the Roman sun god and often associated with imperial rule. The obelisk was an Egyptian symbol of solar and divine power, so this is an easy adaptation. Connecting this through a symbolic solar calendar to a monument to the blessed rulership of a divine emperor shows how general meanings fit new specifics.

James Stuart, Pyramidion of the Montecitorio Obelisk from De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti, Bandini 1750, plate III
Stuart was an English architect associated with the early Greek Revival, but also spent time in Rome. He was involved in the excavation of the Obelisk of Montecitorio in 1748, and published it a nice volume two years later. We should not be surprised to see the solar disc at the peak and enthroned gods of the sun and rebirth - what looks like a Ra-Horekty and Osiris. Only here it means a divine Roman devotee to Apollo. 


Changing the specifics against a general set of meanings brings us to the second main point:


2. The Spray of Symbols. This central feature of occult "thought" goes back to Roman times at least. The idea is that all this occult knowledge - all knowledge in general for some - points to some deeper, secret, hidden truth that is never explained, but is really important. True meaning of the universe important. Different groups have different angles, but they all share a commitment to secrecy. Schools of magic and philosophy, mystery cults, alchemy, Kabbalah and the rest all keep the inner workings hidden and initiate members gradually. Over time "seekers" keep respinning the same sources, increasing the overlap between symbols and movements. This makes it hard to draw hard lines between say Hermeticism, late Neoplatonism, and the cult of Isis. They aren't the same, but the symbolism overlaps.

This hokum came back with the Renaissance interest in ancient learning. Optimistic but gullible - they saw the past as a path to Truth, but couldn't assess historical source material. 

So an already jumbled occult mess got taken up by ideologues from a totally different culture, mixed with their own ideas, and this time, they've really got it! It's why they all use the same symbols and sages - there's nothing else there. An endless hall of charlatans reflecting charlatans with no check on the imagination. No empirical testing, no scriptural authority, just different spins on the desire to be your own god.

Alchemic coniunctio, plate III in Stephan Michelspacher's Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia, 1615.

Engraving by a Paracelsian alchemist - Paracelsus was another Renaissance occultist who sprayed the hermetic symbolism in his own way. In other words, an occult spin on an occult spin. 

This shows the "alchemical conjunction with the seven planets" over a mountain with a phoenix - classical astrology and a modified Egyptian symbol associated with resurrection. 

The constellations aren't in natural order but paired to depict opposing elements coming together. Mercury is at the top - combining Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, Classical Mercury, and the alchemical importance of the element of the same name. Then Biblical extracts from both Testaments. In Revelation 21:10 John sees New Jerusalem descend from heaven onto a mountain and Ezekiel descibes a mountain where heaven and earth meet (40:2, 28:14)

Same old luciferian-gnostic path to enlightenment through opposites. There's even a sun/moon pair. This time the path is hermetic and alchemical. But the structure is as old as the occult.



The spray of symbols has two parts. The first is just squid ink. The Band first used the term when looking at how Jordan Peterson vomits incoherent chains of symbols and references to confuse his audience. The tactic depends on being able spam out enough deep sounding things that no one can source-check you. If the audience believes you communicate in good faith, they will assume you are extraordinarily knowledgable and really have profound knowledge to communicate. This falls apart under scrutiny but the occult always does - it relies on people believing what they want to hear and being too lazy to look deeper.

The second part deserves its own red label.

3. The Churn of Symbols - how the same spray of symbols keeps getting repackaged and reused under slightly different labels. This is the modern occult in a nutshell. Consider Satanic a-hole Aleister Crowley. Obviously there is more to the modern occult than this turd, but he makes a good example because he is well-known and doesn't need backstory. At one point, Crowley belonged to the Order of the Golden Dawn - a mainly Hermetic occult group with some other crap mixed in. He split with the group over what seems to be lifestyle/morality issues before moving into demonology and magic and founding his own occult system. On the surface it looks like two "movements" but in reality Crowley and the Golden Dawn continued to believe a lot of the same things.

Émile Bayard Summoning the Beloved Dead, from Paul Christian's ‘Histoire de la magie’, Paris, 1870. The picture supposedly represents the Rites of Isis, a Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ritual.

Like Egypt as a mystical source. The Golden Dawn drew heavily on the same Hermetic thought as Kircher and the late Roman occultists. Their rituals and magic system incorporated the resurrection of Osiris and the Book of the Dead. Their most powerful magic was the assumption of Egyptian God Forms - when "the plasiticity of the energetic body" awakens "the forces of the Egyptian Deities".  So there's that. 

Likely Lola Zaza Crowley, undated photo of Aleister and Rose Crowley's second daughter.

After Crowley left the Golden Dawn he went to Egypt, where he claimed to have been contacted by a messenger of Horus he called Aiwass. Crowley was the be the prophet of a new age. The result was his Book of the Law and his first declaration of his most famous message: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". 

"Aiwass" first contacted Crowley by speaking through his first wife Rose and making an appointment to meet in person. Afterwords, the Crowleys went to the Egyptian museum, where Rose claimed to recognize Horus on the painted Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu i, number  666 in the collection

The Crowley family looks terrible, and we aren't willing to look deeper. This picture is likely Lola Zaza Crowley, Rose's second daughter, who disowned her father as an adult and distanced herself completely from this life. Her older sister Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith died at 2.

Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu i (Stele of Revealing) 680/70 BCE, late Dynasty 25/early Dynasty 26, painted plaster on wood, Egyptian Museum, Cairo

It depicts the priest Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu i and falcon-headed Re-Harakhty - a hybrid of the sun god Ra and Horus, the son and heir of Osiris. The winged solar disc is above and Nuit, goddess of night brackets the whole thing. The text includes passages from the Book of the Dead - the late form of the Egyptian funeral ritual intended to lead the deceased into eternal life. "Make for me the path to the place in which Re, Atum, Khepri, and Hathor are therein." This resurrection theme also comes in the repeated references to the deceased as "The Osiris".

Crowley claimed that it showed the three chief deities of Thelema. 












Both the Golden Dawn and Crowley accepted the idea that occult knowledge from Egypt promised to bring humanity into a new age. Both based their fables on the incoherent spray of symbols coming out of the Renaissance and metastasizing in the Enlightenment. Same basic thought pattern but disagreement on the details - what other nonsense to mix in, the role of demons, etc. But one critical thing that they have in common with just about every occult movement is that they promise some kind of a new beginning.

Frontispiece from Oswald Croll's Basilica chymica..., Frankfurt, 1609

Renaissance occultists took up ancient lore for the same reasons as the Renaissance in general - the notion  it could improve the present. Alchemy reflected the Neoplatonic and Hermetic idea that the material world was a microcosm for the heavens, so relations down here symbolized Truths from up there. 

The pyramid corresponds nicely to symbols of the Trinity, so the "heaven" can be nominally Christian. Orders of angels corresponding to the elements. But the path to Truth through occult ancient knowledge us the opposite. 








These claims have a short shelf life, but as one movement fails to deliver, there is always another to take up the old nonsense. And every time the old symbols are regurgitated, they come with a fresh promise that this time the lost wisdom will do... something.

Macrocosm and microcosm, engraving from Johann Daniel Mylius' Opus Medico-Chymicum..., vol. 3, Basilica Philosophica, Frankfurt: 1618.
Now it's the path of balanced opposites leading through the zodiac to the pyramid/Trinity. This is Gnosticism with a Christian mask - the opposites "resolve" in an utter transcendence beyond both of them. Even the deer-headed abomination has something to offer. The Christian doesn't seek to balance evil with good, he seeks to avoid it.


The standard history is that the Renaissance was was a short-lived transition from the Middle Ages into modern times. Turning to the ancients kick-started Progress!, but once the West got going, their work was done. A comfortable retirement to the history museums while the Enlightenment ushered in full secularism. Meanwhile, all the occult, mystical, and religious is dismissed as something modern man "outgrew". The reality is that these things may have disappeared from "history" but they didn't disappear. They just went elsewhere.

Modernity broke knowledge into "disciplines" or "domains" - each with their own rules and concerns.  There was no choice - as our collective knowledge base grew, it had to be categorized to be manageable. But this required critical judgement, and modern disciplines developed according to the ideologies and interests of authorized historians. The writers of "history" as an academic field. 






As pointed out in the last post, this greatly reduces the frame of reference for historical artifacts. Bluntly, not being of interest to professional historians is not the same as not having happened. Consider the Pyramid of Austerlitz, built by French general Auguste de Marmont's Netherlands-based army in 1804 and renamed to commemorate Napoleon's victory a year later. 

The Pyramid of Austerlitz, 1804, stone obelisk, 1894, Woudenberg, Netherlands
The basic history is that it was inspired by the Giza pyramids that Marmont saw during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. But that doesn't explain why it's a flatter step pyramid. Or why there's an obelisk on top. The layout is much closer to a sun temple. It is also curious that the pyramid and obelisk were 36 and 13 meters - important occult numbers in the globalist metric system invented during the French Revolution in 1799. 


The Band is not arguing that Montmont was an occultist - no allegations pop up in a quick search. But the purported story doesn't really explain what this monument looks the way it does. Or even why the effort would be expended on it - a huge sun temple type pyramid with occult dimensions as a make-work project in wartime?

The last post looked at Athanasius Kircher as a late example of Renaissance occult ideas. The debunking of the Corpus Hermeticum during his lifetime makes his a good bookend for that period of intellectual history, if we stick to the official story. But the same year Casuabon blew up Hermes, a manifesto appears repackaging the same old ideas in an attractive new package - Rosicrucianism or the Order of the Rosy Cross in English.

Fama fraternitatis Roseae Crucis oder Die Bruderschaft des Ordens der Rosenkreuzer, Kassel, 1614 

The first of three anonymous tracts that told of the likely fictitious Christian Rosenkreutz, a medieval alchemist and occultist. It was the same old mixture of hermetic and gnostic ancient wisdom blather but with a twist - the secret learned society as the purveyors of the occult wisdom. The Rosicrucian pitch was that manifestos referred to a group that had been around for centuries - this was just them going public.  

It makes it hard to date them. It is most likely that this Rosicrucianism was a direct outgrowth of occult groups in the Renaissance. The "cross" can be confusing, but it is not a Christian symbol. It represents the coming together of occult opposites as a path to human enlightenment. 

Tree of Pansophia, 1604, from the Rosicrucian Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum, by the pseudonymous Theophilus Schweighardt Constantiens, 1618 

The same old human microcosm / cosmic macrocosm link, through the gnostic balance of alchemical elements. The path of balance leads to a transcendent "unity" - a reference to the Old Testament God as an Egyptian winged solar disc. By now, the churn of symbols should be clear. But the general meaning never really changes - ancient human knowledge through fake balance leading to Truth. And presumably power, but the power occult societies always seem to be of the political, conspiratorial type. 

Occult societies were like a throwback to the old mystery cults, but with a twist. These movements preach the Renaissance gospel of ancient wisdom as the way to social renewal, not the consistent observance of an established deity. This gives them a short shelf life, but once one set of fake promises proves false, the symbols can just churn on into a new form.

The Seven Governors or Planets from Jakob Böhme's Theosophische Wercke, 1618 and reprinted countless times. 

Böhme applied the Gnostic-Hermetic-alchemical occult to Protestant Christianity into a weird mystical spin of his own. This picture has balanced "opposites", zodiac, alchemical unity, crosses, winged solar pyramid gods - another churn of the spray.

See how hard it is to classify this nonsense?

Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens Secretioris naturae secretorum scrutinium chymicum, Frankfurt: Johann Philipp Andreae for Georg Heinrich Oehrling, 1687

A lavish collection of Hermetic alchemical occult images by a German alchemist, physician and a counsellor to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II Habsburg at Prague. The first edition first came out in 1617. 

It's typical of Hermetic or 'Egyptian' interpretations of myths as containing hidden occult meanings. Here, the legend of Atalanta is told in alchemical terms with Atalanta as Mercury, her suitor Hippomenes is Sulphur, and the Golden Apples that lets him catch her as Salt - the principle of balance that brings synthesis. The emblems are loaded with references to occult sources. 

Like this one, where the triangle/pyramid has morphed from a vague symbol of the Trinity to the unity of human opposites - male and female - in a higher place. Note how the pointers look like compasses. 

It should come as no surprise that this union of opposites elevates the hermaphrodite to a higher state. This emblem retells the mythical romance between Mars and Venus  - war and love - as Mercury and Venus - Hermes and love. 

Love. It doesn't mean affection in the Hermetic alchemical occult. Love is the balance that brings opposites into synthesis - physical and metaphysical. This is really important for understanding occult symbols.

Thelema is Crowley's fake religion based on his famous "law". This churn of the spray is part of the Hermetic family tree, with its own magickal twists. 

The second part is less well-known. The "love" here is the breaking of distinctions and synthesizing of "opposites" of the alchemical occult. Explicitly making will the driving force is the luciferian part. 

Elphias Levi's famous Baphomet, reprinted in Stanislas de Guaita's Le Serpent de la Genèse: Le Temple de Satan, Paris, 1891

Path to enlightenment through balancing opposites by will. Sun and moon, male and female, heaven and earth with the Hermetic caudecus - what the luciferians and satanists add to the churn is human and animal. Specifically the goat, an animal with a long symbolic history connecting it to carnality and lust, as opposed to reason and spirit. Not sure about the Turkish pants. 

Driving opposites into monstrosities by forcing desire onto nature is a Satanic inversion at the basis of all this occult nonsense. 










The idea of the Rosicrucians as a secret esoteric society had a real impact on Europe. The formation of the famous English Royal Society was inspired by the Rosicrucians, and Michael Maier of the Atalanta fugiens was an influence on Isaac Newton's own alchemical ideas. And then there were the Masons.

We've already done some occult posts on Freemasonry - looking mainly at the compass as a symbol of secret knowledge of the universe. We decided that the basic perspective of the organization was luciferian in that it promoted human knowledge and will as a path to metaphysical truth. Looking back on the images now, it is easy to see them churning the spray - Böhme even turns up as a comparison. The obelisk was part of the spray.

Masonic engraving commissioned by B.R. Newman and painted in 1798 by J. Biggen

Masonic symbols are another churn of the spray with a bunch of their own stuff added. Like the pillars in front of the Temple of Solomon cast by the imaginary founder of "the craft" - the unfortunately named Hiram Abiff. Like the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry is founded relatively late, but claims to possess secrets from Biblical times. Hermetic orders like to pretend that they are improbably old in order to claim to have been the secret source of the ideas they were actually ripping off. 

Gnostic-alchemical path of balance, sun and moon, sunburst unity / pyramid with all-seeing eye... The eye and pyramid is easily taken for the Trinity and Providence, but the actual history is alchemical and Hermetic. 







The occult-esoteric-secret society world of the late 18th century is impossibly complicated. This article looks at William Blake's connection to all this, but is most interesting for the deep dive into the mess of Masonry, "illuminated" Masonry, Swedenborgianisn, Theosophy, Hermeticism, alchemy, Kaballah, sexual magic, assorted strains of Christian, Jewish, and pagan mysticism, and revolutionary politics. If you are interested in this stuff, it is a fascinating deep dive. If not, the point for our purposes is that there is no way to separate these into distinct beliefs or schools of thought. Groups would form, split, change, and/or merge depending on the ideas and whims of different "leaders". This makes it impossible to just say 'Masons believed X' or 'Theosophy and Hermeticism are different for Y reasons'. What matters is that all of these nonsense peddlers were drawing on a common set of ideas that the Band calls Gnostic-Luciferian and/or Satanic. And the moronic "unity of all religions".

There are few places where stupidity and vanity have come together as persistently as in the "unity of all religions". To be clear, this is not the idea that people of different religions get along. No, this is the long-running idiocy that any source of "wisdom" offers insight into the same "deeper" metaphysical truths.

Basically no philosophy or religion gets God right, but they all are partly correct. They may directly contradict, but that's where the arrogance comes in - this time, the charlatan with the paltry set of symbols that have been recombinated for centuries knows what they really mean!  The picture captures the level of self-idolatrous vanity needed to claim you better understand the metaphysical claims of different religious traditions than they do. It's occult wisdom 101. 

Let's do an alchemical transformation: 

Unity through personal desire and will

[Alchemical] love though personal will 

Love is the law. Love under will. 

See how it works?

Note how the unity of all religions types can never explain why their dogmas are more credible than they ones they claim to replace. There is never a coherent ontological or theological argument, or any reason why their fake "ancient sages" should be taken seriously at all. When you look at how flimsy and inconsequential unitarian "doctrines" actually are, it becomes impossible not to see charlatans exploiting idiots.

Pierre Lambert de Lintot, Masonic copperplate engraving, published in London in 1789.

This becomes occult when it involves secret knowledge. And these groups loved secrets. Despite their Enlightenment views, the secret knowledge they trafficked in was the same hermetic drivel as Kircher and the Renaissance occultists from the last post. 

Lambert came out of that muddle of Enlightenment occult societies. A talented engraver and Jacobin that started a Masonic lodge of French Illuminés and combined occult themes into  arcane diagrams prized by European Masons.





The "debunking" of the Corpus Hermeticum was resolved in the most gamma way possible - the book itself may be a late antique forgery, but it's based on real ancient sources! That are now lost! Hermes lives! And all the wisdom is still there - you have to dig it out from a corrupt transmission. You get to be the king of secrets. Instead of joining an ancient Hermetic mystery cult, the text is the mystery. This actually makes Hermeticism more suited to the occult - it's a hidden code like alchemical secrets or kaballah to be churned however you want.

Click for an in-depth look at the Hermetic aspects of the symbolism. We'll stick to one close-up - the second from the top in the middle. Note the central pyramid and Rosicrucian crosses. The obelisk on the left with the dove is labeled "love" and the tower with the Templar crosses says "sign of God's Will". 

Love is the law. Love under will. It's balance.











The obelisk brings us back to the point of this post - the occult obelisk in modern times. Although Masonic symbolism always looks like classical realism of some kind, there are connections to Egypt in their dogmas. The big one in web searches is their involvement in installing prominent obelisks in world cities. Specifically, the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the Cleopatra's Needles in London and New York's Central Park, and the towering new Washington Monument dedicated to the first president and prominent Freemason in DC were all Masonic projects.

Thomas Crane and Ellen Houghton, page 4 illustration of Felix Leigh's London Town, London/New York: Marcus Ward & Co., 1883. 

Four children and a dog stand on Waterloo Bridge, looking south along the River Thames towards the Palace of Westminster. Cleopatra's Needle can be seen to the left. Imperial Victorian globalism was in full swing - what better sign than the old Roman symbol of the center of civilization. Only now several cities have them. 














The Egyptian connection runs deeper than generic occult Hermetic hieroglyphic wisdom. According to Masonic legend, one of their key figures, Hiram Abiff, is Osiris reborn. This takes the supposed architect - or mason - of the Temple of Solomon in the Old Testament and ties him into the Egyptian resurrection myth. The source material is bare bones - the artificer sent to Solomon by Hiram, King of Tyre, to help build the Temple. In 2 Chronicles 2 he is described as multi-skilled, while 1 Kings 7 describes him as a brass artist who cast the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, and other works. From this, Freemasonry made up a legendary character who knew the occult secrets of the universe and encoded them in his work before being murdered by jealous rivals.

According to the link, the historical records indicate this story appears around 1725 with the invention of the Third Degree.

The Egyptian Room in the Masonic Temple of Philadelphia, 1873.
One of several symbolic theme rooms in this lavishly decorated temple. Masonic prints aren't heavily Egypt-themed, but Egyptian symbols and myth play a big part in their own occultic mythology


The Osiris connection derives from the Rosicrucian claim that building the Temple prefigured Christianity and that Hiram was therefore a Christ figure. Osiris goes all in on the unity of all religions by anchoring it in the occult source of the spray. Rosicrucians connected Hiram to the Son of God, Light of the World and to the resurrection of Osiris as the light of the sun. It's incoherent historically, but that's why we call it a churn. The idea is that all these symbols of eternal life point beyond themselves to... wait for it... a higher truth - resurrection into the Grand Lodge above, where "the Great Architect rules and reigns forever".

Plate made by Osiris Shrine Temple in Wheeling, West Virginia for the Imperial Council Session in New Orleans, 1910

The Shriners were founded in 1870 as a fraternal society for Masons who had achieved the level of master. The basic symbolism carries over. How does one reconcile Osiris Temple as a name, even comically, with a Christian world view? Commitment to the first reveals at best a poor understanding of the second. They are literally contradictory.  







Higher truths above the unity of all beliefs, it is by definition not a Christian notion of God. Denying the divinity of Jesus is a declaration that your supreme being is diametrically opposed to the core foundation of Christian truth. Metaphysical knowledge is based in faith, and you can't hold faith in contradictory things. Masonry may do some good in the world, but on the spiritual level, faith in the path to the Great Architect or to the Christian God are mutually exclusive. They pathways contradict each other. You have to choose.

The unity of all religions, like the churn of symbols it draws from, is fundamentally oppositional to Christianity - or any other religious system. But it is catnip for retards. Consider:

Andrei Rublev, Holy Trinity or The Hospitality of Abraham, around 1400, tempera on wood, Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery

Theology is philosophical, in that it builds on logic until it reaches the limits of human discernment. This point comes sooner in the mystical areas, but it all starts with a logical approach to ultimate principles accepted on faith. The nature of God is beyond us, but the pathway that leads to that awareness is neither random nor concerned with your preferences and desires. 

The churn of symbols is based on choosing general similarities against doctrinal truth claims on your own authority - you decide that the Osiris, Jesus, and Hiram stories resemble each other so they must be the same thing. 

Like this common IQ test. The "history" is absolutely nonsensical fan fiction and the "argument" no more than "they sort of look like each other...". As if symbols were some sort of 19th century lungfish instead of arbitrary choices for specific reasons. 

Osiris between the Eyes of Horus and two fetishes - stuffed animal skins tied to a phallic lotus pole, from the Tomb of Sennedjem, 13th century BC

But the ankh in ancient Egypt was a generic symbol of divinity. Osiris sometimes had them, but so did any divine entity. Osiris' personal symbols were the crook and flail - legacies of the agrarian origins of his cult. Of course, the crook looks a bit like a cross and an ankh. And the flail has has two straight bars. And the fetishes have a vertical shaft. And they resemble penises... Conversely, all shepherds and threshers are really priests of Osiris. 

A moment of thought makes it obvious what an ignorant and imaginary matching game this is. But a moment might as well be an eternity for the sort of idiot solipsist drawn to this sort of "insight".

Symbols have lives, but these are based on ideas. The ankh and cross represent opposing notions of human relations to the divine - whatever they look like, the meanings - that is, how they are used and what they stand for - conflict. Many of the vast range of Christian symbols don't resemble each other at all, but all point back to the same set of beliefs. Why? Because their users chose them. 






Unity of all religions a-holes ignore fundamental defining differences in theological depth, historical evidence, nature of source material, etc. matters because they "see a similarity". They claim to adjudicate theological legitimacy without offering anything beyond "ancient sages" nothing rising to even the most basic level of argument. Sort of like Mercury had a snake on his wand, so the serpent in Eden had valuable wisdom. If you can't see the Satanic, self-deifying, do what thou wilt nature of this perspective, it may be time to ask what can you know and how can you know it.


Masons were into Egyptomania from the start. There were numerous prominent Masons among Napoleon's commanders, advisors, and scholars on his Egypt invasion - this may be where Marmont got his obelisk pyramid idea. Another Masonic explorer claimed he found a Masonic temple in Thebes with paintings of Osiris in a Masonic apron being initiated into Freemasonry. This was obviously a fake claim, but it shows how deeply they wanted that Egyptian connection.


Then there are the prominent obelisks.

Like Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. 

The link provides good view of how involved Freemasons were in the whole process of procuring the obelisk. The erection was a big deal too - the 50,000 who attended heard an hour-long speech from the Grand Master then 10,000 Masons singing "a battery of three times three".

The Grand Master's address is pure occult truth in the unity of all religions:

Or the Washington Monument, one that always turns up in searches for Masons and the occult. They were as central to the funding and building of this as they were the importation of Cleopatra's Needle. And it is filled with Masonic "relics". 

The occult always comes down to belief, but symbols do have lives. This isn't a "secular" symbol at all. It isn't Christian either. It's metaphysics are the spray of Hermetic, Gnostic, Rosicrucian self-deification that goes back to Egyptian solar temples. Ultimately it's luciferian. What that "means" depends on what you believe. 

Vinnie Ream Hoxie, Proposal for the completion of the Washington Monument, 1876-78

We do know that when construction stalled, the Masons proposed to top the stump with a massive statue of Washington. Is this consistent with either the classical republican values that the US was founded on? The Christian values of the American nation? Enlightenment faith in equalism? Anything in the history of the polity? 

But it makes way more sense when we think of it as a specific application of a general meaning. The ascention of the exalted leader not through faith, but the mastery of occult lore. Like the pharaoh as a god, or the divine Augustus, only adapted to the world of secret societies, where the "real" kings are secret. 

That is, another churn in the life of the symbol. 

Vinnie Ream, between 1870 and 1880, photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

Vinnie has a whiff of brimstone about her too. She was a friend and enthusuastic supporter of Albert Pike, a highly influential Mason who was deeply immersed in the occult side of the order. Hoxie was inexplicably chosen by Congress at 18 to carve a statue of Lincoln, making her the first woman and youngest sculptor so honored. It was here that she met Pike, who confered Masonic degrees on her despite having no relatives in the order. 

There's a look...

Henry R. Searle, Proposed design for the completion of the Washington Monument, 1877, photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

Then there was this beauty. No obvious connection between Searle and Freemasonry, but he does goes all in on the pyramid allusion and phallic symbolism. All that's missing is the Eye of Horus at the tip. 

Which puts the George Washington Masonic National Memorial - a self-declared "Beacon of Light" - in perspective. It's a modified obelisk with pyramid top.

It's newer than the Washington Monument - built between 1922 and 1932 - but it is also a functioning temple as well as a memorial. And it finally managed to get the obelisk and cult statue back together. The interior speaks for itself:

As the symbol churns, it picks up new heroes. There is no evidence Washington saught to be deified. The historical record shows the opposite - that he was happy to retire to private life after his service to the nation. But this doesn't matter once something is plugged into the churn of symbols. Rewriting a real person is minor - the churners will fabricate characters completely when needed. Masonic Washington is remarkably honest compared to Hermes Trismegistus or Christian Rosenkreutz.

The "modern" perspective is that this is all allegorical. It doesn't have to meet serious historical standards because it isn't historical. It's symbolic - the same tired old unity of all religions or all "wisdoms" that titillated the Renaissance occultists, just without the magic. Technically, the word occult should apply to any secret lore, but the modern redefinition of the spray of symbols as "allegory" created a division around place of the supernatural.

Time Magazine cover, Feb. 14, 1955

Modern occultists from Masons to Satanists claim that the symbols are just "esoteric" - they don't have any real spiritual meaning. This way, it doesn't matter that the spells don't work - they're just signs of some higher truth. Jungian archetypes are an excellent example of pretending mystical hocum isn't supernatural.

Note the two entwined serpents - clearly Hermetic and not the Biblical Eden/Fall. The rest is familiar - the brute stone beneath male and female principles who join through hermetic lore into the alchemical-Gnostic third way. Love as unity under will. And what looks like the Rose Cross betwen the T and I. 

That "the weekly newsmagazine" was printing this occult bullshit under the banner "EXPLORING THE SOUL" sums up their historical relationship to the beautiful, the true, or the good. 





"Real" occultists believe that that esoteric higher truth has a practical supernatural dimension. Think of it as atheistic sociopathy vs. actual magic. On another way - what do you make of this:

Works Projects Administration, Dealey Plaza Obelisk, 1940, Dealey Plaza, Dallas

Dealey Plaza, the site of  JFK's assassination in 1963 has an obelisk. Is this significant or anecdote? If significant, is it because of cosmic forces or human conspiricy? And is there any to determine the answer beyond faith in the unknowable?
















More importantly, does it matter? Claims about the nature of God, ultimate reality, and the afterlife are by definition "supernatural". It's a false distinction intended to confuse. Squid ink. There's really only one question:

That was a long one, but we've already stretched the two-parter to three, and need to move on. Obelisks were the focus, but the pattern applies to so much occult dimwittery:

The life of symbols - how symbols lie dormant, waiting for the next in an endless parade of self-deifying charlatans to apply general associations to new specifics.

The spray of symbols - how different symbols pile up into nonsensical claims about the unity of all religions, or wisdom, or knowledge. It is hard to sort the Hermeticism from the Gnosticism from the Kabbalah from the other mysticisms, but they all point to a self-driven path to secret "true knowledge" that never amounts to anything.

The churn of symbols - how one spray replaces another, recombinating the same general ideas into new spins until distinctions become almost meaningless. The details vary between or even within groups, but the pattern never changes. Click for a fairly shameless recent version.

Call it the spray of charlatans. 

Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman of all people has perhaps the best take on this.

Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963-1967, Cor-Ten steel, Rothko Chapel, Houston
One of four versions of the sculpture.

And the University of Washington version. 

The old rusted metal is a nice metaphor for the substance behind the "Egyptian mysteries" symbolized by obelisk and pyramid. 

But it's even more fitting. These were originally solar-divine symbols - pointing upward phallically towards occult self-divinization. Then charlatan after charlatan claimed them as signs of their own occult enlightenment. Newman lifts the veil and shows where they really point - at each other. The spray, the churn, the unities of all religions - they're all recursive. They just lead back on themselves and endlessly recycle the same nonsense. 






















A slow drain for solipsists and secret kings, endlessly circling the bowl. That's enough for obelisks, but rember the larger pattern. Avoid the spray.