The bright, four-winged cherub that filled the garden with its red, fiery light was an impressive sight while it rested in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The image of the tree with the angel overwhelming its branches has a name: phoenix, a word related to the Greek phoinos (φοῖνιξ) orphonos, meaning “blood red or purple,” the color of royalty. “Phonos” also means “to murder” or “to strike.”[i]
The description of the phoenix as a legendary bird of fire fits the image of the cherub in the tree. Ovid describes the mythical bird in his Metamorphoses:
There is one, a bird, which renews itself, and reproduces from itself. The Assyrians call it the phoenix. It does not live on seeds and herbs, but on drops of incense, and the sap of the cardamom plant. When it has lived for five centuries, it then builds a nest for itself in the topmost branches of a swaying palm tree, using only its beak and talons. As soon as it has lined it with cassia bark, and smooth spikes of nard, cinnamon fragments and yellow myrrh, it settles on top, and ends its life among the perfumes.
They say that, from the father’s body, a young phoenix is reborn, destined to live the same number of years. When age has given it strength, and it can carry burdens, it lightens the branches of the tall palm of the heavy nest, and piously carries its own cradle, that was its father’s tomb, and, reaching the city of Hyperion, the sun-god, through the clear air, lays it down in front of the sacred doors of Hyperion’s temple.[iii]
Like the phoenix, the Nachash “dies” from the curse imposed on him by God:
And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou [art] cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. (Genesis 3:14)
As we shall see, the Nachash plans to raise himself up from the ashes of his demise and throw off the image of the lowly snake, ultimately to rule the earth as the god of light. The Nachash caused paradise to become a desert and introduced death, which can be thought of as the first act of murder done to humanity. Indeed, in His response to the Pharisees who were questioning Him, Jesus referred to the cherub specifically as a murderer:
Ye are of [your] father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)
The palm tree is often seen in Masonic art. The pinnate or “feather-like” leaves of the palm mimic the appearance of the cherub in the tree. In a typical reversal to the true nature of the Nachash, a person wandering in a desert might find an oasis. In the place surrounded by the “death lands” of the desert, the water of the oasis and the life-giving fruit of the Phoenix dactylifera (date palm) would provide restoration.
Jesus not only points out the fact that Satan was the original murderer, but indicates that he imitates the truth by taking the symbol of the cherub of light in the tree symbolized by the phoenix:
Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. (John 8:42)
The Nachash has always tried to mimic Christ and replace Him as the “light” of the world. Just as Ovid describes the cycle of the phoenix, the Nachash comes from himself and for himself. Those who intentionally reject God to follow the cherub’s false light, the “way of desolation,” epitomize what it means to break the Second Commandment:
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. (Exodus 20:7)
The Hebrew word for “vain” is shav (שָׁוְא), meaning “emptiness,” “nothingness,” “falsehood,” or “desolation.”
The Arch-Archery
The arrow concept that mirrors the quality of the creature in the garden can be extended to the centaur, the mythological bowman whose skill makes the investigation of the etymology behind the word “archer” significant. In Greek, the archi or arch means “the chief or principal leader, the first in rank.” The Nachash was known as the most beautiful of the cherubim.[v] The Latin arche from the Greek “archi” also means “to begin, to lead, rule or govern.” In architecture, the structure known as the “arch” used extensively in stonemasonry actually comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for the bow and arrow. “Archery,” from the Latin arcus, is “the art, practice, or skill of propelling arrows with the use of a bow.” Anyone known in mythology as a skilled archer was also an effective hunter or warrior.
The Greek “arche” has the primary meaning of a beginning or an origin of first cause. The meaning of arche or archai during the eighth century BC always meant the beginning foundation of an idea or principle, or something with a solid foundation.
The Greek philosopher Anaximander (610–546 BC) was the first to use the term “arche,” later termed the“substratum” by Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) to ascribe something as having divine attributes. The substratum is the divine, eternal substance that encompasses all things and gives them value.[vi]
Aristotle used “substratum” to define an element or principle not easily understood but described in such a way as to make its existence possible. To him, the arche was the element or first principle of all that exists. He considered it as a permanent substance in nature physis, and asserted that all things first come to be from it until they are resolved into a final state.[vii]
The “illuminated” stonemasons who utilize the structure of the arch symbolically honor and represent their god continually in the form and names of the structures they skillfully produce. The classical Greek philosopher Plato’s (428–347 BC) “unmoved mover,” or “demiurge,” as described later by the Neoplatonists, had three ordering principles:
1. Arche: “Beginning”—the source of all things
2. Logos: “Word”—the underlying order that is hidden beneath appearances
3. Harmonia: “Harmony”—numerical ratios in mathematics
The idea of the arche, logos, and importantly, special ratios, combine to make a distinctive building style known today as Palladian architecture, which has been used in all of the ancient temples. The Greek poet Hesiod (750—650 BC) wrote that the arche or origin of the world started with nothingness (chaos) and that the earth and heaven came forth out of chaos.
Pillars
The Story of Atlas
Mythology has been interpreted as allegory to explain or personify natural phenomena or approached as an ancient evolution of science. Usually, comparative mythology interprets the narratives as simply “stories,” fashioned perhaps to teach, entertain, or explain the origin of man. It is not common to look at the characters in myth and make associations with them to ones found in story of the Garden of Eden. However, by using and extending this unique approach, the characters that might not directly display any similarities to the characters in Eden can be understood to represent antitypes or ones gaining symbolic forms or attributes through the point of view of the Nachash.
The personification of the pillars in Greek myth is the Titan Atlas. In his Theogony, Greek for “origin of the gods,” Hesiod wrote that the first of all the gods was Chaos. He reigned as the “personification of nothingness.”
Magnum Chaos represented at the Basilica
di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome[viii] |
 |
The next primordial god from Chaos was the Earth (Greek: Gaia), who brought forth Heaven (Greek:Ouranos; Latin: Uranus). The firstborn of Earth and Heaven was Chronos (Time). He was the first of the Titans (“Strainers”), as Heaven called them. Time was said to have hated his father, Heaven:
But these sons whom be begot himself great Heaven used to call Titans (Strainers) in reproach, for he said that they strained and did presumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards.[ix]
Earth and Heaven made many children as well as terrible monsters. Some of these were the Cyclopes, Cottus, Briareos and the fifty-headed, one-hundred-armed Gyes. Heaven knew that he would eventually be dethroned by one of his children and decided to force all of his newly born back into Gaia to a place called Tartarus, the “horrid or terrible region”:
And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light: and Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing.[x]
Gaia and her son, Chronos, were so angered by Heaven’s actions that they made plans to punish him. Hesiod writes:
And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her.
Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him. And not vainly did they fall from his hand; for all the bloody drops that gushed forth Earth received, and as the seasons moved round she bare the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armour, holding long spears in their hands and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae all over the boundless earth.[xi]
After Chronos took his father’s throne, he decided to reimprison his siblings, turning to the same unjust rule as his father. He began swallowing his own children from his sister-wife Rhea.
Rhea and the Goddess Cybele
Rhea is related to the important goddess Cybele (described in chapter 5) since she is identical in many ways. Both have been represented in ancient art as a woman seated on a throne flanked by lions.[xii]
Birth of Zeus
Rhea hid her youngest child, Zeus, from Chronos by substituting him with a stone wrapped in a blanket. She then brought Zeus to a cave, where he was raised by Amalthea or Adrasteia, meaning “the inescapable,” and the goat god, Pan. Amalthea has also been referred to as Ide or the Nymph of Mt. Ida, which is located in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), and is said to be the origin of the Trojans and the mountain of the goddess Cybele. Adrasteia was also known as the remorseless Greek goddess of revenge, Nemesis.
In order to keep Cronus from hearing the infant, Amalthea had the dancing male youths known as the Kuretes or Korybantes yell and clash their spears against their shields to drown out his cries. This is an example of how the myth/garden comparative technique is applied. The stone substitute can be thought of as a trick that Satan orchestrated against the one God, the idea being that the will of God was subverted by the Nachash and that “God-Zeus” now needed to be nurtured by the actions of the Nachash and Eve. Using this unorthodox technique, the image of Zeus (God), Amalthea (Eve), and Pan (Nachash) together in the cave hiding away from Chronos is perversely similar to the situation in the Garden of Eden.
Earth and Chronos
The Nachash was present when God made the earth. The oldest book of the Old Testament, Job, mentions the establishment of the earth:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4–7, emphasis added)
A passage earlier in the book of Job identifies Satan as having the moniker “son of God”:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. (Job 1:6)
The account of how Earth and Heaven became separated in Ovid’s Theogony, the “castration of paradise” as mirrored in the garden story, was, according to the view of Satan, a twisted representation of the act he orchestrated against God—his Creator, the God of the Universe. It was the ultimate disrespectful and undignified “emasculation” of God Himself.
The “Zeus-God” helped by Rhea-Cybele and later Amalthea (Eve) in the Theogony can be viewed as another outrageous insult, as if the act of Satan in the garden was for God’s sake or that God didn’t realize the greatness of what Satan had done for Him. “God” was “nurtured,” allowed, to participate in this “plan of the subtle.”
Chronos takes on a new identity at this point in theTheogony and represents the “unjust” God. The act of bringing Eve to the knowledge of good and evil is symbolically reversed with Rhea protecting Zeus as a saving, helpful act to God Himself, who now is represented by Zeus.
The Titanomachy
Upon reaching adulthood, Zeus became the cupbearer of Cronus and tricked him into drinking a mixture of mustard and wine, causing him to vomit up his swallowed children. After freeing his siblings, Zeus led them in rebellion against the Titans, known as the “Titanomachy,” or “War of the Titans.”
Atlas entered the story along with his brother, Menoetius, as enemies of Zeus fighting on the side of the Titans. When they were eventually defeated, all of them except Atlas were confined to Tartarus. Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the western edge of Gaia (Earth) to hold up Ouranos (Heaven) on his shoulders, and prevent the two from ever resuming their primordial embrace.
Hesiod writes about the birth of Atlas:
Now Iapetus took to wife the neat-ankled maid Clymene, daughter of Ocean, and went up with her into one bed. And she bare him a stout-hearted son, Atlas: also she bare very glorious Menoetius and clever Prometheus, full of various wiles, and scatter-brained Epimetheus.[xv]
The name “Atlas” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root tel, “to uphold or support.”[xvi] Two Atlases are mentioned in ancient myth. The Atlas involved in the Titanomachy was the son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Asia or Klyménē (Κλυμένη). The other is known as the son of Poseidon and Cleito, the daughter of Evenor, king of Atlantis.[xvii] The term “Atlantic Ocean” refers to the “sea of Atlas,” and “Atlantis” refers to the “island of Atlas.”
The Hidden Meaning of Myth
The ancients believed that the gods of myth had power over nature and the lives of men, and it is reasonable to start the exploration of the highest class of knowledge with their origin. The study of mythology in this regard would not seem to present such a difficult task. While some of the stories passed down over the centuries might have been lost, we can still gain a good understanding of the quality, personality, and power of each mythological deity. We still have the works of many ancient writers who describe them at great length. To understand who the myths actually represent and their importance to the goals of the living descendants of the gods (as they consider themselves) and their end-game, we consider that there is more to mythology than simply understanding the attributes and origins of the ancient gods. An underlying secret woven into the stories of myth can only be discerned by the wise. Approaching this learning from the point of reference of the Garden of Eden is an essential part of our unique path of exploration. Continuing in this fashion but stepping back for a moment to the study of a portion of the quadrivium (i.e., geometry) will add the wisdom necessary to continue.
The Greek philosopher Plato understood the importance of geometry, writing:
The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.… geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down.[xviii]
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