Mary and Hiram

[Robert Baird]

There are far better sources than Philo and you might want to address Hypatia of Alexandria who I suspect is similar but you will enjoy seeing what the good Christians did to her. Just because she was educated, smart and able to defeat Clement in an argument or two (IMHO). I think there should be a whole book on Hypatia - a movie for sure. Mary Rose D'Angelo in Vatican II is a good source too. The whole matter of women hating cults since Hammurabi is a testimony to the culpability and ego of men who claim they wrote for some boogeyman or are inspired by same. The American Psychoanalytical Association did a good job forwarding one printing of Augustine's autobiography.

Comarius taught Mary and Jesus and Cleopatra as well. Jesus was called 'The Egyptian' because he spent so much time studying the Therapeutae arts in Alexandria at Mary's father's home there. These things are not triple re-inforced verified. There are quite a few scholars who say Mary Magdala is Mary of Bethany where Joseph of Arimathaea had homes - and the wedding at Canae has J of A talking with the groom - Jesus.

Many Christians have called Mary a prostitute and Jesus the Dark Prince for consorting with her. It threatens the whole only-begotten theory (crap) to have him a normal man with love for a woman he respected. Mishnah is a law (though only verbal at the time of Yeshua) and it requires a Rabbi or teacher has to be married.

The Miriam prophetess mentioned by Philo is probably the sister of Moses (Akhenaton) - there is an extant alchemical treatise from her (If I recall - on the whitening of the stone). She was married to Jasher who kept the staffs of Moses and probably Aaron. I have dealt with the importance of the staffs in the development of the Rosicrucian Tepaphone or 'remote poison'. I suspect Moses (a title meaning leader who bulrush story has been found in Anatolia by archaeology from an era about a millennium before the Biblical Moses) was too busy in foreign lands to really develop himself adequate to the challenge of making those staffs.

The token code of Masons referring to themselves as 'Sons of the Widow' may relate to Isis but there are those who say Miriam is their Hiram. 'H' is an aspirant and can be dropped and reversing a word is a lesser code. Mery-taten and Meritaten and many other Mary people might all be part of a grand play devised to make a great bedtime story.

The following link from a person who posted his book all over the web for free (Barbelo) develops the issue of Mary and who the father of her child was (It was not G-d). www.riaanbooysen.com/barbelo/...mariamne-jesus

There is another author who wrote a book (I forget the name) who says the Royal Blood Mary carried was prized over all others in places far from Israel including the Emperor of Rome who fathered a child with her. Herod was another of her mates as was an Egyptian potentate. Though I know San Graal or the Royal blood has these properties or people who believe in it - I have difficulty seeing all those fathers for her kids. But Rian is opening this door and it does fit with the Roman Messiah theory. Rian has some good thinking in what this link shows about her kids and her being raised in the Temple. Temples were hotbeds of sexual experimentation and rituals long before and long after this. It started when walls were built around places of worship at the same time Ariadne of Crete fought to maintain her throne and women all over the revolting misogynist infested Mediterranean (still is) were being deprived of any rights at all.

[Secret Alias]

I love arguments that depend on 10,000 contentious and unproven things to all be true together and all against conventional wisdom and accepted assumptions.

[Robert Baird]

One way to ensure you will be constantly amused is to continue reading only that which you BELIEVE. On the other hand you could quote something you think has no veracity and I would provide the sources.

In this case there are no end of sources.

[Secret Alias]

Really? You REALLY think these theses you've made up are the best explanation of the phenomena in question. I don't think you really believe that. You just like them for personal reasons.

[Robert Baird]

Dear SA

I have not made anything up. I do expose the myths which most people (including academics paid by the paradigm which is or has been subservient to Bible Narratives and Cradle of Civilization lies. I have thousands of sources and every hard science at my disposal. You appear unable to even identify what this thread is about and employ ridicule and ad hominems.

Here is a little addressing the Q or source. I take this many millennia further back - century by century almost. The Essanoi are derived from far earlier sacerdotal languages, codes and memes were used as well as hypnotic triggers ten millennia and more ago. Are you a believer in a Bible theory? If so please read or just watch Know Rome - Know Jesus, No Rome - No Jesus by Atwill with top scholars from universities all over the world.

Here is just one small thread - the links or urls require some work due to rules here.



DEAD SEA SCROLLS: - Dr. Norman Golb is a top scholar who makes a plea for the de-politicization of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His plea is not related to the current argument that Palestine will own or control the Scrolls but to the Generals and politicians who piecemeal and with apparent deceit are doling out access to these important documents for the examination of scholars. The original involvement of the Catholic scholars and the Scrolls being housed in a Museum named for the Rockefellers is of more concern to me. The management of the life of Jesus and his brother James ('the Righteous) who led the group at Qumran that some are calling Essenes is why the concern exists for myself and others who know the ways of the Christologists. They have blamed the Jews for 'killing our Saviour'.

The documents discovered at Dag (or Nag) Hammadi in the same decade were fully translated by 1971 and they are of equal if not greater insight. The life of Jesus as a 'Therapeutae' or Gnostic with a 'Source' of learning in a large family of adepts is contrary to all sorts of proselytes and his involvement of an equal partner and wife puts a lie to a lot of 'only begotten' or other Divine appellations sought by the Popes who have claimed to be the only representatives of the Lord on Earth. This 'Source' is described correctly by Barrett as the very Grail that the Dag Hammadi scrolls represent from the verbal tradition or Qabala. If you consider that there was no name or actual Christians at the time of Jesus we will be starting at a fair beginning. The Copper Scrolls that made coded references to the site of Solomon's treasure were found here as well. That is of import to our continuing effort to know what trade and designs exist (ed) in the Templar to Benjaminite or Merovingian lineage. It is more important to start with this 'Source' as many Biblical scholars are calling it. They call it this rather than a pagan tradition of Bardic and nature worshippers or Phoenicians, as the Father of Biblical Archaeology assures us that even the Bible itself should be seen as being. We are of the opinion that all documents and related things that reflect on the life of Christ are part and parcel of the 'Holy Grail'; and the churchians were crusading and killing to get them and control the truth that might upset their marketing and other plans. Thus we should provide a little proof of the actual religions and politics of the time that Jesus was alive upon this earth.

"The Bible imagines the religion of ancient Israel as purely monotheistic. And doubtless there were Israelites, particularly those associated with the Jerusalem Temple, who were strict monotheists. But the archaeological evidence (and the Bible, too, if you read it closely enough) suggests that the monotheism of many Israelites was far from pure. For them, Yahweh (the name of the Israelite god) was not the only divinity. Some Israelites believed that Yahweh had a female consort. And many Israelite invoked the divinity with the help of images {Remember Onias' Temple in Egypt and the archaeology of the sacrificing of Ibises practiced by Moses and later Jews.}, particularly figurines. I call this Israelite religion pagan Yahwism.

The archaeological evidence we will look at comes mostly from Judah in what is known in archaeological terms as the Assyrian period, the span from 721 B.C.E., when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, until 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and brought an end to the Davidic dynasty in Judah. This period, to put it into perspective, is several centuries after King Solomon built the Jerusalem Temple {Actually done by an architect Mason from Tyre named Hiram but not the King of that name and time.} in about 950 B.C.E. So the archaeological evidence we are about to discuss documents a level of Israelite paganism long after Solomon built an exclusive home for Israel's god. {The Incas and other used such techniques of social management rather than garrison armies in occupied territories.}

While Yahweh was the god of the Israelites, other nations had their own national gods. The chief god of the Phoenicians was Ba'al. For the Philistines, the chief god was at first Dagon {As noted earlier we suggested a Berber/Phoenician connection to Philistine. This Dagon is almost the same as the Dogon of West Africa who are early observers of Sirius the Dog Star. This is a Berber influence to be sure.} and later also Ba'al {He could mention Bel in Mesopotamia is the same as Ba'al but he is just developing the extensive similarity of the actual worship of people with different names within a gradually degrading or devolving 'Brotherhood'. We can't expect all of these things to be integrated all at once, can we?}(Judges 16:23; 2 Kings 1:2). For the Ammonites it was Milkom. For the Moabites {In Deuteronomy 23 you will see prejudice and hatred excluding them from the 'House of the Lord', 'Yes, even unto the tenth generation' along with 'bastards' and 'he who is wounded in the stones'.}, Chemosh. For the Edomites, Qos. And for the Israelites and Judahites -- Yahweh. Except for the Edomite god Qos, who appears only in the archaeological record, all of these gods are mentioned in the Bible (1 Kings 11:5, 7, 33).

Interestingly, while each nation's chief god had a distinctive name, his consort, the chief female deity, had the same name in all these cultures: Asherah or its variants Ashtoreth or Astarte. (As we shall see, this was even true of Yahweh's consort.)

Not only was the female consort the same, the various nations used the same cult objects, the same types of incense altars made of stone and clay, the same bronze and clay censers, cult stands and incense burners, the same chalices and goblets and the same bronze and ivory rods adorned with pomegranates. It was easy to take cult vessels of one deity and place them in the service of another one--and this was commonly done. For example, in the ninth-century B.C.E., stela erected by Mesha, the king of Moab, he describes himself as the 'son of Chemosh,' and tells how he defeated the Israelites (see also 2 Kings 3:4-27). He then brags,'(I) took t(he ves)sels of Yahweh, and I hauled them before the face of Chemosh.'

We sometimes get the impression that after Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, Yahweh had no other sanctuary in ancient Israel -- but this is not the case." (1)

It is possible that the prevalence of the 'one god' was actually a one goddess as we see in the fact they all worshipped one similarly named(identical really) goddess. The reality as we see it was almost the same for Ba'al in this period as well. He goes on to show these multiple and pantheistic practices seem to disappear when the exiles are returned from Persia, (Few came back and those who left were invited guests) so maybe Cyrus and Zoroaster were able to convince them of the error of their ways and we might see what many have pondered in regards to the magi of Zoroaster being a major influence on Christianity in the original foundations and not the more ritualistic Moses. At Qumran many scholars note the people called themselves 'Covenanters of the Law'. Most of them note this law was Mosaic but my perception is different and I believe it was a syncretism akin to Gnosticism and with many adept understandings such as the healing practices of the Therapeutae. Golb makes it clear he is on the side of the Qumran library having been a collection of all the factions of religion and practices in a large area even beyond Judaea. The Roman practice of destroying all literature and writing new ones around old beliefs which were in line with their approaches was the reason for this, and all tribes, zealots or cults knew it.

The henges of the Emerald Isles which were once wood as some are seeing today, are in the Negev and Sinai deserts as well. The 'Bedouin' ('tent dweller') fiction is not the root as we showed from the scholars of the excellent book Carthage. The article following the one just quoted from Biblical Archaeology Review says this:

"Take even a one- or two-day trip through the Sinai or Negev deserts and you'll come across scores of them--standing stones erected in a variety of combinations. These stone installations may help us understand the very origins of Israelite religion." (2)

Last year the word about pre-hieroglyphic alphabets in the Sahara were accompanied by more on the agricultural savannah people who had henges too. This is where the Berbers were from and the connection if no simple chance occurrence. The article goes on to discuss 'fertility triads' and whenever you see triad or troad (Greek) you are looking at the central laws of the philosophic Kelts. These parables of process and moral or spiritual concepts are a wealth of insight to this very day. The Triune Nature of Man that was plagiarized into the 'Holy Trinity' and raised to a deity took more of man's self awareness and divinity away from humanity than any of us can imagine. A central theme in the Dead Sea Scrolls is said to be very Zoroastrian in nature (and the Mani attempt to join Christianity and it in one ecumenical religion that Augustine was a promoter of until bought out by the Catholics); - it is simply this: 'There are two spirits 'truth and error'. We surely see the real original sin of the Gnostics who saved the Dag Hammadi Scrolls and gave their lives protecting the Library of Alexandria in this. These people who were with the Cathars a millennium later say 'The original sin that separates us from God - is IGNORANCE!'

Another culture that really worshipped this goddess at one time is the Greek or Hellenic culture of Dionysius and Aphrodite as we see a practice that was at work while Yahweh became the one and sole male god Jehovah and that development was not mentioned in BAR.

"In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite, Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of Western Asia." (3)

Casting aspersions on great thinkers like Augustine is easy and I don't want any readers to think I'm saying these things without basis in fact. We have his own book to work with in that regard. Here is a little from Augustine's autobiography called Confessions.

"As literature, the Scriptures compared poorly with the polished prose of Cicero and he thought them fit only for the simple minded." That was when he was a Manichean before "the mercy of God had saved him from this evil." (4)

I know the writings found in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine or Jordan are all important to the whole cultus of Judean/Christians and Islamists. Beyond that they were important to all people of Parthia and Rome at the time they were hidden so hegemonists in search of power might not find them - and it was a successful and thankful thing that they remained hidden. If Paul/Saul or his Roman masters had found them it would have been far easier for them to gain even greater power than they did (if that is possible). It is widely known that Paul was a leader in the stoning of St. Stephen but it is less known that he was behind the assassination attempt on James who was the leader of the Qumrunites we call Essenes. This James was almost certainly the older brother of Yeshua who people refer to by his titles Jesus (Iesa) and Christ (Christos or Messiah). These titles go way back and the Great Pyramid of Iesa (Brotherhood) is testament to that. There were so many messiahs in every century and still are!

Was the fact that Rome was seeking to develop a way to enslave people in all nations and regions they conquered important? Was the fact that Paul was a Roman important? Would the immaculate conception such as had been used before with Plato going to be a hard sell if James is the older brother (Not a Virgin Mary, but someone worthy of respect who had experience), and his Christian leadership after Jesus was crucified was saying something other than what we now have and is known as Pauline Christianity? Yes, James and indeed all erudite people did not buy the 'only son of' some boogeyman concept. They knew all was "within" or I AM (YHVH) that these scrolls elucidate and demonstrate includes Buddhist and other Eastern thought.

This link will take you to an official site telling officious truths.

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...y/deadsea.html

Not only was there no Diaspora in the time of Nebuchadnezzar as recent tablets found by archaeology prove; the Benjaminite satrap overlords are documented doing perverse things to the people of Israel in the Bible. www.biblegateway.com/passage...20&version=CEB

Why is it almost illegal and certainly career-threatening to suggest an earlier account of someone like the mythical (Title not person) Jesus. Have people read Barbelo which goes far further and has all the best old references. Why would a person suffer attacks on character including being bi-polar or an alcoholic AFTER saying things the paradigm wants out of the news?

"The great trove of texts found after Israeli independence, however, was under Jordanian control, and no Jewish scholars were allowed on the official team of editors who had exclusive access to the manuscripts. After the 1967 war, all the scrolls came under Israeli control, but ownership is disputed to this day.

Controversy erupted anew during the 1950s when John Allegro, a maverick member of the editorial team, claimed in a British radio broadcast that a Jewish sectarian leader, known as the Teacher of Righteousness, had anticipated Jesus Christ in uncanny ways. According to Allegro, the teacher was crucified and his followers "took down the broken body of their Master to stand guard over it until Judgment Day," when he would rise again. The other editors protested that they found nothing of the sort in the scrolls. Allegro later fully discredited himself by publishing "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross," in which he argued that Christianity was a fertility cult involving sacred mushrooms.

In the 1980s, scholars grew impatient with the long delay in publishing the scrolls, which meant that access to them was severely restricted. That controversy came to a head in 1991 when the editor in chief, John Strugnell, was forced to resign after he was quoted in an Israeli newspaper as saying that Judaism was a horrible religion that ought not to exist. Strugnell, an alcoholic who also suffered from bipolar disorder, was not of sound mind when he gave the interview. He had a good record of working with Israeli scholars and was the first to include some of them on the editorial team, but his position was obviously untenable.

The publication of the scrolls, however, remained a contentious issue, even when access to them was no longer restricted.

The unauthorized publication of an important text called 4QMMT ("Some of the Works of the Law") by Hershel Shanks in Biblical Archaeology Review became the subject of a lawsuit by Elisha Qimron, one of the editors to whom the text had been assigned. An Israeli court ruled against Shanks, and the trial cost him more than $100,000."

articles.latimes.com/2013/mar...versy-20130310

libcom.org/library/2-essenes-therapeutae-qumran

Remember that Jesus and James were leaders and not followers as you read this. The end of days stuff is largely a means to galvanize sheeple, generally. I also could say that great adepts do not fear the end of physicality for reasons this author apparently does not know.

"Until recent years our knowledge of religious communist groups in the classic period was quite limited. ..... The most information we have is about the Essenes, the communist religious cult or lay monastic movement amongst the Jews; but that amounts to little more than brief descriptions in Philo, Josephus, and Pliny. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the community at Qumran in the desert hills above the Dead Sea, which was almost certainly the same as Philo’s Essenes, we can form a pretty clear picture of the life of a communist religious sect around the beginning of the Christian era. From an anthropologist’s point of view the most outstanding characteristic of this life is that it was a highly ritualized return to the life of the primitive village community and was a conscious revolt against the life of the city, or even town, and the attendant priestly temple structure and militaristic kingship.

On these brief materials provided by Pliny, Josephus, and Philo, with echoes but little augmentation in the Church fathers, an immense structure of speculation was raised, particularly in the nineteenth century, by writers influenced by the higher criticism of the Bible and by Liberal Protestantism. The Essenes were supposed to have been Buddhists or Magi or Pythagoreans or members of an occult, eremitical Egyptian cult. It was hypothesized that Jesus was an Essene; even more, John the Baptist. Since all three classical authors were commonly read by theologians and learned religious laymen from the Renaissance on, their picture of the Essenes’ rule of life probably had a considerable influence on the rule of life of the more literate, strict Pietist sects. In the nineteenth century, the most balanced speculation on the relations between the Essenes, John, Jesus, and the first Christians was Ernest Renan’s. His ideas were to have great influence on the picture of primitive Christianity held by most radical socialists after the publication of his Life of Jesus.

In 1947 seven scrolls of leather were found by Bedouin shepherds at approximately the spot described by Pliny. In the course of the next ten years a dozen caves surrounding the ruins of a settlement on the Wadi Qumran produced scrolls and fragments in abundance — more than five hundred manuscripts — and the settlement itself was carefully excavated. The Essene community was removed from the realm of speculation and fantasy. The discoveries included large parts or fragments of almost all the books of the Old Testament and apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writings, commentaries, hymns, apocalyptic and prophetic writings peculiar to the sect, and an extensive and detailed Manual of Discipline or monastic rule. By and large the accounts of the three classic authors were substantiated. There are variations only in detail, with two important exceptions. First of all there are many skeletons of women in the Qumran cemetery. Either the sect was not celibate, or it was divided into a celibate order and an association of married laymen such as we still find in the Franciscans. Inside the community enclosure the archaeologists discovered large numbers of carefully buried jars filled with the bones of sheep, goats, and cattle, each animal buried individually. There can be little doubt that these are the remains of the sacrificial feasts of the community, so that Josephus’s statement is to be understood as meaning that the Essenes rejected the sacrificial cult of the temple at Jerusalem and carried on one of their own (as the Falasha of Ethiopia do today). This is important because it means that the Essene community did not consider itself just a stricter Jewish sect but a new Jerusalem which would replace the old.

The scrolls and the excavations expand the picture of the community given by the classic authors in very specific ways, over and above minor disagreements. The community was organized according to the strictest order. At the top was the so-called Teacher of Righteousness, followed by the priests and Levites, and below them the rank and file, each of whom had his place in the elaborate hierarchical structure. In spite of this structure the community was a complete democracy. In theological matters the authority of the priests seems to have been absolute, but the governing council consisted of twelve laymen and three priests, patterned on the government of Israel in the Wilderness, and the decisions of this council were subject to the meeting of the entire community in which every man had a vote. The theology of the community was a kind of apocalypticism, millenarianism, chiliasm, a rigorously eschatological interpretation of life and history.

Apocalyptic has been called spoiled prophecy. The prophetic books of the Old Testament envisage the fulfillment of the purpose of God in history in the normal development of this world. The apocalyptic writings of the Old and New Testaments and their respective apocryphal additions look forward to the end of history, the rule of this world, in cataclysm, and to the advent of a supermundane kingdom of God beyond history. Millenarianism is the belief in the advent of this kingdom as the fulfillment of time — the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20 during which holiness is to be triumphant throughout the world, when Christ the anointed Messiah will reign on earth with his saints. ....

In immediate expectation of the apocalypse great possessions, status, power, become meaningless, and the chiliastic, millenarian community practices a strict community of goods, the sharing of voluntary poverty. Labor is reduced to its simplest terms — to the agricultural labor of the early village community and its attendant necessary crafts, all made easier by the technology taken from the dominant — and doomed — society. These three characteristics of the Essene community at Qumran were certainly not original. Many aspects of their theology, the coming war of the Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, for instance, are to be found in Persian religion. But Qumran is now the community about which we know not just the most, but in fact a great deal. The existence of similar communities throughout the Near East around the time of the Christian era is still largely speculative. Whatever their antecedents, these outstanding characteristics of the Essenes were to remain the distinguishing marks of almost every communalist sect from then on, and were, in a secularized form, to be perpetuated in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, utopian, communist, anarchist, and socialist.

Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish neo-platonic (more or less) philosopher who wrote in the first decades of the Christian era, gives the earliest accounts of the Essenes in his book Quod Omnis Probis Liber Sit and in the Apologia pro Judaeis. The latter work is lost but the Essene passage is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea. Philo says in the former:


The Essenes are totally dedicated to the worship of God. They do not offer animal sacrifice. They flee the cities and live in villages. Mostly they work in the fields. Others practice peaceful crafts. They do not hoard money or buy and rent land. They live without goods or property. They never make weapons or any objects which might be turned to evil purpose. They engage in no commerce. They have no slaves and condemn slavery. They avoid metaphysics, logic, and all philosophy except ethics which they study in the divinely given ancestral laws of the Jews. Every seventh day they keep holy and do no work but spend their time in religious assemblies seated strictly according to their rank, and listen to the exposition of their sacred books explained according to the ancient symbolical system. They study piety, holiness, justice, the sacred law, and the rules of their order, all leading to the love of God, of virtue, and of men, to which ends their lives are completely devoted. They refuse to take oaths and never lie. They believe that God is the cause only of good, never of evil. They treat all men with equal kindness and live together in a communal way. No one man owns his house. Their homes are always open to visiting members. They keep one purse and one budget. They eat together in a common meal and take their clothes from a common store. They care for the sick, the young, and the aged.....

Philo ends this account with four paragraphs of diatribe against women, marriage, and children which are usually assumed to reflect his own attitude, not that of the Essenes. Some paragraphs of his description apparently describe life in the communities of the order; others that of associates like Franciscan tertiaries who live in the world.

In De Vita Contemplativa, which is doubtfully attributed to Philo, there occurs a description of an Egyptian community similar to the Essenes — the Therapeutae. They lived in Alexandria, each member in a separate hut, with a tiny chapel for prayer, something like the arrangement of the medieval Carthusians, and met at sunrise and sunset for community prayer, and once a day for a common meal"

Jesus said (in saying 108 from the Gospel of Thomas):

"Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person." The 'hidden things' were not in his religion, they were in his heart. Those who would interpret for us would say they know what he meant. I say if they have lived his life and done what he did then they have a leg to stand on.

I recommend reading The Gospel of Thomas by Howard Bloom. The codes and intellectual systems of the times Gnosticism developed are not covered well in this article but I agree the Nag Hammadi finds are more important spiritually than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"The Gnostic Apostle Thomas: "Twin" of Jesus

Gospel of Thomas

The Gnostic Apostle Thomas: Chapter 23

One December day in 1945, far up the Nile Valley, two Egyptian peasants were looking for a local variety of crumbly nitrate rock used as fertilizer. Amid the scree at the foot of the cliff bordering the valley, they came across a large jar, about a meter tall, hidden by a boulder. Inside they found a collection of ancient leather-bound books or codices. The spot where the books were found is within a few miles of the site of an early monastery, established by the founder of Christian monasticism in Egypt, Pachomius. Nag Hammadi, a nearby village , has given this remarkable collection its name.

The Find Near Nag Hammadi

Mohammed Ali, one of the finders, wrapped the books in a tunic and carried them home on his camel. He was involved in a blood feud between clans; his father, a night watchman, had earlier killed an intruder in the fields he was guarding, and a kinsman of the dead man had killed Ali's father. And Mohammed Ali, with his brothers, had in turn hacked to death the murderer of their father, and had eaten his heart. {A common blood ritual amongst barbaric members of the Judaeo/Christian/Islamic cultus, it was brought to North America very early in the development of this cult by Rome.}

Their victim's father was the local sheriff. He was an outsider in the neighborhood and unpopular among the local peasants, who refused to testify against the killers of his son. At the time of his literary find, however, Mohammed Ali was being closely watched by the police and his house was frequently searched for weapons. He decided the ancient books he had just uncovered would be safer with the local Coptic priest, whose brother-in-law, an itinerant teacher, took one book to Cairo and showed it to the authorities dealing with antiquities.

For the next quarter of a century, the collection was scattered in various ways. The finders' mother used part of one codex as kindling for her cooking fire. Most books fell into the hands of opportunistic dealers. One important codex reached psychologist Carl Jung in Switzerland. The Egyptian government eventually gathered them all under one roof, in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Rivalries among scholars of different nationalities, the French-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Nasser's determination to get rid of foreign cultural influences -- all combined to delay a cooperative approach to reproduction and translation of the codices. At last an international effort was organized under the auspices of UNESCO and Egypt and under the leadership of an American scholar, James Robinson. The team made facsimile copies of the texts generally available to scholars. Translations into modern languages began to appear. It was a find more important, for students of the New Testament, than the much better known ones at Qumran in Palestine, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Nag Hammadi Library consists of fifty-two texts or "tractates" written in Coptic on papyrus and gathered in thirteen volumes, twelve of which have separate leather bindings. Forty of the texts had previously been unknown to modern scholars. Most of the writings are of a Gnostic character. Scraps of paper found in the binding of eight codices bear dates indicating that the books were made in the mid-fourth century, and at least one of these clearly appears to have come from a monastery. Efforts to date the books more precisely continue. In general, it can be said the collection dates from about the middle of the fourth century. The Coptic texts could be many years earlier and the originals (probably written in Greek or Aramaic) from which the Coptic translations were made could have been still earlier.

The origin of the collection remains to some extent speculative, but the general setting can be reconstructed with considerable confidence. Theodosius, the Roman emperor in Constantinople late in the fourth century, was determined to stamp out paganism and Christian groups that were held by the bishops then dominant to be heretical. Christians, long the victims of persecution, were now at the other end of the stick. It was now the policy of the churches enjoying imperial protection to destroy writings not consistent with their own views.

Toward the end of the century, Alexandria became a particular target of heresy-hunters' zeal. (Their main concern at the time was the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus, although divine, was not equal with the Father). About the year 391 Roman soldiers destroyed the temple of Serapis in Alexandria. They pillaged and burned, once more, the famous Alexandrian library. In the year 367 the Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, in his annual Easter letter to his churches, condemned heretics and their "apocryphal books to which they attribute antiquity and give the name of saints." He listed the books that would form the New Testament canon: "In these books alone the teaching of piety is proclaimed. Let no one add or subtract from them." The head of the Pachomian monasteries had the letter translated into Coptic.

This was the century when Epiphanius said he had driven eighty libertine Gnostics out of Alexandria. And in the same or following century, an Egyptian Christian named Shenute warned against an apocryphal gospel: "There are some who want to confound you, changing the gospel of Christ . . . . He who says 'I know' because he reads apocryphal books, is greatly ignorant."

We can suppose that monks of a Gnostic bent, far up the Nile, would take steps to save their own libraries from heresy-hunters. In any event, some group hid an impressive collection of books, mainly Gnostic in character, in a large jar and placed it in a cave in a cliffside -- probably a pharaoh's tomb that had been looted long before. There it reposed for sixteen centuries until discovered by the Ali brothers. Some students of these matters, assuming that Pachomian monasteries were steadfastly orthodox, suggest that monks were getting rid of heretical works by burying them. Leather-bound codices, however, were rare and precious at the time these were hidden and destruction by burning or other means, not preservation by concealment, was the usual way of dealing with writings deemed unacceptable. To bury was to save.

Up to the time of the find at Nag Hammadi most of what was known about the various Gnostic sects had come from their enemies, from early church fathers who wanted to stamp out what they regarded as dangerous and threatening aberrations from their views of what constituted true Christianity. Most writings of the Gnostics themselves had been destroyed or lost. Now and then a fragment would surface, but for the most part scholars trying to reconstruct Gnostic beliefs and texts had to rely on accounts given by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, and other early church fathers hostile to the Gnostic systems that they were describing.

The Nag Hammadi library marks a dramatic change. It brings a relatively huge addition to the "fragments of a faith forgotten," as the sparse Gnostic materials earlier available have been called. The collection will provide grist for scholarly mills for generations to come. Within a few decades of the discovery a large body of scholarly literature emerged, and it grows apace.

Much of the specialized study of Gnosticism has been concerned with trying to find the movement's origins, with emphasis on the interrelationships of texts that seem to tie the movement to various trends and known writings, or genres of writings, in Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, mystery religions, early Christianity, Greco-Egyptian religious movements, the religions of India, and Persian Zoroastrianism.

Some scholars find roots of Gnosticism earlier than the time of Christ, some think the movement arose in the first century A.D., some later. All can agree that the peak period of its Christian variety came in the second and third centuries.

Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas (to which I have referred only glancingly earlier in these pages) is one of the most striking of the documents found at Nag Hammadi. Many scholars date its origins to about the middle of the second century; others would date it much earlier, perhaps to the middle or late first century. (We will want, later, to explore this difference.) The book is not, in the familiar sense of biblical gospel, a narrative of the life and passion of Jesus as well as a record of his teachings. Rather, it is a collection of logia or sayings -- aphorisms, words of wisdom, proverbs, parables -- purportedly recorded by his closest disciple and confidant, Thomas. In many cases they are close to the sayings attributed to him in the canonical gospels, but often tantalizingly different in wording and nuance from them. Many are entirely different from anything found in the canon.

The only connection among the Sayings, at first glance, is that one often has a catch word found in the preceding one. (For example, the term "little children" may be repeated from one Saying to the next.) Perhaps this chain was used as an aid to memory, just as in ordinary conversation one topic leads to another ("That reminds me . . ."). If the Gospel is read as a Christian Gnostic document, Gnostic motifs and themes will be readily recognized.

About half of the sayings, as already noted, have no parallels in the New Testament, and several of these are at the heart of the mystical element in the Thomas literature. Scholars' classifications vary. Hans Jonas identified about 35 Sayings of the 114 as having no counterpart in the New Testament, and about 25 others as only "faint echoes" of canonical sayings. Twenty or more are almost identical, and about 30 loosely parallel, to New Testament material.

The Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas is apparently a translation from the Greek; some fragments of a version in that language, dating to about A.D. 200, were discovered in Egypt early in the twentieth century. Some scholars think that these Sayings were originally written in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic that was the language of Jesus and his followers. The fascinating possibility thus arises that the Sayings are closer to the words originally ascribed to him than those, translated into Greek, that are found in the canonical New Testament gospels.

In other words, they may be even older than, or at least as old as, the source of Jesus-sayings known to scholars as "Q" ( for Quelle , or Source, in German), on which Matthew and Luke are believed to have drawn to supplement those found in Mark . And some of the Sayings have parallels in John , whose author did not draw on Q. (Q has never been found as a separate corpus of written sayings. Scholars have deduced its existence and contents, as a supposed collection of Jesus-sayings preserved in early oral tradition, from the available texts of the synoptic gospels -- Mark, Matthew , and Luke .)"


gnosis.org/thomasbook/ch23.html

In this link to a book addressing gnosis and apocryphal books we have an Appendix with many things which give insight to prior beliefs upon which much has been built into Christianity. The Romans did not have far to go in creating new myths all they had to do was take the extreme nonsense of less than sane practitioners of many systems. They could have chosen better things but they needed people to live in fear, and to pay them money for protecting their souls.

/books.google.ca/books?id=swL...tic%22&f=false


It is fair to call any wise person an ecumenicist and humanist. The Gnostic revivalists are ecumenical but there are some 'elements' of apocalypse thinking and having to be something before being accepted into a hereafter of purpose. I prefer to think the wise people like Carl Jung would say we all are perfecti (As the Cathars did) if we work at it, and all are worthy of acceptance without some test for having sinned. So when I see Jung being termed a Gnostic I agree and disagree. http://www.religioustolerance.org/gnostic4.htm

"The "Lost Gospels" refer to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, both discovered in the 1940s. The Nag Hammadi Library consists of writings found by two peasants who unearthed clay jars in 1945 in upper Egypt. These did not appear in English for 32 years, because the right to publish was contended by scholars, politicians, and antique dealers. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in clay jars in Palestine by a goatherder in 1947, weathered similar storms. The first team of analysts were mostly Christian clergy, who weren't anxious to share material that frightened church leaders. As Dr. Hoeller shows, they rightly feared the documents would reveal information that might detract from unique claims of Christianity. Indeed, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library both contradict and complement accepted tenets of the Old and New Testaments.

As to the connection with Jung, Dr. Hoeller states, "Jung knew that the one and only tradition associated with Christianity that regarded the human psyche as the container of the divine-human encounter was that of the Gnostics of the first three centuries of our era. For this reason he called for a renewed appreciation of this ancient tradition, and particularly for a return to the Gnostic sense of God as an inner directing and transforming presence." Dr. Hoeller goes on in his preface, "His sympathetic insight into the myths, symbols, and metaphors of the Gnostics, whom by his own admission he regarded as long-lost friends, continues as the brightest beacon of our day...""

www.amazon.com/dp/0835606465/...2Fgnostic4.htm

[Peter Kirby]

Here is just one small thread - the links or urls require some work due to rules here.

Your links work now.

[Robert Baird]

Dear Peter

Thanks.

Here is a little more about how many lies are told. In the case of most alchemists (Pythagoras was definitely one and his Therapeutae are at least hermeticists) they would be subject to heresy trials so they would have to hide inside the church or the church made them work for them (Da Vinci for example).

Mircae Eliade take alchemy back to a million and more years ago. It is the Q along with the Bairds who recounted it and it's history. Langue D'Oc is Langue do Occamy (Alchemy) as one example in many millennia I detail. I can provide many so-called experts who deny Aquinas was an alchemist working another alchemist's work into the church dogma - or else see his lover Albertus Magnus get more than merely de-frocked.

This next author was a Masonic linguist whose book took me 20 years to research completely enough to re-write it; as my Ogham mentors asked of me. //books.google.ca/books?id=YOG...esa%22&f=false It starts at this juncture addressing one of the three laws - As Above, So Below or the Dictum of Hermes.

In a book on Aquinas (The Dumb Ox) I recall denials that he was an alchemist. I enjoyed de-constructing that stupidity. Here we have a church group (New Advent) being honest in this matter.

"Henry IV of England exhorted the learned men of his kingdom to study alchemy, and pay off the debts of the country by discovering the philosopher's stone. In the sixteenth century practically all rulers patronized alchemists.

Many clerics were alchemists. To Albertus Magnus, a prominent Dominican and Bishop of Ratisbon, is attributed the work "De Alchimia", though this is of doubtful authenticity. Several treatises on alchemy are attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. He investigated theologically the question of whether gold produced by alchemy could be sold as real gold, and decided that it could, if it really possess the properties of gold (Summa Theologiæ II-II.77.2). A treatise on the subject is attributed to Pope John XXII, who is also the author of a Bull "Spondent quas non exhibent" (1317) against dishonest alchemists. It cannot be too strongly insisted on that there were many honest alchemists. Chemists have never given up the belief that the transmutation of elements might yet be effected, and recent work in radio-activity goes to prove its possible accomplishment in the case of radium and helium."

The site is Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat as we see here.

"About this page

APA citation. Sloane, T. (1907). Alchemy. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved April 22, 2015 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01272b.htm

MLA citation. Sloane, Thomas O'Conor. "Alchemy." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 22 Apr. 2015

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Thomas M. Barrett. Dedicated to the memory of Rev. James G. Anderson, C.S.C., Ph.D.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York."
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01272b.htm

Then we have a person with my name writing a nice article touching on many issues of merit, including Thomas attacking his own order.

/www.slate.com/articles/arts/b...se_lost.2.html

[Robert Baird]

This link says alchemists could not transmute metals and it does not know that chemistry was not how it was done. It would occur by attunement with the ingredients in conjunction with psycho-kinesthetic movement of atomic structures. Shamans galore attuned with plants to learn how to make medicines - still do. Christopher Dunn says ultrasonic drills made the fitted rock of the so-called sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid. Could amplified sound do what amplified light (lasers) can do. I think Archimedes also worked with re-directing and amplifying light and his burning lenses were used as weapons in a battle for Syracuse on Siciliy. I doubt he could have generated enough heat to cause the vitrification of rock as seen in places from Edinburgh to Sacsayhuaman, that required nuclear fission or Brown's Gas (Like Napalm - Greek Fire). I had that debate on a cell diffusion forum and got the support of a professor of chemistry.

The paper also has thoughts on de-materialization leading to a most fantastic potential - the creation of a small black hole. I have heard this has been done and that it is a way to accelerate space vehicles as one places the black hole in the direction one wishes to travel and gets sucked into it's energy vortex.

But this link has a lot of creative insights on free energy or the disposal of atomic waste through transmutation.

/www.padrak.com/vesperman/Radi...ds_5.30.14.pdf

Since Ernest Rutherford ‘split the atom’ in 1919, we have known that bombarding atoms with particles such as neutrons or protons can convert one element into another. This generally requires nuclear reactors or particle accelerators with kilometres of tunnels and huge superconducting magnets, but Ledingham and colleagues have used a laser to do the job. True, the laser is a huge one. Called Vulcan, and housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, it is the most powerful laser in the world and the size of a small hotel. But laser technology is progressing fast, and within 5 years lasers nearly as powerful as Vulcan could be small enough to fit on a table top. And this could bring the power of transmutation to the masses.

Ledingham and his colleagues have used Vulcan to add protons to gold nuclei to create mercury. But there is more to the new alchemy than turning one heavy metal into another. In a paper accepted by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, the team holds out the tantalizing possibility of neutralizing dangerous radioactive waste. They used Vulcan to convert iodine-129, an isotope that remains active for millions of years, into iodine-128, which decays in minutes.


To carry out the transmutation, the researchers fired a picosecond laser pulse at a gold target. The intense energy of the laser beam blasts the gold atoms into a plasma of free nuclei and electrons, which then emit gamma rays as they pass through the rest of the target. These intense gamma rays collide with the atoms of iodine-129, shaking the nuclei so violently that a neutron is squeezed out.

Transmuting nuclear waste has long been considered an attractive way of dealing with the ugly by-products of nuclear power. Researchers in France, which uses nuclear energy to supply 80 per cent of its electricity, are obligated by law to investigate transmutation. The US also has an active research programme into this kind of alchemy, and the British government is considering whether to start one. Until now, the only options have been modified versions of nuclear reactors, in which neutrons released during fission collide with the unwanted isotopes and break them apart. But many anti-nuclear groups see this as a ploy for reviving nuclear power."

The story of Eugene Mallove is a story of a man who gave his life to help mankind and for it he was assassinated by the Nuclear Lobby. He was killed shortly before he was to testify to a Senate Department of Energy or congressional hearing on Cold Fusion; which took him years to arrange. There are many such stories and no doubt some of them are fictional. I followed this one intently for a decade or so - I am near to certain of what I say. This site may overstate the case but it is worth reading as a starting point. It is easy to get a person killed if you tell drug-addicted people someone has money and will be found at a certain place at a specific time. /www.pureenergysystems.com/obi...EugeneMallove/

And we must not forget Tesla - the father of free energy. /www.free-energy.ws/nikola-tesla.html

Is it true that energy saved is free energy? Think about that and how much energy is used to counteract gravity. Einstein was ridiculed for proposing negative gravity and schools certainly weren't talking about it (or any real science to speak of) when my nephews were in school.

/www.nytimes.com/2001/04/03/us...e-gravity.html

But the major power source Tesla was working on is a Unified Force field leading to dimensional energy tap-ins which he said caused him to see past, and future simultaneously. In my book on him I explain his work on the attention point to overcome deep psychological and even matter dysfunction. Tesla used the Earth Grid and air or ether forces - he used what works and did not abide stupid academic me-too think. The possibility of energy sources in ancient times that no historian working for the paradigm will discuss grows more realistic every day. Dr. Don Robins described megaliths as macrochips - he was a very accomplished person in archaeology whose inventions bring us better means to date artifacts and many other things. The Dragon Project researchers included Cambridge mathematicians using magnetometers. It is near to certain that attunement sciences and metaphysics was more developed before the Carolina Bays event destroyed most cities and killed most humans. Today you will hear scientists working on Gravitational Wave research say metaphysics is more real than old physics. The pentagon dodecahedron allowed major energy flows through the megaliths - it had twelve major center points and our Mr. Brown has calculated three of them. Ivan Sanderson added more and I think Mt. Yamato or another part of the Antarctic is one as well. Everyone agrees (most real thinkers) that the Great Pyramid was central to it but it was built long after the people with the real knowledge had used smaller structures there to affect many things including advanced psychic ability. In the research on Pine Gap we have submarines with antennae being powered at a great distance - VRIL antennae receiving power from the Megalithic power plant could do likewise. Indeed we have a modern day effort to use the Earth Energy Grid. Tesla probably would roll over in his grave. The Pentagon dodecahedron and Earth Energy Grid is now a lot more powerful.

/www.millennium-ark.net/stans....ne_Gap_CC.html

It is very easy to read a little and learn a lot but still know nothing to speak of.

To Keep Silent (Tacere in the Law of the Magi - Scrire, Potere, Audere, Tacere) has many requests it makes of the ego, and yet it no sooner is apprehended than it must be broken and no more. At least that is how it was for me, because I answered the call of Karma as an old soul with a task and legacy to fulfill. I was told that by many mystics and psychics who these mystics knew who told them about me. But I also read that the advent of Atomic Physics also necessitated that many others like me would have to prepare life on Earth for the dangers far beyond the nuclear threat. Those dangers far exceed any holocaust borne by mushroom clouds. Including spirit in one's life will be more difficult if spirit is individuated and soul is collective.

Full text of "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages - Manly P Hall"

/archive.org/.../The_Secret_T...ges_-_Manly_P_...



This school also first expounded the theory of celestial harmonics or "the music of ...... The fixed zodiac is described as an immense dodecahedron, its twelve ...... the regular pentagon necessitating a rather elaborate application of Pythagoras' ...... the Hiramic legend to have been invented for that purpose by Elias Ashmole, ..."

You might not be able to access the book above due to "issues with it's content" - you might ask what those issues are? I hope you refer to the last post and my introductory remarks which follow again. The meaning behind the Logos and pentagon dodecahedron would get you summary execution in the era of Plato if you spilled the beans. When (IF) did that end?

[Robert Baird]

Adding to the work of Mary Rose D'Angelo in Vatican II we see some stories of women had to be covered over or made less obvious. The Vatican II research sought to place women in an important position and undo what has been done to women in the horror show called religious and uplifting. I think Vatican II was even open to Teilhardism as the present Pope is - but in between Teilhard was treated most foul in places like the Catholic Encyclopedia.

No truly adept or spiritual person can diminish women and make that lack of appreciation for our sisters and mothers a central part of any advanced system of thought. But that does not stop deviates from fomenting lies as Augustine certainly id. Equality (Egalite), Liberte (Liberty or Freedom) et Fraternite (Brotherhood) should be a revived cry for change. Alienation and alien intervention theories born in religion should be put on the trash heap and not promoted all over the media. Yes, there are extraterrestrial advanced lifeforms of innumerable species but there is nothing done on Earth which man did not develop.

What follows is an old story which may even pre-date what Christianity thinks is it's roots. Like Beowulf or Thoth we may never know how important women were before man began to need to control them, and write words put in the mouths of g-ds to make a new order which has been a scourge on humanity. My fellow researcher named Sal put the following together.

Thanks for the link!

The Storie of Asneth: Introduction
by: Russell A. Peck (Editor)
from: Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse 1991
Publisher Location: Kalamazoo, Michigan
Publisher Name: Medieval Institute Publications
Publication Date: 1991

Anyone reading this please note a copy of the details for the manuscript, Ellesmere 26.A.13 containing The Middle English Storie of Asneth location - for viewing is at The Regents of the University of California.
To view some of the images, Digital Scriptorium Huntington Catalog Database

* An original Latin romance of Joseph and Aseneth found in two Cambridge manuscripts, Corpus Christi 424 and Corpus Christi 288 from Christ Church, Canterbury.

From the The Storie of Asneth: Introduction by: Russell A. Peck (Editor)





This narrative tells of Jesus eating ears of corn during the flight into Egypt, a passage that suggests a pleasant inverse typology of the Joseph-Asneth narrative where, instead of Joseph as the Christ figure who supplies grain to Israel, Jesus is a Joseph figure going to Egypt to find grain. Further details located at The Aseneth Home Page by Dr Mark Goodacre Duke University in connection with a University of Birmingham course focusing on Joseph and Aseneth.





Welcome to The Aseneth Home Page, the web site devoted to Joseph and Aseneth, a Pseudepigraphical tale told about the Biblical Patriarch Joseph and his Egyptian wife Aseneth. You will find here an introduction, translation, bibliography and links. The site was created in 1999 to coincide with a University of Birmingham course. It was last updated in October 2013 to include links to several newly available texts and translations. Some brief comments from The Storie of Asneth: Introduction

The origins of this manuscript go back into the Lynne family daughters of Alice and William (a wool merchant and grocer of London), Margaret and Beatrice.

Beatrice married Avery Cornburgh (yoman of the Kynges chaumbre)
Margaret married John Shirley (amanuensis, publisher, book dealer, literary gossip, and founder of England's first important lending library)
Note there is also a suggusted connection to (lifetime, childhood friend) Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate.

One might wonder why such a book was "gifted" to two females, if unaware that ladies use to gather in what today is known as "book clubs" and had libraries of their own to share within their circle of friends.

Here again we find the names of more ladies inscribed in the book
Elizabeth Gaynesford married Nicholas Gaynsford (Usher to the Chamber of Edward IV and Queen, Elizabeth Woodville)
Anne Schyrley
Margery Hungerford
the Coton's and Francis families

Another manuscript that pops up is Findern Manuscript. Although not found the list of names of the females suggested to be located in the side margins, this appears to be an interesting review of the Thisbe Out of Context: Chaucer's Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript by Kara A. Doyle, which again examines women's knowledge of literature along with their lively interpretations/debate/etc on women's roles, etc.





Most recently, two scholars, Carol Meale and Nicola McDonald, have drawn conclusions from the contents of the Findern MS about women's reactions to the Legend of Good Women. McDonald suggests that the women in Chaucer's contemporary audience, the noblewomen of the Ricardian court, were sophisticated readers accustomed to the conventions of debate poetry and the role-playing involved in courtly pastimes, but that the fifteenth-century provincial women who read the Findern MS, isolated from this "ludic" atmosphere and lacking in such sophistication, would not have understood or appreciated Chaucer's ironies. For Meale, similarly, the insertion of the Legend of Thisbe into the Findern MS indicates that some readers may have been "underplaying the controversial and dialogic aspect" of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and interpreting Thisbe's story "divorced from its narrative frame . . . simply as a further expression of the vicissitudes suffered by loving women." Both scholars conclude that "provincial" fifteenth-century women were not in a position to appreciate Chaucer's ambiguous relation to and humorous commentary on the discourses of fin' amors and medieval misogyny.

The contents of the Findern MS -- the context in which Thisbe's story was placed -- suggest otherwise. The selection and juxtaposition of texts in several quires of this manuscript reveal a fifteenth-century female reading community familiar with the "ludic" aspect of late fourteenth-century literature: that is, its humorous give-and-take in debates about the value of service in love, about misogynist views of women, and about the degree to which women, in particular, should take the game of love seriously. The Findern MS texts that allude to this latter debate construct the sort of sophisticated relationship Chaucer himself anticipated between the female reader and male fin' amors discourse, in which the love object's traditional pose of Daungier metamorphoses into a female hermeneutic of detachment and skepticism. In the light of these patterns, the Legend of Thisbe's place in the manuscript becomes clearer. This context suggests that, to the female interpretive community that created the Findern MS, there were more ways of reading Thisbe than as simply a victim -- and that there is more to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women than irony. Even Wikipedia acknowledges, Findern Manuscript





The Findern Manuscript (CUL MS Ff.1.6) is a paper codex written entirely in Middle English and compiled in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by a series of gentry who were neighbors in the countryside of Derbyshire. A list of its major texts creates a “greatest hits” of fourteenth-century secular love literature; however the volume also contains around two dozen anonymous lyrics, which have been added in the blank spaces left at the bottoms of pages and the ends of quires. There are several names and scribal signatures written into the book, including the names of five women Thus, one should not be so quick to assume that such books were taken as examples of a women's role of piety as summarized in an essay written in 1999 by Moira Forbes, Ideal Man versus Ideal Woman in Joseph and Aseneth found in the link above based on a course from University of Birmingham.





..... has disturbing implications for women; that they are incapable of being saved as they are but have to rely upon a man for their salvation. This in turn implies that women are second class people and are somehow more sinful than men.

In Joseph and Aseneth the author ensures that the ideal man will always win, for no matter what she might gain a woman loses her independence, having to depend upon a man to become the ideal woman. Obviously, one may have to read and study more on this subject/story to grasp the significance that Aseneth appears obedient she is equally independent and intelligent when taking in the context of the "Pauline sense of the odor of piety" among other references and details that would lead to other subject matters.

Anyways,





The point is not simply that she is obedient, but that her obedience gives her privileges which she recognizes and claims, privileges which extend not simply to his feet, but to his soul. He may get her when he marries, but she gets him too. He is hers - ``thi soule ys my soule: thu are thn myn owen fere,'' which implies, in effect, ``you are my rib.'' For some ladies





Its plot is thrilling, high-minded and romantic, a story that a young girl would respond to and admire. Of yeah, since this is a Gnostic thread, will leave with one final quote.

(7) Who wrote Aseneth? My friend who created much of this post from a simple link I provided made each point an active link. /www.markgoodacre.org/aseneth/intro.htm


Aseneth is an anonymous work and we have little idea of its origin. We do not even know where it was written. Indeed, we cannot even be sure whether we should think of Aseneth as a Jewish or a Christian book (or neither). Most scholarship this century has taken the work to be Jewish, but again Ross Kraemer has challenged the consensus and has argued that it may well have been composed by a Christian (or Christians), tracing connections with works like Acts of Thomas.

[outhouse]

I have not made anything up.

LOL what you don't make up is a better question.