King Solomon's Goat. George Willard Bartlett
text of Ezek. 9:4 shows that the sign of Jehovah was the Signa Tau, or the cross of Taurus, the bull, with which the elect were sealed in their foreheads. In the Enchiridion, a prayer book and book of magic credited to Pope Leo III, he says: “By this sign
The male emblem, or triangle, placed in the circle of Asherah makes the Three in One, the profound and esoteric mystery forever hidden from the profane and vulgar. That is the sacred quartet, those are the idols we worship.
Turn to Siva, Stand. Dic., and you will see that he has stolen all the pious Christian symbols, although he existed for ages before the Christians. In one hand is the circle and in another hand a trident or fleur de lys, a male emblem. Around his neck is a large rosary or stole. Thrusting his male head through this female emblem is a symbol of life and a saving rite. Putting his hand through a rosary is just as effective. We can trace the spotless lineage of our beloved religion back through the dim vistas of time to a very archaic and rotten ancestry.
In both the Christian and pagan symbolism the oval in which the saints and gods do stand is often represented as composed of roses and constitutes a rosary. The horseshoe brings good luck because it is identical with the cave, the arch and the grove and is the sacred emblem of the goddess Mary or Astarte. Both Buddha and Christ are represented as standing in the horseshoe or Royal Arch. I conclude that the Masonic Holy Royal Arch and the oval above the church altar, in which the Virgin stands, represent the Grove that Manasseh set up in the House of the Lord, 2 Kings, 21, and that Josiah burnt at the brook Kidron, 2 Kings, 23:6. The stole, worn by the priests, is equivalent to, and has all the mystic powers of, the cross ansata. It is well named “stole”, as the early Christians stole it from the pagan worship.
Serapis, the Egyptian god, is bedecked and bedizened with all the Christian emblems. He holds the crook of the Good Shepherd in one hand and the cross ansata in the other. He has the head and horns of a bull, showing that he is the son of the cow Hathor or Mary. And over his head are the Masons’ marks, the square and the eye, showing that he is in good standing in his lodge in Hell, for he, like christ, is Lord of the Underworld.
Refer to Vishnu, Stand. Dic., and you will see that pagan god wearing all the above emblems. He is christ and came as Rama in the sign of the Ram and as Krishna in the sign of Pisces. Turn to Krishna, and you will see the Hindu Madonna and christ that we kidnapped.
In the Sun. Am. Magazine, Aug. 29, 1910, we see a picture of Isis mourning at the bier of Osiris. At Egyptian funerals they assured the dead of eternal life by raising the symbol of Isis, the circle or rosary above the body. You will see that the head of the deceased at the wake is surrounded by male emblems, which gross symbols are now replaced in the present civilization by candles. You will see that Isis is bowing down before the Tree of Life, and that she has at hand a basket of perforated cakes, which she is about to offer to the Tree of Life, which tree is called Osiris or Baal or Moloch or Buddha or Yahveh or Iao or Siva or Jove according to the country in which the religion is perpetrated. If you place a wreath on a dead man’s stomach and seven candles around his head, he is no longer a meet candidate for Hell, but an heir of eternal glory. If you stick a cross through the wreath, it is a through ticket to the seventh heaven, and you may be assured that he will go through purgatory a-humping.
CHAPTER IV.
The Sabbatic Goat or God of the Sabbath.
When the sun entered the sign of Capricorn, it was reborn as, or christ came as the goat, that individual on whom the Jews used to load all their sins and then drive him forth into the wilderness. They sacrificed goats on the altar because the goat was one of the ancient redeemers. Caesar says of Egyptian sacrifices: “Imprecations were uttered over the head of the expiatory victim, around whose horns a piece of byblus was rolled. The animal was generally led to some barren region sacred to Typhon. It is in this custom that lies the origin of the scapegoat of the Jews, who, when the ass-headed god was rejected by the Egyptians, began sacrificing to another deity, the red heifer.”
It was claimed by Madam Blavatsky and Elephas Levi that the hermaphrodite Goat of Mendes, or Baphomet, was anciently an object of worship and adoration by the mystic societies and at the Witches’ Sabbath. In Mysteries of Magic, 7 and 75, the author thus describes a Witches’ Sabbath: “Approach stealthily this cross roads among the rocks. A hoarse and funeral trumpet is heard, lurid torches burn on every side, a disorderly assembly surges around an empty seat. All look around in expectation, then suddenly fall prostrate and mutter: ‘He is here, ’tis himself.’ A goat-headed prince comes forward with bounds, he ascends the throne, turns around and stooping presents his back to the audience, which everyone approaches, black taper in hand, to salute and to kiss. Then he stands up with a discordant laugh and distributes to his favorites gold, secret instructions, occult medicines and poisons.”
The Goat of Mendes is pictured by Elephas Levi as a regular god. He wears the male emblem on his head like all gods in good standing and holds up three fingers, and has the double triangle in his forehead, and the caduceus, or male and female emblems, on his stomach. With one hand he coagulates or creates, and with the other he dissolves or destroys.
“Let us say boldly and loudly that all the inferior initiates of the occult sciences and the betrayers of the Great Arcanum have adored, do and will always adore that which is signified by the frightful figure of the Sabbatic Goat. Yes in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the ancient orders of the Templars adored Baphomet.”—Elephas Levi. It will be seen by the chart that the Masonic coat of arms, consisting of the four zodiacal beasts, is supported on either side by the goat god Pan.
Pan, the Good Shepherd, the son of Deus, with the horns and feet of a goat, is the same as the Devil or christ. At the Witches’ Sabbath in England, the women made manikins, or images of men, of clay or wax, and these they worshipped and played with. And when these images were properly magnetized, they could perform miracles therewith and summon up demons from the abyss. If they possessed sufficient will power and knew the occult and secret form of words to use, they could play that the manikin was an enemy, and then stick him through the heart with a needle, and the next morning the enemy would be dead. If their magical power was sufficiently potent, they could summon a satyr or subordinate goat god to take the place of the manikin and consummate the Sabbatical marriage ceremony. Their spells were said to be sufficiently powerful to reduce a human being to the primordial protoplasm, and then cause it to again pursue the path of evolution through the cell, the blastoderm, the devil-fish and all the other beasts constituting eternity’s great highway by which the soul walks down. This is similar to the unavoidable cycle, the circle of necessity, the inexorable doom of the sacred mysteries of the Serpents’ Catacombs of Egypt.
The countersign of the Witches’ Sabbath was the closed hand with the thumb between the first and second fingers pointing downward to the abyss. The meeting place was lighted only by the altar fire, where the human sacrifice sizzled to attract the phantoms and ghosts. And the devotees, singing mystic songs, danced hand in hand in a circle around the god Pan. They used the holy grail like the churches and mystic societies, and the drafts from this poisonous cup, the singing, the whirling dance and the incense from the altar brought on the oft-times fatal frenzies in which the victims fell shrieking to the ground, as they do among certain Christian sects. They were seized and possessed by foul fiends from the Pit, or elementary spirits, and sometimes by the spirits of serpents that materialized themselves in the writhing human victims and crawled out of the prostrate bodies in plain view of the audience. There in the blackest hour of the night the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water. And each one that drank found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream.—Machen’s House of Souls, 438.
Similar to these convulsionaries are the miserable creatures in Russia afflicted by strange disorders, which people attributed to possession by the Devil. They throng the entrance of cathedrals without daring to