A senseless man has no knowledge, Nor does a stupid man understand this
The tsaddiq* will flourish like the palm tree, He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.[1]
* “righteous man”
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed Witha word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.
There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimeswords have two meanings.
In the tree by the brook, there’s a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it makes me wonder.
Palindrome ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ
(Nipson anomemata me monan opsin, Wash your sins, not only your face)
inscribed in ancient Greek upon a holy water font outside the site of
Saint Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople. The phrase can be read
from left to right or from right to left.[2]
What is your favourite poem or song?
Imagine it being performed by two people. As in a duet.
Now, imagine that each performer begins with the verse at opposite ends – the first and the last – crossing over at the middle verse. Each performs one-half verse alternately, moving up and down, down and up the verses, like rungs on a ladder. Like Jacob’s angels, ascending and descending on their stairway to heaven.
Jacob’s Dream by William Blake (c. 1805, British Museum, London)
What do angels do? Sing psalms (תהילים tehilim, “praises”) to God.
The verses of the poem or song as performed would give birth to new, composite verses, quite different to those appearing in the text as written.
Now, unless the artist has deliberately constructed his poem or song to be performed in this way, these composite verses would likely be nonsensical gibberish.
Oh, say, can you see?
O’er the land of the free
By the dawn’s early light
and the home of the brave!
What so proudly we hailed
Oh, say, does that star
at the twilight’s last gleaming;
-spangled banner yet wave?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
Gave proof through the night
through the perilous fight,
that our flag was still there:
O’er the ramparts we watched
And the rocket’s red glare,
were so gallantly streaming.
the bombs bursting in air.
O’er the land of the free
Oh, say, can you see?
and the home of the brave!
By the dawn’s early light
Oh, say, does that star
What so proudly we hailed
-spangled banner yet wave?
at the twilight’s last gleaming;
Gave proof through the night
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
that our flag was still there:
through the perilous fight,
And the rocket’s red glare,
O’er the ramparts we watched
the bombs bursting in air.
were so gallantly streaming.
A truly clever artist, however, could include hidden meanings within such a work. Sprinkle in a double entendre, a euphemism, a subtle wordplay or two, and he might even succeed in – oh let’s say – mocking his co-performer of the work, without their knowing it.
Psalm 92 is not considered one of the most difficult pieces of poetry in the Psalter. Its vocabulary and syntax are quite clear and its meaning is the subject of a general consensus. Apparently, the poet compares the temporary prosperity of the wicked with the durable experience of divine blessing reserved for the righteous.
Several elements, however, point to an additional and deeper level of meaning. The first is the elusive nature of both the conflict and the protagonists’ identity. The second is the lack of consensus concerning the genre of this song.
This vagueness originates in the singular mixing, in this psalm, of verses of praise (vv. 2-6, 9, 11, 13–16) and of condemnation of the wicked (vv. 7–8, 10, 12).[3]
But one half is cheating, with forked tongue double meanings, and cunningly attacking the other.
Ancient Greek: διάβολοςdiábolos: a slanderer, false accuser
from διαβάλλωdiabállō : “I throw over”, “I throw across”,
“I slander”, “I deceive by false accounts”, “I set at variance” or “I make a quarrel between” from διά (diá, “across”, “through”, “between”) and βάλλω(bállō, “I throw”)
Translation from Hebrew שָׂטָן satan: adversary, opponent
diá (two, double)
from *δισα(disa), from Proto-Indo-European*dwís (related to δίς(dís, “twice”) and δύο(dúo, “two”)) bólos (a throw with a casting net, or dice)
diábolos (devil): a double-thrower
Agent noun from διαβάλλειν diaballein “to slander, attack”
from diá (across, through, divide) and ballein (“to throw” a weapon, e.g. a stone or arrow [or word – CM])
This is exactly what happened in the newly monotheistic temple cult at Jerusalem during the Persian Empire (c. 538–330 BC). Yahweh-worshipping poet-singers from the southern Canaanite region of Edom were integrated into the temple elite by Ezra, the High Priest and Scribe. Their counterparts – or opposites – and the official cultic performers, were Asaphites. According to the book of Ezra, they were descendants of the Jerusalem elite who had been exiled to Babylon in the early sixth century BC.
It has been taught: R. Yosé says . . . “Even though the Torah was not given through [Ezra], through him was given the accepted form of writing and of speech.”
Rabbi says, “The Torah was given in Assyrian characters, and when they signed, it was turned into Raas* characters for them. But when, in the time of Ezra, they attained merit, it was turned into Assyrian characters for them.”
[“Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;] today I declare that I will restore to you double” (Zech. 9:12).
“And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, [from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests]” (Deut. 17:18). This will be in a form of writing [71c] which can be changed.
*Hebrew slang, from Arabic “bujaras” meaning “nuisance”. From Arabic وجع راس (waja3raas) meaning “headache”; cf. Hebrew רֹאשׁ rósh “head”; רָעַשׁ râ‛ash “to shake”, “to quake”.
Geographic distribution of Echis coloratus in Canaan and Sinai.
Unlike the ex-Babylon immigrants, the Edomites had retained their ancient liturgical and musical traditions.
A cult of YHWH in Edom is only elusively mentioned in the Bible.However, the origin of YHWH in Seir/Edom is stated outright (Seir: Deut 32,2; Judg 5,4; Teman/Paran: Hab 3,3), independently of Israelite Yahwism and even preceding it.
[T]his superiority of the musical traditions of the psalmist and his companions fits their identification as Ezrahites because the sons of Zerah were apparently reputed among the Israelites for their cleverness and wisdom (1 Kgs 5,11) [4:31]*and, consequently, for their ability to craft poetic riddles. Their musical tradition is also very ancient. According to Gen 4,19–22, poetry and music are rooted in the lineage of Cain, itself closely related to Edom/Seir. This is why the Ezrahite musicians and poets may deem themselves to be carriers / trustees of the musical and poetic traditions of Canaan.
* This is confirmed by the association of wisdom with Edom in Jer 49,7 and Obad 8.[6]
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a Spring clean* for the May queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
And it makes me wonder.
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all is one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.
Palestine/Arabian saw-scaled viper (Echis coloratus) has a characteristic threat display,
rubbing sections of their body together to produce a “sizzling” שׂ warning sound.
“Why is this script called Ashurit [אשורית A-shur-it]? Because it ascended with the Jewish people from Ashur when they returned from their exile in Babylonia.” (Sanhedrin 22a:2)
L-R: vav or waw (6th letter, value: 6) Shin or Šin (21st letter, value: 300)
Four-tooth Shin feat. on left side of tefillin
represents “the World to Come”
The allegory of the wise and “subtil” (עָרוּם ʻârûwm, shrewd, cunning; pun עָרוֹםʻârôwm,naked, Gen 2:25) serpent in the Garden of Eden, who tempted the first woman with “forbidden fruit”, that makes one ‘wise’ (שָׂכַל sâkal) “as gods” (אֱלֹהִיםʼĕlôhîym), a product of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – in other words, a ‘fruit’ born of the knowledge of how to mix together opposite “voices”, a “sense” voice and an “anti-sense” voice, a Good one and an Evil one, a plus one (𓂻)* and a minus one (𓂽) – will be illuminated in later essays.
* Hieroglyph of feet walking forward 𓂻 : in Egyptian mathematics “make in going”; to square, double (i.e.) to multiplyby oneself … and, esoterically, one’s self. [7]
A History of Mathematical Notations (Florian Cajori)
Ezra’s assimilation of more skillful Edomite poet-singers into the Jerusalem temple cult resulted in intense rivalry with the returned Asaphites.[8] The biblical and later, the rabbinic narrative, insists that these distant descendants of patriarchal twin brothers, Jacob (יַעֲקֹב “heel-catcher”, i.e., usurper, layer of snares; renamed Israel יִשְׂרָאֵל “contender”) and Esau (עֵשָׂו “hairy”, renamed Edom אֱדֹם “red”; compare Adam אָדַם “to be red”, “ruddy”), have shared a long history of acrimonious relations.
[T]he Psalter of songs [reflects] violent conflicts surrounding the question of integrating foreign (Ezrahite) singers in the Jerusalem temple. In this retaliation, the most efficient weapon is probably the ability to compose songs that carry a concealed meaning too subtle to be understood by members of the opponents’ group. By this device, poets may express their superiority, articulate their closeness to YHWH, and mock their opponents.
Such a stratagem seems to be fully in action here. Psalm 92 is a conflictive poem disguised as a piece of liturgy composed for official worship in the temple.
Psalm 92 is not the only biblical poem in which the Ezrahites reference their enemies in the post-exilic community. Briefly expressed scorn by the Ezrahites against their opponents is already identified at the end of Psalm 112, the song which, together with Psalm 111, was apparently composed (again, in complex antiphonal fashion) for their new investiture as cultic singers at the Jerusalem temple…
The contrasting situation (Asaphite singers attacking the Ezrahites) is also identified in the Psalter. In Psalm 14, for example, the opponents (here, the Ezrahites) are called vile hypocrites (pōʿalêy ʾāwen)*, mainly because they are accused of exploiting their new status of cultic singers in the Jerusalem temple for the secret promotion of their own theology at the expense of the Israelite one while having been appointed and supported by the post-exilic community.
The multiple references to the psalmist’s foreign traditions and theology in Psalm 92 indicate that the accusation formulated in Psalm 14,4 is far from unfounded. The verbal violence in this conflict reaches its climax in Psalm 137, a song of Asaphite obedience that explains the reason for appointment of the foreign (Ezrahite) singers in the Jerusalem temple (the loss of musical tradition of the Israelite singers in exile, as noted in vv. 1-6) and immediately afterwards expresses their bitter detestation of the Edomite people, with whom these foreign singers are identified (vv. 7–9):
Remember, YHWH, the children of Edom [on] the day of Jerusalem,
How they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”
Vassal of Babylon [=Edom] doomed to be destroyed,
Blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
And dashes them against the rock!
If the title of the psalm [92] dates from the time of its composition, we may assume that it represents an ultimate stratagem. Disguising this conflicting poem as a psalm devoted to the Sabbath liturgy is a subtle way of inducing its author’s opponents to perform it every week without understanding its genuine content and implications. Indeed, a situation of people devotedly singing a sentence such as “The brutish man cannot know; The stupid cannot understand this” (v. 7) without understanding that it refers specifically to them is a comic demonstration of the rightness of the psalmist who claims his art to be superior to that of his opponents and rivals. The insertion of this song into the Psalter, and even the preservation of the reference to the Sabbath liturgy in the title, reveals the repeated success of such a stratagem, generation after generation.[9]
“Complex antiphony” is the technical term for this mode of poetic or musical performance. It mixes two opposing voices, reciting or singing the same text, but in the inverse order of its verses.
[T]he text of the song divides in two parts, each one sung by another voice. The text of these two parts divides in small antiphonal units designed to be paired during the performance. [..] the homolog fragments from the two parts, once paired as composite verses, yield a coherent composite text displaying structural features characterizing biblical poetry.[10]
Antiphony is alternation between two choirs.This mode of performance is extensively attested in the ancient Near East, especially in cultic context.[..]It would appear from these [biblical] instances that antiphony was also a privileged mode of performance of the cultic songs in the Jerusalem temple—as it has been long argued by many scholars.
When the walls of Jerusalem are consecrated in Neh 12:27–41, singers and musicians form two distinct choirs designated as תּוֹדֹת (todah; “confession”, “thanksgiving”). They perform while walking on/near the city walls, each one in a different direction, finally meeting at the temple where they combine their voices in an apparently antiphonal fashion (vv. 31, 40, 42).[11]
By structuring a composition this way, a skilled creative artist causes his passive text to “give birth” or “bear fruit,” to flower in its active performance. Or, to borrow the ancient Egyptian way with words, to “make [square2] in going” 𓂻 ; to multiplyby oneself. The combined flow of two opposing voices reveals new information that otherwise remains hidden in a normal, linear recital of the verses by a single voice.
Concentric symmetry invests the text of a song with palindromic properties and, especially, the ability to read its verses in both ascendinganddescending order. From the perspective of complex antiphony, this property suggests that Psalm 92 was designed for dialogic performance between a “sense voice” (first choir), which sings the text in ascending order of verses, and an “antisense voice” (second choir) that responds by singing the same text in descending order. Such a pattern, already identified in biblical poetry, has been defined as cross responsa.[12]
Translation as proposed by Amzallag (2017).
“Tormentors” and “counterparts” used for
untranslatable double entendres.
In Psalm 92, the pairing of corresponding verses from the sense and antisense voices yields a series of composite verses (CVs) centering on an echo performance of verse 9 (identified above as the pivotal axis), after which both the ranking and the precedence of paired verses become inverted: 2//16 → 3//15 → 4//14 → 5//13 → 6//12 → 7//11 → 8//10 → 9//9 → 10//8 → 11//7 → 12//6 → 13//5 → 14//4 → 15//3 → 16//2. [..] The only monocolic verse in this song (v. 9) can be paired only with itself, exactly as observed here.
Cancer (Latin: crab): fourth sign of zodiac
Approx. June 22 to July 22 in classical antiquity July 17 +/- 2 days = Sirius’ heliacal rising, herald of Nile inundation Alchemists’ symbol for dissolution. Compare 🝢 in Basil Valentine, A Table of Mediaeval Alchemical Symbols, The Last Will and Testament (1670)
Scholars have identified verse 9, an expression of praise (“You, YHWH, are on high forever”), as the rhetorical center of Psalm 92—the pivotal verse that stresses YHWH’s supremacy and his indifference to the stratagems fomented by the psalmist’s enemies, evoked in the two verses that flank it (vv. 8, 10). This pivotal function of verse 9 is confirmed by its position at the exact numerical center of the song (52 words before and after) and by the central (fourth) mention among the seven mentions of the name YHWH.[13]
The selection of verse number 9 (Hebrew ninthletter ṭet ט “good”, from Phœnician/Paleo-Hebrew ⊗ “wheel”) as pivotal would seem to be of great significance. Observe that the first verse, “A psalm. A song; for the Sabbath day” is titular. Its four Hebrew words are not included in the 52 before/after verse 9. Meaning, the turning point verse 9 is really verse 8 (khet or ḥet ח , from Paleo-Hebrew , Phœnician , “courtyard”). This also means that there are only fifteen verses. Not sixteen.
The fifteenth Hebrew letter samekh ס derives from the Phœnician and Paleo-Hebrew “pillar”, “support”, “stability”; from the ancient Egyptian “djed”. Their symbol 𓊽 represents the spinal column of the demiurge creator god Ptah; later, the underworld and afterlife supreme god of the dead, Osiris.
But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.[14]
In gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet and Vav, (9+6) to avoid the normal construction Yud and Hei (10+5) which spells a name of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Tet and Zayin (9+7) instead of Yud and Vav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of the Tetragrammaton.
Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah.[15]
Teth – Ktav Ashurit (“Assyrian”) script
In the Torah there are many applications to the “law of similars.” One of them is that in order to kill a snake you must be like a snake.
In gematria, Mashiach [“Messiah”, “Anointed”] (משיח ,358) equals snake (נחש). As extreme opposites they are in fact similar, numerically identical.
Mashiach is the one soul that is capable of killing the evil snake, the evil inclination in the heart of man.[16]
Now this rabbit hole is deep, dear Alice. It is one that takes us back 5500+ years, through many ancient cultures, and through the rise of astrotheology, metallurgy, sciences, arts, the development of speech, language, abstraction, writing, symbolism, mysticism and magic, to early pre-dynastic Egypt. So it needs be explored at another time. To whet the appetite, consider only this:
XXXII (32). When they would represent delight they depict the number 16*; for from this age men begin to hold commerce with women, and to procreate children.
XXXIII (33). To denote sexual intercourse they depict two numbers 16. Cum enim sedecim voluptatem esse diximus; congressus autem, duplici constet, maris ac fœminæ, voluptate, propterea alia sedecim adscribunt.
*From Pliny (Nat. Hist. V. 10.) we may infer that number 16 as a procreative symbol references the rising waters of the Nile:
While it is rising it has been pronounced criminal for kings or prefects even to sail upon its waters. The measure of its increase is ascertained by means of wells. … When the water rises to only twelve cubits, [Egypt] experiences the horrors of famine; when it attains thirteen, hunger is still the result; a rise of fourteen cubits is productive of gladness; a rise of fifteen sets all anxieties at rest; while an increase of sixteen is productive of unbounded transports of joy.[18]
Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem
on the head of a snake, so is mathematics
at the head of all knowledge.
The structure and vocabulary of Psalm 92 reveal the same under-lying principles as those found in Jewish esotericism (Cabala), and in double entry bookkeeping. These ancient gnostic principles are the foundation of modern accounting, banking, finance, equilibrium economic theories, and thus, of worldly power and control of others.
Jewish gnosticism unquestionably antedates Christianity, for Biblical exegesis had already reached an age of five hundred years by the first century C.E. Judaism had been in close contact with Babylonian-Persian ideas for at least that length of time, and for nearly as long a period with Hellenistic ideas. Magic, also, which … was a not unimportant part of the doctrines and manifestations of gnosticism, largely occupied Jewish thinkers. There is, in general, no circle of ideas to which elements of gnosticism have been traced, and with which the Jews were not acquainted. It is a noteworthy fact that heads of gnostic schools and founders of gnostic systems are designated as Jews by the Church Fathers.
Jewish Encyclopedia 1906
These principles are already found in the ‘magical’ art of extispicy and Šumma Izbu: ancient Mesopotamian divination, using sheep livers and malformed foetuses.[20]
We have previously referred to these principles (e.g., here, here) as the Union of Opposites and the Law of Inversion (or Reversal); and, as the Paradox of Opposite Perspectives.
With bank loans – ‘money’ created out of Nothingness by double entry bookkeeping – the ‘magic’ trick is hidden in the cunning wordplay used to describe what the bank owes (debt) to its customers (“Accounts Payable”). This debt owed to its customers is, simultaneously – and legally – the banks’ asset (‘unsecured’ “Client Deposits”).
In essence, all the ‘money’ in all the banks is owned by the banks, and by the customers. Simultaneously. Truth be told however, all the ‘money’ is merely bookkeeping entries: records of the banks’ promises to pay out the physical cash money (legal tender) that is owedby the banks to their customers.
In other words, it does not exist. All the ‘money’ in all the banks, is just an illusion. A word and number magic trick.
On its creation as a +1|-1 (= 0) double entry bookkeeping record, the new ‘loan’ instantly becomes a new ‘deposit’.
In the fulness of that unceasing reality we call the flow of Time, the true value of the one (1) Interest-bearing Liability record called the “Client Deposit”, is not equal to the true value of the same one (1) Earning Asset record called the “Loan”. This hidden-in-plain-sight, income-‘earning’ (i.e. extracting) inequality between the opposites is also embedded in the structure and vocabulary of Psalm 92.
The fundamental profits of banking come from the Net Interest Margin. This is the (usually) small, subtle difference between the rate of usury (“interest”) that a bank pays on ‘deposits’, and the rate of usury that it ‘earns’ on loans.
The primary business of a bank is managing the spread between deposits that it pays consumers and the rate it receives from their loans. In other words, when the interest that a bank earns from loans is greater than the interest it pays on deposits, it generates income from the interest rate spread.
Investopedia
In other words, banking is just a practical analogue of the mythical self-generation powers of Creator deities in ancient religion.
Recall our earlier observation that Psalm 92’s pivotal verse number 9 (“wheel”) is really verse number 8 (“courtyard”). This monocolic verse number 9 (i.e. 8) is performed in echo. The remaining verses are cola pairings (dicola) – four half-verses, performed alternately. However, the two verses immediately preceding and following the pivotal verse 9 (8) are the exceptions.
Scholars have identified verse 9 … [as] … the pivotal verse that stresses YHWH’s supremacy and his indifference to the stratagems fomented by the psalmist’s enemies, evoked in the two verses that flank it (vv. 8, 10).[21]
Verses number 8 (i.e. 7) and 10 (i.e. 9) are tricolic: each comprises six half-verses. These two verses, number 7 (ז zayin, from Proto-Sinaitic glyph zaynu “sword” or ḏiqqu “manacle”, slang “penis”) and 9 (“wheel”), bespeak the destruction of the Edomite psalmist’s opposition. The following quotation uses the scholar’s (incorrect) numbering, which considers Psalm 92’s title as verse 1.
After alluding to those who are unmindful of the subtleties of this art [CV6]* the poet now devotes the next composite verse to his opponents. The first pair designates them as evildoers (rešāʿîm, 8a) and, by so doing, summarily transforms them into enemies of YHWH (10a).
*Nb. the author’s composite verse numbering [CV] 1-15 could be viewed as supporting my assertion of error.
The expression pōʿalêy ʾāwen is generally translated as evildoers. In Psalm 141,9, it is associated with the setting of snares [cf. יַעֲקֹב Jacob, aka “Israel”: “layer of snares” – CM], a malicious furtive mode of action. The very same perfidy is attributed to pōʿalêy ʾāwen in Prov 30,20. In Psalm 14,4, the term pōʿalêy ʾāwen specifically evokes people who live in the Jerusalem temple and, while involved in the official cult of YHWH, are accused of corrupting it intentionally. Accordingly, if the opponent group refers to cultic singers working at the Jerusalem temple, it seems that pōʿalêy ʾāwen designates them as people of righteous and virtuous appearance who secretly do evil to their peers, the psalmist and his companions. It should therefore be translated as vile hypocrites.
The appellation as pōʿalêy ʾāwen in the second and third pairs (8b and 10c respectively) reveals the nature of their misconduct: they strive furtively to discredit the psalmist and his companions in the eyes of the Israelites.
The inversion of precedence between verses 8 and 10, in CV9 introduces a new element. Now, the perdition of the psalmist’s enemies (v. 10) is revealed through the vegetal metaphor (v. 8). Since this latter is closely related to the musical worship of YHWH in the temple, we may conclude that the poet considers the rival group’s poor musical and poetic performances the most blatant evidence of their perdition.[22]
There is more evidence that the ‘devilish’ trickery embedded in the complex antiphonal singing of the Jerusalem temple cult is a precise analogue of ‘modern’ bank credebt creation. It is found in the Hebrew words used to describe this ancient musical system.
The sacred singing of the opposites – of ascending and descending ‘voices’ of “praise” and “thanksgiving” – was believed to cause the theophany (literally “appearance”) of the Canaanite serpent deity, that is known by a ‘magic’ four-letter word having the same ‘hidden’ procreative connotation as a word that rhymes with “buck”.[23]
The spontaneous revelation of YHWH provoked by his musical worship is explicitly mentioned in I Sam 10,5–6.10–11, where the presence of a musical / choral procession stimulates spontaneously a ›spirit of prophecy‹ among the participants.[24]
A proverb from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 1938–1630 BC) says:
Ye shall offer to me with what is in your hands; if there chance to be nothing in your hands, ye shall say with your mouths.[25]
The implication is that you are commanded to make sacrifices – to the ruling elite, presumably, as earthly representatives of the deity/s – but if you have nothing of value to offer, then words of praise are an acceptable substitute. Exactly the same principle is hidden in the Hebrew bible. Particularly in the words of the psalmists.
As we have seen above, the Greek word diábolos (devil), meaning “slanderer”, “false accuser”, “I deceive by false accounts”, equivalent to Hebrew satan, derives from root words meaning double-thrower, to throw or cast a net, stones or arrows.
The Gemara asks: How could she possibly become pregnant in such a manner? Didn’t Shmuel say: Any semen that is not shot like an arrow cannot fertilize?
The Hebrew word lehōdôt (להודות), often mis-translated as “praise” or “thanksgiving”, is a Hifil (causative active voice) form of the Hebrew verb root ידה yâdâh – literally, to use (i.e. hold out) the hand. Yâdâh means to throw, shoot, cast; in (Qal) form, to shoot (arrows); (Piel) to cast, cast down, throw stones; (Hithpael) to confess (sin), or to give thanks. In other words, its primary (Qal) meaning and derivative conjugates convey identical concepts to the ancient Greek diábolos; including, most importantly, the possibility of double meanings.
The verb להודות (identified as hifil of ידה) is usually approached as a generalized expression of praise / thanksgiving to Yhwh.
A different semantic of להודות in the religious context is apparently expressed in a single instance, when the speaker turns to Yhwh to acknowledge his or her sins (Ps 32:5).
These meanings [praise, thanksgiving, confession or acknowledgement of sin] are not always easy to distinguish from one another in the biblical text. That is why most scholars have attempted to integrate them by assuming that the confessional and the musical dimensions of להודות are closely related to the act of praise, which is approached as the essential sense.However, this assumption is by no means indisputable, especially in light of the clear-cut distinction established in Egyptian and Akkadian between the notions of praise, confession, and thanksgiving.[26]
In a musical context, the verb להודות lehōdôt is translated as to sing antiphonally.[27]
[T]he verb להודות never designates the act of sacrifice.
The confessional context of להודות (Ps 32:5) corresponds to the “doxology in court” identified for תודה [“todah”] in Josh 7:19; Ps 26:7; Ezra 10:11.19.[28]
Ponder this in context of Psalm 92, and its analogous implications for bank credebt ‘loan’ creation by double entry bookkeeping. The “confessional” aspect of antiphonal ‘praising’ is – for one of the participants – really a covert public acknowledgment of sin before the divine judgment seat; and/or, a mocking (likely false) accusation made by the ‘superior’ party against their opponents.
According to L. C. Allen, “ידה” [yâdâh] in NIDOTTE, 2:406, “the thank-offering [= תודה-sacrifice] was accompanied by an individual song of thanksgiving, which was both a testimony to the congregation and a giving of thanks to God.”
Confirming as much is the use of תודה [todah] in a context of juxtaposition between music and animal sacrifice: “I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify Him with תּוֹדָּה. And it shall please Yhwh better than a bullock that has horns and hoofs” (Ps 69:31–32).The implication is that the musical performance was not approached as a mere ornament of the offering but rather as an essential feature.
This deduction is supported by G. Mayer, “יָדָה” [yâdâh] 5:437–438, who concludes that “without thanksgiving song there can be no thanksgiving offering. On the other hand, we hear of thanksgiving songs being sung without an associated sacrifice. A tôdâ can in fact take the place of sacrifice.”[29]
Likewise the banking system. It has been empirically proven, and openly admitted by central banks, that commercial banks do not lend from ‘reserves’. Nor do they lend out the savings of ‘depositors’.
There is no sacrifice by the bank. There is only a song of praise for “giving us your business”, and forked-tongue ‘confession’: that the magic numbers assigned to your “account” are real ‘money’, and that it is really your ‘money’.
Neither ‘confession’ is true.
It costs nothing to create new +1|-1 credebt entries, place a symbol in front of them, and then call those numbers by the magical name “dollar”, “euro”, or “pound”. And voila! on speaking (and writing) the magic name, the money god ‘appears’. Exactly like the theophany of the serpent deity in the psalms.
[There is] a relationship between the improvement of the knowledge (ידע) [yâdaʻ] of YHWH [in Ps 100:](3a) and the blessing [בָּרַךְbârak] of his name (4d). A similar relation is observed between the two parallel members of Ps 76,2: »Known (נודע) in Judah [is] Elohim, In Israel great is his name (שמו)«. This relation is confirmed by the association frequently encountered in the Psalter between the cultic mention of the name of YHWH and the ›revelation‹ of the god.[30]
Recall that earlier we saw the Hebrew word תודה todah expressly referred to two half-choirs performing the Jerusalem wall rebuilding inauguration ceremony (Neh 12:27–41).
In its narration, the singers and musicians convoked for the ceremony were divided in two groups called תודות (Neh 12,31.38.40). [..] The description of their singing משמר לעומת משמר (Neh 12,24) strongly suggests that they were two half-choirs performing together in antiphonal fashion. This is not the only source associating todah with antiphony. A similar feature is encountered in Ps 147,7 »Respond (ענו) to YHWH in todah, sing to our God with the lyre«. Allusions to antiphony may also be identified in the corresponding verb form (להודות, hif. yadah). This verb is explicitly associated in Neh 11,17 to a musical performance involving two distinct choirs (one conducted by Mattaniah and another conducted by Abda). Also in Ezr 3,11 and in II Chr 7,6, the responsorial claim כי לעולם חסדו is associated with the verb להודות [lehōdôt].*
*In this latter case, להודות is associated with a dialogue between the Levites singing כי לעולם חסדו and the priests answering with their trumpets. Also in psalms 118 and 136, the verb להודות encountered in the first claim of the opening voice, may be interpreted as an invitation to respond turned to the second voice.[31]
Obvious analogy? The banker’s siren song: an invitation to respond … by completing and signing a Credebt Application.
Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know,
The piper’s calling you to join him,
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
As with the magic of bank loans by double entry, the “fruit” or “yield” of this union of opposite ‘voices’ (i.e. claimants on the deity named ‘money’) benefits the ‘divine emissary’.[32] The alchemist who has, with skill and cunning, mixed together the opposites, to ensure that it is not his opponent but the ‘holy man’ who flowers.
CV4 (vv. 5//13)
5aFor You have made me glad, YHWH, by Your work
13aThe righteous, like a palm tree he flourishes
5bAt the works of Your hands I sing for joy
13bLike a cedar in Lebanon he grows up
The verb prḥ (13a) is generally interpreted as to grow / develop, exactly as in Ps 92,8a and according to the parallel meaning of śgy (= to increase) in 13b. It also, however, denotes to flower (e.g., Isa 35,1-2; Hos 14,6; Hab 3,17), and this meaning fits especially the 5a//13a pairing.
The date palm is a dioecious species, in which the two complementary reproductive organs (male and female) develop in distinct individuals.
In the context of musical worship, the image of the blossoming date palm metaphorizes complex antiphony, in which the complementary components of the song are carried by distinct choirs that bear fruit (= produce the composite meaning) only when the separate claims are mixed with the help of wind / breath (= the voices).
Following this metaphor, the divine “work” (5a) as the source of joy is none other than the spontaneous emergence of composite meanings in the course of the complex antiphonal performance.[33]
The tsaddiq’s like the date palm, how he flowers. He flowers! Usually only the female flowers. A tsaddiq – a holy man – is a master of his male and female properties.[34]
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The antiphonal singing of the sacred song of “praise” to the $erpent god in Psalm 92 cleverly conceals / reveals another ancient practice continued to this day – or rather, to this mid night – by cabalist adepts the world over.
One of the esoteric secrets to ‘earning’ the ‘blessing’ of YHWH is to be awake in the late evening, hard at work studying the sacred books, thereby praising the deity. In this way, the cabalist mystic ‘unites’ with (sexually arouses) the deity’s ‘glory’: his ‘bride’, ‘queen’ and ‘crown’, the female Divine Presence – called the Shekhinah – precisely at midnight. Arousal of the Queen of the Night is believed to provoke the arousal of Her divine spouse, causing Him to release “a shower of blessing”.
CV2(vv. 3//15)
3aTo declare your steadfast love in the morning
15aThey still bear fruit in old age
3bAnd your faithfulness by night
15bEver full of sap and green they are.
[T]he first pair affirms the musical worship of YHWH (3a) as the source of vitality for the psalmist and his peers even in their advanced age (15a). Through the combination with v. 3a, which evokes hymns of praise, the verb nwb (= to bear fruit, 15a) alludes to the composition of hymns and liturgical works. The second pair (3b//15b) reiterates the claims that the musical worship of YHWH (3b) maintains the singers’ vitality (15b). Here, however, a nuance is introduced. The first pair of colas (3a//15a) evokes diurnal performances, a probable reference to the official worship of YHWH at the temple, which justifies their appointment. The second pair of cola (3b//15b) is suggestive of nightly performances independent of the official cult of YHWH at Jerusalem. It is noteworthy that the vitality educed in 15b through the adjectives dešēn and raʿănanis, for the psalmist and his companions, associated with their nocturnalprivate performances (3b) rather than the official diurnal worship of YHWH.
Exactly as in the corresponding CV2, the dual activity of the psalmist group is specified here: their appointment for the diurnal (official) worship of YHWH in the temple (1a//3a) and their nocturnal adoration of YHWH, probably independent of it (15b//3b). After an extensive exposition on the difference vis-à-vis his opponents in musical skill and performances in the previous composite verses (CV9-CV13), the psalmist now reveals the nocturnal activity, of which the opponents are ignorant, as the source of vitality / talent.[35]
As I was saying.
The present findings, together with the identification of foreign singers in the Jerusalem temple and the conflicts they fomented, suggest that other songs in the Psalter that mention persecution, perfidy, and other torments may also reflect the conflict between the Ezrahites and their opponents over authority in the musical worship of YHWH at Jerusalem in the Persian era. In this struggle, poetic riddles and double-entendre claims misunderstood by the rivals are exploited as signs of superiority and, as a consequence, of closeness to YHWH. This feature urges us to reconsider our approach toward these songs of conflict if we wish to avoid being systematically identified with the group mocked by their authors.[36]
A final observation.
What we have discovered here, in the ancient texts of the psalms, aligns perfectly with Hollywood’s stratagem of “confessing sins” in plain sight, while mocking the participating opponent (the paying audience) in ways too subtle for them to understand.
Spoiler Alert: if you’ve not seen this brilliant film…
“Therefore he knoweth their works [maʻbâd / satanâs] and he overturneth them in the night, so that they are destroyed.” (Job 34:25)
Addendum:
I asked Angie Bowie why her ex was involved in magick. She recalled that he heard that Led Zeppelin were involved in the occult, and so he wanted to be even cooler and scare Jimmy Page.
By 1970 Page was obsessed with Aleister Crowley, had a growing collection of Crowleyana and that same year bought one of the most treasured Crowleyan artefacts of all: Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland which was Crowley’s estate from 1899 to 1913.
All the letters are symmetrical vertically, with the N stylized Ͷ in the right part, as a result the sentence is not only a palindrome but also a mirror ambigram, that can be read the same way in either direction. The phrase was firstly written on the apex at the entrance of the church, and is attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus.
[3] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[4] K. Gersch Ph.D, The coniunctio (online, retrieved 27 April 2020)
[5] Jacob Neusner, Tzvee Zahavy, The Jerusalem Talmud: A Translation and Commentary (2010)
[6] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[7] Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notions (1993 Courier Corporation), p.229 (online, retrieved 29 April 2020), op. cit. T. Eric Peet, The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, British Museum 10057 and 10058 (1923), p.20, 135 –
That the conception of squaring was familiar is known to us from the problem of the truncated pyramid from the Moscow Papyrus. Here the phrase used for “square 4” is ı͗r·ḫ·r·k 4 pnm 𓂽,* “You are to make this 4 in square.”No conjecture can be hazarded as to the reading of the sign here usedfor “square”: from the point of view of mathematical clarity it is unfortunate that the same sign should be used in Rhind No . 28 for addition.
No example of square root occurs in Rhind, but Pap. Berlin 6619, Pap. Kahun Pl. VIII, 1. 40 , and Pap. Moscow (unpublished) show that the idea of square root existed and that the technical term for it was ḳnbt, literally “corner” or “angle” the idea presumably being that the original number, say 16, represented the area. of a square, while the length of each of the two sides containing any corner of it was its square root, 4.
*Here facing as in the hieratic.
𓂻 “add,” 63 𓂻 “to square,” 20 𓂽 “to subtract,” 63
[8] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235; fn. 42 –
The integration of the Ezrahite singers (sons of Heman and of Jeduthun/Ethan of Seirite and Edomite origin respectively) into the Jerusalem clergy is reported in Nehemiah 7-11 (See Amzallag, Esau in Jerusalem, pp. 15-52, 121-144). It therefore occurred after the completion of the “house of YHWH” (Ezra 6,16).
The Babylonian Talmud (Kidd. 69b.2) raises questions as to the lineage of the returned exiles –
The Gemara answers that the wording of the mishna supports the opinion of Rabbi Elazar, as Rabbi Elazar says: Ezra did not ascend from Babylonia until he made it like fine flour, free of bran, i.e., he ensured that the lineage of those remaining was unsullied, and selected all of those in Babylonia who were of questionable lineage, and then he ascended with them to Eretz Yisrael.
[9] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[10] N. Amzallag (2014), The Meaning of todah in the title of Psalm 100, ZAW 2014; 126(4): pp. 535-545
[11] N. Amzallag (2015), Praise or Antiphonal Singing? The Meaning of לְהֹד֥וֹת Revisited, Hebrew Studies 56 (2015), pp. 115-128
[12] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[13] ibid.
[14] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003 Plume Centennial Edition), p. 218
[15] Teth#Significance, Wikipedia (online, retrieved 27 April 2020)
[16] Snake Spine, Gal Einai, (online, retrieved 28 April 2020)
[17] Alexander Turner Cory, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous (1840), (online, retrieved 28 April 2020)
[18] Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book V, Chapter 10 – The River Nile, (online, retrieved 28 April 2020)
[19] George. G. Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (2011 Princeton University Press, Third Edition)
[20] This author, On Banks, Usury, And Doublethink In The Roman Empire – Part 2
[21] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[22] ibid.
[23] The Tetragrammaton (YHWH) is strictly only three letters (yod, heh, vav), but is imagined as having as many as 72 letters.
[24] N. Amzallag (2014), “The Meaning of todah in the title of Psalm 100″, ZAW 2014; 126(4): pp. 535-545. cf. footnote 42 –
This point is confirmed by the first mention of the presence of YHWH in the inaugurated temple in the verse evoking the first occurrence of antiphonal performance in this place (II Chr 5,13– 14). For the musical nature of the theophany of YHWH in Chronicles, see Kleinig, The Lord’s Song, 165–66 and ref. therein.
cf. footnote 43 – The epidemic character of such a musical revelation is explicitly confirmed in I Sam 19,20–24.
[25] B. Lumpkin, Mathematics Used in Egyptian Construction and Bookkeeping (The Mathematical Intelligencer 24(2):20-25, 2002)
[26] N. Amzallag (2015), Praise or Antiphonal Singing? The Meaning of לְהֹד֥וֹת Revisited, Hebrew Studies 56 (2015), pp. 115-128
[27] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235, fn 3, cit. N. Amzallag, Praise or Antiphonal Singing? The Meaning of לְהֹד֥וֹת Revisited, Hebrew Studies 56 (2015), pp. 115-128
[28] N. Amzallag (2015), Praise or Antiphonal Singing? The Meaning of לְהֹד֥וֹת Revisited, Hebrew Studies 56 (2015), pp. 115-128
[29] ibid.
[30] N. Amzallag (2014), The Meaning of todah in the title of Psalm 100, ZAW 2014; 126(4): pp. 535-545
[31] ibid., and *fn 16.
[32] N. Amzallag (2012) The Identity of the Emissary of YHWH, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: An International Journal of Nordic Theology, 26:1, 123-144
[33] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[34] Rabbi Yom Tov Glaser, TorahAnytime
[35] N. Amzallag (2017) Foreign Yahwistic Singers in the Jerusalem Temple? Evidence from Psalm 92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 31:2, 213-235
[36] ibid.
The signs on earth just as those in the sky give us signals.
Sky and earth both produce portents. Though appearing separately, they are not separate (becausesky and earth are related (.[1]
Babylonian Diviner’s Manual, c. 7th century BC
That wch is below is like that wch is above
& that wch is above is like yt wch is below
to do ye miracles of one only thing.
Hermetis Trismegisti (“Hermes the Thrice-Greatest”) Tabula Smaragdina (The Emerald Tablet) from كتاب سر الخليقة و صنعة الطبيعة أو كتاب العلل للحكيم بلنياس (Book of Balinas the Wise on the Causes), c. 8th century AD Sir Isaac Newton FRS PRS transl., c. 1680 AD (Keynes MS 28)
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(If you have not yet done so, I urge you to read Part 1 of this series, before continuing with this Part 2.)
Let us take a leap back to the future from our summary introduction to banks, usury, and doublethink in the Roman Empire, with a visit to the ancient Mesopotamian empires.
To fully appreciate the esoteric influences in our ‘modern’ systems of philosophy, politics, religion and economics (but I repeat myself), we must come to see that our long and winding roads all lead back to Bābili(m) (Babylon: “Gate of God”, “Gate of the Gods”). Built “between the two rivers” Tigris and Euphrates, descending from the Creator’s legendary Garden of Eden (“Paradise”, “heaven on earth”) – the Mother’s Womb where some say all life was first born – feeding the waters of life into the fertile valley delta Δ of the Fertile Crescent – the “Cradle of Civilisation”.
Babylon in Fertile Valley delta; Iraq (32°32′11″N 44°25′15″E)
“Good is on the right, evil on the left,
but the supreme excellence is above both…”[2]
We must also come to see that it is all about sex, and ‘gendered’ war. More sex than you can imagine. Most cleverly concealed in a vast matrix of metaphysical allegories, metaphors, puns, euphemisms, colours, numbers, and symbols.
MAN-kind has never gotten over his deep-seated fear of the unknown, the mysterious, the changing, that which is beyond HIS *control* … as embodied in the lunar, and human female menstrual cycles.
There you go. I just summarised the past 5+ millennia of human history.
In order to better understand the hidden forces at work during the Roman Empire, in this and in subsequent essays we will closely examine the early development of these ‘magic’ systems of abstraction, manipulation, and concealment of information, knowledge and understanding by those “in the know”, and their weaponisation as tools of control over the majority who were, and are, not“in the know”.
Perhaps the most important of these clever symbolic systems is hidden in plain sight. It is found in the very forms of the letters in our aleph-bets.
It is disguised in the combinations of those letters, and in the sounds that their forms re-present.
“Why is this script called Ashurit [A-shur-i]? Because it ascended with the Jewish people from Ashur when they returned from their exile in Babylonia.” (Sanhedrin 22a:2)
Its God-like power to create, to destroy, to transform reality, by manipulation and persuasion, is manifested by magicians in the art of evocative, enchanting, Mesmer-ising, spell-bindingly ‘sexy’ language (speech), and writing.
The supreme exemplar of this magic is he who attains the Philosopher’s ‘Stone’ – the alchemists’ Pow(d)er of Projection.
“Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur
in conformity with Will.”
– Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Know that all the souls come forth from supernal copulation [ziwwug elyon] from the drop of the five mercies and five strengths that are in the mind [da’at], as is known from the verse ‘And Adam knew his wife Eve’ (Gen. 4:1), for copulation is referred to as knowledge [yedi’ah] since the drop of the copulation [tippat ha-ziwwug] is drawn forth from the brain of the mind [moah ha-da’at].[3]
R. Ḥayyim Vital, Sha’ar ha-Pesuqim 3a (c. 1660 AD)
Source: Visualization of Colors, 1 – David ben Yehudah he-Ḥasid’s Kabbalistic Diagram (Moshe Idel, Ars Judaica 2015)
Source: Visualization of Colors, 1 – David ben Yehudah he-Ḥasid’s Kabbalistic Diagram (Moshe Idel, Ars Judaica 2015)
RABBI SIMEON answered and said: “The lower or passionate nature is always striving to imitate the actions of the higher, with this difference, that what is spiritual and pure it changes into the carnal and impure. The higher nature takes its origin from the right side of the sephirotic tree of life, but the lower from the left side, and is embodied in the female and becomes unified in it, as it is written, ‘His left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me’ (Cant. ii. 6). Hitherto we have discoursed on a subject, exceedingly esoteric and unknown to ordinary minds, but now we will speak more clearly so that every one may comprehend and understand them.” On hearing this the student novitiates expressed their great desire to learn more of this mystery of sex.
Whether mainstream or alternative view, open or secret society, exoteric or esoteric doctrine, establishment or revolutionary power, beneath all it really is all about sex, and war. In one form or another.
“In the vigour of his age he married Gargamelle, daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well-mouthed wench. These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon ‘gainst one another.”
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532 AD)
Nothing has changed… in more than 5,000 years.
Or rather – if the carbon-dating of Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain and France (that we will de-mystify in Part 3) is correct – in more than 40,000 years.
It really is time that humanity got over its adolescent obsessions, grew up, and started behaving like an independent, balanced adult. With a higher purpose in life than merely the maximisation of pleasuring our Self.
But we digress.
In recent years we have seen a leading accounting scholar identify the dualist (or “binary”) Input-Output principle of double-entry accounting in Mesopotamia’s clay token / bullae “envelope” record-keeping system of the 4th millennium BC:
[The] ancient people of the Middle East had record keeping systems, the basic logical structure of which was virtually identical to that of modern double entry.[4]
Schmandt-Besserat, “The Earliest Precursors of Writing” (Scientific American. June 1977, Vol. 238, No. 6, p. 50-58.)
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The prehistoric clay token accounting system gave birth, first to pictograms, and then, to cuneiform (“wedge”) writing:
SAG (“head”) sign
Stage 1: c. 3000 BC. Stage 2: c. 2800 BC. Stage 3: c. 2600 BC. Stage 4: contemporary to stage 3. Stage 5: late 3rd millennium. Stage 6: Old Assyrian, early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Stage 7: as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium, until the script’s extinction.
Cuneiform incorporated what later became known as the alchemists’ “Rebis”, or phonetic “rebus principle” (multivalency; multiple meanings or values for the same sign or sound, i.e., puns)…
…and eventually gave rise to the proto aleph–bets (alphabets) of our modern languages.
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It is also here, in Babylonia during the 19th–18th centuries BC, that we observe more evidence for the dualist gnōsis (esoteric, mystical “knowledge”) – the philosophical (or rather, theosophical) principle underpinning the dark arts of doublethink, double-entry accounting, and credebt-based usury intermediation.
(n.) secreting organ of the body, Old English lifer, from Proto-Germanic *librn.
Formerly believed to be the body’s blood-producing organ [Claudius Galen, c.129–200 AD]; in medieval times it rivaled the heart as the supposed seat of love and passion. Hence lily-livered, a white (that is, bloodless) liver being supposed a sign of cowardice…
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For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for yourselves; for it is the blood that makes atonement because of the life.
Leviticus 17:11 (Complete Jewish Bible)
–––––––– SIDEBAR ––––––––
As with many biblical quotes, it is unlikely that ‘God’ ever said this to an Egyptian royal family adoptee named ‘Moses’. Even if so, there is a double meaning – an occult (“hidden”) reference to the female gamete (ovum, egg cell), “washed” from her body in conclusion of each monthly cycle, unless fertilised by the male spermatozoon. It is this “life in the blood” that alchemical magicians of the East and West have devised “silver-tongued” philosophistic ‘tricks’ to steal, both literally and analogically, in their pursuit of an “Elixir” of immortality, and the power of wealth, for millennia. The ovum is noteworthy for its Sun-like corona radiata. We will return to this in future, when we examine the Cabalists’ identification of the glans penis corona (“crown”) with the skull’s brain membrane as being female;[5] and, the alchemical ‘magic’ reversal of the natural “flow” of the male’s white “water of life”, whilst simultaneously stealing the female’s red “river of death”, containing her “life in the blood”. A circumcised tip for those who cannot wait: analogically contemplate the form and colour of the royal crowns of Upper (south) and Lower (north) Egypt: hedjet (white) and deshret (red). After reading the next few essays in this series, you may never accuse one seeming to play the fool of being a “dick head” ever again.
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Les Vaisseaux d’Hermes: “The ‘Vessels’ / ‘Ships’ of Hermes”
–––––––– SIDEBAR ––––––––
Yes, seriously.
The theosophical, ‘magic’ operative principle of ‘modern’ double entry accounting-based financial credebt intermediation, as the means to make war, by deception, and the manipulation of desires (“La passion”), in order to extract ‘blood’ – life energy, life time; usury – from the many, for the gain of the few, is found in Old Babylonian divination of good or evil fortune, by the colour and position of liver defects.
Or, by the nature and position of foetal birth defects, known as Šumma Izbu.
Just coincidentally, this is also the true explanation for the ancient, purportedly biblical insistence of ‘Moses’ that only “unblemished”, “pure” creatures may be given to the priests at the Temple cult slaughtering yard of justice (Ḥēth ח, 8th Hebrew letter, from an Egyptian hieroglyph for “courtyard”).
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Modern Tarot divination card systems often reverse
#8 Justice (Hod, left ‘foot’ of Cabalist “Adam Kadmon”)
and #11 Strength (Da’at דעת “Knowledge”,
the “hidden” emanation).
The essential interchangeability of forms, including letters
and numbers, is fundamental to Cabalist philosophy and theurgy
since at least the first two centuries A.D. (e.g., Sefer Yetzirah)
We will learn more on this when we examine
Jewish gnosticism.
If a creature is clearly dis-eased on external inspection, then its entrails are unreliable as ‘divine’ prophetic reading tablets. The “blemished”, “unclean” animal is thus disqualified automatically from being acceptable for the Temple cultists’ blood ‘sacrifice’ ritual, to cancel / “wash away” the guilt of your endless list of heinous sins.
This is also the true explanation for why, under the Law that was, allegedly, personally written by The Finger of the All-Wise, All-Knowing, All-Understanding, All-Loving, All-Merciful God – twice – and handed down directly to ‘Moses’ – in the deshret, shortly after he magically divided the Red Sea with his priest brother’s magic alternating flaccid-stiff serpent-‘rod’ – your heinous sin of being born with a defect “in the stones”, or being “wounded in the stones” later in life, automatically disqualifies you from being a tzitzit-wearing, foreskin-deprived male (and thus, fully human) member of the pure and holy Chosen People.
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Should you be tempted to react with emotions of resistance, perhaps ranging from mirth to knee-jerk rejection, consider that elite-school experts still practice this today, if only out of scholarly curiosity; or possibly, to be uncharitable, out of passion for personal publicity –
Ancient Mesopotamian Sheep Liver Magic Predicted Trump’s Rise:
The army of the prince will go on a terrifying campaign. An army will attack the prince in battle. The god Adad will flood the enemy’s land, or there will be confusion amongst the enemy. Whatever his circumstances, the gods will protect him. The prince will not return from the campaign he embarked upon. The king’s son or brother will flee. His army will not reach its goal. The days of the prince will be long. Dogs will become rabid.
Although it’s tempting to read some of these lines as ominous reflections of the way the Trump campaign played out, these predictions seem vague and even contradictory. [Dr Selena] Wisnom [DPhil (Oxon), University of Cambridge] doubts that they were meant to be taken literally, though. Instead to get your yes-or-no answer, you were meant to tally the number of good or bad omens—and in this case, the numbers came up Trump.
It is no coincidence that the Hebrew bible (Tanakh) is replete with references to divination of the liver (lifer), practiced not only by Babylonian god-kings and other Mesopotamians (e.g., Philistines) but by the Hebrews as well:
Here is what Adonai says, your Redeemer, he who formed you in the womb: “I am Adonai, who makes all things, who stretched out the heavens all alone, who spread out the earth all by myself. I frustrate false prophets and their omens, I make fools of diviners, I drive back the sages and make their wisdom look silly.
“You, therefore, don’t listen to your prophets, diviners, dreamers, magicians or sorcerers, when they tell you that you won’t be subject to the king of [Babylon].”
And she bore him a stout-hearted son, Atlas: also she bore
very glorious Menoetius and clever Prometheus,
full of various wiles…
And ready-witted Prometheus he [“wise Zeus”] bound
with inextricable bonds, cruel chains,
and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him
a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver;
but by night the liver grew as much again everyway as
the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day.
Hesiod (c. 700BC), Theogony (“birth of the gods”) 507-525.
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Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Shakespeare, Hamlet (2.2.520, 550-554)
Go pricke thy face, and over-red thy feare,
Thou Lilly-liver’d Boy.
Shakespeare (1564–1616AD), Macbeth (5.3.10)
Do not laugh. The principles are perfectly rational. Provided that you never stop to contemplate the core assumptions. Just like doublethink, double-entry accounting, state-endorsed and -enforced, exclusively-privileged, covertly above-all-law corporate credebt-based currency intermediation, and “geometric progression” (i.e., infinite $ growth) on finite planet, consumption-driven capital-ism:
Ivan Starr [The Rituals of the Diviner, 1983] found that in extispicy an anomalous feature on the right or the left is related to an auspicious or inauspicious prognostication according to objective principles. The system reflects a familiar symbolic pattern. The right side of the exta pertains to the inquirer and is positive; the left side pertains to his enemy and is negative. In other words, the right constitutes the pars familiaris and the left the pars hostilis.[6]
A heads-up for any reader not paying careful attention to the details.
Where formerly, the good God (“Le bon Dieu est dans le détail”)[7] – and latterly, the Devil – is inclined to hide.
In the following illustrations, when (e.g.) a bad omen for the Inquirer is demonstrated, I have maintained consistency with the divinatory ground rule Right = Positive + , Left = Negative – , by changing the COLOUR of the Right-Left +/– “field” signs.
The LOCATION of the +/– signs (i.e., Right-Left, for InquirerandEnemy) does not change.
In extispicy the right/left duality serves to polarize a single divinatory context, the exta, into a negative and positive divinatory field. The anomalous features observed were further classified in opposing pairs with positive and negative values. A favorable or unfavorable prognostication is the compounded product of two factors – the positive and negative aspect of the sign and the context against which it occurs. A light colored mark on the right was propitious. If it occurred on the left it represented a sign favourable to the enemy and the resulting omen was inauspicious.
Conversely, a dark colored mark on the right was inauspicious. A dark coloured mark on the left is a double negative. It is detrimental to the enemy and the resulting omen is favorable.[8]
The definitive interpretation attributed to the presence of a given mark in a given zone of a liver part can be obtained by the quasi-arithmetic combination of the positive/negative value of the mark and the positive/negative value of the zone where it occurs: a hole on the right side might portend death for the king, whereas a hole on the left might portend death for the king’s enemy.[9]
In this system we obviously find the reflection of a pervasive symbolic pattern and an orientation that lies at the core of much divinatory practice. When we observe the division of the body into right and left we observe the symmetry that divides the whole into equal halves and the asymmetry that gives one side the edge.[10]
A fundamental, artifice-ial, egoic asymmetry that modern financial and economic doctors of philosophistry refer to by an uninteresting, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” euphemism.
Net Interest Margin.
The difference between the rate of interest paid, and the rate of interest ‘earned’, by the banking Lords of Time.
The stronger right hand and by extension the right side commonly attracts a wide array of positive associations. It is considered to be auspicious and it stands for a variety of positive moral and religious values such as justice, rectitude and purity. The left symbolizes antithetical values and stands for the inauspicious, the sinister, and the impure. The right often represents aspects of reality that can be clearly understood; it articulates what is unambiguous, certain and verifiable. The left can express perceptions more difficult to penetrate. It evokes the shady, the unstable, the mutable – the imaginative.[11]
We might note in passing that these ancient yet perennial associations of Right-Left dualism appear to be contradicted by modern scientific analysis, in one key area. Our brain activity. It is the left hemisphere that neurologists associate with logic, intellect, analytical thought (the ‘light’ of ‘reason’), and the right that is associated with the ‘shady’, ‘unstable’, ‘mutable’ aspects – emotion, imagination, intuition, creativity; the alleged ‘chaos’ of femininity.
In other words, it appears that, when it comes to R-L spatial attribution of the supposed ‘origins’ of human behaviour, the Babylonian dualist divination and philosophical system core assumptions are the exact opposite of scientifically measured reality.
Thus, they, and their philosophical descendants, also have the overarching binary classification categories – “dark” versus “light” – exactly inverted.
The Babylonian “I” – Mr. Intellect, Knowledge, Logic and Reason – assumed to be ‘Good’, is not on the right; he is on the left.
The assumed Evil ‘chaos’, and “enemy” of the Babylonian “I” – Mrs Intuition, Emotion, Holistic Thought, Imagination and Creativity – is not on the left; she is on the right.
In Šumma izbu the opposition right/left in the protasis is reflected in the apodosis as follows: opposition of subjects, opposition of verbal predicates, opposition “ego” vs “enemy”, opposition expressed by symmetrical inversion of syntactical structures, semantic opposition without syntactical symmetry.[12]
It hardly requires a rocket scientist then, to extrapolate the rather obvious conclusion, regarding which side’s characteristic behaviour or fundamental Strengths should represent the Good, and which should represent the Evil … if viewed purely in isolation, rather than holistically; (i.e.), a Balanced view.
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But we digress, from the ‘art’ of divining sheep livers.
This ‘magic’ duality system gets more complicated. At least, it appears to do so:
Does this system exist in any other form of Mesopotamian divination? Consistent patterns related to right and left also occur in Šumma Izbu [teratomancy: observation of malformed animal foetuses – CM], but at first glance the pattern appears to be reversed.[13]
Again, we note in passing the remarkable parallels with Roman-era rabbinic analyses of malformed human foetuses, miscarriage emissions, and menstrual blood. In the Babylonian Talmud (e.g., Niddah 19a through 26a), their shape (“form”), consistency, and colour – all corresponding to Old Babylonian divination and to the primary alchemical colours: red, white, black and (yellow-)green[14] – are the subject of detailed analysis and debate by Babylon-resident rabbinic “sages”.
The supposed purpose? In order to determine which of the binary categories “clean” (Good) or “unclean” (Evil) a woman should be classified as – and in consequence, subjected to or relieved from the punishments of ostracism, and economic penalty – by ‘reason’ of all that may emerge from her fertile delta.
Rabbi examined blood in the light of a lamp. R.[abbi] Ishmael son of R. Joseph examined it even on a cloudy day between the pillars. R. Ammi b. Samuel ruled: All kinds of blood must be examined only between the sunlight and the shade. R. Nahman citing Rabbah b. Abbuha ruled: The examination may be performed in the sunlight under the shadow of one’s hand.
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‘ONE LIKE DILUTED WINE’? TWO PARTS etc. A Tanna taught:
Sharon wine [diluted] is regarded as the Carmel wine in its natural undiluted state when it is new. R. Isaac b. Abudemi ruled: All these must be examined only in a plain Tiberian cup. What is the reason? — Abaye replied: Generally a cup that contains a log is made of a maneh {100 zuz} and one that contains two log is made of two hundred zuz, but the plain Tiberian cup, even if it contains two log, is made of one maneh, and since it is so thin [the colour of the wine can] be recognized better [than in any other kind of cup].
One hopes the significance of the card number is not lost on any fertile ladies reading. Gentlemen may have some catching up to do. Fear not, as Part 3 explains all. And offers some big surprises.
R. Johanan remarked: The wisdom of R. Hanina caused me not to examine any blood, for when I declared any unclean he declared it clean and when I declared it clean he declared it unclean. [..] R. Zera remarked: The Babylonian coinage was the cause of my refusing to examine blood; for I thought: If I do not understand the coinage system would I understand the nature of blood? This then implies that capability to examine blood depends on an understanding of the coinage; but did not Rabbah in fact understand the coinage system and yet did not understand the qualities of blood?
This great obsession of the rabbinic “sages” with female cycles, and their curious association of menstrual emissions with money, also sheds light on the story of Jesus (c.30–33 AD), and his healing of the woman suffering from an “issue” of blood, merely by virtue of her touching the tassles on the hem of his holy garment, with a heart full of faith:
And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians,[a] she could not be healed by anyone.44 She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased.45 And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When all denied it, Peter[b] said, “Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!”46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.”47 And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed.48 And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
We can only presume that Jesus, the poverty-embracing, debt Jubilee-proclaiming activist who had “no place to lay his head,” nevertheless somehow obtained tzitzit dyed with the rabbinically-prescribed, rare, Roman elite-restricted, more expensive than gold, 6,6′-dibromoindigo magic light-transformed dye – turning Tyrian “Royal” Purple if processed in the dark, or as-above-so-below, night sea-and-sky[15] Cabalist coal-fired flame[16]indigo blue if processed in sun light – made from the foul fishy-smelling secretions of “unclean” predatory sea snails with shell forms remarkably reminiscent of human female genitalia, and did not take the intelligent and wise approach of using perfect colour copies made from inexpensive, rabbinically-forbidden indigo vegetable dye, or else the magic may not have worked.
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Rabbi Simeon said … Whoever wishes to understand the mystery of union with the Divine will do well to reflect and meditate upon the flame proceeding from a lighted candle or a burning coal, in which may be recognized two kinds of flame or light, one white and the other dark or bluish in color. The white flame ascends upwards in a straight line, the dark or blue part of the flame, being below it and forming its basis. Though these be conjoined together, the white flame is always seen clearly and distinctly, and of the two is the most valuable and precious. From these observations we may gather somewhat of the occult meaning of the thekheloth (blue fringes) mentioned in scripture. The dark or blue flame is connected and conjoined with that above it, namely, the white, and also below it with the candle or coal in a state of combustion. It becomes sometimes red, whilst the superior white flame never varies in color and remains invariably the same. Furthermore, it is noticeable that the dark or blue flame consumes and wastes the substance of the coal or candle whence it emanates, but the white pure light consumes nothing and never varies. Therefore, when Moses proclaimed the Lord to be a consuming fire [Deut. 4:24], he alludes to the astral fluid or flame that consumes everything similar to the dark flame that wastes and destroys the substance of the candle or coal.
On the other hand, maybe Jesus did use a cheap organic compound to counterfeit the rabbis’ (or rather, Rome’s) exclusive purple/blue dye, and so that is why the magic worked.
A profound metaphor there, regarding credebt, usury extraction, and exclusively-privileged, money and monthly time cycle ‘doctors’, for those with eyes to see. A touch of mystical in-sight helps.
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But again we digress from our main topic – divination of future fortunes, by ‘reading’ the entrails.
And the malformed abortions, or indeed, live births (Šumma Izbu: “If a malformed foetus”) :
A comprehensive analysis of the protases of Šumma Izbu and of their sequential arrangement reveals that in general the descriptions of the malformations fall into five categories:
A) Malformations resembling animal features
B) Absence of body parts
C) Deformed or incomplete body parts
D) Misplacement of body parts
E) Presence of excess body parts
For a given body part these types of malformations tend to be treated in sequence. [..] It should be emphasized that while it is known that malformed births were actually observed, the full range of malformations mentioned in the series .. includes physically impossible phenomena…
[T]he classification of malformations according to the binary opposition right/left is by the far most important and pervasive structuring feature in the series. [..] In addition to the dichotomy right/left, other common oppositions in the series include examples of spatial (above/below, front/rear, inside/outside) and qualitative (large/small, long/short) oppositions (as well as complementary pairs such as male/female, dead/alive, normal/abnormal), some of which can be combined with the opposition right/left in larger classification groups.. .
The corresponding apodoses fall into the opposing categories of favourable/unfavourable predictions, thus combining themselves with the protases to form pairs of omens based on a structure of symmetric oppositions. While this organizational principle is in evidence in all divinatory disciplines, in Šumma Izbu a malformation on the right side (normally the pars familiaris) is considered negative, a malformation on the left (normally the pars hostilis), positive. This is owed to the context of the observation: a malformation being eo ipso a negative sign, the normal meaning of the opposition right (“favourable”) / left (“unfavourable”) is inverted.[17]
Confused?
Cannot see how there is consistency of organising principle between Right = Good, Left = Evil (livers), and Right = Evil, Left = Good (foetuses)?
One must simply pay close attention to the difference in the details. The core assumptions, and the context:
It has been observed over and over that cultures express right/left symbolism consistently, although the values symbolized obviously vary [Hertz 1909, Needham 1973]. If one proposes the not so daring hypothesis that right/left symbolism is consistent in Mesopotamian divination and that a general system of interpretation is based on it, then the apparent discrepancy in Šumma Izbu must be resolved. [..] In a divinatory procedure which judges physical malformations to be either auspicious or inauspicious a defect on the right is bound to be considered threatening and conversely, a defect on the left, which leaves the right side unaffected, must be the auspicious component.
In the following omens one can see the standard right/left symbolic associations operating in spite of the superficial transposition:
“If an anomaly has no right ear – the reign of the king will come to an end; his palace will be scattered; overthrow of the elders of the city; the king will have no advisors; the mood of the land will change; the herds of the land will decrease; you will make a promise to the enemy.”
“If an anomaly has no left ear – the god has heard the prayer of the king, the king will take the land of his enemy, the palace of the enemy will be scattered, the enemy will have no advisors, you will decrease the herd of the enemy, he will make a promise to you.”[18]
It is interesting to observe that the act of making a promise is always considered a negative omen, for the person who is pre-destined to make it. Perfectly logical, really. It means that they are pre-destined to be in their enemy’s debt.
The system where double occurrences transform the prediction can also be explained. Double occurrences are based on additional features and augment the strength of the side on which they occur.[19]
Some examples:
“if a woman gives birth and (the foetus) has two ears on the right and none on the left – the gods (who were) angry will return to the land and the land will live in peace”
“if a woman gives birth and (the foetus) has two ears on the left and none on the right – the advice of the land will be unheeded”
“if a malformed foetus has a second ear inside its right ear – the prince will have advisers”
“if a malformed foetus has a second ear inside its left ear – the advisers of the prince will advise him badly”[20]
Thus a consistent principle of divinatory interpretation underlies both extispicy and Šumma Izbu. It is based on the analogical association of pairs of opposites, whose positive and negative values are well established. This consistent symbolic pattern reveals the binary nature of divination, in general, but does little by itself to elucidate the deeper imaginative patterns. The value of right/left symbolism lies neither in the validity nor consistency of its occurrence, but rather when the patterns are unexpectedly reversed.
In the omen series Šumma Alu, transposition of right/left occurs frequently. In general it is an auspicious omen when an animal crosses from the right to the left.
“If a snake crosses from the right of a man to the left of a man – he will have a good name.”
“If a snake crosses from the left of a man to the right of a man – he will have a bad name.”
“If a man starts out on an undertaking and a falcon crosses from the man’s right to the man’s left – his undertaking will be successful.”
However, when a man sees a crow on the right at the start of a journey, the journey will not achieve its goals. Because of this we are able to determine that the crow has a negative symbolic value as an ominous sign:
“If a man starts out on an undertaking and a crow hovers and caws on the man’s left – he will go where he is established, he will enjoy profit.”
“If a man starts a journey and a crow hovers on the right and caws – that man will not go where he is established, he will be unhappy.”
Reversals of right/left symbolism become an interpretive tool when they simply open our eyes to broader imaginative patterns. The sleep omens of Šumma Alu begin with omens based on the position of the sleeper. If he sleeps on his right side, it is inauspicious.
The unexpected reversal catches our attention and points to a larger pattern. Laughing in one’s sleep brings sadness. Muttering insults while asleep brings an outpouring of friendliness. If one speaks pleasant words, however, his days will be short. The whole tablet comes into focus: sleep is portrayed as the mirror world of waking.
The interpretation of sleep and the dream-world – the unconscious mind – as being the mirror (exact opposite) of waking, is depicted identically in the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot), the Zohar (c. 1300 AD), and in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). It is not only double-entry bookkeeping, bank credebt creation, and ‘Orwellian’ doublethink; the fundamental principles of ‘modern’ psychoanalysis too, are identical to Old Babylonian divination, and to Jewish mysticism and magic (see here).
Significant information derives from the reversals, but only by first establishing a consistent system are we able to apprehend their internal logic. The system thus established provides a solid, stable context against which the imaginative patterns work. The mutations of this system show that in many ways divination is left-handed truth.”[21]
The fundamental ‘logic’ or operative principles of double entry bookkeeping – and thus, 97% of bookkeeping credebt entry-based ‘money’, so-called ‘modern’ ‘sophisticated’ finance, and economics – is also “left-handed truth.”
As we have seen in earlier essays (e.g., here, here, here, here, here), it functions in precisely the same way, in service of the same male Ego-driven, hedonistic (i.e., pleasure-maximising), selfish ends.
However, in order to really ram (pun intended) the point home that double-entry principles are identical to Old Babylonian divinatory ‘magic’, here is a further illustration, in express context of ‘divining’ sheep livers, malformed foetuses, and snakes/birds/beasts appearing beside or crossing over one’s path:
Incidentally, we note in passing that this illustration highlights again – at least for yours truly – the failure of most modern economists to (a) think for themselves, and (b) do their job thoroughly, with intellectual honesty. Rarely, if ever, do economists imagining themselves to be modelling economic actions – including those using double entry bookkeeping to do so – take into consideration that every action has more than one, often un-equal and opposite reaction. There are both internal, and external, asymmetric ‘mirror’ reflections of every economic act, by every human being. Impacting on an-Other/s, and on Mother Nature. That is reality. Whether recorded, at all (much less correctly, by and for all affected parties), or not.
The reason why economists have such limited success in predicting the future, is because their academic discipline is based on fundamental principles that are identical to, and thus no more intelligent and rational than the divination of sheep livers, in order to analyse a system (the financialised economy) that is itself based on fundamental principles that are identical to, and thus no more intelligent and rational than the divination of sheep livers.
In concluding our review of Old Babylonian divination as being the theosophical ‘magic’ organising principle that ‘modern’ accounting, finance, and all post-Middle Ages economic theories are based on – particularly neoclassical economic ‘equilibrium’ “Greed is Good” theory, the core ‘rational’-isation for the fiscal and social policies of neoliberalism and globalist “free markets” – there is one further topic of note.
It has profound relevance for our essay series’ titular subject – banks, usury, and doublethink in the Roman Empire. The context is the Cabalist ‘magic’ system of gnōsis. Mystical “knowing”, or “knowledge”.
Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten[a] a man with the help of the Lord.”
The symbolic values attributed to animal-like features draws on culturally conditioned notions that can also be observed in other genres of cuneiform literature. Here we just give a few examples:
Lion → the king, royal power and military strength
“if a woman gives birth (and the foetus) has the ear of a lion – there will be a strong king in the land”
“if a malformed foetus has the head of a lion – the prince will seize universal kingship”
[if] a malformed foetus has the eyes of a lion – the prince will have no rival”
Wolf → pestilence, discord and strife
“if a woman gives birth and (the foetus) has the head of a wolf – there will be massacres in the land”
“if a ewe gives birth to a wolf – there will be a plague in the country; madness; catastrophe for the land; disease of the herds”[22]
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“if a goat gives birth to a wolf – pestilence (lit. “the god will consume”)”
Dog → pestilence, discord and strife
“if a woman gives birth to a dog – the owner of the house will die and his house will be scattered; the opinion of the land will change; pestilence (lit. “the god will consume”)”
“if a ewe gives birth to a lion and it has the face of a dog – (lit. “Nergal will consume”)”
“if a sow [pig] gives birth to a dog – there will be strife in the land”[23]
As we will discover in future parts to this series, “all Jewish spheres – the prayer book, the Talmud, and Jewish philosophy,” being rooted in “the official theology” of Cabala,[24] and derived from “old Chaldea” (Babylonia), are identically rational.
******************
Am reminded of hypothesis that leaped to mind recently, while reading an interdisciplinary academic study on several key cultures of antiquity, still having deep influence today. Rather interesting to contemplate, compare those which venerate(d) dogs, versus those vilifying them.
[2] Constant, A.L., Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (A.E. Waite transl.), George Redway: London (1896), p.46
[3] Wolfson, E.R., Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, Fordham University Press: New York (2005), p.549 fn. 58 cit. Ḥayyim Vital Sha’ar ha-Pesuqim, 3a (online, retrieved 22 Jan 2018)
cf. Kosher Torah School (online, archived from original, retrieved Feb 2, 2019) – “Sha’ar HaPesukim, Ezekiel, Secret of Cain Souls, Lesson 3 – Souls from the “head” of Cain, and those from the “feet.” Source of the souls of Hezekiah, King of Judah, and of Ezekiel the prophet, himself. Secret of the reversal of Gevurot and Hasidim, secret of the reversal of the Levites and the Kohanim. Secret of the rectification and the reversal to the true order in the days of the Third Temple. Secret of the Kohanim Levites, sons of Tzadok. Secrets of reincarnation and rectification. Summary of Rabbi Ḥayim Vital’s profound vision of the secret reality of human souls.”
[4] Mattessich, R., Accounting and the Input-Output Principle in the Prehistoric and Ancient World, ABACUS, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1989, p. 81 — “The significance of the input—output principle for double entry accounting is well recognized in the literature. For example; ‘The writer wishes to emphasize the merit that comes from understanding a double entry bookkeeping as an input-output system of data calculating the amount of capital charged’ (Kishi, 1984, p. 359).” (p. 77, fn 7)
[5] Wolfson, E.R., Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, Fordham University Press: New York (2005), pp. 76, 133, 137, 184, 739 (online, retrieved 22 Jan 2018) –
To be more precise, the dimension of God that is, paradoxically, present in its absence is the corona of the phallus (ateret yesod). So prevalent is this idea, what I would call the ground concept of the tradition, that I could easily fill a chapter citing pertinent passages that illustrate the point.. . [..] Yesod itself is composed of male and female in the secret of the phallus [yesod] and the corona [atarah] that is in him. Yesod thus exemplifies a dual nature: it is disclosed as the locus of concealment, a disclosure, perforce, that preserves the concealment of what is disclosed.
The phallic gradation of the divine embodies what I have termed ‘hermeneutical duplicity’ – for the secret to be secretive, it must be hidden in its exposure, exposed in its being hidden. The duplicity is engendered by Kabbalists in a hierarchical way that we would expect from an andocentric and at times misogynistic culture: hiddenness, the more inward and consequently more valuable, is rendered as masculine, and exposure, the more outward and consequently less valuable, as feminine. But how is the phallus engendered as both male and female? The male is the shaft of the penis (yesod) and the female the corona (atarah). As Isaac of Acre articulates the matter, “You already know the secret of circumcison [sod ha-milah] alludes to Saddiq . . . and the corona that is revealed through the excision of the foreskin alludes to Atarah.” The identification of the corona .. as the locus of contemplative envisioning can be well expressed by the Lacanian dialectic of the signifier that is veiled in the unveiling of the veil, that is, the object of mystical vision is the phallic sign manifest in the exposure of its hiddenness. [my bold emphasis added – CM]
[6] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), p.5
[7] Bartlett, J., Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature, 17th ed. (2002)
[8] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), pp.6-7
[9] De Zorzi, N., The Omen Series Šumma Izbu: Internal Structure and Hermeneutic Strategies, Rivista di storia, ambienta e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico Vol. 8 (2011), p.54
[10] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), p.7
[11] ibid.
[12] De Zorzi, N., The Omen Series Šumma Izbu: Internal Structure and Hermeneutic Strategies, Rivista di storia, ambienta e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico Vol. 8 (2011), p.52, n.38 (cf. Starr 1983, 6.)
[13] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), p.6
[15] Sagiv, G., Dazzling Blue: Color Symbolism, Kabbalistic Myth, and the Evil Eye in Judaism (Numen 64 (2017) 183-208) –
The Talmud asserts that tekhelet is special among all colors, basing this opinion on a chain of homologies (Herzog 1987: 87–88; Scholem 1979: 90 n. 11), such as the following version of the Palestinian Talmud: “tekhelet is like the sea and the sea the grass, and the grass the firmament, and the firmament the throne of glory and the throne of glory is like the sapphire” (y. Berakhot I.2). This chain of homologies seems to be leading the worshipper from the tekhelet thread, through the sea, to the divine, thereby imbuing tekhelet with mystical significances. However, it should be noted that the word tekhelet can refer to various shades of blue. Just as tekhelet can be the color of a daylight sky, it can also be the color of the sky at night. In contradistinction to the spiritual promise of tekhelet, there are sources that introduce threatening aspects to this color. One characteristic of tekhelet, which has its origins inthe first centuries CE, associates the word tekhelet/ תכלת with the Hebrew roots klh/ כלה (denoting annihilation) and škl/ שׁכּל (denoting bereavement). Hence, tekhelet is an end, and sometimes even a divine power of destruction and death.7 In a similar vein, according to one Talmudic source, “all colors bode well in a dream except the color tekhelet” (b. Berakhot 57b).
(pp. 186-187; fn.7 “Sifre to Numbers associates tekhelet with the annihilation of the elder sons of the Egyptians and the sinking of the Egyptian soldiers in the sea (Neusner 1986: 178). The Onkelos translation of the Bible into Aramaic translates the Hebrew root of bereavement ( שכל ) as .תכל”)
[16] Blumenthal, D.R., Three is Not Enough: Jewish Reflections on Trinitarian Thinking (first published in Ethical Monotheism, Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Wendell S. Dietrich, ed. T. Vial and M. Hadley (Providence, RI, Brown Judaic Studies: 2001) 181-95), citing Zohar 1:50b-51b, modified from F. Lachower and I. Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, transl. D. Goldstein (Oxford, The Littman Library and Oxford University Press: 1989) 1:319-20. (online, retrieved 12 December 2018) –
Rabbi Simeon began by saying: There are two verses [that contradict one another]. It is written, “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24) and it is also written, “And you who cleave to the Lord your God are alive, all of you, to-day” (Deuteronomy 4:4). We have reconciled these verses in several places, but the [mystical] companions have a [deeper] understanding of them…. Whoever wishes to understand the wisdom of the holy unification, let him look at the flame that rises from a glowing coal, or from a burning lamp, for the flame rises only when it takes hold of some coarse matter.
Come and see. In the rising flame there are two lights: one is a radiant white light and one is a light that contains black or blue. The white light is above and it ascends in a direct line. Beneath it is the blue or black light and it is a throne for the white. The white light rests upon it and they are connected together, forming one whole. The black light, [that which has] blue color, is the throne of glory for the white. And this is the mystic significance of the blue.
This blue-black throne is joined to something else, below it, so that it can burn and this stimulates it to grasp the white light…. This [blue-black light] is connected on two sides. It is connected above to the white light and it is connected below to what is beneath it, to what has been prepared for it so that it might illuminate and grasp [that which is above it].
This [blue-black light] devours continuously and consumes whatever is placed beneath it; for the blue light consumes and devours whatever is attached to it below, whatever it rests upon, since it is its habit to consume and devour. Indeed, the destruction of all, the death of all, depends upon it and therefore it devours whatever is attached to it below. [But] the white light which rests upon it does not devour or consume at all, and its light does not change. Concerning this, Moses said, “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire,” really devouring, devouring and consuming whatever rests beneath it…
The Zohar begins this passage in classical midrashic style by showing a contradiction between two verses, one of which speaks of God as a consuming fire while the other advocates cleaving to God. It, then, goes on to draw an analogy to the common flame which is attached to a dark coal, which it must consume in order to burn. The flame itself is composed of two parts — a blue-black center, which is attached to the wick or coal, and a white periphery which encompasses and rises above the blue-black center.
In this passage, the Zohar depicts the central sefira which is Tiferet as the white part of the flame. It rests upon the sefira which is the point of contact with creation, Malkhut, here depicted as the blue-black part of the flame. At the end of this passage, the Zohar calls attention to the invisible part of the flame — the zone of invisible heat which surrounds every fire — and interprets it as Keter (God’s ultimate ineffability).
Finally, the Zohar notes that the blue-black part of the flame, Malkhut (God’s ruling ability), consumes the coal or wick to which it is attached. The coal and wick are material; they depict creation, particularly humanity.
Above the white light rests a concealed light which encompasses it. Here is a supernal mystery and you will find all in the ascending flame. The wisdom of the upper realms is in it.
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[17] De Zorzi, N., The Omen Series Šumma Izbu: Internal Structure and Hermeneutic Strategies, Rivista di storia, ambienta e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico Vol. 8 (2011), pp.46-48, 52-53
[18] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), pp.7-8
[19] ibid., p.8
[20] De Zorzi, N., The Omen Series Šumma Izbu: Internal Structure and Hermeneutic Strategies, Rivista di storia, ambienta e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico Vol. 8 (2011), p.53
[21] Guinan, A.K., Left/Right Symbolism in Mesopotamian Divination, SAAB 10 (1996, 5-10), pp.8-10
[22] De Zorzi, N., The Omen Series Šumma Izbu: Internal Structure and Hermeneutic Strategies, Rivista di storia, ambienta e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico Vol. 8 (2011), pp.61-62
[23] ibid., p.62
[24] Jewish Mysticism, Aleph Society Inc. (online, archived after original, retrieved 1 Feb 2019)
In our ancient past, we traded between ourselves simply by drawing on our public reputation. We did favours for each other, and memorised — later, recording on clay tokens — the I Owe You. Our “currency” was our public Honour.
Today, bankers use the magick of double-entry bookkeeping to create IOUs out of nothing. These digital ‘tokens’ represent our IOU to the bank. Then — by a clever accounting trick — they let us ‘borrow’ their IOUs as ‘money’. Why don’t we all do the same thing, and just lend to ourselves?
Le bon Dieu est dans le détail (“the good God is in the detail”) means that attention paid to small things has big rewards.
MISLEADING PARLIAMENT
Imagine writing a paper for the Parliamentary Information and Research Service, correctly describing the Operational aspects of ‘money’ creation by the central Bank of Canada…
In practical terms, the Bank of Canada’s purchase of government securities at auction means that the Bank records the value of the securities as a new asset on its balance sheet, and it simultaneously records the proceeds of sale of the securities as a deposit in the Government of Canada’s account at the Bank – a liability on the Bank’s balance sheet (see Appendix A). No paper evidence of a bond, treasury bill or cash is exchanged between the Government of Canada and the Bank of Canada in these transactions. Rather, the transactions consist entirely of digital accounting entries. [..] By recording new and equal amounts on the asset and liability sides of its balance sheet, the Bank of Canada creates money through a few keystrokes.[3]
…but then showing the operation backwards:
Source: Library of Parliament, Canada
Step-by-Step: How It *Really* Works
Imagine describing and showing the identical (in law) process of ‘money’ creation by the Private Banking System, and getting that exactly backwards too:
Private commercial banks also create money – when they purchase newly issued government securities as primary dealers at auctions – by making digital accounting entries on their own balance sheets. The asset side is augmented to reflect the purchase of new securities, and the liability side is augmented to reflect a new deposit in the federal government’s account with the bank.
However, it is important to note that money is also created within the private banking system every time the banks extend a new loan, such as a home mortgage or a business loan. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money (see Appendix B). Most of the money in the economy is, in fact, created within the private banking system.
A key similarity between money creation in the private banking system and money creation by the Bank of Canada is that both are realized through loansto the Government of Canada and, in the case of private banks, loans to the general public.
The legal reality is that banks do not lend money:
What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers’ transaction accounts. Loans (assets) and deposits (liabilities) both rise by [the same amount].
It is important to notice here that the “Loans (assets)” are not loans to the borrowers. The “assets” of the bank are the promissory notes (promises to pay) issued by the borrowers.
Homeowners usually think of their mortgage as an obligation to repay the money they borrowed to buy their residence. But actually, it’s a promissory note they also sign, as part of the financing process, that represents that promise to pay back the loan, along with the repayment terms.
Banks ‘purchase’ promissory notes (“securities”) from the public, and from the Government. Then, they record – not their payment, but their promise to pay – as a ‘credit’ (i.e., a ‘deposit’) to a customer or Government account at the bank.
These ‘deposit’ accounts are recorded as a Liability on the bank’s Balance Sheet. This means that the bank has not paid. The bank still owes payment* to the customer. The so-called ‘deposit’ is fictitious.
(* Legal tender: cash notes and coins)
Stated another way, the bank ‘buys’ our IOU, and ‘pays’ for it with … its own IOU!
Incredibly, the bank then claims that its IOU to us (‘deposit’) is, simultaneously, our ‘credit’ (loan) to the bank.
As ‘depositors’, legally, we are “unsecured” creditors of the bank.[6]
In other words, the bank did not really give us ‘credit’; we gave our ‘credit’ to the bank … and that record is what we use as money.
We are paying the banks “interest” for the privilege of using our own money.
Why don’t we all just give our own ‘credit’ … to ourselves?
Read this, and think carefully on the clever words, “in effect”:
In today’s world of computerized financial transactions, the Federal Reserve Bank pays for the securities with an “electronic” check drawn on itself. [..] The Federal Reserve System has added .. securities to its assets, which it has paid for, in effect, by creating a liability on itself…
(Keep that concept in mind. Drawing. A liability. On yourself. I will be showing you a revolutionary new accounting system, where everyone can do this. We could become our own central bankers, and begin to solve many global problems, sustainably.)
Source: kateraworth.com
There is no need to take my word for this.
Or, indeed, the word of the Federal Reserve Banks.
I produced the first empirical studies[8] to prove that in the five thousand year history of banking.
The law courts in various judgements have made it very clear, if you give your money to a bank – even though it’s called a ‘deposit’ – this money is simply a loan to the bank.
They invent fictitious customer deposits.
The banks create the money supply by inventing these claimson themselves, the fictitious deposits.
The modern banking system manufactures “money” out of nothing; and the process is, perhaps, the most astounding piece of “sleight of hand” that was ever invented. [..] Banks in fact are able to create (and cancel) modern “deposit money”, just as much as they were originally able to create, or call in, their own original forms of private notes. They can, in fact, inflate and deflate, i.e., mint, and un-mint the modern “ledger-entry” currency.
He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements .. but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia.
Early 13c., “of or pertaining to the head,” from Old French capital, from Latin capitalis “of the head,” hence “capital, chief, first,” from caput (genitive capitis) “head” (from PIE root *kaput- “head”).
We the general public, and the governments of the world, are dupes.
The human race has repeatedly been duped by the “sleight of hand” and quicksilver tongues of temple scribes, silver merchants, goldsmiths, and bankers, for thousands of years.
There was already a grave problem with merchants creating and issuing ‘receipts’ for fictitious ‘deposits’ almost 4000 years ago. The sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty tried to stop it:
If any one buy from the son or the slave of another man, without witnesses or a contract, silver or gold, a male or female slave, an ox or a sheep, an ass or anything, or if he take it in charge, he is considered a thief and shall be put to death.
Hammurabi Code of Laws, Number 7 (c. 1790 BC) [11]
Hammurabi Code of Laws, c. 1790 BC. (Louvre Museum)
By the time of King Nebuchadnezzar I (c. 1124-1103 BC), the ‘smiths had a new trick to avoid being caught in this *cough* capital crime. They discovered how to create fake silver, and use it to counterfeit the royal standard ingots.
Perhaps they even called it “Full Reserve” banking?
Their “royal art” is now known as alchemy; the art of transforming comparatively worthless, ‘base’ materials – like copper ♀, vinegar, oil, flour, milk and honey – into ‘pure’ and ‘precious’ counterfeits:
“Do not be careless (with respect to these instructions). Do not [show] (the procedure) to anyone!”
The text obviously describes a method of producing a silver-like alloy from base metal ingredients — the “leukosis* of copper” of alchemistic fame. The purpose of the operation is to deceive and the final formula [“this (kind of) silver cannot be detected”] is to allay any possible doubts of the “chemist”.[12]
* whitening
In 290 AD, Emperor Diocletian ordered the destruction of all manuscripts in the economic crisis-stricken empire on the topic of alchemy. Two manuscripts from Egypt written in Greek survived, and these papyri make it easy to understand why:
Several of the recipes speak quite explicitly about the economic purpose of these processes. Such phrases occur as e.g. “(alloy) imitating silver* of such a kind that it cannot be found out”, “this will be… of the first quality which will deceive even the artisans”, or “the metal will be equal to true… so much as to deceive even the artisans”.[13]
* Rome’s traditional metal currency (silver dēnārius)
By the early 14th century, the discovery of how to create highly corrosive acids had placed new weapons in the alchemists’ armoury. The need for secrecy was now being met through a complex array of cryptic allegories, symbols, euphemisms, and double, triple, or even greater multiple (Orwell’s doubleplus?) entendres:
Luna [☽ silver] is also yellowed similarly with a solution of Mars [♂ iron]. The method of that yellowing which is perfected by vitriol [🜖 sulphuric acid] or copperas [🜨 green vitriol] is as follows… Then it should be dissolved into a redwater to which there is no equal.[14]
At the dawning of the Age of Reason, a recipe of the famous alchemist Basil Valentine – likely pseudonym of Johann Thölde, owner of a salt-works in Thüringia – offers us a glimpse of the “hidden” influence of alchemy on ‘modern’ systems of thought … and banking practice:
..in the bottom of the glass you will find the treasure, and fundamentals of all the Philosophers, and yet known to few, which is a red Oil, as ponderous in weight, as ever any Lead, or Gold may be, as thick as blood, of a burnt fiery quality.[15]
Book of Abraham Lambspring – Nicolaum Maium 1607
The sleeping Father is here changed
Entirely into limpid water,
And by virtue of this water alone
The good work is accomplished.
(Note the “hidden hand” (left), and the right hand making the sign of the 21st Hebrew letter, שshin (šīn). It stands for Shaddai, a name for God. In the Sefer Yetzirah this “Mother Letter” means King over Fire: “He Made Shin King Over Fire, And He Tied A Crown To It” .. “the hissing ש corresponds to the hissing fire”.)
Today, we are enslaved by what two Italian professors recently called “outright false accounting”:
Under current accounting practices, seigniorage is largely underappreciated, it is systematically concealed, and is not allocated to the income statement (where it naturally belongs), while it is recorded on the balance sheet under debt liabilities, thus originating outright false accounting.
If money is accounted as debt, instead of correctly being considered as equity of the issuing entities and wealth for the society using it, it inevitably introduces a deflationary bias in the economy…[16]
This trick is not new.
It is simply the ‘modern’, electronic, government-licensed version of the same trick that ‘smiths and alchemists have used for millennia, to extract a special kind of “rent” from the sovereign, and the public.
1610s, “a person’s wealth,” from Medieval Latin capitale “stock, property,” noun use of neuter of Latin capitalis “capital, chief, first”.
[The term capital] made its first appearance in medieval Latin as an adjective capitalis (from caput, head) modifying the word pars, to designate the principal sum of a money loan. The principal part of a loan was contrasted with the “usury” – later called interest – the payment made to the lender in addition to the return of the sum lent.[17]
The difference between the value of money (its “purchasing power”), and the cost to produce it, is called seigniorage. The word comes from Old French, meaning “right of the lord (seigneur) to mint money.”
Minted coins bear an image of the bust or head (capital) of the sovereign – the “lord” of the land – because he/she is the creator (issuer) and owner of the coins. In accounting terms, the coins are the equity of the lord.
And they brought Him a dēnārius [a day’s wage]. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “[The Emperor Tiberius] Caesar’s.” Then He said to them, “Then pay to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.”
The lord ‘issues’ new currency into the community, by using it to purchase something of value from his/her subjects. No matter what substance it is made from – no matter what its real value, in any other context – the coin’s face (“nominal”: named) value, and the requirement to accept it in payment, is decreed by the authoritative Word of the “Lord” (“fiat”):
Legal tender is any official medium of payment recognized by law that can be used to extinguish a public or private debt, or meet a financial obligation. The national currency is legal tender in practically every country. [..] A check, or a credit swipe, is therefore not legal tender; it merely represents a means by which the holder of the check can eventually receive legal tender for the debt.[18]
Even though the citizens now hold the coin, and use it as currency between themselves, the “Lord” still owns it, and may demand its return at any time, (e.g.), in payment of a tax ‘obligation’ (debt).
In effect, at any moment in time, a citizen and the “Lord” both claim to own the coin. And we know what happens when someone tries to fight the will of the “Lord”.
If that seems rather unjust to you – even tyrannical – then you are not alone.
Nicole Oresme (1320-1382) was one of the first medieval theorists who did not accept the right of the monarch to have claims on all money. Standard excuses, such as a “budget emergency”, did not hold water (pun intended) with Oresme. He stated that any ruler who reclaims monies they have previously issued (spent) is a “Tyrant dominating slaves.”[19]
In the Middle Ages, when commodity (metallic) money was standard, seigniorage was a tax added on to the cost of producing coins by the mints. A customer (e.g., a prince or feudal lord) who wished to issue coinage for trade within their own feudom or “fief” paid this tax, often in the form of a percentage of the metal delivered to the mint for coining, which was then passed on to the sovereign (king, queen) of the land.
Today, the ‘sovereign’ government ‘earns’ seigniorage profits in a similarly circuitous manner. Its profits are routed – pun intended – via the “independent” Central Bank:
In Canada today, seigniorage can be calculated as the difference between the interest the Bank of Canada earns on a portfolio of Government of Canada securities—in which it invests the total value of all bank notes in circulation—and the cost of issuing, distributing, and replacing those notes.
After deducting the Bank’s general operating expenses .. the remainder is paid to the Receiver General for Canada.[20]
In the case of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, its twelve Member banks are owned by private banks. The Fed pays a ‘return’ (dividend) of up to 6%[21] to those banks, before returning its leftover profits to the U.S. Treasury:
[T]he Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund.[22]
The Private Banking System also ‘earns’ a form of seigniorage profit or rent, called “monetary seigniorage”. It earns this on 97% of the ‘money’ supply. It is the difference between what it costs to produce their fictitious ‘deposits’ (i.e, nothing), and the interest and fees that we pay them for the use of what is actually our own money:
Commercial bank seigniorage represents structural element of subtraction of net real resources from the economy, with potentially deflationary effects on profits and/or wages, distributional consequences, and frictions between capital and labor.. .[23]
Perhaps it is now becoming evident why bankers see themselves as “doing god’s work”. They have succeeded in becoming gods of the earth. It is they who now create and issue the ‘currency’ we all use. They can and do demand its “return” – pun intended – as and when it suits them; typically, in a “liquidity crisis”. Having long ago usurped the powers of sovereigns, replacing them with an illusory rule of the dēmos (people), it is they who now ‘earn’ the vast majority of seigniorage profits from ‘money’ creation.
Thanks to the sleight of hand and mouth of the alchemists – hidden (“occult”) knowledge, that has been passed down for millennia in sexual allegories and symbols – the global money system is a cunning inversion (or reversal) of sovereign ownership rights.
We the People are, individually, the true seigneurs.
We – not bankers – are the true creators, issuers, and owners of the purchasing power (re-presented by “money”) used in the economy.
Through word ‘magic’ – especially puns; double entendres – and the paradoxical doublethink embedded in Double Entry Bookkeeping, bankers transform our wealth (equity) into debt.
Through this trick, they are able to ‘earn’ (steal) vast wealth and power for themselves.
Bankers have transformed themselves into the new Lords of Time. Their business is buying and selling our life times.
The business of banking can be – and indeed, has long been – defined as a ‘satanic’ practice. According to one of the founders of humanistic psychology, David Bakan:
A major psychological feature of black magic is that it provides immediate gains without immediate payment. The payment is feared as “really” both deferred and excessive. Thus deferred and excessive payment for immediate gain is characteristically associated with pacts with the Devil. The aversion towards usury, in current times as well as throughout the history of Christianity, is not completely coincidental. For usury is exactly a social expression of the Satanic Pact, immediate gains and excessive deferred payment.[24]
We ‘sell’ (promise) our future life energies to the bank, in exchange for a fictitious, lump sum ‘deposit’, or high usury ‘credit line’, now.
The bank ‘earns’ a covenantedflow of income from our labour, provided that we remain willing and able to pay, and, so long as the ‘sovereign’ remains willing and able to enforce the bank’s right to seize our real world assets pledged as collateral.
Over the long term, banks slowly acquire legal ownership title to all of our value-able assets, using their fictitious ‘loans’. The price of value-able assets is first driven up, thanks to the immediate availability of abundant, lump sum purchasing power, created by banks with a few keystrokes. Then, their price falls again, when the flow of new purchasing power ‘dries up’. Those who bought at the higher prices, are trapped paying usury on the ‘loan’ taken at the higher price. They have just been “fleeced”. Not just of ‘money’. They have been fleeced of the most precious ‘commodity’ of all .. life time.
Like the ‘loans’ themselves, the so-called “business cycle” is consciously, willfully, artificially created, by bankers, for the benefit of bankers.
–––––––– SIDEBAR ––––––––
Das guldene Vleiss (“The Golden Fleece”) Alchimiæ encomium. Vera chymia licet mundo sapientia falsa,
attamen est divæ diva parens sophiæ.
This 1737 alchemical text purports to show an image, dated to 1607, of ‘Sophia’ (Greek: σοφία), symbol of Wisdom in Hellenistic, Gnostic and Platonic philosophy and religion. In Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) is an expression for God the Mother in the Trinity (Θεοτόκος, Theotokos), and often for the Holy Spirit, or Divine Logos, as personification of Christ.
What is depicted, however, is the alchemists’ androgyne god Hermes, or Mercury ☿ , as evidenced by his traditional symbol, the winged helmet. About his head, a nimbus of ‘light’. Around his neck, a pendant in the shape of a ‘heart’, womb, or ‘Water’ 🜄. The wealth in his left (Asset) hand, is the symbol of Venus ♀ (Female, Love, Beauty, Nature, Nurture), inverted, and bound; around the cross is a crown of thorns. On the left (Asset) wrist, a chain, from which a lamb is hanging. At his left foot, a pot of money, and treasure chest. Chained to his right (Liability) ankle, a ball with Mercury’s (“equal and opposite”) ‘wings’, adjacent alchemist’s flasks. ‘His’ robe exposes a female breast. There are twelve decorations on the hem; it is prominently secured at the top of ‘his’ thigh with one more decoration, a 4-petalled ‘flower‘ (🝊 wax, created by ‘drones’, labouring for a ‘Queen’, from whence golden ‘honey’; also 🜨 green vitriol), for a total of thirteen (number of lunar-menstrual cycles per year). In his right hand, a book opened, with an ‘eye’ on the left and right pages, and a serpent coiled around his arm.
The inverted and bound Venus, or orb and cross 🜭 , is the globus cruciger (Latin: “cross-bearing orb”), used from the early 5th century to represent Christ’s dominion over the world. In alchemy however, it is a symbol for cinnabar, or Mercury Sulphide. This is the source of two out of the three primary elements in alchemical ‘experiments’, and philosophy: the double-natured liquid-metal, Mercury ☿ (the “Divine Fiery Water” of Kabbalah), and Sulphur 🜍. The third element, is ‘Salt’ 🜔. Of the Earth 🜃. “The Body”. The ‘Base’ Matter. That must be subjected to Putrefaction 🝤. Reduced to a massa confusa (“confused mass”). Ringing bells? Look closely, at all the symbols. What do you see? Cinnabar 🜭 is also represented by 🜓 , a symbol of great significance (e.g., associated with Jesus’ life span; number of years between natural alignments of the pure lunar calendar and pure solar calendar.)
–––––––– END SIDEBAR ––––––––
There are other grave problems caused by bankers’ quest for profit. Making excessive new purchasing power available for consumption, and that of an increasingly vast array of products manufactured with a profit-driven goal of ‘Planned Obsolescence’ – i.e., poor quality – has dramatically accelerated humanity’s consumption of natural (and often, finite) resources.
This accelerated rate of production and consumption has, in turn, accelerated the production of waste, and pollution of the natural environment. While Mother Nature has her ways of recovering and restoring herself, it can take tens, hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of years for her self-healing processes – driven by her grateful receiving of energy from the Sun – to return Nature to anything like her former condition.
Allowing bankers to usurp our rights, as the seigneurs of our own money, and lords of the expenditure of our life’s time and energy, has not turned out well for many of us.
Even if we accept the narrow argument that capital-ism has “lifted millions out of poverty”, the manner and speed at which this has been achieved has not turned out well for our collective home – Mother Nature.
USURY
Sometimes, lest worse befall and to avoid scandal, a community tolerates dishonorable and evil things, like brothels. Sometimes also, by necessity or convenience, vile business is tolerated, like money-changing, or evil business, like usury.
Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
With the bankers’ system, our money becomes our debt, because we don’t spend it into existence; we ‘sell’ it to the bank, in return for a fictitious ‘loan’ from the bank, created out of nothing by the Word of the “lord”.
Instead of equity (wealth, purchasing power), our money is magically transformed into the exact opposite: our promise to re-pay the bank in the amount of their fictitious ‘loan’ … plus “interest” (usury).
On the other hand, the bank ‘deposit’ record created in our name is considered our loan to the bank, and the bank might pay us “interest” on it.
Unsurprisingly, the banks ‘earn’ a higher rate of usury on their Asset (our promise to pay them), than they pay on their Liability (their promise to pay us).
The difference in these rates is called the “Net Interest Margin” (NIM). It is key to how banks ‘earn’ so much ‘money’ in profit. It is the 24/7/365 reward for their hard labour, in taking our money, and then renting the use of their fictitious accounting ‘money’ back to us.
Book of Abraham Lambspring (1556)
I am told that the Danish, French, Germans and Italians do not use the words “Asset” and “Liability” as titles for Balance Sheet records. It would seem more than mere coincidence that they use their words for “Actives” and “Passives” instead.
How so?
In alchemy, the Active force is associated with the Male (Mars ♂, Fire), and the Passive with the Female (Venus ♀, Water).
copperas (n.)
A green,crystallineheptahydratemineral of ferrous [iron]sulfate,FeSO4·7H2O. Alsocalledgreenvitriol.
[MiddleEnglishcoperose, a metallicsulfate, fromOldFrench,fromMedievalLatincuperōsa, probablyshortforaquacuprōsa, copperwater, fromLateLatincuprum, copper]
Frenchcouperosé (adj., “blotchy”), from Latin cupri rosa, “rose of copper.”
Latin aes (“copper”) .. from the Latin form of the name of the island of Cyprus, where copper was mined (the alchemists associated copper with Venus).
Aes passed into Germanic .. and became English ore. In Latin, aes was the common word for “cash, coin, debt, wages” in many figurative expressions.
In the ‘modern’ money system, the Active (‘Male’) party is the bank. ‘He’ extracts usury from the Passive (‘Female’) party – the misled and deceived ‘borrower’.
Observe that even the usury that is ‘paid’ by the bank on its fictitious ‘deposits’, is recorded as if it were coming from the Passive (Liability, ‘Female’) side of its Balance Sheet.
Step-by-Step: How Banks Extract “Interest”
The fact is that from the earliest recorded times until the later Middle Ages even interest was forbidden by both canon and civil law, for interest then was synonymous with usury.
But the general detestation was diminished by 37 Hen. 8, c. 9 (1545) which, while entitled “A Bill Against Usury”, tacitly legalized it to a maximum of 10 per cent per annum. This statute inaugurated the serviceable fiction that usury no longer meant any interest, but only excessive interest.
The etymology of usury is from the Latin words usa and aera, meaning “the use of money”.
J.L. Bernstein, American Bar Association journal (1965) [27]
“Interest” (usury) is often called the “price” or “cost” of money. This cost is not just the price we pay for “the use of” the banks’ fictitious ‘deposits’. It is also a hidden cost, that is embedded in the prices of everything we buy.
Even those who imagine they have no debt, do, and are paying the price of someone else’s debt every time they go to a shop.
Indeed, even a ticket for “public” transport carries this hidden cost in its price.
Under this system, the bottom 80% of the population pay twice as much interest as they ‘earn’. The top 10% ‘earn’ twice as much interest as they pay. And the top 0.01% ‘earn’ 2000times more interest than the top 10% receive, on average.
The interestusury system is the Number 1 driver of inequality.
Little has changed, in 5000 years.
Professor Michael Hudson (How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC – 1000 AD) informs us that usury “became the major force polarizing ancient society as credit passed out of the hands of public institutions into those of private households”:
The irony is the fact that the Latin term for loan interest was fænus. Its prefix (fe‑) connoted the idea of fecundity, much as the Greek word for interest/usury, tokos [“birth”]. Aristotle noted that unlike cows which reproduce themselves, metallic money lent out by usurers is sterile. This barrenness of metal is the central problem of usury: Interest is demanded on the basis of money-loans whose proceeds are not invested productively, much less at sufficient profit to pay the rates demanded by usurers. [..]
Creditors often broke up families by taking away their servant girls, daughters, sons or mother as debt pledges, while they themselves refrained from marrying in order to keep their own family fortunes intact. [..]
By classical Greek and Roman times, no palace rulers were left to cancel agrarian debts and otherwise keep creditor power in check. Thus, what seems to have begun as justifiable debt in third‑millennium Mesopotamia evolved into classical usury. Its corrosive dynamics polarized ancient society more than any other factor, destroying the archaic social balance between rich and poor, mercantile creditors and cultivators, despite the nominal decline in interest rates.
The power of creditors increased in the face of declining royal authority. Although the normal lending rate declined from Bronze Age Mesopotamia through classical Greece and Rome, creditors were able to render irreversible the forfeiture of land and personal freedom which debtors traditionally had been obliged to pledge as a condition for obtaining loans. In sum, what is first documented in Sumer is a revolutionary institution, revolutionary in that interest-bearing debt ended up by inciting populations to revolution at the end of antiquity, in the second and first centuries BC throughout the Romanized Mediterranean world.[28]
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The discovery of strong mineral acids, particularly of HNO3, and aqua regia, had a strong effect on existing ideas about minerals, metals, and their chemical composition. For example, the discovery of aqua regia [“royal water”, 🜆] derived from vitriol* and sal ammoniac [🜹] robbed gold of its status as an indestructible metal, for now it could be dissolved, or “killed” as some alchemists would say. .. Indeed, green vitriol was often referred to as “the green lion” [“devouring the Sun”] in alchemical terminology, and the corrosive elixirs extracted therefrom caused it to be the subject of much secrecy, allegory, and interesting imagery in fourteenth century alchemical texts.[29]
* green vitriol 🜨 (iron ♂ sulphate), and blue or “Roman” vitriol (copper ♀ sulphate)
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‘People’s revolutions’ rarely occurred under the monarchies of ancient Mesopotamia. Their kings gained favour with the commoners by regularly using their royal authority to declare the people’s debts forgiven. All private debts were cancelled, family members sold (bankrupted) into slavery were free to return home, and any property forfeited was returned to the original owner.
This practice involved smashing the clay tablets on which the details of debt were recorded. Typically this occurred at New Year, and so the people were able to start over with “a clean slate.”
In the series Mr Robot, the hacker hero Eliot wishes to destroy the digital records of student debt held by EvilCorp. In accounting terms he is attacking the asset side of a bank’s balance sheet – destroying the digital records of what people owe the bank – but the same process could be applied to the data records of bank liabilities, the promises they issue to people, the ‘money’ we see in our bank accounts.[30]
In Sumerian, it was called ama-gi; in Akkadian, andurārum; and in Babylonian, mi’arum. The word meant the return of persons or property to their origin, or former status.
Readers of my earlier essays on the radically misogynous, predatory sex ‘magick’ principles in alchemy and banking may recognise a profound significance, and connection, in learning that the Sumerian word ama-gi derives from a noun ama “mother”, and the present participle gi “return, restore, put back”. Its literal meaning is “return to the mother”.
The same word in Hebrew (דְּרוֹר֙) meant “release”, “a flowing”, and “liberty”.
From an unused root (meaning to move rapidly); freedom; hence, spontaneity of outflow, and so clear – liberty, pure.
It is the word Jesus is reported as using in his first public sermon, when he stood in the synagogue and read from the scroll of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent Me to announce release (pardon, forgiveness) to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.
That word was deror.
DEROR
To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.
If you think fundamentally, a banking licence is not given to everyone. It is only given to a certain organisation which fulfills certain criteria. So it’s a privileged licence.
Imagine a world where you could do exactly what banks do.
Pay with “an electronic check drawn on (your)self.”
Imagine if everyone could do the same thing – “create a liability” on themselves, and use it to buy goods and services from each other.
A world with no banks, and no usury.
The accounting is really quite simple. We need only to cut the banks out of the picture we have just been looking at, and internalise the same operations.
Imagine a world with no banks.
Unlike the banks, however, who “systematically conceal” the seigniorage value of the ‘deposits’ that they create out of nothing, cleverly taking that value for themselves (“seigniorage rent”), we will clearly show it, for everyone to see.
This can be done with an inverse public Honour rating, linked to both sides of your Balance Sheet.
In this accounting system, Single Entry is combined with Double Entry (SEDE). This means that most often, your “Balance Sheet” will not be balanced*. The amount on each side will be different. The side that is the largest determines your public Honour rating.
(* For readers keen on economic theory, this can be called a dynamic disequilibrium system.)
Let us see how it works.
Every time you draw a liability on yourself – that is, every time you create new purchasing power for yourself – your public Honour rating falls:
In this step, you have not actually used your new purchasing power (‘money’) to pay for something yet. You have simply created a matching Asset and Liability. Exactly like all the banks do. And your public Honour rating fell, according to the amount you created. Anyone you trade with can now see that you have “drawn” a liability on yourself, of 5%. The seigniorage value of the new purchasing power that you just created for yourself, has been publicly recorded.
(So, if you didn’t actually need to buy something right now, perhaps you should have waited, until you do? That way, the seller would see your perfect public Honour rating, at the Point-Of-Sale.)
When you do buy something, however, only the Asset side of your Balance Sheet is effected. Part of your new Asset is transferred to someone else. But your public Honour rating remains unchanged:
You created a debt (Liability), remember? In a real sense, that debt is not just a debt to yourself. Your creation of new purchasing power, out of nothing, bought you something (a benefit) that ultimately came from the natural world; consuming resources*, and/or human energy (life time). You need to give back – do something for someone else – to restore your public Honour.
(* Also, all human activities result in waste – pollution – in one or many forms. These real costs to the environment and society are “externalised” by current accounting methods. Some people profit – corporate ‘persons’. Everyone else suffers the costs.)
By selling something, or doing work for someone, you earn back purchasing power from others. Your debt (Liability) is reduced, and your public Honour rating rises.
In the following example, having spent3000 (above), you are now receiving a payment of 2000, which cancels some of your Liability:
As you can see, when you received purchasing power (i.e., a payment) from someone else, only the Liability side was effected.
That is because any payments received are first used to reduce any outstanding Liability amount that you have previously created, by drawing on yourself.
If you have no Liability – a zero (0) on the right side – only then will new payments received be added to your Asset side.
In other words, you must pay down your Liabilities; you cannot just accrue more Assets. In time, your worsening public Honour will incline others to refuse to deal with you.
Remember: your public Honour rating is determined by the largest side of your Balance Sheet. This means that simply building up more accounting Assets also harms your Honour rating. If you have them, it is wiser to spend them, which benefits someone else, as well as yourself. After all, you can always create more, when and if you really need it. In this way you can maximise your public Honour.
If you wish, you can transfer amounts internally – from your Asset side to your Liability side – in order to more quickly restore your public Honour rating.
For example, perhaps you have created more purchasing power than you actually need to spend right now. You can simply transfer your Asset, to cancel out some (or all) of your Liability:
This system is built on a set of rules that provide everyone with strong incentives to do the right thing. For themselves. For others. And for nature.
To use your seigniorage rights – that is, your individual sovereign right to create purchasing power – wisely, and sustainably.
By exercising self-discipline with your life’s time – by balancing your spending flow and your earning flow – you maximise your public Honour.
Alchemical symbol for Time (1 hour)
🝮
Alchemical symbol for Time (24 hours)
🝰
I-Ching, Hexagram 24 復 (fù): “Return”, The Turning Point, Renewal, Restore
Now, we all know that life can seem cruel at times. We make mistakes. And pay a price. Sooner, or later. Sometimes they are really big ones. And sometimes, despite our best efforts, things just happen to us.
We have accidents. We fall ill. Or someone we love does. The economy has a “downturn”. We lose our job. Our business fails. On it goes.
Many have tried to sell us the idea that “everyone is (born) equal” but let us be honest here, ok?
That is a plain, bald-faced lie.
For many, the ‘negative’ outcomes – at least compared to many others – begin before conception.
For some, extraordinarily ‘positive’ outcomes begin before conception.
I am confident, for example, that there are some who will read this essay – and many more who won’t – who are natural-born, genius intellects. Or at least, an awful lot smarter than I. And there are others, who are naturally gifted with an overabundance in particular drives, or aptitudes, and so will always be able to out-compete me, and you, in one way or another … and possibly in everything!
And that’s just fine by me. Personally, I cannot, and do not wish to imagine the bleak, colourless horror of a world without difference.
Frankly, I do not believe that mere imperfect humans are capable of conceiving a “perfect” system of exchange, that can ‘magically’ create a utopian outcome in a world of vast differences, and imperfections. To imagine that we can, I think, implies a degree of egotism that should encourage our caution.
I do believe, however, that after 5000 years of repeating exactly the same, fundamental mistakes when it comes to the design, and regulation of our mediums of exchange, that now we can design systems that are, at least, a lot more fair.
And, a lot more merciful.
This accounting system offers everybody exactly the same power to create purchasing power … coupled with exactly the same responsibilities.
So, it is only fair that it offers everybody the same amount of mercy.
And it gives this mercy – or grace – every week. Not once a year, or every seven, or forty-nine, or when a new king ascends the throne and wants to buy public favour.
Every seventh day, the algorithm cancels a percentage of the units from both sides of your Balance Sheet.
It restores your public Honour.
You might call it a small weekly Jubilee. Or andurārum, or mi’arum, or a return to the mother.
Or … grace. A little bit of forgiveness.
I call it Polarised Demurrage (“P.D.”).
It is a kind of “inverse” demurrage function, that operates the same way on both of the unequal and opposite “poles” of your Balance Sheet.
The following example illustrates how it works. To make it simpler (for me, to make the animation!), this only shows what P.D. will do with no new transactions by you, of any kind, over eight weeks.
Notice how both sides of your Balance Sheet reduce, and your public Honour rating climbs a little each week. It starts with you in the somewhat precarious position of only 60% Honour – because you are 40,000 in the red.
Any time you receive a payment, or, spend some of your Assets, or, create some more purchasing power for yourself, the algorithm will simply recalculate, and start the weekly forgiveness cycle over again.
The seventh day – the day that you receive some forgiveness – is determined by the date of the transaction that has taken you the greatest distance away from zero .. on either side of your Balance Sheet. Your personal “forgiveness day” will only change, if you exceed that number again, on a different day of the week.
Here is one more example, to illustrate how a new drawing of liability on yourself interrupts, and restarts, your forgiveness cycle. Again, you are starting 40,000 in the red, at 60% Honour.
After four (4) weeks worth of “forgiveness”, during which time you have (again) not made any new transactions of any kind, you decide to draw some more liability on yourself – another 3000.
The forgiveness cycle is shown continuing on for a further six (6) weeks, after your new “drawing” of 3000.
I hope that this has helped to show you that it is possible for us to eliminate the role of banks, and usury.
That it is possible to create a new system of ‘money’ and exchange, that returns our seigneur right to ourselves, and works fairly and equally for everyone.
An inversion, of their inversions.
It is not even a ‘money’ system, really. It is just a system for counting how much net benefit each one of us has gained, from the equal right to make withdrawals from other people’s – and nature’s – finite resources.
I think that a counting system like this would eliminate many problems caused by the greed of the ‘smiths and alchemists, and, provide benefits similar to those that many are now calling for – e.g., UBI, “living wage” – without having to beg banker-owned ‘sovereign’ governments for it.
Or trust that they will not abuse the increased power such regimes would give them, over our life times.
Or trust that we will not fall into ever more destructive habits of mind and action, as a result of increased dependency, without increased responsibility.
Perhaps you might wish to think about the pros and cons of this system, for yourself.
In future, I will write more on how this new SEDE accounting system embodies principles of what some believe to be ‘sacred’ geometry, expressing the Grace (Mercy), Nurture, Wisdom and Beauty of the life-giving Female .. or Mother .. Nature.
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REFERENCES
[1] Galbraith, JK, Money: Whence It Came, Were It Went (1975), p. 15 – retrieved from Wikiquote August 2018
[2] McKay, Colin, deror.org, (2011)
[3] Becklumb, P., and Frigon, M., How the Bank of Canada Creates Money for the Federal Government: Operational and Legal Aspects (10 August 2015) – retrieved August 2018
[4] Nichols, D.M. and Gonczy, A.M.L, Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion (1994 edition), p. 6
[5] Investopedia: Promissory Notes – retrieved August 2018
[6] Financial Stability Board, Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions (2014 revision) – retrieved August 2018
[7] Nichols, D.M. and Gonczy, A.M.L, Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion (1994 edition), p. 6
[8] Werner, R.A., A Lost Century in Economics: Three theories of banking and the Conclusive Evidence (2014)
[9] Angas, Major L.L.B. (Lawrence Lee Bazley), Slump ahead in bonds (1937), Somerset Pub. Co. pp. 20-21. (cited in Wikiquote, Banking) – retrieved August 2018
[10] Keynes, J.M., Newton, the Man, (c. 1946) – retrieved from University of St. Andrews History of Mathematics archive, August 2018
[11] King, L.W., The Code of Hammurabi, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School – retrieved August 2018
[12] Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale. Given intention to publish a book revealing further evidences, the author apologises for not providing a more detailed citation.
[13] ibid.
[14] Karpenko, V. and Norris, J.A., Vitriol in the History of Chemistry, Chem. Listy 96, 997-1005 (2002)
[15] ibid.
[16] Bossone, B. and Costa, M., Monies (Old and New) Through the Lens of Modern Accounting (2018), VOX CEPR – retrieved July 2018
[17] Fetter, F.A., Reformulation of the Concepts of Capital and Income in Economics and Accounting (1937) in “Capital, Interest, & Rent” (1977). via etymologyonline, Capital – retrieved August 2018
[18] Investopedia: Legal Tender – retrieved August 2018
[19] Oresme, N., Treatise on the Origin, Nature, Lw, and Alterations of Money (De origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum), cited in Woodhouse, A. “Who Owns the Money?” Currency, Property, and Popular Sovereignty in Nicole Oresme’s De moneta (2017-18). Speculum. 92 (1): 85-116
[20] Bank of Canada, Backgrounders: Seigniorage, March 2013 (pdf) – retrieved August 2018
[21] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Board issues interim final rule regarding dividend payments on Reserve Bank capital stock, Feb 18, 2016. – retrieved August 2018
[22] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FAQs – About the Fed: Who owns the Federal Reserve? – retrieved August 2018
[23] Bossone, B. and Costa, M., Monies (Old and New) Through the Lens of Modern Accounting (2018), VOX CEPR – retrieved July 2018
[24] Bakan, D., Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958). D. Van Nostrand Company Inc. New York. p. 204
[25] Oresme, N., cited in Rolnick, A.J., Velde, F.R., & Weber, W.E., The Debasement Puzzle: An Essay on Medieval Monetary History, Federal Rserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review, Fall 1997 – retrieved August 2018 (pdf)
[26] Keynes, J.M., Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: Essays In Persuasion, The Future (1930) – retrieved September 2017
[27] Bernstein, J.L., The Checkered Career of Usury, American Bar Association Journal, Volume 51, September 1965. – retrieved August 2018
[28] Hudson, M., How Interest Rates Were Set: 2500 BC – 1000 AD (2000) – retrieved August 2018
[29] Karpenko, V. and Norris, J.A., Vitriol in the History of Chemistry, Chem. Listy 96, 997-1005 (2002)
[30] Scott, B., How to Burn Digital Money, 1 August 2018 – retrieved August 2018
[31] Assange, J., Conspiracy as Governance (2006) – retrieved Augsut 2018 (pdf)
[32] Shah, A.K., Big Four and the Revolving Door, Renegade Inc (2018) – watch online
[33] Whipple. J., The Importance of Usury Laws (1836)
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Oh the irony.
Or perhaps rather, the karma.
From the birthplace of el modo vinegia (“the Venetian Method”) of Double Entry Bookkeeping, and the modern banking Usurocracy that it spawned more than half a millennium ago, comes academic confirmation of the “outright false accounting” and “double nature” of bank ‘money’.
Professor of Accounting Massimo Costa, along with former international financial markets professor and current World Bank and IMF advisor Biagio Bossone, have confirmed that so-called “money of account” created by Double Entry Bookkeeping is a “systematically concealed” tool for extracting “seigniorage rent” from the labour of the human race.
In academic jargon, it is “a structural element of subtraction of net real resources from the economy, with potentially deflationary effects on profits and/or wages, distributional consequences, and frictions between capital and labor.”
In other words, the global banking system is an enormous parasite, and its parasitic method is fraudulent.
Their article relates to the heart of my essays (eg, here, here, here, here, here) on the ancient, alchemical philosophistry – the word ‘magic’ with numbers added – on which the ‘modern’ banking system is built.
More generally, absent adverse economic or market contingencies inducing depositors to convert deposits into cash, the liabilities represented by deposits only partly constitute debt liabilities of the issuing bank, which as such require [central bank] reserve coverage. The remaining part of the liabilities is a source of income for the issuing bank – income that derives from the bank’s power to create money. In accounting terms, to the extent that this income is undistributed, it is equivalent to equity.
This double nature of demand deposits is stochastic in as much as, at issuance, every deposit unit can be either debt (if, with a certain probability, the issuing bank receives requests for cash conversion or interbank settlement) or equity (with complementary probability).
Despite the fact that they claim to have loaned us all this money, thanks to the magical paradox at the heart of double-entry accounting, they also claim, simultaneously, precisely the opposite to be true — that we have actually loaned all that money to them.
[..]
Believe it or not, there is an explanation—albeit a perverse, morally abhorrent and unconscionable explanation—for this, and in turn, for how the creeping global preparations to legally steal the “deposit” assets of bank customers (refer above diagram) is able to be “justified” by the banks, the financial and political authorities, and the unelected, BIS-funded, Goldman Sachs alumni-chaired FSB.
At the heart of the matter is the ever-present paradox of perspective inherent in the BabylonianDuality Principle on which double-entry accounting is based.
Banks are able to create new (so-called) ‘money’ ex nihilo through the loan origination process. As this is recorded using double-entry accounting, every new loan results in a new Asset and a new Liability on the banks’ balance sheet records.
However, because banks act both as new loan (thus, new ‘money’) originators and as financial intermediaries, there is no way of disaggregating the Liability side of any bank’s balance sheet in order to clearly distinguish between those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s own lending (so-called), and those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s intermediation (i.e., ‘transfers’ of ‘money’ from one customer account to another customer account at the same bank, or, from the customer accounts of other financial institutions to customers of the bank).
Whether or not any particular unit of any particular “deposit” amount could truthfully be defined as ‘money’ loaned to the bank by a customer, or, loaned by the bank to a customer, is dependent on knowing with complete certainty how and when each and every unit came to be recorded in the customer account. The only customer account for which such certainty is possible, is a customer account created by the bank at the moment of first originating a loan, and, before any new entry for even one single fractional unit of the denominated currency has been either added to, or subtracted from that customer account.
There is one further exception – an account established for one of the bankers’ favourite clients—arms dealers, drug cartels, mafioso, and other criminal organisations such as the CIA—at the first moment of the client handing over real legal tender cash notes at the bank to open the account.
In any event, since even a ‘transfer’ of ‘money’ from one bank to another still has the same ultimate origin—an out-of-nothing creation of an electronic record of a mutual exchange of promises to pay—then from a whole-of-banking-system perspective it really doesn’t matter; all so-called ‘money’ on ‘deposit’ is simultaneously owned by the customers, and by the banks.
In other words, the global Usurocracy’s rent-extracting ‘money’ system is based on the arbitrary, subjective, relativist ‘logic’ and philosophistry of Cabala, or what George Orwell called doublethink – “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Also related is cognitive dissonance, in which contradictory beliefs cause conflict in one’s mind. Doublethink is notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance—thus the person is completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction.
Thanks to 503 years of “progressive” regulatory capture – amounting to nothing less than a thinly-concealed regime of state-sponsored Usurocracy – it is the banks’ exclusive privilege to ‘earn’ compounding usury on all the self-annihilating, +1|-1 Double Entry ‘money’ units that they create out of nothing:
Owing to double nature of commercial bank money, a relevant share of the deposits that banks report in the balance sheet as ‘debt toward clients’ generates revenues that are very much similar to the seigniorage rent extracted by the state through the issuance of state money (coins, banknotes, and central bank reserves).
Costa and Bossone confirm that it is precisely this “double nature” of bank ‘money’ that enables banks to hide the reality of their extracting “seigniorage rent” from the labour of the human race. How?
By not recording the value of their imaginary accounting ‘money’ – supposedly “equivalent” to, or, in more honest words, a counterfeit of, real physical government legal tender cash notes and coins – on their Income Statement:
Under current accounting practices, seigniorage is largely underappreciated, it is systematically concealed, and is not allocated to the income statement (where it naturally belongs), while it is recorded on the balance sheet under debt liabilities, thus originating outright false accounting.
As I extensively evidenced, this fraudulent system is actively aided and abetted by the “secretive”, tax haven-registered, “private” corporations of the international accounting standard-setters; a fact also confirmed – tacitly – by Costa and Bossone:
The stochastic double nature of bank money is consistent with the principles of general accounting as defined in the Conceptual Framework of Financial Reporting, which sets out the concepts underpinning the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). In light of these standards, demand deposits are a hybrid instrument – partly debt and partly revenue. The debt part relates to the share of deposits that will (likely) be converted into cash or reserves, while the revenue part relates to the share of deposits that will (likely) never be converted into cash or reserves. This share of deposits is a source of revenue.
The Mercurial Rebis: A Crowned and Bat-winged Hermaphrodite, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 14th Century (Munich MS, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
What Costa and Bossone (conveniently?) neglect to mention is that the share of so-called ‘deposits’ that “will (likely) never be converted into cash or reserves”, and that is thus “a source of revenue,” is around 97%.
Rather like the banks conveniently neglecting to mention the same 97% on their Income Statement.
Apparently it is sufficient to describe what is in reality the vast majority as merely “a relevant share”.
In “Dishonourable Debt” we saw that effective July 1, 2009 – in the middle of the global banking liquidity crisis known as the “GFC” – the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) introduced Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) §305 Cash andCash Equivalents. This new standard effectively sanctioned – and further concealed – the banks’ misleading and deceptive conduct in renting their electronic records of promises to pay physical cash under the guise of so-called ‘money’. As I observed:
The FASB has ex post facto codified that banks may consider bank ‘credits’ (a record of a promise to pay cash) as actually being “cash” for accounting purposes; that the customers’ perspective of bank ‘credits’ “shall” be that those ‘credits’ are (literal physical) “cash”, and, that they are not amounts owed to them by the bank…
Pure Orwellian doublethink.
This should help us to understand the real reason why, for several decades, there has been an accelerating drive by the international banking system to ‘normalise’ numerous forms of electronic banking and ‘money’ – including crypto currencies – and more recently, to actively discourage and even to incrementally (“Boiling Frog” strategy) restrict or outright ban the use of physical cash.
Contrary to all propaganda, this carrots-and-sticks drive towards a global economy reliant on pure abstraction, rather than real physical currency, has nothing to do with improving “convenience” for the public, or “efficiency” in the banking system, much less with “fighting crime” or “the black market”.
Real physical cash – State legal tender – is perhaps the weakest link in the Usurocracy’s “golden chain” of Double Entry ‘magic’ enslaving the human race.
Real physical cash is what the Usurocracy is counterfeiting, using +1|-1 Double Entry nullities, and then “systematically” concealing by not reporting their counterfeit ‘cash’ on their Income Statements.
Once physical cash is eliminated, the promises-to-pay ‘money’ system will be fully “unfettered” and “independent” from the real, tangible world. It will exist solely in the abstract, “imaginary”, ‘magic’ paradox-riddled, counterfeit world (pun intended) of Double Entry Bookkeeping controlled by the Usurocracy.
“The bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.”
Do read and share this outstanding resource compiled by Urunu: The Cashless Society.
This is in fact the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that existence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action; that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as much as the wounds of the martyrs of Mary.
..the existence of “Evil” is fatal to philosophy so long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions; and to accustom the mind to “make no difference”[1] between any two ideas as such is to emancipate it from the thralldom of terror.
The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying “evil”. The essence of such practice will consist in training the mind and body to confront things which cause fear, pain, disgust, shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyse them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth.
Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast) [2]
I will just say it.
The global accounting, banking, and ‘money’ systems, are Satanic.
All three systems are based on and operate according to fundamental principles that are identical to those in the philosophy and practice of satanism.
They are also identical to those in the “system of thought” that George Orwell described as doublethink.
An honest observer should be able to see this clearly, with a little thoughtful reflection.
According to a former priest in the (Anton LaVey) Church of Satan, the four main tenets of satanic ideology are:
Self-Preservation
Moral Relativism
Social Darwinism
Eugenics
These principles can be discerned in just one passage from the most notorious and influential Black Magician of the twentieth century:
We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit:
let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the
wretched and the weak: this is the law of the
strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.
Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou
Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live.[3]
This is emphasised by the Fraternitas Saturni (Brotherhood of Saturn) in an oxymoronic, ‘blackwhite’ expansion on Crowley’s dictum “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”:
Love is the Law, Compassionless Love.[4]
‘Art’ work allegedly owned by John Podesta. Note colours: ‘white’ demon (with Male, red-haired child) on Left; ‘black’ demon (with Female, white-haired child) on Right.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche equated pity with self-annihilation.[5] For the satanist, or Black Magician, rejection of pity is “the magical equivalent of the rejection of self-annihilation.”[6]
In other words, to “emancipate” or “liberate” oneself entirely from the “bond” of compassion, of empathy for other beings, is seen as an act of Self-Preservation.
In our time compassion is even forbidden by science, as is already happening in England, where they have political economy.
‘Modern’ accounting, banking, and ‘money’ – the foundations of global finance, markets, economic and political life – all operate on the Double Entry Bookkeeping system.
Many historians and economists, including (eg) Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter, have traced the development of modern capitalist business practice to the Double Entry system, attributing to it the “pitiless” spirit of modern commerce in its “unending, systematic pursuit of profit”:
In [Schumpeter’s] view, double entry’s “cost-profit calculus” drives capitalist enterprise – and then spreads throughout the whole culture: “And thus defined and quantified for the economic sector, this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career subjugating – rationalizing – man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.” For Schumpeter, capitalism “generates a formal spirit of critique where the good, the true and the beautiful no longer are honoured; only the useful remains – and that is determined solely by the critical spirit of the accountant’s cost-benefit calculation”.[7]
Karl Marx – the 19th century arch materialist – stated that accounting is even “more necessary” for a communist system:
As unity within its circuits, as value in motion, whether in the sphere of production or in either phase of the sphere of circulation, capital exists ideally only in the form of money of account, primarily in the mind of the producer of commodities, the capitalist producer of commodities.
Bookkeeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, becomes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of handicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production.[8]
As we have seen in previous essays (here, here), Double Entry Bookkeeping was not created as a neutral, objective tool for value-adding producers or manufacturers to manage their costs. It was developed by merchants (traders) from the dawn of mercantile capitalism, as a tool whose real “use” value was to conceal their illegal practice of usury from Church-State authorities. It also served as a psychological tool of self-deception, enabling the merchant to convince himself that his actions were morally (thus ‘divinely’) justified – as “proved” by his meticulously-recorded and balanced books.
Merchants or traders have been condemned by true sages and religious divines throughout history and across many cultures, because their actions were seen as parasitic, and immoral; not adding to the common wealth of society, but merely taking from that produced by others.[9] The merchant is an intermediary, a middleman between producer and consumer, who aims to “buy low and sell high”, whether by fair means or foul (hello storytelling: advertising, marketing, “Public Relations”). He profits in whole or in part through taking advantage of what many today euphemistically call “information asymmetry” – which in other, more honest words, means the relative (to oneself) ignorance of others.
Double Entry embodies the satanic doctrine of Self-Preservation. The goal of the Black Magician is to become ‘as god’ – the Absolute, the One, the All, the Nothing, the ‘Divine Mind’ or ‘Pure’ Intellect – without sacrificing* his or her “individuated existence”.
(*The exact opposite of the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice, and its ultimate aspiration of self-less union with, or complete self-annihilation in, the Divine; e.g., Matthew 16:20-25.)
Double Entry is a numeric and sophistic tool of control over the real or imagined events of the past, present, and future. It offers the possibility of becoming ‘as god’; of attaining Ultimate Power over the material realm (“Money Power”), which the magician equates with power over the imaginary (‘divine’ mind) realm as well.
This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of MAN, but HE who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught initiation. He is ‘the Devil’ of the Book of Thoth and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.[10]
According to Lewis Mumford (Myth of the Machine), accounting’s “concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards” – Profit (or Loss) – “introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk’s search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.”
Double Entry Bookkeeping also embodies the satanic doctrine of Moral Relativism.
The core of Crowley’s magical philosophy is the willed dissolution of opposites – “Let there be no difference … between any one thing and any other thing.” – in greater unity (agape, love).[11]
[As we have seen, ‘love’ in satanic doctrine is “Compassionless”, “pitiless”.]
Every single transaction recorded by Double Entry, is entered twice. The one action or event (real or imaginary) is dissolved or divided into two records which, in effect, cancel out or an-nihil-ate each other: a debit entry, and an equal and opposite credit entry.
Debits must equal Credits.
Negatives must equal Positives.
‘Evil’ must equal ‘Good’.
Black must equal White.
The union of both – the “sacred marriage” or “union of opposites” – equals Nothing:
I am God, I very God of very God; I go upon my way to work my Will; I have made Matter and Motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that Nothingness should figure itself as twain… [two]
I am the None, for all that I am is the imperfect image of the perfect; each partial phantom must perish in the clasp of its counterpart, each form fulfil itself by finding its equated opposite, and satisfying its need to be the Absolute by the attainment of annihilation.
The World LAShTAL includes all this.
LA—Naught.
AL—Two.
LA … represents the Ecstasy of Nuit and Hadit conjoined, lost in love, and making themselves Naught thereby. [..]
AL, on the contrary, though it is essentially identical with LA, shows “The Fool” manifested through the Equilibrium of Contraries. The weight is still nothing, but it is expressed as it were two equal weights in opposite scales. The indicator still points to zero.
[“ShT” is “Fire” (Sh) and “Force” (T); it “expresses the secret nature which operates the Magick or the transmutations.” Abbreviation of “Shaitan”; Satan.][12]
The Fool, Thoth Tarot deck, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, Liber LXXVIII. (Source: bibliotecapleyades.net)
The Double Entry system embodies what George Orwell referred to in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink [..] a vast system of mental cheating”:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.[13]
The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.[14]
The Double Entry system also embodies another “essential” principle of Satanism, and applies it in the same way, for the same purpose: as its means to an end – the practice of Antinomianism.
The [left-hand path] practice .. often manifests itself in antinomianism, that is, the purposeful reversal of conventional normatives: ‘evil’ becomes ‘good,’ ‘impure’ becomes ‘pure,’ ‘darkness’ becomes ‘light’.
In [Crowley’s] “theology” the results of the application of this antinomianism are that opposites, such as the Beast and the Lamb (Rev. 13:8) and the Whore of Babylon and the Woman clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12:1) are only apparent, and that from a higher perspective they are unities or equivalencies (Beast = Lamb; Whore = Woman).
LaVey sees as natural [the] indulgence in all the so-called seven deadly sins of Christianity: greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust and sloth. Each of which he views as a possible catalyst for positive and natural human activities or attitudes … (See the Satanic Bible, ch. III). The fact that most people today, and the whole “western industrialized economy” is really driven by the desires of the masses to indulge in all of the seven deadly sins is a powerful argument for the presence of a Satanic Age.[15]
The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.[16]
Double Entry causes much confusion (“Babel”, from Hebrew בָּלַלbalal, Babylon), not only with beginners (‘novice’, ‘apprentice’) but even with experienced practitioners (‘adept’). The reason why is because its ‘logic’ is the exact opposite of what a normal person would naturally expect, based on the words used.
In common understanding, the word “credit” implies something Good. A positive. Something that adds to, increases, or improves. “Well done! That work is a credit to you.”
A “debit”, on the other hand (see etymology), is commonly understood to mean the exact opposite; something Bad. A negative. A loss, deficiency, or deficit. “On the biographical debit side there are the usual miscellaneous acts of thoughtlessness, rudeness and generally shabby behaviour.”
In Double Entry, however, the operating ‘logic’ is reversed. In its fundamental process – recording entries – words actually mean the exact opposite of what we normally understand them to mean.
A “debit” does not subtract (-) from an account. It adds to it (+).
A “credit” does not add (+) to an account. It subtracts from it (-).
(That is, for an Asset account. For a Liability account, the same words mean the reverse: a “debit” subtracts, and a “credit” adds. Doublethink.)
The satanic principle and practice of antinomianism – the deliberate inversion or reversal of values and conventions; the breaking of rules, laws, taboos – is embedded in Double Entry’s basic operation.
It is pitiful to see, how strangely some Men of Quality and Fortune, are to seek in Accompts; and how they are blinded and bambouzled by the Mists, that artful Men raise up before their Eyes, with Estimates, as they call ’em, and Representations of Values, drawn out of immense Books of Accompts, while the proper Judges know the Way neither into, nor out of them, and listen to the Jargon, as if it were Coptick, or Arabick.
Roger North, The Gentleman Accomptant, 1714
“For every debit there must be a credit, and for every credit there must be a debit” – Alas! How few consider that if this must be the case, the rule to go by, nothing is more easy than to make a set of books wear the appearance of correctness, which at the same time is full of errors, or of false entries, made on purpose to deceive!
Edward Thomas Jones, Jones’ English System of Book-Keeping by Single or Double Entry, 1796
The whole difference, and the only difference, between the two systems of accounting is in the fact that single-entry bookkeeping always uses literal language, while double-entry bookkeeping always uses figurative language except when speaking of persons.
In single-entry bookkeeping, cash means cash. Merchandise means merchandise. Interest means interest. Expense means expense. But in double-entry bookkeeping cash does not mean cash; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the cash. Merchandise does not mean merchandise; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the merchandise. Interest does not mean interest; it means the imaginary person who owes or is owed the amount of the interest. Expense does not mean expense; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the expenses. Net Capital does not mean net capital; it means the person (real in the case of an individual owner, imaginary in the case of a firm or a corporation) who is owed or owes the amount of the net capital.
Charles M. Van Cleve, Principles of Double Entry Bookkeeping, 1913
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Consider closely “The Fool” (‘0’) tarot card (shown above), as designed by Aleister Crowley. His exposition of its symbolism can be found here.
At some point in future, I hope to discover the necessary motivation to begin the task of elaborating on the colour green and its far-reaching symbolic significance, not only as the “colour of money”, but also in alchemy, Cabala, sex ‘magick’, human biology, chemistry, metallurgy, and in Hollywood movie ‘entertainment’.
UPDATE 8 June 2018: included clarification (in parentheses) regarding the opposite application of debits and credits for Asset and Liability accounts.
**********************
REFERENCES
[1] In the ‘Jewish’ festival of Purim, conventional normatives (such as social roles, e.g., teacher and student, adult and child) are reversed, and revellers are encouraged to drink until “he cannot tell the difference between ‘blessed be Mordechai’ [‘Good’] and ‘cursed be Haman’ [‘Evil’]. See Jeffrey Rubenstein, Purim, Liminality and Communitas, Association for Jewish Studies Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1992
[2] Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast); retrieved 5 June 2018
[3] Aleister Crowley, Book of the Law, or Liber AL II: 21; retrieved 5 June 2018
[4] Gregor A. Gregorius, G. Mitleidlose Liebe (cited in Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path, 1997, p. 148)
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (cited in Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path, 1997, p. 149, fn 68)
[6] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p.149
[7] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped Modern Finance (Kindle edition, p. 169)
[11] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p.144
[12] Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast); retrieved 5 June 2018
[13] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003 Centennial edition), Plume Harcourt Brace, USA. p. 220
[14] ibid., p. 218
[15] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p. 144, 185 – “‘Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!’ is [..] a specific exhortation to indulge in those things which collective or mass culture may call sins – because by virtue of their very rejection by the mass they can be exalted as worthy aspirations for the individualistic Satanist.” (p. 186)
[16] Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (1967)
[17] Joel H. Amernic and Russell J, Craig, Accounting as a Facilitator of Extreme Narcissism (2010), Journal of Business Ethics 96(1):79-93.
The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
[..]
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.
The Book Of Lambspring
To anyone paying attention, it should be obvious that the inverted moral value (vice) of infidelity that is actively and very profitablypromoted in the half light of public consciousness, in adultery-themed “dating” sites, apps, and “reality”TV, is now being actively normalised by mainstream media, along with ‘liberal’ academia.
This “normalisation” of cheating has exactly the same root as the accounting, banking, and money systems.
As we have seen recently, the first step in an alchemical experiment is called nigredo (“blackening”; a synonym for corruption, decay, sacrifice, death, negation).
In double entry bookkeeping, the foundation of the accounting, banking, and money systems, the first rule is also an act of negation:
For every debit there must be an equal credit, and for every credit there must be an equal debit.
In Cabala, the first act of creation by “Ein-Sof” (Infinite God) is said to be an act of self-negation (“tzimtzum”; contraction, concealment).
In mainstream “financial intermediation” theory of banking, the first principle is a pretence of self-negation: supposedly, the mere coupling together of two opposites, Savers and Borrowers.
This “normalisation” of cheating – a direct attack on the cornerstone social bonds of traditional marriage and family – aims to bring about the corruption – and destruction – of human society.
Or, as the “philosophers” of the “royal Art” prefer to frame it, the “transformation” of human society.
The first step in the “experiment”, is the decay, destruction, or negation, of traditional moral values. Only then can the alchemist bring forth “gold” from the “base”; the “higher”, from the “lower”; Order, out of Chaos.
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
It should not be necessary to spell out the myriad economic impacts of broken marriages, and broken homes, inclining “preferences” toward an increased “demand” (need) for debt: the Usurocracy’s exclusive monopoly “product”.
One can only wonder at the magnitude of economic inefficiencies – and wealth inequality – associated with the increased “need” to pay billions in fees to the “family” lawyer class, for example.
I would like to draw public attention to the alchemical symbolism evidencing this once covert, and now increasingly overt goal, of normalising infidelity – that is to say, lying and cheating.
In previousessays we have seen that the ancient “Art” of alchemy is an andocentric, misogynous, predatory sex magic system, whose hidden goal is the theft, manipulation, and domination, of the feminine birth-force (life, “growth”) energy, or “gynergy”.
For power and profit.
Throughout recorded history, alchemical adepts have advanced their deception by combining exoteric (outer) and esoteric (inner) doctrines, with the difference between the two cloaked in metaphor, allegory and symbolism – in particular, by means of the rebus (Latin rēbus “by means of objects”) or punning principle – thus hiding the truth in plain sight:
The Rebis (from Latin res bina, meaning dual or double matter) is the end product of the alchemical magnum opus or great work.
As we have also seen, the alchemical “Art” is based on two philosophical principles: the Unity of Opposites (exoteric), and the Law of Inversion (esoteric).
The “profane” are gulled – enchanted – by the outward appearance of beauty, nobility and virtue. Only the “illuminated” understand that the appearance cloaks a diabolic inner doctrine of inversion, that is explicitly contra naturam.
To illustrate this, let us now consider the alchemical allegory of the Stag and the Unicorn, from the Book of [Abraham] Lambspring (Frankfurt, 1625):
It seems that this little book was first published under the title De Lapide Philosophico Triga Chemicum (Prague 1599) compiled by the Frenchman Nicolas Barnaud prominent in the alchemical circles around Rudolf II.
Appearing at face value to be a work of “spiritual” alchemy, “[i]ts verses point to the soul and spirit involved in the alchemical transformation and its fifteen emblems are evocative symbols of these inner processes.”
The parable of the “deer” and the Unicorn appears to explain that the forest is “the Body”, the deer is “the Soul” , and the unicorn “the Spirit”. Knowing how to master all three “by Art” appears to be the goal aspired to.
The tinctures in alchemy relate also to the substances of the Mass, the red wine, the blood, and the white wafer, the body of Christ. Administration of the Sacraments was seen as spiritualising the souls of the partakers. In alchemical terms these white and red stones or tinctures served much the same purpose, though the alchemists achieved this, not through the intermediacy of a priest but by their own inner work of transmutation. Here alchemy links directly with the Grail stories which use similar parallels between the Grail and the Sacraments. The red tincture was occasionally symbolised by a stag bearing antlers. The stag being seen as a noble masculine animal. This links in with the Unicorn as a symbol of the white or feminine tincture. In some alchemical illustrations, such as that of the late 16th century Book of Lambspring, the Stag and Unicorn meet in the forest of the soul as part of the process of inner transformation.
We have already learned, however, that the secret inner doctrine of alchemy is one of sexual magic, and that the inversion (or reversal) of values lies at its heart.
The Stag as a symbol is often associated with the Sun [Sola ☉, Mars ♂, Asset, active, creditor] and the Unicorn is usually linked with the Moon [Luna ☽, Venus ♀, Liability, passive, debtor]. These polarities are to be coupled together through the alchemist’s work.
Seen in this hidden ‘light’ – from the “other side” of the Sun or “Black Sun” – the parable of the Stag and the Unicorn is actually a metaphor for the infidelity and promiscuity (Latin infidēlitas: unfaithful, disloyal, treacherous) that is essential to the alchemists’ sex magic rituals; where, in the act of “coupl[ing] them together”, the initiated adept uses a cunning trick (upaya, method) to steal the seed of the woman for his own empowerment, and enrichment:
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
Rather than the “deer” representing nobility of the Soul, for the alchemical adept it represents the rutting Stag’s “active” (creditor) sexual activity with all the females (debtor) in the herd.
stag (n.)
late 12c., probably from Old English stagga “a stag,” from Proto-Germanic *stag-, from PIE root *stegh- “to stick, prick, sting.” The Old Norse equivalent was used of male foxes, tomcats, and dragons; and the Germanic root word perhaps originally meant “male animal in its prime.”
Adjectival meaning “pertaining to or composed of males only” (as in stag party) is American English slang from 1848. Compare bull-dance, slang for one performed by men only (1845); gander (n.) also was used in the same sense. Stag film “pornographic movie” is attested from 1968. Stag beetle, so called for its “horns,” is from 1680s.
Rather than the Unicorn representing the Spirit, for the initiated it represents a cynical mockery of what is to him a mythical creature – the chaste and faithful female; symbolic also of the Holy Spirit, the Wisdom of God, the Virgin Mary, and the Christian saint.
Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived c. 490 to 425 BC, wrote that “the foulest Babylonian custom” was the practice of sacred prostitution. Once in their lifetimes, all women were required to sit in the temple of Ishtar/Inanna (“Aphrodite” to the greek Herodotus) and “have intercourse with some stranger” in return for money which was given to the temple:
Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, “I invite you in the name of Mylitta” (that is the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. [..] So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four.
It is noteworthy that “a fraction of female gender researchers” dispute Herodotus’ account, claiming that the entire notion began with a few “patriarchal” Greek writers concocting defamatory tales about cultural or political enemies.
What is of importance is that the existence of “holy prostitution” in Babylon has been the widely-held belief, for thousands of years. Given this accepted milieu then, it is little wonder that the adepts of “Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian” are seen in alchemical texts referring to the “base” subjects of their experiments as “whores”, and in at least one instance, as “the Babylonian whore”.
The final four verses of the parable clearly allude to what is the true goal of the alchemist: the attainment of “golden flesh”, that he may “triumph everywhere” and “rule over great Augustus” (the first Roman emperor).
[T]he “Alchemy of life: he can make his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make his body eternally be but sixteen years old[; and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he can turn iron and copper into gold”. These three experiments, then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the attainment of immortality, and secondly the production of gold, that is, material wealth.
I would draw your attention to two further points of special interest, before leaving you to contemplate the entire parable for yourself.
Firstly, bear in mind that the exoteric (public) doctrine actively promotes the idea of “equality” of the two “universal” genders. Then observe the subtle, egocentric misogyny implied by the lyrical praise of the Male (“glorious, beautiful and swift”, “great and strong”, etc), sharply contrasted by the absence of any adjectives, much less any superlatives, applied to the Female. One might get the impression (“The other an unicorn”) that the Female is merely an afterthought, barely worth mentioning at all.
Secondly, observe that the Stag is depicted as proudly boasting six (6) tines on each of its antlers, and bear in mind that a stag’s antlers function as objects of sexual attraction, and as weapons in fights for control over harems.
The Book of Lambspring,
A Noble Ancient Philosopher,
Concerning the Philosophical Stone;
Rendered into Latin Verse by
Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas,
Doctor of Medicine, a zealous Student of this Art.
Figure III
HEAR WITHOUT TERROR THAT IN THE FOREST ARE HIDDEN A DEER AND AN UNICORN
The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
They are concealed in the forest,
But happy shall that man be called
Who shall snare and capture them.
The Masters shew you here clearly
That in all places
These two animals wander about in forests
(But know that the forest is but one).
If we apply the parable to our Art,
We shall call the forest the Body.
That will be rightly and truly said.
The unicorn will be the Spirit at all times.
The deer desires no other name
But that of the Soul; which name no man shall take away from it.
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
– St. Augustine, City of God
Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity’s idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.
Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that “the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder.” Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.
*******
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
– Jesus of Nazareth (Sermon on the Mount; Matthew 5:27-28)
*******
* Credit for the term “Usurocracy” goes to Dr John Dunn, author of Renaissance: Counter Renaissance
Come, my love, my dove, & pour
From thy cupthe serpent wine
Brimmed & breathless -secret store
Of my crimson concubine
Surfeit spirit in the shrine-
Devil -Godess -Virgin -Whore.
In my recent two-part essay “Cheating Females” (Part 1, Part 2) we traced evidences back to circa 3200 BC showing that the ‘modern’ accounting, banking, and economic systems are built on two fundamental principles of cabalist alchemy – the Unity of Opposites, and the Law of Inversion – and are nothing less than a predatory, radically misogynous metaphor for ancient Babylonian sex magic.
A few quotations as a reminder:
“the woman … involved is an object, a representation of power … women are merely spiritual batteries..”
“In European alchemy the coarse starting material for the experiments is known as the prima materia and is of a fundamentally feminine nature. Likewise, as in the tantras, base substances such as excrement, urine, menstrual blood, part of corpses and so forth are named in the alchemic texts, no matter which culture they belong to, as the physical starting materials for the experiments. Symbolically, the primal material is described in images such as ‘snake, dragon, toad, viper, python’. It is also represented by every conceivable repulsive female figure — by witches, mixers of poison, whores, chthonic goddesses, by the ‘dragon mother’ so often cited in depth psychology. All these are metaphors for the demonic nature of the feminine…”
“These misogynous terms for the prima materia are images which on the one hand seek to describe the untamed, death-bringing nature; on the other one readily admit that a secret force capable of producing everything in the phenomenal world is hidden within ‘Mother Nature’. Nature in alchemy has at its disposal the universal power of birth. It represents the primordial matrix [▽] of the elements, the massa confusa, the great chaos, from which creation bursts forth.”
One text talks of ‘the transformation of the Babylonian whore into a virgin’..”
“The general term for body orifice, KA in Sumerian or bãbu in Akkadian, is expressly liminal because it also means door or gate. The vaginal opening, bãb uri and the anus bãb šuburri are imagined then as thresholds. From literary and incantation texts we know that the body and its orifices were regarded as sites of transition, especially when aroused.”
“In an Old Babylonian incantation (spell) .. the ‘chief tools of magic making are the female’s aroused body orifices’.”
“If one sips the sukra out of his mudra’s genitals with his mouth, then the process is described as being ‘from mouth to mouth’. [..] Through this oriental ‘Last Supper’ the power and the strength of the women are passed over to the man.”
Those who have read my two essays should now be able to recognise the alchemical and financial significance of key metaphorical concepts (eg, “spend”) embedded in the following poem written by the infamous ‘magician’, Aleister Crowley, to his “wisdom consort”, the Swiss-American Leah Hirsig:
In 1919, after seeking out Aleister Crowley due to her interest in the occult, she was consecrated as his Babalon or, “Scarlet Woman”, taking the name Alostrael, “the womb (or grail) of God.” Leah Hirsig wrote in her 1921 diary: “I dedicate myself wholly to The Great Work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures”.
18+ Do not read if extreme vulgarity offends.
Crowley’s own comments that “I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah..” and “an occasional publishable line thrown in when I weakened” should serve as fair warning.
My bold and/or italicised emphasis is added.
Leah Sublime
by Aleister Crowley
Cefalú, Italy
1920
MONDAY JUNE 21 1920
5.25pm to 5.15am
Against all principals, and in breach of two promises, I have sat up all night in the snows, writing a poem to Leah.
One long poem — an occasional publishable line thrown in when I weakened.
7.00 am: I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah in plain figures.
10.00 am: I think I did.
Leah Sublime,
Goddess above me!
Snake of the slime
Alostrael, love me!
Our master, the devil
Prospers the revel.
Tread with your foot
My heart til it hurt!
Tread on it, put
The smear of your dirt
On my love, on my shame
Scribble your name!
Straddle your Beast
My Masterful Bitch
With the thighs of you greased
With the Sweat of your Itch!
Spit on me, scarlet
Mouth of my harlot!
Now from your wide
Raw cunt, the abyss, Spend spouting the tide
Of your sizzling piss
In my mouth; oh my Whore
Let it pour, let it pour!
You stale like a mare
And fart as you stale;
Through straggled wet hair
You spout like a whale.
Splash the manure
And piss from the sewer.
Down to me quick
With your tooth on my lip
And your hand on my prick
With feverish grip
My life as it drinks—
How your breath stinks!
Your hand, oh unclean
Your hand that has wasted
Your love, in obscene
Black masses, that tasted
Your soul, it’s your hand!
Feel my prick stand!
Your life times from lewd
Little girl, to mature
Worn whore that has chewed
Your own pile of manure.
Your hand was the key to—
And now your frig me, too!
Rub all the much
Of your cunt on me, Leah
Cunt, let me suck
All your glued gonorrhea!
Cunt without end!
Amen! til youspend!
Cunt! you have harboured
All dirt and disease
In your slimy unbarbered
Loose hole, with its cheese
And its monthlies, and pox
You chewer of cocks!
Cunt, you have sucked
Up pricks, you squirted
Out foetuses, fucked
Til bastards you blurted
Out into space— Spend on my face!
Rub all your gleet away!
Envenom the arrow.
May your pox eat away
Me to the marrow.
Cunt you have got me;
I love you to rot me!
Spend again, lash me!
Leah, one spasm
Scream to splash me.
Slime of the chasm
Choke me with spilth
Of your sow-belly’s filth.
Stab your demonic
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine;
Sprawl on me! Sit
On my mouth, Leah, shit!
Shit on me, slut!
Creamy the curds
That drip from your gut!
Greasy the turds!
Dribble your dung
On the tip of my tongue!
Churn on me, Leah!
Twist on your thighs!
Smear diarrhoea
Into my eyes!
Splutter out shit
From the bottomless pit.
Turn to me, chew it
With me, Leah, whore!
Vomit it, spew it
And lick it once more.
We can make lust
Drunk on Disgust.
Splay out your gut,
Your ass hole, my lover!
You buggering slut,
I know where to shove her!
There she goes, plumb
Up the foul Bitch’s bum!
Sackful of skin
And bone, as I speak
I’ll bugger your grin
Into a shriek.
Bugger you, slut
Bugger your gut!
Wriggle, you hog!
Wrench at the pin!
Wrench at it, drag
It half out, suck it in!
Scream, you hog dirt, you!
I want it to hurt you!
Beast-Lioness, squirt
From your Cocksucker’s hole!
Belch out the dirt
From your Syphillis soul.
Splutter foul words
Through your supper of turds!
May the Devil our lord, your
Soul scribble over
With sayings of ordure!
Call me your lover!
Slave of the gut
Of the arse of a slut!
Call me your sewer
Of spilth and snot
Your fart-sniffer, chewer
Of the shit in your slot.
Call me that as you rave
In the rape of your slave.
Fuck! Shit! Let me come
Alostrael—Fuck!
I’ve spent in your bum.
Shit! Give me the muck
From my whore’s arse, slick
Dirt of my prick!
Eat it, you sow!
I’m your dog, fuck, shit!
Swallow it now!
Rest for a bit!
Satan, you gave
A crown to a slave.
I am your fate, on
Your belly, above you.
I swear it by Satan
Leah, I love you.
I’m going insane
Do it again!
From Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (h/t twitter user @HereIsJorge). Emphasis in original:
In his essay on cocaine [Freud] gave an account of the religious practices associated with it among South American Indians. [..] These rather irresponsible activities in the quest for a “magical drug” to achieve mood modification, are reminiscent of the whole history of magic. As we shall see when we discuss his essay on demoniacal possession, Freud cites overcoming incapacity for work as a major motive for entering a pact with the Devil. [..] Indeed, perhaps, one of the important reasons for the aversion to “magical drugs” is that they are reminiscent of black magic. A major psychological feature of black magic is that it provides immediate gains without immediate payment. The payment is feared as “really” both deferred and excessive. Thus deferred and excessive payment for immediate gain is characteristically associated with pacts with the Devil. The aversion towards usury, in current times as well as throughout the history of Christianity, is not completely coincidental. For usury is exactly a social expression of the Satanic Pact, immediate gains and excessive deferred payment.
[If you have not yet done so, I urge you to read Part 1 of this essay, before continuing with this Part 2.]
To fully understand the base principles of alchemical cheating through the ages – did you see what I did then? – we need to travel back in time, to ancient Mesopotamia.
It is here, in the Fertile Crescent – the Cradle of Civilisation – that archaeologists have uncovered abundant evidence for the earliest recorded origins of two fundamental concepts, or principles, that are still with us today. Together, they are the foundation for fully understanding what George Orwell (1984) described as doublethink – “a vast system of mental cheating”.
These two principles are embedded not only in the monetary art of males cheating females but also in Eastern and Western philosophy, politics, religion, occultism, economics (but I repeat myself), science; indeed, in all realms of human thought, belief, and activity.
The Unity (or Union) of Opposites.
And the Law of Inversion (or reversal).
The Unity of Opposites is an abstract idea – a belief – that all things are created out of the union – the Sacred Marriage – of two equal, “gender” opposites.
A male principle (active, creative, “light”, positive, good).
And a female principle (passive, destructive, “dark”, negative, evil).
This is the exoteric (suitable for the public) principle in alchemy – the manipulated or engineered “transformation” of something, from a “lower” form into a “higher” form.
Like, let’s say, “transforming” a female (evil) into a male (good).
Or, “transforming” your promise to pay the customer real cash (liability), into a record of an unsecured, borrowed from the customer “deposit” (asset).[44]
As the alchemical principles are believed to be universal, in theory everything can be manipulated and transformed, including minerals (eg, lead into gold), biological matter, ideas, markets, society, and even human consciousness itself.
The only way to do so, however, is by a precise inversion, or reversal, of values.
Lying, and cheating.
In other words, by faking it.
Counterfeiting.
According to Ahmad al-Hassan (Arabic Alchemy ‘Ilm al-San’a: Science of the Art), the Unity of Opposites principle first appears in ancient Babylonia:
The Babylonians believed that the universe originated from water. They noticed also that the universe contains opposite elements. Thus there is day and night; light and darkness; male and female; hot and cold; wet and dry. There is also the good and the evil, and in general, there is for every feature an opposite one. It is also possible to divide matter intotwo opposite elements, and from these two opposite elements everything can be generated.
The Babylonians were keen observers of the stars; and from their early history they believed that the gods are in control of the planets. They believed also that the sun, the moon and the other planets [five then known; with sun and moon, seven “gates”] have influence on what happens on earth. This was the beginning of astrology. The influence of the planets involves metals; thus sun influences gold, and the moon influences silver, and the other planets control the remaining metals.
The principle of the two opposites of the Babylonians was inherited by Greek philosophers who were thinking about the nature of matter and whose theories were based in part on the Babylonian concept.[45]
The alchemy of the Middle Ages – and the Hermetic Reformation (Renaissance, french “rebirth”), and the 18th century Enlightenment – was built on this Babylonian belief in a cosmic, sexual duality:
[T]he alchemic world view was, just like that of Tantrism, dominated by the idea that our universe functions as the creation and interplay of a masculine and a feminine principle and that all levels of existence are interpenetrated by the polarity of the sexes. “Gender is in everything, everything has masculine and feminine principles, gender reveals itself on all levels”, we can read in a European treatise on the “great art”.[46]
This is also the origin of the Duality Principle in medieval and ‘modern’ bookkeeping by double entry. The Duality Principle is really just the Babylonians’ Unity of Opposites by another name:
For every debit there must be a credit, and for every credit there must be a debit – Alas! How few consider that if this must be the case, the rule to go by, nothing is more easy than to make a set of books wear the appearance of correctness, which at the same time is full of errors, or of false entries, made on purpose to deceive![47]
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906):
The whole dualistic system of good and of evil powers, which goes back to Zoroastrianism and ultimately to old Chaldea, can be traced through Gnosticism; having influenced the cosmology of the ancient Cabala before it reached the medieval one. So is the conception underlying the cabalistic tree, of the right side being the source of light and purity, and the left the source of darkness and impurity [..] The fact also that the “Ḳelippot” (the scalings of impurity), which are so prominent in the medieval Cabala, are found in the old Babylonian incantations [..] is evidence in favor of the antiquity of most of the cabalistic material.
It stands to reason that the secrets of the theurgic [from Latintheūrgia: “magic”] Cabala are not lightly divulged; and yet the Testament of Solomon recently brought to light the whole system of conjuration of angels and demons, by which the evil spirits were exorcised; even the magic sign or seal of King Solomon, known to the medieval Jew as the Magen Dawid [✡], has been resurrected.[48]
The prehistoric clay token/envelope record-keeping system of the Fertile Crescent is the earliest evidence for the Unity of Opposites.
Accounting scholars call it the Input-Output principle; a dualistic, abstract re-presentation of real economic exchanges. Like, let’s say, a transfer of “seed” from a male (Output) to a female (Input) … or vice versa:
[The] ancient people of the Middle East had record keeping systems, the basic logical structure of which was virtually identical to that of modern double entry.[49]
[T]he token-accounting of the ancient Middle East, as well as modern accounting, deal with two distinct but related duality aspects. The first kind of duality involves concrete transactions and belongs to physical reality, while the second kind of duality arises out of ownership and debt relations which belong to social reality.
[The] inconspicuous impressing of the clay tokens upon the surface of the receptacle [..] [was] the precursor of modern double entry bookkeeping; more importantly, it was the major impetus to cuneiform writing as well as abstract counting.[50]
Bulla-envelope with 11 plain and complex tokens inside, representing an account or agreement, tentatively of wages for 4 days’ work, 4 measures of metal, 1 large measure of barley and 2 small measures of some other commodity. (Source: The Schoyen Collection)
Cuneiform (Latin cuneus: “wedge”) writing was created by making impressions on a wet clay tablet with a stylus made from a reed (Sumerian gi-dub(-ba), Akkadian qan-tuppi; literally “tablet reed”), with its tip cut into a triangular wedge.
As cuneiform clay tablet writing gradually replaced token/envelope record-keeping, naturally there was a need to continue recording this doubleduality.
The mutual obligations of a Sacred Marriage – a mutual exchange of promises to pay – involves two different identities (a male and a female), and eight recordable actions in total when the promises are both honoured.
The promises to pay and repay “seed” – an abstract Ownership-Debt exchange – is one inverse pair of Output-Inputs (4).
The actual payment and repayment of the “seed” – a real exchange – is another inverse pair of Output-Inputs (8).
But when considered from only one perspective (the male’s), there are two identities, and only four recorded actions.
The abstract Output of the (male) promise (his liability), and the abstract Input of the (female) promise (his asset).
Then, on the honey-moon, the real Output of the promised (male) “seed” (his expense, cancelling his liability), and 9 months later again, the real Input of the promised (female) repayment of the “seed” (his income, cancelling her liability/his asset).
All “square”.
This was now reflected in the number of sides the ancient scribe needed to record different kinds of transactions:
Four-sided tablets were utilized for financial transactions and two-sided clay tablets were reserved for agricultural records.[51]
Early proto-cuneiform (pictogram) writing was steadily refined, and by 3000 BC scribes were able to convey word-concepts (honour), not just word-signs (an honourable man).[52]
By 2600 BC, it was also possible to isolate the phonetic (sound) value of a certain sign. This is known as the rebus principle (Latin rēbus “by means of objects”) – using existing symbols just for their sound, to represent or allude to other words or abstract concepts. It became a favourite form of expression in heraldry of the medieval era – the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Norwich, for example, consisted of a stag (or hart) lying down.[53]
Ancient scribes – an elite class, thanks to their special knowledge – could now record their puns – “magic” words, that minds inclined to double entendres, deception, or secrecy, purposed to carry double or multiple meanings.
Indeed, scholars believe that cuneiform writing, hieroglyphs, and alphabets, were all based on punning:
The Rebis (from Latin res bina, meaning dual or double matter) is the end product of the alchemical magnum opus or great work.[54]
As we have already seen (Part 1), when stripped bare of all its “authoritative” pretences to mathematical precision, “balance”, and objective impartiality, bookkeeping by double entry is really nothing more than story-telling … with equal positive and negative numbers added.
(Did you see what I did then … for the second time? Loθok again.)
A pendulum-governed escapement of a clock, ticking every second. (Source: Wikipedia)
Most importantly, it is always a story of two (2) opposite perspectives, but it is told from only one perspective – the bookkeeper’s.
By telling his story using puns – words with double or multiple meanings – a cunning bookkeeper can easily deceive any reader or auditor who has not been “initiated” into the occult (hidden, secret) meanings of his code words and symbols:
Legally, [banks] do not take deposits, they borrow from the public. The expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening.[55]
Thoughout the “Dark” and Middle Ages, the practice of usury (lending at “interest”) – a mortal sin – was officially banned by the Church-State authorities. Following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), it was also mandatory to make a full confession of one’s sins, at least once a year.
For merchants and money-lenders, it was now all the more important to have trading records with code words and symbols “hidden in plain sight”.[56]
Though not as drastic as the penalty imposed by the Babylonian Hammurabi Code No. 7 for issuing fraudulent “deposit” receipts (“that man is a thief: he shall be put to death”), the penalties for practicing usury were still severe.
Not only was there a spiritual threat of the soul’s eternal damnation to the lowest of circles in the seventh circle of hell in the afterlife[57], there was also the ever-present, material threats of social condemnation and ostracisation, physical expulsion from the town, city or state, and of gravest concern for most, asset forfeiture:
Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, founder of the Medici Bank and Cosimo de Medici’s father … died intestate because in making out a will “he would have denounced himself as a usurer and might have caused considerable trouble for his heirs.”[58]
Accounting is a form of story telling – giving an account – and stories require an audience, listeners; auditors. In late medieval Italy, the auditor was God. One historian of accounting, James Aho, argues it’s no coincidence that double entry emerged at a time when confession became compulsory for ordinary Catholics. [..] [K]eeping the fullest possible set of accounts is a bit like confessing your sins. Even if you are doing something morally suspect, at least you are making a clean breast of it.[59][60]
[The “Father of accounting”, Luca] Pacioli [c. 1447-1517] advises merchants to incorporate explicit signs of Christianity into their books as a way of legitimising their profit-seeking activities. The use of double entry itself was like the Catholic confession: if a merchant confessed – or accounted for – all his worldly activities before God, then perhaps his sins would be absolved.[61]
Remarkably, there is a compelling analogue to this in a cuneiform text from the 7th century BC. It comes from the same “fertile” region that had previously birthed the Unity of Opposites principle, punning, primitive record-keeping by double entry, and all the foundational beliefs of alchemy, including – as we will see – the “mystery” cult sex magic rituals, based on the Law of Inversion.
The text is known as the Netherworld Vision or Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Crown Prince, and is the “oldest known visionary journey to hell”[62]:
Scholars have [..] agreed that the text has a great significance for the history of religions and literature. But no one can agree precisely on what that significance is. The text’s interpretation has been hampered by its very distinctiveness: in 2,000 years of cuneiform literature, there are no other examples of the genre it represents…[63]
There are many fascinating and important analogous details to be found in this unique text – so many as to warrant a comprehensive separate study.
Our key observation is that – just as with medieval double entry – in the Underworld Vision it is the telling of the story .. twice .. seemingly from two perspectives .. but both told by the same person .. that absolves the story-teller of “the sin that the vision condemns”.[64][65][66]
The tale tells of a crown prince, “surrounded by luxury” and “piling up jewels like dirt”, who is having a profound personal crisis – sleepness nights, uncontrollable weeping, the whole box and dice.
As it turns out, the “prince” (and narrator) also just happens to be a scribe.
After twice praying to the Queen of the Underworld – the first resulting in a dream (šuttu) where the Queen appears and tells him “I shall not answer” – he has a vision (tabrītu) of himself visiting the Underworld[68].
The word tabrītu “appears frequently [in period texts] to describe building projects – actually existing physical objects.”[69]
So then, we have the story of a progression from the abstract (šuttu), to the real (tabrītu).
The prince’s “vision” (real building project) begins with … “an overwhelming, pedantic scholarly list of gods and demons”[70].
These are described by scholars as “hybrid monsters” or “monster-demons”. Most of the monsters have “feet like a man”. About one it is said that “with its left foot it was treading”[71] – a metaphor for conquering and domination.
The list ends with an ominous[72] figure called the “one” or “unique man” (ištēn etlu) – depicted as the “ideal king”, the mediator between god and man, the “exalted shepherd”, who is given everlasting dominion over all nations from the god(s).[73]
The prince is told that this is his ancestor, a “conqueror” and “high priest of Assur”[74] – a role exclusively reserved for Neo-Assyrian kings. He is also told that this ancestor “ate the taboo and stamped on the abomination” – two noteworthy points, as we will see.[75]
His body is said to be “black like pitch”, his face “like the Anzû bird,”[76] and he is wearing a red robe.[77]
“Eyes Wide Shut” Artist Print (AP), J.S. Rossbach (Click to enlarge)
The Anzû or “storm-bird” (Sumerian IM.DUGUD, “heavy rain”, i.e., a flood of waters; in Akkadian, “the wise one of heaven”) is a famous mythic creature – depicted as an eagle with a lion’s face – that is first recorded in the Old Babylonian era.
It is said to be a “worker of evil, who raised the head of evil”[78]. In the Epic of Anzû, this brazen rebel lusts after the Tablets of Destiny – the key to world rule – and proceeds to steal them from the supreme deity, thus gaining total control over the universe, the gods, and the fates of all.
In other words, Anzû was a thieving “time god” … remarkably reminiscent – or rather, prescient – of Mercury-Hermes, “the Sage, the Babylonian”, god of the alchemists.
The “vision” concludes with Nergal, the King of the Underworld, sparing the prince’s life – why? – so that “he may return penitent to the upper world to begin the glorification of Nergal”[79].
Assyriologists have identified the “crown prince” as Assurbanipal, who “alone among Neo-Assyrian kings, described himself as a scribe”[80]. Indeed, in another text he is depicted in a personal dialogue with Nabû, the god of writing.[81]
Assurbanipal is a most interesting figure for other reasons too, as we will see.
His deceased “father” ([šu]-u zār[û ]ka : “he is your ancestor”) – the “one” or “unique man” referred to in the Vision – is identified as Assurbanipal’s grandfather, Sennacherib (Akkadian: Sîn-ahhī-erība, “Sîn has replaced the brothers”), king of Assyria 705-681 BC.
In biblical texts, Sennacherib is recorded as having besieged Jerusalem, the capital of the rebellious kingdom of Judah, and finally left Hezekiah on the throne as a vassal ruler (c. 701 BC).[82]
Judean captives being led away into slavery by the Assyrians after the siege of Lachish in 701 B.C. (Source: Wikipedia)
In a striking similarity to other idolised figures in freemasonry and related secret societies (King Solomon, Hiram “King of Tyre”[83], etc), Sennacherib was a great builder – his “Palace Without Rival” is thought to have been the prototype for, or even the actual Hanging Gardens of (not) ‘Babylon’.[84]
Sennacherib is famed for his military campaigns to put down repeated Babylonian rebellions against Assyrian rule.
Hexagonal clay prism, foundation record lists campaigns of Sennacherib until the start of his final war against Babylon, and includes a description of the tribute received from Hezekiah, King of Judah in 701 BC. British Museum #91032. (Source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, published 31 March 2014 under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence)
His assassination “in obscure circumstances”[85] – believed to have been at the hand of one or more of his own sons[86] – was seen as divine vengeance, a punishment for his complete destruction of Babylon in 689 BC.
“Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah. He asked him, ‘What was the Holy One, Blessed be He, doing in that hour?’
“Said Elijah, ‘He was laughing and saying, “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.””‘
Sennacherib is identified in the Underworld Vision text as the one who built “the Akitu house.” This was the temple for the twice-yearly festivals celebrating the sowing and reaping of the barley crop.
Importantly, other sources[88] show that Sennacherib rebuilt the Akitu temple, in 683 BC – two of them, one outside the walls of Assur, the other outside Nineveh – some six years after his total destruction of Babylon and its Akitu temple, located directly outside the famous Ishtar gate.
The Akitu (“barley”) New Year festival had begun with the Sumerians. Their calendar had featured two Akitu festivals: one in the Autumn in the month of Tashritu, which celebrated the “barley-sowing”; the other, in Spring in the month of Nisannu, which celebrated the “barley-cutting”.
The Babylonians also celebrated the Akitu but only the Spring (“reaping”) Nisannu – an eleven day festival honouring their supreme god Marduk, and his crown prince Nabû, the god of writing.[89]
Sennacherib was hated by the Babylonians, not only for his dominion over their former empire and ultimate destruction of their capital city but also for his apparent disregard for their religious beliefs, gods, and ceremonies.
The Akitu temple was known as the “House Which BindsDeath/the Sea.”[90][91]
The Law of Inversion (or reversal) has a close relationship with the Unity of Opposites principle – like two sides of the same coin. It follows by deductive reasoning.
Because all things are believed to be created out of the natural union of two equal opposites, it is therefore possible to manipulate, and dominate all things, by developing methods to attract (“charm”), and “bind”, the “light” (or, the “dark”) “force” – gender – that one wishes to control.
To do so implies the “need” for deception, and, the precise inversion of natural and sovereign laws, traditional moral and ethical values, and social taboos.
This Law of Inversion (or reversal) is the esoteric (for initiates-only), “revolutionary” principle that lies at the heart of all forms of alchemical “magic” or “transformation”.
In other words, it is the principle of lying, and cheating.
It is the principle of re-presenting the true, with the un-true.
Faking it.
Creating an illusion, or counterfeiting the real thing.
The earliest overt evidence for the practice of values inversion is found in the cult worship of Inanna, the Mesopotamian “goddess” of Sex (union, creation, life) and War (separation, destruction, death).
A vivid embodiment of the Unity of Opposites androgyne principle, “she” was also known – in some or all of “her” aspects – as Ishtar (Akkadia, Assyria and Babylonia), as Ashtoreth or Astarte (Canaan), as Venus (Greece), and as Aphrodite (Rome).
Inanna’s cult celebrations were debauched – meaning, de-valued – “carnivalesque” affairs that deliberately broke all laws, social taboos, natural and social boundaries. They were a time for “disorder and antistructure”.
The rituals were “creative negation” that reminded Inanna’s devotees of “the need to reinvest the clean with the filthy, the rational with the animalistic”.
They are said to “confirm the endless potentiality of dirt and the pure possibility of liminality” – meaning, the ambiguity, and disorientation that is felt by a ritual initiate when “standing at the threshold” of transformation from a previous state into a new, opposite state (from Latin līmen, “a threshold”)[92].
Through the deliberate inversion of values, Inanna’s cult personnel – transvestites[93] – “attack[ed] the basic categorical differences between male and female, human and animal, young and old”[94]:
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna….
Business, great winning, financial loss, deficit are yours, Inanna….
She (Ishtar) [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side, she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she ador[ns] a woman as a man.[95]
The representations of the “goddess” are their own testament to this shattering and confusion of boundaries – the “Queen of the Night” is a deity in human form, and also, part woman and part owl.
“She” has been compared to the Jewish demon Lilith, a seducer, a kidnapper and slayer of children “who appear[s] to human beings, to men in the likeness of women and to women in the likeness of men” – “[t]he traditional depiction of Lilith from ancient Mesopotamia through medieval Kabbalah presents an antitype of desired human sexuality and family life.”[96]
The Burney (Queen of the Night) Relief; c. 1800-1750 BC (Old Babylonian). British Museum 2003,0718.1
Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guessed my name,
But what’s confusing you Is just the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails Just call me Lucifer
The medieval alchemists saw their androgyne “time god” – the “Grand Sorcerer”, Mercury-Hermes: a silver-tongued liar and thief, a “producer” of gold, a hegemonic “Master of the Universe” who transcends life and death, a traveller and merchant, a mediator between the real and unreal worlds – as boasting the same power of inversion, enabling mimickry (i.e., faking it, counterfeiting):
The male tantric master [..] has the power to assume the female form of the goddess (who is of course an aspect of his own mystical body), that is, he can appear in the figure of a woman. Indeed, he even has the magical ability to divide himself into two gendered beings, a female and a male deity. He is further able to multiply himself into several maha mudras.[97]
Outside of Luciferianism, Satanism, and various “magick” cults and male-only (“brotherhood”) societies of the ancient past and present, the primary purveyor of the Law of Inversion in the modern era is Jewish Cabala. In particular, the world-wide Chabad-Lubavitch sect, founded in 1775.
As we have seen, its theurgic (“magic”) doctrine has been traced back “ultimately to old Chaldea”. The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that “the apocalyptic literature belonging to the second and first pre-Christian centuries contained the chief elements of the Cabala”.[98]
Unsurprisingly then, the Law of Inversion principle also appears in Cabalist doctrine, precisely as it does in the Inanna-Ishtar cult, medieval Tantric Buddhism, and medieval Western alchemy:
It appears that the acosmic background of Habad thought influenced the acceptance of the nihilistic doctrine of inversion, for in a doctrine where the existence and nonexistence of reality are one and the same for God, and a religious view in which Yesh [Something] and Ayin [Nothing] are equal, good and evil are also equated with one another, as are positive religious action and transgression [..] The more extreme formulations, which deny the substantiality of every gradation and commonly accepted dichotomy, doubtless influenced the denial of significant value to reversals, inversions, and oppositions. [..] if “everything is absolutely as nothing and naught in relation to His being and essence,” then neither traditional distinctions nor relative and absolute values have any validity.
“Worship in inversion,” “descent for the purpose of rising up” [..] were seen to be theurgical [“magic”] missions [..] fulfilling the reverse of the divine commandment for the sake of the divine will to be revealed in all dimensions.[99]
[T]hrough breaking a taboo for which there is often a high penalty, the adept confirms the core of the entire Buddhist philosophy: the emptiness (shunyata) of all appearances. “I am void, the world is void, all three worlds are void”, the Maha Siddha Tilopa triumphantly proclaims — therefore “neither sin nor virtue” exist. The shunyata principle thus provides a metaphysical legitimization for any conceivable “crime”, as it actually lacks any inherent existence.[100]
In both Eastern and Western alchemy, the starting point for an alchemical “transformation” is the realm of primal matter – the impure, ignoble, or base.
The female (passive, negative, liability; also, since the 1789 French Revolution, “conservative”, “Right”).
According to the Law of Inversion – and a monstrous Ego – the “skilled” magician can transform it (the “female”) into something pure, noble and divine.
The male (active, positive, asset; since 1789, “progressive”, “Left”):
In European alchemy the coarse starting material for the experiments is known as the prima materia and is of a fundamentally feminine nature. Likewise, as in the tantras, base substances such as excrement, urine, menstrual blood, part of corpses and so forth are named in the alchemic texts, no matter which culture they belong to, as the physical starting materials for the experiments. Symbolically, the primal material is described in images such as “snake, dragon, toad, viper, python”. It is also represented by every conceivable repulsive female figure — by witches, mixers of poison, whores, chthonic goddesses, by the “dragon mother” so often cited in depth psychology. All these are metaphors for the demonic nature of the feminine [..] Shakyamuni compared women in general with snakes, sharks and whores.[101]
These misogynous terms for the prima materia are images which on the one hand seek to describe the untamed, death-bringing nature; on the other one readily admit that a secret force capable of producing everything in the phenomenal world is hidden within “Mother Nature”. Nature in alchemy has at its disposal the universal power of birth. It represents the primordial matrix [▽] of the elements, the massa confusa, the great chaos, from which creation bursts forth.[102]
But in order to transform the female into the male, a negative into a positive, a liability into an asset, lead into “gold”, evil into “good” – and so possess the secret birth-force in himself – there is something the lying cheating “time god” must do.
He must kill the essential feminine.
He must destroy the “mother” nature:
Experimenting around with the primal material sounds quite harmless to someone who is not initiated. Yet a symbolic murder is hidden behind this. The black matter, a symbol of the fundamental feminine and of powerful nature from which we all come, is burned or in some cases vaporized, cut to pieces or dismembered. Thus, in destroying the prima materia we at the same time destroy our “mother” or, basically, the “fundamentally feminine”.
The European adept does not shy away from even the most crass killing metaphors: “open the lap of your mother”, it says in a French text from the 18th century, “with a steel blade, burrow into her entrails and press forward to her womb, there you will find our pure substance (the elixir)”. Symbolically, this violent first act in the alchemic production is located within a context of sacrifice, death and the color black and is therefore called nigredo, that is “blackening”.[105]
A sacrifice of the feminine [..] may be found in the logic of the entire Buddhist doctrine. Woman per se – as Buddha Shakyamuni repeatedly emphasized in many of his statements — functions as the first and greatest cause of illusion (maya), but likewise as the force which generates the phenomenal world (samsara). It is the fundamental goal of every Buddhist to overcome this deceptive samsara. This world of appearances experienced as feminine, presents him with his greatest challenge. “A woman”, Nancy Auer Falk writes, “was the veritable image of becoming and of all the forces of blind growth and productivity which Buddhism knew as Samsara. As such she too was the enemy — not only on a personal level, as an individual source of temptation, but also on a cosmic level”. In this misogynist logic, it is only after the ritual destruction of the feminine that the illusory world (maya) can be surmounted and transcended.[106]
“In … Tantrism … woman is means, an alien object, without possibility of mutuality or real communication”. The woman “is to be used as a ritual object and then cast aside”. Or, at another point: the yogis had “sex without sensuality … There is no relationship of intimacy with an individual — the woman … involved is an object, a representation of power … women are merely spiritual batteries”.[107]
Autumn’s leaving
And Winter’s coming
I think that I’ll be moving along
I’ve got to leave her
And find another
I’ve got to sing my heart’s
True song
Is it for this reason that maya (illusion), the mother of the historical Buddha, had to die directly after giving birth? In her early death we can recognize the original event which stands at the beginning of the fundamentally misogynist attitude of all Buddhist schools. Maya both conceived and gave birth to the Sublime One in a supernatural manner. It was not a sexual act but an elephant which, in a dream, occasioned the conception, and Buddha Shakyamuni did not leave his mother’s body through the birth canal, but rather through her hip. But these transfeminine birth myths were not enough for the tellers of legends. Maya as earthly mother had [..] to be proclaimed an “illusion” (maya) and destroyed.[108]
Every type of passion (sexual pleasure, fits of rage, hate and loathing) which is normally considered taboo by Buddhist ethical standards, is activated and nurtured in Vajrayana with the goal of then transforming it into its opposite. The Buddhist monks, who are usually subject to a strict, puritanical-seeming set of rules, cultivate such “breaches of taboo” without restriction, once they have decided to follow the “Diamond Path”. Excesses and extravagances now count as part of their chosen lifestyle. Such acts are not simply permitted, but are prescribed outright…
[T]he Kalachakra Tantra exhorts its pupils to commit the following: to kill, to lie, to steal, to break the marriage vows, to drink alcohol, to have sexual relations with lower-class girls. A Tantric is freed from the chains of the wheel of life by precisely that which imprisons a normal person.[109]
A central role in the rites is played by the tantric meal. It is absolutely forbidden for Buddhist monks to eat meat or drink alcohol. This taboo is also deliberately broken by Vajrayana adepts. To make the transgression more radical, the consumption of types of meat which are generally considered “forbidden” in Indian society is desired: elephant meat, horsemeat, dogflesh, beef, and human flesh. The latter goes under the name of maha mamsa, the “great flesh”.
In the Hevajra Tantra the adept must drink the menstrual blood of his mudra out of a skull bowl. But rotten fish, sewer water, canine feces, corpse fat, the excrement of the dead, sanitary napkins as well as all conceivable “intoxicating drinks” are also consumed.[110]
As a tantric saying puts it, “What binds the fool, liberates the wise”, and another, more drastic passage emphasizes that, “the same deed for which a normal mortal would burn for a hundred million eons, through this same act an initiated yogi attains enlightenment”. According to this, every ritual is designed to catapult the initiand into a state beyond good and evil.[111]
[The third] justification for the “transgressions” of the Vajrayana consists in the Bodhisattva vow of Mahayana Buddhism, which requires that one aid and assist every creature until it attains enlightenment. Amazingly, this pious purpose can render holy the most evil means. “If”, we can read in one of the tantras, “for the good of all living beings or on account of the Buddha’s teaching one should slay living beings, one is untouched by sin. … If for the good of living beings or from attachment for the Buddha’s interest, one seizes the wealth of others, one is not touched by sin”, and so forth. In the course of Tibetan history the Bodhisattva vow has [..] legitimated numerous political and family-based murders, whereby the additional “clever” argument was also employed, that one had “freed” the murder victim from the world of appearances (samsara) and that he or she thus owed a debt of thanks to the murderer.[112]
These two principles – the Unity of Opposites and the Law of Inversion – were evidently the foundation of all human reasoning for the “philosophers” of the “royal art” of cheating “females” in ancient Mesopotamia.
The Unity of Opposites explained all things, in the heavens (Above) and the earth (Below).
The Law of Inversion explained how to gain control over all things, Above and Below.
By deception, and reversal.
All that remained, is a question of method.
Since all things are believed to contain both a masculine and a feminine principle, then the method for gaining control over all things, is to use the “magnetic” power of sexual attraction, to tempt or “draw in” the force or power that one wishes to “bind”.
Which organ has maximum utility (usefulness) for achieving this?
In Inanna’s words to her shepherd-king “bull” bridegroom Dumuzi, a “honey-sweet” tongue[113]:
Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom,
My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk,
Wild bull, Dumuzi, make your milk sweet and thick.
I will drink your fresh milk.
Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold,
Fill my holy churn with honey cheese,
Lord Dumuzi, I will drink your fresh milk.
Sacred Marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi. (Source: Wikipedia. Public Domain licence)
My honey-man, my honey-man sweetens me always.
My lord, the honey-man of the gods,
He is the one my womb loves best.
His hand is honey, his foot is honey,
He sweetens me always.
He laid me down on the fragrant honey-bed,
My sweet love, lying by my heart,
Tongue-playing, one by one,
My fair Dumuzi did so fifty times.[114]
[There ended the “honey-moon”]
Or, in Mercury-Hermes’ words, a mercurial (quicksilver) tongue:
“Allegory of Eloquence”, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1498. (British Museum)
Since at the end of the sexual magic rituals the masculine principle alone remains, the verbal praise of the goddess, beauty and love could also be manipulative, designed to conjure up the devotion of a woman. [..] [W]e must regard such charming flattery of the female sex as at the very least a non-committal, albeit extremely lucrative embellishment. But they are more likely to be a deliberately employed manipulation, so as to draw attention away from the monstrosities of the tantric ritual system. Perhaps they are themselves a method (upaya) with which to appropriate the “gynergy” of the women so charmed. After all, something like that need not only take place through the sexual act. There are descriptions in the lower tantras of how the yogi can obtain the feminine “elixir” even through a smile, an erotic look or a tender touch alone.[115]
One example of this manipulation of sexual “magnetism”, is an Old Babylonian method for controlling the forces of good or evil fortune, by an incantation (“s.p.e.l.l.”) spoken over a magic figurine:
A pair of supernatural beings, demons of some kind, are said to accompany man [..] one is called mukīl rēš daniqti, or rabis damiqti, “he who offers good things,” or “good demon”; the other is mukīl rēš lemutti, or rabis lemutti “he who offers misfortune” or “evil demon.” [..] A similar reference can be found in Greek literature – suffice it to mention here the scales of Zeus and his mixing of the “good and bad things” from the two jars (Iliad 24:527).[116]
Mukīl rēš lemutti, inscribed in cuneiform Sumerian syllabograms as (d)SAG.ḪUL.ḪA.ZA and meaning “he who holds the head of evil”, was an ancient Mesopotamian winged leonine demon, a harbinger of misfortune associated with benign headaches and wild swings in mood, where the afflicted “continually behaves like an animal caught in a trap.”[117]
The [evil] demon frequently appears in prescriptions such as those for the fashioning of a figurine for a neurological disorder caused by a pursuing ghost, where “The evi[l confusional stat]e (causing ghost or) mukīl rēš lemutti-demon [which] was set [on] (personal name) son of (personal name)–he is your husband. You are given [t]o him (as wife).”[118]
The Lion of Venice in Piazza San Marco, 1870s (Photo: Carlo Naya, 1822-1881, via Wikipedia)
Winged lions on Holborn Viaduct, City of London.
The production of magico-religious objects such as figurines and erotic plaques was widespread in Old Babylonia. They were strategically positioned at thresholds – zones of transformation, or a change in state between two equal opposites.
Like, say, the transition between Inside and Outside your house.
Or, let’s say, between a Credit and Debit “balance” of your “account” rented from a cheating time lord:
Ancient Mesopotamians envisioned liminal zones in general as having great magical potency, for better or for worse. Gates, doorways, windows, crossroads, shrines, beds and even the sexually aroused body, to name some, were the perceived spacial correlates of an invisible membrane through which the worlds of the seen and the unseen, of the magical and the mundane interacted. Since these intersections amplified paranormal activity, they were usually manipulated to ensure activity of a positive nature.
J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002). (Photo: J. Assante, courtesy of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin)
Old Babylonian plaques were themselves liminal, serving as points where inhabitants of the non-physical universe could emerge and affect every day reality.
Old Babylonian visual erotica inserts the liminal by structuring scenes around sexual anatomy. The general term for body orifice, KA in Sumerian or bãbu in Akkadian, is expressly liminal because it also means door or gate. The vaginal opening, bãb uri and the anus bãb šuburri are imagined then as thresholds. From literary and incantation texts we know that the body and its orifices were regarded as sites of transition, especially when aroused. In the Old Babylonian period, it is usually Inanna’s excited thresholds that work to effect white magic [..] whereas in the first-millennium BCE Gilgamesh Epic Ishtar and her vulva bring only death or castration.[119]
SAL (Sumerian: “woman”) | J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002)
We have already seen that what many call “white” and “black” magic are closely associated with the Cabala of Old Chaldea, and the “All-Wise” alchemical King Solomon – he of the “magic sign or seal” “known to the medieval Jew as the Magen Dawid” [✡], the Cabalistic key to “the whole system of conjuration of angels and demons.”
The development of the rēbus (punning) principle in ancient Sumer helps shed light on the true origin of a biblical saying that, according to rabbinic tradition, was written by King Solomon.
“Cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days, Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the earth”, has long been used by slick salesmen – including economists, financial advisors, fund managers, televangelists, trans-national corporate executives, politicians and bankers – in their sales pitches for charitable giving, diversified investing, and globalised “free” trade.[120]
The Marriage of the Sea Every year on Ascension Day, the doge of Venice dropped a consecrated ring into the sea, and with the Latin words “Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini”
(“We wed thee, sea, as a sign of true and everlasting domination”) declared Venice and the sea to be indissolubly one.[121]
In Sumer, most aspects of life appear to have revolved around the production and consumption of beer. This was the official libation (ritual drink offering) to Inanna-Ishtar, patron goddess and harimtu (prostitute, or libidinous single female)[122] of the tavern.
It was also a common cause of insolvency due to unrepayable bar debts, incurred by offering alcohol on credit[123] – a trading method that was broadly repeated in the Russia Empire in the 18th-19th centuries.[124]
In Sumer, beer was made by casting bread into jars of water:
The passage of Qoh. xi 1-2 has traditionally been understood as a call for charity or international trade. However, in the light of the procedure by which beer was made in the ancient Near East … a more likely interpretation is that Qoheleth is recommending beer production and consumption in perilous times.[125]
In other words, this “wisdom of Solomon” is a (profitable, for some) command to brew, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.
Cuneiform Pictographs Recording the Allocation of Beer. Thought to be from southern Iraq Late Prehistoric period, about 3100-3000 BC. (Source: Jim Kuhn [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)
For the Sumerians, beer was considered a magical potion. It was commonly compared to an attractive and promiscuous female. Both had the ability to “seize” or “bind” the drinker. In an Old Babylonian incantation (spell) recited by a woman “to bend her straying lover to her will”, the “chief tools of magic making are the female’s aroused body orifices”.[126]
Inanna-Ishtar is the central figure in these rites and incantations. An Old Babylonian hymn to “Inanna-Nine-galla” (galla: androgynous demons) is set at dusk, when the two clear opposites of day and night blur.
Exactly like Lucifer in biblical writings, Inanna-Ishtar identifies “her”self in the texts with both the morning and evening star.
Inanna’s celestial body has the nature of a shape-shifter: as “her” star rises through the transition of light to dark (and vice versa), so too does Inanna-Ishtar the harimtu. When named Kilili (“Lady Owl”), “she” is “the harlot who like the owl comes out at dusk”[127], and sits at the door of the tavern to entice customers.
From a namburbi incantation, we learn that Inanna’s presence was invoked to create an ambiance of enchantment, with the purpose being to “effect magical gains of a non-sexual nature” – that is, to secure “brisk trade”.[128]
J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002). (Photo: J. Assante, courtesy of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin)
It is here too, that archaeologists have discovered cuneiform fragments in Nineveh and Babylon, from which we learn that alchemists have had secret recipes for creating fake silver since before the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (c. 1124-1103 BC). Word puns in the recipe suggest that it was made in a form that counterfeited the royal standard ingots:
“When rubbed and polished these (objects) are ziqpu (or ziqiptu) of silver. This (kind of) silver [can]not [be detected].”
What makes this severely mutilated prescription so interesting and intriguing is the [..] passage which addresses the chemist directly: “Do not be careless (with respect to these instructions). Do not [show] (the procedure) to anyone!” References to secrecy do not occur anywhere else in the cuneiform texts dealing with instructions written for specific crafts.[129]
These recipes are remarkable for a multitude of reasons.
The older of the two ends in a colophon stating that it is a copy, and is the property of Nebuchadnezzar I, King of Babylon.
The other (above) was found as part of the famous royal library of King Assurbanipal (c. 685 BC – 627 BC) in Nineveh; a collection of around 30,000 tablets and fragments, said to be the most compelling discovery of the ancient Near East. Assurbanipal – who we met earlier – is the Assyrian “prince” who (as king) is reported to have taken the Israelite population into captivity, and replaced them with a mixture of tribes from other parts of his empire.[130]
(This may offer an explanation for why archaeologists have discovered evidence in Israel from the 7th century BC, of the Epic of Anzû – the rebel “storm-bird” who stole the Tablets of Destiny.[131])
Source: Anzu and Ziz – Great Mythical Birds in Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Traditions (2008)
There are numerous parallels between the method for producing this fake silver, and the methods cryptically described in medieval alchemical texts for producing the longed for “elixir” or “gold” of “the philosophers”.
Even more remarkable though, is the ingredients.
According to a renowned Assyriologist, whose technical expertise was expressly sought to interpret the two fragments, a “red alkali” used as a “binder” in the recipe “occurs to my knowledge only here” and in no other technical texts from the ancient world.
Similarly, the alchemical texts mention a mysterious substance called “Red Mercury”. What this actually is has been the subject of speculation for hundreds of years – and more recently, lucrative hoaxes, with far-reaching geopolitical, and economic ramifications – because it is supposed to possess a massive destructive power:
When red mercury first appeared on the international black market 15 years ago, the supposedly top secret nuclear material was ‘red’ because it came from Russia. When it resurfaced last year in the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe it had unaccountably acquired a red colour. But then, as a report from the US Department of Energy reveals, mysterious transformations are red mercury’s stock in trade. (New Scientist, 1992)
The only thing we can be sure of is that it’s a ripping yarn. Rumours that Soviet nuclear experts had produced a mysterious explosive material with unimaginable destructive power first circulated in the 1970s, and despite several official investigations and subsequent denials the story refuses to die. (The Guardian, 2004)
For decades, aspiring bomb makers — including ISIS — have desperately tried to get their hands on a lethal substance called red mercury.
Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. [..] Chief among its proponents was Samuel T. Cohen, the American physicist and Manhattan Project veteran often called the father of the neutron bomb [..] In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury [..] “is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive…” (New York Times, 2015)
It is an interesting coincidence that this “ripping yarn” first emerged in the 1970s, at the same time a special kind of “gate” opened – one that has flooded the world with a “nonexploding high explosive”, a red “binder”, for the past 45 years.
Two other ingredients are similarly remarkable. Milk and honey. And in a quantity that “seem[s] excessive”.
It is difficult not to be reminded here of the fascinating tale told in the Old Testament account of the Exodus, written in 273-272 BC by Jewish scholars at Alexandria in Egypt, quite possibly as a reactionary polemic against the Egyptians.[132]
We are told that once upon a time, a messianic intermediary named Moses (meaning “I drew him from the waters”) was saved from infanticide when his mother chose to hide him among the reeds of the river Nile, in a basket weaved from papyrus (used for making writing paper, and boats).
As an adult, Moses is minding sheep when God “appears” to him – a voice speaking from a “burning bush” which doesn’t burn.
Round and round
The burning circle
All the seasons
One, two and three
Autumn comes
And then the Winter
Spring is born
And wanders free
Vajra (“diamond scepter”, “thunderbolt”, penis) Yogini in the “Burning Circle”. (Source: Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism)
God tells Moses to throw his “staff” or “rod” on the ground; it is transformed into a “snake”. When God tells him to grab it by the tail, it transforms back again.
Moses magically brings a series of ten plagues on the Israelite’s alleged captors, the final plague killing all the “firstborn” of Egypt. On finally being allowed to exodus, he is told to “raise up” his “rod” and “stretch out” his hand over the “Red Sea”, which is divided in two, allowing the “chosen” “children” of Israel to go to the land of the Promise (“Promised Land”).
The “Land of Milk and Honey”.
Indeed, it is said to be “flowing with milk and honey.”[133]
Milk and honey also feature in the alchemical sex magic rituals. Both words are used to describe the “virgin milk”; the female sexual fluids or gynergy which the male adept aims to steal for himself:
As the female correspondence to male sperm the texts nominate the seed of the woman (semen feminile). Among Tantrics it is highly contested whether this is a matter of the menstrual blood or fluids which the mudra [young virgin female] secretes during the sexual act. In any case, the sexual fluids of the man are always associated with the color white, and those of the woman with red. Fundamentally, the female discharge is assigned an equally powerful magic effect as that of its male counterpart. Even the gods thirst after it and revere the menses as the nectar of “immortality”.[134]
Outside of the gynocentric and tantric cults however, a negative valuation of menstrual blood predominates [..] This idea is also widely distributed in Hinayana Buddhism. Menstrual blood is seen there as a curse which has its origins in a female original sin: “Because they are born as women,” it says in a text of the “low vehicle”, “their endeavors toward Buddhahood are little developed, while their lasciviousness and bad characteristics preponderate. These sins, which strengthen one another, assume the form of menstrual blood which is discharged every month in two streams, in that it soils not just the god of the earth but also all the other deities too”. But the Tantrics are completely different! For them the fluids of the woman bear Lucullan names like “wine”, “honey”, “nectar”, and a secret is hidden within them which can lead the yogi to enlightenment.[135]
Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic, and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003).
According to the tantric logic of inversion, that precisely the worst is the most appropriate starting substance for the best, the yogi need not fear the magical destructive force of the menses, as he can reverse it into its creative opposite through the proper method.[136]
Thousands of years before the medieval Tantrics, we find another remarkable parallel in the ancient mythology of Inanna.
In the tale of Inanna and Šu-kale-tuda, having gone up into the mountains on a quest to “detect falsehood and justice, to inspect the Land closely, to identify the criminal against the just”[137] – in other words, to learn to discern the difference between the moral opposites of right and wrong – Inanna is violated by a callow youth while sleeping under a tree. On waking and discovering the offense, the enraged goddess asks “What should be destroyed?”, and floods the Sumerian water supply with “her” menstrual blood:
[E]very woman knows that she has two kinds of flow that come from her vagina. Ancient sources called these the River of Life and the River of Death, meaning the clear or white flow at the time when a child is more likely to be conceived; and the forbidden flow of menstruation, when it is most unlikely that a child can be conceived.[138]
Similarly, in the tale of the Exodus we are told that the first of the ten biblical plagues invoked by Moses magically transformed the Egyptian water supply into blood. In the river Nile – source of life for the Egyptians – all the fish died, and the river became foul smelling, when Aaron (Moses’ brother) touched the water with the “rod of God”.[139]
The second plague?
The magical invocation of frogs: another classic alchemical symbol of the prima materia or base matter – the “evil” fundamental feminine, containing the secret birth-force.[140]
It should not surprise us to discover that the biblical “Moses” is revered as a great alchemist in both ancient and not-so-ancient texts.
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica:
The Jewish association with alchemy dates from ancient times. Zosimos, a fifth-century Greek historian, states that the Jews acquired the secrets of the “sacred craft” of the Egyptians and the knowledge of the “power of gold” which derives from it by dishonest means, and they imparted the knowledge of alchemy to the rest of the world. In ancient Greek manuscripts, which contain lists of writings on alchemy, a number of alchemic and magic writings are attributed to Moses…[141]
The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) elaborates:
There is [..] scarcely a single important ancient work upon the science which is not directly related to the Jews, with their traditions and their science.
Alchemy had already in the second or third century assumed a mystical and magical character, exemplified in such recipes as appear in the magic papyri. The whole syncretism of the East—Jewish and Egyptian gnosis, Greek mysteries, and Ophite speculations—combined to produce a current of thought which affected every mental production of the age.
Adam and Abraham have in their turn been described as authors of alchemistic treatises, and Moses is repeatedly met with as the author of such works. To Moses are ascribed the Greek treatise known as “Diplosis” (that is, the art of doubling the weight of gold ), and the treatise “The Chemistry of Moses”…[142]
Gold and silver
Burnt my Autumns
All too soon
They’d fade and die
And then
Aye, there were no others Milk and honey
Were their lies
autumnal (adj.) 1570s, “maturing or blooming in autumn;” 1630s, “belonging to autumn,” from Latin autumnalis “pertaining to autumn,” from autumnus (see autumn). From 1650s in figurative sense “past the prime.”[144]
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END OF PART II
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POSTSCRIPT
Let us summarise then. Consistent with the alchemists’ Babylonian metaphor, your “account” (story) at the bank, is a magic “threshold”, “gate”, or liminal zone.
An orifice.
A rented hole.
Your bank “account” is a metaphor for ‘cock’ hole, rented from a cheating “time god”.
Within a liminal zone – the “source” of all creation – all opposites are equal. They are “unified”. They become one and the same thing.
Within a liminal zone, any one idea, any one word (the “Word” of “God”), is “magic” – it has two, simultaneous, precisely opposite meanings.
Confusion (“chaos”) reigns.
In your rented orifice, the banking high priest shows a magic number. It represents – to you – either a positive (credit), or negative (debit) “balance”.
It represents the opposite to the banking high priest.
Every time that you make a “payment” to someone, the high priest will reduce the amount of sukra (mixed semen-blood) in the orifice you are renting, and increase the amount of sukra in the orifice they are renting.
Every time that you “receive” a “payment” from someone, the reverse happens.
Even if you have no debt owed to any bank or financial institution, metaphorically, as a “customer”, you are still a “whore” of the bank. You are renting an orifice from the bank, for the purpose of ingesting and regurgitating the sukra rented by other people.
In essence then, by participating in the lying cheating time lords’ “money of account” fake “deposit” payments system, you are acting as a “Babylonian whore” for the “Grand Sorcerer” and misogynist thief, Mercury-Hermes.
Let that sink in.
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My thanks to readers who have confirmed and connected more dots, by informing me that multiple languages (eg, Danish, French, Italian, Russian) use their native words for “Actives” and “Passives” as synonyms for “Assets” and “Liabilities”, in their double entry bookkeeping balance sheets.
*****************
FOOTNOTES
[43] Jackson C. Frank, Milk and Honey, Jackson C. Frank (1965). My thanks to visual artist John Stark for bringing this lyric to my attention.
[44] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014)
[45] Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, Arabic Alchemy ‘Ilm al-San’a: Science of the Art; History of Science and Technology in Islam
[46] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p.102, citing Gebelein, 1991, p. 44.
[47] Edward Thomas Jones, Jones’ English System of Book-Keeping by Single or Double Entry, 1796; cited in Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013 (Kindle)
[48] Cabalistic Dualism, Jewish Encyclopedia 1906 (online), 30 June 2017
[49] Richard Mattessich, Accounting and the Input-Output Principle in the Prehistoric and Ancient World, ABACUS, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1989, p. 81 — “The significance of the input—output principle for double entry accounting is well recognized in the literature. For example; ‘The writer wishes to emphasize the merit that comes from understanding a double entry bookkeeping as an input-output system of data calculating the amount of capital charged’ (Kishi, 1984, p. 359).” (p. 77, fn 7)
[50]ibid., p. 81 — “[R]elatively soon after the emergence of the original envelopes (c. 3200 BC) it was already customary to impress the softer clay surface of those envelopes with the hardened clay tokens before putting them into the receptacle and sealing the
latter. This enabled one to determine at a first glance the content of the envelope while the seal and other markings may have informed about the debtor and other details. . This enabled one to determine at a first glance the content of the envelope while the seal and other markings may have informed about the debtor and other details. There can be little doubt that inserting a token into a receptacle was equivalent to a debit entry in an asset account. Yet there were two other requirements: first, to indicate, on the outside of the clay envelope, the individual items contained in it; and second, to disclose instantaneously the total equity represented by the receptacle. By a lucky stroke these two requirements could be met in a single step: impressing the hardened tokens upon the softer, unburned surface of the clay container. The resulting indentations are mirror pictures and true counter-entries (credit entries) on the equity side of this prehistoric record keeping system.”
[51] Murray, Stuart (2009)The Library: An Illustrated History. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing. pp. 3-10; cited in Ashurbanipal, Wikipedia
[55] Richard A. Werner, To a new understanding of the function of the banking sector: the mechanism of productive credit creation and quantitative easing; presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences, round table “Anti-crisis fiscal policy of the state in the interests of economic development of Russia” (2015). (watch video)
[56] Miroslav Novák, Heritage of Alchemical Cryptography (2013), Il Chimico Italiano 24: 17-24 — “Medieval European alchemists used a disorganized way of coded expressing together with a very complicated system of diverse graphical symbols... The symbols, besides their shorthand role, also serve as a specific cryptographic system, for very often the alchemists tried to conceal the results from the Christian church, avaricious noblemen and possible competitors. [..] The cryptography (or cryptology; from Greek κρυπτός, “hidden, secret”; and γράφειν, “writing”, or λογία, “study”, respectively) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties (called adversaries) (Wikipedia). And these adversaries were the main reason, why alchemists coded their written products.”
[57] Dante’s Inferno, Canto XIV — Wikipedia: “Ring 3: Against God, Art, and Nature: The third round of the seventh circle is a great Plain of Burning Sand scorched by great flakes of flame falling slowly down from the sky, an image derived from the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24.) The Blasphemers (the Violent against God) are stretched supine upon the burning sand, the Sodomites (the Violent against Nature) run in circles, while the Usurers (the Violent against Art, which is the Grandchild of God, as explained in Canto XI) crouch huddled and weeping. Ciardi writes, ‘Blasphemy, sodomy, and usury are all unnatural and sterile actions: thus the unbearing desert is the eternity of these sinners; and thus the rain, which in nature should be fertile and cool, descends as fire’ (John Ciardi, Inferno, Canto XIV, pg. 112).”
[58] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism As The Conflict Between Labor And Usury, 2014
[60] Geoffrey A. Lee, The Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of 1299-1300, The Accounting Historians Journal, Fall 1977 Volume 4, Number 2 —
“Francesco di Marco Datini in late 14th century Italy opened a new ledger with the dedication: ‘in the name of God and of the Virgin Mary and all the Saints of Paradise, that they may give us grace to do right both for body and soul.’
His factor, Monte d’Andrea, followed this with the ten commandments – ‘not always to be observed, perhaps – but there at the head of the ledger they stood.'” — (cit. Origo, Iris, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco Di Marco Datini, Penguin Books, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1963, p. 279)
[61] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013 (Kindle)
[62] Seth L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, pp. 151-169 — “As a forerunner of the apocalyptic otherworldly journey and the visionary tour of hell, its lineage includes the books of Enoch, the Revelation of John, and Dante’s Inferno.”
[63]ibid., p. 151
[64]ibid., p.156 — “[The vision] switches without warning into a first-person confession, and in an exquisite narratological twist, the story itself becomes its narrator’s expiation for the sin that the vision condemns.”
[65]ibid., p. 160 — After the prince awakes from his “vision”, the story changes focus to a character called “that scribe”, who is portrayed as “a double of the crown prince: like the prince a sinner who occupies the post of his father”. It is also noteworthy that the narrator of the vision self-identifies as a scribe (p. 162).
[66]ibid., p.161 — On observing the prince’s actions, “that scribe” also takes the King of the Underworld’s warning to heart: “[the scribe] went and repeated [the story] to the palace, saying ‘Let this be my expiation.’”
[67] What Does “Box and Dice” Mean?, WiseGeek, (17 July 2017) — “‘Box and dice’ is an idiomatic English expression, most common in Australian English, which means ‘the whole thing.’ It is usually part of a longer phrase, most commonly ‘the whole box and dice.” The expression is one of a number of similar terms called merisms.
The phrase ‘the whole box and dice’ probably originates from dice games. In many such games, players store the dice in a small box or cup, often made of wood or leather, when not in use. In some games, the box or cup actually forms part of play. For example, in the game ‘liar’s dice,’ players cover their dice with a box to conceal the value of the score they have rolled.
In games of this type, the box and dice are the only pieces of equipment required to play. To have them is therefore to have everything necessary for the game. This is the most likely origin for the use of this expression as a term for “the whole thing.”
[68]ibid., p.157 — “The prince’s sequence of actions has mythic and ritual connotations, albeit ones we do not fully understand. Certainly, the reference to descent to the netherworld evokes a long tradition in both myth and exorcistic ritual of journeys to the realm of the dead, since both Ishtar and terminally ill patients are said to ‘set their mind to going down to the netherworld.’ This suggests that Kummay [titular name of the “crown prince”] is attempting to deliberately induce a vision or even travel to the netherworld of his own volition.”
[69]ibid., p. 158 — “While a šuttu is simply a dream, tabrītu appears frequently in the vocabulary of Sennacherib and Essarhaddon to describe building projects—actually existing physical objects. It refers to awe-inspiring things seen with the eye. Far from a strictly mental event, numerous Sargonid occurrences of tabrītu refer to material things seen in daylight. The way this vision is narrated emphasizes its reality.”
[70]ibid., p.156
[71] The “gods and demons” are described by various scholars as “hybrid monsters” (Collins 1990) and “monster-demons” (Kvanvig 1981) – that is, they combine animal-bird or human-animal features. Most of the monsters have “feet like a man” (Kvanvig 1981). About one it is said that “with its left foot it was treading” (Kvanvig 1981). One is lacking its hind leg; it will walk with a limp. The last monster is composed of two bodies, has “the head of a man” on the second body, and wears a crown (Kvanvig 1981).
[72] Seth L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 158
[73] Helge S. Kvanvig, An Akkadian vision as background for Dan 7? (1981), Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology, 35:1, 85-89
[74] Seth L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 160
[75] John J. Collins, Review of Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man by Helge S. Kvanvig; Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 109, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), p. 717
[76] Seth. L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 158
[77] John J. Collins, Review of Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man by Helge S. Kvanvig; Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 109, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), p. 716
[78] Donald A. Mackenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), p. 74 (via Sacred Texts, 17 July 2017) — “Another Sumerian storm demon was the Zu bird, which is represented among the stars by Pegasus and Taurus. A legend relates that this ‘worker of evil, who raised the head of evil’, once aspired to rule the gods, and stole from Bel, ‘the lord’ of deities, the Tablets of Destiny, which gave him his power over the Universe as controller of the fates of all. The Zu bird escaped with the Tablets and found shelter on its mountain top in Arabia. Anu called on Ramman, the thunderer, to attack the Zu bird, but he was afraid; other gods appear to have shrunk from the conflict. How the rebel was overcome is not certain, because the legend survives in fragmentary form.”
[79] Seth. L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 159 — “The vision culminates in a theophany of Nergal, the king of the underworld, enthroned. Kummay quivers in terror at his splendor and falls to his knees before the god. Nergal siezes him by the forelock [..] and roars, intending to kill him, but his advisor Ishum instead advises him to spare Kummay, that he may return penitent to the upper world to begin the glorification of Nergal that results in the story we now read.”
[80]ibid., p.164, citing L4 I. 13 (Streck Assurbanipal: 254), with the variant published by E. Weissert and H.-U. Onasch “The Prologue to Assurbanipal’s Prism E” Or 61 (1992):71.
[81]ibid., p. 165, cf. Dialogue Between Assurbanipal and Nabû — “Of further interest for the identification of the circle in which this text originated is the string of stereotyped wisdom epithets that describe Sennacherib: ‘the eminent one, experienced in matters, wide of understanding, comprehensive in the seat of ordaining fate, who scanned the plans of the foundation of the earth’ (r. 66 uurāti ša markās qaqqari īru).”
[82] 2 Kings 18-19:36, Tanakh, Jerusalem Publication Society (1917)
[84] Sennacherib, Wikipedia, citing Von Solden (1994) p. 58,100; Foster & Foster (2009) p. 121-123; Stephanie Dalley (2013) The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: an elusive world Wonder traced, OUP — “..his building projects included the beautification of Nineveh, a canal 50 km long to bring water to the city, and the ‘Palace Without Rival’, which included what may have been the prototype of the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or even the actual Hanging Gardens.”
[85] Seth. L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 160 — “The specific historical identification with Sennacherib is made clear when Nergal says that he built the Akitu house, an act uniquely identified with Sennacherib in this period.”
[86] Joshua J. Mark, Sennacherib, Ancient™ History Encyclopedia (17 July 2017) — “The Book of II Kings 19:37 states, ‘One day, while [Sennacherib] was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.’ Assyrian inscriptions also maintain that he was killed by his sons but differ on whether he was stabbed or crushed to death. The historian Stephen Bertman writes, ‘Sennacherib was stabbed to death by an assassin (possibly one of his sons) or, according to another account, was crushed to death by the monumental weight of a winged bull that he just happened to be standing beneath’. Whichever way he died, it is thought that he was killed because of his treatment of Babylon.”
[87] Jewish Holy Scriptures: Halakha/Aggadata/Midrash, Encyclopedia Judaica (17 July 2017)
[88] Seth. L. Sanders, The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation (Brill, 2009), Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 160 — “For Sennacherib’s rebuilding of the Akitu-house at Assur, see OIP 2:135-43.”
[89] Given his connection with the “crown prince” and self-professed scribe Assurbanipal – the grandson of Sennacherib – Nabû is an important figure. According to A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology (G. Leick, Routledge 1991):
“He was first called the ‘scribe and minister of Marduk’, and when the latter was assimilated into the official pantheon as the son of Ea, Nabû in turn became known as the son of Marduk from his wife Sarpanitum. He was also accorded the office of patron of the scribes [..] With his elevation to the ranks of the great gods, Nabû became a cosmic deity, entrusted with the Tablets of Destiny, ‘pronouncing the Fate’ of mankind. The texts equate him with Ninurta [elsewhere thought to be the god sent to take back the Tablets of Destiny from the thieving Anzû storm-bird]. He was also sometimes mentioned as a god of water and the fertility of fields, maybe through his descent from Ea; he also shares the epitheton of ‘god of wisdom’. (Pomponio 1978)”
[90]Andrew George, Exit the “House which Binds Death”: the names of Sennacherib’s Akitu temple and its cella, Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires, 1993 (2 no. 43). pp. 34-35.
[91] Meir Malul, The House Which Binds Death/the Sea, N.A.B.U. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires, vol. 1993/100, 1993, No.4, pp.83-85
[92] Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and Coincidence of Opposites; History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), pp. 273, 275-276
[93]ibid., p. 276-277 — “The chief participants and actors in the goddess’s cult are well known by name [..] Their transvestism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes. [..] The cultic personnel of the goddess in their costumes, words, and acts had but one goal: ‘to delight Ishtar’s heart, give themselves up to (otherwise) for[bidden] actions.'”
[97] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p. 60
[98] Antiquity of the Cabala, Jewish Encyclopedia 1906 (online), 30 June 2017
[99] Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God – The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidim (1992), pp. 217-218 — “‘Before Him, blessed be He, for He is omnipotent, Yesh and Ayin are equated with each other, for before Him, blessed be He, heaven and earth are called one, and Yesh and Ayin are entirely equal to each other’ (Rabbi Aharon Halevi, ‘Avodat ha-Levi, I, p. 1)”
“[..] the Habad teachers posited the vital importance of the equalization of the opposites in human worship. The quality of the equalization of opposites that characterizes God deprives contradictions of all validity. Likewise it permits Him to possess dual and contradictory wills that are susceptible to being equalized and unified from the divine point of view. Thus, a divine paradigm is transformed into a pattern for human worship, which also equalizes between nether and upper worlds by descent and ascent, unifying sanctity and sin, commandment and transgression, divine manifestation and inversion.”
“‘Worship in inversion,’ ‘descent for the purpose of rising up,’ ‘self-prostration,’ and ‘sacrifice of the soul’ were seen to be theurgical missions based on the conflict of fulfilling the reverse of the divine commandment for the sake of the divine will to be revealed in all dimensions. [..] This form of worship is the radical conclusion of the view of divinity as the unity of opposites and the understanding of human vocation as being to equalize the opposites.”
[100] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p. 75
[101] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p. 104, p. 103; cf. p. 80; — “The five taboo types of meat are granted a sacramental character. Within them are concentrated the energies of the highest Buddhas, who are able to appear through the ‘law of inversion’. The texts thus speak of the ‘five ambrosias’ or ‘five nectars’. Other impure ‘foods’ have also been assigned to the five Dhyani Buddhas. Ratnasambhava is associated with blood, Amitabha with semen, Amoghasiddhi with human flesh, Aksobhya with urine, Vairocana with excrement (Wayman, 1973, p. 116).”
“The Candamaharosana Tantra lists with relish the particular substances which are offered to the adept by his wisdom consort during the sexual magic rituals and which he must swallow: excrement, urine, saliva, leftovers from between her teeth, lipstick, dish-water, vomit, the wash water which remains after her anus has been cleaned (George, 1974, pp. 73, 78, 79). Those who “make the excrement and urine their food, will be truly happy”, promises the Guhyasamaja Tantra (quoted by Gäng, 1988, p. 134). In the Hevajra Tantra the adept must drink the menstrual blood of his mudra out of a skull bowl (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 98). But rotten fish, sewer water, canine feces, corpse fat, the excrement of the dead, sanitary napkins as well as all conceivable “intoxicating drinks” are also consumed (Walker, 1982, pp. 80–84).”
“There exists a strict commandment that the practicing yogi may not feel any disgust in consuming these impure substances. ‘One should never feel disgusted by excrement, urine, semen or blood’ (quoted by Gäng, 1988, p. 266). Fundamentally, ‘he must eat and drink whatever he obtains and he should not hold any notions regarding likes and dislikes’ (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 67).”
[102]ibid., p. 104
[103]ibid., p.124 — “In one relevant text can be read: ‘Eve keeps the female seed’ (Jung, 1968, p. 320). Even the retention of sperm and its transmutation into something higher is known in the west. Hence the seventeenth-century doctor from Brussels, Johannes Baptista Helmont, states that, ‘If semen is not emitted, it is changed into a spiritual force that preserves its capacities to reproduce sperm and invigorates breath emitted in speech’ (Couliano, 1987, p. 102). Giordano Bruno, the heretic among the Renaissance philosophers, wrote a comprehensive essay on the manipulation of erotic love through the retention of semen and for the purposes of attaining power.”
[104] ibid., p.104 citing Evola, 1993, p. 207
[105]ibid., citing Bachelard, 1990, p. 282.
[106]ibid., p. 62, citing Gross, 1993, p. 48
[107] ibid., p. 47, citing Shaw, 1994, n. 128, pp. 7, 254–255
[108]ibid., p. 63
[109] ibid, p. 75 — “Suitably radical instructions can be found in the Hevajra Tantra: “A wise man … should remove the filth of his mind by filth … one must rise by that through which one falls”, or, more vividly, “As flatulence is cured by eating beans so that wind may expel wind, as a thorn in the foot can be removed by another thorn, and as a poison can be neutralized by poison, so sin can purge sin” (Walker, 1982, p. 34).”
[110]ibid, p. 80
[111]ibid, p. 75
[112]ibid., p.76 — “The fifth and final argument attempts to persuade us that enlightenment per se arises through the radical inversion of its opposite and that there is absolutely no other possible way to break free of the chains of samsara. Here, the tantric logic of inversion has become a dogma which no longer tolerates other paths to enlightenment.”
“However, this tantric logic of inversion contains a dangerous paradox. On the one hand, Vajrayana stands not just in radical opposition to ‘social’ norms, but likewise also to the original fundamental rules of its own Buddhist system. Thus, it must constantly fear accusations and persecution from its religious brethren. On the other there is the danger mentioned by Friedrich Nietzsche, that anyone who too often looks monsters in the face can themselves become a monster.”
[113] J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002); Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East; proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 2001, p. 34
[114] Wolkstein D. and Kramer S., The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi; Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (1983), Harper & Row (New York), pp. 38-39, 48 — “These Sumerian love songs between the shepherd-king and Inanna belonged in Sumerian times to a ritual Sumerologists call the sacred marriage rite. In this ritual, the king of a Sumerian city (usually given the epithet ‘Dumuzi’) symbolically weds the goddess Inanna, who is represented by the high priestess of her city. If the goddess is pleased with her suitor and his gifts, she opens her house to him. The sacred marriage bed is prepared, and there, at the proper time (see ‘The Joy of Sumer’ hymn and commentary), the marriage between king and goddess takes place to the accompaniment of merriment and such songs as those in ‘The Courtship.'” (Kramer, p. 154)
“The ‘always’ ends. Whether by external or internal interference, unending, uninterrupted mutual bliss is not an earthly possibility. Change is the human condition. In this instance, it is the woman Inanna who by calling for the royal marriage bed brings the family and social world into her exclusive relationship with Dumuzi, thus ending ‘the honey-moon.'” (Kramer, p. 153)
[115] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p. 91-92, 271
[116] A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, (University of Chicago Press, 1977 ed), p. 204
[117] Mukīl rēš lemutti, Wikipedia, citing F.A. Wiggermann (1997) “Mischwesen, A”. in D.O. Edzard. Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie: Meek – Mythologie. Walter De Gruyter, p. 241 ; and Jo Ann Scurlock, Burton R. Andersen (2005), Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses. University of Illinois Press, p. 246
[118] Jo Ann Scurlock (2006),Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia. Brill, pp. 30, 53
[119] J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002); Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East; proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 2001, pp. 28-30
[120] Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 (Amplified Bible)
[121] Marriage of the Sea ceremony, Wikipedia, citing Kennedy, Benjamin (1962). “35b”. Revised Latin Primer. Great Britain: Longmans. p. 19; The Bucintoro, Comitato Festa della Sensa (17 Feb 2012). (21 June 2017)
[122] J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002); Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East; proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 2001 — The traditional scholarly view is that harimtu means prostitute, and refers to a cult of “sacred prostitution”. This view has been challenged by feminist scholars such as Assante (1998, 2000: 10-73), arguing for an interpretation of the harimtu as an unmarried/unattached woman looking for sex, in a culture that had a libertine (my word) view to sexual activity.
[123] Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop, Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, pp. 23-35
[124] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Two Hundred Years Together, chapter 3. See also the “Jewish Regulation of 1804”, which included a total prohibition on Jewish distilling and tavern keeping.
[125] Michael Homan, Beer Production by Throwing Bread into Water: A New Interpretation of Qoh. XI 1-2, Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 52, Fasc. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 275-278 — “Beer and bread were intimately linked in the ancient Near East. Breweries from Egypt to Mesopotamia created beer by lightly baking dough composed of ground germinated cereals, and these loaves along with yeast were placed in jars of water, where the maltose sugars were converted to alcohol.”
“In favor of this interpretation are several Akkadian passages which state that beer ingredients (including bappir bread and dates) are thrown into the water to produce beer, with the verb nadu (“to throw”) used in technical language for brewing beer.”
[126] J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002); Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East; proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 2001, pp. 33-34 —
“With the slap of the face, with the rolling of the eyes,
I have hit you on the head, I have deranged your reason,
Set your will to my will,
Set your decision to my decision,
I hold you fast as Ishtar held Dumuzi,
(As) beer binds her drinker,
I have bound you with my hairy mouth,
With my vagina (full of) wetness,
With my mouth (full of) saliva,
With my vagina (full of) wetness,
No female rival shall go near you!”
“What is important here is that the incantation employs Ishtar’s seizure of her lover and beer’s seizure of the drinker as similes for the state of being spellbound. [..] Ishtar, beer, vagina and mouth all have the power to bind. Here, as elsewhere, the vagina and mouth are interchangeable. The magical body of the divine harimtu binds at both ends. [..] The association between drinking and sex was deeply rooted in the Mesopotamian psyche of the Old Babylonian period [..] For example, beer was firmly equated to saliva and vaginal wetness [..] Mesopotamian beer was normally sweetened with date syrup, called “honey” in modern translations. In most literary erotica the mouth and vulva are honey-sweet, as they are in this Sumerian court poem from Ur:”
“My god, the tavern keeper, her beer is sweet!
And her vulva is sweet like her beer – and her beer is sweet!
And her vulva is sweet like all her mouths – and her beer is sweet!
Her kašbir-beer and her (regular) beer are sweet.”
“In this hymn, the poet adds the anus to the list of transposable body portals, although it is merely alluded to as inferior kašbir beer.”
[127] Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and Coincidence of Opposites; History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), p. 273
[128] J. Assante, Sex, Magic, And The Liminal Body In The Erotic Art And Texts Of The Old Babylonian Period (2002); Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East; proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 2001, p. 33
[129]Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale. Given intention to publish a book revealing a host of further evidences, this author apologises for not providing a more detailed citation at this time.
[130] 2 Kings 17:19-24, Ezra 4:9-11, Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917 — 2 Kings 17:19-24 19. Also Judah kept not the commandments of the LORD their God, but walked in the statutes of Israel which they practised. 20. And the LORD rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until He had cast them out of His sight.
..
22. And the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them; 23 until the LORD removed Israel out of His sight, as He spoke by the hand of all His servants the prophets. So Israel was carried away out of their own land to Assyria, unto this day.
24 And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.
Ezra 4:9-11 9 ..then wrote Rehum the commander, and Shimshai the scribe, and the rest of their companions; the Dinites, and the Apharesattechites, the Tarpelites, the Apharesites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Shushanchites, the Dehites, the Elamites, 10 and the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Asenappar brought over, and set in the city of Samaria, and the rest that are in the country beyond the River…
[131] Nili Wazana, Anzu and Ziz: Great Mythical Birds in Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Traditions (2008), Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31 (2009): 111-135 –– “Were the Israelites acquainted with the Epic of Anzu? A seventh century b.c.e. cylinder seal portraying the battle of Ninurta and Anzu was discovered in Israel. While this sporadic, graphic witness cannot count as proof of knowledge of the Epic of Anzu, it does show that symbols of the combat myth had arrived along with the Assyrian army, part and parcel of a general cultural influence. Furthermore, studies have shown that the Bible employs literary motifs and linguistic expressions reflecting royal Neo-Assyrian inscriptions when ‘quoting’ Assyrian speakers, concluding that some biblical authors must have been acquainted not only with the ‘Assyrian experience,’ but also with official royal literary traditions. Considering that the Epic of Anzu played a role in the language of royal Neo-Assyrian inscriptions, underlying the criminal characterization of some of the figures in imperialistic propaganda, it is highly probable that biblical authors were familiar with this creature and its traditions—even if they did not know the epic itself, before the Babylonian exile.”
[132] Russell Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, 2006 — Gmirkin offers evidence that contradicts a widely-accepted argument concerning the earliest origins of “anti-Semitism”, which is allegedly found in the writings of an Egyptian priest of the third century BC named Manetho, in his history of Egypt (Aegyptiaca). Manetho reported that centuries earlier, a foreign population had entered Egypt from the east via the Nile delta. These foreigners rose in power, and became an increasing problem to the Egyptian natives, who were finally motivated to expel them when the foreign population developed a serious skin disease (leprosy?). According to Manetho, these ejected foreigners relocated to Jerusalem.
Gmirkin argues that the book of Exodus was written by Jewish intellectuals in Alexandria (Egypt) in reaction to Manetho, whose account came first and was more accurate. That is to say, rather than Manetho attacking the Jews, “the borrowing and polemics took place in the opposite direction; the Pentateuch polemicized against the Egyptian expulsion stories in Manetho.” (pp.2-3)
[133] Exodus 3:8, 33:3, Tanakh, Jerusalem Publication Society, 1917 – the common interpretation has been that “flowing with milk and honey” is a metaphor for the abundant fertility of the land itself.
[134] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p. 119
[135]ibid., p. 120-121
[136]ibid., 121 — “The embracing of a ‘bleeding’ lover is therefore a great ritual privilege. In his book on Indian ecstatic cults, Philip Rawson indicates that ‘the most powerful sexual rite … requires intercourse with the female partner when she is menstruating and her “red” sexual energy is at its peak’ (Rawson, 1973, p. 24; see also Chöpel, 1992, p. 191).”
[137] Judy Grahn, Ecology of the Erotic in a Myth of Inanna, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 29(2), 2010, p. 60; citing Black et al., 2004, p. 197
[138] Lishtar, The Avenging Maiden and the Predator Gardener: A Study of Inanna and Shukaletuda (2000), citing Shuttle and Redgrove (1989), p. 21
[139] Exodus 7:14-24, Tanakh, Jerusalem Publication Society, 1917 – “And the LORD said unto Moses: ‘Say unto Aaron: Take thy rod, and stretch out thy hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their ponds of water, that they may become blood; and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’” (verse 19)
[141] Alchemy, Encyclopedia Judaica, Jewish Virtual Library (17 June 2017) — “The Jewish association with alchemy dates from ancient times. Zosimos, a fifth-century Greek historian, states that the Jews acquired the secrets of the “sacred craft” of the Egyptians and the knowledge of the “power of gold” which derives from it by dishonest means, and they imparted the knowledge of alchemy to the rest of the world. In ancient Greek manuscripts, which contain lists of writings on alchemy, a number of alchemic and magic writings are attributed to Moses…”
[142] Alchemy, Jewish Encyclopedia, (17 June 2017) — “Traces of the connection of Jews with the science of Alchemy are very scanty in Hebrew literature. Not a single distinguished adept is found who has left in a Hebrew form traces of his knowledge of the subject. There is, however, scarcely a single important ancient work upon the science which is not directly related to the Jews, with their traditions and their science. Alchemy, like others of the exact sciences, suffered from the introduction of foreign elements, and developed from a more or less secret science belonging to a particular craft, into a mysterious science dealing with changes in the organic as well as the metallic world.”
“In the evolution of Alchemy there are at least three epochs: The first, the Greek and Egyptian period; the second, the Arabic of the Middle Ages; and the last, or modern, period, extending from the sixteenth century to the present day.”
“Alchemy had already in the second or third century assumed a mystical and magical character, exemplified in such recipes as appear in the magic papyri. The whole syncretism of the East—Jewish and Egyptian gnosis, Greek mysteries, and Ophite speculations—combined to produce a current of thought which affected every mental production of the age.”
“Adam and Abraham have in their turn been described as authors of alchemistic treatises, and Moses is repeatedly met with as the author of such works. To Moses are ascribed the Greek treatise known as ‘Diplosis’ (that is, the art of doubling the weight of gold), and the treatise ‘The Chemistry of Moses’ (dealing with metallurgy), published by Berthelot in his ‘Collection des Anciens Alchimistes Grecs,’ Paris, 1887-88, ii. 300-315, iii. 287-301. In the Greek manuscript of St. Mark of the ninth century Zosimos quotes long passages from ‘The Chemistry of Moses.'”
[143] Vladimír Karpenko, Alchemy asdonum dei, HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No. 1, pp. 63-80; — “In the Hellenistic world particular attention should be paid to Mary the Jewess, one of the most influential personalities of this science. God appears in connection with her, but in a slightly different manner than later. To Mary, alchemy is donum dei, a gift of God; but this gift was given only to ‘chosen people’, Jews. She is reported to have said: “Do not touch the philosopher’s stone with your hands; you are not of our race, you are not of the race of Abraham.’* Thus alchemy was not for alchemists in general, but for the race of Abraham. Alchemy is presented here as the spiritual property of Jews. As pointed out by Patai, the singular form ‘God’ is used strictly in texts attributed to Mary, and this claim that alchemical secrets were revealed to her by God became a part of the medieval alchemical tradition about her.”
*Patai, R.: 1994, The Jewish Alchemists, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, p. 76.
Autumn (n): late 14c., autumpne (modern form from 16c.), from Old French autumpne, automne (13c.), from Latin autumnus (also auctumnus, perhaps influenced by auctus“increase”).
Harvest (n): Old English hærfest “autumn,” as one of the four seasons, “period between August and November,” from Proto-Germanic *harbitas (source also of Old Saxon hervist, Old Frisian and Dutch herfst, German Herbst “autumn,” Old Norse haust “harvest”), from PIE *kerp- “to gather, pluck, harvest” (source also of Sanskrit krpana– “sword,” krpani “shears;” Greek karpos “fruit,” karpizomai “make harvest of;” Latin carpere “to cut, divide, pluck;” Lithuanian kerpu “cut;” Middle Irish cerbaim “cut”).
In Old English with only implied reference to the gathering of crops. The borrowing of autumn and the use of fall (n.) in a seasonal sense gradually focused the meaning of harvest to “the time of gathering crops” (mid-13c.), also to the action itself and the product of the action (after c. 1300), which became its main senses from 14c.
I’ve been deceiv’d. The Publick Safety
Requires he should be more confin’d; and none,
No not the Princess self, permitted to
Confer with him. I’ll quit you to the King.
Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base Injustice thou hast done my Love:
Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past Distress,
And all those Ills which thou so long hast mourn’d;
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.
In marital relations, there is no greater sting, no act more likely to turn love to hatred, than the act of infidelity. The breach of trust. The breaking of a sacred bond. It is the ultimate betrayal.
Imagine for a moment the most hurtful of such betrayals. An adulterous affair, resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child.
In medieval Latin, the word infidēlitas means unfaithful, disloyal, and treacherous. It implies a willful intent.
From ancient times, men have used overt sexual symbolism to communicate and record economic actions. Even when divorced from their origins in husbandry, we still use these sexual metaphors in our economic language. In accounting and finance in particular, many words are puns – they carry a double meaning.
Growth. Cycle. Period. Maturity. Seed. Deposit. Yield. Labour. Bond. And that’s only a handful.
In New York, happiest among the financial alpha males is the big swinging dick. The term entered the lingua franca via Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker.[1]
It should come as no surprise then, that men have long used covert sexual symbolism to secretly communicate – and propagate – the art of economic deception, manipulation, and domination:[2][3][4]
Just like their oriental colleagues, the occidental alchemists expressed themselves in a twilight language. All the words, signs, and symbols, which were formulated to describe the experiments in their obscure “laboratories”, possessed multiple meanings and were only comprehensible to the “initiated”.[5]
“Make of the man and the woman a Circle,
of that a Quadrangle, of this a Triangle,
of the same a Circle, and you will have
the Stone of the Philosophers.”
So cryptic, so long disguised and so deeply embedded is it, that even men such as former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King (The End of Alchemy) appear not to have understood the core conjugal metaphor:
[A]lchemy lies at the heart of the financial system; moreover, banking was, like alchemy, a medieval idea, but one we have not as yet discarded.
As Lord King remarks, the alchemy is “the belief that money kept in banks can be taken out whenever depositors ask for it”. This is a confidence trick in two senses: it works if, and only if, confidence is strong; and it is fraudulent. Financial institutions make promises that, in likely states of the world, they cannot keep.[6]
Banking – and money – is all about the making of promises.
Mutual promises.
A mutual exchange of promises.
Banking, and money, is all about the alchemical marriage of two opposite principals (principles) – a lender (male, active), and a borrower (female, passive) – who agree to a mutual, binding exchange of promises.
The primal act of banking, is the forming of a “bond” – a union of opposites – between a creditor (Sola ☉, Mars ♂), and a debtor (Luna ☽, Venus ♀).
The purpose of this bond – this union of opposites – is not to love each other, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. There is a higher purpose.
Reproduction.
The reproduction and growth of money.
The true purpose of this union of opposites, is the creation and multiplication of money … for the lender.
In banking, the production and reproduction of money is achieved not by alchemy, or magic.
It is achieved by lying, and cheating.
Cheating females is the base principle that lies, by design, at the heart of the money system.
Cheating females, is what makes our world go round. It is the driving force behind a critical factor in all monopoly-monied economies: the “circulation”, the “flow”, or the “velocity of money”.
Cheating lies at the heart of the “creative destruction” phenomenon in capitalism, and the so-called “boom and bust” economic cycle.
Cheating females is also the cause of a phenomenon seen repeatedly, through all of recorded human history: the long term relationship between lending at “interest” (usury), and rising inequality.
The art of monetary cheating – along with its base sexual metaphor of male (lender) principle cheating the female (borrower) principle – can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Babylon, through the trade and migration routes, and the boastful claims to historicity, of a unique guild of artisanal merchants.[7]
The same secret principle – a gross perversion of the hieros gamos (“Sacred Marriage”)[8] fertility rite – is found in the accounting records, in the scholarly, literary, and technical texts, and in the magico-religious artifacts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire, Arabia, and the Far East.
“The Crowns of Red and White combine into One.” – S.A. Weor, Treatise of Sexual Alchemy (1953)
It is found in the Babylonian Talmud and Jewish Cabala, in the code words and symbolism of Eastern and Western alchemy, and in the upaya (“method”, “trick”) of the Tantric Buddhist Kalachakra (“Time Tantra”) secret high initiation rites of medieval India.[9]
(Source: Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism)
Last of all, the same secret principle of monetary cheating is found in el modo vinegia, the medieval “Venetian method” of bookkeeping by double entry, still used as the foundation of banking and finance to this day.
“And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.”[10]
Cheating females – the Royal Art of “philosophers” – is all about producing inequality, by illusions of equality.
Since ancient times, the illusion of equality has been represented by the alchemical symbol of the androgyne (Mercury-Hermes ☿). It does not, as most believe, represent the union of male and female principles – two equal opposites – in a gender-neutralising, transcendent harmony.
The androgyne actually represents a mixture of male-female reproductive forces – the mixed “seed” of the man and woman – that is “possessed by a man”.[11]
In the alchemy of banking, the illusion of equality is represented by a bookkeepers’ symbol (“$”, “€”, “£”, “¥”) called “money of account”. It does not, as most believe, represent the union of Assets and Liabilities – two equal opposites – in a “supply-demand” harmonising equilibrium.
“Money of account” actually represents a mixture of lender (male) and borrower (female) “deposits” – Assets (left side) and Liabilities (right side) … that is possessed by a Lender:
[T]he role of money [of account] as supplementer of value is concealed behind an apparent but deceptive power to guarantee equivalence. Moreover, the power of money enables the construction of previously unprecedented levels of wealth, and the possibility of new power relations for those with money and those without it.[12]
Following in the footsteps of Hermes “the Sage, the Babylonian”[13] – god of merchants, orators (eloquent liars), tricksters, imposters, hegemons and thieves – the lender actually “sucks money out of purses as the magnet attracts iron”:[14]
In the traditional Buddhist conception an embryo arises from the admixture of the male seed and the female seed. This red-white mixture is referred to by the texts as sukra. Since the fluids of man and woman produces new life [..] if the yogi succeeds in permanently uniting within himself both elixirs (the semen virile and the semen feminile), then eternal life lies in store for him. He becomes a “born of himself”, having overcome the curse of rebirth and replaced it with the esoteric vision of immortality. With the red-white mixture he attains the “medicine of long life”, a “perfected body”. Sukra is the “life juice” par excellence, the liquid essence of the entire world of appearances. It is equated with amrta, the “drink of immortality” or the “divine nectar”.[15]
In the four highest secret initiation rituals of Tantric Buddhism, this “skillful” trick (upaya) is called the Vajroli method. It is considered “a veritable touchstone of the highest yogic skill”.
In the act of yuganaddha (fusion) with a “wisdom consort” (mudra) – lots of them – the tantric master sucks out the seed of the woman with his ‘cock’ :[16]
“After he has streamed forth,” Mircea Eliade quotes a text as saying, “he draws in and says: through my force, through my seed I take your seed — and she is without seed”. The man thus steals the seed of the woman under the impression that he can through this become a powerful androgynous being, and leaves her without her own life energy.
Some of the “initiated” even succeed in drawing up the semen feminile without ejaculating any sperm so as to then produce the yearned-for sukra mixture in their own body. The mastery of this method requires painful and lengthy exercises, such as the introduction of small rods of lead and “short lengths of solder” into the urethra.[17]
Now what happens if the yogi has not mastered the method of drawing back? .. [T]he adept may catch the sukra from out of the vagina in a vessel and then drink it. It is not rare for the drinking bowl to be made from a human skull. The Candamaharosana Tantra recommends sucking the mixture up with a tube (pipe) through the nose. If one sips the sukra out of his mudra’s genitals with his mouth, then the process is described as being “from mouth to mouth”. Without exaggeration one can refer to this drinking of the “white-red bodhicitta” as the great tantric Eucharist, in which semen and blood are sacredly consumed in place of bread and wine. Through this oriental “Last Supper” the power and the strength of the women are passed over to the man.[18]
The frontispiece from Nicolas de Locques’ Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle (1665) perfectly illustrates the essence of the alchemical act. As the two “flames” (desire, lust) of Mercury-Hermes and Aphrodite-Venus “bond” – with the Sun ☼ (male) in the dominant position over the Moon ☾ (female), and her eyes blissfully wedded to the point of their “fusion” – the thieving trickster god steals her “waters” from right under her nose.
He uses her symbol (ancient Greek kteis, a pun meaning scallop shell and vagina) – held in his right hand (symbol of phallic power) – to perform the theft.
This calculating thievery is celebrated by the Tantric Babhaha (“Free Lover”) in poetic verse:
In the sacred citadel of the vulva of
a superlative, skillful partner,
do the praxis of mixing white seed
with her ocean of red seed.
Then absorb, raise, and spread the nectar—
A stream of ecstasy such as you’ve never known.[19]
The deity Kalachakra and his consort, Kali Vishvamata. (Study carefully – click to enlarge)
The gesture of dominance with which the tantric master seals his consort during the sexual act is called the Vajrahumkara mudra: he crosses both hands behind the back of his partner, with the vajra [phallus] held in his right hand, and the gantha [vagina] in the left. The symbolic content of this gesture can only be the following: the yogi as androgyne is lord over both sexual energies, the masculine (symbolized by the vajra) and the feminine (symbolized by the gantha). In encircling (“sealing”) his wisdom consort with the androgyne gesture, he wishes to express that she is a part of his self, or rather, that he has absorbed her as his maha mudra (“inner woman”).[20]
In the alchemical doctrine of both East and West, the entire wealth of the cosmos is created out of the interaction of male and female genders – two equal opposites. By stealing the seed of the woman and uniting it with his seed within the temple of his own mystic and physical bodies, the tantric adept believes that he has at his disposal the secret birth-force of the female – a power that he both lacks and desires:
The tantric master uses a human woman [karma mudra], or at least an inana mudra [“spirit woman”] to create his androgynous body. He destroys her autonomous existence, steals her gynergy, integrates this in the form of an “inner woman” [maha mudra] and thus becomes a powerful double-gendered super-being.
“He absorbs the Mother of the Universe into himself”.[21]
In the alchemical doctrine of bankers, the entire wealth of the economy is created out of the interaction of two opposite genders – Savers and Borrowers. By uniting their “deposits” within the temple of his own mystic and physical body – a monopoly banking △ system – the banking adept has at his disposal the secret birth-force of material wealth.
He now possesses legal ownership claims, on real world assets – the “collateral” he demands as “security” against failure to repay “his” “loans” – land, industrial “capital”, intellectual “property”, and the spent time and gynergy of human “labour”.
By cheating females – lots of them – the alchemist can become the “Grand Sorcerer” (Maha Siddha):
The goal of tantric androgyny is the concentration of absolute power in the tantric master, which in his view constitutes the unrestricted control over both cosmic primal forces, the god and the goddess. [..] Supernatural power gives the tantric master control over the whole universe. He can dissolve it and reestablish it. It grants him control over space and time in all of their forms of expression. As “time god” (Kalachakra) he becomes “lord of history”.[22]
This cheating process is precisely what happens in our ‘modern’, neo-medieval banking and money system. Or, to be more precise, their neo-Babylonian banking and money system. It is built on precisely the same Old Babylonian occult (Latin occultus: hidden, secret) sex magic principles.
The Unity (or Union) of Opposites.
And the Law of Inversion (or Reversal).
“Eyes Wide Shut” Artist Print (AP), J.S. Rossbach
In both East and West, the cheating method for sex magic – claimed to result in the spiritual and physical transformation of the (male) adept into an immortal Time Lord – at the expense of the female – is the same as the method for supposedly transforming base metals into pure gold:
[P]recisely because most extreme estrangement from enlightenment is inherent to the “daughters of Mara”, because they are considered the greatest obstacle for a man and barricade the realm of freedom, according to the tantric “law of inversion” they are for any adept the most important touchstone on the initiation path. He who understands how to gain mastery over women also understands how to control all of creation, as it is represented by him. On account of this paradox, sexual union enjoys absolute priority in Vajrayana. All other ritual acts, no matter how bizarre they may appear, are derived from this sexual magic origin.
The Tibetan lama, Dragpa Jetsen [..] distinguishes three aspects of the royal art: the “Alchemy of life: he can make his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make his body eternally be but sixteen years old[; and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he can turn iron and copper into gold”. These three experiments, then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the attainment of immortality, and secondly the production of gold, that is, material wealth.[23]
It should not surprise us to discover then, that the method long used by the male “time god” to steal the female’s gynergy, is precisely the same method long used by the male (lender) to cheat the female (borrower) in banking and trade.
Faking “deposits”.
As long ago as the dawn of the second millennium BC, the oldest written law code of human civilisation targeted this covert form of thievery:
Some evidence of the knowledge and previous existence of such practice of issuance of false receipts as against supposed valuables on deposit for safe-keeping clearly exists in the Law No. 7 of the great Hammurabi [1792 BC to 1750 BC] which same law was undoubtedly intended as a preventative to this sickness in society, which, even at that day, may very well have been the cancer that destroyed much that has been before. [..] The severity of the penalty and the placing of the law so high in the code leaves little doubt that it was directed against an evil that was by no means new…
“If a man buys silver or gold or slave, or slave girl, or ox or sheep or ass or anything else whatsoever from a [free] man’s son or a free man’s slave or has received them for safe custody without witness or contract, that man is a thief: he shall be put to death.”
The requisite of witnesses and contract attesting to the true facts of valuables on deposit, would to some extent obviate the danger of the goldsmiths, silversmiths or traders, involved in a transaction, creating receipts for valuables that did not exist, in safe custody or otherwise.[24]
Figures at top of stele “fingernail” above Hammurabi’s Code of Laws, Old Babylonian Period, c. 1792 – 1750 BC. (Milkau Oberer Teil der Stele mit dem Text von Hammurapis Gesetzescode 369-2)
The death penalty must have motivated the cheating “time gods” to alter their method. As we will see, some six hundred years after King Hammurabi, the alchemists of Babylon were secreting a recipe to create the appearance of silver – their international trade (and thus, the accepted royal) standard, against which all other commodities were measured. The method, and especially the ingredients of this secret recipe, has far-reaching, explosive – and truly enlightening – explanatory powers.
Around two thousand years later, the cheating time lords were still practicing their secret method in and around what remained of the fallen and fragmented Roman Empire:
I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches andsmiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul…
Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, c. 433 AD
[This prayer also known as The Cry of the Deer (i.e., the “hart”)]
Palladius Patricius (St. Patrick) chases the ‘snakes’ out of Hibernia (Ireland).
In 620 AD the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a decree ordering to destroy all alchemical manuscripts for he was afraid of devaluation of the currency by false silver and/or gold made by alchemists.[25]
Almost a thousand years after that, at the dusk of the medieval era and the dawn of ‘modern’ commercial banking, they were still at it:
Francesco de’ Medici, a prince of the Medici, eldest son and heir to Cosimo I, should have been born with the golden apple of fortune clutched firmly in his hands. What went wrong? Why did he end his life loathed and feared by the people of Florence, amid whispers he had been poisoned by his own brother? [..] [I]n in letters and documents of the day Francesco is universally described as .. obsessed with alchemy.[26]
Joannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) – Francesco I de’ Medici in The Alchemist’s Laboratory, 1570.
Thurneisser or Thurneysser, as well as five other spellings, was born in Basel in 1530. His father was a goldsmith. Arrested for selling gilt lead as gold, Thurneisser fled Basel [..] He wrote on chemistry, alchemy, meteorology, pharmacology and medicine, making it up as he went along. History sees him now as a flamboyant charlatan.[27]
Today, we “females” no longer use silver or gold as common money. Nor do we use cuneiform or paper I Owe You’s – written records of a Promise to Pay – receipts issued by ‘smiths for our gold and silver “deposited” with them for safe-keeping.
Instead, almost all of the “money” that we use today, is really just an electronic bookkeeping record of a male promise to pay us the government’s legal tender – cash notes and coins – “on demand”.
We pay the male rent – renamed as “account keeping fees”, “charges”, and “interest” – to have electronic “access” to his “payments system”; meaning, a system allowing us to send a request for a change in his bookkeeping records.
We believe, or unthinkingly assume, that the male – a privileged monopoly “agent” of the Sovereign – actually has a “supply” that is equal to his promises to pay out the Sovereign’s real money, stored securely in his safe.
He does not actually discharge his “promise” – a binding, legal obligation – to pay us real, physical Sovereign money, unless we “demand” it.
But he would really, really prefer that we didn’t:
In case you thought banks lend money – they take deposits and lend money – you’re wrong. Legally, they do not take deposits, they borrow from the public. The expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening…
What is a bank account? It is not a deposit. What is it? It is a record of the bank’s debt to the public; it is a record of the bank’s debt to the new borrower, and they’ll show you the record of how much money they owe you. That’s it. They don’t pay up.[28]
So what happens when we “spend” the “money” in the “account” that we are renting access to?
The male “time god” simply changes hisstory in his books.
He now records that his debt to one female is less, and his debt to another female – or, the debt owed by his fellow cheating time lord in another temple of their cabal – is more.
He calls that a “payment” or “transfer”. Even though no one has actually been paid out any real money.
He and his fellow cheating time lords have simply shuffled their stories of their undischarged promises – their Sacred Marital obligations – to give the cat the cream.
“The Conjurer,” painted by Hieronymus Bosch (between 1496 – 1520). The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Source: Wikipedia)
In ‘modern’ banking, the counterfeiting of “deposits” is done using the “Venetian method” of bookkeeping by double entry. For all its fabled pretences to mathematical precision, “balance”, and objective impartiality, the art of bookkeeping – the keeping of “accounts” – is really nothing more than story-telling.
So his double story-telling has lots of opportunity for “skillful” tricks of word-play.
Puns.
Words with double, or even multiple meanings:
Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were originally based on punning systems. Punning has been credited as the fundamental concept behind alphabets, writing, and even human civilization.[29]
In the world’s first empirical test to discover what banks really do when they “issue” a “loan” of “money”, Professor Richard Werner has proven that the trick of the ‘modern’ cheating time lord is … a pun.
He just names the record of hisundischarged debt – his promise – as her “deposit”.[30]
From the perspective of the female renter of access to “money”, it appears to be her money – the money that he promised to give her. It appears to “perform” just like the real thing.
But from the perspective of the cheating time lord, it is just a record – a reflection, a re-presentation – of hisunpaid debt. His false promise. The source of his power, to “draw blood” from “easy meat” … from, in his own words, a “Babylonian whore”.[31]
At all times, all of these “deposits” (and a few drops of real money) are stored within the temple of his mystic and physical body – the monopoly banking debt-“money of account” △ system.
The male never discharges his debt – his promise – unless she demands to have it in her“purse”.
If and when she does, he might not be able to do it:
Banks promise to return money today, when most is tied up until tomorrow or the day after. They rely on the trust of customers collectively not to call their bluff. When that trust is lost, creditors run, promises cannot be met and the banking system collapses.[32]
There is nothing the cheating time lord fears more, than having lots of “females” – karmamudras – collectively exercising their Sacred Right and demanding to have the money – the real money – that he promised to pay:
[I]n India the flowing of the male seed into “the fiery maw of the female sexual organ” is still today regarded as a sacrificium and therefore feared as an element of death.[33]
[E]jaculation is equated simply with death. [..] “The fear of losing body fluids leads not only to retention, but to attempts to steal the partner’s fluid (and the fear that the partner [karma mudra] will try the same trick) — yet another form of competition”.[34]
The drawing up of sperm by a woman is viewed by a tantric yogi as a mortally dangerous theft and a fundamental crime.[35]
For the lying cheating banker, this means that the Royal Art is a delicate balancing act. If the females ever wake up to his “confidence trick”, and collectively demand the real Sovereign money, then he is royally f****d.
He is always living on the edge, of economic life and death:
For a Buddhist Tantric the retention of the male seed is the sine qua non of the highest spiritual enlightenment. [..] As soon as a person begins to experience sexual desire, it starts to flow out, drop by drop [..] The destination of the sperm’s journey within the body is the tip of the penis. Here, through extreme meditative concentration, the adept collects the lust [..] “Through this, the act obtains a cosmological dimension. … It becomes the means of attaining enlightenment (bodhi)”. “Delight resides in the tip of the vajra [penis]”…[36]
The Sanskrit term for alchemy is Rasa-vada. Rasa means ‘liquid’ or ‘quicksilver’. Quicksilver was considered the most important chemical substance which was made use of in the “mystic” experiments, both in Europe and in Asia. The liquid metal was employed in the transformation of materials both in the east and the west, in particular with the intention of producing gold. In the Occident it bore the name of the Roman god, Mercury. The Kalachakra Tantra also mentions quicksilver at several points. The frequency with which it is mentioned is a result of its being symbolically equated with the male seed (bodhicitta); it was, in a manner of speaking, the natural-substance form of the semen virile.
It is a characteristic of quicksilver that it can “swallow” other substances, that is, chemically bind with them. This quality allowed the liquid metal to become a powerful symbol for the tantric yogi, who as an androgyne succeeds in absorbing — i.e., “swallowing” — the gynergy of his wisdom consort.[37]
The alchemist plays a dangerous game. In order to transform himself into the Master of the Universe – having “absolute power” and “unrestricted control over both cosmic primal forces, the god and the goddess” – he must “conquer” all the “females”.
To do this, he must continually “grow” the size of his undischarged promises to pay out real Sovereign money (cash notes and coins).
In bankers’ words, he must “expand his balance sheet” … until all the “females” are firmly, irredeemably in his debt.
This is nothing less than an alchemical, misogynist metaphor for growing an enormously “big swinging dick”.
Given that borrowers’ debts are recorded as the bankers’ Assets, to expand his balance sheet means that – from his perspective – he is growing an enormously “big black swinging dick”.
We “females” see a growing debt as our being “in the red”.
The “time god” sees that same debt, for him, as being “in the black”.
As we will see, according to the Law of Inversion the alchemist believes that he should begin with the worst substances, in order to “transform” them into the best. Indeed, the very first step in an alchemical experiment is “located within a context of sacrifice, death and the color black”, and is called nigredo – “blackening”. So the bankers’ cynical creed is not only malevolently misogynist; paradoxically, it is also rapaciously racist … against black people.
Professor Werner’s world-first empirical study has shown that every time a lying cheating “time god” makes a new false promise to pay – every time he “issues” a new “loan” of fake “money of account”, and does not discharge any real money – this is precisely what happens.
His balance sheet – his metaphorical ‘cock’ – grows bigger:
For firms without a bank licence, the disbursement of the loan is from funds elsewhere within the firm. Thus there is an equal reduction in balance of another account from which the lent funds came from. Therefore, the balance sheet shrinks again. There is no overall change in the total size of the balance sheet.
However the story is quite different for the bank. Surprisingly, we find that unlike the other firms whose balance sheets shrank back in Step 2, the bank’s accounts seem in standstill, unchanged from Step 1. The total balance sheet remains lengthened. No balance is drawn down to make a payment to the borrower.[38]
“For banks only the balance sheet remains unchanged in its EXPANDED position .. In other words: banks do not discharge their liability.”
From Vajrayana comes the striking saying that “A yogi whose member is always hard is one who always retains his semen”.[39]
These lying cheating time lords have long told a romantic story of their past, and present. This fairy tale “account” says that theirs is only a neutral, benevolent, guiding hand – the Invisible Hand – in the reproductive affairs of others. Just like a high priest, officiating at the Sacred Wedding of two opposites. His divine intermediation and blessing on their union is necessary to ensure that the gentle rains of prosperity, security and happiness will fall on both of them … or so hisstory goes.
Over many centuries, these invisible-handed banking high priests – along with their most-favoured choir boys in the economic theory profession – have conjured up lots of abstract word-pairs to describe this “productive” union of two opposites.
Savers and Borrowers. Patient and Impatient. Investors and Entrepreneurs. Sellers and Buyers. Producers and Consumers. Exporters and Importers. External and Internal. Public and Private. And that’s just a handful.
These abstract word-pairs serve the purpose of creating a false appearance – an illusion – of equality in the union of two opposites, with the banking high priest merely “serving” the community as the trusted, Fatherly intermediary.
As with most effective deceptions, there is some truth in this tale. One part of time lord operations once was – and still is, in a manner of speaking – acting as an intermediary between so-called “Savers” and “Borrowers”: receiving “deposits” for “safe-keeping” (legally, borrowing) from one, and “lending” to the other.
But even here, the appearance of equality between these two abstract opposites, is just an illusion. A clever trick of word-play.
The banking high priest is practicing “Time manipulation” – or more accurately, date-of-birth shuffling – with all the “accounts” of his promises to pay real money.
He is able to “create” and multiply real wealth for himself, using the “flows” between all the opposites.
The banking high priest calls this date-of-birth hustling procedure “maturity transformation” – of “term” “deposits”.
With one hand, he borrows from “depositors” for a short period of time.
With the other hand, he lends to “borrowers” – who are instantly “transformed” into “depositors” too – for a long period of time:
By doing this, banks transform [their] debts with very short maturities (deposits) into credits with very long maturities (loans), and collect the difference in the [usury] rates as profit.[40]
There is no “magic” in any of this. The cheating time lord is simply abusing his privileged, monopoly position. Because he controls the bookkeeping records of large “stocks” of hispromises, and constantly re-writes hisstory of his promises – that is, his story of the “flows” of his promises between his customers’ “accounts”, and, between those and the “accounts” written by his fellow “time gods” at other temples – he is able to gain real wealth for himself by cheating all the “depositors”.
He will only get caught if too many “account holders” (renters) start to smell a rat, and decide, at the same time, to demand the real deal – legal tender cash notes and coins – that the cheating time lord has promised to pay.
However, this is only one small part of banking “alchemy” thievery.
The hidden truth is that the banking high priest is not just a lying, cheating, fake “intermediary” officiating at the Sacred Marriage of Savers and Borrowers.
He is the infamous Mercury–Hermes (☿), the “purse”-sucking androgyne himself.
Hiding behind economic babel (“confusion”) – and that owing much to the Paradox of Opposite Perspectives in double entry – the cheating time lord does not just shuffle promises to pay; he also creates new promises to pay.
Thanks to the magic“$”, “€”, “£”, “¥”, and especially the “%” signs that he flashes in our eyes, we “females” are blinded to the reality.
His fake system is an inversion – a reversal – of “Mother” nature.
His system of promises is all about cheating, stealing, manipulating, dominating, and destroying the “autonomous existence” of the fundamental feminine principle – ourmother nature.
Almost 2,500 years ago, Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that money is sterile. It does not naturally breed more money, the way that cows breed more cows. He explained that “Money exists not by nature but by law”:
The most hated sort [of wealth getting] and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural. (1258b, POLITICS)
For over 1000 years in the “Dark” and Middle Ages – when there was no separation of two “opposites”, the Church and the State – there was an official ban on the practice of usury.
Honoured sometimes as much in the breach as in the observance. There’s a long story of willfully-blind eyes there, all in itself.
But prohibition, nonetheless.
The defenders of usury prohibition were – are – precisely right.
Far more right, than any are given credit for.
The lying cheating system of false promises and fake “deposits”, of usury by double entry – the Royal Art of “the philosophers” – is contra naturam:
[Watch to the end. The devil’s in all the little details.]
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END OF PART I
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POSTSCRIPT
I hope that you have found Part 1 of this essay to be informative. Despite its length, it is only a barely adequate quick summary of the voluminous, multi-disciplinary literature touching the subject matter. To do the themes justice may well require a multi-volume book series. Publisher inquiries welcome.
My thanks to Professor Steve Keen and Professor Richard Werner for inspiration, support and economic reading suggestions, and kind assistance with accessing academic journals; to Dr. Omar Zaid for reading suggestions and support; to Adam McLean (alchemywebsite.com) for kindly granting permission to use his coloured alchemical images; to my family for love, patience and support; and to Anna Novikova for love, inspiration, support … and more reading suggestions! Finally, I would like to borrow a leaf out of the book of one wiser than I, in giving thanks for any good to be found here to the original source of all true wisdom (Jeremiah 33:3).
The interpretations and opinions expressed here are entirely mine – ergo, the aforementioned persons are not to be held in any way responsible for them, or for any errors or omissions.
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.
In writing this essay, I earnestly hope to provoke in womenfolk the Fury of the Woman scorn’d.
I say this to all but especially to the menfolk reading: There is no way – in my opinion – that the Babylonian “Money Power” can ever be defeated, unless the tremendous power of the “scorn’d Woman” – and her fiercely-protective Mother nature – is invoked by all of us, and turned against her violator:
“Tell the housewife at her kitchen table about this stuff. She is smart. She understands. But if you keep it a secret, naturally she’s not going to be able to act, and we can’t transform something until we understand it.”
In Part 2 we will consider a perfect example of the righteous anger of the Woman scorn’d, from Old Babylonian mythology.
“Now whether the yogis can actually and permanently maintain control over the women through their ‘tricks’ (upaya) is another question. This is solely dependent upon their magical abilities, over which we do not wish to pass judgement here. The texts do repeatedly warn of the great danger of their experiments. There is the ever-present possibility that the ‘daughters of Mara’ see through the tricky system and plunge the lamas into hell.”
Robert H. Bork (The Antitrust Paradox) wrote that “One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.”
In Part 2, we will travel back to ancient Mesopotamia, and trace forward from the earliest recorded, pre-writing origins of the two fundamental principles that lie at the heart of the Babylonian “money of account” usury system.
We will learn more – and more repulsive – details about alchemical sex magic “experiments” and rituals. We will also consider the Old Babylonian magico-religious objects and incantations (“spells”), and learn the real significance of the winged lions guarding the city of Venice, and the City of London financial district.
We will also discover the “explosive” and enlightening ingredients in the Old Babylonian secret alchemical recipe for making fake silver counterfeits of the royal standard ingots.
Thank you for reading, and sharing.
**********
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (…) Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. (…) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating.”
– George Orwell, 1984
**********
FOOTNOTES
[1] Daniel Gross, The End of the BSD, Slate, Sept 25, 2008 — “(Relevant quote: ‘If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.’)”
[2] Miroslav Novák, Heritage of Alchemical Cryptography (2013), Il Chimico Italiano 24: 17-24 — “Medieval European alchemists used a disorganized way of coded expressing together with a very complicated system of diverse graphical symbols... The symbols, besides their shorthand role, also serve as a specific cryptographic system, for very often the alchemists tried to conceal the results from the Christian church, avaricious noblemen and possible competitors. [..] The cryptography (or cryptology; from Greek κρυπτός, “hidden, secret”; and γράφειν, “writing”, or λογία, “study”, respectively) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties (called adversaries) (Wikipedia). And these adversaries were the main reason, why alchemists coded their written products.”
[3] Samuel Scarborough, The Imagery of Alchemical Art as a Method of Communication, Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition No. 9, Vol. 1, Autumnal Equinox (2005) — “[T]he metalworkers, especially the gold and silver smiths, who in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance formed guilds to protect their secrets and craft worked with a kind of alchemy that was later to become metallurgy.”
“Alchemists, like modern day scientists, would share their findings and works with one another [..] So, how could alchemists from various countries and parts of Europe communicate in a safe manner without giving away their secrets? The answers came as allegory and allegorical imagery, which hid, from the uninitiated what was being discussed and shared amongst them.”
“This form of discussion or conveying information and ideas in allegorical images would later go on to influence several bodies of dramatic initiating orders or lodges. Among these would be the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, particularly the fringe Masonic bodies, and even the magickal orders of the nineteenth century. This idea that images convey a message and power is powerfully illustrated in a line from the Neophyte Initiation Ceremony: ‘…for by Names and Images are all Powers awakened and re-awakened.'”
[4] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p.77 — “In order to keep hidden from the public all the offensive things which are implicated by the required breaches of taboo, some tantra texts make use of a so-called ‘twilight language’ (samdhya-bhasa). This has the function of veiling references to taboo substances, private bodily parts, and illegal deeds in poetic words, so that they cannot be recognized by the uninitiated. For example, one says ‘lotus’ and means ‘vagina’, or employs the term ‘enlightenment consciousness’ (bodhicitta) for sperm, or the word ‘sun’ (surya) for menstrual blood. Such a list of synonyms can be extended indefinitely.”
[5]ibid., p. 102; — “Just as in some tantra texts, ‘secret’ practices were represented by ‘harmless’ images in the European treatises; this was especially true of the topic of erotic love and sexuality.”
“Both the tantric and the alchemic writings are [..] maps of the erotic imagination and anyone with a little speech psychology can recognize the pervasive sexual system of reference hidden in a hermetical text from the 16th century. At that time people did not have the slightest qualms about describing chemical processes as erotic events and erotic scenarios as chemical fusions. They behaved in exactly the same manner in the West as in the East.”
[7] I have chosen not to specify here the artisanal guild in question, in view of intention to publish a book encompassing the subject.
[8]Hieros gamos, Encyclopædia Britannica — (Greek: “sacred marriage”), sexual relations of fertility deities in myths and rituals, characteristic of societies based on cereal agriculture, especially in the Middle East. At least once a year, divine persons (e.g., humans representing the deities) engage in sexual intercourse, which guarantees the fertility of the land, the prosperity of the community, and the continuation of the cosmos.
Some scholars have applied the term hieros gamos to all myths of a divine pair (e.g., heaven–earth) whose sexual intercourse is creative. The term, however, should probably be restricted only to those agricultural cultures that ritually reenact the marriage and that relate the marriage to agriculture, as in Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Canaan, Israel (the Song of Solomon has been suggested to be a hierogamitic text), Greece, and India.
[9] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 40, 585 — “..if we translate upaya (as it is clearly intended) as ‘cunning means’ or even ‘trick’ or ‘ruse’ (Wilber, 1987, p. 310).”
upaya – “‘skill in means’ – array of expedient devices employed by bodhisattvas to enlighten beings trapped in suffering existence.”
“To summarize, upaya stands for the masculine principle, the phallus, motion, activity, the god, enlightenment, and so forth; prajna represents the feminine principle, the vagina, calm, passivity, the goddess, the cosmic law. All women naturally count as prajna, all men as upaya.” (p.39)
[10] Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars; The Lawful Path (1996), citing William Cooper, Behold A Pale Horse (1991), Light Technology Publishing
[11] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p. 47, 65, 93; — “Modern Western authors with views compatible to those of Buddhism [..] tend toward the opinion that the tantric androgyne harmonizes both sexual roles equally within itself, so that the androgynous pattern is valid for both men and women. But this is not the case. Even at an etymological level, androgyny (from Ancient Greek anér ‘man’ and gyné ‘woman’) cannot be applied to both sexes. The term denotes [..] the male-feminine forces possessed by a man, whilst for a woman the respective phenomenon would have to be termed ‘gynandry’ (female-masculine forces possessed by a woman).”
“The tantric yogi unites with her not just in the sexual act, but above all through consuming her holy gynergy, the magical force of maya. Sometimes, as we shall see, he therefore drinks his partner’s menstrual blood. Only when the feminine blood also pulses in his own veins will he be complete, an androgyne, a lord of both sexes.”
“In the usual yab–yum representation of the Dhyani Buddhas, the male Buddha figure always crosses both of his arms behind the back of his wisdom consort, forming what is known as the Vajrahumkara gesture. At the same time he holds a vajra (the supreme symbol of masculinity) in his right hand, and a gantha (the supreme symbol of femininity) in his left. The symbolic possession of both ritual objects identifies him as the lord of both sexes. He is the androgyne and the prajna is a part of his self.”
[12] Mahmoud Ezzamel and Keith Hoskin, Retheorizing Accounting, Writing and Money with Evidence from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2002) 13, 333–367; — “The distinctive development that we see introduced by the invention of money of account is a principle of value reciprocity. Money of account constructs value by denominating it as something other than, and separate from, either the commodity or its accounting; instead value becomes something which passes reciprocally between the two, supposedly guaranteeing that each is equalised in value terms. In so doing, the role of money as supplementer of value is concealed behind an apparent but deceptive power to guarantee equivalence. Moreover, the power of money enables the construction of previously unprecedented levels of wealth, and the possibility of new power relations for those with money and those without it.”
“[M]oney plays a double game. First, it appears as the benign supplement, embodying the new possibility that value exists in a separate denominable form and simply making space for itself as numeraire to act as the measure of that value. But secondly, money is also the dangerous supplement. Beneath the apparent surface where equivalence reigns and money is just a transparent medium, the play of difference is at work: from the production of little remainders and marginal inequalities, through the generation of interest and profit, to money’s own re-writing into new and more complex instruments.”
[13] Vladimír Karpenko, Alchemy asdonum dei, HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No. 1, pp. 63-80; — “In the Tenth Discourse of his treatise Al-Fihrist,[12] An-Nadim (A.D. 987) writes, after the introductory basmallah, about the origin of alchemy [§ 1]: ‘The adepts of the Art of Alchemy, … assert that the science of the Art was first discussed by Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian …’.”
[14] Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus (1995), pp. 36-38; — “Panurge is not only connected to the tradition of Hermetic magic: he also has something of the humanist Hermes, the savant of his time. This does not prevent him from being at the same time a sort of alchemist, for he claims to possess the Philosophers’ Stone: ‘I have a philosophical stone which sucks money out of purses as the magnet attracts iron.’ And in his speech in praise of debtors, he speaks of the ‘joy of the alchemists when, after long labors, great care and expense, they see the metals transmuted in their furnaces.'”
[15] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 121-122 — “Even if many tantric texts speak only of bodhicitta, the male seed, at heart it is a matter of the absorption of both fluids, the male and the female, in short — of sukra. Admittedly the mixing of the sexual fluids does seem incompatible with the prohibition against ejaculation, but through the so-called Vajroli method the damaging consequences of the emission of semen can be reversed..”
“The bodhicitta is also called bindu, which means ‘point’, ‘nil’, ‘zero’, or ‘drop’.” (p. 135)
[16]ibid., p. 124 — “The initiation path of the Kalachakra Tantra [..] now leads us on to the four highest initiations, or rather to the twelfth to fifteenth initiation stages. [..] The reader will soon see that we are dealing with an extended copy of the four ‘higher initiations’ (8–11). They thus also bear the same names: (12) the vase initiation; (13) the secret initiation; (14) the wisdom initiation; and (15) the word initiation. The difference primarily consists in the fact that rather than just one mudra, ten wisdom consorts now participate in the ritual. All ten must be offered to the master by the pupil (Naropa, 1994, p. 193). There are different rules for monks and laity in this regard. It is required of a layman that the mudras be members of his own family — his mother, his sister, his daughter, his sister-in-law, and so on (Naropa, 1994, p. 192). This makes it de facto impossible for him to receive the Kalachakra solemnity. Although the same commandment applies to a monk, it is interpreted symbolically in his case. Hence, he has to deliver to his guru numerous girls from the lower castes, who then adopt the names and roles of the various female relatives during the ritual. Among other things the elements are assigned to them: the ‘mother’ is earth, the ‘sister’ water, the ‘daughter’ fire, the ‘sister’s daughter’ is the wind, and so on (Grünwedel, Kalacakra III, p. 125). After the pupil has handed the women over to his master, he is given back one of them as a symbolic ‘spouse’ for the impending rites (Naropa, 1994, p. 193).”
[17] ibid., p. 122-123 — “Here can be seen very clearly how much of a calculating and technical meaning the term upaya (method) has in the tantras.”
“Equivalent quotations from many other Western interpreters of Tantrism can be found: ‘In … Tantrism … woman is means, an alien object, without possibility of mutuality or real communication’ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7). The woman ‘is to be used as a ritual object and then cast aside’ (also quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7). Or, at another point: the yogis had ‘sex without sensuality … There is no relationship of intimacy with an individual — the woman … involved is an object, a representation of power … women are merely spiritual batteries‘ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, n. 128, pp. 254–255). The woman functions as a ‘salvation tool’, as an ‘aid on the path to enlightenment’. The goal of Vajrayana is even ‘to destroy the female’ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7).” (p. 47)
[18]ibid., p. 122; citing Eliade, 1985, p. 257, Shaw, 1994, p. 157, and White, 1996, p.200
[19]ibid., p. 122, citing Shaw, 1994, p. 158.
[20]ibid.,p. 98
[21]ibid., p. 60, 62 — “[A]lthough her autonomous feminine existence has been dissolved, her feminine essence (gynergy) has not been lost. Via an act of sexual magic the yogi has appropriated this and with it achieved the power of an androgyne. He destroys, so to speak, the exterior feminine in order to internalize it and produce an ‘inner woman’ as a part of himself. ‘He absorbs the Mother of the Universe into himself’, as it is described in the Kalachakra Tantra (Grünwedel, Kalac[h]akra IV, p. 32).”
“In general, the maha mudra is said to reside in the region of the navel. There she dances and acts as an oracle as the Greek goddess Metis once did in the belly of Zeus. [..] The male tantric master now has the power to assume the female form of the goddess (who is of course an aspect of his own mystical body), that is, he can appear in the figure of a woman. Indeed, he even has the magical ability to divide himself into two gendered beings, a female and a male deity. He is further able to multiply himself into several maha mudras.”
[22]ibid., p. 48 — “In place of the human ego is the superego of a god with far-reaching powers. This superhuman subject knows no bounds when it proclaims in the Hevajra Tantra, ‘I am the revealer, I am the revealed doctrine and I am the disciple endowed with good qualities. I am the goal, I am the master of the world and I am the world as well as the worldly things” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 167).'”
[23]ibid., pp. 77; 102-103 — “[F]or the ‘true’ adept (whether Tantric or European alchemist) it was not just a matter of the actual yellow metal, but also the so-called ‘spiritual gold’. In the West this was understood to mean the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ or the ‘hermetical elixir’, which transformed the experimenter into a superman. Alchemy and Tantrism thus have the same spiritual goal. In order to achieve this, numerous processes of conversion were needed in the laboratory of the adept, which did not just take the form of chemical processes, but which the alchemist also experienced as successive transmutations of his personality, that is, his psyche was dissolved and then put together again a number of times in the course of the experimentation. Solve et coagula (dissolve and bind) is for this reason the first and most well-known maxim of the hermetical art.”
[24] David Astle, The Babylonian Woe (1975), pp. 15-16, citing G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, Ancient Codes and Laws of the Near East (Clarendon Press, Oxford); and Professor W.F. Albright, The Amarna Letters from Palestine (Cambridge University Press)
[25] Miroslav Novák, Heritage of Alchemical Cryptography (2013), Il Chimico Italiano 24: 17-24
[27] Bibliotheca Chemica, p. 453; D.S.B.; cited by Abe Books, Item Description: 1571. THURNEISSER ZUM THURN, Leonhart. PROKATALEPSIS ODER PRAEOCCUPATION, DURCH ZWOLFF VERSCHEIDENLICHER TRACTATEN; GEMACHTER HARM PROBEN. Frankfurt: Johann Eichorn, 1571. First edition. (24 June 2017)
[28] Richard A. Werner, To a new understanding of the function of the banking sector: the mechanism of productive credit creation and quantitative easing; presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences, round table “Anti-crisis fiscal policy of the state in the interests of economic development of Russia” (2015). (watch video)
[29] John Pollack, The Pun Also Rises: How The Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, And Made Wordplay (2011), cited in Wikipedia: Pun (21 June 2017)
[30] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014) — “What banks do is to simply reclassify their accounts payable items arising from the act of lending as ‘customer deposits’, and the general public, when receiving payment in the form of a transfer of bank deposits, believes that a form of money had been paid into the bank. As a result, the public readily accepts such ‘bank deposits’ and their ‘transfers’ to defray payments. They are also the main component of the official ‘money supply’ as announced by central banks (M1, M2, M3, M4), which is created almost entirely through this act of re-classifying banks’ accounts payable as fictitious ‘customer deposits’.”
[31] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p.104
[32] Andy Haldane, Trust and Finance, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oct 2013
[33] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 119, citing White, 1996, p. 28
[34]ibid., p. 123 — “‘If the woman is too powerful or too old or too young, terrible things will happen to the innocent man who falls into her trap, a fact often depicted in terms of his losing his fluids’ (O’Flaherty, 1982/1988, p. 56).”
“Now whether the yogis can actually and permanently maintain control over the women through their ‘tricks’ (upaya) is another question. This is solely dependent upon their magical abilities, over which we do not wish to pass judgement here. The texts do repeatedly warn of the great danger of their experiments. There is the ever-present possibility that the ‘daughters of Mara’ see through the tricky system and plunge the lamas into hell.” (p. 268)
[35]ibid., p. 123 — “Is this purely a matter of male fantasies? Not at all — a gynocentric correspondence to the thieving seed-absorption is, namely, known from the Kali cults to be a ritual event. Here, the woman assumes the upper position [in] the sex act and in certain rites leaves the man whose life energies she has drained behind as a corpse. According to statements by the Tibet researcher, Matthias Hermanns¸ there were yoginis (female yogis) who received instruction in a technique ‘through which they were able to forcibly draw their partners’ semen from out of the penis’, and the author concludes from this that, ‘It is thus the counterpart of the procedure which the yogi employs to soak up the genital juices of several women one after another through his member’ (Hermanns, 1965, p. 19).”
[36]ibid., pp. 118-119 — “[T]he tantras teach that the semen is originally stored in a moonlike bowl beneath the roof of the skull. As soon as a person begins to experience sexual desire, it starts to flow out, drop by drop, passing through the five energy centers (chakras). In each of these the yogi experiences a specific ‘seminal’ ecstasy (Naropa, 1994, p. 191). The destination of the sperm’s journey within the body is the tip of the penis. Here, through extreme meditative concentration, the adept collects the lust: ‘The vajra [penis] is inserted into the lotus [vagina], but not moved. When lust of a transient art arises, the mantra hum should be spoken. … The decisive [factor] is thus the retention of the sperm. Through this, the act obtains a cosmological dimension. … It becomes the means of attaining enlightenment (bodhi)” (Grönbold, Asiatische Studien, p. 34). ‘Delight resides in the tip of the vajra [penis]’, as is said in a Kalachakra text (Grönbold, 1992a)…”
[37]ibid., p. 123
[38] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014) — “The act of signing the loan contract and purchasing it as a promissory note of the borrower without yet making the borrowed funds available to the borrower (Step 1) has the same accounting implications for banks, non-banks and non-financial corporations alike. In all cases, the balance sheets lengthen, as an asset (the loan contract) is acquired and a liability to make money available to the borrower is incurred (accounts payable).”
“In Step 2, the lender makes the funds available to the borrower. The fact that in Step 2 the bank is alone among firms in showing the same total impact on assets and liabilities as everyone else at Step 1, when the money had not yet been made available to the borrower, demonstrates that the bank did not actually make any money available to the borrower. This means that the bank still has an open ‘accounts payable’ liability, as it has not in fact discharged its original liability.”
“For banks only the balance sheet remains unchanged in its EXPANDED position .. In other words: banks do not discharge their liability.”
[39] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p. 119, citing Grönbold, Asiatische Studien, p. 34.
[40] Stephen D. Simpson, The Banking System: Commercial Banking – Economic Concepts in Banking, Investopedia (1 July 2017)
[41] Zosimos Alchemista of Panopolis, Tractatus Avicennae, Alchemist Wikia, (1 July 2017)
[42]Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1855; (Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, translated by A.E. Waite (1896), p. 80-81
“In an effort to vet his credibility, however, the Free Thought Project did some background research on him, and it checks out. He is who he says he is.”
, Phœnician 
, “courtyard”). This also means that there are only fifteen verses. Not sixteen.
“pillar”, “support”, “stability”; from the ancient Egyptian “djed”. Their symbol 𓊽 represents the spinal column of the demiurge creator god Ptah; later, the underworld and afterlife supreme god of the dead, Osiris.
With bank loans – ‘money’ created out of Nothingness by double entry bookkeeping – the ‘magic’ trick is hidden in the cunning wordplay used to describe what the bank owes (debt) to its customers (“Accounts Payable”). This debt owed to its customers is, simultaneously – and legally – the banks’ asset (‘unsecured’ “Client Deposits”).
“sword” or ḏiqqu “manacle”, slang “penis”) and 9 (“wheel”), bespeak the destruction of the Edomite psalmist’s opposition. The following quotation uses the scholar’s (incorrect) numbering, which considers Psalm 92’s title as verse 1.
PSALMISTICE 
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