THE ANGEL WITH A SWORD

The Celestial Architecture of the Restoration

by Kamron Coleman, creator of the Apotheosis Scroll

Script for YouTube videobook, copyright 5/2026

INTRODUCTION:

SETTING THE STAGE

In the seven years spanning from the total solar eclipse of 2017 to the total solar eclipse of 2024 I spent 7,000 hours working on a single work of art, a 288-ft long scroll comprised of 36 panels, called Apotheosis Scroll, that for all the years and time spent was only half-finished. The first public showing of the half-finished Scroll occurred in the fall of 2024 at Restore, a religious conference in Utah for a majority Latter-day Saint audience. I had spent several months building 42 seven-foot-long inclined drafting tables on which the Scroll would be rolled out. As of this writing, I have just finished another 12 panels and the Scroll has reached a length of 384 feet. It’s creation has been an almost entirely solo effort, that I have compared to a cave-sequestered monk’s receipt and translation of an ancient lost script that may never see the light of day. I have received no funding for all the expenses associated with my exhibition and the creation of the Apotheosis Scroll except for proceeds from my own art sales. These sporadic sales have been augmented by a few modest donations from family members received just in time.

Subtitled: The Celestial Architecture of the Christian Mystery, the Scroll is a self-guided mystery initiation through seven astronomical seals. It is about the lost language of astronomy in the Bible and the primitive Christian cosmology in Joseph Smith’s Restoration project. It is from gospel astronomy that we get the scriptural doctrines of exaltation, and instruction on not just how to worship, but how to ascend. In other words, the astronomy supplies the doctrine.

In the Apotheosis Scroll, the basic unit of the gospel is the individual human soul and his or her co-creative communion with the Eternal Father and Eternal Mother. Marriage between one man and one woman is an invitation to act out the relationship modeled by the family of God, from which everyone comes and to which everyone will return.  The church or the mystery school is a potential facilitator of recognizing this phenomenon by the establishment of religious practices. The church is not its originator. The miraculous phenomenon of the co-creative communion of the human soul with the Eternal Father and Eternal Mother is older than religion. It predates and is not reliant on the existence of a church or literal companionship for its instantiation in the world. A church or a mystery school that doesn’t teach this has lost the plot. At its best, the church is an embodiment of this communion many thousands of times over. Until the whole world recognizes itself as this body, the church isn’t whole. It has yet to understand many of its body parts and what they do.

The Apotheosis Scroll is a mystery, not history, but like the books of the Bible, the more closely it’s situational claims can be corroborated, the better the initiate might be transported to a believable world where faith is increased. Like every mystery that preceded it, including Christianity itself, the Apotheosis Scroll has a semi-historical theatrical setting on which it’s transcendent themes are staged. Many of the ancient mysteries were set in the celestial Garden of Eden. The initiate began his or her journey there, in the presence of God. In a series of catastrophes, the initiates were cast out of the presence of God and had to find their way back. But rather than being set in the celestial Eden, because of the condescension of God, the viewer of the Apotheosis Scroll is transported to the terrestrial world of Judea in the first century AD. Instead of humanity being placed in the celestial Garden by the LORD God, the LORD God comes to the terrestrial world in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. Around zero AD, the world sat on the cusp of the terrestrial zodiacal kingdom of ARIES, a land animal, and its descent into the telestial zodiacal kingdom of PISCES, a sea creature. Bathed in the blood and conflict of the birth pangs of a new age, first century Roman Palestine was born into a world marked by a lesser degree of glory and the total loss of communion with the gods. The coming world, ours, was a horror and catastrophe where a direct connection with the LORD God is lost and we, the initiates, must find our way back, through the obtaining of gnosis by following the Good Shepherd in his ascension journey among the stars.

Once again, like the books of the Bible, the setting of the Apotheosis Scroll is semi-historical. The Apotheosis Scroll makes no claim to an academic method, nor is it sourced in any particular authority. The purpose is artistic and transformational. The goal is to induce in the viewer a deep and lasting ontological change.  This little manuscript is prepared in that same spirit. It may serve as a viewer’s guide, but it is not a substitution for the Scroll itself, which is where the real teachings are.

Since the age I was able to critically study the scriptures for myself I have spent as many years inside as I have outside of the formal Church. It shocked everyone, myself included, when eleven years ago I returned to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after a twenty-year departure from it. Before I was commanded back to the Church by the voice of the Lord, I couldn’t imagine I would ever fellowship with the Saints again. In my absence the Church in my imagination had become an oversimplified caricature that didn’t resemble the body I now commune with. The church I returned to is more complex and nuanced than I had thought it was in my youth. In my relative maturity I find that some of the doctrines are profound, and some are rear-facing. My friends are there. Others of my friends have been unable to stay. This manuscript is directed at people who share or previously shared my faith, but the Apotheosis Scroll, which refers to Mormonism only very sparingly,is offered to everyone willing to give it a moment of their time. It bears a unique testimony of Christ to a world that has become numbed by the shadow side of Christianity- burnt-out dogmas, infantilizing apologetics, secret combinations, and hypocrisy. The Apotheosis Scroll teaches that there is true religion beyond literal fundamentalism. There is so much more to the mystery of Jesus Christ.

In my time away from the Saints, I had never stopped studying the scriptures almost daily and reading all the good books about religion and the origins of Christianity that I could get my hands on. The first adult gospel doctrine class I attended on my return to worshipping in the LDS Church was an inspiration. The doctrine was deep, well-researched, and smart. But it isn’t always so. 

It reminds me of a talk I recently listened to by Alan Watts, a Taoist philosopher. The address was called Learning the Human Game- Being in the Way. Watts described three types of games. The first is tic-tac-toe. The second is chess. And the third is three-dimensional chess. Tic-tac-toe is popular among children. Chess is popular among people of all cultures and capacities, and three-dimensional chess is rarely played; it is too hard. While tic-tac-toe is played all around the world, it doesn’t have the ability to deeply engage. But chess can be engaged at a very deep level. It can bond opponents together in opposition and worthwhile play. It requires discipline and knowledge, and for best results, it requires a worthy opponent. So, it is fun. It is a good game. The problem with tic-tac-toe is that if played between moderately intelligent people the game usually ends in a draw. If the game somehow ends with a winner, the player who makes the first move usually wins. If the same person always makes the first move, tic-tac-toe is soul-killing. Too often when I go to church, I feel I have just played a game of tic-tac-toe, and the Church always goes first.      

More so than the Apotheosis Scroll itself, this little manuscript is my appeal to my religious community to elevate our play to the level of chess, which means taking more personal responsibility to know what the scriptures say, and from whence they came. I want to leave Gospel Doctrine class exhilarated and filled more often than not. I want to leave Sacrament Meeting in tears, humbled by calls to repentance and healed by pure religion. I want to barely feel worthy to eat the flesh of Christ. I want to be viscerally moved when the blood of Jesus enters my throat. I want to experience religion when I go to church.

Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ founder, Joseph Smith Jr. was such a prolific producer of scripture, and because the church’s founding, early practices, and succession crises are so controversial and disputed, and because its administration is so hierarchical, it’s doctrine is highly correlated to get the right message across. Correlation takes whole, inspired, and revelatory thoughts that were revealed to one individual, and blends them together with inspired and uninspired thoughts revealed to many other distinct individuals over time, until the different visions are melded into a new one, a new gospel, which is a harmonized synopsis of wildly different ideologies masquerading as continuity. While it is good to hear more than one voice, the result when repeated enough is a mush of ideas that no one individual has ever had, except by borrowing from a collective mind.

While there is undeniable power in this collective, gospel correlation is just as likely to dull the senses and to vampirically drain the lifeblood out of the collective as artificial intelligence is likely to give the human mind more answers than thoughts. In time, human imagination and its capacity to ask the right questions will be preempted by a curated collective answer. Individual members who think for themselves may be publicly bullied and slandered, straw-manned and censored, and disenfranchised of covenant blessings if they hold and express a nonconforming opinion. The result of this thought-policing is a Soviet-styled purging of some of the culture’s most intuitive and perceptive souls which leaves the church increasingly monochromatic and shallow, sentencing it to suffer a spiritual death despite opposite intentions. This abandonment of a soul’s prerogative of authenticity is all the more tragic because the Restoration promises restitution of first century Christianity which I suppose was the greatest mystery ever offered to the religious mind.

Rather than a selectively curated homogenous belief system sealed over with a gloss of unity, it appears to me that the Christian gospel itself was created not to be correlated, but competitive. It is set up as a game of chess, to pit challengers against each other, to break hearts, to puzzle with mysteries, to engage, to contradict, to disturb, to humble, to exalt, and to dismay. It is this built-in tension and opposition that made Christianity a game worth playing, and the Restoration so baffling and compelling.        

PART A: BODIES CELESTIAL

THE COVENANT PATH

When considering astronomical references in the scriptures one must bear in mind the perspective of the speaker. Usually, the prophet looks east and heavenward, as if from the porch of an east-facing temple. If the Lord is speaking, His perspective is from heaven, looking down and in the direction of his audience. North, then, is to the prophet’s left, but the constellations of the north are on the Lord’s right hand. It follows, then, that the south is on the prophet’s right, but on the Lord’s left. Unless otherwise indicated, our perspective will be from the porch of an east-facing temple, looking upward toward the heavens with the northern constellations to our left.

When one faces east, the MILKY WAY stands like a bedazzled Tree of Life bearing sparkling white fruit, rising from the horizon and splitting off into two primary boughs overhead. The ancients also referred to the MILKY WAY rising from the horizon as the fountain of everlasting life, the veil, the River Jordan, the pillar of heaven, the olive tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the highway, etc. Just to the right of the Tree of Life stands ORION, one of the most recognizable of all the constellations, known for his belt stars, his flaming sword, his distinctive garment, and upraised right hand.

When the earth’s equator is projected out into space, it crosses horizontally just above the stars of ORION’s belt. Accordingly, ORION’s navel represents the level-line of the cosmos. To emphasize ORION’s central importance in the heavenly temple of the cosmos, a plumb line dropped through ORION, from the north celestial pole to Canopus, the star that marks the southern pole, represents the north/south axis of the cosmos. Taken together, the north/south axis and the horizontal navel line superimpose a cross over the ORION constellation, meaning that ORION bears the cross.

For millennia, ORION was known as the Good Shepherd because he stands in the pasture with the cattle (TAURUS) and the sheep (ARIES). If one looks further to the right, or southward, one will reach the end of the pastures of earth and arrive at another body of water as indicated by the constellation PISCES. It is from this body of water, the Sea of Galilee, that fishermen catch disciples in the age of PISCES. Once a fish is caught and emerges from the waters of baptism, she becomes a covenant lamb in the ARIES constellation, shepherded over by the Good Shepherd ORION. Hence, Peter the fisherman was commanded by the Good Shepherd to “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17). While Jesus, as Savior and Redeemer of the world is understood to be the archetypal bearer of the cross, as the Good Shepherd he is also the exemplar for every man and woman to follow. Thus, every disciple, or initiate, is invited to ascend as he did, through the veil and into the celestial kingdom, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

Throughout the scriptures ORION is the central action figure. He is David in the David and Goliath story. He is Abraham raising a sword to sacrifice his son Isaac, he is Jehovah whose upright arm is mighty to save, and he is Jesus ministering to his sheep and healing a man born blind. He is the action figure of the many stories passed down orally for generations, and “his hand is stretched out still” (Isaiah 5:25, 9:12, 17, 21). ORION is a celestial ordinance of the almighty God while simultaneously, and in a radical democratization of theosis, ORION is a symbol of the Christian mystery initiate taking up the cross and following in the path of the Savior.

When the ancients told stories, the earth was the region of the night sky to the right of the MILKY WAY tree of life. Everything to the right of the tree, or the veil, is earth, or the terrestrial kingdom. To explain by analogy the separation of earth from heaven, and the separation of female from male, the terrestrial kingdom is represented on the whole by TAURUS, the cattle, or oxen, and because it is matter, Mater, or the Mother, the migratory, or planetary body ruling over the whole terrestrial kingdom is the moon. From the ancient perspective, the sun and the moon were exactly the same size and were in a particularly profound one-to-one relationship. This one-to-one correspondence was analogized in Roman monogamy, the only type of marriage sanctified in the Roman mystery.

“There are also celestial bodies (lions), and bodies terrestrial (oxen): but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.”

-1 Corinthians 15:40-41, parenthesis added.

Everything to the left of the tree is the celestial kingdom, or heaven. The celestial kingdom is represented on the whole by LEO, or lions and lionesses, and the migratory, or planetary body ruling over the celestial kingdom is the sun. The summer sun gives LEO, the lion king, his regal mane that radiates from his face as a golden corona, or crown. The celestial kingdom is also ruled by the Queen of Heaven, the Heavenly Mother. To explain by analogy the eternal unity of the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, She is represented by the constellation CANCER. It is from CANCER that all of creation pours forth through the veil, the maternal matrix, to the terrestrial kingdom of earth. Every initiate was invited to ascend from starting out as a PISCES fish, when upon entering into the covenant with God, the initiate became an ARIES sheep. With maturity and opportunities to teach, nurture, and guide, a sheep might advance to the station of the Good Shepherd ORION, where unlike a shepherd who fleeces his sheep, the Good Shepherd is willing to lay down his life for the flock, for “Greater love hath no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Having taken upon him-or herself the cosmic cross, the initiate becomes the Good Shepherd passing through the gate, or the veil where the two  olive tree witnesses stand as sentinels, and into the kingdom of God, where he or she becomes a lion or lioness in the celestial kingdom to sit down upon the Father’s or the Mother’s throne. Such as in Matthew 25:32-33: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep (ARIES) on his right hand, but the goats (CAPRICORN) on the left, parenthesis added. See also in the Lord’s great intercessory prayer:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

-John 17:21-23

While many assume the celestial kingdom is entered after death, ancient teachers, including Jesus, primarily viewed it as an ontological transformation available to everyone right now, as admonished in the Gospel of Thomas, saying 3:

Jesus said, “If your leaders tell you, ‘See, the kingdom is in heaven (LEO)’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea (PISCES),’ then the fish will precede you. But the kingdom is inside of you. And it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known. And you will recognize that it is you who are the children of the living Father.”

The initiate embarked upon his or her journey in a terrestrial state on the earthward side of the veil, ultimately attaining a celestial existence on the heavenly side, imagined as ORION ascended to penetrate the veil. In certain instances, this transition was achieved not through death but was quickened through the acquisition of knowledge. Upon fully comprehending the initiation process, the initiate recognized ORION as an emblem of his or her own transformation. In observing ORION from earth, the initiate perceived a mirrored counterpart above—a celestial twin. While the terrestrial initiate remained mortal and physical, the celestial twin represented the eternal, without beginning or end. Thus, one identity is celestial, the other terrestrial. The fundamental aim of temple initiation was to foster awareness in the initiate of the initiate’s divine nature and the epiphany of his or her cosmic counterpart.

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.

Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.

The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.

As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.

And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.

-1 Corinthians 15:45-49

This degree of recognition signified that the initiate had transcended previous boundaries, achieving a distinguished status likened to a lion or lioness among cattle and sheep, an obviously dangerous situation! Centering his prophecy on the astronomical figure of ORION, Isaiah prophesied of just such an initiate, a messianic servant clad in temple garments, a prince of peace, whose initiation would cause a chain of paradoxes bringing all things together in one great whole.

Righteousness will be his (ORION’s) belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf (LUPUS) will live with the lamb (ARIES), the leopard (LEOPARDALIS) will lie down with the goat (CAPRICORN), the calf (the temporary pole star around zero AD representing the GOLDEN CALF) and the lion (LEO) and the yearling (EQUULEUS) together, and a little child will lead them. The cow (CELESTIAL POLE COW Hathor) will feed with the bear (URSA MAJOR), their young will lie down together, and the lion (LEO) will eat straw like the ox (TAURUS). The infant will play near the cobra’s (DRACO’s) den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s (HYDRA’s) nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain (celestial kingdom), for the earth (terrestrial kingdom) will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (telestial kingdom).

-Isaiah 11:5-9, parenthesis added

THE ORIGIN CONTROVERSY

The Lincoln Presidential cabinet was deliberately made up of Lincoln’s Republican 1860 Presidential campaign rivals. The rivals: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates are representatives for the competing factions of the Republican party’s ambition to solve the slavery problem vexing the United States. As described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s strategically curated cabinet was intended to keep his defeated enemies and critics close, such that if he could force them to work together for a compromise solution, he could get the people of the United States to do likewise and join in the common cause. This inspired direction was central to the administration’s successful execution of the American Civil War.

But this strategy had a precedent. Rather than a coherent Christian ideology, the New Testament is a specially curated anthology of mutually contradicting Christian testimonies gathered to facilitate, if possible, the era of the Prince of Peace in Roman Palestine in the wake of the catastrophic Roman wars against the Jewish rebellion in the first century AD.

Approximately one-third of the world’s population are disciples of Jesus Christ, and yet, controversy swirls around Christianity’s origins. Perhaps the most contentious of Christianity’s origin controversies is whether disciples of Jesus borrowed their sacraments from the Roman mystery of Mithraism, or whether Mithraism was a satanic parody of the Christian communion, a suspicion held by some early Church Fathers, as will be detailed later in this investigation.

Christian apologists say it is a conspiracy theory to impute a Roman provenance to the New Testament. They say that there is no association whatsoever between the church and the pagan rites of Mithraism, which is the grand repository of astronomical wisdom in Roman antiquity. Conversely, researchers of Roman Mithraism point out the many convergences of Mithraism and Christianity, and suggest that Mithraism came first, but Christianity’s ultimate success in prevailing over the Roman mystery was due to the populist anti-Roman appeal of the Christian movement and sympathy for the testimony sealed by the blood of its martyrs.  

What both camps can agree on is that while hundreds of Mithraic temples have been excavated and studied, along with the standardized system of artworks within them, and even though Mithraism was the official state-sponsored mystery promulgated through the Roman military, there is no surviving contemporaneous written liturgy for Mithraism for the entirety of its roughly 500-year existence. The inverse of this seems evident when it comes to Christianity, because, while there is a relative abundance of varied testimonies from early Christian disciples written in the era of the primitive Christian church, there is almost nothing to show for formalized Christian worship in the early archaeological record. 

We will propose here that the written legacy of Mithraism, whose Christ figure is the Unconquerable Sun, or Sol Invictus, is not missing at all. Rather, it is right where the convergences suggest it ought to be, and is encoded all over the New Testament, from the Star of Bethlehem to the Sermon on the Mount to John’s Revelation. But the smoking gun establishing a direct Roman provenance contributing to the creation of Christianity is a riddle found in Matthew’s gospel, called the Parable of the Great Wedding Feast which will be analyzed below after we have established the astronomical language the parable is written in. 

Disciples of Jesus Christ and initiates in Roman Mithraism alike, gathered on the Sunday of each week to partake of ritualized sacraments consisting of bread, which was broken and eaten to represent the Bread of Life and the body of the Savior, and water or wine, drunk in remembrance of the blood of God spilt as a compensatory offering for sin.

In Roman Mithraism, which appeared sometime around the middle of the first century AD, there were seven seals, or ordinances in the mysteries of godliness. As was typical in temple mysteries throughout the ancient world, the seven ordinances corresponded to the seven visible planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each of the planets corresponded to specific constellations. In the same order, the Sun corresponded to LEO. The Moon corresponded to CANCER, MERCURY corresponded to GEMINI. Venus corresponded to TAURUS. Mars corresponded to ARIES. Jupiter corresponded to PISCES. And Saturn corresponded to AQUARIUS. In temples generally and in Mithraism in particular, ascension through the seven planets and their constellations, and the initiate’s ascension beyond these into the stars of the highest heavens, was symbolized in seven corresponding ordinances such as baptism, marriage, enthronement, ascension to heaven in a chariot, and apotheosis. 

So, the question arises, if a Roman government administration had a hand in the creation of the Christian gospel, would it make Christianity false? Many have argued that it does. We will argue the opposite and show that the Restoration of Joseph Smith illuminates and rectifies this controversy as much as any other contribution to the subject since the parallel first appeared 2,000 years ago. It is not that one stole from the other, but that they grew up together as rival, mutually contradictory testimonies of how the divine mission of Jesus, the Sun of God, was accomplished, and how the ascension of Jesus might be replicated by his disciples.

The variety of Christian testimonies comprising the Christian New Testament, bound together in a Roman style fasces where each maintained their individuation, produced a religion that would fill and have the potential to civilize the world. Centuries later, the Founders of the United States drew from this ancestral well and ultimately adopted the motto of e pluribus unum to represent their restoration of a Mithraic republic. Following on their restoration groundwork, the Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. would innovate and canonize Mithraic liturgies heretofore unknown in his production of ancient and modern Christian scripture.

Several years before Joseph Smith Jr. saw the Egyptian papyri for the first time in Kirtland, Ohio in 1835, his highly sophisticated Mithraic cosmology was already established. The ordinances of Mithras, or constellations of the temple of the cosmos, were already captured in liturgies dictated in his revelations, but in my whole life spent in and around the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had never once heard of Mithras or Mithraism, nor would I have ever had any idea it had anything to do with the faith. The Book of Abraham, which references Egyptian cosmology, and where we get mention of Kolob, Mormonism’s favorite astronomy trope, was not produced until almost a decade later- 1842 in Nauvoo.

This investigation hypothesizes that Mithraism was a fundamental contributor to, if not the basis for Joseph Smith’s cosmology but, as had been done previously in history, its influence on the movement’s beginnings was buried as the ecclesiastical church grew and the consolidation of religious authority was sacralized. This hypothesis is substantiated by supplying a better understanding of the Mithraic language of the Doctrine and Covenants via Section 4, 11, and 12, produced in 1829, Section 133, dictated in 1831, Section 76, produced in 1832, and Section 88, produced in 1832-1833, all of whose cosmology was ratified in the Prophet’s letter to the Saints produced in Liberty Jail in 1839 and preserved in Section 121. For perspective, translation work for the Book of Mormon was done in 1829 and it was published in the same early Restoration period in 1830. Joseph Smith Jr. was murdered in June of 1844 at the age of 38.

In Judea, called Roman Palestine in the first century, three rival factions fought bitterly over the identification and role of the messiah and whether he fulfilled the “Star Prophecy” found in Numbers 24:17:

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel.

As chronicled in the first century historian Josephus’ The Wars of the Jews, Peter James and John were the Jewish heroes of their day. In ways that did not necessarily have much to do with their actual lives, these figures were creatively rendered into literary archetypes by gospel authors, and each of these came to represent three different philosophical worldviews variously associated with the Christian movement. Each faction had a mutually distinct and profound interpretation of how Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the prophecies of the age and became the savior of the world. The literary archetype of Peter was symbolically rendered the steward over the ecclesiastical church and Platonist Greco-Roman civic administrations. Second was James, who presided over the Jewish tradition, the Jerusalem Temple, the Abrahamic Covenant, and the gathering of Israel. Third, John represented the international temple mysteries, whose astronomical, or celestial ordinances were preserved through the mysteries of godliness, or the Roman mystery that researchers call Roman Mithraism, a renovation of Indo-Persian Zoroastrianism, that anticipated the physical incarnation of a messianic son of God (saoshyant) who would bring about the remodeling of the earth (frashokereti) at the turning of the astronomical age. The alloy cast from these three embattled models, each in tension with the other, would come to form the universalist Christian religion in the first several centuries of its existence.

We will first propose that a “team of rivals” was curated from these three rival factions to inaugurate the kingdom of God presided over by the Prince of Peace. And then, with a cipher provided in Section 4 of the Doctrine and Covenants, by interpreting the Mithraic tauroctony scene, which is a representation in sculpture of an initiate’s communion with the Father through the reconciliation of spirit and matter by the practice of meditation, we will provide strong evidence that the Restoration of Joseph Smith correctly reframed the “primitive church” as a divinely curated “team of rivals” represented by the three-pronged presidency of Peter, James, and John. In Christianity’s formative years, its architects hoped that in creating a unified, universal mystery religion, the fundamentalism bred by factionalism would cease, wars would end, and the world would have peace under one head, the resurrected Lamb of God. However, this framing of the Christian gospel had long since been driven underground due to totalitarian power wrested from James and John and then exercised for centuries by the dominant ecclesiastical church of Peter. To legitimize its claims to sole authority, a revitalized literal fundamentalism replaced gnosis, and initiates were disenfranchised of their keys to the gospel. The lost legacy of James the brother of Jesus, and the mysteries of godliness presided over by John, were perpetuated thereafter only symbolically, in fraternal secret societies, occult (hidden) wisdom, folkloric storytelling, mythology, art, and architecture, until meaning was lost even to the storytellers.

PARADIGM SHIFT

Devout Christians, academics, and detractors alike have considered the promise of the earth’s remodeling (frashokereti) at the time of Jesus, the saoshyant, to be either a postponed, or worse, a failed prophecy. And yet, it seems that every generation of Christians has thought the Second Coming would happen in their day.  The Second Coming has always been near, but has yet to be fulfilled. This is because the language the prophecy was written in has been lost to literal fundamentalism. Unbeknownst to many, with the inevitable turning of myriad gears in a cosmic clock, a mighty change in heaven and earth did happen with the coming of Christ, just as prophets said it would, and more is to come.

Ancient prophet astronomers were able to track the advancement of the zodiac through time. Tracking the movement of the zodiacal constellations and the implications of this advancement for humankind was the gift of prophecy. In the centuries and millennia leading up to the birth of Jesus, the earth was in a terrestrial spiritual state, as signified by its having spent the preceding 4,320 years in the ages of ARIES and TAURUS- which are land, or terrestrial animals looked over by the Good Shepherd, the constellation ORION. This terrestrial kingdom was about to sink into the sea of PISCES for the next 2,160 years, more or less. It was unknown how God might reveal himself in a kingdom where the life-giving sun does not directly administer, because as far as the zodiacal kingdoms go, it is nighttime. After that, the world and all of its people would descend even further- all the way into the underworld abyss of AQUARIUS where Osiris sits enthroned in the everlasting judgment scene in the world of the dead. The coming of the Christ in the age of PISCES heralded the end of the terrestrial world and a terrifying descent into hell, where only a miraculously transcendent God could save them.

The Hebrew word mazzaroth, meaning ordinances, is the same as the word for constellations, particularly but not limited to the constellations of the zodiac. For the ancient architects of religion, even within the Abrahamic traditions, astronomy supplied the doctrine. Ancient prophets, prophetesses, priestesses and teachers probably couldn’t imagine a time when the celestial ordinances, or constellations, wouldn’t be known to all. The authors of ancient oral and textual traditions took for granted that the hearer already understood the basic astronomical ordinances upon which their stories and systems were based. Astronomical signs corresponded exactly to the agricultural cycle, particularly manifest in the rising and setting of the star Spica in the constellation VIRGO and the rising of ORION in the summer which precipitated the flooding of the Nile in Egypt, the breadbasket of the world. Any deviations from the timing of these ancient standards would increase the risk of floods, famines, and droughts. Innovations to the ancient system jeopardized all aspects upon which society depended. But due to an astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, the rising and setting of key stars began to deviate, almost imperceptibly from generations-old norms. This was an existential threat to the ancient world order.

Around two thousand years ago, a higher degree of prosperity and urban differentiation brought changes to the world rhythm that was already in crisis. Typical of leaving the terrestrial zodiacal signs of ARIES and TAURUS, and entering the water of PISCES, civilizations began to transition away from agricultural subsistence, which had set the rhythm of their life, and taught them the life cycle and transmigratory nature of the human soul. As this transition rolled ahead, astronomical memory was exchanged for philosophical doctrines that set the human imagination free from the never-ending grind of a toilsome life tied to tilling the land and the domestication and processing of animals.

The farmer and the shepherd were ancient ways of life that were encapsulated in the lifestyles of Cain and Abel, each of whom were represented in the multivalent constellation ORION. In the oral telling of the story of Cain and Abel, the storytellers may have pointed toward ORION, and either described him as Abel, the original keeper of the sheep, or, alternatively, the storyteller may have described that the club raised in ORION’s upraised hand is Cain’s murder weapon. Even more fundamentally, ORION, with his characteristic upraised right hand, represented the LORD God, or Ba’al, in Israel and surrounding cultures. In one culture, the LORD God, or Ba’al, was Yahweh, in another, the same constellation of ORION was the same god, with a different name and different attributes. The story of Cain and Abel served as a polemic and a warning against the worship of foreign gods among the Israelites. The Cain and Abel myth of the first murder, where a brother killed a brother, biases the reader toward the Israelites, who were more typically shepherds than their Mesopotamian neighbors, who farmed the fertile crescent. In other words, ORION was an interchangeable celestial motif that could represent the good guy or the bad guy, which is to say, the Good Shepherd or the foreigner come to scatter the flock or to threaten, and even kill, the shepherd. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain, is a firstborn heir of Adam and Eve with royal potential who has gone astray, like the tendency of Israel to go after strange gods.

In a progressive departure from the ancient agrarian model, and in an attempted escape from the murderous Cain and Abel cycle, popular Platonist philosophies of the heavenly ideal cast the terrestrial kingdoms of cattle and farming aside as backwater, and city-dwellers portrayed the vulgar earthiness of matter as filthy, and as a taskmaster to imprison the human soul.

Matter is personified in the Mother’s terrestrial kingdom, and her corresponding motifs of fertile fields, trees of life, and sacred cows, through which the ordinances of childbirth and resurrection were not just performed, but actualized. As a by-product of modernization, whenever philosophies of the heavenly ideal and terrestrial reality clashed, the sacredness of terrestrial ordinances were suppressed, and women and their priestesshoods were disenfranchised. As a result, myths and teachings were dangerously decontextualized from the zodiac and the other constellations, cutting collective human wisdom loose from its grounding in eternity.

Centuries before the Christian church was a unified gentile institution organized under a formalized central authority, first century Christianity self-consciously embodied the tension between Platonist and agrarian paradigms. While varied strains of Christianity fully rejected the body, matter, and a physical resurrection, other strains of Christianity deliberately kept one foot on the land while the other stepped into the sea of PISCES. See Revelation 10:2. In a thematic preservation of the agrarian worldview, and against the philosophical trend of the age, in John’s gospel, the body of Christ was not merely left in the tomb to disintegrate, but with a woman as the midwife, Jesus was said to have resurrected physically, so that in one form or another the physical body of Christ would live forever.

THE THREE WITNESSES

There are three primary witnesses of the eternal ordinances of the Kingdom of God. In the mysteries of godliness, authority was substantiated by corroboration between all three of these witnesses. The witnesses of eternal ordinances are:

1. The heavens (the cosmos),
2. The stones (temples), and
3. The clay (the human body)

The temple was the mediator between the other two witnesses. It showed how the human body is made in the image of the cosmos, because without interpretive help, this correspondence isn’t obvious.

The mysteries of godliness are as old as the archaeological record of human civilization. From culture to culture the mysteries of godliness have revolved around the cyclical production and consumption of the Bread of Life, through saving the seed of the soul and transforming it into that very bread. First, the initiate, as the seed, perceived that he or she was saved. Then the initiate was planted when the star Spica in the constellation VIRGO rose above the horizon. Depending on the receptiveness of the initiate to the Word, the seed might fall on stony ground, or in the weeds. Hopefully the seed fell into good ground, where it could be born spiritually, without sex, or by a virgin birth, in the womb of mother earth, VIRGO’s terrestrial counterpart. Then the seed, germinated by the Spirit of God, sprouted and grew. Some yielded twenty-fold, some forty, and some sixty-fold. At last, after spending its life following the sun, the ear of wheat was harvested and taken to the mill when Spica set below the horizon. The mill is the pulverizer of the kernel where it is crushed into powder. At this stage, the individual has, through its suffering, become one with other kernels who have been similarly crushed. This atonement, or this flour, is the primary constituent of the Bread of Life. In addition to the flour, an essential ingredient constituting the bread of life was salt, the most celestial and star-like of all the terrestrial elements. When the flour was anointed and kneaded with water and yeast, the dough was leavened so that it could rise again.

Then the dough underwent its final stage, where it was baked in the oven with fire until it received a golden crown. Ultimately, it is not the purpose of the bread to sit on the shelf any more than it was the destiny of the seed to be merely saved. The seed was not meant for preservation, but multiplication. The seed was saved to become bread, and the bread was made to be eaten by the next generation of disciples that would begin the cycle again.

The transformation of the soul was accomplished through the opening of the seals of the body that corresponded to constellations, in ascending order. For thousands of years and all around the world, an individual’s initiation in certain mysteries was the most transcendent, transformational, and holy experience in that individual’s life. Additionally, the performance of these celestial ordinances ratified the divinization of a civilization’s ruler while maintaining social order. The metaphysical cycling of the Bread of Life in the eternal human soul was rooted in the soil of this profane and glorious world where immortal gods, previous graduates of the great cosmological initiation process, came down from heaven to mingle, celebrate, and even suffer with humankind. These mysteries of great antiquity were an international phenomenon until the Roman Church eradicated them in the fourth and fifth centuries AD.

Among the most demanding priorities for the Roman state in the first century was the suppression of the Jewish revolt and the assimilation of Israel into the Roman body politic. Even while messianic Jews anticipated a ruler who would deliver them from Rome’s oppression, the Jewish sacrifice of the paschal lamb became a crucial element of the greater Roman mystery. As an element of Roman Mithraism, the Christian mystery expanded the almost superhuman spiritual and stoic capacity of a flayed and crucified historical man, a miracle-working Jew named Jesus, into a cosmic principle, the saoshyant. In every astronomical age, the savior archetype of the past age is sacrificed, and in its stead, a new archetype of the same eternal God is born. The Lamb, whose sacrifice would close out the age of ARIES, was the savior of the world and the rising sun to occupy the age to come. The Son of God theology attributed to Jesus undermined the militant monotheism of the Jewish revolt by cleaving Judaism along its monotheistic and more ancient polytheistic fault line. A generation of slaughtered Jews was saved from total elimination if they forsook their zeal for monotheism and the Law of Moses and acquiesced to Roman rule and the pluralistic values described in the New Testament.

The Christian mystery was a new variety of grain in the Bread of Life. It taught that the essence of Christ is the seed of divinity in every man and even every slave. It was likewise with the disenfranchised women whose intrinsic value was culturally suppressed. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, the gospels cast the Marys in roles of ancient mystery archetypes performing celestial ordinances of ascension and deification from birth to resurrection. The two Marys representing the GEMINI constellation, anointed the ground flour of Jesus with water and yeast, and kneaded the flour so that the dough could rise, and so that the disciples could declare that “He is risen!” And in the tomb of the CANCER constellation, the womb of the Mother, he was baked. In the LEO constellation Jesus received a golden crown. For millennia thereafter, his disciples ritually consumed him, although many had forgotten why.

In this innovative and antithetical reformulation of messianic prophecy, the kingdom of God was restored through Israel’s pre-exilic familial polytheism still sacred and unforgotten to many of Abraham’s descendants.

The Apotheosis Scroll explores the ancient basis for the radical democratization of theosis Jesus exemplified, and why the Roman military deliberately legitimized and spread the primitive Christian mystery through Mithraism. The Christian mystery had more in common with the ancient mystery traditions of all of the world’s great cultures, including greater Israel and Samaria, than it did with the monotheistic institutions of Judaism. Similarly, the Christian Church, a totalitarian Platonist bureaucracy, was a later development that oscillated in its relationship to the original Christian mystery. Though the language has been obscured and the stars darkened, the earth is a resurrection and divinization machine, and the clockworks of ascension have never slowed.

The key to recognizing the astronomical motifs in Biblical storytelling is the realization that the LORD God of the Old Testament is represented by the constellation ORION, the angel with the sword whose right hand is stretched out still. In ancient times this constellation was referred to simply as “the Lord.” The LORD God ORION created humankind in his image and placed them in the Garden of Eden. The LORD God ORION led the children of Israel out of Egypt, and so on.  Jesus of the New Testament is the incarnation of this eternal God. His mortal ministry followed the signs of his celestial counterpart, the ORION constellation.

In another layer of astronomical language, in all the temple cultures of the ancient Near East and all around the world, the ages of humankind were marked by the sun rising at the vernal (spring) equinox in the zodiacal sign of the age. The Old Testament was written in the age of ARIES the Ram. Abraham is associated with a new covenant made in the transitional period from worship in the Ugaritic cult of El, which sacrificed bulls in the age of TAURUS, to worship in the age of ARIES. This transitional covenant was exemplified in Genesis 22, by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, the bull, but Isaac was spared by a ram (ARIES) caught in the thicket. The Hebrews framed themselves as Abel, an archetype of the Good Shepherd ORION in the Cain and Abel story, and all of their temple ordinances reinforced this identity, leaving no quarter for sacrifices of wheat or fruit or other agricultural offerings derived from the cultivation of the earth. Because the Temple of Solomon was erected in the age of ARIES, Israel was specially identified with the ram and burnt offerings of the same continually ascended to Israel’s God in the heavens. As the story of Abraham and Isaac suggests, at the end of every zodiacal age, the God of that age was sacrificed as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the Sun of God was reborn in the new zodiacal kingdom, with a new covenant, and sacrifices appropriate to that age would commence. 

Such was the case around the year zero AD when the age of ARIES was winding down, and the age of PISCES had begun. All the world was watching for a messianic figure, a Sun, who would represent the God sacrificed at the end of the age of ARIES and his resurrection as the Sun of God in the age of PISCES. The last of the Hebrew prophets in the Old Testament sets the expectation with this prophecy in Malachi 4:2

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings…

It is important here to recognize that in this model, Christ is simultaneously the Sun of God entering his new zodiacal kingdom, and the Lamb of God sacrificed to end the prior age of ARIES.

Because Jesus (Jupiter, the King of Kings) was the resurrected Sun of God in PISCES, the fish, he set about immediately to choose his disciples from Galilean fishermen. “And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19).

This is but one of several astronomical motifs around which the Christian gospel revolves. In addition to the transition of the sun out of ARIES and into PISCES, a special sign in the heavens appears to have occurred. This is the sign the Magi followed in Matthew’s telling of the nativity of the Christ child and will be corroborated later on in this investigation when we discuss Revelation 12.

For the last thousand years of the age of ARIES, the night sky was void of a pole star. Previously, the pole star had been Thuban, a star located at the udder of the CELESTIAL POLE COW, Hathor, a constellation coined as “Bossy” in the Apotheosis Scroll. In Egypt Thuban was given profound ritual significance. For centuries, if not millennia, initiates ritualistically nursed from the udder of the Mother Cow as a sign of having been received into the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. Due to an astronomical phenomenon called procession, or the axial precession of the equinoxes, the pole stars rotate into and out of pole position over a period of roughly 26,000 years. When Thuban was no longer located at the celestial north pole, around 1,000 BC, there was no longer a star near enough to the pole to qualify as a pole star. The polar region which had moved to the womb of the CELESTIAL POLE COW, was void of any stars. At this time, Yahweh was worshipped in Israel as a formless God whose celestial temple occupied empty space. It is proposed in the Apotheosis Scroll, that around the year zero AD, a momentary pole star, such as a comet or other astronomical phenomenon, appeared in the empty womb of the CELESTIAL POLE COW, signaling to prophet astronomers that the child of Heavenly Parents, a golden calf if you will, had been delivered and the Star Prophecy fulfilled (see Moses’ Deuteronomistic injunction against worshipping the golden calf in Exodus 32. See also the author’s YouTube video, “Is Jesus the Golden Calf?”). Today Polaris is the pole star. Polaris is located squarely on the back of the CELESTIAL POLE COW constellation. As will be shown below, this star has profound significance to the theology of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in the primitive Christian church and in Joseph Smith’s Restoration cosmology.     

Peter, James, and John represent the anticipation of three primary messianic movements in Roman Palestine at the turning of the age from ARIES to PISCES- the end of the world (ARIES) and the advent of the world to come (PISCES). Of these, John, through Mithraism, has the most to say about covenant astronomy in general and the astronomy associated with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in particular. Of the three rivals, John, whose astronomical mysteries were restored by Joseph Smith, will be the primary focus of this investigation.

THE ORDINANCES OF HEAVEN

We previously described the cross superimposed over the ORION constellation, but let’s take a moment to review. When the earth’s equator is projected out into space, it crosses horizontally just above the stars of ORION’s belt. Accordingly, ORION’s navel represents the level-line of the cosmos. To emphasize ORION’s central importance in the heavenly temple of the cosmos, a plumb line dropped through ORION, from the north celestial pole to Canopus, the star that marks the southern pole, represents the north/south axis of the cosmos. Taken together, the north/south axis and the horizontal navel line superimpose a cross over the ORION constellation, meaning that ORION bears the cross. This means that the terrestrial kingdom of TAURUS is on ORION’s left side, and the celestial kingdom is on his right. Because the kingdom of LEO is zodiacal it falls on the path of the ecliptic, the apparent annual path of the sun through the zodiacal constellations as seen from earth. This means that LEO will always be located relatively near the equator, and never high in the vault of heaven. As such, LEO is the lowest of the three degrees of the celestial kingdom. The BIG DIPPER is higher than LEO, and the pole star is the Most High. The North Celestial Pole, which is the point around which even the pole stars revolve, is higher than them all, and cannot be seen, but must be revealed. All of the highest degrees of the celestial kingdom are found within the constellation of the Great Mother, the CELESTIAL POLE COW. Like a river of milk, stars pour down from her body from the BIG DIPPER in the vault of heaven to the horizon. In the Apotheosis Scroll She is named BOSSY, for the milk cow on the Coleman family’s Pearl Hill farmstead.     

The prophets and teachers who wrote our scriptures visualized that the circular rotation of the cosmos was most like the rotation of a grinding mill or a winepress. Due to the earth’s slight wobble that can only be perceived by observation over many thousands of years, at any given time only one or another of the circumpolar stars is the pole star.  It takes 26,000 years to complete just one rotational wobble, so the time frame we are dealing with is almost incomprehensibly immense and infinitesimally incremental. And yet, the ancient temple builders knew about it. The most immediate example of this vastness is our pole star, which is Polaris. Polaris has been our pole star since around 500 AD. Polaris will administer as the pole star until 3,000 AD, and will most precisely represent the north pole in 2100 AD.

The north celestial pole is the center point of the vault of the cosmos. There is no wobble at the north celestial pole because it is the point around which everything, even the pole stars, revolve. This point of utmost importance is in the shoulder of the CELESTIAL POLE COW constellation. One pole star, Thuban, is located at her udder, and another, equidistant from the north celestial pole is Polaris, which is located on the center of the CELESTIAL POLE COW’s back. Continuing on around, other pole stars are located at her head, or out in front of her chest, or under her front hoof.  All of these are equidistant from the location of the north celestial pole in her shoulder. The north celestial pole is the nail fastened in the most sure place. If one tied a string to this nail and circumscribed a circle with a pencil at the end of the string, the pole stars would all fall near the path of this line. The circumpolar pole stars which move into and out of pole position over a period of roughly 26,000 years are the congregation of the north, whose path is drawn on the vault of the firmament of heaven as if by a compass.

Now imagine that the string is the handle connected to the axle of the mill or winepress mentioned above. The handle forms a right angle to the axis, which has been set to form an exact right angle to the equatorial level line. The perfect 90° square of the equator to the axis of the north celestial pole is the master temple builder’s square. The cosmos has rotated on this north/south axis without interruption for millennia upon millennia, churning out the flour of the bread of life and the wine of suffering. Accordingly, the compass and the crank handle squared up to the immovable axis are heavenly symbols for the most exalted regions of the celestial kingdom, all of which are on ORION’s right, while TAURUS, representing the terrestrial kingdom on the whole, is on ORION’s left.

The symbols of the level, square, and compass—tools used by temple builders—have been passed down over time and are linked to the concept of “squaring the circle” especially in relation to the figure of ORION. ORION is the Master Builder. The tools are his tools, employed to build the temple of the cosmos. This meant that the terrestrial temple builder, the material image of ORION, was a twin of the grand architect of the cosmos. Like ORION, the initiate was a divine image-bearer in the veil. ORION had the terrestrial kingdom on his left, represented by an ox, and the celestial kingdom was on ORION’s right, represented by a square. When the initiate put on ORION’s garment, the initiate became ORION. It was the garment that transformed the initiate ontologically. In performing the celestial ordinances, the initiate became the temple high priest and high priestess, and they were able to walk through the veil and into the Holy of Holies. The initiate was a celestial being able to freely traverse through all of the ordinances at will.

We hope it has become evident that the terrestrial and celestial kingdoms are not necessarily a place where a soul goes after death but are an analogy for the condition of a soul and its relationship to the Divine. Please consider verses 69-79 and verses 114-118 (separated by ellipses) of the watershed revelation of Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants in this light:

These are they who are just men made perfect through Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, who wrought out this perfect atonement through the shedding of his own blood.

These are they whose bodies are celestial, whose glory is that of the sun, even the glory of God, the highest of all, whose glory the sun of the firmament is written of as being typical.

And again, we saw the terrestrial world, and behold and lo, these are they who are of the terrestrial, whose glory differs from that of the church of the Firstborn who have received the fulness of the Father, even as that of the moon differs from the sun in the firmament. 

Behold, these are they who died without law;

And also they who are the spirits of men kept in prison, whom the Son visited, and preached the gospel unto them, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh;

Who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it.

These are they who are honorable men of the earth, who were blinded by the craftiness of men.

These are they who receive of his glory, but not of his fulness.

These are they who receive of the presence of the Son, but not of the fulness of the Father.

Wherefore, they are bodies terrestrial, and not bodies celestial, and differ in glory as the moon differs from the sun.

These are they who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus; wherefore, they obtain not the crown over the kingdom of our God…

But great and marvelous are the works of the Lord, and the mysteries of his kingdom which he showed unto us, which surpass all understanding in glory, and in might, and in dominion;

Which he commanded us we should not write while we were yet in the Spirit, and are not lawful for man to utter;

Neither is man capable to make them known, for they are only to be seen and understood by the power of the Holy Spirit, which God bestows on those who love him, and purify themselves before him;

To whom he grants this privilege of seeing and knowing for themselves;

That through the power and manifestation of the Spirit, while in the flesh, they may be able to bear his presence in the world of glory.

The recognition of one’s eternal divine nature, or the potential to become a celestial being while in the flesh through knowledge of the ordinances (mazzaroth), or constellations, is further described in Section 84of the Doctrine and Covenants in verses 19-22, parenthesis added:

And this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God.

Therefore, in the ordinances (constellations) thereof, the power of godliness is manifest.

And without the ordinances (constellations) thereof, and the authority of the priesthood, the power of godliness is not manifest unto men in the flesh;

For without this no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live.

ORION’s initiation advances from ordinance to ordinance and follows the counterclockwise daily and monthly rotation of the zodiac. History, however, advances clockwise. If the zodiac were to be overlaid onto a clock, LEO would be at the 12 o’clock position, AQUARIUS would be at the six o’clock position, and SCORPIO would be at the 9 o’clock position, etc. While the individual initiate has been advancing toward the celestial kingdom, from PISCES at 5 o’clock, to ARIES at 4 o’clock, to TAURUS at 3 o’clock, to GEMINI at 2 o’clock, to CANCER at 1 o’clock, to LEO at 12 o’clock, the earth has been in a process of falling, from the golden age of celestial glory in LEO beginning 13,000 years ago, to CANCER 11,000 years ago, etc., to the age of PISCES, beginning 2,000 years ago. “The fallen world” is an analogy of falling from heaven in LEO, through time, all the way down to the age of AQUARIUS at the 6 o’clock position on the clock.

The anthropological record of humanity and the geological record of earth bear witness to great wisdom stored in temple ordinances corresponding to the zodiacal ages. These astronomical ordinances point to a war in heaven that upended the golden age of LEO. This cosmic disturbance, corroborated in the geological and anthropological record, brought about the end of the Pleistocene epoch and introduced our warmer Holocene epoch. In the age of LEO, the sun was unusually destructive, and a serpent was reportedly cast down from heaven to earth. These cataclysms associated with the Younger Dryas climate event appear to have been caused by an increase in atmospheric radiocarbon due to a massive solar flare. Add to this a comet or series of comets that appear to have accompanied the increased solar activity, and the earth was hurled into a crisis that took thousands of years to stabilize. (Credit: Richard Firestone and Allen West for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and Robert Schock’s Plasma, Solar Outbursts, and the End of the Last Ice Age). The descent from LEO was fully articulated by the time sea levels rose from the catastrophically rapid melting of the earth’s ice sheets (Meltwater Pulse 1B) during the age of CANCER. The Fall, blamed on Mother Eve, whose seal is CANCER, is a highly sophisticated preservation of ancestral knowledge about these cataclysms and when they happened in deep, deep history, that we are only just now coming to appreciate. From CANCER the earth continued its fall through GEMINI and then TAURUS, and from TAURUS to ARIES, when the Old Testament was written, and then to PISCES.

At any given time in the cycle of the zodiac, ORION is the archetypal high priest or high priestess performing the ordinances of the age. Therefore, in the age of PISCES, ORION is a fisherman throwing his net into the Sea of Galilee to catch disciples. As such, he is a baptizer of disciples in water. AQUARIUS is the seventh of the seven descending seals. AQUARIUS represents the bottom of the wheel and the throne of the Father in the underworld as will be discussed in more depth below. Halfway through AQUARIUS a new heaven and a new earth will come again when the earth begins its ascent back to LEO, repeatedly satisfying the truism that “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

For the last two thousand years and for another 4,000 or so years to come, the earth is in the telestial kingdom. This is because humankind will be passing through the kingdoms of the sea and the underworld, which are PISCES (the sea), and then AQUARIUS (the underworld), and then CAPRICORN (the sea). However, a thousand-year reprieve of this underworld darkness has been promised:

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season (Revelation 20:1-3).

Lets look again at the exact language of the culminating verses of Revelation and the coming of the Sun to the age of AQUARIUS:

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:

And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.

And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.

-Revelation 22:1-5, emphasis added.

We should anticipate that in AQUARIUS a new ordinance to reflect the age will be instituted and performed by the ORION initiate. Described in the verses above, it will bring light to the darkness and has been prefigured in the Mithraic tauroctony that will be analyzed below.

Late in the age of CAPRICORN, a goat with a dolphin tail, the earth will walk like an amphibian out of the watery underworld and back onto land. In great antiquity this recognition was represented by a male figure wearing a fish costume. He represented Adam and was called Oannes, Enki, Adapa, and Atum. Then the earth will ascend through seven seals again, from AQUARIUS to CAPRICORN and on to the terrestrial kingdom of SAGITTARIUS. From SAGITTARIUS the earth and its inhabitants will ascend through SCORPIO, then to the judgment in LIBRA, and on to the spirit world of VIRGO where it waits for its reunion with the Father and Mother in the celestial kingdom of LEO.

The Biblical record maps over the ages of humankind in a prophetic and marvelous manner, from the development of the Magdalenian cultures in the age of VIRGO 15,000 years ago, to the days of Enoch’s celestial and terrestrial upheaval in LEO 13,000 years ago, to the Great Flood and the fermentation of wine and beer in Noah’s age of CANCER, to the prime of cattle domestication in TAURUS. It is of great importance to this investigation to track the pole stars of the ages against this zodiacal backdrop, and to recognize how Biblical prophecy pertains to them. We have discussed that the north celestial pole was devoid of a pole star at the time of Christ’s birth, unless it was supplied one momentarily by an astronomical event such as a comet, or a super nova illuminating a star previously too faint to detect without sophisticated equipment. We speculate that such an event was recorded in Matthew and followed by the Magi. This astronomical event signaled the Virgin birth and the first coming of Christ to the age of PISCES. His second coming in the age of PISCES pertains to the administration of the pole star, Polaris.

A FAMILY PORTRAIT

The New Testament restores knowledge and worship of the familial council of El, Asherah, Baal and Anat, the Godhead of the Biblical patriarchs. In this scheme, Jesus Christ is shown to be Baal, the son of El. This will undoubtedly come as a shock to some readers of the Bible who thought such idolatrous gods had been done away with very conclusively with good King Josiah’s Deuteronomistic reforms in 639 BC. The purge is recorded in 2 Kings 23. We will look at verses 2, 4-6, 11, 14-15, 20, 24-25, parenthesis added. The Asherah trees or groves mentioned are individuated ways of expressing the tree of life, all of which are feminine conceptualizations associated with the grand ordinance of the MILKY WAY tree of life.

And the king went up into the house of the LORD, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant (Deuteronomy) which was found in the house of the LORD.

And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out of the temple of the LORD all the vessels that were made for Baal (ORION), and for the grove (MILKY WAY), and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of them unto Bethel.

And he put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal (ORION), to the sun (LEO), and to the moon (CANCER), and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven.

And he brought out the grove (MILKY WAY) from the house of the LORD, without Jerusalem, unto the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and stamped it small to powder, and cast the powder thereof upon the graves of the children of the people.

And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the LORD, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.

-This is the Merkabah chariot. The chariot was a terrestrial replica of the vehicle that pulled the sun in its daily course behind a team of horses. It is the same vehicle in which Elijah ascended to heaven, and at night, when the chariot is not being utilized to pull the sun from east to west across the sky, the empty chariot circumambulates the celestial pole as the BIG DIPPER. The terrestrial chariot, or wagon, was kept in the Holy of Holies like an automobile in a parking garage, and the driver’s seat was the mercy seat upon which sat the Ark of the Covenant. In the centuries that Yahweh was worshipped in Israel, the empty seat of this astronomical chariot was the exact location of the north pole, the throne of the Most High.

The Merkabah chariot has a direct parallel in the cult of Mithra in India, in the cult of Amun Ra in Egypt, and the cult of Marduk in Babylon, all of which housed the chariots of the sun in their temples. The chariot of the sun is perpetuated in the sixth of seven initiatic ordinances in Roman Mithraism in the seal of Heliodromus– the Sunrunner- the sealing power of Elijah. Because Elijah was taken up to heaven in a chariot- the Big Dipper, his priesthood was higher than all of the zodiacal ordinances, which meant he had the higher priesthood keys that could administer to all the lower seals, including marriage and anointing kings and queens, priests and high priestesses. It was by this power that a marriage could be sealed in the eternities.

Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles (GEMINI) and covered the sites with human bones.

Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin—even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole (MILKY WAY) also.

Josiah slaughtered all the priests of those high places on the altars and burned human bones on them. Then he went back to Jerusalem.

Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book (Deuteronomy) that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord.

Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.

Every one of the ordinances of the celestial kingdom that were destroyed in Josiah’s carnage are restored in the New Testament. In Revelation chapters 11 and 12, John is describing the very image engraved on a 4,000-year-old cylinder seal recovered from Mari, Syria which depicts the Ugaritic familial cult of El as worshipped in ancient Babylon and surrounding civilizations for millennia. This is the same council written of in the Sumerian epic, the Enuma Elish, which translated means, When on High and recounts the Creation myth. To put it plainly, John is not a monotheist and the gods described are the constellations, the ordinances of the celestial kingdom. The scene repeated in temples for millennia depicted four figures. Because this cult was established in the age of TAURUS (+/-4,320-2160 BC) all four of the figures are wearing bovine horn headdresses.  Two of the figures are females and two are males.

On the far left stands a woman (VIRGO), called Anat. In the Biblical Hebrew tradition she is the Shekinah (Spirit), or “the Barren.” She holds the bitter cup (CRATER). Betwixt the horns of her headdress is an olive tree. Behind her grows a barren olive tree and her feet and the hem of her gown are in the Water of Life (MILKY WAY), from which her olive tree branch has sprouted. VIRGO is one of the pair of female olive tree witnesses (GEMINI) standing before the throne of God.

Next to VIRGO in the center-left position, the Father, El (LEO) sits upon the throne of the mountain of the Lord. He holds a scepter in his hand and between the bull horns of his headdress is an evergreen cypress tree. A pair of eight-pointed stars, one above the other, representing the Sumerian/Akkadian word for Anu, which is eternal, and God, represent the two thrones of the Father. One is in LEO at the noonday peak of the sun’s course across the sky. The other is in the AQUARIUS underworld, where the Father (Osiris) sits enthroned at midnight, ruling over the world of the dead. “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there” (Psalm 139:7-8). 

At the foot of the mountain throne of the Lord, a water serpent (HYDRA) spews a flood of water from its mouth while a bird (CORAX) swallows the water back up.

Standing on the other side of the throne of the Father (LEO) is the Bride Asherah, represented by the constellation CANCER. She holds a menorah, which represents the almond tree, whose fruit is in the almond shape of the maternal matrix. CANCER is the seal of vision through the eyes and the light entering into the body via the pineal gland. She is called “the Fruitful” because she is the mother of all living, the first to partake of the tree of knowledge. Behind her grows a prolific olive tree and her feet and the hem of her gown are in the Water of Life (MILKY WAY), from which her olive tree branch has sprouted. CANCER is the other in the pair of female olive tree witnesses (GEMINI) standing before the throne of God.

Dispelling in advance the urge by some to think of these women as being interchangeable females in a celestial harem, the gospel of Philip deploys a gnostic riddle to interpret the identity of the women represented in the three constellations, VIRGO, CANCER, and GEMINI which will be corroborated by John’s Revelation chapters 11 and 12 below.

Three women always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother, Mary his sister, and Mary of Magdala, who is called his companion…[Mary is his mother.] Wisdom [his sister], who is called barren, is the mother of the angels. The companion of the savior is Mary of Magdala. The savior loved her more than all the disciples, and he kissed her often on her mouth. The other disciples said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The savior answered and said unto them, ‘Why do I not love you like her? If a blind person and one who can see are both in darkness, they are the same. When the light comes, one who can see will see the light, and the blind person will stay in darkness’ (Gospel of Philip, brackets added).

In other words, the females on the celestial side of the veil represent women in different modes of life. Sometimes she is a sister, sometimes a mother, sometimes the spirit, sometimes Wisdom, and sometimes the bride. Moreover, as will be shown below, in the mysteries of godliness the Marys represent the right hemisphere of the brain and the human subconscious, where the creative, intuitive, compassionate, and communal stirrings of the heart enlighten the mind, especially through the secretions of the pineal gland. In the culmination of John’s Revelation, “The spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).

Standing on the far right, the fourth of the figures is the LORD God, ORION, known in ancient Mesopotamia as Baal and to John as Jesus Christ. He stands with “his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot upon the earth” (Revelation 10:2). His right foot is in the same water of life as the GEMINI Olive tree witnesses, and his left foot is in the terrestrial kingdom. In his hands he holds the iron rod which crosses in front of his garment to the ground, and between the bull horns of his headdress is an evergreen cypress tree. The initiate is invited to put on the garment of ORION, and in so doing the initiate has become ORION. Such an initiate may pass through the veil and into the celestial kingdom. Every person represented in the cylinder scene is in the family of God and has received the fulness of the Father. The family of God in the celestial kingdom is populated by “whosoever will.”

Now that we are familiar with the figures inscribed on the Mari Cylinder Seal and on temple walls and veils throughout Mesopotamia, including, according to Josephus, the Jerusalem Temple (Wars of the Jews 5.212-214), we will see how they fit into John’s Revelation in chapters 11 and 12.

As described in Revelation 12, the first woe was a war in heaven that ended the ice age and inaugurated the Holocene epoch. The Holocene is the history of the last 13,000 years, punctuated by the birth and administration of Jesus Christ in the age of Pisces.  Revelation 12 merges this 13,000-year history as a single archetypal mystery event. We will now look at Revelation 12 in its entirety while pointing out the astronomical drama as it unfolded:

1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun (solar flare), and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars (in the age of LEO):

-The woman is CANCER, the queen of heaven on the celestial side of the veil. The sun is the planetary body ruling over the celestial kingdom and with its glory she is clothed. As the regent over the terrestrial kingdom of matter, the moon and all the terrestrial world subject to it, is under her feet. Her crown of twelve stars is the constellation LEO.

2 And she (CANCER) being with child (the perpetual virginity of the CELESTIAL POLE COW whose womb, the most high, was empty except for the sign of Christ’s birth) cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon (DRACO), having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

-The great red dragon is the constellation DRACO, which circumambulates the north celestial pole and forms the womb of the CELESTIAL POLE COW constellation. The sign of Christ’s nativity occurred in this constellation, in the bend of DRACO’s serpentine body. The threat of the body of Christ, the church, being crushed by Rome immediately after its conception, as if by an abortion, is alluded to in the aggression of the heads, horns, and crowns.

4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth (Draconid comet impacts): and the dragon (DRACO) stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child (the Golden Calf) as soon as it was born.

5 And she brought forth a man child (ORION), who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God (LEO), and to his throne.

6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels (the seven archangels represented by the circumpolar stars of the BIG DIPPER) fought against the dragon (DRACO); and the dragon fought and his angels,

8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

9 And the great dragon (DRACO) was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.

11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb (ARIES), and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens (celestial), and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth (terrestrial) and of the sea (telestial)! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

13 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he (HYDRA) persecuted the woman (CANCER) which brought forth the man child (ORION).

-DRACO has fallen from his exaltation in the highest degrees of the celestial kingdom, and by this fall has become HYDRA, the water serpent ascending from the underworld to persecute the woman and her seed.

14 And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

-We said above that CANCER represents the eye of the maternal matrix of creation and vision. What is being described in this verse is Isis, as the winged Eye of Horus fleeing the wrath of the serpent to hide in the wilderness of the terrestrial kingdom represented by TAURUS. Called “the eye in the sky” this is the star Sirius, the brightest heavenly object besides the sun or the moon. 

15 And the serpent (HYDRA) cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. 

16 And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.

-Recall that at the foot of the mountain throne of the Lord, a water serpent (HYDRA) spews a flood of water from its mouth while a bird (CORAX) swallows the water, as water covers over the telestial kingdom underworld.

17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

The second woe is the prophecy of an event in the future. It begins with the two olive tree witnesses (GEMINI) being described as two candlesticks, the harbingers of the second of three woes, or cataclysms. By the greater context established early on in Revelation that the vision takes place in a land of seven candlesticks, or volcanoes (Revelation 1:12-13), it becomes clear that John has seen the eruption of two of these seven volcanoes. These two spew fire and smoke for three and a half years, causing droughts and plagues due to the air pollution they have inflicted on the world.  

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will (Revelation 11:3-6).

Based on the full context of the images in the cylinder seal, we might expect the volcanoes to be in the terrestrial Eden. We might further expect the two active volcanoes located on land but near to the sea, to flank another volcano, this one dormant and slightly more inland, which is the mountain throne of God (celestial kingdom). In the midst of the volcanoes, where the summer sun rises in the east between them, we should expect to find a great westward-flowing river, pouring its contents out of its mouth into the sea. The world of the dead, accessed by the gate to Hades in the western horizon, is presided over by CORAX, the raven, who straddles the world of the living and the dead. So, the body of water (telestial kingdom) the river flows into should be to the west of the land (terrestrial kingdom), and ORION, the Prince of Peace, should be likewise on the land but near to the same sea as the two olive tree, or candlestick, witnesses.

PART B: BODIES TERRESTIAL

THE ANGEL WITH THE SWORD

We are well into the first act of The Sound of Music before Maria, played by Julie Andrews, starts singing Do-Re-Mi with the Von Trapp children. The lyrics describe that Do-Re-Mi supplies the ABC’s of music and is “a very good place to start.” The first three chapters of Genesis tell the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This is the Do-Re-Mi of gospel astronomy.

In the first chapter of Genesis, we are introduced to a reversal of the ascension language described earlier in this investigation. Where Paul talks about a heavenly image (ORION) reflecting the earthly, in Genesis we see the earthly, or terrestrial, images that were made to reflect the heavenly, or celestial.

Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God (ORION) he created them; male and female he created them.

-Genesis 1:26,27

The story commences in Genesis 2:7-10:

The LORD God (ORION) formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

-The Angel with a Flaming Sword in this story, the LORD God, has made a man, a terrestrial ORION, a living soul like the celestial one, but the man is made of dirt gathered from the terrestrial world.

And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

-The LORD God, who may traverse freely through all the ordinances has built a garden in Eden on the celestial (LEO) side of the veil.

And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

-The tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil are representations of the multivalent Milky Way, as established above. Whether the tree is one or the other depends upon the direction one is traveling. If ascending into the celestial kingdom, the MILKY WAY is the tree of life. If descending from the presence of God into the terrestrial kingdom, the MILKY WAY is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The latter leads to death and the former leads to eternal life.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.

-The river is the multivalent MILKY WAY, whose roots part into headwaters and fill over the ceiling of the underworld with water, dividing the terrestrial kingdom from the telestial, the only place where the sun in its glory cannot minister because it is night.

Now that the three worlds have been established the LORD God has gotten back to the little ORION made of dirt. Genesis 2:15-18, 22-25

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

The LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him…

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

-We will focus here on the fact that the terrestrial Woman and the terrestrial Man, although paired together according to the law of heaven, are out of place in the Garden of Eden. It would be as though the LORD God had taken a pair of wildebeests from the safe side of the river coursing through the African savannah, and placed them on the side where hungry lions wait to feed on them. They are completely unlike those on the celestial side of the veil and vulnerable to destruction. They lack ORION’s garment, which when worn, turns a wildebeest into a lion.

Here comes the astronomy. We can imagine an ancient storyteller pointing out the constellations as they appear above the horizon. Remember that the story picks up on the celestial side of the veil where the LEO and CANCER constellations preside. -Genesis 3: 1, 3-15, 20-24, parenthesis added:

Now the serpent (HYDRA) was more subtil than any beast of the field (TAURUS) which the LORD God (ORION) had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

But of the fruit of the tree (MILKY WAY) which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent (HYDRA) said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods (Lions), knowing good and evil.

-In this passage, Eve is talking about partaking of the tree through the ordinance of death. But the serpent is talking about partaking of the tree without tasting of death, by initiation in the mysteries. After considering her options, Eve opts for the way of the mystery initiate.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the LORD God (ORION) walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

-Adam was afraid because he realized he was a wildebeest among lions.

And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent (HYDRA) beguiled me, and I did eat.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent (HYDRA), Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle (TAURUS), and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

And I will put enmity between thee (HYDRA) and the woman (CANCER), and between thy seed and her seed; it (LEO) shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his (LEO’s) heel.

-It is most instructive to look at a star chart to see how in this prophecy of Adam and Eve’s future exaltation, the constellation HYDRA is always challenging CANCER. Meanwhile LEO hovers just above the length of HYDRA with the heel of his forepaw in striking distance of HYDRA’s fangs. Despite the danger, LEO is equally poised to crush the serpent’s head. The tension between the three sojourners in the Garden of Eden is unmistakable and as eternal as the heavens.

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

ASIDE: The original Hebrew text does not specify the type of skin used. Perhaps the most intuitive reading would suggest that the skin provided is the hide of a lion, so that Eve and Adam, in wearing the garment of a lion would become lions. But this isn’t quite right for our purposes, or else HYDRA, in tempting them, would have been their true teacher. Before Eve and Adam could wear a lion skin, they had to be initiated in the world, seal by seal, ordinance by ordinance.  Therefore, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden in order to have the terrestrial experience. Having satisfied the ordinances of initiation, in time they would be welcomed back into the Garden where once they had only been brief visitors. On their return they would be given the garment of ORION and would be able to traverse freely through the veil.

Then what kind of skin was provided? We reason that it wasn’t the skin of a dead animal at all, whether lion, bull, sheep, or any other animal. Symbolic references to the nehushtan—the bronze serpent raised by Moses—and mentioned in certain apocryphal works suggest the existence of two wisdom serpents in the Garden of Eden: one representing Christ, and the other a Luciferian serpent imitating him. This duality is posited as the reason HYDRA was so alluring to Eve, presenting itself as the serpent deity within Eden.

The regenerative serpent traditionally symbolizes the state of vulnerability that precedes a transformation into increased creative potential. Historically, prior to its association with deception, the numerous serpent constellations, many of which populate the celestial kingdom, were understood to embody balanced dualities, particularly during acts of creation. In this context, the Garden of Eden—teeming with creative possibility—served as a juncture between two states of being, populated by celestial serpents anticipating physical renewal. These beings awaited regeneration through the acquisition of a new body or, more precisely, a new skin. As referenced in Doctrine and Covenants 88:28:

They who are of a celestial spirit shall receive the same body which was a natural body; even ye shall receive your bodies and your glory shall be that glory by which your bodies are quickened.

When a snake sheds its skin for a new one, the newly exposed skin is tender and translucent and highly sensitized to temperature and pain. The serpent (seraph) in Eden is totally naked and assailable, such as the vulnerability characteristic of Eve and Adam. The story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis features two celestial snakes representing the lie and the truth. The liar was the assailant in the tree who came tempting Eve to eat of its fruit. This deceiver imitated the Christ, the original wisdom serpent who represented regenerative creation out of sacrifice. After the first serpent opened Adam and Eve’s eyes through deceit, the Redeemer offered them coats of skins. The skins were not the hides of dead animals as is often assumed, but a cloak of the most precious and luminous material in Eden, a latticework woven by God: the shed skin of the true serpent.

Unto Adam and also to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them. And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil (Genesis 3:21, 22).

In clothing their nakedness, the skin was more than a shield against immodesty and to protect them from the elements. The snakeskin garment, which was shed for them, conveyed the sacred ordinance of clothing their resurrected spirit in a new body, a celestial body.

Jesus of Nazareth’s very life represented the supreme archetypal serpent shedding, not just his skin as he had repeatedly done prior, as symbolized in the death and rebirth of the sun from zodiacal age to zodiacal age, but now his flesh and blood as well, to put the human race on the path to exaltation:

The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 460).

Astronomical justification for this conjecture is supplied by the constellation CYGNUS, a magnificent sign that represents the fiery flying serpent fastened to a cross. The CYGNUS constellation is fastened right in the crook of the Tree of Life where the boughs spread. When the Garden of Eden scene is manifest above the eastern horizon, CYGNUS stands on the western horizon, like a cross planted in the ground at the gate to Hades as a constant reminder of the sacrifice of the Son of God as a lost but elemental part of the story.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us (Lions), to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

-Note that the tree of knowledge of good and evil has become the tree of life. The image of a lion reaching his paw into this tree to partake of its fruit and live forever will resurface in Mithraism. In the fourth of seven seals, called LEO, the initiate, ascending from the terrestrial kingdom toward the celestial kingdom, is drawn through the veil and into the celestial kingdom by a lion’s paw worn on the outstretched hand of the Father, Pater.

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden (celestial kingdom), to till the ground from whence he was taken (terrestrial kingdom).

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims (GEMINI), and a flaming sword (ORION’s flaming sword) which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

-In this telling, rather than carrying his sword on him, ORION, the Prince of Peace, has left the flaming sword behind in the terrestrial world. This detail prefigures ORION’s singular significance to the Roman Mithraic mystery that we will explore below when we talk about the tauroctony scene.

THE NATURAL LION

In the previous section, eponymously called “The Angel with a Sword,” we demonstrated that Adam and Eve did not belong in the celestial Garden of Eden with the serpents and lions because as uninitiated beings they had not yet advanced from ordinance to ordinance, or from seal to seal, in the lesser kingdoms. This shortcoming was described as their being vulnerable, like wildebeests (TAURUS) who found themselves on the wrong side of the river of life. With each successive ordinance completed on the terrestrial side of the MILKY WAY veil, Adam and Eve would eventually receive a garment signifying that they had taken on the nature of the celestial beings. The garment of ORION is the greatest of all the garments, because when it is worn, the initiate can pass freely through all the zodiacal ordinances and ascend like a fiery flying serpent, above the plane of the ecliptic, and into exaltation among the circumpolar stars. Even though we framed the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis as a story for children, supplying the ABC’s of gospel astronomy, the archetypes undergirding the narrative are profound.

In this section we will explore the nature of celestial beings in a more nuanced and adult manner, because the nature of serpents and lions in the celestial kingdom is not the same as the nature of serpents and lions in the terrestrial kingdom of earth. This distinction makes all the difference.

A major influence on this investigation is the Restoration project of the prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other “Mormon” Restoration movements. I have studied his scriptures and teachings for my whole life. Whether inside or outside the formal church, his teachings and scriptural legacy are part of the fibers of my soul. I have wrestled acutely with the popular narratives about his character and experiences. I have been crushed and baffled and eventually acclimated to and accepting of his alleged polygamous and adulterous history. But after digging harder, and hacking through malicious and correlated commentaries for years, I have grown entirely dissatisfied with the anti-Mormon tropes and apologist glosses that purport to be doing essential “shadow work” on Church history when really they appear to be shadow boxing straw men.

After digesting hundreds and hundreds of hours-worth of papers and commentaries on the subject of early Mormon polygamy, some affirming and others denying its provenance to Joseph, the most disappointing aspect has been the subject’s oversimplification in the public discourse. The more I study and the deeper I delve into the historical documents such as The Joseph Smith Papers, I have become more confident than ever in Joseph Smith’s integrity and morality. Just like the team of rivals comprised of Peter, James, and John mentioned above, the origin myth of Mormonism is hotly contested. Even within the Church, individuals worship side by side in the pews while viewing the Restored gospel of Jesus Christ from conflicting paradigms. But this should come as no surprise. Nor should it interfere with our principle commission “to love one another.” Tension and opposition due to the internal rivalry of related traditions is the model upon which Christianity itself was founded. In my gut I feel something went wrong with the Restoration. I feel when I walk into church like I am walking into a building advertised as something like “The Leonardo DaVinci Museum of Art” but when I get inside, most of the art is by other artists, and as I look closer, someone has signed all the paintings with DaVinci’s name and few seem to be concerned about the fraud.  One doesn’t have to have formal training to see problems with the provenance of a lot of these works.

The consensus narrative, that continually emphasizes the quantity of polygamous attestations over the quality of those sources and claims, has not convinced me that Joseph was a dishonest man who railed and fought against “the principle and doctrine of … having many wives and concubines” (see verse 1 of Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants) in public but was a prolific champion practitioner of polygamy, by any name, on the side. Ostensibly, the reason for polygamy was to “raise up seed unto God,” but though historians say Joseph Smith had several dozen wives, only Emma bore him children. He was not a perfect man, but I think he was honest when he constantly and vociferously denied ever having taught or practiced polygamy, which his entire provable scriptural canon called an abomination. While some of its verses, copied and pasted from a previous public teaching are clearly consistent with the Prophet’s teachings on monogamous marriage entered into with an eye to eternity, the controversial thrust of the infamous Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which supplies the polygamy commandments, is full of doctrinal inversions, disturbing curses, and wild distortions. In short, it completely contradicts all the rest of his scriptural legacy, public teachings, private writings, and the biological reality of his never having produced any children with any woman except his wife, Emma.

While the authorship of Section 132, which was written by a scribe, and which sacralizes the so-called doctrine of “having many wives and concubines” has been posthumously pinned to him, a growing minority within the faith tradition do not believe the contents of Section 132 can be attributed to Joseph Smith alone. Brigham Young pulled the text of the revelation out of his desk drawer and foisted it on the Saints without a customary vote of common consent years after Joseph’s martyrdom. Joseph never signed his name to its contents like he did the other scores of revelations he received and taught. His prolific scriptural legacy, produced while he was alive and able to vouch for it, is monogamous because while it is based on the ordinances of the celestial kingdom as understood since ancient times from culture to culture, it is specifically reflective of Roman Mithraism, which was expressly anti-polygamous. Even in the fall of 2025 when this manuscript was in its first drafts, mainstream scholars were beginning to refer to Joseph Smith’s “proto-polygamy,” because it lacked documentation, witnesses, cohabitation, and sexual consummation. In my opinion, this isn’t polygamy at all but constitutes a total misunderstanding of what being sealed into the family of God meant according to Joseph Smith’s cosmology. Because the mutually beneficial consensus is so central to the anti-Mormon smear narrative as well as the justification for Brigham Young’s prophetic authority, the tropes will easily overshadow the nuance of Joseph’s teachings, and proponents of Joseph Smith’s monogamy  will continue to be shouted down and shamed out of the fold by the church’s enemies and church apologists alike.

On coming back to the LDS Church after a 20-year departure from it, I have seen Joseph Smith Jr. through a different perspective not supplied by church correlation or by its apologist scholars and professors, or by its critics and detractors. Having been away from the church for so long, only to return with gratitude to God, it is galling to see disciples of Christ hounded and penalized out of the church for their defense of eternal monogamy in general, and their confidence in Joseph and Emma’s fidelity in particular. Ironically, if not sacrilegiously, couples who find themselves on the wrong side of church disciplinary councils over this matter are seeing their own marriage sealing ordinance annulled by church authorities who had nothing to do with their entering into these faithfully kept marital covenants in the first place. It has come as a shock to me the number of married men in the church who believe in a God that instituted polygamy once in this dispensation and may do it again, no matter the feelings of the men’s wives and daughters. But as we will see below, it takes a hardened heart to succeed at polygamy. Even though polygamy was articulated only once in LDS scripture, published years after the Prophet’s martyrdom, polygamy apologists interpret all the scriptural canon with those glasses on, however consistently the false doctrine of “many wives and concubines” is elsewhere condemned. Today, for an individual to publicly express skepticism that Joseph Smith Jr. was a polygamist and adulterer is the surest way to be targeted for excommunication and media blacklisting because of how the implications of his innocence might impact the establishment’s succession narrative of keys and authority.

While in some cultures, polygamy has been rationalized by looking to a male lion and his harem of lionesses in nature, a more careful look is justified. If the celestial man were to follow the example of the lion in nature, he would kill off or scatter his male competition and all the work of providing for his whelps would be left to the lioness. He would be aloof and dominating and every appetite would be satisfied by swings from sedation to violence. If this were the model God established in the ordinances of the celestial kingdom, Adam would have been the first murderer and Eve would have been one of many women in the Garden, placed there only to satisfy Adam’s desires and to supply him with progeny.

The true lion in the celestial kingdom is an example of overcoming nature, overcoming the fallen world, to lie down in peace with his potential prey as described in Isaiah 11, to work and toil instead of lolling in the grass, and to be faithful to one mate. Although it has been sanctified from time to time throughout temple cultures, polygamy is inconsistent with the celestial kingdom of God in scripture, and thus it was for the Joseph Smith era of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a possibility we hope the listener will consider during this investigation.

As the high priest of a new temple era, Joseph Smith Jr. might appear, according to some archived historical documents, to have been sealing people to himself as part of a universalist vision to begin a reunification of the entire family of God. As such, he may have been sealed, by his innovation of proxy temple marriage, to numerous women, many of them married, and to some men as well, although evidence for even this is disputed and was produced under the auspices of “the new order of things” in the Brigham Young administration, after Joseph’s death, and while documents pertaining to Joseph Smith’s history were being revised. To say or assume that these sealings are anything like cohabitation and consummated polygamy is unwarranted when historical evidence is held to a high academic standard and when proxy temple performances are better understood.

Furthermore, Joseph Smith’s polygamy can’t be substantiated by appeal to “the angel with a flaming sword,” who according to folk stories never told in Joseph’s own words and curated long after his death, commanded that Joseph institute polygamy or be killed by the messenger angel on the spot. (see the article, Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword, by Brian C. Hales). In addition to the poor quality of these witnesses, the greatest strike against “the angel with a flaming sword” narrative is the fact that the angel with a sword is none other than the LORD God, and not some lesser, unnamed and comparatively unauthoritative figure.

The LORD God—referred to in ancient times as ORION, the angel with a sword—is the one who gave the commandments found in Doctrine and Covenants Section 49 in May of 1831, specifically in verses 15–17.

And again, verily I say unto you, that whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man. Wherefore, it is lawful that he should have one wife, and they twain shall be one flesh, and all this that the earth might answer the end of its creation; And that it might be filled with the measure of man, according to his creation before the world was made.

Just a few months later that year, at the end of August of 1831, in Section 63, verses 13-19 and 62-63 (separated by ellipses), the LORD God, whom we recognize now as the angel with a sword, tells the prophet Joseph Smith Jr.:

Nevertheless, I give commandments, and many have turned away from my commandments and have not kept them. There were among you adulterers and adulteresses; some of whom have turned away from you, and others remain with you that hereafter shall be revealed. Let such beware and repent speedily, lest judgment shall come upon them as a snare, and their folly shall be made manifest, and their works shall follow them in the eyes of the people. And verily I say unto you, as I have said before, he that looketh on a woman to lust after her, or if any shall commit adultery in their hearts, they shall not have the Spirit, but shall deny the faith and shall fear. Wherefore, I, the Lord, have said that the fearful, and the unbelieving, and all liars, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie, and the whoremonger, and the sorcerer, shall have their part in that lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. Verily I say, that they shall not have part in the first resurrection. And now behold, I, the Lord, say unto you that ye are not justified, because these things are among you…

For behold, verily I say, that many there be who are under this condemnation, who use the name of the Lord, and use it in vain, having not authority. Wherefore, let the church repent of their sins, and I, the Lord, will own them; otherwise they shall be cut off.

Doctrine and Covenants 63:13-19, 62-63

Speaking of liars who use the name of the Lord in vain, the serpents in the Garden of Eden on the celestial side of the veil are “subtil,” because while they are the light bringers, delivering light to the mind by ascending the spine and activating the pineal gland, the white stone where light enters the body, the serpent can also lie, and tell half-truths that are very convincing, and can drag a soul down to hell. DRACO, CYGNUS, HYDRA and other serpents, even the multivalent GEMINI seraphs standing before the throne of God, are all representations of celestial snakes that have agency and offer choices. Some of these are the accusers, and another is the initiate’s true advocate. They are agents of creation out of light and chaos. They are the seraphs: some ascending and some descending, who sometimes ask Fiona Apple’s immortal question, “what would an angel say? The devil wants to know.”

Are we to believe that the same God who gave the commandments above was coercing on Joseph the “whoredoms and abominations” of “having many wives and concubines” roundly condemned in all the revelations he produced in his lifetime, because an unnamed angel with a sword commanded it? Given his command of the Bible, Joseph must surely have known the peculiar precautionary tale in Numbers 22 of an angel with a sword who was visible to Balaam’s talking ass. This angel prevented Balaam from doing wrong- a wrong so obvious that even his own dumb ass had to reprimand him for not hearing or seeing “the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand” (see Numbers 22: 22-35).

We will return to the “angel with a sword” in Mormon history folklore and its implications on Joseph Smith Jr.’s cosmology as our current investigation progresses to the end. But this project is not about Joseph Smith’s cosmology or biography. It is about the original Christian mystery that seems to have permeated all of his revelations from the beginning, whether his later alleged polygamy is finally confirmed or not. The mystery preceded the church Joseph Smith Jr. founded, and not the other way around, just as “the way” taught by Jesus superseded all the authority of the apostles. The only prophet I follow is the good shepherd that showed “the way,” as far as I understand it, and as far as it has been revealed to me. My thoughts are expressed perfectly in the Book of Mormon and are attributed to a sermon by Jacob, which says,

O then, my beloved brethren, come unto the Lord, the Holy One. Remember that his paths are righteous. Behold, the way for man is narrow, but it lieth in a straight course before him, and the keeper of the gate is the Holy One of Israel; and he employeth no servant there; and there is none other way save it be by the gate; for he cannot be deceived, for the Lord God is his name.

-2 Nephi 9:41

And so, before undertaking a sacred conversation about the seals of the body as taught by Joseph Smith Jr., I wanted to preface the subject with my defense of his legitimacy as a prophet of Jesus Christ, otherwise confusion might have crept in as the reader continually waits for the polygamy shoe to drop whenever a lion in the celestial kingdom is mentioned.

THE SEALS OF THE BODY

The kingdom of God is made of kingdoms telestial, terrestrial, and celestial. It includes everyone and everything. To teach this, temples drew correspondences between the seals of the human body and celestial constellations. To understand what Joseph meant by “sealing” people together in the kingdom of God, we have to study how he described the seals in the scriptures and letters he produced. The seals, or ordinances, of the three witnesses of the body, the temple, and the cosmos converge in Joseph’s earnest plea from the hellish confines of Liberty Jail where he and companions had been confined for several months. I will first supply the verses that recite his prayer for deliverance, and then I will provide the verses a second time, but with an explanatory narration of how they may be understood in light of the celestial ordinances we have been discussing.

O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?

How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?

Yea, O Lord, how long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?

O Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven, earth, and seas, and of all things that in them are, and who controllest and subjectest the devil, and the dark and benighted dominion of Sheol—stretch forth thy hand; let thine eye pierce; let thy pavilion be taken up; let thy hiding place no longer be covered; let thine ear be inclined; let thine heart be softened, and thy bowels moved with compassion toward us.

Let thine anger be kindled against our enemies; and, in the fury of thine heart, with thy sword avenge us of our wrongs.

-Doctrine and Covenants 121:1-5

The seals in the prayer descend from the seventh because God, in the celestial kingdom, is descending to the terrestrial world by degrees. While the initiate ascends the seven seals, God can only descend to his children in the world. And now the verses with narration:

O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?

How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?

 –How long shall thy hand be stayed: The hand is the seventh of seven seals of initiatic ascension. It represents the hand of the Father penetrating the veil to grasp the hand of the initiate and draw him or her into the celestial kingdom. It corresponds to the ordinance of the LEO constellation, where the Father sits enthroned in the kingdom of glory. In Roman Mithraism, when the Father, Pater, reached out, it was a lion’s paw that penetrated the veil. The highest degree of revelation of God is his fulness, which means to be received by Him. To feel his touch. To be embraced. To be taken by the hand. The seventh seal also corresponds to the crown of the head, as LEO wears a crown, and the sun crowns the head of the lion with glory. This is why hands are laid on the head to commission a patriarchal blessing. The seventh seal further corresponds to the mind. 

–and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold…: The pure eye is the sixth of seven seals. It is the seal, or ordinance of vision. It is to have one’s eyes opened. It is to see the Lord for oneself. It is also the pineal gland- the third eye. It is where light enters the body. It is the seal of the CANCER constellation, the Queen of Heaven. It is the shape of the vesica pisces, or the almond, from which all living things flow.

-and thine ear be penetrated with their cries…: The ears and mouth are the fifth of seven seals, representing the seal of revelation pertaining to hearing or speaking the Word of the Lord. The sixth seal of vision is an exponentially higher degree of revelation than the fifth, and the seventh seal of being brought into God’s presence is exponentially higher still. The fifth seal, or ordinance is the GEMINI constellation, the pair of olive tree witnesses standing in the veil on the celestial side of the tree of life.

Yea, O Lord, how long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?

-before thine heart shall be softened toward them…: The heart is the fourth of seven seals. It corresponds to the constellation TAURUS. As we will study more deeply below, the Lord requires a soft heart in order that it might be deeply penetrated. While the previous three seals, or ordinances, are celestial, or on the celestial side of the veil, TAURUS is the first of the terrestrial, or earthly seals, and represents the terrestrial kingdom on the whole. It is vivified by the lifeblood of living things. 

-and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them..: The bowels are the third seal or ordinance of the front of the body. It is easy to underestimate the symbolic importance of the bowels to ancient temple worship. As the breadbasket of the world Egypt was represented by the bowels, with its black, fertile earth and the processing of dung in the manufacture of fertilizer to sustain the world. The bowels were the seat of the indispensable virtue of compassion and health in the bowels issued through the whole body. The astronomical ordinance corresponding to the bowels is ARIES.    

O Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven (celestial kingdom), earth (terrestrial kingdom), and seas (telestial kingdom), and of all things that in them are, and who controllest and subjectest the devil, and the dark and benighted dominion of Sheol—stretch forth thy hand (7^th seal); let thine eye (6^th seal) pierce; let thy pavilion be taken up; let thy hiding place no longer be covered; let thine ear (5^th seal) be inclined; let thine heart (4^th seal) be softened, and thy bowels (3^rd seal) be moved with compassion toward us.

Let thine anger be kindled against our enemies; and, in the fury of thine heart, with thy sword avenge us of our wrongs.

-with thy sword avenge us of our wrongs: The sword is ORION’s sword. This means that the speaker, the Lord, is represented by the ORION constellation, in exactly the way the LORD God was conceptualized to the ancients who wrote the books of the Bible. The giveaway that we had been talking about the ORION constellation all along was first supplied in the clue “stretch forth thy hand,” which is typically a reference to ORION’s outstretched hand as will also be demonstrated below. ORION’s outstretched hand is multivalent. It may be raised in battle, or raised as if a fractal, to resemble the tree of life that rises behind him, but once he has ascended to the Father’s throne in LEO, the outstretched hand is stretched through the veil to pull the initiate into the celestial kingdom.

While it is polite to think of ORION’s sword as being sheathed at his side, his sword is actually between his legs and is a phallic reference. The second seal is the loins, or PISCES. PISCES, or the vesica pisces shape created between two circles in the process of cellular division, can fruitfully be compared to the feminine matrix. Additionally, fish and serpents are symbolically interchangeable for human genitalia, especially when the serpent motif represents male sexuality. Moreover, the Orion Nebula, among the most prolific nurseries of stars in the whole visible galaxy, is precisely in the starry region of ORION’s loins. It is critical to recognize here that PISCES also represents the initiate in the womb of the mother, which is to say that the seal of PISCES is the unborn fetus in utero. Therefore, PISCES is the seal representing all aspects of human reproduction. As such, the identity of the archetypal sacrifice of the outgoing age may be represented by the abortion of billions of little fishes.

In these few verses of Joseph Smith’s Liberty Jail prayer, which is an introduction to a letter to the Saints, we are offered a rich discourse on his prophetic cosmology. Later in the same letter, Joseph describes that the time will soon come when none of these mysteries will be withheld and all will be revealed. Later verses in the same Section describe what exactly to expect when the veil of revelation is lifted. To explore behind that veil by learning Joseph’s language, which is above all things, Biblical, is the purpose of this investigation:

God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the world was until now;

Which our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectation to be revealed in the last times, which their minds were pointed to by the angels, as held in reserve for the fulness of their glory;

A time to come in the which nothing shall be withheld, whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest.

All thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, shall be revealed and set forth upon all who have endured valiantly for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And also, if there be bounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars—

All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their glories, laws, and set times, shall be revealed in the days of the dispensation of the fulness of times—

According to that which was ordained in the midst of the Council of the Eternal God of all other gods before this world was, that should be reserved unto the finishing and the end thereof, when every man shall enter into his eternal presence and into his immortal rest.

-Doctrine and Covenants 121:26-32

The ascending ordinances of revelation, beginning with a broken heart (4^th seal), and then hearing the voice of the Lord (5^th seal), and then seeing the Lord in vision (6^th seal), and ultimately being received into the presence of the Lord and touching his body (7^th seal), are nowhere more beautifully demonstrated than in 3 Nephi of the Book of Mormon. In this, the hinge point of the entire scriptural narrative, the risen Christ has come to the Americas to visit his other sheep following a series of cataclysms that occurred with his Crucifixion in Jerusalem. In the narrative that follows we note the mention of the bitter cup, the constellation CRATER. As the passage progresses we will ascend the seals as they did in former times, as the broken-hearted survivors of the catastrophes receive the revelation of God seal by seal.

And now it came to pass that there were a great multitude gathered together, of the people of Nephi, round about the temple which was in the land Bountiful; and they were marveling and wondering one with another, and were showing one to another the great and marvelous change which had taken place.

And they were also conversing about this Jesus Christ, of whom the sign had been given concerning his death.

And it came to pass that while they were thus conversing one with another, they heard a voice as if it came out of heaven; and they cast their eyes round about, for they understood not the voice which they heard; and it was not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice; nevertheless, and notwithstanding it being a small voice it did pierce them that did hear to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake; yea, it did pierce them to the very soul, and did cause their hearts (4^th seal) to burn.

And it came to pass that again they heard the voice, and they understood it not.

And again the third time they did hear the voice, and did open their ears (5^th seal) to hear it; and their eyes (6^th seal) were towards the sound thereof; and they did look steadfastly towards heaven, from whence the sound came.

And behold, the third time they did understand the voice which they heard; and it said unto them:

Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him.

And it came to pass, as they understood they cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they saw a Man descending out of heaven; and he was clothed in a white robe; and he came down and stood in the midst of them; and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him, and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another, and wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.

And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying:

Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world.

And behold, I am the light and the life of the world; and I have drunk out of that bitter cup which the Father hath given me, and have glorified the Father in taking upon me the sins of the world, in the which I have suffered the will of the Father in all things from the beginning.

And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words the whole multitude fell to the earth; for they remembered that it had been prophesied among them that Christ should show himself unto them after his ascension into heaven.

And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto them saying:

Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world.

And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel (7th seal) the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes (6^th seal) and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record (5^th seal) that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come.

And when they had all gone forth and had witnessed for themselves, they did cry out with one accord, saying:

Hosanna! Blessed be the name of the Most High God! And they did fall down at the feet of Jesus, and did worship him.

               -3 Nephi 11:1-17, parenthesis added.

BAPTISMS FOR THE DEAD IN THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD

Let’s consider the temple practice of baptisms for the dead, which is particularly instructive of the astronomical ordinances we have been describing. Since the greatest antiquity, temples were thought to be the “navel of the world.” Temples are designed to connect the three worlds, namely,

1) the water-covered underworld, or the telestial kingdom (the kingdom to which the sun cannot directly administer because it is night, or under water),

2) the earth, or terrestrial kingdom, and

3) heaven, or celestial kingdom.

One should imagine an umbilical cord running through and connecting the three worlds. The site of that connection, the navel, is the baptismal font, because it symbolizes the connection to the Mother Tree. The MILKY WAY is a tree of life that reaches into heaven and vaults across the sky, while its roots turn into rivers, and seas, overflowing the world of the dead.

The font is set up below ground level so that when the initiate is immersed in the water, she is ritualistically buried in the ground, or she becomes a momentary traveler in the underworld. The baptismal font sits on the back of twelve oxen. As we have said, the oxen represent the terrestrial world on the whole. The twelve oxen represent the twelve tribes of Israel, yes, but that is too limiting. At a more correct level, they represent the twelve kingdoms of the zodiac. The sun (Sol) traverses each of these houses, mansions, or kingdoms daily, providing its influence during every hour, much as it systematically governs each month of the year and presides over the various kingdoms of the zodiac in succession. The following long quote begins with recognizing the light of Christ as symbolically dispensed through the sun, and then the quote commences to acknowledge the sun’s administrations in each of the twelve zodiacal kingdoms, which is to say, all the kingdoms of earth and through all time:

The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun (Sol) giveth his light by day, and the moon (Luna) giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in their glory, in the midst of the power of God.

Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms, that ye may understand?

Behold, all these are kingdoms, and any man who hath seen any or the least of these hath seen God moving in his majesty and power.

I say unto you, he hath seen him; nevertheless, he who came unto his own was not comprehended.

The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not (telestial kingdom-nighttime), nevertheless, the day shall come when you shall comprehend even God, being quickened in him and by him.

Then shall ye know that ye have seen me, that I am, and that I am the true light that is in you, and that you are in me; otherwise ye could not abound.

Behold, I will liken these kingdoms unto a man having a field, and he sent forth his servants into the field to dig in the field (the terrestrial world represented on the whole by TAURUS, the cattle or oxen).

And he said unto the first: Go ye and labor in the field, and in the first hour I will come unto you, and ye shall behold the joy of my countenance.

And he said unto the second: Go ye also into the field, and in the second hour I will visit you with the joy of my countenance.

And also unto the third, saying: I will visit you;

And unto the fourth, and so on unto the twelfth.

And the lord of the field went unto the first in the first hour (CAPRICORN), and tarried with him all that hour, and he was made glad with the light of the countenance of his lord.

And then he withdrew from the first that he might visit the second (SAGITTARIUS) also, and the third (SCORPIO), and the fourth (LIBRA), and so on unto the twelfth (AQUARIUS).

And thus they all received the light of the countenance of their lord, every man in his hour, and in his time, and in his season—

Beginning at the first (CAPRICORN), and so on unto the last (AQUARIUS), and from the last unto the first, and from the first unto the last;

Every man in his own order, until his hour was finished, even according as his lord had commanded him, that his lord might be glorified in him, and he in his lord, that they all might be glorified.

Therefore, unto this parable I will liken all these kingdoms, and the inhabitants thereof—every kingdom in its hour, and in its time, and in its season, even according to the decree which God hath made.

And again, verily I say unto you, my friends, I leave these sayings with you to ponder in your hearts, with this commandment which I give unto you, that ye shall call upon me while I am near.

-Doctrine and Covenants 88:45-62, parenthesis added.

The coming of this Sun to his kingdom is nowhere plainer and more glorious than in the culminating verses of the New Testament itself, when Christ comes to AQUARIUS, the last of the twelve kingdoms of this Great Age. The verses in Revelation begin with mention of “the throne of God and of the Lamb,” which is the celestial kingdom ruled over by the constellation LEO, who has been joined by the nearby constellation of LEO MINOR, or the Lamb. Then notice how CANCER, the MILKY WAY of Asherah, the Great Mother Tree, is referred to as “a pure river of water of life,” “the street,” and “the tree of life who bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month (the zodiac),”

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:

And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.

And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.

-Revelation 22:1-5

The mixed metaphor, or multivalent nature, of the MILKY WAY Tree of Life dividing the celestial and terrestrial kingdoms as if by a veil, or a river, or a tree, a highway, a fountain, or a column, is made even more evident later on in the same Section 88 mentioned above, “they also shall be caught up to meet him in the midst of the pillar of heaven- They are Christ’s, the first fruits” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:97,98).

We recall that ORION, the Good Shepherd, stands at the veil with his right arm raised. His raised arm is in similitude of the MILKY WAY rising behind and above him.  Because the baptism is being performed for the dead in a temple font, or MILKY WAY fountain, the baptizer is ORION, with upraised arm, standing in the veil or the MILKY WAY River Jordan while the constellation GEMINI, the two olive tree witnesses mentioned above, bear witness of the ordinance from the heavenly side of the veil. If the ordinance were performed to mirror the ordinances of heaven on earth even more exactly, the pair of GEMINI witnesses would be standing with water up to their shins in the baptismal font with ORION and the initiate.

We speculate that if there is a corresponding temple in the celestial kingdom at the other end of the umbilical cord, the celestial font does not rest on the backs of oxen, but on the backs of lions.

FIRST FISHERS AND THEN HUNTERS

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond to outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether ORION is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

               –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

For half the year ORION never ascends above the horizon. When he finally appears, he is lying down. As the nighttime advances, ORION seems to stand up and then walk across the sky toward the southwest. Because ORION is so life-like, he can be imagined as a high priest moving around the sky from ordinance to ordinance, or as the good shepherd tending sheep on the pastures of earth, even though his position is fixed forever next to the constellation TAURUS, just to the right of the MILKY WAY fountain.

One might wonder why up to now I have neglected to state the obvious- that ORION is also the archetypal hunter:

 And after him I marked huge ORION driving together over the field of asphodel wild beasts which he himself had slain on the holy hills.

–Homer, Odyssey, Book 11

When it comes to the subject of temple theology, most of us will be more accustomed to thinking of the Lord as the high priest and we will be much less likely to imagine him as a hunter.

For millennia upon millennia, ORION hunted on the terrestrial plains of earth with a weapon in his upraised hand. He holds a club, or a mace in the case of the Pharaohs, or with stones collected from the nearby Brook Kidron, the weapon of ORION is David’s slingshot, expertly flung in his confrontation of Goliath, the giant headless constellation known to us as HERCULES. In the story, David takes five stones from the brook. One of them, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and called the “eye in the sky” in several cultures, is hurled at Goliath and strikes him, very ironically, in the forehead, an injury resulting in his death. In the following scene, the victorious David crosses the brook and proceeds to decapitate Goliath with his sword, and this is how Goliath, or HERCULES, the most giant of the constellations of a man in the whole cosmos, appears forever after without a head. Even more than these, ORION is the angel with a sword, although the sword, like all the other constellations, is multivalent. When ORION is recognized as Jesus Christ, the sword is synonymous with the Word itself:

And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

-Revelation 1:16

And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand hath he hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in his quiver hath he hid me.

-Isaiah 49:2

Isaiah’s version of the hunter just cited, has ORION holding a bow in his left hand, angled toward the beasts of the field. He is the ultimate action figure, not just the archetype of the temple high priest or priestess. For millennia, ORION was depicted as wrestling TAURUS, the bull of creation. ORION overcame and then made a sacrifice of the bull, which brought life into the world when every plant and animal spilled from the sacrificial wound at the bull’s neck to begin the age of TAURUS.

TAURUS is synonymous with agriculture, especially grain. While pulling the ploughshare behind him, TAURUS turns up soft soil to create a suitable bed for seeds and kernels of every type of grain. ORION’s sword is beaten into a ploughshare when the angel with a sword goes from hunter to farmer. The ordinance of TAURUS is associated with the bodily seal of the heart, and so a soft heart is like the soft rich soil he has upturned. Whether by sword or ploughshare, when ORION plunges his blade into TAURUS, the ensuing bounty is the result of his implement cutting deep into the earth, just as the word of God penetrates a soft heart. This is essentially the message of the Mithraic tauroctony found all over the Apotheosis Scroll.

On a theological level, the tauroctony scene is a riddle hearkening deep into religious tradition, and substantiates that the seal of the heart, which vivifies the life blood of the body, is where the sacrifice is actuated in the initiate.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness. O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise. For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

-Psalm 51:10-17

The crown of the head, the intellect, is the seventh seal of LEO in the celestial kingdom, and the heart is the fourth seal of TAURUS, which is the terrestrial kingdom, or the earth, and not just earth in the agricultural sense, but the whole earth- the rock or the stone upon which we live. If the earth is hard, like a hardened heart, ORION’s implement cannot easily penetrate it.

The tension between ORION and TAURUS served as a central agricultural motif for millennia, exemplifying the ancient paradigm of human dominion over nature. In an elevated transformation of this motif, the tauroctony illustrates how the heart could beneficially overshadow the mind, as the moon, TAURUS, eclipses the sun, LEO.

Let us now consider the tauroctony, as described in Hebrews with this in mind.

To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts…

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

-Hebrews 4:7,12

Here the Lord is calling on his disciples to have a soft, not a stony heart. Only a soft heart can receive the word/sword. A soft heart allows the word/sword to sink all the way in. Alma, in the Book of Mormon elaborates on these verses more completely than any other scriptural source I know.

It is given unto many to know the mysteries of God; nevertheless they are laid under a strict command that they shall not impart only according to the portion of his word which he doth grant unto the children of men, according to the heed and diligence which they give unto him.

And therefore, he that will harden his heart, the same receiveth the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full.

And they that will harden their hearts, to them is given the lesser portion of the word until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and then they are taken captive by the devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of hell.

               -Alma 12:9-11, emphasis added.

See also in the Book of Mormon the admonition of Christ to his other sheep on the American continent:

Yea, verily I say unto you, if ye will come unto me ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me.

Behold, I am Jesus Christ the Son of God. I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are. I was with the Father from the beginning. I am in the Father, and the Father in me; and in me hath the Father glorified his name.

I came unto my own, and my own received me not. And the scriptures concerning my coming are fulfilled.

And as many as have received me, to them have I given to become the sons of God; and even so will I to as many as shall believe on my name, for behold, by me redemption cometh, and in me is the law of Moses fulfilled.

I am the light and the life of the world. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

And ye shall offer up unto me no more the shedding of blood; yea, your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away, for I will accept none of your sacrifices and your burnt offerings.

And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost…

               -3 Nephi 9:14-20

It wasn’t until early in the first millennium AD that the agricultural worldview came to be viewed as backwards, and dismissed as pagan, a whole new concept promulgated by the Neoplatonist Christian church several centuries after Jesus. The effectiveness of the establishment’s anti-pagan smear campaign has been nearly total. But the evidence of pagan contribution to Judaism and Christian discipleship is more than an unwanted pollution in the Biblical record, it is as fundamental and essential as any other voice.

Up to now in this investigation, my ORION, my angel with a sword, has avoided violence, having left his sword behind in the terrestrial world to perform the work of the LORD God Gardener of Eden, or to ascend as Jesus of Nazareth through the veil into the celestial kingdom. In the age of PISCES, ORION is more like a mountain man than a soft-handed mystic teacher. He arrives on the scene only momentarily at first, and as a fisherman. Jesus said, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men” (-Matthew 4:19).

But when he returns, and this time to stay, he is the hunter again and he has returned for his sword. Because ORION is always the celestial twin of the terrestrial initiate, these signs, the fisherman and the hunter, will be evident in Christ’s disciples in the age of PISCES, and ancient Hebrew prophets had already forecast it.

Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.

-Jeremiah 16:16

Perhaps when we imagine ascending onto the mountain of the Lord, we should be seeking, not an invisible God in a burning bush, but a trapper wearing otter pelts and a coon skin cap. This pair of signs commences with fishermen opening the age of PISCES. After his arrival and crucifixion, the sign of his second coming was immediately canonized in the Roman Mithraic tauroctony scene. The tauroctony is the ultimate depiction of the second coming of Christ.

The temporary pole star of Christ’s nativity is named Bethlehem and indicates the short window of time from his birth through his mortal life and ministry, but our pole star, Polaris has everything to do with Christ’s second coming to PISCES. The administration of Polaris began about 500 years into the age of PISCES and has continued for its duration. The administration of Polaris as the pole star will continue for another 900 years into the age of AQUARIUS after peaking in 2100 AD. Therefore, the reign of Polaris will last about 2,500 years. While the first pole star signifying Christ in PISCES was in the womb of the CELESTIAL POLE COW, the second, Polaris, is squarely on her back. In the tauroctony scene, heaven has come down to meet earth and LEO, the sun, has been eclipsed by TAURUS, the moon. The Akkadian/Syrian god of the moon was represented by the bull who wore a crescent moon crown, an object of cult worship undoubtably established in the age of TAURUS. This god was named Sin. In an inverted transfiguration, or turning inside-out of the Celestial Pole Cow, the Great Mother of the cosmos has been transfigured into the Syrian bull, a suitable sacrifice, who is pierced in the shoulder with his sword, the nail in the most sure place, fixed there by Mithras who has conquered Sin or “overcome the world.” While the star story in Genesis is the Do-Re-Mi of gospel astronomy, the Mithraic tauroctony is the symphony for which the Do-Re-Mi was conceived.

Where in his first coming, Christ’s presence was momentary and vulnerable to abortion, in his second coming Christ is in command. It is in the second coming, and not the first that Christ subdues everything under him and reigns as the Prince of Peace. Paradoxically, the angel with the sword is the Prince of Peace. This is the mystery and the riddle, and many of Jesus’s followers have not understood it. We must remember that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. His subduing it, or his overcoming sin and the world, is like all the constellations in the mountain of the cosmos lying down peaceably together as described in a previous section when Isaiah was quoted to have said in chapter 11 that “righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

Any other kingdom, even if it calls itself after Christ, is a kingdom of the world. Around the year 500, when the Roman church was solidifying its dominion over its vast territories, the underground reign of Jesus Christ was being seeded in the wilderness and planted in the hearts of disciples. To experience Jesus Christ in his second coming in the form of the pole star Polaris is to receive the administration of the Second Comforter, not necessarily the sacraments of the governmental church.

In comparison to Judeo-Christianity, the violence of pagan sacraments may seem like the capricious demands of bronze age gods to some of us today, and far beneath the sanctity of our holier communion, for it seems sometimes that Christianity has become anaesthetized to the utter violence of its central sacrificial motif. We disciples of Christ understand that we are not celebrating the violence, the horror, and the brutality of the Crucifixion, where a man, only one among many thousands, was brutally de-fleshed by whips and meat-shredding barbs and then hung up on a dead tree to die as cruelly as humanly possible. As we have seen, the mode of death was symbolic and full of deeply poetic synchronicity with the grandest conceptualizations in the universe. But even without knowledge of the cosmological synchronicity the Crucifixion embodies, somehow the Passion of the Christ has stirred the human heart to some of its noblest imaginations, which includes, if I have to say it, eating the flesh and drinking the blood that fell from above into the profane dust of Calvary.

The Crucifixion is the ultimate paradox. The contradictions- the impossible dreadfulness, the exquisite sanctity that has burned in the heart of billions of Christian disciples for millennia, is only one step removed from the ancient dynamic tension between ORION and TAURUS captured in recognizably pagan rites. We understand the cross, but we cannot fathom the unfamiliar Roman tauroctony scene of a man killing a bull he straddles. One of these we are used to, and the other is out of this world, but I think the Roman Mithraic tauroctony scene is the original depiction of the atonement and apotheosis of Jesus Christ. It is essential to understand that the Mithraic tauroctony scene is not the ancient scene of ORION slitting the throat of a sacrificial bull. It assumes familiarity with this anciently ubiquitous motif, and transubstantiates it into something quite different, and deeper, just as a man nailed to a cross is made holy when it is Jesus who is fastened there. Pointedly, the sword is being driven into the bull’s shoulder, a sacrilege of total incompetence if a typical sacrifice was intended. This absurdity tells us that what we are seeing is a riddle, not a practice. The riddle is astronomical, the details of which will be discussed in the next section.

THE MITHRAIC TAUROCTONY

Before proceeding, I want to remind you, dear listener, of what I think I am doing and what I am not trying to do. My religion, which is sincere, isn’t dependent on the historicity of the gospel narrative. I am an artist, not even a famous one, trying with words to convey what I have preferred to express in art within the Apotheosis Scroll. While making the Scroll I was thinking and feeling out loud, and trying to remain a believer. On Sunday evenings for almost three years, I was scribbling the earliest diagrams of the astronomy, zodiac, and seals of the body on the chalkboard of the Relief Society room while teaching these things to a group of really smart church women, and although several years have passed since then, the basics were always there. Because I have an artist’s imagination, I have been able to conceptualize things about religion and the cosmos that have informed my worship of Jesus Christ in some unorthodox and unique, but hopefully useful ways.

I think people in the first several centuries AD saw religion differently than we practice it in Christian churches today. Citing primary sources from the second, third, or fourth centuries doesn’t speak for the ancient worldview of an individual believer and doesn’t prove or disprove the value and sincerity of Christian discipleship. Despite this, I recommend reading every book and peer-reviewed article about Mithraism that you can get your hands on. Currently, my favorite scholar on the subject of primitive Christianity is C. J. Cornthwaite, while my favorite scholar on the subject of Mithraism is the late Roger Beck, but neither of these are the source of my understanding. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s doctoral thesis on the subject of Mithraism is very interesting. My least favorite scholar of Mithraism is David Ulansey. But that is beside the point. My primary attention is not in academia, but on the art.

I think early Christians were part pagan, part Jewish, part Persian, and other parts other things, and largely just trying to find enough work to have a little more than their daily bread. They didn’t see religion the way we moderns do today and there simply was no formal Church with priesthood offices and programs of correlated teachings. A restored primitive church of Jesus Christ would be populated by people with wildly different religious experience and there would be no consensus about the Resurrection or what sort of being Jesus is and how his atonement was accomplished. The point of their gathering was not necessarily to agree on these things, but to love one another and to look after the poorest among them.

On top of this, the latter-day Saint Restoration movement isn’t just one church but hundreds, and more people have left the largest of the Mormon churches after baptism than attend it. There is no consensus about what Mormonism’s founding Prophet taught or which of his scriptures are genuine revelations. No one knows exactly how they were received and there is doubt as to whether they were recorded correctly. I think this puts modern Latter-day Saints and ancient Christians in a similar situation, and many of us say it is worthwhile regardless.

Hereafter I will continue to say things I have never heard in Sunday School, and for which there is currently no scholarship. The translation of the tauroctony scene is my own. I don’t have scholars to cite or credit with this interpretation because none of them have gone to the scriptures I have to decode it, because Mithraism is thought to be a rival of Christianity, not an expression of it. This is my vision, and maybe it will open up the scriptures to you the way it has opened up the scriptures to me. I think the mystery of Mithras contributed to the Christian canon and it was known colloquially as “the mysteries of godliness.” Do I think Mithraism as understood today is how mainstream Christianity was practiced in its first few centuries? No. Not at all. Nor do I think the majority of primitive Christian disciples were even aware of or formally initiated in Mithraic rites. What I can say with confidence is that the Mithraic mystery was encoded in the Gospels by whomever wrote and transmitted them, which includes contributions from some element of the Roman government itself. This need not have a negative impact on faith in God. Maybe my vision of the Roman mystery’s contribution to the scriptures will increase your faith in God the way it has increased my faith in God, a God that can only be expressed in billions of ways, and cannot be confined to one ideology. I think with my heart that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of that God. And, actually, so are we. 

The tauroctony is a sculpture that was repeated with exacting detail from mithraeum (temple) to mithraeum. The sculpture was situated in the frontal portion of the temple. If participants in the Roman mystery couldn’t afford a sculpture of the tauroctony, a fresco of the same scene was painted on the front wall. The mithraea, were quite small and meant to feel cavernous, or cave-like. They seated 24 elders along a bench running up the two sides.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

-Revelation 4:4

There was a pool for baptisms and if possible, like their Zoroastrian mother temples, the mithraea were situated along a live stream or river with fresh running water. Because the mithraea were meant to be a replica of the northern celestial hemisphere, the ceilings were painted with the constellations. The Mithraic tauroctony contains all the mysteries of godliness.

In the Mithraic tauroctony, ORION straddles TAURUS, having run him down until TAURUS was exhausted. In Roman Mithraism, as in Christianity, the ORION figure is a terrestrial representation of the sun God. In the Vedic tradition, possibly as old as 2,000 years BC, this figure was Mithra. Romanized, his name is Mithras, which roughly translated means “covenant maker and friend,” a name that might be familiar to some in the Restoration as the self-designation of the voice of the revelations to the Prophet Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants, such as-

…I will call you friends, for you are my friends, and ye shall have an inheritance with me—

-Doctrine and Covenants 93:45

Verily I say unto you my friends, fear not… for your prayers have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord hath sworn and decreed that they shall be granted. Therefore, he giveth this promise unto you, with an immutable covenant that they shall be fulfilled; and all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory, saith the Lord.

–Doctrine and Covenants 98:1-3

Both Mithras’ and the bull’s body face to the right. Every time. This will matter later, because of the correspondence to the right hemisphere of the brain the tauroctony scene encodes. Mithras, a young man who is clad head to ankles in red horse-riding gear, is an analog for the ascended ORION. Stylized as a Phrygian youth, Mithras has overcome the bull, TAURUS, who is pure white and whose legs are splayed beneath him. Perplexingly, a black scorpion is busy about the bull’s scrotum. The bull’s right front leg is bent at the knee, but the rest of the bull’s legs are straight out at the angle of the ecliptic to the equator, and the bull’s tail, pointing toward the left, ends in ears of wheat. Mithras sits squarely on the bull’s back, while with his left hand he has pried the head of the bull to face upward. Mithras’ right foot is exactly over the bull’s right rear leg, touching down in the seven o’clock position of CAPRICORN, while his left is crossed upon the bull’s back, reminiscent of Lord Shiva’s dance, the Ananda Tandava, within the circle of fire. The pose suggests that Mithras shares the typology of ORION with Shiva inthe cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction. Gruesomely to the modern viewer, but in this critical context of destruction that brings about creation, Mithras has plunged his sword all the way to the hilt in the bull’s shoulder. A serpent ascending from the water-covered telestial kingdom below is angling toward the wound.

Historians call this a bull sacrifice, but the sword in the shoulder tells us otherwise. Our familiarity with the north celestial pole in the shoulder of the CELESTIAL POLE COW and Mithras sitting squarely on her back should arouse our understanding and inform our interpretation of Mithras and the bull. No self-respecting pagan in ancient times would ever kill an animal by plunging a sword into the joints and marrow of the victim’s shoulder. What we are looking at is an astronomical riddle hearkening all the way back to Genesis and looking forward all the way to the birth and then the second coming of Christ. We established above that TAURUS is the terrestrial kingdom. TAURUS is the pasture of earth. As indicated by the pure white coloration of TAURUS and his tail made of wheat heads in the constellation VIRGO where the star Spica is setting, “the field is white, already to harvest.” The sickle of LEO, an asterism expressed in the mane curving around the back of LEO’s head and down the front of his chest, is the farm implement used to cut the wheat of the TAURUS harvest.

In Mithraism, Mithras and Sol share a feast on the sacrificed bull of creation, hearkening back to the practice of bull sacrifice in the cult of Mithra in the age of TAURUS, for which Roman Mithraism is named by modern researchers. This feast is commemorated in sculpture and paintings in the mithraea. And yet, no bovine bones have ever been found in association with their archaeological excavations, because the hearkening back and acknowledging ancestral wisdom, is not the sum total of the meaning of the new rite. Unlike the Imperial cult of the Roman empire, which is easily confused with Roman Mithraism because of its official endorsement, bull sacrifice appears only to have been referred to symbolically. It can’t be said that feasts on sacrificed bulls never happened in Mithraic ceremonies over the cult’s 500-year history, but we do have corroboration for the weekly sacraments, which consisted of partaking of bread, for the harvest, eaten in remembrance of the body of God, and water or wine drunk in remembrance of the blood of the God shed for the remission of sins.

A strong parallel here to the Christian sacrament, where bread and wine represent the body and blood of the Savior is obvious. Just as men aren’t crucified weekly to supply the communion to the initiates in Catholic and other Christian churches, neither was a bull sacrificed every Sunday to supply the ritual Mithraic feast. The sacrifice is in remembrance of the God and meant to cause an ontological feeding of the spirit of the initiate on the essence of the God.

And this food is called among us Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, said, “This do in remembrance of Me, this is My body;” and that, after the same manner, having taken up and given thanks, He said, “This is My blood;” and gave it to them alone. Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology- Of the Eucharist, 155 AD

In Roman Mithraism, Mithras is the celestial twin of the physical sun, Sol. So, their communion of feasting together is meant to symbolize their mutual recognition, just as the initiate is meant to recognize his celestial counterpart in the ORION constellation, and commune with his counterpart as if with a feast.

Now that we have previously considered the symbolism of the word/sword and its penetration deep into the heart/stone, represented by the sword plunged all the way to the hilt into TAURUS, let’s take a closer look at Hebrews 7:12-

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

The verse is talking about the paradox of thinking with one’s heart. This is an astronomical allusion to the total solar eclipse, where the moon completely overshadows the sun, or when compassion completely overshadows the merely rational mind. Such an event causes an ontological change in the being at the terrestrial level, and in the case of the celestial, the total solar eclipse portends a new paradigm in the world. This overshadowing, or the conforming of the mind to the heart, is what is represented in Mithras pulling the head of TAURUS upward to conform TAURUS into the exact outline of LEO so that the moon can directly overlay the sun to cause the eclipse. The tauroctony scene, then, is metaphysical, and not literal. It is an image of the conception of the cosmos translated into a liturgy in sculpture.  

The black scorpion, then, is obviously SCORPIO. In alchemy, which was called the Great Work, or Magnum Opus by its practitioners, SCORPIO is the symbol for the first stage of chemical reactions, which is separation of the elements by burning, or dissolution. Because of the black carbon produced, this stage is called Nigredo. What is being depicted is the separation of ammonia in the bull’s urea from water to help in the manufacture of fertilizer, a critical component in the production of the Bread of Life.

The Great Work has very ancient origins and it is about the transubstantiation of things. It just means “chemistry.” Softening a heart to allow the Word to sink all the way in is a kind of alchemy. So is the Eucharist, or Sacrament of bread and water, where the bread and water are transubstantiated, if only in the imagination, into the body and blood of the Savior. I believe that symbolic alchemy has roots in actual industrial chemistry as practiced by the Egyptians and other ancient peoples. The first stage of symbolic industrial chemistry is Nigredo, represented by SCORPIO in the tauroctony. The second stage is Albedo, the whitening, which is the digestion chamber and is represented by TAURUS because cattle have a highly complex, four-chambered stomach which allows them to digest tough plant fibers through fermentation, or biological chemistry. The final stage is Rubedo, or the reddening, or the reaction chamber, known to the Medieval alchemists as the final transcendence, and is represented by Mithras clothed head to ankles in red horse-riding gear.

I subscribe to independent researcher Geoffrey Drumm’s Egyptian Pyramid Chemical Plant hypothesis. The reason I subscribe to it is when I heard his description of the various stages of chemical reactions that occurred in certain chambers of Egyptian pyramids, I could see the Mithraic tauroctony as a preservation of Egyptian industrial knowledge employed in the production of agricultural fertilizer produced from bovine manure as a primary component in the production cycle of the Bread of Life. This is significant because, where in our time, industry is divorced from religion, in ancient times everything in the mundane subsistence life was given meaning, so that whether one was walking in the dust of the furrowed field behind smelly cattle, or gathering manure into carts and hauling it to the temple to be burned for its methane, these unglamorous and toilsome tasks were transfigured into acts of religious piety and devotion and accepted as sacrifices to a transcendent God. In my mind this is the essence of paganism, or agriculturalism, preserved in Christian discipleship, and highlights what was lost in the Platonist revolution that completely remodeled Christianity into the worship of a being completely unlike the rest of us, and accessed only through the authority of a priesthood class.   

Returning to my astronomical analysis of the Mithraic tauroctony, the bull’s head has been pulled up to conform his splayed body into the shape of the constellation LEO, so that TAURUS, so conformed, is hiding LEO exactly in its shadow. The celestial kingdom and the terrestrial kingdom, or spirit and matter respectively, have been combined by overlapping their primary zodiacal ordinances in exactly the way the moon passes in front of the sun to produce a total solar eclipse. HYDRA, seeing the opportunity to enter into the world through the opening the sword has made, is angling for the eye-shaped wound, just as HYDRA attacked Eve in the Garden of Eden. But in this scene, the telestial kingdom is becoming celestialized by the condescension of Mithras and the awakening of the pineal gland in the cavern of the initiate’s mind, as we will focus on in the next section.

Mithras, the Phrygian youth clad head-to-ankles in red riding gear has subsumed in him all the ordinances of heaven as Isaiah prophesied he would. “And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins” (Isaiah 11:5). His navel has become the level line of the cosmos. The head of TAURUS is at his left breast, and on his right the wheat of the heavenly VIRGO rises perpendicular to the ground. The tauroctony scene has become an analog for ORION’s garment, displaying the level, compass, and square of the master temple builder. The right front leg of TAURUS, which is well below the level line of the cosmos, or in the underworld, is bent at the knee where the path of the ecliptic crosses below the equatorial line in the constellation PISCES.

And again, we saw the glory of the telestial, which glory is that of the lesser, even as the glory of the stars differs from that of the glory of the moon in the firmament.

These are they who received not the gospel of Christ, neither the testimony of Jesus (the sun cannot administer directly to the telestial kingdom because it is night).

But behold, and lo, we saw the glory and the inhabitants of the telestial world, that they were as innumerable as the stars in the firmament of heaven, or as the sand upon the seashore;

And heard the voice of the Lord saying: These all shall bow the knee, and every tongue shall confess to him who sits upon the throne forever and ever;

-Doctrine and Covenants 76:81-82, 109-110, parenthesis and emphasis added.

In any church foyer there are beautiful paintings of Jesus coming in the clouds surrounded by numberless concourses of angels. 2,000 years ago, the second coming of Christ was rendered differently. So differently that few have ever considered the Mithraic tauroctony as that scene, unless perhaps this is what Joseph Smith envisioned when in the very early days of his Restoration project, in November of 1831, he “inquired of the Lord and received the following important revelation:”  

And it shall be said: Who is this that cometh down from God in heaven with dyed garments; yea, from the regions which are not known, clothed in his glorious apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength?

And he shall say: I am he who spake in righteousness, mighty to save.

And the Lord shall be red in his apparel, and his garments like him that treadeth in the wine-vat.

And so great shall be the glory of his presence that the sun shall hide his face in shame, and the moon shall withhold its light, and the stars shall be hurled from their places…

And for this cause, that men might be made partakers of the glories which were to be revealed, the Lord sent forth the fulness of his gospel, his everlasting covenant, reasoning in plainness and simplicity—

To prepare the weak for those things which are coming on the earth, and for the Lord’s errand in the day when the weak shall confound the wise, and the little one become a strong nation, and two shall put their tens of thousands to flight.

And by the weak things of the earth the Lord shall thresh the nations by the power of his Spirit.

And for this cause these commandments were given; they were commanded to be kept from the world in the day that they were given, but now are to go forth unto all flesh—

And this according to the mind and will of the Lord, who ruleth over all flesh.

And unto him that repenteth and sanctifieth himself before the Lord shall be given eternal life.

Doctrine and Covenants 133:46-49, 57-62, emphasis added.

The doctrine of theosis is that humankind has the potential to become co-creative gods in the image of their Creator, the LORD God ORION, whom I know as Jesus Christ, if they believe in him, and repent and become sanctified. This is what is meant by the everlasting covenant. By strict definition, the doctrine of apotheosis is that there can be only one pole star that rises above all the others to attain oneness with the Father in the peak of the canopy of heaven. Almost inconceivably, Jesus Christ undertook the radically democratic task of apotheosis for all. He wanted to make pole stars of everyone and turn everyone into an “only begotten” forged in the heat of the highest degree of the celestial kingdom, which is to overcome the world, to conquer sin, and to stand in the holy place, even at the very center of the north celestial pole around which everything, even the pole stars revolve, and not be moved.

If I were an astronomer prophet like men and women in former times, I would see myself as a citizen of the kingdom of God under the administration of Christ as the pole star Polaris. Although this administration has lasted more than 1,500 years and has a thousand to go, I anticipate a great sign, the sign of the coming of the Son of Man. That sign is the plunging of the sword into the shoulder of the cow in the vault of the north celestial pole. The most poetic and elegant time for this to happen would be around 2100 AD when Polaris is most accurately the pole star in the whole course of its 2,500-year administration. But whether I ever see this sign, or if it is just a key to unlock my imagination, the sign has already occurred more than once in the firmament of my temple, and it has undoubtedly happened similarly to countless others as they have pondered similar things in their heart.

RIGHT BRAIN

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard… His going forth is from the end of heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

-Psalm 19: 1-3, 6

What has long been considered John’s visionary experience in Revelation might be more correctly identified as a veiled account of John’s initiation in the mithraeum of Caesarea Maritima after his capture at the end of the first Jewish-Roman War. As described in Josephus’ War of the Jews, Book 5, in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD at Passover, the anti-Roman tyrants John and Simon, (as Josephus characterized them) the leaders of two fierce and nearly indomitable rival Jewish factions, surrendered to Titus after the temple was burned to the ground. Simon the Strong, acclaimed as a savior and guardian to the Jewish people, was cast to his death from the Tarpeian Rock at the Temple of Jupiter. This is the source of what is actually a cruel pun in the gospels where Jesus, or Jupiter, changes Simon’s name to Peter, the Rock.

John, who was allowed to tarry, was sentenced to life imprisonment. It may be that upon being imprisoned, John was taken into the Flavian court and initiated in the Mithraic mystery. We speculate that in harmony with the Jewish tradition of writing the sacred history, John was commanded to write down his experience. Because telling the secrets of a mystery initiation was ordinarily punishable by death, the initiatic part of Revelation was an exception made for the Jews and a substitute for the sculptural tauroctony scene. As such, Revelation may be the only written account of a Mithraic liturgy dating to the first century. It appears from internal contradictions and slanders, that later redactors from other modes of Christianity embellished John’s initiation account in order to create a stark division between the later mainstream Christianity of the church fathers and the earlier Jewish/Christian/pagan hybrid that birthed it.

Fifteen centuries after the Roman Church’s suppression of the mystery of Mithras in the fourth century AD, Franz Cumont ignited public and scholarly interest in the possible association and comparisons between Mithraism and Christianity in The Mysteries of Mithra (1903).  In May of 1829, however, a direct link between the Mystery of Mithras and Christian discipleship had already been taken for granted in the Doctrine and Covenants. A description of the tauroctony scene and Mithraic liturgy is as follows:

Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet to his brother Hyrum Smith, at Harmony, Pennsylvania, May 1829. This revelation was received through the Urim and Thummim in answer to Joseph’s supplication and inquiry…

1) A great and marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men.

2) Behold, I am God (Mithras, the Covenant Maker and Friend); give heed to my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow (blade driven through the shoulder of the bull instead of a typical sacrifice by throat-slitting); therefore give heed unto my word.

3) Behold, the field is white (the white bull/TAURUS) already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap let him thrust in his sickle (Saturn, the Father, Pater, hands Mithras the Sickle of LEO to take over the harvest from him) with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.

4) Yea, whosoever will thrust in his sickle (the Sickle of LEO asterism) and reap, the same is called of God.

5) Therefore, if you will ask (fifth seal) of me you shall receive; if you will knock it (the pineal gland) shall be opened unto you.

6) Now, as you have asked, behold, I say unto you, keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and establish the cause of Zion.

7)  Seek (CANCER- sixth seal- the third eye, pineal gland) not for riches but for wisdom (Sophia); and, behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, he that hath eternal life is rich…

27) Behold, I speak unto all who have good desires (John’s wish to tarry in the flesh), and have thrust in their sickle to reap.

28) Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I am the life and the light of the world (the Sun/Sol Invictus).

29) I am the same who came unto mine own and mine own received me not;

30) But verily, verily, I say unto you, that as many as receive me (seventh seal), to them will I give power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on my name. Amen.

–Doctrine and Covenants, Section 11:1-7, 27-30, parenthesis and emphasis added. Portions of the liturgy are repeated verbatim in Sections 4 and 12.

The fourth seal is TAURUS, the midpoint between LEO and AQUARIUS. TAURUS’ ruling planet is Venus, and the corresponding organ of the human body is the heart. Cycling in much the same way that oxygen-poor blood is exchanged for oxygen-rich blood in the heart, the mysteries of godliness recognize upbeats and downbeats and move through valves and chambers. In more than one way, Christ is the heart. For this reason, Christ’s love for humankind is represented by the blood He shed. Luke is the apostle of TAURUS, or the witness of Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane, and so we find the most visceral description of Jesus’ agony in his account:

And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup (CRATER) from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

–Luke 22:41-44, parentheses added

Because the seal of the heart, TAURUS, is in the terrestrial kingdom, the initiate had to be taught how to bring the heart, made of matter, into the celestial kingdom, which is spirit. This is the riddle that Mithraism proposes and solves in the tauroctony.

The enigma of the tauroctony scene and the Mithraic axiom, “harmony of tension in opposition,” is encapsulated in the final phrases of Hebrews 4:12 as, “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The scene is astronomical as well as anatomical and merges LEO with TAURUS in a total solar eclipse.

There is nothing like a total solar eclipse in its paradoxical strangeness. In an instant all the birds stop chirping and the temperature drops. All the natural world thinks it is suddenly night. For just a few moments the telestial kingdom (the stars), the terrestrial kingdom (the moon), and the celestial kingdom (the sun) are all in the same place at the same time. In the pitch darkness of such a total solar eclipse that passed over Salem, Oregon on August 21, 2017, spectators called it the most spiritual event of their lives, and in the silence of nature thus moved upon by the whole cosmos, the gathering began gently singing whatever song of the heart came to their mind. In an instant, this group of strangers were in the celestial kingdom together presided over by the Prince of Peace. The Prince of Peace is Mithras, the mediator.

Marvelously, the tauroctony scene we have been describing, which is an analog for the cosmos, is also a model of the right hemisphere of the human brain. When the four-and-twenty elders sat along the two benches flanking the mithraeum, decorated with the zodiac and the stars of the north celestial hemisphere, the tauroctony represented the seat of the human subconscious and the functions of spatial awareness, creativity, musicality, and spirituality.

Significantly, as will be described below, the first mithraeum appears to have been a converted shipping warehouse in the port district of Judea’s Caesarea Maritima on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The building was specially selected for its domed ceiling which represented the cranium. Mithras, the Mediator in the center of the brain cross-section, represented the Thalamus, which regulates and mediates sensory and motor signals as well as alertness, sleep, and consciousness, and Mithras’ billowing red coat flowing out from behind him represented the chorid plexus and ventricles. That place where Mithras sits is the mercy seat, the solar chariot of the human mind pulled by a team of horses.

TAURUS, the white bull, represented the base of the cerebrum and his tail unwound behind him and to the left as the optic nerve. TAURUS’s scrotum is the pituitary gland, called the “master gland,” in charge of growth and sexual/reproductive development. The pituitary gland regulates the organs of the kidneys, uterus, and breasts. The pituitary gland also regulates the adrenal and thyroid glands, as well as the gonads. TAURUS’ legs are splayed to conform to the angle of the base of the frontal cortex on the left and the supratentorium, the tough sheet of connective tissues between the base of the upper cerebrum on the right and the lower part of the brain, the cerebellum.

Angling upward toward the opening created by ORION’s sword is HYDRA, the ascending serpent. In the tauroctony of the mind, HYDRA is the spine, which is ascended by the kundalini serpent. The head of the serpent is the amygdala, or the primitive reptilian base of the brain. The serpent’s mouth gapes open to swallow the orphic egg, or the almond-shaped white stone, as in the case of the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Peebles, Ohio. This almond-shaped white stone is the stone spoken of by John:

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

-Revelation 2:17

The white stone is the pineal gland and is the nail in the most sure place in the center of the north celestial pole, the point of stillness around which even the pole stars revolve. The pineal gland, “the single eye” is where light enters the body:

The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.

Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.

If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.

-Luke 11:34-36

The pineal gland is where the word, the still small voice, enters into the mind. It is where the sword of ORION has wounded TAURUS, or as Rumi, a Sufi poet explained so beautifully, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

When one’s body has been made full of light thus, the initiate will become compassion, a prince of peace, unmoved by the circumstances and horrors that may abound and encircle around the still point of the cosmos.

Let thy bowels (Moon/ARIES) also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virtue garnish thy thoughts (Sun/LEO) unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God (calling and election); and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven (secretions of the pineal gland).

The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth (scepter in the hand of Mithras/Orion); and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.

-Doctrine and Covenants 121:45-46, emphasis and parentheses added. 

In a highly successful preservation of Mithraic themes, in King Arthur’s medieval legend, Arthur’s predecessor, the gravely wounded Fisher King, has ruled over a once prosperous but now infertile wasteland kingdom. The Fisher King, who fishes daily at a nearby lake, is the guardian of the Holy Grail, the white cup said to have caught the blood of Jesus, but the cup has been lost.  The Lady of the Lake miraculously provides the king with a special sword that has the power to redeem the land and the people. The magician (Zoroastrian Magus) Merlin contrives a way to identify the rightful heir and redeemer of the kingdom. The only way for the kingdom to be redeemed is for the rightful prince and heir to the king’s throne to pull the sword Excalibur from a stone where Merlin has magically placed it. Three knights of the Round Table, Galahad, Percival, and Bors, are compared to white bulls, and are ultimately successful in recovering the Grail, but only after a young Arthur, who was unaware of his royal heritage, pulled the sword from the stone, identifying him as the heir and redeemer of Camelot.  

FISHER KING: The Ecclesiastical Church of Jesus Christ, the decrepit Father in PISCES

HOLY GRAIL: CRATER

LADY OF THE LAKE: CANCER

EXCALIBUR: ORION’S SWORD

MERLIN: A Zoroastrian Magus wearing a Phrygian cap

THE STONE: TAURUS

THE WHITE BULLS: Peter, James, and John, three of the original twelve apostles

THE ROUND TABLE: The zodiac

ARTHUR: Mithras

The underground Christian movement didn’t await an earthly king that would rule like the kings of the earth do. The underground mystery keepers remembered that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. The legend of King Arthur was not to express the need for a better government, but the imperative for the soul to be ruled from within.

Mithraism preserved the key to knowledge of the sovereign holiness of the human soul. The administration of Polaris, beginning around 500 AD, and represented prophetically in the Mithraic tauroctony, was the second coming of Christ- the Second Comforter, the everlasting covenant, a heavenly administration that would last generations. The legend of King Arthur may be saying that, since Mithras has plunged the sword into the stone, or it has been placed there by Merlin, the next initiate to follow in the path of ORION will have to pull the sword from the stone because “he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do:”

Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father…

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever…

Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?…

Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.

These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you.

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

               -John 14:11-12,16-18, 22-27, emphasis added

In keeping with the era of PISCES, the task of drawing the sword from the stone will not fall to a single individual, but rather to thousands, perhaps even millions, reflecting the multitude of fish in the sea.

PART C: BODIES TELESTIAL

THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT WEDDING FEAST

I hope it has become clear that religion in the Apotheosis Scroll is not about the afterlife. In fact, as citizens of the age of PISCES we are in the afterlife the ancient architects of religion prophesied. Ancient prophets envisioned that when humanity entered the age of PISCES, despite being as numerous as the sands of the sea (telestial), humankind would be a dead man walking- through PISCES, AQUARIUS, and CAPRICORN, a period that would last about 6,480 years until humanity reemerged onto land (the terrestrial kingdom).

Moreover, the Christian world has seemed to have forgotten that the New Testament is a wartime document, created to find meaning in the stars for the blood and horrors that accompanied the descent into hell and the birth pangs of delivery from the water-filled womb of the age of PISCES. It can be easy to think of the gospel as a compilation of tender sayings, created to make one feel the Spirit and to invoke peace in troubled times. It might be that, among many other things. The New Testament is the story of the bitter fruit of massacre, confusion, and near hopelessness. Like the infant emerging from the womb, the emergent age was covered in blood. The New Testament was composed in wartime and pounded out from the heart of a machine that was crushing kernels of wheat of covenant bread by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, if contemporary historians are credible, in a cacophony of violence where even the air was explosive, and where the flour mill was squeezing out blood like a monstrous winepress. Like an ember of light in a mill full of floating particles, Jesus was perceived by someone, one of his Jewish peers here, and some servant to the Roman industrial complex there, and he would be perceived again another billion times as the age progressed toward the bottom of the zodiacal wheel. The New Testament‘s Jesus is a faint glow in the dark cavity of a skull, a tiny white stone emitting light that began to fill the whole body.

The Christian movement emerged in the historical context of Rome’s relatively recent adoption of the ancient practice of the deification of certain rulers in the imperial cult, epitomized in Julius Caesar. Caesar Augustus, anointed the Son of God by adoption to Julius Caesar, established the homogenizing program of the Pax Romana to secure peace to a sprawling empire.

A separate system of performances to the imperial cult, but based in the same constellations, the cult of Mithras was designed and implemented for the general population of conquered and conquerors that made up the army. To channel the assimilation of conquered peoples, the military spread the seeds of Mithraism, a new and innovative mystery cult patterned on the ancient mysteries and reflective of Rome’s diversity. Roman Mithraism, the composite mystery of the Roman military, syncretized mystery stereotypes from the surrounding cultures east of Rome to foster cohesion and legitimize the Roman emperors as the peak of the celestial order on Earth. Mithraism appropriated mystery figures from temple cultures and reframed them in the language of astronomy and its association with the recurrent life cycles of immortals and agriculture.

Both men and women performed roles of salvation and exaltation in the mysteries. The culminating seal was the marriage of the divines, prefiguring the monogamous marriages of mortal men and women expected throughout the Roman empire.

In the ancient mind, as it happened above in the night sky, so it happened below. Celestial communication, star talk, was a key to events in the terrestrial world. The main event of the astronomical seals- exaltation, the ascension of the married son or daughter to the throne of the king or queen was a cosmically significant ordinance, particularly in the east, that turned such a man or woman into a god. This astronomical sign, which occurs every year at the summer solstice when the Sun comes home to the constellation LEO, was applied to the ascension of Titus to Vespasian’s throne. Before that could happen, Titus’ right to ascension was substantiated by his violent and conclusive military victory:

Caesarea was, however, the scene of some bloody preliminaries to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. At that time, Caesarea was a polyglot city of Jews, Christians, Samaritans, and gentiles, Greeks and Syrians, each group living in separate city districts. A disagreement between the Jews and Greeks over access to a synagogue in a gentile district of Caesarea led to open conflict and the subsequent desecration of the synagogue. Besides their frequent conflict with Roman subjects resident in Caesarea, Jews were often subject to Roman persecution.

The Jews found themselves increasingly at odds with their Roman rulers. Soon after the conflict over the desecration of the synagogue, word leaked out that soldiers of the Caesarean garrison, attempting to put down a Jewish insurrection in Jerusalem had plundered the temple treasury. The Jews of Caesarea attacked Roman troops garrisoned in the city. The troops responded, killing 20,000 Caesarea Jews. This atrocity catalyzed the First Jewish Revolt (66-70AD), which ended in the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the burning of the city. Vespasian, who directed the suppression of the revolt until he became emperor, made his headquarters and supply base at Caesarea. Titus, operating with supplies from Caesarea, completed the job left unfinished by Vespasian and after five months captured Jerusalem. Titus returned to Caesarea with Jewish captives. During the festivals and games held at Caesarea to celebrate his victory, 2,500 Jews lost their lives in gladiatorial sports in the Caesarea amphitheater.

-Robert J. Bull, director of the Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima from 1971-1996, Caesarea Maritima: The Search for Herod’s City, Biblos Foundation

This historic event was recorded in the Gospels. The cipher encoding this linkage between the imperial cult of the Flavian Roman government, which employed the same eternal celestial ordinances as Mithraism, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, is the parable of the Great Wedding Feast in Matthew:

And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and said, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king (LEO/Vespasian, savior of the Roman Empire), which made a marriage(CANCER/Berenice) for his son (ORION/Titus), and sent forth his servants(GEMINI/The army) to call them that were bidden(ARIES/The Jews) to the wedding: and they would not come.

Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen (imperial cult bull sacrifice of TAURUS) and my fatlings(ARIES/Jesus/Jews in Jerusalem for Passover-The Paschal Lamb) are killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage. But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: and the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. But when the king (Vespasian) heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers (the militant rebel Jews), and burned up their city (Jerusalem).

Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways (MILKY WAY), and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment(HYDRA): and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment(ORION’s garment)? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen. (The martyrdom of James the Just: He is cast down from the Temple wall and then beaten with a fuller’s stick until dead. For greater context see, James, the Brother of Jesus, Robert Eisenman.)

-Matthew 22: 1-14, emphasis and parenthesis added.

The Flavian government left its signature on the parable and took responsibility for at least part of the Gospels. Justified by Titus’ decisive victory over the Jews, whomever wrote this parable into the Jesus story saw Vespasian as the Prince of Peace for the age to come. One such person who saw Vespasian this way was Flavius Josephus, a Jewish military leader who, upon facing certain death at the hands of the Roman army, surrendered and spent the rest of his career in the Flavian court as a historian.

Despite this, Vespasian is a name that would go down in the annals of barbarity. Like the good King Josiah, the careful reader of history would see his reign as an atrocity. In reference to his initiation as a god into the imperial cult, the war-wearied Vespasian’s last words, which have been variously translated to range from sincere to mocking, were “Vae, puto deus fio” (“Woe is me. I think I am turning into a god.”) The only man, now that PISCES is winding down, who can be called the Prince of Peace of the age is Jesus of Nazareth. As far as we know, Jesus never stood up an army. He never even ruled a city. He never extorted a tithe from the poor or a tax on the laborer. He never put anyone in jail or deprived them of association with their people. He taught an inner way, and his peaceable followers have gone largely unknown throughout the history of the last two thousand years.

Nevertheless, Christianity was built in history and in time by the arm of the flesh. The building of a New Jerusalem and a new temple was a central motif of the Caesarean Christian movement. The New Jerusalem Temple, built without hands over and above the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple, was a spiritual edifice coming down from heaven to replace the defiled earthly one. The gentile Christians created the New Testament gospel atop the ruins of Jerusalem’s messianic Judaism as an altogether new religion for a new age to dominate Jerusalem Christianity.

It is important to recognize that while Mithraism was the official Roman mystery as disseminated through the Roman military, it is differentiated from the imperial cult, which worshipped the family of the Caesars and emperors as god-kings and queens. The ruler of Rome, at any given time, did not necessarily have anything to do with the Roman Mithraic mystery, and in fact, they usually didn’t. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Marcus Aurelius who is suspected to have been initiated in Mithraism, and his son Commodus was a known initiate. 

The historical practice of deification of certain rulers in the imperial cult was epitomized in Julius Caesar and was further perpetuated by successive Roman emperors including Vespasian and Titus. Initiates in the highest order of initiation in Mithraism, recognized by the seal or ordinance of “Pater,” the Father, protested the deification of men in the imperial cult when it was offered them. One can identify the Roman emperors who refused to be coronated as living god-kings because their initiation in Mithraism forbade it. Emperors who were initiated in the highest degree of Mithraism are identified by their lack of a laurel crown worn on their head. They were offered the crown of the imperial cult, but they refused it. Tertullian, around 200 AD, wrote in De Corona Militis (On the Soldier’s Crown), that when a soldier was presented with a crown extended to him on sword-point, the initiate would push it away, or throw the laurel crown to the ground and say, “Mithras is my crown,” or “There is no crown but Mithras.” The act demonstrated the initiate’s rejection of worldly honor, his devotion to Mithras, and his spiritual rebirth that made him forget his earthly name because in the process of his initiation he had received a new one.  

One contributor to an anthology of essays called, “Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima,” proposes that the mithraeum built from an arched warehouse at the Caesarea seaside might be the first of all of the many hundreds of mithraeums that would be built over the next several centuries. It may have been the prototype, even though it was the only mithraeum ever built in Judea:

The question of the origins of Mithraic beliefs is difficult if not impossible to answer; understanding the beliefs of the cult in its full-blown expression is complex enough. But understanding the avenues of transmission may eventually help in understanding both the beliefs and their origins. The evidence… suggests that Caesarea, as the headquarters for an extensive Roman military operation, might have played a key role in the transmission of the religion from its Anatolian origins to the wider Roman Empire.

-Painter, R. Jackson, The Origins and Social Context of Mithraism at Caesarea Maritima

Every mithraeum and tauroctony scene was faithful to the prototype sculptures and frescoes. The periphery was customized slightly to assimilate to the local culture. Likewise, each mithraeum had a variety of lesser altars dedicated to the worship of local deities. Thus, one mithraeum could hint at parallels to Perseus and his winged Pegasus, and another could bear motifs glorifying Phaeton and Europa, etc. The fascinating thing about the Caesarea Maritima mithraeum is that no artwork was found there at all. No frescoes, and no tauroctony sculpture. The Caesarea Maritima mithraeum lacked a proper tauroctony scene and only a small tauroctonic medallion has ever been recovered. This might indicate that the absence of the typical tauroctony scene was an accommodation of the Jewish prohibition against the worship of graven images, even while handling pagan coinage was allowed. Because Jews were prohibited from worshipping images of celestial ordinances, but could use coins in their temples, this suggests that the Caesarea Maritima mithraeum was used by Jews.

We said at the beginning of this investigation that parallels between Mithraism and Christianity were taken for granted early on in the history of both. Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, listed some of the sacraments held in common between Mithraism and Christianity in chapter 40 of De praescriptione haereticorum, (On the Prescription of Heretics), written around 200 AD and paraphrased here:

-Baptism: Tertullian says of the devil, “He too, baptizes some—that is, his own believers and faithful followers” and by this act “he promises the putting away of sins.” (See Revelation 7:14: These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.)

-The Mark of the Forehead: Tertullian states that “Mithra there sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers” which he sees as an imitation of the sign of the cross. (See Revelation 7:3: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, not the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. See also Revelation 9:4: And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. See also Revelation 14:1: And I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. See also Revelation 22:4: his name shall be in their foreheads.)

-The Eucharist: He mentions that the Mithraists “celebrate also the oblation of bread.” (See Revelation 2:17: To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. See also Revelation 3:20: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.)

-Monogamous Marriage: “Limiting [the] chief priest to a single marriage.” (See Revelation 19:7-9 and 21:9, which describe “the marriage of the Lamb” and “the bride, the wife of the Lamb” in faithful, exclusive, and monogamous terms. Note also that the entry-level initiate was a CORAX, or Raven. Ravens mate for life and exemplify citizenship based on the economy of nuclear families.)

-Resurrection: He notes that the cult “introduces an image of a resurrection.” (See Revelation 1:18: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forevermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.)

This is but a small sampling of the many correspondences between Mithraism and a potential initiatic rite described in Revelation. In the Apotheosis Scroll other parallels to Mithraism are introduced, such as pyrotechnics used in the Mithraic initiation which seem to be the source of some of the dramatic spectacles in Revelation (indirectly suggested by Roger Beck). It is also interesting to picture the beasts in Revelation 4:6-8 as men in costume guiding John through the ordinances, such as a lion-LEO with a mane and lion paws, a raven-CORAX, called a flying eagle, an ox-TAURUS with a bull’s hide and horns, a serpent-HYDRA who is cast down from heaven, and the Lamb of God-ARIES, the resurrected Christ whose white wool has been soaked in blood.

The origins of Christianity may be far more complex than some may have previously contemplated. Figures once cast as purely good, or irredeemably evil may be hopelessly and confusingly intermeshed and far more nuanced. It is possible to be cynical and dismayed about Roman butchery and the propaganda being canonized into the gospel, while leaving room for the possibility that the theology and ancient ordinances captured in Mithraism preserved and transmitted a golden thread of precious truth. It seems profound and inspired, if not miraculous, that the Restoration of Joseph Smith may have threaded that needle. After nearly 2,000 years of Christianity, as AQUARIUS loomed at the bottom of the zodiacal wheel, the ordinances of heaven were the same as they had always been, and they were all new as the coming age shifted their emphasis. With immutable rules in mind, it is possible to imagine new meaning from the same old signs.

As residents in the telestial kingdom underworld, at the very bottom of the zodiacal wheel at the end of time, we are just now living out the Egyptian judgment scene. Osiris sits enthroned, wrapped in strips of funerary cloth. Before him is the lotus flower, the tree of life, Hathor the Mother, with two lotus flower witnesses, Isis and Nepthys, the Bride and the Spirit, emerging from the water of life. On the other side of the veil is the scale of Ma’at, where Horus, the Christ figure has placed the initiate’s heart in a jar to be weighed against an ostrich feather.  If the heart weighs less than the feather, the initiate will be welcomed through the veil, to sit on the throne of the Father, Osiris. Hanging on a plumb line from the scale of Ma’at is a small stone. Often touched at the fingertips of Anubis, the stone is the star Canopus, the south pole star. CANOPUS is the stone stopping the drain at the bottom of the world sea. It can be thought of as a giant anchor, dropped from the plumb line of the north/south axis running through ORION. Moreover, in the southern hemisphere, there is a spellbinding series of constellations, a parade of three crosses whose third to appear is the SOUTHERN CROSS. It is hard to imagine that a Christian could go unmoved by the sight, as the constellation is so crisp and stately that it seems to have been deliberately placed there by a timeless and infinitely powerful deity. Particularly in the age of AQUARIUS, the SOUTHERN CROSS can be imagined as ORION’s sword, plunged into the stone plug in the telestial kingdom underworld. Although these ordinances are eternal, there has never been a more opportune moment to reach into hell and pull ORION’s sword from the stone.

THE LAW OF THE GOSPEL

And it came to pass that I saw a man, and he was dressed in a white robe; and he came and stood before me. And it came to pass that he spake unto me, and bade me follow him. And it came to pass that as I followed him I beheld myself that I was in a dark and dreary waste. And after I had traveled for the space of many hours in darkness, I began to pray unto the Lord that he would have mercy on me, according to the multitude of his tender mercies. And it came to pass after I had prayed unto the Lord I beheld a large and spacious field. And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy.

-1 Nephi 8:5-10

In the ages of TAURUS and ARIES the individual embarked upon his or her initiatic journey in a terrestrial state on the earthward side of the veil. In the age of PISCES, the initiate began his or her journey in the telestial kingdom in the mists of darkness. The great and spacious field of TAURUS lay ahead of the initiate in his or her ascension through the ordinances of heaven. Usually after death, but sometimes while still in mortality, the initiate obtained a vision of celestial existence on the heavenly side of the veil, imagined as ORION partaking of the Tree of Life and ascending to heaven. The veil between the terrestrial and celestial kingdom, the MILKY WAY Tree of Life, is continually guarded by two angels, GEMINI, who alone may grant the traveling soul safe passage if the sojourner is deemed worthy to penetrate the veil. The angels of GEMINI are the Two Olive Tree Witnesses, so named because they sprout from the trunk of the mother olive tree, or MILKY WAY ascending and arching across the vault of the sky.

As we have said above, upon fully comprehending the initiation process, the initiate recognized ORION as an emblem of the initiate’s own transformation. In observing ORION from earth, the initiate perceived a mirrored counterpart above—a celestial twin. While the terrestrial initiate remained mortal and physical, the celestial twin represented the eternal, without beginning or end. Thus, one identity is terrestrial, the other celestial. The fundamental aim of temple initiation was to foster awareness of the initiate’s divine nature and the epiphany of his or her cosmic counterpart. Because it had always existed, and had seen the cosmos through an infinity of cycles, one’s celestial twin had experience and expertise unavailable to mere mortals and could reveal unspeakable eternal mysteries when the initiate’s terrestrial soul communed with its celestial twin. And so, while ORION is a celestial ordinance representing God, ORION is also a representation of the temple high priest or priestess. But no less than these, ORION is also the representation of the initiate’s own divine nature, a nature that is eternal and coexistent with God. The primary difference between the nature of the initiate and the nature of Jesus Christ is recognition. To live up to this ideal and to recognize the same intrinsic divinity in one’s neighbor, and even in one’s enemy, allows the initiate to penetrate the veil to commune with the family of God. The initiate penetrated the veil only because the Marys at the veil anointed him. His mother was the first to anoint him by virtue of the ordinance of childbirth. By his birth to the Queen of Heaven, he was born with the potential to become a King and a priest of heaven.

In first century Roman Palestine, Philip, the apostle of Caesarea Maritima in the primitive Christian church, had two prophetess daughters who were a living type of the GEMINI constellation. Thus, Philip described the Marys in the family of Christ according to the celestial typology manifest even in his own household:

There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and […] sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.

As for Wisdom, who is called “the barren,” she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the [Savior was] Mary Magdalene. [The Savior loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he] used to kiss her [often] on the mouth.

-Gospel of Philip, sayings 32 and 55

CANCER, whose element is water, particularly the water of the womb, is mother to the living soul. Her seals are on the front of the body and are especially evident in the womb and breasts. By contrast, VIRGO, or Wisdom, also called the Barren, is obtained to by ascending the seals of the spine. VIRGO is often shown holding sheaves of wheat represented by Spica, her most prominent star. Crucially to agriculturalists for millennia, the rising of Spica above the horizon in the spring meant the time for sowing the seeds, especially grains of wheat. The setting of Spica below the horizon in the fall meant the time for the wheat harvest. VIRGO is closely associated with the constellation CRATER, the bitter cup. Hers is the path of the angels and the enlightened ones. It is a solo journey where marriage and children are not a part. Thus, VIRGO is mother to the angels, as described in Matthew 22:30 and surrounding verses. “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” VIRGO the Bitter/Barren, and CANCER the Beloved/Fruitful are both kingdoms of glory. Their archetypal character is contrasted by barrenness or motherhood, as highlighted in the discourse of Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6:

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

On returning to the veil in adulthood, the ascending initiate has asked his bride for permission to enter in through the maternal matrix and into eternal life in the kingdom of God, or LEO, where a lion and a lioness rule as coregents. The birth anointing is the initiate’s descent into mortal life and the second, or marriage anointing is to the initiate’s resurrection, as described in each of the New Testament Gospels with Jesus’ anointing by the Marys of GEMINI. Mary of Bethany whose mythical counterpart is Anat in Mesopotamia and Nephthys in Egypt, is his sister, called Wisdom the Barren. The other Mary in the pair representing the anointing angels of GEMINI is the beloved, his bride Mary Magdalene:

And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head. And there were some that had indignation…and they murmured against her. And Jesus said…She is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.

-Mark 14: 3-9

Other accounts of the anointing of Jesus by the Marys indicate that his feet were anointed. Both head and feet are correct. Whether descending through the maternal matrix at childbirth or ascending the matrix of matrimony, it is the head, smeared with oil, that penetrates first. The answer to why the olive tree witnesses wash and anoint the Lord’s feet for his resurrection is demonstrated in the Mari cylinder seal. Because he, ORION, has stood on the blood-soaked dirt of earth (TAURUS) and he wishes to penetrate the veil, he must be found worthy by the Two Olive Tree Witnesses to enter. Essentially, the initiate’s judges are his mother and his wife, the women who know how he treats women. In passing through the veil of the MILKY WAY Tree of Life and the river of everlasting life at its roots, ORION’s feet are washed in the very water of purification the feet of GEMINI are already immersed in. As one cleansed of the blood and sin of the world, the hunter shepherd may dare to gaze into heaven.

Christianity was a hybrid, made of Greek Platonism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, symbolized in the literary archetypes of Peter, James, and John, respectively. This investigation has focused on John via a form of Indo-Persian Zoroastrian astronomy that I think influenced the creation of the Christian Mithraic mysteries of godliness. I see these mysteries as being deliberately engineered in Caesarea Maritima, the headquarters of the Roman Flavian dynasty, to reform and rebuild the ruined Jewish civilization on its former ancient religious foundation of immutable celestial ordinances. I propose that this Zoroastrian influence on the Gospels was sincere and inspired, and runs through the Gospels, interweaving disparate narratives like a net cast upon the sea. The weave was most likely supplied by court astrologers, particularly Claudius Tiberius Balbillus, who was employed by several of the first century AD Roman emperors, including Vespasian. While both Flavius Josephus and Claudius Tiberius Balbillus were associates in the Flavian court, I see their collaboration as an intense rivalry that shows up in the Gospels. While Josephus saw Vespasian as the second coming of the Son of Man, I think it is Balbillus who recognized Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God and built the mysteries of Godliness around him, to teach us, through Jesus, our eternal and divine nature. For millennia to come, Jesus’ disciples would recognize him by the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Second Comforter, symbolized by the administration of the pole star Polaris. In my imagination, Claudius Tiberius Balbillus is the original prophet of Jesus Christ’s incarnate divinity that no one has ever heard of.

The late Roger Beck, a preeminent scholar of Mithraism, hypothesizes in “The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun” that Mithraism is the invention of Balbillus, a genius in a line of Roman court astrologers. Balbillus was born in Alexandria, Egypt and was an Equestrian Magistrate in the Roman equestrian order. He was high priest of Egypt’s temple of Hermes and director of its Library of Alexandria. Under the emperor Claudius he was the Procurator of the Asia province, and under Nero, Balbillus was the Prefect of Egypt. Balbillus may have been married to a woman of Commagenian royalty, and thereby, was likely to have been married in accordance with the celestial ordinance of marriage. Balbillus, a man who was considered to have been of most upright moral and intellectual character, died in 79 AD in Ephesus, almost a decade after the Roman siege of Jerusalem by Titus.

The figure of Mithras in the tauroctony scene is the celestial counterpart to the physical sun, Sol Invictus. Overall, Mithras’ style is eastward of Rome. Commagene, in modern south-central Turkey where Balbillus may have been married, was a buffer zone between Rome and its military rival Persia. Mithras is stylized as an Anatolian youth in Phrygian riding gear. He is a hybrid, suggesting an “east-meets-west” and “old-meets-new” caricature of Commagenian Hellenism. In casting Mithras in this way, the mystery is suggesting that Mithras is everyman. He is not a purple-robed earthly royalty, or a physically magnificent god like the Greek Serapis. Mithras is cast as a youth of no apparent personal pedigree.

In the fourth century, under the reign of Theodosius, the Roman Christian government brutally suppressed all the mysteries in the Roman Empire, including the very popular Egyptian cult of Isis and Rome’s own Mithraism. They were labelled with the new pejorative term, paganus, or pagan, meaning “country dweller,” for their ongoing reliance on the agricultural cycles, which had become a cultural backwater to Neoplatonism. In 391 and 392 Theodosius issued edicts banning astrology altogether, in part to suppress the circulation of astronomical knowledge that could be interpreted as Christ’s return when Polaris came into pole position.

Early Church Fathers such as Jerome in his Letter 107 to Laeta, written in 403 AD, celebrated the violent overthrow of pagan rites, by which some Roman officials obtained favor with the government and their Christian baptism:

And to pass over such old stories which to unbelievers may well seem incredible, did not your own kinsman Gracchus whose name betokens his patrician origin, when a few years back he held the prefecture of the City, overthrow, break in pieces, and shake to pieces the grotto of Mithras and all the dreadful images therein? Those I mean by which the worshippers were initiated as Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Perseus, Sun, Crab, and Father? Did he not, I repeat, destroy these and then, sending them before him as hostages, obtain for himself Christian baptism?

Even in Rome itself paganism is left in solitude. They who once were the gods of the nations remain under their lonely roofs with horned-owls and birds of night. The standards of the military are emblazoned with the sign of the Cross. The emperor’s robes of purple and his diadem sparkling with jewels are ornamented with representations of the shameful yet saving gibbet. Already the Egyptian Serapis has been made a Christian; while at Gaza Marnas mourns in confinement and every moment expects to see his temple overturned. From India, from Persia, from Ethiopia we daily welcome monks in crowds. The Armenian bowman has laid aside his quiver, the Huns learn the psalter, the chilly Scythians are warmed with the glow of the faith.

And then, five centuries after Jesus in Jerusalem, tensions rose between Rome and Persia, until erupting in the Iberian War of 526-532, and the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 572-591. In the lead up to war, the Roman government banned the mystery of Mithras from the military because its hero/god Mithras was the namesake for the Persian Sun God reborn. Meanwhile, as predicted, Polaris was moving into pole position, and this meant Christ’s second coming was present, as portrayed in the tauroctony. As the age of PISCES advanced, the government could be unseated at any moment if Jesus came bodily with a flaming sword to reclaim it. Ironically, because the Jesus story is a star story, from that time on and for that reason, astronomy and Christianity ceased to be compatible.

CONCLUSION:

IN JOSEPH’S OWN WORDS

Scholars are now referring to the “Christianities” instead of “Christianity,” because it was never a single coherent ideology. It moved forward based on many mutually contradicting testimonies. Some believed in a physical Resurrection of Jesus, and some thought the Resurrection had nothing to do with the flesh. If the kingdom of God was comprised of fish, there were always hundreds of species of fish caught up in the net. I feel this, since as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for large portions of my life, I have heard it said by many Christians that Mormons aren’t to be counted among them. To a Mormon, this is disheartening. It is like a tuna snobbing black cod while all jostle together in the confines of the ship net as we are pulled up from the deep.

It is widely recognized that the Christian traditions emerged within the Roman Empire. Less recognized is how deeply Rome may have shaped their formation. Would Rome have persecuted a religion it helped create? That seems unlikely. Yet the Christian movements of the first centuries would probably be unfamiliar to many believers today. It is increasingly plausible that the Catholic suppression of Mithraism in the fourth century was, ironically, an anti-Christian act. A movement’s successors can easily reverse the vision of its founders. It happens often and was forecast in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, when on the very first night after planting, the adversary sowed tares in the field God planted.

Throughout this study, we have seen that marriage is as central to the original Christian mystery as salvation itself. Salvation begins with the recognition that the soul is preserved by God—kept, replanted, and reborn through the virgin-birth symbolism of VIRGO and the rising and setting of Spica. But the soul becomes a co-creator with God through marriage in CANCER and enthronement in LEO. In this framework, marriage reverses humanity’s fall through the celestial ordinances. Monogamous celestial marriage, or Hieros Gamos, is enacted outwardly so that it may be realized inwardly in the imagination, apart from death or the afterlife. Through this inward rite—what alchemists called the “chemical wedding”—a terrestrial being may become celestial in this life by being sealed into the family of God as a co-creative agent, regardless of literal marital status.

This inward and outward relationship of spirit and matter, sun and moon, male and female, is sanctified in Roman monogamy. Although no one knows its beginnings, this mystery has been taught by the constellations for as long as meaning has been found there. It is the basis of the oldest story in the Hebrew tradition, the story of the Garden of Eden, where one man and one woman were married by the LORD God as a model for all marriages to follow.

Through marriage performances, some literal and others by proxy symbolism, the family of God was knitted together in eternity. In our present study, the Prophet Joseph Smith Jr.’s Restoration scriptures (excluding Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 whose attributed authorship and provenance is contested) illuminate the Roman mystery of celestial marriage. Whether in Mithraism, where male soldiers played roles of bride and bridegroom, or in Joseph Smith’s temple ordinances where the family of God was knitted together through living and proxy performances of the highest celestial ordinance, terrestrial marriage between a man and a woman was a symbol for the apocalypse of parting the veil and having a personal revelation of the Holy of Holies. In the absence of any direct proof that Joseph Smith preached or practiced any other kind of literal, live-in, consummated “plurality of wives and concubines” doctrine, it looks very much like Joseph Smith was restoring Mithraism, which incorporated symbolic proxy weddings for initiatory purposes, and that his understanding was in harmony with the Mithraic practice.

This analysis argues that, within Joseph Smith’s cosmology, the angel with a flaming sword represents the LORD God. This interpretation demonstrates Joseph’s deliberate and precise engagement with biblical authority, which served as both corroboration and inspiration in his work. And yet, there is a generations-old legend in Mormonism that an angel with a sword commanded Joseph to introduce and practice polygamy or the angel would kill him. The greater context for this angel in Joseph’s cosmology should lend doubt to these already suspect narratives that Joseph did not corroborate in his own words. In Joseph’s worldview, “the angel with a sword” would have been none other than the Lord himself, and not some secondary, unnamed angelic figure. “The angel with the sword” is none other than the deliverer of most of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants. What did this messenger have to say to Joseph Smith about marriage in the Prophet’s lifetime? The following quote is wholly consistent with everything Joseph said publicly about marriage while he was alive:

Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else. And he that looketh upon a woman to lust after her shall deny the faith, and shall not have the Spirit; and if he repents not he shall be cast out. Thou shalt not commit adultery; and he that committeth adultery, and repenteth not, shall be cast out. But he that has committed adultery and repents with all his heart, and forsaketh it, and doeth it no more, thou shalt forgive; But if he doeth it again, he shall not be forgiven, but shall be cast out.

-Doctrine and Covenants 42:22-26.

By 1831, very early on in the Church’s restoration, the Lord, through Joseph, was already warning that adultery had put the Church under a curse, and that unless they would repent, their wickedness would lead to their destruction.

Wherefore, I, the Lord, am not pleased with those among you who have sought after signs and wonders for faith, and not for the good of men unto my glory.

Nevertheless, I give commandments, and many have turned away from my commandments and have not kept them.

There were among you adulterers and adulteresses; some of whom have turned away from you, and others remain with you that hereafter shall be revealed.

Let such beware and repent speedily, lest judgment shall come upon them as a snare, and their folly shall be made manifest, and their works shall follow them in the eyes of the people.

And verily I say unto you, as I have said before, he that looketh on a woman to lust after her, or if any shall commit adultery in their hearts, they shall not have the Spirit, but shall deny the faith and shall fear.

Wherefore, I, the Lord, have said that the fearful, and the unbelieving, and all liars, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie, and the whoremonger, and the sorcerer, shall have their part in that lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

Verily I say, that they shall not have part in the first resurrection.

And now behold, I, the Lord, say unto you that ye are not justified, because these things are among you…

…For behold, verily I say, that many there be who are under this condemnation, who use the name of the Lord, and use it in vain, having not authority.

Wherefore, let the church repent of their sins, and I, the Lord, will own them; otherwise they shall be cut off.

-Doctrine and Covenants 63:12-19, 62-63

Only a year later the sins of the Church persisted. The Book of Mormon is forceful in its doctrine of the sanctity of marital monogamy and the abomination of polygamy. I am unaware of a scriptural work that champions monogamous marriage more than the Book of Mormon, and I know of no other scripture that rebukes polygamy as scathingly as does the sermon found in Jacob 2, thought by Book of Mormon literalists to have been written in 530 BC. It is significant then that on any given Sunday or on any podcast, polygamy apologists with the backing of official Church correlation, will point to a slightly awkwardly worded verse, Jacob 2:30, pulled completely out of context, as a loophole carved out specially for the practice of polygamy by the Utah Saints some 2,400 years in its future. As the quote below demonstrates, generations later, the church has not repented of its formerly institutionalized adultery, and it is not controversial in any given elder’s quorum of the church to entertain the possible reinstatement of the commandment of polygamy, or the doctrine of having many wives and concubines, as “the principle” is described in Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants.

And your minds in times past have been darkened because of unbelief, and because you have treated lightly the things you have received—

Which vanity and unbelief have brought the whole church under condemnation.

And this condemnation resteth upon the children of Zion, even all.

And they shall remain under this condemnation until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon and the former commandments which I have given them, not only to say, but to do according to that which I have written—

That they may bring forth fruit meet for their Father’s kingdom; otherwise there remaineth a scourge and judgment to be poured out upon the children of Zion.

For shall the children of the kingdom pollute my holy land? Verily, I say unto you, Nay.

-Doctrine and Covenants 84:54-59

It is implausible that Joseph Smith was privately endorsing polygamy while publicly denouncing it as a false and wicked doctrine, excommunicating offenders, preaching monogamy, warning women against false and lying priests and apostles, and predicting judgment on the Saints for lying and adultery. The claim depends largely on testimony from a secret inner circle that outlived Joseph and made these assertions despite the sustained protests of his wife Emma, who survived him by decades.

There is no direct contemporaneous evidence for Joseph Smith being commanded to institute polygamy by an angel with a sword while he was alive to confirm it. But Joseph probably spoke of the angel of the LORD God, ORION, many times. In accord with Mithraism which informed Latter-day Saint temple ritual, monogamous marriage between one man and one woman, sealed by the LORD God, was the only type of literal, actualized marriage that Joseph Smith preached in his own words. Moreover, monogamous marriage is the only type of marriage institution condoned in the scriptures he produced and published while yet alive and directing the church he founded. Given the greater context of this angel’s ministrations in Smith’s own revelations, it would have been counterintuitive for the angel of the LORD God to command polygamy.  Therefore, it becomes evident that the angel with the sword as understood in Roman Mithraism is a motif that was allowed to die on the vine after the Prophet’s martyrdom because the themes associated with this figure work against the polygamous culture, doctrine, and administrative structure that prevailed in the successionist Utah church.

It is instructive, then, to contrast Joseph’s very Roman cosmology and scriptural legacy to Brigham Young’s view of Roman monogamy:

Monogamy, or restrictions by law to one wife, is no part of the economy of heaven among men. Such a system was commenced by the founders of the Roman Empire… Rome became the mistress of the world, and introduced this order of monogamy wherever her sway was acknowledged. Thus this monogamic order of marriage, so esteemed by modern Christians as a hold sacrament and divine institution, is nothing but a system established by a set of robbers.

-Brigham Young, Deseret News, August 6, 1862

And…

Since the founding of the Roman empire monogamy has prevailed more extensively than in times previous to that. The founders of that ancient empire were robbers and women stealers, and made laws favoring monogamy in consequence of the scarcity of women among them, and hence this monogamic system which now prevails throughout all Christendom, and which has been so fruitful a source of prostitution and whoredom throughout all the Christian monogamic cities of the Old and New World, until rottenness and decay are at the root of their institutions both national and religious.

-Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, v. 11, p. 128

If Brigham Young had any knowledge of what Joseph was doing with Mithraism, he either didn’t understand it, or didn’t carry on with it because it ran contrary to Brigham’s polygamy doctrine and cosmology. After Joseph, the Utah Church decoupled itself from the celestial ordinances of astronomy because they prove monogamy, and the teachings have been all but erased from the cultural memory, until the predominant narrative is that without the doctrine of polygamy initiated in Section 132, there would be no celestial marriage, no sealing of humanity into the family of God, no temples and no temple ceremonies, no Garment of the Holy Priesthood, and no doctrine of theosis in Mormonism, a claim that fails to be true despite constant repetition. (For just one of many examples, see Polygamy Denial: The Conspiracy That Could Rewrite Latter-day Saint History 5:04-6:25 minute-mark of her interview of BYU Professor Dr. Christopher Blythe, Jasmin Rappleye, YouTube, 8/28/2025. https://youtu.be/98fJ_hRcHew?si=D78exzBwpSYJLYzu)

This study has supplied a canonical justification beyond the disputed parts of Section 132 for sealing the family of God together through celestial ordinances, the profundity of the ritualistic Garment of the Holy Priesthood worn by  many of the LDS endowed, ordinance work done for the dead in LDS temples, and the ascension to co-creative exaltation by initiation through celestial ordinances. Just as these can be performed now without any dependence whatsoever on the false doctrine of many wives and concubines, neither was polygamy needed for their establishment in the era of Joseph Smith. The understanding and performance of celestial ordinances preceded their reiteration in the authentically revealed portions of Section 132.     

The supposed angel with a sword, threatening violence to the Prophet Joseph Smith, is not the celestial God who set down his sword to plant a Garden in Eden, nor is this the angel who plunges his word deep into a soft heart. Joseph would have known such a polygamy-commanding angel threatening his destruction to be a false god, the god of this world- the imposter. He had already deeply considered such a fraud  when he produced the Book of Moses:

The words of God, which he spake unto Moses at a time when Moses was caught up into an exceedingly high mountain,

And he saw God face to face, and he talked with him, and the glory of God was upon Moses; therefore Moses could endure his presence.

And God spake unto Moses, saying: Behold, I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name; for I am without beginning of days or end of years; and is not this endless?

And, behold, thou art my son; wherefore look, and I will show thee the workmanship of mine hands; but not all, for my works are without end, and also my words, for they never cease.

Wherefore, no man can behold all my works, except he behold all my glory; and no man can behold all my glory, and afterwards remain in the flesh on the earth.

And I have a work for thee, Moses, my son; and thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten; and mine Only Begotten is and shall be the Savior, for he is full of grace and truth; but there is no God beside me, and all things are present with me, for I know them all.

And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Moses, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee.

And it came to pass that Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created; and Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered.

And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.

But now mine own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence; but his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him.

And it came to pass that when Moses had said these words, behold, Satan came tempting him, saying: Moses, son of man, worship me.

And it came to pass that Moses looked upon Satan and said: Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten; and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?

For behold, I could not look upon God, except his glory should come upon me, and I were transfigured before him. But I can look upon thee in the natural man. Is it not so, surely?

Blessed be the name of my God, for his Spirit hath not altogether withdrawn from me, or else where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me? And I can judge between thee and God; for God said unto me: Worship God, for him only shalt thou serve.

Get thee hence, Satan; deceive me not; for God said unto me: Thou art after the similitude of mine Only Begotten (the LORD God ORION).

And he also gave me commandments when he called unto me out of the burning bush, saying: Call upon God in the name of mine Only Begotten, and worship me.

And again Moses said: I will not cease to call upon God, I have other things to inquire of him: for his glory has been upon me, wherefore I can judge between him and thee. Depart hence, Satan.

And now, when Moses had said these words, Satan cried with a loud voice, and ranted upon the earth, and commanded, saying: I am the Only Begotten, worship me.

And it came to pass that Moses began to fear exceedingly; and as he began to fear, he saw the bitterness of hell. Nevertheless, calling upon God, he received strength, and he commanded, saying: Depart from me, Satan, for this one God only will I worship, which is the God of glory.

And now Satan began to tremble, and the earth shook; and Moses received strength, and called upon God, saying: In the name of the Only Begotten, depart hence, Satan.

And it came to pass that Satan cried with a loud voice, with weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; and he departed hence, even from the presence of Moses, that he beheld him not.

And now of this thing Moses bore record; but because of wickedness it is not had among the children of men.

-Moses 1:1-23, produced June 1830–February 1831, parenthesis and emphasis added.

In light of all the things we have discussed, I think it is instructive and beautiful to meditate for a moment at the end of this investigation on the first account of Joseph Smith’s First Vision. It is in his own words, written sometime in 1832 when the Prophet was 27 years old, and describes a vision he had when he was 16:

I pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind, the contentions and divisions, the wickedness and abominations, and the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind. My mind become exceedingly distressed for I became convicted of my sins. And by searching the scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord, but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament. And I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world for I learned in the scriptures that God was the same yesterday today and forever. That he was no respecter to persons for he was God. For I looked upon the sun (LEO-7th seal), the glorious luminary of the earth, and also the moon (CANCER-6th seal) rolling in their majesty through the heavens, and also the stars (GEMINI-5th seal) shining in their courses, and the earth (TAURUS-4th seal) also upon which I stood, and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven (ARIES-3rd seal), and the fish of the waters (PISCES-2nd seal), and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in majesty and in the strength of beauty whose power and intelligence in governing the things which are so exceeding great and marvelous even in the likeness of him (LORD God ORION) who created them. And when I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed, well hath the wise man said it is a fool that saith in his heart there is no God! My heart exclaimed, all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotent and omnipresent power- a being who maketh Laws and decreeeth and bindeth all things in their bounds, who filleth Eternity, who was and is and will be from all Eternity to Eternity. And when I considered all these things, and that that being seeketh such to worship him as worship him in spirit and in truth, therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go to obtain mercy. And the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness and while in the attitude of calling upon the Lord, in the 16th year of my age, a pillar of fire light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me, and I was filled with the spirit of God, and the Lord opened the heavens upon me, and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying, Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee. Go thy way. Walk in my statutes and keep my commandments. Behold, I am the Lord of glory. I was crucified for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life. Behold, the world lieth in sin and at this time none doeth good. No, not one. They have turned aside from the gospel and keep not my commandments. They draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me, and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth, to visit them according to their ungodliness, and to bring to pass that which hath been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Apostles. Behold and lo, I come quickly, as it is written of me, in the cloud, clothed in the glory of my Father. And my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy, and the Lord was with me. But I could find none that would believe the heavenly vision, nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart.

-Please see the actual transcript found at BYU Religious Studies Center, The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, by Dean C. Jessee. Edited here for flow and to correct misspellings and repetition of words. Emphasis and parenthesis added by K. Coleman.

This investigation is meant to start a conversation about an approach to the scriptures I have never heard in a faithful setting. It seems self-evident that the history of religion is often a threat to it. This is part of the reason people leave religion, and in leaving they lose much. What we think we know is continually subject to revision. It seems to me that scripture isn’t the record of one doctrinal truth, but scripture is the bittersweet fruit plucked from the tree of tension and rivalry between people of faith. But whether bitter or sweet, if the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is left uneaten, there is no life.