Panel 000 Frontispiece Commentary Transcript
This is the first in a series of commentaries that will describe the Scroll panels in order, beginning here with the Frontispiece.
Eight years ago, I got married for the second time. I had been married previously for nineteen years and my two children from that union were stepping into the independence of young adulthood. I was deeply wounded by the dissolution of my family, which was brought about in no small part by the fact that I had quit drinking only after the divorce was finalized. The divorce forced me to remodel the myth I had created about my identity as a father and husband in a loving family that I had supposed was doing fine.
When I met Bethany two years later, she had two very young children. Her circumstances were appalling and things she and the children had been subjected to were unconscionable. To marry her and to share those burdens was a very difficult decision for me. Despite my love and affection for Bethany and her little ones, I wrestled for months with what to do, and whether I was qualified enough for the challenges Bethany’s and her children’s situation presented.
Bethany had recently turned away several other suitors with more material security to provide than I could offer as a Walla Walla foundryman and crate-builder. She never made me think I didn’t make enough money. I’ve spent many years doing very hard work, and highly skilled work, and she has a lot of respect for that. I really love that about her. As we dated and then married in a House of the Lord, our story together condensed into the essentials of a myth that simplified the difficulty, romance, adventure, and complexity of our courtship. There are a few times we have fought bitterly since then. In such moments there is no time or clarity to recreate from scratch all the reasons we committed our entire lives and souls to the other. We must fall back, in our pain and alienation, on the sacred myth that binds us tightly, even when, and especially when our little society is threatened by our unhealed wounds. The authority of our myth, our sacred history, has been essential to our thriving.
Likewise, when we are lying together in the sublime rest of each other’s arms or driving home late at night from the symphony with a concert grand harp in the back of the minivan, we will again recount the myth of our genesis. None of our retellings of our creation story are too concerned with drilling down on all the historical details. We tell a variant of the story again and again to further bind us in love. We follow the very ancient human ritual of strengthening our mythological memory in order to lay it up in store for the lean times.
It is with this sort of circumspection that I use the words “myth” and “mythology” in the Apotheosis Scroll. The authority of myth is how our societies, from families to nations, survive in the face of life’s nearly insurmountable complexities. Sometimes our myths are based on pure distilled truth, and sometimes they can’t be relied upon at all.
Christianity was born in one of the most violent, confusing, and consequential contexts imaginable. The conflict was so intense and the social rending so unspeakably visceral, that if the human mind tried to comprehend the suffering of Jesus compounded by the tens and hundreds of thousands who underwent horrors equal to his, the human heart would break under the strain. And so, the universal myth was performed in real time through the law of sacrifice focused in on one man. Some will say that because it is a myth the Christian gospel isn’t true. In my view, the mythologization of first century AD Roman Palestine makes the gospels the truest account of humankind in all human history. The astronomer prophets that translated the facts of the first century into ritual initiation transubstantiated mere matter into eternal spirit. It is a communion as profound today as it was when it was first imagined. It was only by condensing the suffering of hundreds of thousands into one, that the sacrifice of the one was able to atone universally.
I come from a tradition of Christian worship with one of the wildest origin mythologies I have ever heard. There’s nothing wrong with wild, and sometimes there is nothing truer than myth. But in its 200-year history this peculiar society has rewritten its myth a few times. None of its myths written by revisionist secretaries or prophet-administrators have fully domesticated its paradoxes, for none of the mythmakers have managed to locate authority in the sure place, the point of stillness around which the cosmos revolves. As we will see, few societies have been able in their prophesies to accommodate that the nail in the sure place is always on the move. Few have been able to discern the trajectory of the nail in the sure place, and in seeing its trajectory, proven capable enough to intersect it, even thousands of years and tens of thousands of years down the road.
The failure to secure the nail in the sure place is the story of all our societies. But despite their need for constant remodeling, our myths are still the most important thing we have. The weaker the myth, the less enduring it will be. In my view, the original Christian mystery was not mere history, but the very endurance of the original human myth, and indeed, the nail in the sure place. It has been shown by those who have studied the science of crucifixion, that a nail in the hand of the victim would simply tear through the flesh once the weight of the body hung from it. For this reason, a second nail was fastened in the wrist, between the bones of the forearm, so that the nails thus placed could support the weight of the tortured. The nails securing the Christian mystery in place in the cosmos, it turns out, are a pair, as a nail in the hand is paired with a nail in the wrist, lest “the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off: for the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 22:25).
Every 2,160 years, more or less, the great human myth has been remodeled for the age it will occupy for the next 2,160 years. If this great human myth is to go with us into future ages, we will have to learn a greater appreciation for what the myth-making prophet-astronomers of the Christian gospels left to us. The astronomical key they have left is not only the nail in the sure place, but the even more sure nail in the wrist, around which even the pole stars revolve.
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The Apotheosis Scroll is my expression of gratitude for the great Christian myth. The Scroll is subtitled:
THE CELESTIAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN MYSTERY
So what is this Mystery we talking about anyway? I see the Mystery as two-fold
FIRST, What is the relationship of humankind to God?
SECOND, Who wrote the Christian gospel narrative and to what end did they write it?
The Apotheosis Scroll undertakes to answer these questions by triangulating what might be called the ancient law of the witnesses. In ancient times, corroboration between three primary witnesses established the truth of all things. The three witnesses were: The Cosmos, Stones, which are temples, and Clay which is the human body.
These three witnesses taught the eternal ordinances of the Kingdom of God through astronomical mythology. The Christian gospel is the epitome of this grand allegorical system. The language of these witnesses has been lost over time, and with it the understanding of humankind’s divine nature. The Apotheosis Scroll seeks to illuminate the ancient theological riddle of humankind’s kinship with God: the mystery at the very foundation of Christian faith.
The Apotheosis Scroll is a self-guided initiation into the Mysteries of Godliness. The Scroll traces Christian atonement theology to its roots in the polytheistic temple mysteries of Egypt, Israel, Greece, Babylon, and India. From such pluralistic roots, the vine of Christian theology spread, in part, through the Roman Mystery that we call Mithraism. Although elements of the Christian mystery were driven underground by the ecclesiastical church, the mystery stayed alive in every succeeding century through ritualized symbolic ordinances and through the mythology of secret societies, folkloric storytelling, and individual revelatory experiences. In modernity, the mystery has reincarnated in myriad ways from Jungian psychoanalysis to temple endowment ceremonies. The Apotheosis Scroll celebrates this living body of scripture produced on the authority of the Holy Ghost, which is the voice of God responding directly to all kinds of people everywhere and through all time.
The Scroll is composed of hundreds of individual artworks including oil paintings, spray paintings, drawings, and a book-length hand-written text, all gathered into a massive digital document and then printed in scroll form on canvas rolls or as individual panels on archival paper.
Eight years in the making, the Apotheosis Scroll is a work in progress projected for completion in 2029. When the Scroll debuted at the Faith Matters RESTORE conference in Sandy, Utah in the fall of 2024 it was half-finished. The exhibition was 288-feet-long, comprised of (36) 32″ x 96″ panels printed on three canvas rolls, and displayed on three 98-foot-long drafting tables that I made at the shop where I am currently employed in my home state of Oregon. When complete, the Apotheosis Scroll will be comprised of 72 panels. When rolled out in its entirety, the Scroll will be approximately 600-feet long.
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The Frontispiece has minimal artwork. The title is on a broad parchment field and shares the space with the Scroll’s logo, which is in the center. The logo is a gear that houses a stylized Orion constellation. In the Scroll, gears represent the seals of ascension which rely on turning together to activate the clockworks of ascension. Orion’s seal, shared with the nearby Zodiacal constellation of the bull Taurus, is the fourth of seven seals, and the hinge of the gate of the Good Shepherd, upon which heaven and earth turn.
Orion is the action figure of the whole Scroll. He or she is the archetype of the ascending soul. Orion stands by the veil, poised to step out of the world and into immortality. Orion, the action figure, bears the cross. The most recognizable feature of the Orion constellation is his belt of three prominent stars. Remarkably, when the earth’s equator is projected into space, it falls just above the beltline across Orion’s navel. Thus, Orion’s navel is the level line. Orion is the reflection of the initiate, or put differently, the initiate is Orion’s earthly twin.
Orion’s upper body signifies the higher self and contains the seals from the heart to the crown of the head. Seals below the heart constitute earthly elements. The Orion Nebula resides in Orion’s loins, where countless galaxies are fathered. Ancient astronomers dropped a plumb line from the pole star in the northern hemisphere down and through Orion to the south pole star, that we call Canopus. Accordingly, the cross is transposed over the figure of Orion who contains all of the paradoxes within him: left and right, ascension and descent, east and west, male and female, the celestial and the earthly. Orion is at once the God over all the heavenly host, and the archetypal every-human. This is the heavenly cross upon which Orion, the dual-natured being, part God, and part man, was crucified. And so, Jesus, the grand archetype of initiatic ascension, said unto his disciples in Matthew 16, verses 24 and 25, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
The Apotheosis Scroll doesn’t pretend to be ancient history. I’ve already offered you all my credentials and authority will appear nowhere in my resume. But we might come closer to historical fact in this endeavor than some would like to believe. Although the Apotheosis Scroll has been rigorously researched, its primary goal is not to say for sure what any group did or did not do, or thought or didn’t think. It is more like historical fiction, or a mystery murder game a group of friends would play at a party. First and foremost, it is art. I hope that the historicity will be credible enough for the participant to succumb to the real goal of the Scroll, which is the spiritual and intellectual advancement of the soul through participation in a mystery initiation. This is accomplished by a kind of absorption that might be best facilitated by art, because only art can transmute the cold indifference of space into the conceptualizations that specially formed the primitive religious mind and can still arrest the modern intelligence and imagination. By acquainting the participant with the sacred astronomy at the foundation of the Christian gospel, the initiate will discover that the proto-Christian gospel is of a kind with all the international mysteries that preceded it, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, the mysteries of Isis of Egypt, and the ascension of Marduk in Babylon.
Of the hundreds of varying and hotly contested historical narratives that can be told of Christian beginnings, in creating the Apotheosis Scroll I have adopted one of the most controversial narratives possible. Why did I not choose the standard narrative that I would hear when I go to church- a straightforward reading as it appears in the plain text?
I chose a narrative that I suppose will be unpopular among some people of faith because as far as I can tell, the gospels were an esoteric riddle written by prophet astronomers, and while it’s plain language may have originally been in Greek, or Aramaic, or Hebrew, the real root language of the gospels is astronomy. The authors intended the study of the gospels to be an adventure whose grand finale is to soar high into the heavens on otherworldly wings, to attain the God-like perspective, which is to see planet earth, and everything on it, from above, at the still point of the center of the cosmos around which everything revolves. Only the most disciplined, faithful, and studious would discern the riddle that only those with ears to hear and eyes to see would be able to find and then treasure up. Without a knowledge of the covenant astronomy employed by the authors of the gospels, whose identity is revealed in the central astronomical parable of the text, one cannot discern the presence of the riddle, let alone the riddle’s answer.
So, the Apotheosis Scroll works backward. Having identified and then solved the riddle, which is couched in the parable of the Great Wedding Feast, the history I have selected becomes the obvious one, which also happens to be the most counter-intuitive. I didn’t choose this for the sake of controversy, but because I have found the consequence of the riddle in this sacred history to be as compelling and profound as any of the sermons I have heard delivered over the pulpit. I love the sermons. I am a religious man, and I live my life by faith. One of the greatest blessings in my life is to be a part of a community of faith in Jesus Christ. I have found, however, that the riddle that pits controversy against orthodoxy is not accidental but is baked into the primary theme of the gospels themselves. When it comes to the Apotheosis Scroll, the Atonement of Jesus Christ is true not merely because of how it happened in history but because it is the paradoxical nuclear reaction between God and humankind outside of time. The closest thing it can be compared to is the formation of a Sun. And this endless string of hydrogen explosions is so steady and gentle that they can only be perceived as a still small voice heard only by the human heart.
The authors of the gospels embraced contradiction. Dr. Roger Beck, a preeminent scholar of Mithraism, translated the embrace of paradoxes in the Mithraic mystery as the “harmony of tension in opposition”. The prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, described this paradox as, “by proving contraries, the truth is made manifest” (History of the Church 6:428). In the end, I find the riddle and its answer to be deeply faith affirming.
Every religion, even every person who takes the time to think about it, creates a myth, a unique sacred story, which is a way of telling a historical narrative that affirms their faith. Information is selected or downplayed based on whether the sacred history is served by it. I suspect that the sacred history that I supply here will subject me to ridicule and even the possibility of institutional persecution. Of more influence on my mind than this threat is the sense of connection I have to the ancient teachers of the mysteries of godliness. For these teachers of ancient wisdom, the astronomy supplied the doctrine, and in this model, they rooted themselves in eternal truths that resisted the fickle and ever-changing doctrines, lusts, ambitions, and prejudices of men.
The goal of the Apotheosis Scroll is to teach the astronomical language that reveals the riddle. With the riddle thus revealed and answered, I hope to contribute to the possibility that a revived element of Christianity may situate itself again as a great carrier of the ancient mystery of humankind’s familial relationship to the Divine, lest it be further relegated to the fringes of reactionary fundamentalism, or equally bad, the insult of proselytizing a true religion reduced to superficiality and shallow platitudes.
I will finish by reading a couple of excerpts from the acknowledgments that can be found at the bottom of the Apotheosis Scroll page online.
“My primary source is the canonized scriptures of the Holy Bible and my personal belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The significance of select portions of the Doctrine and Covenants, (a canonized scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon Latter-day Saint movements) to this work came as a complete and indispensable surprise. I am an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am a member of said church because it is a carrier of the mystery, and it is where my people are. And because I was commanded back to the church by the voice of the Lord after a twenty-year departure from it. This work, however, does not speak for or about the church, and is my own opinion and, I presume, will be completely unfamiliar to any official practice, tradition, or curriculum of the ecclesiastical church, past or present. It is primarily a work of imagination to demonstrate the process of syncretization and astronomical conceptualization that contributed to the formation of the Christian gospel. Such a process should produce infinite variations of the Christian mystery.
The Jewish Wars with Rome are thematic to this work. Reverberations of this horrifying historical period still echo through the world with repeated violence upon violence for generations. The scholars whose thinking has had the greatest impact on my thinking as pertains to this Scroll are Dr. Margaret Barker, Dr. James E. Tabor, and Dr. Robert Eisenman. Their work illuminates the complexity of Judaism and Jewish messianic movements in the decades and centuries leading up to the Christian movement in the first century AD. It will never be my intent to contribute in any way whatsoever to antisemitism, or any sort of racism at all. I hope that my work here will be generously interpreted despite my flaws and shortcomings, and through the prism of how complicated and nuanced the subject of Judaism to Christianity, and religion in general, has always been. I hope through this work to inspire passionate discussion to increase belief in God, wherever God represents the mutually shared, highest aspirations of the human imagination and soul.”
One final note:
Anyone who listens to all these episodes will notice a lot of repetition. This is because our journey is not one with a beginning and an end, but together we will be ascending a spiral of understanding. Thus, we will pass by recurring themes again and again as we increase in understanding while revolving upward, a little at a time. I hope that each time we pass by the Orion constellation or see a sacred cow, our understanding of that symbol will become more profound. Because as the late great sage, Jim Croce counseled, “if you dig it, do it. If you really dig it, do it twice.”
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 