On a summer day about 35 years ago, my friend and I were sitting on the grass at Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington, talking about the end of the world. We were small-town kids visiting the city from the eastern side of the mountains. Gasworks Park looked like a scene transplanted from a steampunk novel, with giant riveted pipes bolted and bent around each other. One could imagine them swelling with hot fumes and belching steam as some underground contraption growled like an urban life support machine. All the twisted ironworks were covered with inspiringly beautiful graffiti in a rattle-can alternate reality where prophets wore Vans sneakers instead of neckties. We took our conversation to the lakeside later that evening and kept on talking for hours about the Last Days. My, how my idea of the Apocalypse has changed!
I don’t think about religion the way I used to. But I still think about it every day. I think my 17-year-old self would have loved a conversation with my 52-year-old self. I see everything so differently and always from different angles. I would defend that while such an approach will identify more to criticize, it will also reveal more to appreciate. I have come to realize that I have a reformer’s and not an apologist’s heart, and it is that spirit that embodies my work.
I’ve also come to learn in going deeper, that editors, even pious scribes, will regularly change and even invert the meaning of original documents to suit their needs. It appears certain that John’s Revelation is a classic example of such tampering, and so its dire warning to refrain from changing any of its words is ironic.
I’ve wondered all my life about religion and its authority and the meaning of Christian discipleship. Well, everything has led to this endeavor, it seems. This is a wild apocalypse. If I could have shared it with young me, maybe my whole life would have been different.
My daughter asked me, “How do you convey in the Scroll that the narrative in the gospels is an astronomical allegory, and that this is a better way to represent the story than in literal historical terms?”
My best answer to her question is demonstrated on the Title Page. Running across the lower front of the panel is a ribbon featuring several New Testament motifs. At the tomb, Mary Magdalene is on her knees, incredulous at the disappearance of the Lord’s body from its temporary burial place. An angel, or messenger, with a higher perspective and wearing a raven costume, has left his perch upon the tombstone, and has come down to assure and comfort Mary. The costumes suggest that the narrative is a performance, and that the ordinances are better understood as theatre than history. The performers of the ordinances are representing the truth that is in the cosmos and translating it into earthly bodies in a continually cycling system of harmony between what is above and that which is below.
Also in this ribbon, the Twelve argue amongst themselves with the departure of the Sun who had ministered to them, while Roman soldiers have picked up Jesus’ mantle. Elsewhere in the ribbon, the three Marys, with the mother of Jesus in the center, counsel together in Wisdom. Their formation is a “W” for wisdom, and an “M” for Mary, the sacred names they share. The tomb where Jesus’ body is laid is the hollow of an oil lamp, where the two Marys, Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, anoint him with the oil of the olive tree from whose trunk they sprout. This anointing will be developed in greater depth in the fifth seal of the Scroll which belongs to them. On the right-hand end of the ribbon an avatar of the resurrected Lord walks with two disciples on the Road to Emmaus.
The Apotheosis Scroll is so named for the theology that Divinity is something that may be obtained. Once a soul has attained to theosis by his or her ascension through the ordinances of heaven, that soul becomes one with, or sealed to, a community best described in familial terms. Thus, this organization of holy beings, the family of God, is made up of Mothers and Fathers, wives and husbands, and sisters and brothers. These gods go back generation upon generation forever into the past and forward into eternity. These gods are one in the way that all the sand on a beach is one beach, or all the drops of water in the ocean is one sea. When we think of a god, Christ, taking on flesh and coming down to earth, we are zooming in on one grain, or one drop, in an incomprehensibly vast pantheon of eternal beings, in order that we might, through the study of the one, understand all the gods and their combined nature, just as the study of one grain of sand tells one a lot about each grain of sand on the beach. It is what Jesus meant when he said in John 14:9, “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
The Apotheosis Scroll proposes that the story of these gods is the story of humankind, and that all the children of God on the earth are not merely gods in embryo but are coeternal with all the beings mentioned above. No less than it is the nature of things for the carcass of a lion to decompose into the dust of the African savannah, it is the nature of the human soul to reflect our divine parents. Herein, the Christian gospel is the upwardly increasing human experience when extended into eternity, and some have more experience with ascension and transcending than others.
The question is whether we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, see Christ as one with whom we have familial relations, or whether there is a chasm of difference between us; whether “God was one of us”, as Joan Osborne pondered, or completely other. That’s not to say that Christ is vulgar, commonplace, or mundane, Rather, it is to say that holy men and holy women were able to recognize God, the Almighty God, transcended into the tabernacle of a man with frailties and spiraling degradations, until that body, mutilated into a vehicle of pure suffering, was pried open by its wounding to release the holy dove of God’s own eternal Spirit.
Ancient mystery schools taught the potential ascension of the human soul, which came by recognition of a more eternal dimension of human life. This mystery was taught by initiation through seven seals, until in the seventh seal the initiate approached the fulness of understanding. One form of ritualization in this seal was for the initiator, dressed as a lion, to reach his paw through a veil and take the hand of the initiate, whereupon the initiate was pulled through the veil into the Father’s kingdom. In another the initiate was embraced by the Heavenly Parent body-to-body. Another token of this seal was to have one’s feet washed by the Heavenly Parent who had disrobed of every dignity, and having cast aside their royal robes to don the rags of a slave, the initiator bent low to wash the feet of the initiate. The profundity of this symbolic seventh seal ordinance cemented the indivisibility of the Gods and their children in the imagination of the initiate forever and sealed a bond between the initiate and the initiator as emotionally binding as the relationship of a parent to a child can be.
The most prevalent way for humans to recognize their familial association with God was through marriage. Faithful marriage between a man and a woman reflected the celestial ordinance as it appeared in heaven. By celestial marriage, the duality of heaven and earth was united in the symbolic recoupling of spirit and matter, so that heaven could be filled with experience, and earth could be filled with holiness. Through marriage, the family of God was extended by analogy, just as in Christianity, disciples became a part of the eternal family of God by being married to Jesus, whether any individual disciple was literally qualified to be a bride to Jesus or not. It becomes clear with a little study that marriage ceremonies performed in the mysteries were archetypal and not always literal, and that suitable proxies to formal marriage are very common in the history of initiation in celestial ordinances. It seems that wherever symbolic justification could be made, it was employed to extend the endowment of blessings as liberally as possible, because on the deeper level, marriage ceremonies were meant to convey the potential of harmonizing the split nature within oneself. A mystery marriage ceremony could point the mind and heart to alternatives to dualism, where heaven and earth reunited in the human soul, despite inherent conflict, in the sublime celestial reward of peace. Whatever the gender of the initiate, and whether a slave or high-born royalty, by internalizing a symbolic celestial marriage, in a moment of divine recognition the initiate might overcome the world, even while suffering through its sorrows, deprivations, and horrors.
One short-lived, radically generous democratization of this great celestial ordinance was instituted in the early 1830’s by a young American prophet. Consistent with his innovation of proxy baptisms for the dead who had died without knowledge of the gospel, initiates were subsequently sealed into the family of God by proxy wedding performances, such that the formal and legal marriage between one man and one woman was not a prerequisite for the family of God to grow. Hereby, proxy weddings, even between perfect strangers, were recognized as equally valid to customary legal marriages. As in ancient times it was the ratification of the sincere performance, and not the literality of the relationship, that sealed the family of God on earth as it is in heaven. This doctrine, which imagined a generous God, who was happy to seal as many souls as possible into this ever-expanding family so that the kingdom of heaven could be recognized on earth, lasted only as long as its innovator, Joseph Smith Jr., was alive. This abbreviated period of my home religion’s past is very opaque and guarded with impenetrable demagoguery to the point of bullying, but if I am correct, after the murder of Joseph Smith, the liberality of ritualized performances was literalized into consummated polygamous marriages, and for the living, the distinction between performance and practice was abandoned, and institutional duality at every level was methodized instead.
Where properly administered, the extension of the family of God through an unbreakable bond of love between eternal gods and their children was taught through astronomical mythology which revolved daily, monthly, and yearly, and across tens of thousands of years in one eternal round. The Christian gospel and its ordinances can be read as a resolution of the obvious paradox of humankind’s dual nature, taught in the stars, from zodiacal constellation to zodiacal constellation, from a fisherman casting his net in the Pisces constellation, to a betrayal for thirty pieces of silver in Scorpio, until the falsely accused is judged in Libra, and visits the spirit world of the dead in Virgo, ascending through all celestial ordinances, until the initiate is anointed and then invited to sit upon the Father’s throne in Leo.
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The name “Apotheosis” filling the title page begins with “A” for the Apis bull, the zodiacal counterpart to Orion, who is the action figure and archetypal soul of initiatic ascension. The bull represents power and virility, for in the loins of these two, Orion and Taurus, the earth’s posterity increases for time and all eternity. It is from this bull that the earth’s abundance of agriculture and livestock poured forth in the age of Taurus, which age began around 4320 BC and ended sometime around 2160 BC. Because it is situated in the pasture on the earth side of the veil, Taurus stands for the temporal world. When female, Taurus represents Mother Earth, the giver of all life. Although humankind had endured for ages prior, the beginning of this age signified the reckoning of time because the ages of humankind had now descended past Gemini and through the veil that divided heaven from earth, and prehistory from history. In the minds of the ancient astronomers, an opaque veil had dropped between the gods and humankind, barring their commingling. In the Scroll, the advancement of temporal time in one eternal round of life sustained by Mother Earth on this side of the veil, is represented by Taurus hitched to the axle of the mill or the winepress in which the inhabitants of earth are ground into flour, or pressed into wine.
The “A” in Apotheosis is also used to form a compass. The compass, of course, is a very ancient symbol of the technology used to draw a circle, through which feat the powers of heaven are circumscribed on earth. This letter is also the “Alpha” in the Alpha and Omega.
The “P” in Apotheosis forms a stained-glass window paying homage to the Rosicrucians- a medieval brotherhood and sisterhood who preserved the above riddle of Taurus in their name of “the Rosy Cross.” The constellation in the banner hanging from the stained-glass window is Cygnus, the cross upon which the ascending serpent that healed the children of Israel is fastened.
The “O” in Apotheosis is a stylized wig worn by Hathor, the Queen of Heaven, and Asherah, her Israelite and Canaanite counterparts. This letter is also the “Omega” in the Alpha and Omega.
The “T” in Apotheosis is represented by Jesus upon the Cross, wearing a crown of thorns, and hanging in such a way as to suggest to the imagination the Cygnus constellation mentioned above.
The “H” in Apotheosis is formed by the Silver Gate of Gemini, and it is also the Arch of Titus, the significance of which is alluded to in the fourth of the Scroll’s seven seals.
The true vine emerges from an abstraction of the “E” for Elohim, the family of God, which helps to form the left-hand side of the dyad, or the splitting into two the “O” of the monad, or singularity. Dividing the monad into two is the principle behind the generation of life on earth through cellular division. Of central importance to the entire Scroll, the shape created by this division is called the vesica pisces, which is the eye of the needle, or the mandorla. The needle featured on the Title Page is a stylized ankh key. It is through the eye of this needle that all of life flows. The ankh, an Egyptian abstraction of the light-filled human body. It is the key of creation. As you know, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man. Why is that? It is because the eye of the needle is the feminine matrix, which is the birth canal. And so, we can see that it is easy for a camel to go through the birth canal of its mother camel. It happens every day. Granting first the parable’s point that it is with particular difficulty that human mothers give birth to their children when compared to other mammals, a rich man cannot pass through the eye of this needle because every human is born naked, with none of the proofs of wealth and status they may obtain later. Matthew 19:24 describes that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” because the only way to enter into the kingdom of God is through the strait and narrow path of a second birth.
The mother’s body in any of her lives is primarily where the celestial ordinances of the creation and resurrection of human bodies are accomplished. In a special endowment of power and authority, only women have been given the divine potential to deliver the gods into the kingdom of God. While passing through the veil of childbirth, the infant is anointed by the oil of their mother, the olive tree. As children these divine offspring are thus anointed to their legitimate potential to one day sit where their Father or their Mother sit as creators of life. Later, after the children have grown and married, a second anointing will seal the first, and everything the Father has will be given them. In maturity, the second anointing ratifying the divine ascent of the individual to the celestial association of the Gods who have the power within them to create life on earth, is consummated by passing through the olive tree again, and being anointed again, but this time by her oil of intercourse. Everyone who obtains the profound recognition for themselves that they are thus anointed in the kingdom of God, to become creators of the tabernacles of gods, has received their second anointing, or the Holy Spirit of Promise, which is an eternal increase to their posterity. The purpose of temple rituals in the mysteries of godliness was to help the initiate come to this recognition about him- or herself through the immutable ordinances eternally established in the stars.
So what can the Father give them in a kingdom that is not of this world? Our verse specifies that the Father’s kingdom is not characterized by material wealth. The priceless gift the Father bestows upon his begotten is the initiate’s recognition of their association with the Gods by virtue of their being co-creators of human life consecrated to the family of God, to “keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are” (John 17:11).
The “SIS” in Apotheosis is formed by two fiery flying serpents, or the Gemini seraphs, mirrored around the Celtic symbol for “mother and child”, a motif that I find exceedingly beautiful and powerful, which contextualizes the Mother of all as the Spirit in the Godhead.
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On the flanks of the panel, in the lower zones of the blueprint areas, I speculate on the ordinances of the Roman mystery that we call Mithraism as performed by initiates in costume. I will try to demonstrate over the course of the Scroll that I consider the earliest portions of the book of Revelation in the New Testament to be a record of John’s initiation into Mithraism. This is a highly controversial proposition, no doubt. My perspective is that imagination and mythological mystery play a huge role in coming to truth, and it was truth, the most profound truth, that the creators of the Christian mystery sought to unveil to a horrifically violent and exploitative world so that somehow it might be redeemed. It seems possible that one way or another, all imagination circles back to a meta truth, a prime astronomical myth, that is central to human experience, and that the oldest parts of John’s Revelation is its preservation.
Because their secrets were held so sacred by the initiates, every description we have of Mithraic rites is supplied by its enemies and was used by them as pre-war propaganda. Even hundreds of years after it was practiced and then brutally suppressed by the church, we have no direct recording of the liturgies, unless I am able to make the case, as I hope to, that the Roman Mystery of Mithras is all over the New Testament canon, and hiding in plain sight from Revelation to the Sermon on the Mount. We have only the archaeological remains of temples, called in the plural, mithraea, and the iconic artworks within them to interpret as best we can what initiates learned within their walls. The second-hand reports and rumors of Mithraic ideas are so polemic as to portray the Savior God of the Mithraic covenant as Satan himself.
In light of this, it came as no surprise to me that when the Apotheosis Scroll was rolled out in its then-300-foot length at a religious conference in Sandy, Utah, in 2024, a certain scholar friend of mine who has a special interest in John’s apocalypse, saw the representations of Mithras in the Scroll and commented to his son that “the devil” was one of the Scroll’s main characters. Not many people have heard of Mithras. Of the relatively few people who have, his identification as Satan in John’s Revelation is the nearly automatic consensus among them. As a highly qualified defender and apologist of the church, my friend took the Church Fathers’ word for it as an ideological inheritance, when it came to the mystery tradition the Church Fathers libeled as a Satanic imitation of the Christian gospel.
I had flipped the script, but I will argue that I have turned it back over to the original creators in order that we might learn from the source. Do I have any evidence for my hypothesis that rather than the enemy of Christianity, Mithraism is actually the originator and fulfilment of its cosmology? I will offer as evidence the three witnesses of astronomy, the temples, and the seals of the body, and add to these a close inspection of the scriptural account itself. I will try to make the case that the original creators of the Christian mystery have been falsely accused. I will not be the first to try to exonerate them. The memorialization of Mithraic symbolism in the US Capitol are perpetual clues to the fact that the Founding Fathers of the United States were working on the same riddle. Half a century later their work was picked up and added upon when Joseph Smith captured the voice of Mithras in his production of the Doctrine and Covenants and delivered his sacred astronomy to a people who could not hear or see it.
This leads to an important theme upon which the Apotheosis Scroll pivots. That theme is the parable of the wheat and the tares found in Matthew 13:24-30. In brief, the parable goes like this:
The kingdom of God is like a field sown with the good seeds of the master planter. Overnight his adversary comes and sows the seeds of tares among the wheat. As the crop grows, one cannot tell the wheat from the tares. Only when the crop has reached maturity, and the heads of wheat crane to follow the sun as it passes through the sky overhead while the tares resist, will one know which heads are wheat and which are tares- which contributes to whether one’s mortal experience on earth is “one and done,” or whether one is saved to be planted again. Ultimately, it is the purpose of all the kernels to become bread, so whether one is merely ash when one’s life comes to its conclusion, or whether one is the bread of life baked in the oven heated by the Father’s fire, depends upon the agency of the individual.
As we can see from the parable, the contamination of the field is immediate. Even in God’s own kingdom, it doesn’t even take a single generation for the true gospel to be mixed with apostasy. It happens overnight. With the Lord’s kingdom itself as the primary archetypal example, one can and should expect any movement to be fatally tainted with the seeds of its corruption, immediately following its inception. There is no pure movement, no pure gospel, and no strictly true church. They will always be the best we can do, and no more.
Over the course of eight years, as a young husband and father I worked with my family to transform an abandoned pioneer Catholic church in the middle of the Waterville Plateau wheatfields of eastern Washington into a home. I loved to see the wheat heads fill out in the summer sun before harvest, and to see for myself the symbolism behind this timeless agricultural parable.
The crowning event of John’s Revelation is the central organizing motif of covenant astronomy: the coming of the Son, S-O-N, which is represented by the Sun, S-U-N. I think we were always meant to envision the Second Coming as if we are wheat in the field bending to see his rising every morning, and craning to see his passing overhead every day, while the tares proudly exalt themselves as those stubbornly unwilling to bend.
The Sun, which is the light of Christ that gives life and understanding to everyone born into this world, is one unified object, but it radiates in every single direction, in millions and millions of rays from its central core. Likewise, Christian discipleship should radiate out as individuated rays, such that the Christian testimony is limitless and unbound, and diffuse in every direction.
I have heard some say that the Second Coming will be in a few years, while others say in a few hundred more. I propose for your consideration that the Second Coming is a daily occurrence already at hand. The creators of the Christian mystery left astronomical clues to us that in our day, God would be enthroned on the mercy seat of our pole star, Polaris, and his two-edged sword, dividing joints and marrow, would be thrust into the point around which even the pole stars revolve. This astronomical sign which is already upon us points to the seat of consciousness in the human mind as the arrival of the Prince of Peace. In the same way that Christians identify Yahweh (or Jehovah) of the Old Testament as the premortal Jesus, the architects of the Christian mystery called the resurrected Christ Mithras, which translated, means Covenant Maker and Friend. In ancient times in the Vedic tradition, Mithras drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky every day. In recognition of the eternal divinity of Christ, his Second Coming in our age was projected ahead to our day as Mithras descending in his chariot of fire. But there’s so much more. As testified to by astronomer prophets of former days, from whom we can learn much, God is already in our midst. As it was with the coming of Christ, the Second Coming of Christ is a realization about oneself, one’s neighbor, and all humankind.
Jesus said, “If your leaders tell you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they tell you, ‘It’s in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and outside of you.
“When you know yourselves, then you’ll be known, and you’ll realize that you’re the children of the living Father…”
–Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 