Panel 001 Commentary Transcript
PART 1: THE BIRD and the TREE
Hello Friends. My name is Kamron Coleman, and I am the creator of the Apotheosis Scroll. It is subtitled, the Celestial Architecture of the Christian Mystery, because for the ancient architects of religion, even within the Abrahamic traditions, astronomy supplied the doctrine. Ancient prophets, 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 textural traditions took for granted that the hearer already understood the basic astronomical ordinances upon which their stories and systems were based. Since astronomical signs corresponded exactly to the agricultural cycle, any deviations from these ancient standards would increase the risk of floods, famines, and droughts. Innovations to the ancient system jeopardized all aspects upon which society depended.
Around two thousand years ago, a higher degree of prosperity and urban differentiation brought more changes to the already embattled old agrarian philosophy. As civilizations transitioned away from agricultural subsistence, which had set the rhythm of their life, and taught them the life cycle of the human soul, astronomical memory was exchanged for profound new doctrines that set the human imagination free from the never-ending grind of a toilsome and violent life. These popular and eventually dominant philosophies of the heavenly ideal cast matter aside as filthy, and as a taskmaster to imprison the human soul. Because matter is personified in the Mother and her corresponding motifs of trees of life and sacred cows, whenever philosophies of the heavenly ideal dominated, symbols of the earth 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 moorings.
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 these shifting paradigms. While varied strains of Christianity fully rejected the body, matter, and a physical resurrection, other strains of Christianity deliberately kept one foot rooted in the soil of mother earth, while the other foot stepped through the veil into celestial promise. 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.
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Panel 001 is a green chalkboard. A timeline runs across the length of the top of the chalkboard. The timeline would be better represented as a wheel, but we will start with a timeline and work up to the same representation on a wheel as we progress. The timeline begins approximately 26,000 years ago and includes all twelve of the zodiacal ages of this Great Cycle, which Great Cycle comes to its conclusion at the beginning of Aquarius, where a new Great Cycle will begin, just as it did 26,000 years ago, and as it had done 26,000 years before that, and so on. The ancients reckoned time by the zodiacal age they occupied, even the writers of the sacred history of the Hebrew Bible, who lived in the age of Aries. Because an astronomical age such as Aries or Pisces is a long time- roughly 2,160 years, the ancients further reckoned time by counting their generations. Over long periods of time, the oral traditions reckoning a culture’s ancestral history became archetypal. This dynamic is a prize of incalculable worth. While it evidences the folly of taking ancestral myth literally, it conserves priceless generational wisdom. The patriarchal archetypes of the Holy Bible and their corresponding ages are mapped onto this timeline, beginning with Adam and Eve stepping out of their Aquarius Eden and into Capricorn. According to the ancient timeline, we are about to reenter the Eden where Adam and Eve first inhaled the breath of life.
Seven generations, or astronomical seals, after Adam and Eve stepped out of Eden and into Capricorn, the timeline refers to the prophesying of Enoch in the age of Leo. His prophesies represent the destruction of the world by a comet and other catastrophes that moved mountains and changed the face of the land. This cataclysm previewed the epoch of the Great Flood of Noah, whose symbolic seals are in Cancer. Many thousands of years later still, at the turning of the Age of Aries into Pisces, Yeshua, who would become Jesus the Christ, is born.
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A loose theme of augury, which is the study of birds to divine the will of the gods, unites many of the images on Panel 001. The theme of augury helps to set the Scroll firmly in the context of the pagan Greco-Roman world in the first century.
Most prominent among the images of birds and their signs, on the panel’s left, a raven, from a painting on board in the medium of oil paint and spray paint, fills a large portion of a wheel of life. The raven, or corax, whose habitat is the battlefield, is a soul that straddles the world of the living and the dead. The Corax constellation is superimposed over the raven.
Sharing the wheel of life with the raven is a purple butterfly freshly emerged from its chrysalis. It becomes clear after closer inspection that the butterfly was first a man, who like a caterpillar crawling down a branch, enclosed himself in, and then ultimately emerged from the butterfly’s chrysalis. It is thematic in the Scroll that this second birth, as that from caterpillar to butterfly, takes place in the region of the wheel of life that will belong to Cancer, the Queen of Heaven. Herein, Leo will occupy the 12 o’clock position on the Zodiacal wheel, Cancer, the 1 o’clock position, and Capricorn, the 7 o’clock position, etc.
On the far right of Panel 001, a falconer stands with a bird of prey perched on his gloved fist, the falcon being a clear allusion to the Egyptian god Horus. As such, this falconer is a loose interpretation of the action figure, Orion, whom the Egyptians identified as Osiris. In the proximity of this drawing is a quote scrawled in chalk on the chalkboard. The quote is by Carl G. Jung and is from Man and His Symbols: Approaching the Unconscious:
“The Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the God-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris/Horus myth of ancient Egypt. It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were “invented” by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward “believed” by a credulous and uncritical people. It is said that stories told by a power-seeking priesthood are not true but merely wishful thinking. But the very word “invent” is derived from the Latin invenire and means “to find” and hence to find something by “seeking” it…[t]he word itself hints at some foreknowledge of what you are going to find…”
Near to this quote, and in the lower front, just right of center, there is the impression of a rising phoenix. From a spray painting on board, and in colors of fire and crimson, the phoenix, crowned with a halo, emerges from the tree of life through the veil matrix. The phoenix is cloaked in blood, but he is as much a being made of spirit as body. Like the freshly emerged butterfly, the wings of the phoenix have not yet been stretched to lift the bird into the air. The posture of the phoenix is also suggestive of a tree whose boughs momentarily hang low, but after unfurling, will spread in full splendor. The quote from Carl Jung continues:
“Although there is ample historical evidence for the symbolic relation between Christ and the tree symbol…the serious answer would require a far-reaching dissertation about the antique symbolism of the dying god and its relation to the cult of the Great Mother and her symbol, the tree… The further we delve into the origins of a collective image or express it in an ecclesiastical language of dogma, the more we uncover a seemingly unending web of archetypal patterns… We have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present.”
In the proximity of the painting of the phoenix, the constellations, from the lower-right, and winding upward toward the upper-left, are Capricorn, then Aquarius- the Second Coming of Christ, who has the goats of Capricorn on his left, and the sheep of Aries on his right, and then Pisces, then Aries, then Taurus, whose seal is shared with Orion, the Good Shepherd bent in prayer in Gethsemane. Moving on through the veil of the Milky Way matrix, we advance past Gemini, and then to Cancer, who is always being attacked by Hydra, the Luciferic serpent who delivers the constellation Crater, the “bitter cup.” Presently we have arrived in the celestial kingdom of Leo. Recalling Genesis 3, Hydra is always poised to strike Leo’s heel while Leo inevitably crushes the serpent’s head. In the kingdom of Leo are three degrees of celestial glory, namely,
- The Big Dipper
- The Pole Star, even “the nail in the sure place,” and finally,
- The North Celestial Pole, the point around which even the pole stars revolve, or “the nail in the more sure place.”
One can see that the zodiacal constellations to the right of and including Aquarius are labeled one through seven. As opposed to the seals, or chakras, ascending the spine, these zodiacal constellations together with their corresponding ruling planets are the seven ordinances of the covenant path corresponding to the seals of the front of the body. In the Apotheosis Scroll, Jesus Christ is the grand archetype of initiatic ascension, the one, and only one to follow through these seals.
The congregation of the north in the exalted region of the night sky is the celestial mountain-top home to the deceased exalted Patriarchs. It will be shown hereafter that archangels in an ancient Hebrew tradition were represented by the circumpolar stars of the Big Dipper. Yahweh was higher than all of these. In the thousand years prior to the birth of Christ, the north pole sat empty with no star to mark it. And so, Yahweh, who began to be worshipped at this time as “the Most High,” was an invisible God, whose image could not be seen or conveyed, as he occupied a throne in empty space.
In this light, consider a reference to the coming messiah in the “Star Prophecy” in the Book of Numbers:
I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; A Star shall come out of Jacob; A scepter shall rise out of Israel…(Numbers 24:17).
The fervor of the time appears to show that in fact, sometime in the decades around the year zero, a temporary pole star momentarily appeared, satisfying the symbolic weight of the Star Prophecy, although it may have only been visible to astronomers east of Judea. In the first century AD, while some of the Jews saw one or another of the rebel Jewish princes and zealots as the individual represented by the temporary pole star, and thus, the fulfillment of the Star Prophecy, other prominent Jews such as Josephus, saw the prophecy’s literal fulfillment in Vespasian, the Roman Emperor who, having been born at about the right time, brought peace to Palestine through decisive victory in the Jewish/Roman Wars. This controversy lies at the heart of this entire project, for how the Star Prophecy was or was not fulfilled determined the narrative of Christianity that was to follow. Although there were other contenders for the title, Jesus became the primary candidate for fulfillment of the Star Prophecy.
PART 2: THE COW
If one looks carefully, the birth of Jesus is marked on the timeline by Bossy, the Celestial Pole Cow. Because she has been forgotten to history, she is lovingly renamed here for the milk cow on the Coleman family Pearl Hill homestead. This constellation is enlarged for clarity on the far-left side of the timeline so that we can dive deeper into the significance of the Star Prophecy, which was of intense international political interest.
First, some background into Bossy, the Celestial Pole Cow constellation. I was tipped off to the potential of this constellation by the Dendera Zodiac, that used to be in the ceiling of the temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt. In her temple, Hathor, the Queen of Heaven, is stylized as a cow. The curious thing is the labeling of the Big Dipper as “the Thigh of the Cow.” Perplexingly abstract, is this lone, disembodied cow leg revolving around the center. Nearby, a cow which is disproportionately large compared to the other constellations, is center stage. After a few minutes of studying a star chart, I was able to imagine the full body of this cow. The Bossy constellation is made of four circumpolar constellations. They are:
- Cepheus, the King,
- The Big Dipper which forms part of the Great Bear constellation of Ursa Major,
- The Little Dipper, which forms part of the Little Bear constellation of Ursa Minor, and
- Draco, the Great Red Dragon constellation of the north. In universal mythology, this dragon who lives upon the mountain of the cosmos jealously guards the golden treasure safely in the bend of its serpentine body.
Because of the earth’s slight wobble, the north pole star seems to migrate from one star to another at a glacially slow pace. Accordingly, the pole star in one age is not the pole star in another age. By the time of Jesus’ birth, the cosmos had moved from revolving around Thuban, the Cow’s udder, to revolving around the womb of the Cow, which is empty, or virginal, space.
Today, if one were to locate this constellation in the northern hemisphere, it would fill a significant portion of the entire sky as it revolves on the axis of today’s pole, which has moved from the empty womb of the Cow to the pole star, Polaris, which is on the center of the Cow’s back.
Years ago, I was enjoying a talk on YouTube by Dr. John S. Thompson called “The Lady at the Horizon: Egyptian Tree-Goddess Iconography and Sacred Trees.” One image in his presentation captured my imagination in an unexpected way and has had a major influence on the direction of this work. The image, a crude line drawing, was a sketch depicting a scene from the tomb of King Tutmos III and depicted a child nursing from a tree of life in the underworld. Dr. Thompson quoted from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Text of Pepi I as prefiguring the image:
When the deceased king comes to his mother goddess in the underworld journey, she says to her son, ‘accept my breast and suck from it, that you may live. Though you are small, you shall go forth to the sky as falcons.’ This Pepi will go to the sky, to the high mounds, and to yonder high sycamore in the east of the sky, the bustling one atop which the gods sit.
I have thought deeply about this image and Dr. Thompson’s commentary for several years, but it wasn’t until I was studying the phenomenon of the shifting pole stars in relation to the Celestial Pole Cow that I was hit with the full impact of the total astronomical system, and what it says about the coming of Christ.
In the previous video about the Apotheosis Scroll Title Page, I commented on a variety of ways that the seventh seal ordinance of the communion of the heavenly parent with their child was conveyed in the mysteries, whether it be by a lion’s paw pulling the initiate into the celestial kingdom, or a body-to-body embrace, or ceremonial feet-washing. In the Old Kingdom of Egypt, an aspect of this sacred ordinance was called The Opening of the Mouth. I read somewhere that part of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony was to apply milk to the mouth of the deceased. I supposed that what is being conveyed is something like the child nursing from the sycamore mentioned above.
Moreover, the 22nd saying in the Gospel of Thomas describes that:
Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said unto his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”
Upon further study and meditation on the subject, I realized that in the time of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (2,649-2130 BC), the pole star was Thuban, which can be found in the rear third of Draco’s serpentine tail. While it helps to form the distinctive curves of the Draco constellation, Thuban is located within the udder of the Celestial Pole Cow constellation. To suckle from there 4,500 years ago would have meant that one was nourished from the center point of the cosmos, the very fountain of the Milky Way Tree of Life.
The second chapter of Matthew describes Magi, Zoroastrian astronomers from the east, who followed a new star to find the newborn Jesus, whereupon they gave him the spices that nurture the phoenix’s rejuvenation from the ashes. Every astronomer knows, and the Magi were the best of them, that the only star one follows is the pole star, lest one walk in circles. I wonder if 2,000 years ago a supernova or a comet briefly appeared as the Bethlehem Star, a temporary but completely accurate pole star, or “the nail in the sure place” in the empty womb of this celestial bovine virgin, alerting the astronomer prophets to the certain birth of the solar messiah of the age. I said above that Draco, the Great Red Dragon constellation of the north, lives upon the mountain of the cosmos while jealously guarding the golden treasure safely in the bend of its serpentine body. In the Apotheosis Scroll, the golden treasure guarded by Draco is the only one of his kind, the prenatal infant Sun of God, the golden calf anointed at his crowning from the maternal matrix with a golden halo. This birth was phenomenally unique and special, making this virginal pregnancy the uncontestable celestial advent of the Only-Begotten Son of God.
Such a body, a celestial body, where matter is sacred and hails from the highest degrees of the heavenly kingdom, is an issuance of the Celestial Pole Cow. While the Virgin birth of the temporary pole star in the womb of the Cow was miraculously rare, the issuance of seed from the Celestial Pole Cow back to earth is prolific. This pouring forth happens so constantly and with such fecundity that her progeny is represented by the Milky Way which spills earthward from the dually symbolic Big Dipper which makes up the Celestial Pole Cow’s hind portion. The Celestial Pole Cow represents life beyond Leo’s celestial fires, where the human soul is reintegrated, and recombined, and is part human, and part divine. Jesus, Son of Mary, was a child of his eternal Father and this eternal Mother.
In the Christian tradition, and as the incarnation of the transcendent God, Jesus’ premortal identity was Yahweh, the God of Israel. In the age of Yahweh, which began around three thousand years ago, the throne of the Most High was represented by a void in endless space, occupied by an equally invisible God. The name of Christ in the resurrection is Mithras, which means, “the Covenant Maker and Friend.” Now at Christ’s second coming, Polaris, the mercy seat, is the celestial pole of the firmament, marking again the end of the Great Age and the commencement of an entirely new world that happens only once every 26,000 years.
Like the falcons lodging in the sycamore tree mentioned above, Corax the Raven, a character that will feature prominently in the Scroll, is the observer from the tail of Hydra of the Grand Archetype’s successful initiatic ascent. Able to peer behind the veil, Corax is first to perceive the return of the Exalted One in his red riding gear, as Mithras returns with the whole cosmos subsumed in him and under his command at the end of the Great Cycle. One can imagine Corax the Raven, reporting on the triumphal scene as follows:
“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 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” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:46-49).
In the upper right-hand portion of the green chalkboard, a fanciful Merkabah chariot modeled on the Temple of Solomon is held aloft by giant wings, as the Second Coming of the Son of Man in his glory amid the clouds is reimagined.
It will be demonstrated in Panel 028 of the Scroll that this celestial apocalypse observed above in the cosmos, is simultaneously the very same system at work in human biology to produce individual human consciousness. In Panel 028, the cross-section of the right hemisphere of the human brain, the temple, is shown to be a star chart for the astral moment described in the Mithraic tauroctony scene. Prophet astronomers charted the very astronomical moment planet earth is in right now as an invitation to us to learn what they knew. Panel 028 decodes a Mithraic liturgy, somehow hidden and until now, undiscovered in “the missionary sections” of the Doctrine and Covenants. This decoding reveals that the depiction of Mithras in the tauroctony scene in the Roman mystery is the invitation, in this very moment of earth’s ponderous and storied history, to participate in the earthly and celestial atonement anticipated by the angels for millennia, an atonement facilitated by human imagination.
PART 3: THE LAMB
The text of the ABSTRACT, bearing a seal of the breaking forth of the seed of the Bread of Life, begins:
“There are three primary witnesses of the eternal ordinances of the Kingdom of God. Authority was substantiated by corroboration between all three of these witnesses. The rest of hierarchical administrations have been conventions of human agency, for good and bad. The witnesses of eternal ordinances are:
- The heavens (the cosmos),
- The stones (temples), and
- The clay (the human body)
“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. The transformation of the soul was accomplished through the opening of astronomical seals 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 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 century 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. 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 spark of divinity in everyman 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. In an 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. The Apotheosis Scroll demonstrates the astronomical conceptualization and religious syncretization that may have produced ancient mystery motifs and the Christian mystery in particular. 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.”
Another quote is scrawled on the green chalkboard in yellow chalk. This time the quote is from Hamlet’s Mill, by Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend. The quote reads as follows:
“The cosmos was one vast system full of gears within gears, enormously intricate in its connections, which could be likened to a many-dialed clock. Its functions appeared and disappeared all over the system, like strange cuckoos in the clock, and wonderful tales were woven around them to describe their behavior; but just as in an engine, one cannot understand each part until one has understood the way all the parts interconnect in the system.”
The authors continue, “Similarly, Rudyard Kipling in a droll allegory, ‘The Ship that found Herself,’ once explained what happens on a new ship in her shakedown voyage. All the parts spring into clamorous being as each plays its role for the first time, the plunging pistons, the groaning cylinders, the robust propeller shaft, the straining bulkheads, the chattering rivets, each feeling at the center of the stage, each telling the steam about its own unique and incomparable feats, until at last they subside into silence as a new deep voice is heard, that of the ship who has found her identity at last.”
In my view, the Christian churches are somewhat like the groaning cylinders, the straining bulkheads, and the chattering rivets. They seem unaware of the greater system of which Christianity is a part, which is a universal system containing everything, and everyone.
To finish up with Panel 001, a little square on blue paper with white lines has a drawing of a man and a woman wearing snakeskin body suits. An angelic girl has been tasked with offering the man a fish costume as the couple steps across the threshold of Aquarius and into Capricorn where they will begin their ascent. That is all we will say about this for now. It is the first clue in a riddle that will reveal itself over time.
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 