28.
God the Highest and God the King
In the old
Near Eastern folk religion the Highgod is often dethroned by the god of death
and destruction, and this minor god is seen as the real master of the world.
Adonis and Attis are dead and remote figures. In Ugarit, El is housing in the
mountain of the night in the direction of the sunset, where sea and blue heaven
meet, whereas Baal has his throne on nearby Mt. Kassios.
Acc
to Philo of Byblos, Elioun (= “Highest”) was killed in an encounter with wild
animals (the man into animal-symbolism connected with the wild hunter).
Dionysos is followed by his panthers, Mithras by his lions and ravens, Baal by
his servants called ‘pigs”. Linos is a shepherd torn apart by his own dogs, his
name is connected with the Semitic word for “highest”. In Nordic religion we
find a man-into-wolf-symbolism: Odin is followed by his wolves and ravens. He
is the wild hunter riding through the air followed by the dead spirits. The
rage of the wild hunt can also be personified in the charging boar. Odin's army
is put in order after the model of a boar’s head with tusks. Balder the good
God is also a dead god.
The
boar is also the killer of both Attis and Adonis, and even Osiris (acc. to one
tradition), and in Catal Hüyük the hunt for the big bull is followed by a scene
with a man attacked by a great boar. These two scenes are parallels. The
hunters charging with their curved clubs and the leopard's skins dangling from
their waists are men changed into leopards, and their charging wrath is
personified in the boar. The man attacked by the boar carries no leopard’s
skin. He is the suffering god of vegetation also personified by the bull.
His
power is seen as taken over by the god of fight and fire, killing and
destruction. Therefore, in the Near East this god is called the “King”: Molok, Milkom, Melqart. But his weapon
is still the curved club. In the great Baal-epos in Ugarit, the son of the
highgod El bearing the name of Jw is killed by Baal's two throwing-clubs. The
main theme in the epos is the struggle for kingdom (mlk – the West Semitic word for king/kingdom). Baal is the prince of this world, El of the other.
The
highest god in old pre-Islamic Arabia was the moon god. He is called “bull”, or
“father”, or amm = “uncle”, or kahil = “the old one”, hukm = “the wise one” or wadd = “the loving one”. Many amulets
carry the inscription: abm wdm
“Father is love".
A
tribe calls itself “the sons of Wadd”. He is also simply “the god” (= Allah).
There is a whole cycle of lunar traces left in the yearly feast, Hagg of Arafa,
acc. to Ditlef Nielsen[1].
But
also Yhvh of the Old Testament has a cycle of feasts connected with the moon.
At full-moon 13 young bulls are sacrificed at the beginning of the
autumn-feast, the second day 12, the third day 11, etc. On the 7th day 7 (Num
29). As the moon becomes smaller, so does the number of bulls sacrificed[2].
The
god of vegetation and life is often faded to a deus otiosus totally overshadowed by the powerful goddess of love.
This goes for Attis & Cybele, for Adonis & Aphrodite, for Eros &
Aphrodite, for Tammuz (called harmu = “love”) & Ishtar. Love is the
life-giving force in nature, and therefore the highgod is the personification
of love.
In
Egypt and Sumer we often find a very old and complicated system of gods and
rituals. Here, where the art of writing has a long tradition behind it,
theology in the true sense of the word was developed. In the small Phoenician
towns there were no large priestly orders, and we do not know of any groups
nursing an oral tradition. The purpose of life for the wandering Syrian priests
was ecstasy.
When
disregarding the very specia1 developments around the temple in Jerusalem and
the Jhvh-cult, the Syrio-Palaestinian religion has to be dealt with as a
folk-religion centered around the midwinter feast, when light is at its
turning-point in the bosom of darkness and the year and time as reborn spring
anew from eternity, and around the coming of spring and the dying of
vegetation, when the summer heat is at its hottest.
The
highgod in the folk religion is the bull, a symbol of the power of vegetation.
Therefore it is possible to see his life-fluids in direct connection with the
intoxicating drink. Here the re-search of L. Lommel on soma, the drink of immortality,
is brought in to deepen the understanding of the motif so often pictured on the
seals of the highgod sitting with a cup in his hand, with the sign of the moon
just above the cup. He is also the dark night sky with the moon as his shining
horns. Therefore the moon can be seen in direct connection with the drink of
immortality. Another symbol of the highgod as a vegetative power is the high
tree of life at the top of which the drink of immortality is gathered in the
great cup of the moon.
He
is also the primordial mountain, primordial totality, often pictured as a
pyramid, and considered identical with the night sky. Therefore he may also
manifest himself in the form of the stone-stele or be honored in the shape of
the black meteor-stone fallen from the sky. He is driven off to the black
mountain of night and transcendence by a younger god with strong, demonic
features in his personality. He is killed and becomes one with the distant
unchangeable eternity of the starry heaven, therefore the stars may be pictured
as the clusters of grape from where the drink of immortality has its origin.
Cook[3]
has seen these coins as closely connected with the cult of Sandan's pyramid,
his "funeral fire". They are probably from Mallos in Cilicia, and the
two handles on both sides of the top show that they are the world-pillar seen
as a pyramid, but in the process of dividing into the two Heracles-pillars with
the characteristic handle known from the pillar held by Gilgamesh. Instead of
clusters of grape, the stars can also gather round the cosmic mountain in the
shape of the mystical bird. Acc. to some traditions, the stars are pictured on
the tail of the peacock, and the soul of Argos (the fact that he had 1000 eyes
= the stars means that he is the highgod = heaven) flew from him when he was
killed and took up its abode in the peacock. Now acc to the tradition found in
Pherecydes, Chronos created the world out of his own semen and put the
primordial elements into “5 corners”. These five corners are the five corners
of the pyramid. He has no wife like Zas, who succeeded him as universal king.
He is the god of primordial totality and the primordial mountain, the highgod.
Zas is Sandan, the hunter. It is typical of tantric thinking that the visible
world is created when the mystical vision and power of macr'anthropos is lost
in ejaculatio.
The Highgod's
killing is identified with the withering of vegetation under the scorching sun
in the dog-days when the summer heat is at its highest. He is the creator and
god of life, and his enemy is the destroyer, often pictured as the great hunter
(originally the constellation of Orion with the dog-star.)
Adonis,
who is the vegetative power and the beauty of the spring-flowers, and whose death
is celebrated at the beginning of the hot summer, is also an El-type, but with
some of the chthonic features of the great hunter. The fact that he is a
personification of vegetative power makes the strong smell of the myrrh
extracted from the trees his epiphany. He may also be pictured as a bull or
billygoat being hunted down by the demonic god, Resheph, followed by a group of
demonic animals.
This
we will try to prove is also the background of Mithras killing the divine bull
with the help of demonic animals such as snake, scorpion, dog, raven, and lion.
As
mentioned above, Adonis has also some features of the great hunter. He ascends
as a spirit from the realm of death and presides over the orgiastic annual
feast at Byblos where the women must give themselves to strangers.
Jupiter
Dolichenus is the characteristic fusing into one of the highgod standing on his
bull and the great hunter and destroyer with the vegetation-destroying axe in
his hand. As the primordial mountain he is followed by his two Castores, who are the division of the
primordial mountain into the two Heracles-columns, cf the 3 columns in the
first church: Peter the Zion-mountain (Matt 16,17-19) and the two Dioscuric
“sons of thunder” as Heracles-columns.
The
highgod may be pictured as the shepherd and guardian of animals over against
the great hunter, the killer of animals. The latter sometimes presides over the new year’s carnival
and its chaotic interregnum. He is the devil of the Bible and leader of the
pompé of the demons. His element is the fire, as water is the
element of the highgod.
The
purpose of the water rituals and the bonfire in Mabbug (described by Lucian: de Syria dea) is to secure cosmic balance between life-fluids and summer
heat, between water and fire, a balance
that is very important also for the understanding of Anaximander’s philosophy.
But as early as in the Ugarit-text CTA 1-6, Baal is fighting flood and summer
heat to secure cosmic balance symbolized in the building of his palace. As for
Baal of Ugarit it is important to stress his connection with Mount Saphon,
which makes him identical with the Cilician god, Sandan, who is also connected
with this mountain. Sandan is the world-pillar creating open space in the
massive world-mountain (primordial totality). He is a hunter, and is burning on
a bonfire. In the Ugarit text, the “Hunting of Baal” CTA 12, the hunting ends
in Baal burning. Sandan fighting Typhon/Tsaphon is also Apollo’s fighting
Python, like Typhon a symbol of the spirit of the primordial mountain. Apollo burning
Python's bower, his “royal palace”, is the god of fire fighting/killing the god
of vegetation. In Philo of Byblos, Hypsuranios and his bowers of reeds and
rushes and papyrus are fought by Usoos, the hunter. After the fighting, and
after rainstorms, and woodlands being burned down, Usoos secures cosmic order
by setting up the two world-pillars. Usoos is Melqaart, and Apollo sailing to
the Mt. Paradise/Parnassos in the shape of a dolphin is Melqart sailing to the
rocks of ambrosia on the back of a dolphin.
We find the highest god as Elioun killed in an encounter with beasts, as
the shepherd Linos torn up by dogs, as Hypsuranios fought by his brother, the
great hunter, Usoos. The Krt poem speaks about the rain of the Most High, ´lj, as a delight, n’m, to the earth and wheat and a good fragrance to the furrows[4]
n’m and fragrance are closely connected with Adonis, and in fact Philo tells us
that Adonis, the hunter, (Greek: Agrotes)
in Byblos was called the greatest of gods I.lo,12f.
The highgod is the giver of rain, wine and grain (bread). If seen as a
medium of the life-giving powers of this god, these things are the “water of
life” and the “bread of life”, a sacrament from the Most High, Gen 14.18.
P.Beskow[5] has made it
probable that the mysteries of Mithras have their origin in thiasoi (brotherhoods) for
Theos Hypsistos (“The Highest”). In the killing of
the bull-scene in the mysteries of Mithras, the killers clearly go for the
life-fluids of the bull. They drink his semen and blood, which gives special importance
to the vessels found in connection with the cult, vessels from which a snake or
a lion is seen drinking.
Note the
scorpion pumping the male organ of the bull by squeezing it. The
scorpion is an old symbol of ejaculation. The interest in these rather banal secretions is typically tantric, cf
what was said by Pherecydes about Chronos (Greek "Time"), who has his
Indian counterpart in the god Kala = “time”, the father of Prajapati.