Mystery Babylon Rising: Ch 02 - The Worldview Of Mystery Babylon

Babel was the location of the original Mystery cult. When God confused the languages, the people scattered in different groups according to their language. In the evolution of the religions of the world, there emerged two forces. The first was the primeval knowledge of the true God handed down from Adam through Noah. The second was that of Mystery Babylon. The makeup of the newly formed religions would be a product of which impulse was stronger.

As with any organized movement, it may be safely assumed that there are group and individuals with higher levels of commitment who are inclined to lead the movement while the rest are simply following the trends. After the confusion of languages at Babel, language-groups averaging a higher level of commitment to the Mystery Babylon cult would develop religious traditions with more similarity to the original cult. It would also follow that groups settling in close geographical proximity to Babel would have more similarity to the original cult.

All seven heads of the beast-system of organized rebellion against God are influenced by Babylonian or Greek world-views, so I will give a little more attention to these two cosmologies. The extreme degree of similarity between Greek creation myths and Babylonian creation myths indicate that the Greeks borrowed from the Babylonians. Except for name changes and minor differences they are the same story. The Greek culture was influenced by the Phrygians who had links to the Assyrians, cousins to the Babylonians. This is the likely explanation for the similarities in the creation myths of the Greeks and the Babylonians.

The Babylonian creation myth begins with chaos1.The original god-pair, Apsu and Tiamat, evolved out of chaos and begat other gods and goddesses by mixing their waters. Below is a table of their descendents according to The Enuma Elish. It appears that the evolutionary processes of Babylonian religion are often accompanied by male-female pairings. Early on a sky-father/earth-mother pairings were credited as responsible for creative activities.

Male	Female
Apsu (sweet primeval waters)	+ Tiamat (salt primeval waters)
Lahmu ("slime," "mud")	+ Lahamu (perhaps both mean "silt"?)
Anshar ("whole sky")	+ Kishar ("whole earth"--"horizon"?)
Anu ("sky")	+ Ki
Nudimmud ("image fashioner"--another name for Ea or Enki) Enlil	Damkina Ninlil
Marduk - Nanna	Ningal – “great queen”
	Inanna – “Queen of Heaven”

The godhead in Babylonian religion does not begin with an eternally, self-existent God as in Hebrew cosmology. There are two major wars among the Babylonian gods that result in establishing the godhead in Babylonian religion. The fourth generation of gods and goddesses revolt against their father and kill him. Anu and his children, Ea and Enlil, overthrow Apsu and Tiamat. Enlil was later displaced with Marduk as the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon.

Greek creation myth follows a similar path2. The Greek creation story also involves two wars. Out of chaos were birthed Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky). They brought forth Cronus who swallows up his children as they were being born. The youngest child, Zeus, escapes this fate. Later his wife induces Cronus to vomit up the other children who join Zeus in deposing their father. Zeus, like Marduk, becomes king of the gods and brings order out of chaos.

The evolution of the godhead out of chaos is also a feature of Egyptian creation myths3

An almost universal feature of not only Babylonian and Greek religion, but also of all ancient religions4, is the mother goddess cult5. There would be worship of a mother goddess who was symbolic of the earth. A common thread in these stories is that she has an affair with a consort (usually a vegetation god) that ends tragically. She would then try to get him back from the dead which would result in his coming back to life for six months out of the year. This cycle of death and life of the vegetation god/consort resulted in the cycle of the seasons.

This story would be emulated in a ritual called the Heiros Gamos6. A temple priestess, representing the mother goddess, would have sex with the king, who would act as king-priest. It was believed that through this ritual the king was actually having sex with the mother goddess and that this would result in fruitfulness among crops and in wombs, both animal and human.

When Revelation asserts that Mystery Babylon is having sex with the kings of the earth, it is referring to the practice of Heiros Gamos that was a common feature in mother goddess worship. From the viewpoint of the Lord, however, this great mother is “The mother of all harlots and abominations of the earth.”

In the initial stage of the development of the Mystery Babylon religion, the emphasis was on the stories and the rituals. As human civilization became more complex and advanced, two factors would intervene to shift the emphasis from rituals towards an emphasis on the core philosophy: the rise of multi-nation empires and the advent of philosophy.

As empires became bigger and more technologically advanced, the result was that peoples of multiple nations became joined politically and economically. As a result, people of different nations began to compare the stories of their religions. People began to notice that there were many similarities in their stories. In fact, as early as Herodotus, the Greeks realized that they and the Babylonians worshipped the same gods and goddesses, only by different names.

The advent of philosophy, particularly western philosophy via the Greeks, saw a new approach to religious thinking. People began to use logic and critical thinking to distill a world-view or cosmology from the stories. The following elements can be distilled from the creation myths spawned by Mystery Babylon:

1. The primal gods emerged through evolutionary processes out of chaos.

2. The primal gods were overthrown by their descendants by revolutionaries who then create the physical universe.

3. One of these gods is a great mother goddess who has sex with a consort whose dies and is raised repeatedly to power the seasons.

4. Economic productivity is the result of sexual intercourse between the government and nature as emulation of the sex act between the mother goddess and her consort.

With the advent of philosophy, attempts began to be made to justify religious propositions through reason. In the last chapter, I wrote about the original Babylonian mystery religion. Both the Babylonian and Greek religions have similar creation stories, and therefore similar cosmology.

Babylonian cosmology directly predominated the first four heads of the beast system: Old Babylon, Assyria, New Babylon, and Persia. When the Persian Empire fell to the Greek empire of Alexander the Great, Greek cosmology, inherited from Babylon through the Phrygians, then pre-dominated the beast system. The predominance of Greek culture in nations that influenced the development of both western civilization and the rising influence of the Middle East opened the door for Greek philosophy to influence religions in many parts of the world. Because the cosmology of ancient Greek mystery religions is identical to the Babylonian mystery, it was easy for Babylonian Mystery cult to import into Greek dominions.

Three major philosophies developed during the latter part of the ancient times and the middle ages that have distilled the worldview of the ancient Babylonian mysteries: Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Neo-Platonism. The common thread in all three is the view that the creator emanated from the source of all reality.

Neo-Platonism consists of various interpretations of the teachings of Plato. Plato taught that particular instances possessing an attribute possesses the attribute because the attribute exist as a universal or class. Particular trees exist because there must is a universal tree which lends the attribute to the instance. Plato believed these universal forms had real existence independently of the particular instances.

Neo-Platonism teaches that individual minds and souls are but instances of a universal mind and universal soul. These instances are sometimes referred as reflections or actualizations.

“While Plotinus suggests that the One subsists by thinking itself as itself, the Intellect subsists through thinking itself as other, and therefore becomes divided within itself: this act of division within the Intellect is the production of Being, which is the very principle of expression or discursivity (Ennead V.1.7). For this reason, the Intellect stands as Plotinus’ sole First Principle. At this point, the thinking or contemplation of the Intellect is divided up and ordered into thoughts, each of them subsisting in and for themselves, as autonomous reflections of the dunamis of the One. These are the Forms (eidê), and out of their inert unity there arises the Soul, whose task it is to think these Forms discursively and creatively, and to thereby produce or create a concrete, living expression of the divine Intellect. This activity of the Soul results in the production of numerous individual souls: living actualizations of the possibilities inherent in the Forms.” 7

Gnosticism teaches that the universe was created by a rogue emanation from the source of reality. According to The Gnosis Archive “One of the aeonial beings who bears the name Sophia (“Wisdom”) is of great importance to the Gnostic world view. In the course of her journeyings, Sophia came to emanate from her own being a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw. This being, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God”8

This rogue emanation created the physical universe which is devoid of the perfection of this source of all. Gnosticism teaches that enlightenment or gnosis of this source is the essence of salvation. This gnosis is possible in only certain individuals who have the divine spark and only by denying the physical nature

Hermeticism is very similar to Gnosticism. Hermeticism also teaches that an emanation separated itself from the source of being. This emanation evolved mind and created the physical universe. (See ch 5 for a more detailed description of Hermeticism)

Emanation is the common thread of each of these views. Emanationism teaches that from a singularity evolves a personal-rational godhead that then brings forth the universe, usually in a gradual, evolutionary process. In the beginning, there were no categories, but only a monistic oneness. According to emanationism, these categories evolved and from them emanated the universe in its current form

In contrast to the familiar Judaeo-Christian monotheistic view, according to which the whole universe just appears ready- made through Divine Fiat (or command), and the materialistic view which simply ignores first principles, Emanationism explains creation as a gradual process of emanation and descent from a transcendental Absolute to mundane reality. Thus there is no Creator God standing apart from, even if intimately connected with, the universe as in monotheism; but rather a series of stages of down-grading of Consciousness Being, by means of which the Absolute principle actually becomes the multiplicity of entities and objects

It has been suggested (by Professor Huston Smith, in his book Forgotten Truth)

that the basic cosmology, arrived at independently by many different philosophies and spiritual traditions, shows Reality to be divided into a very minimum of four levels or planes of reality: the Infinite or Absolute (the topic of Monism), the Celestial or Divine, the Intermediate or Psychic (with which occultism deals), and the Terrestrial or Physical (the level considered by Materialism). Each of these can in turn be sub-divided

Thus, applying this in an emanationist perspective, the process of creation, in the emanationist cosmogony and cosmology, proceeds through a number of distinct stages. First the Absolute produces the Spiritual reality (or "God"). The Spiritual reality in turn produces the Psychic reality. And finally, the Psychic reality produces the Physical reality; the material world. Each reality constitutes a specific stage of manifestation 9

Emanationism, then, is an evolutionary explanation and an evolutionary cosmology. According to emanationism, god is the product of evolutionary forces, and the divine principle emanates throughout the universe through evolution. Evolution is god in emanationism.

There are two conclusions that follow if evolution is god. First nature, or part of nature, is god as evolutionary processes are natural. The second is that the focal point of natural evolution is social evolution, and the focal point of social evolution is the rise of the state. These philosophical conclusions are closely connected to the ancient Heiros Gamos ritual of the mother goddess cult where the state has sex with nature. The logical conclusion of emanationism is to make the state god on earth.

References

1“The Babylonian Creation Story (Enuma elish) “, Michael Webster, Grand Valley State University

<http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Enuma_Elish.html>

[Accessed January 01, 2013]

2 Encyclopedia Mythica from Encyclopedia Mythica Online.

<http://www.pantheon.org/articles/g/greek_creation_myths.html>

[Accessed January 01, 2013].

3 Egyptian Myth and Legend, Donald Mackenzie, page 1, paragraph 1,

Retrieved from

<http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/eml/eml04.htm>

4 Goddess Names From Around the World

<http://www.mothergoddess.com/gnames/names.htm>