You're a Christian and it's Sunday morning. Like countless millions you put on your Sunday best and go strolling down the street towards your neighborhood church to praise the Lord. But, just like those countless millions, you haven't the foggiest idea from whence came all those symbols and trappings that adorn your faith. Come all ye faithful, loosen your ties, unsnap your girdles and sit down for a few because yours truly is about to spill the beans on yet one more thing that you've never heard in church!
Towering over just about every Christian church on the planet one will find a magnificent steeple pointing to the heavens on high. If you're like most Christians, you've probably never given this symbol of Christian churchosity (yes, I that's a made-up word) a second thought. But just imagine for a moment some non-Christian asking you what that erect pointed thing had to do with Jesus Christ? How would you answer? Likely you'd run to your minister who in turn might sputter something along the lines that the steeple directs people's attention to God in heaven as they enter his sanctuary (at least that's the explanation on Symbols in Christian Art and Architecture's website. Although that reply might have an odd bit of truth laced about it, it's not the whole story by a long shot.
The fact is that the story of the Christian steeple doesn't begin with Jesus or his apostles; nor does it find its origins in Judaism, Christianity's predecessor. Nope! Forget Jesus here because those pointy things atop our churches were around before the bible was even a gleam in the eye of the Jewish priest who scribbled the first verse of Genesis!
In the fifth millennium BC a people in Mesopotamia, called Sumerians, were busy putting together the first bits and pieces of what now passes as civilization. By 3000 BC they had a thriving metropolis—well, at least it was thriving by the standards of the time. As is peculiar to all "civilizations," such things being composed of superstitious idiots, the founding fathers of Sumer didn't fail to incorporate gods, priests and houses of worship in their new utopia—putting one in mind of Voltaire who once wryly observed that "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." In other words, to hold sway over a bunch of quarrelsome nincompoops, one needs to convince them that certain men act on the orders of a divine boogeyman who is ready and willing to smite all non-believers!
What shape do you suppose those first holy houses took? Well, since this article is focused on steeples, then you're probably guessing that the first holy houses were steeple-tower-like structures. If that's your guess, then you're at least partially right. Called ziggurats, or gateways to the gods, these sometimes rectangular, sometimes oval-shaped holy houses of worship wound their way toward the heavens wherein the supreme gods dwelled.1 Whether or not they were originally intended to be phallic in appearance remains debatable. They certainly were mountain-shaped, and we can make a connection to phallicism there since many of the primitive Mesopotamian deities were phallic gods who dwelled on mountains. Thus it is entirely possible that the ziggurat employed double imagery. Whatever the truth of their design, there is no denying that ziggurats, like later Christian monasteries, were principally the dwelling places of the priests who conducted all sorts of "godly" rites therein—like sexual rites and feasting on the food and animal sacrifices squeezed from superstitious moronic believers. And there is no denying that certain archeological features of the ziggurat were incorporated into later temple designs throughout the Middle East.
Now, let's hit the fast-forward button and skip over a lot of boring stuff here. Pressing play, we've stopped at a time in history where we find these towering ziggurats dotting the landscape of all Mesopotamia—especially in Babylon where the most famous ziggurat of all was rising to the heavens. Now you all know that tale, since it has been a favorite of bible classes for the past 2,000-plus years: A character named Nimrod built a ziggurat known as the Tower of Babel on the plains of Shinar, which sorely displeased the Lord who put an end to the whole thing.
Since the tale of Babel and Nimrod has been tossed out the window in my Genesis study, we won't waste any more time on it here, except to relate that Nimrod has been identified by some with the Assyrian King Ninus, who married the legendary Queen Semiramis, and around whom a myriad of sexual myth has been woven. What is certain of this time period comes from historian Albert Champdor who writes that "Of all the lofty monuments of Babylon, the towering 'Ziggurat' must certainly have been one of the most spectacular constructions of its time, rising majestically above its huge encircling wall ... Around the vast square, chambers were set aside for pilgrims, as well as for the priests who looked after the 'Zigguarat.' Koldewey called this collection of buildings the 'Vatican of Babylon.'"2
Although to the Christian mind an upright tower constructed to the glory of a god might seem benign, the fact is that these towers had an underlying vulgar connotation—at least it was vulgar by today's prudish religious standards. This is because a central feature of pagan mystery religions was human reproduction, and hence a strong symbolism centered on human reproductive organs. Since we're talking male dominated religions here, phallicism was a key in both symbolism and ritual in the old mystery religions. However, our focus here is not a full exploration of primitive quack religions—even if they do include exaggerated penises, vaginas, breasts, copulations and assorted sex orgies—but the upright symbolism of an erect male penis pointing to the heavens, or more precisely, pointing to the sun.
And it came to pass that in the land of Sumer holy priests did right in the sight of the Lord and concocted the world's first known organized religion, and they made mother goddesses, the sun, sun gods and upright phalluses key ingredients to human salvation. Now, it was symbolism that must have been comforting to the superstitious dummies living then because, like typhus, it didn't take long for phallicism to spread into every culture of the "civilized" world, most notably in Egypt, a nation that would make phallic worship an art.3
Over in Egypt holy priests invented a goddess named Isis and imbued her with many fabulous powers. In their adoration they bestowed numerous titles on their goddess, such as Hat-Mehit, which meant the incarnate great fish of the Abyss. Now admittedly these Egyptian holy boys had a little help with that one since they borrowed a few bits and pieces from the ancient Sumerian goddesses Tiamat and Ashnan for their Egyptian beauty. (This history is covered in my booklet Satan: the Lies, the Myths, the Human Tragedy). But this didn't stop them from making Isis uniquely Egyptian, such as having her marry her brother Osiris, who was eventually murdered by their evil brother Set. When the body of Osiris was torn into pieces and scattered, Isis succeeded in finding all the scraps but his penis, which had been swallowed by a fish.4 The more enlightened among us know that any god is quite useless, but a dead god—and one without his penis—was a disaster! Isis, being the smart dame her creators made her to be, replaced her dead husband-god-brother's penis with a undoubtedly more desirable ridged gold thing of indeterminable length with which she copulated and "miraculously" conceived a son named Horus. Now little Horus, who is oft represented in Egyptian religious art as an infant sitting on his virgin mother's knee—both spitting images of the later Christian Virgin Mary and baby Jesus—was supposedly his father Osiris reborn. The tangled explanation involves something not unlike the Christian explanation of their holy trinity of God the father, Jesus and the Holy Ghost, only in this case the Egyptian holy ghost happened to be female.
Putting aside the many similarities in both the ancient Egyptian mysteries and the Christian mysteries (such as the original Christian holy ghost being perceived as female, both religions holding the cross sacred, and both worshiping the birth of a virgin-born savior god on December 25) let's refocus on Osiris' golden phallus and the sacred festivals in which both fish and phalluses played key roles.5 These Egyptian symbols of virile godliness explains why one finds sacred standing erect phalluses pointing to the sun god in heaven dotting the ancient Egyptian landscape. (It also explains why the symbol of the fish became important to the Egyptian faithful, it being a reminder of their virgin-born baby savior god Horus, which closely mirrors the same Christian symbol and their lame explanations of Christ being a fisher of men!) Anyway, Christian history remembers Osiris' phallus as an obelisk, but the ancient Egyptians knew an obelisk for what it was—a giant stone penis representing the reproductive organ of their sun god.6
Skipping over a lot of details of Egyptian phallic worship (such as the phallic symbolism of the pyramids), and moving more to the point of our story, the worship of sacred erect stones made its way into the tales of the bible saints of old, specifically in the tales of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants. In my Genesis study I have already covered in some detail how these saints had a propensity for sitting up sacred phallic stones, anointing them with oil and using them for worshiping their Canaanite god Yah, whom the priest would rename Yahweh. What needs to be understood here is that by the time Israel was born as a nation, the cult of phallic worship was culturally entrenched, which is noted in two separate verses: 1 Kings 14:23: "For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill, and under every green tree." 2 Kg 17:10: "And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree."
You might have noticed that the words "phallus" and/or "penis" isn't mentioned in the above verses. This is because the straightlaced, sanctimonious prudes running the Church of England during the time of the King James translation would have never countenanced stark references to phallic worship; so they did the Christian thing and mistranslated the Hebrew word "Asherah", which denoted a phallic pole, as "grove", and thus added to the confusion that is the bible's trademark. Fortunately for us, times have changed just a little since 1611. More liberal-minded translators, such as the old darlings who produced the New International Version of the Holy Bible, made a little progress towards honesty.
Let me show you what I mean by first reproducing the KJV translation of Deuteronomy 12:2-4: "Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place." Now, here is the same verse translated in the New International Version: "Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places."
Since the church no longer burns people alive for doubting, nowadays no small number of Christians are asking what the hell is an "Asherah"? For a starter, they find it is another name for a pagan Canaanite mother goddess and that the "grove" was a clearing representing her womb, in which a erect pole, or phallus, was set upright.7 Also they are finding the reports of modern archeologists who have used archeological discoveries to show that the ancient Israelites were not only indigenous Canaanites who had never left the region for a sojourn in Egypt as the story of Exodus relates, but were like their cousins in the region and addicted to phallic worship. In other words, the ancient Semitic Israelites were, from the beginning, nothing more than run-of-the-mill pagans until a group of priests began rewriting their faith in the seventh century BC. Indeed, ancient Israel worshiped the goddess Asherah as the consort of Yahweh (yhwh, or Jehovah), whose name is translated as "Lord" in the Old Testament. In their book, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman explain how Judah's faith was reinvented during the seventh century reign of King Josiah, after which they note that:
"The existence of high places and other forms of ancestral and household god worship was not—as the books of Kings imply—apostasy from an earlier, purer faith. It was part of the timeless tradition of the hill country settlers of Judah, who worshiped yhwh along with a variety of gods and goddesses known or adapted from the cults of neighboring peoples.... the clearest archaeological evidence of the popularity of this type of worship throughout the kingdom is the discovery of hundreds of figurines of naked fertility goddesses at every late monarchic site in Judah. More suggestive are the inscriptions found in the early eighth century site of Kuntillet Ajrud in northeastern Sinai—a site that shows cultural links with the northern kingdom [of Israel]. They apparently refer to the goddess Asherah as being the consort of yhwh. And lest it be assumed that yhwh's married status was just a sinful northern hallucination, a somewhat similar formula, speaking of yhwh and his Asherah, appears in a late-monarchic inscription from the Shephelah of Judah."8
In other words (and back to the point of this article), it was the Semitic creator god's penis that was worshiped by ancient Israelites in the form of an upright stone, or wooden pole fashioned from an oak tree set inside the grove, or womb, of the mother goddess on a high hill. To be certain the history of Israel and Asherah is much more involved than this brief outline, but it should be enough for any honest Christian to seek more answers, which this study shall provide. (An insightful article about some of this is Asherah, the Tree of Life and the Menorah: Continuity of a Goddess symbol in Judaism? and may be found at www.asphodel-long.com/html/asherah.html
For you who have read my Genesis study, you may be now recalling the sordid history of Abraham, such as this notation from Genesis 21:33: "And Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the LORD [Yahweh], the everlasting God [Elohim]." Now, in case the meaning of this scripture went over your head, we're seeing old Abe either planting a sacred tree or erected an Asherah pole in a clearing, after which he called upon the name of Yahweh Elohim, who was at that time the old pagan Canaanite deity named Yah and who was one of the elohim, or gods—"elohim" being the plural form of El. This revelation might spark you to recall other Genesis tales wherein we find Abe and his boys setting up and anointing sacred rocks. If you're like most Christians, you've probably never given these tales a single thought. But in light of archeological discovery of ancient Israel's worship of sacred Canaanite rocks, the bible offers even more insight into Yahweh and phallicism.
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NEW!
Rival Caesars
by
Desmond Dilg
