Fantastic Metropolis

Correspondences abound. One remembers Sharru-Kin the Assyrian (Sargon II) trying to rebuild long-destroyed Agade by constructing it anew. Nebuchadrezzar II deporting the artisans of Jerusalem (and many other conquered lands beside) to bring them to Babylon and build the city up. I imagine the story of the tower itself, that primordial menhir where all men spoke the same language, and wonder about what, exactly, would the menhir really be for? I imagine a primordial web of power from long vanished Harappa and Mohenjodaro, where a hero cult so similar to the Babylonian flourished in the distant past, where ancient pre-Vedic cultures flourished and then vanished… did they bring their daevas west to Persia, the manifold gods that became demons to the Zoroastrian mind (and Blake might argue that all these gods and demons are just the limitless light of the Ain Sof Aur refracting through the manifold prisms of the human minds that experienced it) to interact with ancient Uruk, Ur of the Chaldees? Did Abraham leave his home when it was struck down by a lightning flash, a fallen star, a “bright son of morning” that plunged like an angel’s fiery sword to destroy that ancient construct? Imagine that it was even worse than that.

We discussed before Crowley’s observation that the feminine aspect of the Elohim was redacted out of the Bible by its earliest compilers. We know that it was in part exposure to the Babylonian Captivity and, later, the Persian religion of Zoroaster that moved Judaism all the way from a monotheism of choice (we choose to worship one god out of many) to a monotheism wherein there are no other gods to worship. What if the real disaster of the Tower of Babel was that it did exactly what it was intended to do and the shockwaves of that experiment were still, are still being felt to this day? What if someone decided to make the many into one? The Elohim were plural, male and female at once, the passage in Exodus wherein the divine name is contained (the 72-fold Name, the Shem ha-Mephoresh) is specifically about the Elohim, about their moving across the waters. What if the Tower of Babel was an elaborate construction, perhaps sponsored by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to map the sky and learn the True Name of the divine force that went by many names, and to remake it in their own image; to make of the whole host of the Annunaki, from Enki and Marduk the Sun Bull, Bull of Heaven, Taurus the Bull, the Primordial Bull itself, to Ishtar (that great rainbow of gods reflected by the prism of the human mind) one God, a King of Heaven, a Gilgamesh in the World Above to justify the rule of Gilgamesh below, a means to immortality for the death-obsessed king who claimed to be a god. It makes a sick kind of sense… Gilgamesh slays the Bull of Heaven, as does Ahriman when he makes war on Ormazd. To quote Yuri Stoyanov: “In his triumphant oration in the Selections of Zadspram (4:3), Ahriman claimed ‘perfect victory’ and recounted his feats of destruction which had despoiled the sky, waters, and earth. Besides withering the plants and blending fire with darkness and smoke, Ahriman assailed the primal Bull, who died” and it was David Ulansey in his The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries who noted that the cult of Mithras in ancient Rome was a stellar cult, one that observed the turning of the stars and the constellations (shades of Ahriman and his war with the constellations, the heavens themselves coming to Ormazd’s aid… like a stone fallen from heaven smithing a tower, perhaps) and the strange lion-headed god Deus Arimanus and his resemblance to the Gorgon of ancient myth, connecting Perseus with Mithras and Mithras with Ahriman, the slayer of the divine bull, connecting another hero cult with that of Gilgamesh, who sought to ascend into immortality (like, as an example, “a follower of the Orphic mysteries” which believed in the strict matter/spirit dualism which would later infect Manichæanism) by shedding the gross matter and becoming pure spirit, untethered, like Ahriman before being trapped in the cage of fleshly existence, also railed against by the Orphic cult, by the Neoplatonists with their IAO incantation, their own attempt to work out the equation of the godhead. Imagine, then, that Gilgamesh’s assault on the Bull of Heaven was by attempting to construct a vast tower to plumb the secrets encoded in the stars. This attempt failed, struck down by the fallen star, the rock from the sky, the god El-Gabal (who is Lucifer, the light bringer, the fallen son of morning) but too late to prevent the despoiling of Ishtar/Asherah, torn away from the god and sunk into the realm of Ereshkigal beneath the earth, where only the sacrifice of the King can retrieve her. Asherah, trapped by the Demiurge, the Divine Wife assaulted by the Lightbringer (as in that gnostic fragment of the Cathars of Desenzano), the union of Michael and Samael of the Ophites.