Fantastic Metropolis

It really works no matter how you choose to frame it: it could literally be an assault on the very nature of the divine plan, an attempt to wrest control of the shi’ur komah away from the slowly forming group mind of humanity as it coalesces (a mass mind that Julian Jaynes might envy, as each individual human builds a mind out of the rainbow of gods caused when the Ain Sof Aur fragments in the prism of the individual will, and then each individual’s chorus of gods joins with all the other choruses, a steadily increasing spectrum of divinity, the Neoplatonic projection on the wall steadily reoccuring, the photons of infinity all one photon interfering with itself yet seeming an infinite series of individual particles at the same time), or perhaps Gilgamesh dragged down an alien entity, a consciousness of the stars themselves, what Johannes Kepler might have called a stellar daemon, and imprisoned one in the geometry of Ur itself, toppling it in the process, slaying Enkidu, his wild twin sent by the gods to make him less a tyrant to his people (and if this reminds us of Mani’s syzygus, the divine twin… did Gilgamesh strike down the better angels of his nature, his own connection to the wild earth and the power of nature, the dragon lines he used to power his mad attempt to ascend and forever pin himself into the cage of fleshly existence?), and toppling the primordial menhir, cracking the telluric web and trapping the goddess of the stars in the death realm of Ereshkigal, stealing from Elohim and leaving it just El.

The star-stones burn with the power of infinity: they can channel the twisted radiance of the many in one as it raged and smashed the tower by which it sought to steal the very nature of he divine. In the telluric web writhes the aspect of god which is Asherah the other half, or Ahriman the dark brother, whispering herself to himself, the “whore” and Ativad the destroyer at once, Samael the angel of poison and death and Eisheth Zenunim, the harlot or woman of whoredom, two halves of the aspect pinned in the dragon lines, the heart of fire pinned in the nothingness of the Qlippoth, “the averse and caricature of the supernal Creative One.” Sophia and the Demiurge, stolen from heaven by the slaying of the primal star bull, the guardian of the barriers between the infinite timeless, spaceless world where idea and form are one, where essence and container come together, an infinite piece of the limitless light, driven like a thorn into the good creation of Ahura Mazda, the agony of the imprisonment in the cage of matter thrashing about, creating the rage and the hate and the infinite host of ills like serpents dripping venom in the face of a god. We remember that the “Accursed Whore” was created by Ormazd. Why would he create her to serve Ahriman? She was Ahriman. She was his frenzy at his imprisonment, his desire to destroy the material world in order to be free from it, the fragment of infinity that sought to be infinite again, to burst forth from the cage of matter she/he found her/himself in. Why else would the infernal seek to rise and mate with the divine, why would God need to seduce the wife of hell to create a savior, to borrow two of the metonyms created by the Cathars to express a small part of the much greater whole.

One point should be clarified. The Gorgon figure is usually thought of as being female, whereas the leontocephalic god seems as first glance o be male. However, as Vermaseren tells us, the leontocephalic god “is shown nude, though often his sex is disguised by a loincloth or by an enveloping snake, as if it was intended either to leave the deity’s sex vague or to convey that both sexes were united in him and that he was capable of self-procreation.”

—David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries

With the fall of the Tower, the smaller menhirs remain: Mecca, Babylon, Jerusalem, El-Gabal, Megiddo. But they are caught up in the furious resonance of imprisoned, maddened divine power, clashing against each other. Madness rises, and men make war again and again, conquer each other, steal each other’s artists and craftsmen, to try again to raise the menhir and allow the pinned spirit to climb the long ladder back to heaven. The Temple will appear in the air when the end of the world is near. The God who made man, made man and woman in its image, and the tower attempted to redact the 72-fold Name down into one, to “solve” the divine equation because the magicians of ancient Ur could not accept that they, too, were creatures, the farthest removed from the creator, and sought to make the divine, limitless light limited, to reduce that infinite complexity down to One. Jerusalem burns with the magic of the star-stone and the infinite box wherein resides an infinite aspect, the will of the God of Abraham and Isaac, that small shard of the divine that did not go down into the ground, a purely male remainder of the Elohim that slowly became first the tribal god of choice, then the God, and asserted its remembered identity as God of gods, maker of all. The vibration of the divine interfering with itself.