Fantastic Metropolis

It becomes possible to imagine that secret lore of the Egyptians passing in time to the Medean priest-caste who called themselves Magi, when Persia conquered the lands of the Pharaohs and introduced the great god Ahura Mazda and his rival Ahriman. In another essay, I’ve covered the similarities between the Ismaili sect called the hashishin and the dualistic religion of the Magi, who attempted to take control of the Persian Empire from Cambyses and almost succeeded. Following that setback, the Magi were always second to the Achaemenids until the destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander himself. Now, if one is paying attention, it comes to mind that the Piri Reis map that brought Charles Hapgood to his first theorizing about Ancient Sea Kings in the first place came from the Imperial Palace of Constantinople in Istanbul, was supposedly drawn by Admiral Piri Ibn Haji Memmed from a map used by Columbus, and Piri claimed that his map was drawn from even older sources, including maps seized by Alexander during his conquest of Persia. In other words, the religious caste of the Persian Empire had maps of South America. Was this information passed down to them from their contact with the Egyptian cult of Osiris? One wonders if the later Mithraic bull-slaying (tauroctanor) which was adopted from the Ahrimanic cult’s war against Ahura Mazda was in part adopted in hatred for the cult of Zeus-Ammon. However you slice it, it becomes possible to imagine the Magi, driven underground by the Alexandrian conquest, making use of the plant lore passed down to them by the Osirian cult… yet, deprived of the alien plant gods, making use of the closest ones available, the mushroom, the vine, and hashish. When one remembers the Song of Roland with its exhortation to the “magical land of Calyferne” one wonders if this was an early form of the Magi invasion of Islamic thought, a precursor to the Islamli sect itself.

One imagines the Magi’s constant quest for Paradise, the literal enclosed space or paradeiza referring back both to the ditch that supposedly enclosed the garden of Ahura Mazda (and one wonders if this garden grew on the shores of the Egyptian Etelenty) translated through Arab eyes to the author of the Chanson de Roland and coming out the other side as “Calyferne,” an encoded tale of that magical land to the west we see so often in myth, from Hy Breasil to Atlantis to Avalon… and so we enter into an interesting set of mystical paradigms running in circles round each other. Why was Spenser so set on making Raleigh into a servant of Arthur?

Imagine that some of the Magi fled the coming of Alexander by heading west. Some dug in, infiltrated Judaism and its splinter offshoot Christianity, some worked their way into Islam, each sect and subsect bringing their unique knowledge to their varying cultures. The Knights Templar brought the fruit of the vine of Tehuty into Europe as the message of Thrice Named Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, from whom the Egyptian Science was thought to be derived (alchemy from al-kheme, the black sand, the very matter of the Egyptian earth itself) while in North Africa the Magi infiltrate the system of the Shia.