Ancient conceptualization of the Matrix

a reply to: pthena

There is some consideration that the Elephantine shrine was built in some part as a resposne to the purges of Josiah;

The style and layout of the Elephantine Jewish Temple suggests that the Jewish mercenaries originated in the former northern kingdom of Israel and not in Judah at the time of Manasseh, or later, during the conquests of Jerusalem.

After the death of Josiah in battle with Pharaoh Necho II in 609 BCE, Judah, including former Israel, came under the domination of the Egyptians (2 Kgs 23:33) and Jewish soldiers were fighting under Egyptian orders in Babylon and elsewhere. It is very possible that these troops, originating in the north, would later be taken, forcibly or voluntarily, to serve in Egypt and perhaps reach that country in about 600 BCE, some eighty years before their temple at Elephantine was preserved by Cambyses II in 525 BCE (Cowley 1923: no. 30). I

if, as Cross has suggested, the memory of the Mishkan remained with the people of Israel (the northern kingdom) then their setting up of a shrine in its form would be much more likely than building one on the lines of the Solomonic Temple. It might also suit them to build a shrine in Egypt in defiance of the centralizing reforms of 622 BCE by Josiah, which obviously caused much dismay among the remaining peoples of the northern kingdom

Jewish Colony at Elephantine.

There were also disputes with regards to Hebrews sacrificing sheep on an island sacred to Khnum the ram God...

a reply to: Kantzveldt

The article you linked to also mentioned Arad.

Tel Arad
The citadel and sanctuary were constructed at the time of King David and Solomon. Artifacts found within the sanctuary of the citadel mostly reflect offerings of oil, wine, wheat, etc. brought there by numerous people throughout the reign of the kings of Judah until the kingdom's fall to the Babylonians. However, during the Persian, Maccabean, Roman, and early Muslim eras, locals continued to transport these items to the sacred precinct of the upper hill.
...
Under the Judaean kings, the citadel was periodically refortified, remodeled and rebuilt, until ultimately it was destroyed between 597 BCE and 577 BCE whilst Jerusalem was under siege by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. Among the most significant artifacts unearthed from this time are ostraca dating from the mid-7th century BCE, referring to this citadel as the House of Yahweh.
...
The temple at Arad was uncovered by archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni in 1962 who spent the rest of his life considering its mysteries, dying there in the mid-1970s.

The incense altars and two "standing stones" may have been dedicated to Yahweh and Asherah.[2] An inscription was found on the site by Aharoni mentioning a "House of Yahweh", which William G. Dever suggests may have referred to the temple at Arad or the temple at Jerusalem.[

The Arad house a model house, was found in Tel Arad. Dated 3,000 - 2,650 BCE . Israel Museum, Jerusalem

I have some difficulty believing this to be a model house. Why would it have survived so long?

To me, it appears as a representation of liminal space wherein a deity is met. The "In the doorway deity".

The Ark of the Covenant!
ETA

Compare with Bed of Og

Og
In Deut. 3:11 and later in the book of Numbers and Joshua, Og is called the last of the Rephaim. Rephaim is a Hebrew word for giants. Deut. 3:11 declares that his "bedstead" (translated in some texts as "sarcophagus") of iron is "nine cubits in length and four cubits in width", which is 13.5 ft by 6 ft according to the standard cubit of a man. It goes on to say that at the royal city of Rabbah of the Ammonites, his giant bedstead could still be seen as a novelty at the time the narrative was written.

Gilgal Refā'īm is an ancient megalithic monument in the Golan Heights (Early Bronze Age II, 3000–2700 BCE).
File:Gilgal_Refa%27im_-_Rujm_el-Hiri.JPG
This last may not be connected but:

Euhemerus
Euhemerus asserted that the Greek gods had been originally kings, heroes and conquerors, or benefactors to men, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. Zeus for example was, according to him, a king of Crete, who had been a great conqueror; the tomb of Zeus was shown to visitors near Knossos, perhaps engendering or enhancing among the traditionalists the reputation of Cretans as liars.[13]

a reply to: pthena

All of this seems like an ancient form of fame or celebrity... and each was made responsible to their masses or fans of them.

It seems of course when that adoration dwindled there was more conquest or acts to keep that cycles of adoration going or those desiring such positions clamoring, ruminating rumor, and back stabbing instead of taking to tasks worthy of that adoration or whatever it is they were seeking.

The smart I suppose would blame it on someone else, if they wanted a modicum of peace or normalcy.

Of course when they finally found rest, some called archaeologists, historians ,or the curious dig them up, teach about them or stumble across their corpses when going about their business of living and in such a manner they too once again live.

Like Odin saying theres too many members to Valhalla as it is, everyone wants to drink with me, so you sit here and play Odin to the next hero worthy enough for the title, then he goes home and gets some rest, simply because he's over the mead hall that once was a revelry and has since become a curse of eternity.

The phoenix is a bird that rises from such ashes shakes off all expectation of those hardened roles that type cast and stereotype such hapless beings into such rigidity... where eternity only feels like it because choice has ceased to continue because of public expectation.

Like poor Gary Coleman never rising above "What you talkn' about Willis?" even when rediscovered working in a mall as security, long after the fame train departed. Due to assaulting someone because people asking him to say it became; enough is enough.

Just pointing out the angles not usually perceived, that form the full circle in the sphere of consciousness.

a reply to: pthena

It's likely an Ashera shrine and will involve the liminality of the threshold with regards to the internalization and externalization and such forth, i looked at them here

a reply to: Kantzveldt
There are a few biblical references to the threshold. The first is when Dagon bows to YHWH as the Ark of the covenant is placed in Dagons shrine. In that situation the threshold is given a negative connotation as a meeting place but this is probably because it had previously held a place of importance and this was henceforth actively discouraged.

1 Samuel 5:4New International Version (NIV)
4 But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained.

I, personally am a huge fan of El Shaddai (the Almighty/the breasted one; shad being female paps ONLY [never male] - thus slightly tied into the Lambkin of Revelations who wears a golden girdle about the paps/breast in the fashion of Athena's golden girdle).

There is also the significant parable of the Levites concubine who is raped to death but found by her ?husband with her hands on the threshold. That story by itself is completely appalling on so many levels from cowardice to human butchery...but it does involve a threshold.

Judges 19:27
And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way; and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, with her hands upon the threshold.

These two allegories (and I think their are more, just blanking) have a few under pining themes that tie heavily into the erasing of the divine feminine from the worship of YHWH. The first of course being that Dagon, while male, was a fish God and visually at least to me resembles ISIS (of IS[IS]RA EL) in dress if not in gender...which seems somewhat odd. The second parable, I think is an attempt to 'get rid' of the divine feminine once and for all and purge it from the cult. Dream on if you can find a visual reference in (well any) modern cartoon of El Shaddai (the presence of the angel of death; pilar of cloud that delivered the children of Israel from Egypt or accompanied them in the wilderness). It is so unbelievably bad at this point that most do not even understand the role of the Feminine (creative source of all life and the light istelf; darkness) where God is said to dwell (in thick darkness).

MAN (light) emerged from darkness, the divine feminine; not the other way around.
Gen 1:4. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness.

It is a 'given' in the religion that light is associated with masculine...but that is a double edged sword that means in the most absolute sense that the supreme God (the origin of all) is female.

Exodus 21 And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness (#6205) where God was.

Deut 4:11 "Then you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire to the midst of heaven, with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness.

So the very thing they have erased with aplomb of a giddy school girl is their female God, the Almighty.

a reply to: ChristianHart

I wrote a series of replies here with regards to El Shaddai and that earlier stratum of North Western Semitic tradition, that it related to the cult of the mountain of the horizon(s) and thus a tradition comparative to that of the Mesopotamian Kur, which was the point of connectivity between the Netherworld and the horizon, and were Inanna-Kur was a general personification of such goings on.

That's an interesting case you make though with regards to YHWH overthrowing Dagon and hence the tradition of the Fish people in that region and the suggestion that for the Levites there could be no Feminine concubine, as it were, bad omens in my opinion.

The important consideration that you draw attention to is what do we reconcile the Sun Goddess of the Netherworld and the visible illumination of the Sun God into, who gets that third slice of cake, and the answer is undoubtably Mother Darkness, and that the Sun Goddess of the Netherworld represents that primary stage of consciousness within darkness, and the secondary light made manifest as a Masculine phenomena, and that this is a cyclic process applicable to the Universe.

a reply to: Kantzveldt

beautiful thought.

A divine controller, in harmony guiding the path of all that is, the very fabric of all, mapped and kept sacred and in balance. A counterpoint to the male points of creation. Flowing reality.

I love it!

a reply to: tadaman

It's long been my strange little belief system, that first there was Mother darkness and from this emerged Allani and then Ishara and then from these the Sun Goddess of the Netherworld, i wrote the curious tale here...

a reply to: Kantzveldt
Worse than bad omens...it means a world without the divine feminine. All we are left with is a male 'wife' as substitute for the divine feminine...referred to by Azazel as the 'Babylonian Hermanphrodite' the Levites MISUNDERSTANDING of the myths. It becomes a problem of practice...and it becomes a global problem as the majority of the worlds populace falls under Abrahamic Religions influence or cultural influence. Illustrated by Sol-o-mons ruling between the two whores...the mother of the child would rather give her child away for the rest of his life (as she has a vested interest in her offspring) whereas the whore cares nothing for the child (only for winning) and would see the child cut asunder to fulfill her goals. Because a man wears a dress does not make him a mother, wife or bride. I think we are coming up to the verdict for the Abrahamic religions...we are about to find out which are whores and which are mothers. I do not believe for a second that they will be allowed, in front of their judge, to kill the child but I wouldn't want to be the one screaming cut it in half when the final verdict on their 'religious' practices is given.

I loved your take on the Beginning...I think it is most important that we connect on a personal intimate level with our understanding of our beliefs. Who gets the most from a play? Foemost the writer (creator), then the actors (who intimately engage with story) and last a passive audience, who reflexively views from an outside perspective, eternally detached. People talk about engaging or recognition of the divine in humanity...but how can the be realized unless we are willing to deeply engage and imagine as you have done? To become in a real sense a 'participant'.

Ok I'm veering off the course of the thread. later...

a reply to: ChristianHart

Yes you're right because that little personal creation mythos was written a few years even before i decided to post it here, it's somewhat unpolished and i could do better now but it was only based upon my own observations regarding colour symbolism and the related sequence of the planets were i developed the narrative from the outermost inward and how those play out in nature, so it took me some time before i could discover a culture and religious tradition which i feel accommodates my own inclinations, so now i could put names to the characters involved.

I think the Atenists and then the Levites under their influence chose only to acknowledge that which is readily apparent, in terms of the exoteric light, believed only in the readily demonstrable which could be quantified and codified, legislative reason, settled for the singular Divine abstraction of the Deists and created the disconnect with the esoteric, of which they also introduced fraudulent versions towards subversion.

The current situation as you mention is far from alright as their shallow ideologies dominate world thinking and their silly little scams are what generally passes for the occult, but all said and done they've actually been set up themselves by that which they're most readily against.