The Three Wise Men and The Revelation of The Magi

Bybyots

Assuming that there really were some kind of city, or temple where the magi resided, I wonder if that wouldn't be the place where Jesus was said to disappear for a time? My bible reading is not what it could be, but I was always under the impression that there are missing years in the life of Jesus. The connection seems to make sense to me. One must learn how to be what one was meant to be, and one must learn of it someplace?

Sure, I know, another mystery that fascinates me too. I have read some crazy stuff about what he might have been up to in those years, I sure don't know what it was, but I am also very much intrigued by the idea of secret enclaves of spiritual adepts.

One of my favourite Bible-y bits...

41 Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. 42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. 43 After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44 Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

49 “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”[a] 50 But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

51 Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

www.biblegateway.com...

I believe, according to the traditional version of events, the Magi instructed his parents to take him to Egypt for his safety...which would have been a very good choice at that time

As Gospels, and Francis Bacon has gotten himself a mention in that context, I want to put in a good word for the other Bacon, Roger, and his work on the fourth gospel, particularly, 'In the beginning was the word...' Francis I can take or leave, but Roger's 'da Bomb'

reply to post by Bybyots


Thank you for sharing that, this article is priceless.

reply to post by maxzen2004


You are so very welcome.

I feel very fortunate that others are finding something that they can take away from this thread.

reply to post by KilgoreTrout


Hello Kilgore Trout,

I believe, according to the traditional version of events, the Magi instructed his parents to take him to Egypt for his safety...which would have been a very good choice at that time

When I read that I immediately thought of the painting by Rembrandt, Rest on the flight into Egypt and I pulled out this detail for you.



Merry Christmas!

Hi folks,

Correction on the painting Rest on the flight into Egypt. The painting that the detail above is from was painted by Luc-Olivier Merson in 1880, not Rembrandt.

Merry Christmas,

It should be noted that in the Byzantine basilicas Christ was sometimes represented, like the sirens, with a fish's tail. He is shown in this way on the capital of a column in the Church of St. Brice at St. Brisson-sur-Loire (Loiret).

The fish is the hieroglyph of the Philosophers' Stone in its first state, because the stone, like the fish, is born and lives in water.

Among the paintings of the alchemical stove, made by P. H. Pfau in 1702, there is one of a fisherman with a line, drawing a fine fish from the water. Other allegories recommended catching it in a net, which is an exact picture of the mesh formed of intercrossed threads represented on our Epiphany cakes.

-Fulcanelli. The Legend of St. Christopher. MotC. P. 146

Bybyots

It should be noted that in the Byzantine basilicas Christ was sometimes represented, like the sirens, with a fish's tail. He is shown in this way on the capital of a column in the Church of St. Brice at St. Brisson-sur-Loire (Loiret).

The fish is the hieroglyph of the Philosophers' Stone in its first state, because the stone, like the fish, is born and lives in water.

Among the paintings of the alchemical stove, made by P. H. Pfau in 1702, there is one of a fisherman with a line, drawing a fine fish from the water. Other allegories recommended catching it in a net, which is an exact picture of the mesh formed of intercrossed threads represented on our Epiphany cakes.

-Fulcanelli. The Legend of St. Christopher. MotC. P. 146

OOOOooooooo...

ΙΧΘΥΣ (Ichthys) is an acronym/acrostic[4] for "Ίησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ", (Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr), which translates into English as "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior".

• Iota (i) is the first letter of Iēsous (Ἰησοῦς), Greek for "Jesus".
• Chi (ch) is the first letter of Christos (Χριστός), Greek for "anointed".
• Theta (th) is the first letter of Theou (Θεου), Greek for "God's", the genitive case of Θεóς, Theos, Greek for "God".
• Upsilon (y) is the first letter of (h)yios[5] (Υἱός), Greek for "Son".
• Sigma (s) is the first letter of sōtēr (Σωτήρ), Greek for "Savior".

This explanation is given among others by Augustine in his Civitate Dei,[6] where he notes that the generating sentence "Ίησοῦς Χριστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ" has 27 letters, i.e. 3 x 3 x 3, which in that age indicated power.[7] Augustine quotes also an ancient text from the Sibylline oracles[8] whose verses are an acrostic of the generating sentence.

en.wikipedia.org...

A marble of the third century found at Autun preserves to us a little poem presenting, like the eighth book of the Sibylline oracles, the acrostic ΙΧΘΥΣ. The pious Valentinians and the orthodox could both equally enjoy the singular style of this strange piece.

“O divine race of the heavenly ΙΧΘΥΣ, receive with a heart full of respect immortal life among mortals; rejuvenate thy soul among the divine waters, by the eternal waves of the Sophia which gives its treasures. Receive sweet nourishment like the honey of the Saviour of the holy; eat in thy hunger and drink in thy thirst; thou holdest ΙΧΘΥΣ in the palms of thy hands.”

www.ccel.org...

Christians had been using the symbolic fish long before Clement of Alexandria was born in such Roman monuments as the Capella Greca and the Sacrament Chapels of the catacomb of St. Callistus. The fish symbolized the baptismal waters, the loaves and fishes, and Jesus' own declaration to the disciples to become "fishers of men". See Matthew 4:19. The Greek work for fish, Ichthus, is an acrostic consisting of the initial letters of five Greek words forming the word for fish (Ichthus), which briefly but clearly described the character of Christ and His claim to the worship of believers: Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. It is possible that this Christian acrostic originated in Alexandria, and was intended as a protest against the pagan coin from Alexandria of the reign of Domitian (81-96) that was had inscribed on it Theou Yios (Son of God). The fish and the word Ichthus held a meaning of high significance for the Christians. It was a brief profession of faith in the divinity of Christ - that He was the Redeemer of mankind. Tertullian referred to believers in this way, "we, little fishes, after the image of our Ichthus, Jesus Christ, are born in the water".

www.oocities.org...

I wonder

I wanted to mention that while I haven't read Fulcanelli (I have the pdfs of both his books bookmarked, but I find it very hard to read a whole book online, much prefer an actual book), I have read Rene Scwaller de Lubicz...

He was fascinated with the esoteric secrets of Gothic architecture and became acquainted with the man whose name is most associated with the "mystery of the cathedrals," the pseudonymous Fulcanelli. Sometime between 1918 and 1920 in Montparnasse, Schwaller met Fulcanelli, who had gathered a band of disciples around him, aptly called "The Brothers of Heliopolis." (Schwaller would later claim that the word alchemy meant "out of Egypt.") Alchemy had found a home in the strange world of the Parisian occult underground, and Fulcanelli and the Brothers of Heliopolis studied the works of the great alchemists, like Nicolas Flammel and Basil Valentinus.

Fulcanelli and Schwaller met often and discussed the Great Work, the transmutation of matter, a possibility that the recent advances in atomic theory seemed to bring closer to reality. Then one day, Fulcanelli told Schwaller about a manuscript he had stolen from a Paris bookshop. While cataloguing an ancient book for a bookseller, Fulcanelli discovered a strange piece of writing: a six-page manuscript in fading ink, describing, Fulcanelli claimed, the importance of color in the alchemical process. But, said Schwaller, when it came to alchemy, Fulcanelli was a materialist, and so he didn't grasp the true nature of color. Schwaller enlightened him.

Tired of the distractions of Paris, Schwaller moved to Grasse, in the south of France, where he invited Fulcanelli to join him in an alchemical retreat. There, after much work, they performed a successful opus, involving the secrets of "alchemical stained glass." The peculiarly evocative reds and blues of the rose windows of cathedrals like the unearthly Chartres had eluded artisans since the Middle Ages. In Grasse, Schwaller and Fulcanelli may have cracked the formula.

And, I think this is relevant here...

Most of Schwaller’s work was done at the temple at Luxor, his study of its remarkable architecture and design a natural outcome of his early fascination with the mystery of number. On his first visit in 1937, Schwaller was impressed with a tremendous insight. The temple, with its strange, "crooked" alignments, was, he was certain, a conscious exercise in the laws of harmony and proportion. He called it the Parthenon of Egypt—somewhat anachronistically, since he believed Luxor was concrete proof that the Egyptians understood the laws of harmony and proportion before the Greeks.

Schwaller searched Luxor for evidence of the golden section, phi. If the golden section had been used, that would prove the Egyptians had knowledge of it much earlier than the Greeks, a revelation that alone would cause an uproar in orthodox Egyptology. But as John Anthony West in The Serpent and the Sky (1978), a study of Schwaller de Lubicz, points out, phi is more than a central item in classical architecture. It is the mathematical archetype of the manifest universe, the means by which we have an "asymmetrical" "lumpy" world of galaxies and planets, and not a bland, homogenous sameness, a question that contemporary cosmologists are also concerned with. Schwaller linked phi to the orbits of the planets, the proportions of Gothic cathedrals, and the forms of plants and animals. It was a "form constant," a blueprint for reality, a law of creation. And the Egyptians knew it.

The Egyptians knew much else: the precession of the equinoxes, the circumference of the globe, and the secrets of pi. The knowledge of the Egyptians indeed made the Greeks seem like children. Their forgotten mathematical wisdom led Schwaller increasingly to realize that Egyptian civilization must be far older than we suspect--the clear evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx also suggests that. He concluded that their knowledge may have been inherited from vanished Atlantis. But more important than any of those conclusions, was his growing conviction that the Egyptians had a radically different consciousness from ours. They viewed the world symbolically, seeing in nature a "writing" conveying truths about the metaphysical forces behind creation—"the Neters," as Egyptian gods are called. It was a vision Schwaller believed we desperately need to regain.

At the center of this vision was Conscious Man, the King. For the ancient Egyptians, Conscious Man was the crown and aim of the universe, a perception many nature-centered mystics would dispute. But Conscious Man was not "man as we know him." He was the individual in whom the "intelligence of the heart" has awakened, one who has had the experience of "functional consciousness."

www.unitedearth.com.au...

On a side note, this very day, as a christmas pressie, I got a book by his wife, Isla...

www.amazon.com...

Incidently, Her Bak, evidently, means 'Chick Pea'...

originally posted by: BlueMule
So far this Christmas season, two things have made it special for me. This thread is one, and Shrek: The Musical is the other. Thanks for making this thread, and thanks to everyone who has contributed.

Agreed. Finding this thread to read has made Christmas a little more special.

Merry Christmas!

a reply to: Bybyots

I think there is something else that seems to be overlooked.

Luke 2 verse 13, "Suddenly there was a "multitude" of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God, and saying , Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on Earth to the people he favors."

It seems the angel was not alone, but with a host of angels. It is said the Shepards were almost compelled to tell everyone what they saw, or knew, about the birth.

I can see how it may not have been such a big deal to tell about a woman giving birth in a stable, but who could be quiet about being in the presence of a multitude of angels?

a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn

For me it's an atronomical event. The birth of a new age is at the heart of this story.. The three kings are the stars that make up Orion's belt. The age of Pisces starts at this time.

originally posted by: midicon
a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn

For me it's an atronomical event. The birth of a new age is at the heart of this story.. The three kings are the stars that make up Orion's belt. The age of Pisces starts at this time.

I can accept that, but it would have to have been something that appeared suddenly. Something that was not there before, and then left.

Luke 2 verse 15 " When the angels had left them and returned to heaven, the shepards said to one another, "Let's go straight to Bethlehem and see what has happened, which the Lord has made known to us."

Which leads me to believe that they went to compare notes. To see if anyone in Bethlehem had seen what they had seen. Or if what they had seen was a gift from God that was not visible to others.

Just a thought.

a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn

Wow.

I have Richmond Lattimore's translation of the four Gospels and the Revelation here, and I just read Luke.

I'm stunned at how closely the story of Zacharia & Elizabeth and Joseph & Mary reflects the story of Cyrus & Prupusius in the story at the bottom of page 1.

There are no Wise Men in Luke, have I got that right? It's just the shepherds. I cannot believe that I didn't know this.

Thanks for the post, that's another great Christmas enhancer.

a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn

I chose my words unwisely. I shouldn't have used the word 'event'. I meant that the story contains astronomical information. There are no Shepherds or wise men. They are a metaphor for the three stars. Astronomical elements have been woven into the story. The gifts refer to the powers conferred upon the deity.