San Jorge y el Dragon
Tomado del Libro Lapidus "Alchemy Key
The hundred-headed hydra is just the same as the dragon. It is
also called the Old Serpent, Lord of the Abyss, Leviathan, Lotan, Shaitan,
Tiamat, Forsaker, Abandoner and Cthulhu. Sufi and Muqarribun writings
make use of the term Abandoner referring to the power of Tajrid and
Tafrid, which mean outward detachment and interior solitude
respectively. The Greeks use the word Apollyon, Abaddon in Hebrew.837
In Pompeii, this menacing dragon is shown both as a crocodile in
the Villa of the Mysteries and the sea monster ketos in the legend of
Andromeda and Perseus in the Mythological Room of the Imperial Villa
at Boscotrecase.838
Nicholas Poussin’s 1633 painting The Companions of Rinaldo,
now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows the
Christian knights Carlo and Ubaldo confronting the same fearsome
dragon. This has the same meaning as the two warring knights in the
Merchant’s Chapel of St Peters Church in Malmo, Sweden. Below them
is a large picture of St George and the Dragon.
A recent interpretation of the story of St George is George Lucas’
blockbuster film Star Wars (1977). Initially, many studios rejected the
script. It went on to gross two hundred million dollars and become the
envy of the industry. Star Wars even redefined cinema in the twentieth
century and became a popular trilogy. In the film, Daath-vader, so named
after Daath meaning man’s knowledge, is man’s base nature or the Lover,
balanced by his pure Son Luke Skywalker. Daath and Luke are two sides
of the same coin. Swords of Light consummate their battle. Only
initiates of the ancient Jedi Knights could wield these swords. So
enduring and popular was the theme that George Lucas’ used it once more
in 1999, with the first of three prequels of a new Star Wars Trilogy.
George Lucas is not alone in using this age-old theme. Michael Douglas’
film The Game is an initiation sequence. Douglas conceals the dragon in
a place worthy of the erudite complexity of Shakespeare.
Gnostic Christianity modified the alchemy of the Greater
Mysteries in a very imaginative way. The Gnostics believed that the
achievement of virtue over the ignorance and moral vice of one’s own
227.base nature was a pyrrhic victory - just as in the Afro-Asiatic sacred
marriage, where the ritual sacrifices the king. In this ceremony, it is the
victor St George, who is sacrificed.839 The killing of the dragon is, in fact,
not a killing to death. When the sword of crystal light subdues the
Dragon, the Knight of the Rose Croix becomes the perfect expression of
life. This needs further illustration.
In a bold defense of the Families of Love in 1580, called an Apology for the Service of Love, the Family describes how death is life. They assert that sin is repairable in life. The Apology is set as a three-way conversation in which the Exile, a Familist, seeks to convince two curious individuals that the Family of Love was neither heretical nor: …the most detestable Sectaries or Hereticks, that ever reigned on the earth; yea, and as people not worthy to live in the Commonwealth. The Exile is seemingly a wild man, clothed in moss and coming from the mountains. He talks of Family Brethren walking upright, peaceably and brotherly amongst all people after their ritual:840 To dye unto sin, to crucify the flesh with her lusts, to put on the new man of righteousness, to dwell in Christ and have him dwell in us, to have the same mind in us that was in Christ…
In a bold defense of the Families of Love in 1580, called an Apology for the Service of Love, the Family describes how death is life. They assert that sin is repairable in life. The Apology is set as a three-way conversation in which the Exile, a Familist, seeks to convince two curious individuals that the Family of Love was neither heretical nor: …the most detestable Sectaries or Hereticks, that ever reigned on the earth; yea, and as people not worthy to live in the Commonwealth. The Exile is seemingly a wild man, clothed in moss and coming from the mountains. He talks of Family Brethren walking upright, peaceably and brotherly amongst all people after their ritual:840 To dye unto sin, to crucify the flesh with her lusts, to put on the new man of righteousness, to dwell in Christ and have him dwell in us, to have the same mind in us that was in Christ…
The odd character of the Exile in the Apology shows the author
had a detailed and insightful knowledge of Ovid or the poems of
Gilgamesh, written in about two thousand BCE.841 Ovid variously
describes how Perseus and Hercules enter the Garden of Hesperides.
Hercules defeated the dragon at the gate.842 Perseus defeated the giant
Atlas, who is an archetype for the Exile.843
In Gilgamesh and the Cedar Forest, a wild man called Enkidu is
beguiled and persuaded to begin a new life among mortals.844 Enkidu
adapts to his new lifestyle but loses his strength and courage. Gilgamesh
suggests that they seek out and kill Huwawa, a giant hideous monster
with lion’s claws. Enkidu is hesitant but finally seeks out Huwawa at the
mountain of cedars. Hu is the name of the cedar tree. The mountain of
cedars is a forest of base natures. The fearsome alter ego of Enkidu
dwells there. In a fit of rage, Enkidu kills his own base ego, as must the
Rose Croix Knight.
The Gnostic version maintains that instead of killing the Dragon,
the Soul instead unites or merges with the Dragon via the crystal sword of
light. This is not yet the sacred marriage. When pierced by the sword,
the Dragon simply floats up the sword to merge with the Rose Croix
228
Knight. The united entity of Spirit and Soul takes the worldly form of the
Dragon or, as San Francesco shows in his famous painting Crucifix, a
Serpent. At this point, the united entity is characterized in two completely
different ways. These are the Serpent and the Agnus Dei, or pure lamb
awaiting ritual slaughter.
The Gnostic Croix Knight, who has found his base nature,
victoriously impaled it and merged with it, then prepares for the sacred
marriage to the Goddess of Wisdom. The aspiring Knight of Holiness
must wed her as Truth to regain life with a new purified Spirit. He must
be reborn.
The Goddess of Wisdom is the hermetic form of the goddess of
death and love who is Aphrodite, Pallas Athena, Venus, Ishtar, Isis and
Sophia. She is both the Lion Goddess and Water Goddess from an
unusual event in astrological mythology associated with the real
Gilgamesh, a Kassite-Hyksos Shepherd King who invaded Babylon.845
He identified with the ancient legends of Gilgamesh and took on the
symbol of the Ram because the relentless precession of the earth’s
equinoxes had moved the sign of the Ram into the favored House of
Spring in the Zodiac calendar. Amun and Yahweh followed Gilgamesh
by taking the sign of the Ram.
When the Ram pushed the Bull from the position of supremacy,
the Crab simultaneously displaced the Lion at the Summer Solstice. As a
result, the Love Goddess of the Summer Solstice left her Lion to become
the Goddess of Water. We see this in Aphrodite’s birth from a seashell
and the Virgin Mary reflected in many a convent garden pool.
The Dragon, who has been female to this point, is now
hermaphrodite, meaning both female and male. It takes on the male
aspect of the Knight and prepares to mate with the Goddess of Wisdom.
In the contrived process of mating, the Dragon disappears and all that
remains is the purified, reborn Knight as the beneficent Star of Life, also
called Phosphorous, meaning the bringer of light.846 The Soul, of course,
never dies and remains constant throughout the process.
Revelation portrays this scene.847 The number 666 is the number
of a man and represents his Spirit:848
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the
number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his
number is Six hundred threescore and six.
229
Historical fundamentalists identify the Great Beast with Emperor
Nero because his Greek title is Neron Kaisar. The Gematria sum of the
Hebrew translation RSQ NWRN is 666.
A rather complex solution to the puzzle uses the Atbash Cipher
(see Appendix 10). The number 666 is the Atbash Cipher code for
alphabetically transforming the Spirit (RWCh) to the spiritually pure
Elohim (ALHYM).849 Gematrists perceive the number 666 as six, six and
six as in the combination of a safe. They transform the letters of the
Spirit, RWCh (Ruach), through six places by cyclic rotation. RWCh
becomes DLB, which is a Notaricon acronym for the Holy Alphabet
(Aleph, Beth, and Lamed). Ch rotates by six to B, the first letter in BYTh.
W rotates by six to the middle letter L in Aleph (ALPh), which is not a
vowel but a consonant. R similarly maps to D, the last letter in Lamed
(LMD). Thus, the Holy Alphabet is the Key to Resurrection. Finally,
DML PhLA ThYB maps through the Atbash Cipher to Elohim
(ALHYM).850
Dante provided a straightforward solution in the Inferno.851 The
letters in the dragon’s name Apophis sum to 667. The victorious knight
who vanquishes his own spirit, cuts-off the head of the dragon. Dante
sees this as cutting-off the initial letter A from the name Apophis. The
value of A is one so the remainder is 666. This is the age-old battle of Ra
and Apophis in Egypt, Apollo and the Python in Greece, Thor and the
serpent in Norse sagas, the Hittite storm god and a serpent on New Year’s
Day, Enlil and Tiamat in Mesopotamia, Tishtrya and Apaosha in Iran,
Indra and Vritra in India, Maui and Tuna in Polynesia and many other
myths.852
We now return now to the mating of the dragon and Goddess.
The Goddess proceeds to destroy the Dragon embodying the Knight’s
Spirit. At this point, the Gnostic ritual diverges from the ancient sacred
marriage. In ancient times, the Knight would have been bound to an
oaken Tau cross, representing God’s Divine Law, using the five-fold bond
that joins wrists, neck and ankles together.853 Flayed and hacked to
pieces, the sacrificial king would become a Eucharist. A new son would
have been naturally born of the Goddess after nine months gestation.
Indeed, the purpose of priestess’ sexual orgies was to ensure that at least
one became pregnant for this outcome.
In the Gnostic version, it was desirous to avoid the actual death of
anything real, let alone murder the initiate. Instead, the Goddess’ love
destroyed his Spirit by figurative crucifixion on a Tau cross. The
230 crucifixion scene shown to the Knight is the same as San Francesco’s
Crucified Serpent or the image of the serpent of bronze that Moses hung
on his staff, the nehushtan.
Another Serpent was born from the ashes of the Knight’s
crucified Spirit. As this was an Easter ceremony, this new Serpent laid
the glain or red egg, which the Goddess ate.854
With the Goddess fertilized one way or another, the Rose Croix
Knight was reborn in life as described by the Family of Love. The
newborn issue of the sacred marriage emerged in the Rose Croix Knight
as the new King. The Dervish maxim is:855
The man must die that the saint may be born.
The modern song Hero expresses the same sentiment:856
Search for the hero inside yourself.
Search for the secrets you hide.
Search for the hero inside yourself.
Until you find the key to your life.
Ovid tells a legendary story of rebirth in the Doctrines of Pythagoras,
where the Phoenix of Assyria renews and begets itself:857
Have passed, with claws and beak unsullied, builds
A nest on a loft-swaying palm; …
Then from his father’s body is reborn
A little Phoenix, so they say, to live
The same long years. When time has built his strength
With power to raise the weight, he lifts the nest –
The nest his cradle and father’s tomb –
As love and duty prompt, from that tall palm
And carries it across the sky to reach
The Sun’s great city, and before the doors
Of the Sun’s holy temple lays it down.
The new King was his own Horus or Christ that was always latent within
the Knight Rose Croix, thus the Gnostic interpretation of I.N.R.I being
Jesus reigns within us.
Jesus sayings, found in the primitive Gospel of Thomas, mirror
this:858
Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring
forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
231
Consistent with this, the Gospel of Philip maintains that
resurrection of the spirit occurs before death and there is no resurrection
after death. A Greek Orthodox cleric readily confirms the meaning of
Easter:859
We contemporary Christians should realise that the Resurrection
of our Lord does not concern the dead but rather those who are
still alive … the victory of the Lord’s sacrifice over moral and
spiritual death … has nothing to do with the physical
phenomenon we call “death” in our daily life.
In 1429CE, Phillip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and Earl of
Flanders, instituted the Order of the Golden Fleece. Excepting that its
membership increased from thirty to seventy-eight, the Order remained
unchanged for nearly four centuries. In some countries, such as Sweden,
it became the most prestigious order of knighthood of its time.
In 1469, forty years after the Order of the Golden Fleece was
established, King Lewis IX created another important French Order, the
Order of St Michael.860 This Order traces the legend of St Michael’s
worldly twin, St George. Its motto Immensi tremor Oceani means an
immense shaking in the waters. The Order’s collar was composed of
scallop-shells of gold. The jewel on the collar is a hillock on which St
Michael tramples the Dragon. Pope Leo X, the Medici’s high
Renaissance maecaneas, contributed to the Order in 1518. Pope Leo
presented King François I with two of Raphael’s paintings, Saint Michael
and the Holy Family, both of which now hang in the Louvre.861
King Henry III of France established the Ordre du Saint-Esprit or
Order of the Holy Ghost in 1578.862 Henry’s purpose was to bind the
French nobility to his side in the midst of religious turmoil. This included
the now infamous Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. on 24 August 1542
where Henry III ordered the murder of hundreds of Protestants who were
in Paris for the wedding of his sister Marguerite to the Huguenot leader,
Henri de Navarre.
The Order of the Holy Ghost became the most prestigious of all
France’s chivalric Orders. Its emblems were a dove, knots of gold and
the Fleur de Lys. The evening before a French Knight received this
Order, he became an initiate of the Order of St Michael.
The old French Ecossais Master or Architect’s Catechism follows
the twin Orders of St Michael and the Holy Ghost. It highlights the latent
Christ within:863
Q: How is your health?
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A: I carry a child in my womb, though I am a man
Q: How long will you carry it?
A: That is not decided, but while waiting I am frequently confined
Q: Who will be the midwife?
A: Minerva
Q: Who will be the Uncle?
A: Mercury
Q: And the Father?
A: One of my equals and I
The Gnostic-Rosicrucian Knight is a philosopher in search of
Truth because he searches for his sacred marriage with the Goddess of
Wisdom. If successful, he becomes a Knight Quadosh. Quadosh
signifies Holiness, Dedication and Sanctification.864 He is also called a
Knight of the Feast of the Brotherhood because his ordeal is celebrated by
the Feast of the Brotherhood held on Passover Eve, also known as the
Agape or pure Feast of Brotherly Love.
We shall discuss Moses’ nehushtan further in Chapter 18.865 It is,
however, worth noting that the crucified serpent continued to be a very
important image representing the crucifixion of Spirit on the cross of
Divine Law, so the seed within the Spirit, that sinneth not, could emerge.
Even Sir Francis Bacon, who wore the black hat of knowledge, chose the
device of a serpent on the anchor of peace, as shown in the Crucified
Serpent from the titlepage of The Faerie Queen, Part II (1617.
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