Even for an atheist the origins of God in Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) is a question of current interest since events in the Middle East and in the Western countries seem to be influenced by certain Messianic efforts. There is no need to believe in the truth of the Bible in order to notice that Israel was and is a Messianic project and if the end of the times prophesies were followed so far, they are followed to the conclusion. An Islamic Caliphate to be established by Mahdi is also end-of-the-times prophesy, yet relevant today.
I have already written two posts of the ancient believes connected with circumpolar stars and especially the Pole Star, but mapping ancient myths to stars is not an exact science: we do not know what ancient people exactly thought and I must make guesses. I try to identify the gods and predecessors of the Abrahamic God from the myths and star constellations as precisely as I can. Compared with the two previous posts I have made minor changes and hope to have reached a fairly stable understanding by now.
Gods of the type we see in Bronze and Iron Age religions are not that old. Oldest forms of religion were probably similar to animistic beliefs of present day hunter-gatherers. These religions feature spirits of nature and spirits of the dead rather than gods, but gods are also very old in Europe and the Middle East, where our concept of God derives from.
Assuming that the Venus figurines found from 45,000 BP-30,000 BP old sites in Europe and Siberia depict a mother goddess, a fertility goddess is the oldest god of which there is evidence. This god was the earth and she did not live in the skies.
Another very old god was the god of the skies. It is not know how old this concept of god is, it may be as old as the fertility goddess. For sure hunter-gatherers could see that the night sky rotates around a point, the heavenly North Pole, a continuation of the Earth axis. Mythologies of many peoples contain a myth of axis mundi, the world pillar. From those myths it looks like the origin of the myth could be in the north of India, but there is also a rock painting in Europe, dated to 16,000 BC, where is shown a shaman and a staff with a bird sitting on it. This staff is explained as the world pillar and the bird is the constellation of the Swan with Deneb as the eye of the Swan. Because of this rock paining we can place the myth of the world pole to at least 16,000 BC.
There is no clear evidence that Paleolithic people believed that a sky god rules from the heavenly North Pole (though it is likely), but already from Mesolithic and Neolithic Stone Age the association of circumpolar stars with gods can be shown. Gods were in the Heaven and the heaven was the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere, for the reason that during the day one cannot see stars (too little interesting to see, only the sun) and it is the northern sky because that is where the people who first developed agriculture lived.
The heavenly North Pole moves because of the precession of equinoxes. The precession of equinoxes is believed to have been noticed first by the Greeks, but from the myths it is clear that people knew much earlier that the heavenly North Pole is moving. It is the origin of the concept of times. The times (era) changes when a star, which used to mark the heavenly North Pole, is not any more the point around which the nigh sky circulates. The concept of times is older than the Zodiac and an astrological era.
The understanding of the world pillar as a mill must be from the Neolithic time, earlier there was a concept of the pillar as a wooden drill for making fire: this leads to the association of the end of the times with fire and a catastrophe. The idea that the end of the times means a catastrophe must derive from several natural catastrophes which often were caused by weather changes and (probably accidentally) coincided with the change of the Polar Star. The Polar Star, when there was such, was understood as the nail that fixed the world pole to the sky. One star can be used as a Polar Star for approximately two thousand years.
The mother goddess and the ruler of the skies were not the only gods. Starting agriculture lead to the introduction of two new gods in Mesopotamia: the first is the protector of culture and humans (Enki) and the second is the opposing force, which creates disasters for humans (Enlil). Sumerians called the rules of the sky with the name An (Anu in Akkadian) and the mother goddess (earth) with the name Ki/Ninhursag. Sumerians developed first Zodic and introduced the Zodiac gods, that is, gods for sun, moon and planets.
The religion of Levant developed from these roots and some of the later gods are variants of these original gods. Thus, Ugarit gods El, Dagan and Baal Hadad are later forms of An, Enlil and Enki, just like the Sumer Zodiac goddess Ianna (Venus) is the later Levantine goddess Astarte.
Following the track of the heavenly North Pole we get many of the most ancient myths and from the myths we can map the new gods to the ancient Sumerian gods, or earlier. Look at the track of the heavenly North Pole from 16,000 BC to our times from some web link, like
https://briankoberlein.com/2013/10/22/as-the-world-turns/
(I do not want to copy the images to my blog as they may be copyrighted.)
Deneb was never very close to the heavenly North Pole, but as a very bright star it was used as the Polar Star around 16,000 BC. The whole cycle takes 25,700 years and Deneb is in the same position in 15,000 AD. Vega was the Polar Star around 12,000 BC, the constellation of Hercules was close to the heavenly North Pole between 9,000 BC and 6,000 BC, Thuban was practically at the North Pole in 2,700 BC and Kocbah in Ursa Minor was close enough to serve as the Pole Star around 800 BC. Today Polaris is the Pole Star.
Association with myths is clearly shown by Finnish mythology in Kalevala. In the foundation myth the sky woman is swimming in the sea, a bird lands on her hip and she gives birth to the world. It is easy to see that the bird must be the Swan, the constellation where Deneb is, and the time must be 16,000 BC. The sky woman is the Milky Way and Deneb is where the legs of the Milky Way join, explaining why the woman gets impregnated.
Going further to the time between 12,000 BC and 9,000 BC there is the Kalevala myth of an old man with an axe cutting down the world oak. The world oak is the world pillar, which in 12,000 BC was fixed to Vega. The old man with an axe is the constellation of Hercules. Cutting the oak indicates that the North Pole moved to Hercules.
Finally, Kalevala has the poem of the Theft of Sampo. Sampo certainly is the world pillar, the mill. Theft of Sampo can only refer to a time when a previous Polar Star lost its position as the North Pole. There are two such cases: one is Thuban. Thuban lost its role as the Polar Star in 1,700 BC. The second is Kocbah. It was discarded as the Polar Star around 1 AD. Theft of Sampo most probably refers to the second case.
Myths of Kalevala do not help us understand Abrahamic religions, but show that Pole Stars were the origins of many myths. We must look at the Middle East, at Sumer.
The myth as Adam and Eve around the Tree of Life also refers to 16,000 BC: Adam and Eve are parts of the Milky Way and the nail of the Tree of Life (axis mundi) is Deneb.
The fall of man describes how the North Pole moved across the Milky Way (Eve) to Vega (the apple) to Hercules (the man to whom Eve gave the apple, indeed another man, not Adam) while the snake was watching (the head of the constellation of Draco was close). The Egyptian correspondence to the fall of man myth is Seth seducing the wife of Osiris. Seth is Hercules. The fall happened and the Paradise was lost around 9,500 BC in the natural catastrophe that flooded the Persian Gulf. People started agriculture at that time in that region.
The fight between Seth and the sea dragon (Sumerian Tiamet) was the time when the heavenly North Pole was between Hercules and Draco. This time was 9,000 BC-6,000 BC. Seth was a storm god, apparently Enlil.
There is a later incidence when a high god slays the dragon. In the series of Ugarit myths known as the Baal Cycle the god Baal Hadad slays the sea dragon Yam. This myth is also from the night sky and Yam is Draco, since there is only one dragon in the northern night sky. The Baal Cycle starts with Yam wanting to rule over all other gods. The time when Draco ruled over all gods was when Thuban was the Polar Star: 1000 years on both sides of 2,700 BC. Thuban was not used as the Polar Star after 1,700 BC and this is the time when Hadad killed Yam.
The time is relevant to the Abrahamic concept of God because Israelites’ stay in Egypt and the Exodus story refer to Hyksos. Hyksos came to Egypt around 1,700 BC and were expelled in 1,560 BC because Hyksos were destroying Egyptian altars, killing Egyptians and doing all bad (according to a writing by Pharaoh Hathsepsut, living soon after that time). The god of Hyksos was a storm god Baal, who was identified as Seth by Egyptians. This Seth could not be Hercules, who fought with Draco much earlier, but that is where the Egyptians took the identification from. Baal of Hyksos had to be Baal Hadad. Hadad was a storm god, but not the desert storm god Seth, who was a variant of Enlil. (I got earlier mixed up in this.)
The Polar Star after Thuban was Kochab of Ursa Minor. We can identify Baal Hadad with Ursa Minor. Hadad kills Yam by Kochab taking the place of the Polar Star.
Kochab and Pherkad are two bight stars in this constellation, which contains a square and a tail. I suggest that the square is the temple and Kochab and Pherkad are the two pillars of the temple of Salomon, and the Way (like in Christianity, I am the Way, Life and Truth, Way is the teaching of the Messiah) is the tail of Ursa Minor leading to Polaris.
Let us continue with the myth of the Baal Cycle. Thus, first Yam wanted to be the king of gods, but he was slain by Hadad. With the help of two goddesses (Anath and Athirat) Hadad persuades El to allow him a palace. The god of magic Kothar-wa-Khasis builds a palace to Hadad. Notice that magic was always associated with King Salomon.
Ugarit El corresponds to Sumerian An (Anu, the high god at the center of the sky). El allows Baal Hadad to have his palace (Ursa Minor), but as it is not quite in the center of the sky, El is not replaced by Baal as the highest god. One of the goddesses, Athirat, is the same as Hebrew Asherah, the consort of Yahweh. Yahweh replaced El as the supreme god, thus originally Asherah was the consort of El. Patriarch Jacob set up a stone for El (a world pillar) and Asherah had poles or trees (also world pillars) and Israelites had sex there. In the Baal Cycle Athirat is the main consort of Hadad. Hadad, after getting a palace, is almost the king of gods. Anath was the war god and the sister of Hadad.
I identify Anath as Ursa Major because Ursa Minor and Ursa Major were identified as two bulls turning the world mill, Baal was identified as a bull and of Anath is said that she searched Baal like a cow for her calf. Thus, Ahath is the bigger bull (Ursa Major) and Baal Hadad is the calf (Ursa Minor).
The Baal Cycle continues by Hadad trying to subjugate Mot (the Death) but Mot kills Hadad. This is analogous to the Messiah being sacrificed. The timing of this event can be calculated from the sky. Kocbah is closest to the heavenly North Pole around 800 BC and then moved further. The timing fits with Solomon’s Temple, the earthly version of Baal’s palace in Heaven. Ugarit was at its height in 1,450 BC and it was destroyed by the Sea People in 1,200 BC. The epic of Baal is written before 1,200 BC and the writers of the myths could not witness events that happened after 800 BC, but they did not have to. It was know that the Polar Star follows a circle with the center in Draco. This part of the myth can be prophetic.
After Baal Hadad is slain, Anath kills Moth, destroys the body and scatters the ashes and then Baal Hadas returns to Mount Saphon. Mount Saphon is Mount Hermon, which is the site of Hadad’s temple, called Baal-Hermon or Baal-Zephon. The original Salomon’s Temple of the Hyksos may have been on Mount Hermon, not on Mount Zion.
Baal-Zephon is also known as a god. In Ugarit texts Baalzephon is identified with Dagon, the father of Baal Hadad. As Baal Sephon must also be Baal Hadad, this shows that the three gods El, Dagon and Hadad formed a trinity: they were aspects of the same God already in Ugarit.
It may be interesting to note that in Gospels Jewish priests accuse Jesus of making miracles with the power of Beelzebub/Beelzebul. Baalzebub may mean Baalzephon, linking Jesus to this older Canaanite tradition. Jesus was called Samaritan by Rabbis.
Identifying Anath with Ursa Major, the fight between Anath and Mot is some time after 800 BC when Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two bulls, circulated the heavenly North Pole, but there was no Polar Star (that is, Mot ruled). Anath was identified as the cow and Hadad as the calf. Anath was known for violence, thus these were times of war and suffering.
Baal Hadad recovers, which may mean that Ursa Minor again moved closer to the heavenly North Pole. The tail of Ursa Minor started approaching the North Pole around 1 AD.
Then follows the final challenge Mot gives to Baal. Mot means emptiness (no Polar Star) and Hadad is Ursa Minor. Before 1 AD Mot is winning as Hadad mover further from the North Pole, after 1 AD the situation is reversed. It most probably is not a coincidence that the Messiah was expected to come around 1 AD.
Ursa Minor became again the ruler of the sky around 1000 AD: around this time Polaris was used as the Polar Star and Polaris is now very close to the North Pole. Baal Hadad rules again, as in the Baal Cycle.
The Baal Cycle is often explained as the vegetation cycle, and sometimes as a longer time of drought. Such an understanding is not totally wrong since what happened on the earth was believed to reflect what happened in heavens. In this sense the Baal Cycle does describe also vegetation and longer cycles on the Earth, but its primary meaning is the movement of the heavenly North Pole, which Ugarit astrologers could predict though they could not correctly count the speed of movement. The path of the heavenly North Pole is a circle with the center point in Draco. From myths ancient astrologers knew very well that the center of the sky had been in Deneb, Vega, Hercules and Thuban. Thuban ceased to be the Polar Star around 1,700 BC, just a few hundred years before Ugarit. Ugarit astrologers should have been able to predict where the North Pole would move even if they could not precisely estimate the time. Nevertheless, they knew that one times is about 2000 years.
I hope I showed that the Polar Star had a central role in some of the most ancient myths and that it is the source of the Abrahamic concept of God.
The Jewish Messiah is a form of Enki/Baal Hadad. He is the son of the high god. In Sumer Enki is the son of An. In Ugarit Hadad is the son of Dagan, but also the son of El. What this means is that in Levant (Ugarit) there is no clear distinction between El and Dagan, like there is no clear distinction between Dagan and Hadad shown by Baalzephon. The three gods form a trinity, just like in Christianity. The highest of the trinity is called the Crown in Cabbalah and the Holy Spirit in Christianity. He is the god of the time. In Levant this highest god was known as El and he required the sacrifice of firstborn sons, which later was changed to the form that firstborn sons must be redeemed.
Modern people do not any more believe that the sky god has his court around the heavenly North Pole, quite naturally don’t as the heavenly North Pole is just a continuation of the axis of the Earth to the sky. They also do not believe in Enki and Enlil, though for that they do not have any good reason. However, they are simply fools. These gods were found by wrong science, but it does not mean that what was found was all wrong.
Enki seems to be the Life, that is, the power or spirit that appears in live creatures and in human culture. It may also be the spirit of culture or truth or knowledge. There is such a concept, not reducible to physics. Enki loves humans, the concept of love, life, truth.
Then there is Enlil, the storm god, who is just but gets angry with noisy people inventing something. This god is traditionally seen as the justice. It symbolizes the concept of balance in nature: what goes up must come down, if a species consumes all resources, it will die. It is just the way nature, the physical world, works. It is for this reason why the sins of fathers are revenged to seven generations, because they are not the kind of sins we think of, they are abusing the earth, over-cultivating it, destroying it, and then comes the revenge of nature. Enlil is not a Spirit, he is a logical necessity, the balancing force.
Finally there is the highest god of all, An. An is time. Time is the only aspect we see of what really exists. That is, everything exists physically only if it moves in time. This physical world can be an illusion, but time moves, so there is something that is real. An illusion exists in something that is real, while we cannot see it. If this world were a 4-dimentional spaced (3 space dimensions and time), then where from is the rule that time goes forward? An is a god of whom one can only say that An exists and nothing else exists but An.
Actually this trinity of gods is not naïve at all, though it has been found through lousy astronomy. It would be ethnocentric stupidity to imagine that this deeper understanding was not known to Sumerians and much earlier. They had their level of science, and that level was much lower than the present level, but the religious level has not much improved. I do not think we are more intelligent than people of that time and they did not understand symbols.
Let me now continue to issues of current importance (I do not say interest, as the connection between ancient myths and the Polar Star may not be interesting to many, I say important as evil some people are doing things that will influence the price of bread in the local grocery store).
There is the issue of whether Jews will build a third temple in Jerusalem or not. It does sound like an academic question, not interesting for sure. Should the Jews build a temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, they would have to demolish the Dome of the Rock or Al-Aqsa Mosque, depending on where exactly the new temple would be placed. That would result to riots in Palestine, but that place is so far from us, and besides they are always fighting there. It does not seem alarming.
But it is, because it means that the pattern outlined in biblical end of the times prophesies is followed by a powerful group of people, who currently control the USA and most of the Western Europe, and if they realize the other end of the times prophesies it means subjugation of all humanity to something like a totalitarian rule, which they already tried with Communism. Am I serious with this or is it Infowars web-page? I am totally serious: 9/11, JFK, Holocaust, USS Liberty, Greater Israel, ISIS, Mahdi, you name it. There is a group of crazy people out there.
Will the Jews build the third temple?
Israel Shamir, a Jew who converted to Christianity and apparently turned critical to Jews or Zionists, wrote a few posts in Unz of our time being a Messianic time with the idea of the Jewish Messiah identified with the Anti-Christ. I asked him whether according to Judaism constructing the third temple is necessary. He referred to the great medieval Rabbi Maimonides to the extent that without the temple there can be no Messiah, so the temple must be built. Maimonides is an authority that hardly can be passed, but Christians, who read the Revelation, can affirm it from Rev 21:22, “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple”.
I prefer a different way to read prophesies and will make an argument based on ancient myths. This is because I do not think Talmudic Rabbis founded Israel. It was Masons and they had some different reading of old myths. Accepting that the heavenly temple is originally the square of Ursa Minor, we can see that this square will not approach the heavenly North Pole. At most one could build a temple with a long entry corridor starting from Polaris, but that would be like going to the temple from the back door through the Messiah. It actually agrees with the Christian understanding that the way to the temple will be through the Messiah. The words of Revelation are appropriate: there is no separate temple outside the center of the sky, Lord Almighty (El, the center point) and the Lamb (Baal Hadad, Polaris) is the light. I believe the original disciples of Jesus (not Paul) knew secret teachings which did contain the Polar Star. Otherwise I do not understand the starting words of the Gospel of Thomas about governing and resting. That means the Polar Star, Polaris. It governs and does not move.
Maybe that was too religious argumentation. I know many people, who consider them intelligent (I cannot understand why) but are allergic to religious arguments.
So, let us look more closely to the concept of the Messiah.
I identify the Messiah with Baal Hadad. There are many reasons for it. One is that the Messiah often has a harlot as the consort, like Simon Magus, the Samarian magician, had the consort Helen, who was a prostitute and titled the Queen of the Heaven. The consort of Baal Hadad was usually Astarte, Venus, the god of physical love, but the consort could also be Athirat, the Queen of the Heaven. I do not think Mary Magdalena was the wife of Jesus, but the legend of Magdalena being a prostitute and the companion if the Lord fit to the identification of Jesus with Hadad. A later Messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, also had a prostitute consort, certainly because of secret tradition of the Jewish Messiah.
Jesus modified this physical love concept to spiritual. It is considerably better. The old worship included sex under sacred trees and sacrifice of children,
Another reason is the biblical story of Prophet Balaam (Bileam), the son of Boer, who tricked Israelites to fornication and worshiping idols. After reading the Qumran Scrolls I identify Bileam with Belial, as Balaam was accused of putting a net on Israelites. Fornication and idol worship were two of the nets of Belial in the Qumran Scrolls (read Paul Epistles, they deal with eating food sacrificed to idols and with fornication of different kind, it was an issue in early Christianity) and indeed Balaam and Belial both refer to Baal Hadad, whose cult included sex. The Qumran Community expected that at the end of the times the nets of Balaam would be thrown. This is just one-sided description of the task of the Messiah, who was Baal Hadad, the prodigal son, for whom the lamb would be slaughtered. (The parable of Jesus is of the Messiah himself.) Baal Hadad was the calf, whom the Israelites worshiped, while El was the god of the sky for whom the firstborn were sacrificed.
The Jewish Messiah is Baal Hadad. Hadad is not born as a man, he is culture. (Jesus was the Messiah born as a man, but he was a prophet and he did symbolic deeds describing and predicting what is.) Those deeds will be made in reality. As in the time of Hyksos, Hadad will destroy all other religions and cultures. He will heal the sick. He will announce the good news. He will discard the law, for which he is called Lawless. This is where the human culture develops. This process cannot be avoided and it leads to the end of the times, to the revenge. After the catastrophe new Moses appears and sets a law, but this law is from Dagan/Enlil. What is described here is a cycle of development and destruction of a culture.