The Golden Legend The link between Adam and Jesus became woven with the Jewish
myths of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to become many centuries
later the Legend of the True Cross. In this apocryphal
story from the time of the crusades, Adam before he died pursuaded
Seth to return to the garden and plead for the oil of mercy. Gabriel
gave Seth the branch of the original tree from which Adam and
Eve ate. This tree had blackened and withered away when they had
committed their "happy sin" or Felix culpa, but had
burst forth anew when Michael promised man's future salvation.
The Queen of Sheba discovers the wood of the True
Cross - Francesca (Lavin)
But Adam had died when Seth returned, so he planted the branch on Adam's grave, where it lasted until Solomon's time as a mighty tree. Solomon cut it down to build, but it always changed shape and was thrown down as a bridge. When the Queen came to cross the water, she knelt in adoration at the sacred wood and prophesied that it would be used to nail a world saviour who would defile and end the Jewish heritage. Solomon thus buried the tree where it remained until it was used for the cross of Jesus, only to be rediscovered after the crucifixion, near a temple erected by Hadrian to Venus, by Helene the mother of Constantine!
The Verdant Cross
The Bible is suspended between the Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life of the Apocalypse. Jesus at the centre represent the arrow of death and violence God in collision with Satan. At either end of the wooden bow we find the axes of the verdant tree of new life nature and the garden. This deep underlying relationship with fertility and the garden seeps out of the scriptures and echoes in Christian art from the first centuries of the Christian era down to the present.
The confluence of Christ hanging in the Tree is all too clearly a reflection of many sacrificial rites of the wounded hero from Attis to Absolom. In restoring our relationship with fertility, it is thus necessary to accomodate the verdant cross and the implications it bears for the healing of diversity.
One should also in passing note the Christmas tree originates from Attis in Rome (Walker).
The Verdant Cross - Simon Schama
"Woman is to be preferred to man to wit, in material: Adam was made from clay and Eve from the side of man; in place: Adam was made outside paradise and Eve within; in conception; a woman conceived God which man did not do; in apparition: Christ appeared to a woman after the Resurrection" - Humbert (Haskins 156)
The Reformation: Luther's Genesis and Calvin's Genetic Sin
Martin Luther (1483-1546) illustrates a protestant attitude of biological sexuality which emphasizes the naturalness of gender and the female genetic identity long before the discovery of the ovum. He married at the age of 42 to a nun and was adamant about marriage for the Protestant clergy. He also recognises an important sociobiological change in the loss of a distinct female esterous in humans. On Genesis (Young 85):
"Just as Adam was created in accordance with a well-considercd counsel, so here, too, we perceive that Eve is being created according to a definite plan. For man is a more excellent creature than heaven and earth and everything that is in them. But Moses wanted to point out in a special way that the other part of humanity, the woman, was created by a unique counsel of God in order to show that this sex, too, is suited for the kind of life which Adam was expecting and that this sex was to be useful for procreation. Hence it follows that if the woman had not been deceived by the serpent and had not sinned, she would have been the equal of Adam in all respects. For the punishment, that she is now subjected to the man, was imposed on her after sin and because of sin, just as the other hardships and dangers were: travail, pain, and countless other vexations. Therefore Eve was not like the woman of today; her state was far better and more excellent.... When God says: 'It is not good that man should be alone': of what good could He be speaking, since Adam was righteous and had no need of a woman as we have, whose flesh is leprous through sin?"
My answer is that God is speaking of the common good or that of the species, not of personal good. The personal good is the fact that Adam had innocence. But he was not yet in possession of the common good which the rest of the living beings who propagated their kind through procreation had. For so far Adam was alone; he still had no partner for that magrifcent work of begetting and preserving his kind. ... In this way, although Adam was innocent and righteous, he did not yet have that good for which he was created, namely, immortality, into which he would have been translated in duc time if he had remained in innocence. Hence the meaning is that Adam as the most beautiful creature is well provided for so far as his own person is concerned but still lacks something, namely, the gift of the increase and the blessing - bccause he is alone. ...
In addition - and this is lamentable - woman is also necessary as an antidote against sin. And so, in the case of the woman, we must think not only of the managing of the household which she does, but also of the medicine which she is. In this respect Paul says (1 Cor. 7:2): "Because of fornication let each one havc his own wife." And the Master of the Sentences declares learnedly that matrimony was established in Paradise as a duty, but after sin also as an antidote. Therefore we are compelled to make use of this sex in order to avoid sin. It is almost shameful to say this, but nevertheless it is true. For there are very few who marry solely as a matter of duty. But the rest of the animals do not have this need. Consequently, for the most part they copulate only once a year and then are satisfied with this as if by duty. But the conduct of human beings is different. They are compelled to make use of intercourse withtheir wives in order to avoid sin. ... If Adam has persisted in the state of innocence, this intimate relationship would have been most delightful. The very work of procreation would have been most sacred and would have been held in esteem. ... Therefore was this fall not a terrible thing? For truly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation. ... Moreover these are the highest praises of sex, that the male is the father in procreation, but the woman is the mother in procreation.and the helper of her husband. When we look back to the state of innocence, procreation was too better, more delightful, more sacred in countless ways."
The consequences of being able to recognise those programmed to sin were first appreciated not by biologists or lawyers but by the followers of John Calvin, the ultimate genetic determinist. A destiny fixed at birth was, he argued, everything. God alone determines fate. Everyone is born a sinner and all deserve punishment, but God, in his mercy, has admitted some, the elect, to eternal life through predestination: 'by which God admits some to hope of life and sentences others to eternal death. We cannot know with the certainty of faith who is chosen.' Although Calvin himself thought initially that it was not within mortal power to identify the saved or the damned, his attention was soon drawn to the beguiling possibility that - perhaps - some of the elect could be recognized while still on earth (Jones 225).
The Birth Pangs of the Kingdom are Delayed
But Christ did not return in the first generation as expected. Nor the next. The Pangs burned on down the annals of history for two thousand years of martyrdoms, executions for heresy and witchcraft and religious wars, everyone as before expecting that the new Kingdom of Immortality, in which no one would have sex and everyone would live forever, was about to arrive: "Christ died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!"
The Roman empire had risen and fallen. The dark ages were followed by the renaissance and finally the industrial revolution began, world population exploded, the pangs of the patriarchy began to become global. The world was wracked by two world wars, and death on a new scale, in battlefields in Russia, the Jewish holocaust and the first atomic bombs. The very same sense of anticipation, which set off the Pangs of the Messiah, now focused itself on our collective mortality. Finally we came right up to the nuclear Armageddon - the true end of the world!
7: The Paradise of Muhammad and the Mahdi
On his night travel to heaven on the Axis Mundi, Muhammad came close to the Garden of the Refuge. This is believed to be portrayed in Sura 53:
Although the unfaithful again taste hell, Muhammad promises the garden of Eden back to the faithful, complete with luxurious adornments and beautiful immortal houris. There is even prophesied a compulsory sacramental drink, which may be idendifiable with isfand, Muhammad's sacred plant with echoes of Soma itself.
Sura 13.23 "The gardens of perpetual abode which they will enter along with those who do good from among their parents and their spouses and their offspring; and the angels will enter in upon them from every gate: Surely those who guard (against evil) shall be in the midst of gardens and fountains: Enter them in peace, secure." 19.61 "The gardens of perpetuity which the Beneficent God has promised to His servants while unseen; surely His promise shall come to pass."22.23 "Surely Allah will make those who believe and do good deeds enter gardens beneath which rivers flow."
Sura 76.12 "And reward them, because they were patient, with garden and silk, reclining therein on raised couches, they shall find therein neither (the severe heat of) the sun nor intense cold. And close down upon them (shall be) its shadows, and its fruits shall be made near (to them), being easy to reach. ... And they shall be made to drink therein a cup the admixture of which shall be ginger, [of] a fountain therein which is named Salsabil."
Sura 76.21 "And round about them shall go youths never altering in age; when you see them you will think them to be scattered pearls. Upon them shall be garments of fine green silk and thick silk interwoven with gold, and they shall be adorned with bracelets of silver, and their Lord shall make them drink a pure drink."
The following quotations outline the relationship between Genesis, the earthly Adam and the culmination of destiny in the Islamic Mahdi of the mystical Shi'ite tradition.
Zahir is the meaning of scriptural law that changes with each prophet, while batin is that truth that is concealed in the scriptures and the law of a given prophet. From this perspective, the outward meaning of the Qur'an is merely a covering meant for the uninitiated, but hidden beneath the surface of the text is an interior reality, accessible only through the "secret interpretation of the secret interpretation" (Green 140).
"The true history of the world is contained within the gradual revelation of batin to those who can comprehend it; the reality is that the cosmos is multi-dimensional, that man is the microcosm of the macrocosm, and that perfection is contained within a totally spiritual world of light, the pleroma, wherein dwell the ten emanations, or hypostases, of the First Cause. ... But a disturbance arises in the pleroma, and in order to restore harmony, this agitation and its ensuing emotional products are made material and cast out, resulting in the material, visible universe, at the center of which is earth, its first inhabitant the [first] earthly Adam" (Green 140).
"There are to be seven cycles of human history, each one inaugurated by the appearance of a "Speaker", who brings a revealed message "abrogating the law of the predecessor" (Green 141). The final speaker is the Mahdi, the "Imam of the Resurrection". Thus far, there have been six Speakers - the (second) Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad - and each has been followed by a "Silent One" or "Foundation," whose role it is to uncover the batin within the message" (Green 140).
"Although such a cosmic history recalls gnostic imagery and in fact the Isma'ilis have been broadly characterized as gnostic, the intellectual and spiritual sources of such teachings are many and diverse; and the gradual transformation of the figure of the Imam from political leader to the repository of divine revelation probably owed as much to the model of Hermes Trismegistus as it did to that form of Islamic theological speculation that drew upon a variety of gnostic systems" (Green 140).
The return of the Mahdi is linked with the second coming of Christ (Isa). The Qur'an states:
There is no mention of the Mahdi in the Qur'an and the return of Jesus is firmly established in the signs of the Hour (the judgement). Shiites and Sunnis alike consider that Isa will play a significant role in the qiyama (resurrection) and in particular that during the rule of the Mahdi, Isa will make the Hour known, that he will break the cross, destroy al-Dajjal the anti-Christ and will form one single umma of the Jews and Christians, establish justice and rule for 40 years after which he will die (Sachedina 171).
Isa is also assigned the task of killing all the Christians who do not believe in him. This is a misunderstanding of the ultimate Tao, in which believer and infidel are complements, even as particle and wave within the totality. It is also unjust, for even Satan himself is given a reprieve in Sura 7.11: "We said to the angels: Make obeisance to Adam. So they did obeisance except Iblis; he was not of those who did obeisance. ... Iblis said: 'Respite me until the day when they are raised up.' The Prophet's answer: 'Surely you are of the respited ones.' "
Certain Sunnis quote a tradition attributed to the prophet "There is no Mahdi save Isa son of Marium." Some early Sufis identified Jesus gnostically as the prophet of the interior life and even amended the Shahadah to say "There is no God but al-Llah and Jesus is his messenger" (Armstrong 1993 260). Shiites however have a differing tradition. They believe the Mahdi will come from the line of Fatima the Prophet's daughter and that Isa will stand behind the Mahdi, whom they believe to be a re-incarnation of either the son of the sixth or the twelfth Imam, claiming another saying of the Prophet: "Even if the entire duration of the world's existence has already been exhausted and only one day is left before Doomsday, Allah will expand that day to such a length of time, as to accommodate the kingdom of a person out of my Ahlul-Bayt who will be called by my name. He will then fill out the earth with peace and justice as it will have been full of injustice and tyranny before then."
"According to one hadith, Muhammad said, "There is no Mahdi save Jesus son of Mary." The Prophet also proclaimed that one sign of this impending end of days is the excessive height of buildings that humanity would construct, as in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. By the 16th century, Twelver doctrine became the state religion of Persia, and under the Safavids (1502-1736), two horses were kept saddled and ready at all times, pending the return of the Mahdi and Jesus." (Occhigrosso 1996 432)
Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until the son of Mary (i.e. Jesus) descends amongst you as a just ruler". No Islamic prophet can unilaterally pronounce the Mahdi, because 'knowledge of the hour' is the prerogative of Isa alone in the Qur'an excepting for Allah himself :31.34 "Surely Allah is He with Whom is the knowledge of the hour."
On November 20 1979, 350 religious zealots invaded the Mosque at Mecca trapping 50,000 worshippers celebrating the start of the 1400 th year of Islam inside. The resulting battle took two weeks and extensively damaged the mosque. All of the attackers were killed or captured. 63 were beheaded. (National Geographic Sept 1980). Theirs was not the knowledge of the hour.
The 'line of Fatima' could equally be the female line of Islam. Jesus prophesied in Matt 12:42 "The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it." There is only one shullamite 'Queen of the South' in this decade. By casting the fatwah of death on the poet of the South she was also made the 'shulamite of darkness'. Her fatwa was cast precisely because she declared the need to 'abrogate the law of the predecessor' - shariat.
8: The Downfall of Tula and the Third Adam
Unbeknown to all but a few, the Snake had been weaving a path of regeneration for centuries, winding its way through human culture, from the same old eve, the Toltec Lady of the Serpent Skirts. Her head is composed of blood serpents pouring from her severed throat, her pendulous breasts are are partly obscured behind a grizzly necklace of severed hearts and hands. Although the Aztec myth might seem to be a cultural antipodes to the Christian faith, both have human sacrifice as their central motif. It is thus natural that in the undoing of the grizzly Aztec tradition of blood sacrifice may come the solution to the dilemma faced by the frozen violence of the Christian flesh and blood Eucharist in the living sacrament of Maria.
The Tree of the Middle Place illustrates the synchronistic parallel between Christianity and Aztec myth. Just as Mary has the tree of Calvary (L. calvaria - skull Golgotha - place of the skull) with Jesus emerging as the blood sacrifice surmounted by the pelican feeding its young from its blood, so two streams of blood pour into the Earth Goddess who is also associated with the Place of the Skull, and from her springs the maize tree of life, surmounted by the quetzal bird of resurrection. Suspended on either side are Quetzalcoatl and Macuil-xochiti the lord of dance music and play - as Xochipilli he is the Lord of Flowers and altered states - the Aztec Dionysus.
In the Mayan Blood Girl myth, the powerful image of the tree of skulls which give new life - death and fertility, is prophetic, as the end to mortal human sacrifice is the blood-fruit of the tree, which replaces the beating heart.
The tree of skulls has strong resemblences to the Kabbalah Tree of Knowledge ... "in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the souls and the angels have their place" (Kabbala unveiled).
But the blood maiden persuades the messengers to take the blood fruit as she is innocent:
She finally becomes one of the sages and magicians who assume the destiny of the living gods.
It is to Quetzalcoatl - Serpent Feather (the plumed serpent) that we must turn to discover the mythological source of the living sacrament. Although this was used by the Aztecs in bloody sacrifice, in its mythical origin, it springs from the blood of the feet of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, as he runs through the world as an Adam of resurrection in his mission to recover the bones of mortal beings and give them to the Mother to breathe new life into them. The living sacrament is also conceived of as resulting from the lightning of Tlaloc, the rain god - the fertilizing hieros-gamos of heaven and earth, who occupied paired temples with Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan.
The Toltec priest Tolpitzin-Quetzalcoatl figures in Mexican history as a spiritual reincarnation of Jesus. He was fair, had eyes the colour of Jade and a beard. Tolpitzin wished to end the sacrificial cycle and replace it with self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of jade, birds, snakes and butterflies. He was humiliated by warrior priests of Tezcatlipoca who give him a spiked potion which makes him intoxicated and incestuous with his sister and break his vows. He is overthrown from Tula, and leaves forthe coast where he immolates himself.
The serendipitous immolation of Tolpitzin occurred around 987 AD, close enough to the millenium to make a captivating mythological episode. He is believed to have been resurrected as the planet Venus, also Ishtar-Mari's star. The forced departure of Tolpitzin from Tula led to the downfall of the so-called theocratic age and the rise of the militaristic one characterized by the Aztecs.
This event continued to be regarded as a source of spiritual instability during each succeeding century, and in a sense the entire meso-American society continued to be overshadowed by the continuing prophecy of Quetzalcoatl's return, just as Christian society has been overshadowed by the prophesied return of Jesus. For Moctezuma it culminated in eight foreboding signs and the fatal prophesy of the chief of Texcoco. The arrival of Cortez and the incorrect belief that he was the resurrected Quetzalcoatl returning from the East thus spelt the end for Moctezuma, the spiritual and military downfall of the Aztecs, and the prophesied end of their civilization.
The living sacrement was suppressed and became a secret for five hundred years. Maria Sabina's son was killed in venegance and her house was burned down when she made the prophesied spiritual transmission to Gordon Wasson.
The Catholic rite of the Eucharist, the flesh of God as mere wafer, may have originated in pre-Christian initiation ceremonies involving the ingestion of hallucinogenic fungi. Investment banker Gordon Wasson (1898- 1986) even suggested that the "apple" Eve plucks from the Tree of Knowledge in the biblical Garden of Eden is actually a mistranslation of the word for an hallucinogenic fungus (Margulis and Sagan).
9: The Twin Kettle Drums of Leucothea
The restoration of the Garden of Eden has been a utopian dream underlying the entire sweep of the modern Western industrial revolution, but it is likely to bring only an end of days ecocrisis:
Teilard de Chardin prophesies an evolutionary Christogenesis.
Leucothea, the White Goddess of the subconscious mind begins her return. William Rivers, treating Robert Graves for the shock of the First World War battlefield, transmits the consciousness of the ancient Goddess, showing him Frazer's work. Graves beats his 'twin kettle drums' of "King Jesus" and "The White Goddess", prophesying the last days of the Christian church and the return of the Goddess in January 1945 (Oprey 1982 327-8) :
Graves subsequently sends Gordon Wasson on his quest to find teonanacatl - the "living sacrament" on behalf of the goddess and suggests the Eleusinian mysteries and Dionysian rites are associated with mushroom taking (Graves 1960). Allegro (1971) in a very cryptic study links a similar cult with Jesus. "Gordon Wasson has suggested that the "apple" Eve plucks from the Tree of Knowledge in the biblical Garden of Eden is actually a mistranslation of the word for an hallucinogenic fungus" (Margulis and Sagan).
After 500 years of repression of the "living sacrament", the fruit of the snake winds its way back to Christianity, to close the cycle of the Fall. Gordon Wasson arrives in Oaxaca and receives the living sacrament from Maria Sabina in 1955, according to her prophecy, having been collected by virgins before sunrise and duly blessed in the Church before being consumed in an all-night sacred healing velada in which the curandera called on the Christian and Mazatac deities - singing (Estrada 107):
Maria Sabina, the mother of the living sacrament had visions on the "little saints" that Gordon was coming and would take the tradition to the world after 500 years of secrecy under the Spanish. As a result, her son was killed and her house burned to the ground. She survived to 91, but lamenting that "the power of the sacrament had now been lost in the clouds" and was speaking English, instead of the Mazatec language. Wasson was however to describe the event as Holy Communion and to see in it the equivalent of the episode of Pentecost.
The Consummating Myth of Eden:
Just as the Fall was both a downfall from nature and a rift between the genders, so the Consummation is both a sacred marriage between the genders and a remerging with nature, which ends the dominance of and revulsion towards bestial nature of the Father. The fruit is the sacrament of this remerging.
It is we humans who evoke the deities as spiritual or shamanic expressions of the ultimate Tao . It is a spermatogenic violation of the Tao for the male deity to be the supreme cosmic ruler. It is like sperm without egg, or particle without wave. It results in competition without cooperation, growth without sustainability. Male monotheism has led to a false conception of a "god of order", creating a flawed universe of sin and suffering at the beginning of time, which has no further creative potential and from which we will all escape to a purely mental heaven in the "Day of Judgement" - Armageddon - the ultimate battle between dark and light. This model of reality is false and a mortal danger to our survival. We have lost sight of the very immortality that brought each of us here to this very day in an endless chain from the ancient past 3500 million years ago, when life first emerged on Earth.
As Jesus said John 10:34: "Ye are the gods". It is now time for us to assume cosmic responsibility for our actions, because, like it or not, we will be shaping the great epochs to our undoing or to our unfolding. The universe is a continuing evolutionary creation. As conscious beings, we play a visionary role in its unfolding.
By merging with the Garden, our genetic Eve, in cherishing and replenishing the Earth and its living diversity, we become immortal in the flesh - the immortal Garden completing and complementing the eternal nature of the Kingdom. The biosphere can then unfold through our vision in a great becoming - the flowering of evolutionary uncertainty through the nurturing guardianship of human consciousness, for like it or not, we have now come of age as the the stewards of evolution. We have 100 million years ahead of us to fully open the portals of eternity. Hallelu-Yah! A shalom Asherah! Amen.
In ancient Samaritan eschatology Sinai is directly compared to the day of judgement: "All the signs and wonders which happened at Mt. Sinai will be repeated on the Day of Requital, namely, a day of turmoil and lightnings and heavy cloud ... and a great fear and a mighty sound of a trumpet ... the Lord will cover his faithful servants with the cloud of the Garden of Eden, while the wicked will be in deep darkness and anguish of soul ... then the bodies will revive and come out of the earth" (Schonfield 274). This both places the Garden of Eden back into the Day of Judgement and explains how the second coming in clouds is an allegory for Moses ascent of the mountain.
In 1 Enoch 24:4 the ancient 'immortal' ancestor Enoch stands on the seventh jeweled mountain and spies fragrant trees "and there was among them a tree with a fragrance such as I have never ... smelt and no tree among them nor any other flourished like it, and its leaves and flowers and wood never wither; its fruit is beautiful .. and I said "How beautiful this tree ... and how fair its flowers" and Michael said "Enoch, Why do you ask and why do you marvel at the fragrance of this tree, and why do you desire to learn the truth? ... This high mountain is like a throne for the Lord ... And as for this fragrant tree, no flesh shall be allowed to touch it until the great judgement, then there will be a recompense for all and a consummation for ever. Then to the righteous and pious, its fruit shall be given for food ; and it shall be transplanted to a place beside the Temple of the Lord, the everlasting King. Then will they be glad exceedingly and enter the holy place; and they shall bring an offering into it its sweet-smelling odours in their very bones; and they shall live a longer life on earth because of it; just as your fathers did."
This passage of Enoch illustrates how the tree of life will make people holy and will practically lengthen their lives, just as the living sacrament makes holy and just as the diverse anti-cancer agents recently discovered in plants are doing today.
The closing climax in the Bible, the last chapter of Revelation completes the entire cycle of Eden in a captivating way, which should stand as a warning to all mechanists to take note of the powers of quantum non-locality - a profoundly relieving passage after all the violence, which prophesies the final return of the tree of life, embracing the abysmal waters flowing from the throne. It is the source of immortality and the healing of the nations in the new Jerusalem:
The lunar monthly yielding of fruit reflects more closely the living sacrament than the annual fruits of flowering plants. The twelve sacred fruit are the other great spiritual sacraments of the tree, extending to the diverse and powerful life-prolonging and anti-cancer properties of a diversity of plants.
This prophecy is of double significance in that it is heralded by an earlier Old Testament vision in Ezekiel 47. "Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house; and, behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward ... And he said unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen this? Then he brought me, and caused me to return to the brink of the river. Now when I had returned, behold, at the bank of the river were very many trees on the one side and on the other. ... And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh. ... And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine".
It is further parallelled in the Essene prophesies of the priestly Messiah: "And he shall open the gates of paradise, And shall remove the threatening sword against Adam. And he shall give to the saints to eat from the tree of life, And the spirit of holiness shall be on them" (Steinmann 45). The prophesied age of the Renewal. It is this spirit of holiness that the living sacrament gives.
Proverbs (3:11). The mark of Homo sapiens is Sapientia, the 666 of 1 Kings 10:13.
The Huichol Prophecy
"When the world ends, it will be like when the names of things are changed during the peyote hunt. All will be different, the opposite of what it is now. Now there are two eyes in the heavens, Dios Sol and Dios Fuego. Then, the moon will open his eye and become brighter. The sun will become dimmer. There will be no more differences. No more men and women. No child and no adult. All will change places..."
Jesus said the kingdom would come: "when the two become one, when the male with the female is neither male nor female" - Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Egyptians
Peyote, the divine cactus Lophophora williamsii, is the sacred medicine of the Huichols of Mexico and the Native American Church of the U.S. and Canada. There is a continuing mythology among tribes with a Christian heritage, claiming that peyote is the sacred food provided by Christ in the second coming in the second millennium:
"Just as soon as he - I suppose his soul - came to, he see somebody coming on clouds. There's a cloud; something coming. That's a man coming this way, with a buckskin suit on; he got long hair. He come right straight for him; it's Jesus himself. So he told this boy, 'Well, one time you was crying, and your prayers were answered that time. So I come here. I'm not supposed to come; I said I wasn't going to come before two thousand years,' he said. 'But I come for you, to come tell you' ... So they went up a hill there. There's a tipi there, all ready. So Christ, before he went in it, offered a prayer. So they went in there. Then he showed him the [ritual] ways; the medicine, how to use it, he gave him the songs ... 'Whoever takes this medicine, he will do it in my name.' So that's how it represents almost the first beginning" (Anderson 23).
Part 1: Archetypal Myth
and Human Destiny
Part 2: The Eden of Genesis - Adam and Eve in the Garden
Part 3: The Crucifixion, Gnosticism,
and the Millennium
Part4: The Follow-through