Lots of things have been mentioned in this thread, all of which fit quite snuggly together into a larger puzzle, IMO.
Gog and Magog... Frankly, I'm a bit shocked that they are the mascots of the City of London

- didn't know that ... and even more shocked that they would make them out of wicker. Why would they they do that!?? There's only one reasonable explanation. (Assumedly you've all seen or read or heard about the wicker man and I don't have to draw you a map.) It just baffles me that a wicker Gog (or Magog) mascot would be in the Mayor's Show. Frikken creepy!!!
And regarding Quest's post - the MTV clip. I remarked in another thread that that clip was aired in Italy, and that the Roberto Calvi (god's banker) scandal which was uncovered there would suggest that Italians are far more aware of the meanings behind these symbols, and hence this clip may have been a dark attempt at humor. Still, the symbology is stunning for something aired on TV anywhere, IMO. I was quite shocked. The elk's head or whatever that is is an obvious attempt to convey the head of Baphomet, something in-between a cow and a goat - both of which have significance, which I will dutifully attend to in this post. (I hope.)
Gog & Magog are best known in association with prophesies about the anti-christ, end of the world and all that. MY overall theme in this thread, are the intertwined and tangled roots of the "Jewish and non-Jewish" elite of the modern western world. Not only do I believe that the roots of the two are connected in more ways than people imagine, I'm convinced that any distinction between the two in a religious sense disappear (to great extent at least) as you enter the inner circles of the ruling class. Look at the Freemasons - who do they try to keep out of their lodges? Jews? Muslims?? NO! Catholics! (Knights of Columbus is a mason-like order which was established by Catholics to counter Freemasonry, which excluded them.) These Kabbalah-oriented (I used that phrase for lack of a better one) institutions like the Freemasons and Rosicrucians engaged in a power struggle with the Catholic Church for centuries - it can be argued that the conflict can be traced all the way back to Akhenaton (Egypt) and continues to this day (MorganChase/Citibank against Bank of America???).
It's not much of a stretch to identify these groups with Skull and Bones, and the use of the Skull and Crossbones suggests an affinity with not only pirates (and by extension the Templar Knights), but Freemasonry as well. Conveniently (for me), the Skull and Bones of myth originated with the "Lord of Sidon", and Sidon was a short walk west from
Mt. Hermon , who's namesake was Hermes - who's mythical son was Pan. In fact, the area around Mt. Hermon (also known as Mt. Sion - not to be confused with Mt. Zion near Jerusalem) was known as Pania - and is now called Banius. Pan was the (Greek) son of Hermes, so, to cut to the chase, Hermes and Pan and Mt. Hermon and half-goats and bulls-horns and Baphomet heads are all connected and refer to the same thing - what, I'm not sure (the female part of the duality equation?), but Mt. Hermon was very very important in the Pagan days of the Holy Land, referred to as the gate through which Angels descended to Earth and mated with the daughters of man to create a (superior) race of giants ... the area around the mountain is dotted with "shrines" - where rituals took place. It is assumed but not concretely proven that child-sacrifice was among those.
This connects to where I want to go because Sidon, in Phoenician territory and near the City of Dan, was a pirate nest ... and, the "Lord of Sidon" is central to the myth of the "Jolly Roger", the Skull and Crossbones as was flown on pirate ships and was adopted by a fraternity of elites at Yale University.
The 'Lord of Sidon' is almost certainly Baldwin I who was a prominent crusader and king of Jerusalem, who's wife's son by a different marriage (which figures into the myth as well) was Roger II of Sicily, who (allegedly) flew the Skull and Crossbones on his ships (that's why it's called the "Jolly Roger").
Freemasons use the skull and crossbones in a ritual called the
Chamber of Reflection.
It was also embroidered on aprons worn by masons (a couple hundred years ago). This article about the Skull and Bones symbol touches on both the roots of the symbol and its use by the Templars and in Freemasonry, but goes much deeper than that - I recommend it.
http://www.esolibris.com/articles/alternat..._crossbones.phpIf you read that whole thing, he touches on many things, one being the Chi-Rho, a P and X letter combination found on texts thousands of years old. The way they were written together may well be the original precursor of the skull and bones symbol. He also mentions Maraclea and its possible meaning ("dark-clear"), as well as the Egyptian deity Osiris - but doesn't however touch on the connection between the skull and bones and the constellation Orion, or the significance of the Christ and John the Baptist figures with relation to all this. John and Jesus' birthdays were each set 3 days after the winter and summer solstices respectively, at opposite points in the year and at the moment the sun perceptively begins its reversal, which indicates how the Christ and St. John figures were appropriated to express pagan attributes.
Orion (the constellation) was very significant in Egyptian religious terms, it is in Orion that Osiris was said to dwell and the two are often equated, furthermore Orion stands next to and is in the house of Taurus the bull, which he hunts. Egypt at the time was IN the "age" of Taurus (as we are now in the age of Pieces). The interesting thing about Orion, is that he has no head or legs. This is ostensibly, at least partly, the root source of the head and leg bones of the skull & bones symbol (in addition to the Chi-Rho and its possible role which I just mentioned). This is expressed again in terms of John the Baptist and the Templar obsession with him, the head of St. John (which king Herod had decapitated and presented as a gift to Salome), and the "legs" of the saltire cross which St. John's disciple Andrew was crucified on. The Templars BTW claimed to possess the head of St. John which they brought back from Constantinople (?) and kept in their church of Notre Dame d'Amiens (there are other heads alleged to be St. John's however). This can all be taken even one step further, by couching it all in the context of male-female, good-evil dichotomy central to Masonry, the mystery religions, Kabbalah etc. Orion (the hunter) expresses the male attribute, Taurus represents the female, the U shape of the horns expressing both the womb and the moon, the moon always being a female counterpart to the sun ... you can find the crescent moon at the foot of many Christian images of the Virgin Mary, and the ends of the crescent moon were routinely described as its "horns". This is (at least partly) why the head of a bull sat atop the brass idols to which children were sacrificed a few thousand years ago in the Levant and around the Mediterranean.
I tend to think of Freemasonry as an institution not unlike a school or college - for potential leaders of a certain ideology - a tool of a class of elitists who's traditions trace back to the Templars. Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity and Freemasonry are totally separate societies, but share similarities both in their use of the skull and crossbones symbol and and in the purpose they both ultimately serve in elite society - IMO. (It's interesting to note that the square black hat graduates wear when they get their "degree" is fashioned after a mason's mortar board.) But there have been other related groups too - the Rosicrucians for example...
Isaac Newton was a rosicrucian - who spent more time
writing about the occult than science btw, how surprising that the Newton family crest is a saltire cross of bones!

There are other examples, such as the Andreae family crest which sports several saltire crosses (Johan Andreae was also a leading Rosicrucian), but maybe the most significant and unnoticed of such examples is the flag of Scotland, which features the saltire cross of St. Andrew. This is only fully appreciated when you remember that the Sinclairs were influential in Scotland then, who took their name from St. Clair sur Epte where their ancestor Rollo the Viking signed a treaty granting him and his followers Normandy in 911. (This date is of supreme importance to the elite, I would go so far as to propose that it's the reason the attacks were conducted on Sept. 11th.)
The connections between the Yale Skull and Bones society and Freemasonry don't end there. S&B's co-founder William H. Russell (the legal name of Skull & Bones is actually the Russell Trust) was from a long line of Masons. W. H. Russell, like so many in that influencial family, appears to have been obsessed with the occult (just google 'Russell' and 'occult' and you'll be swamped). In addition, there's a sort of "pirate" aspect to the Russells - they were heavily involved in the Chinese Opium trade. Even the New York Times couldn't keep that much from being printed in their
opinion section. That article mentions who ran the Russell's Canton operation, Warren Delano, grandfather of FDR. There's another family that intermarried with the Delanos, the Astors, who, like the Roosevelts, held large tracts of land in Manhattan, and, like the Russells, dominated in the Chinese Opium trade.
It surprises me that the Dutch Roosevelts, like these other New York families they intermarried with, weren't into Opium as well, for that whole market was opened up originally by the Dutch East India Trading Company. While the Templars proper and the people who ran the D.E.I.T.C. are separated by centuries, both continued a tradition of seafaring and commerce, both legitimate and illicit - that is, provided you consider dealing in drugs and slaves illicit (sensibilities have changed somewhat over the years). Holland's competitor, the British East India Company, flew a flag that was practically the Templar banner (cross of St. George) slapped on over Viking/Phoenician red & white stripes. Admittedly such connections are weak, but not nonexistent and so I prefer to point them out. There is some controversy over whether the first publically traded corporation was the Dutch East India Trading Company, or whether the Templars should be awarded that title. I was also (not) surprised to discover that the D.E.I.T.C. and Freemasonry in Holland were closely connected. I don't think I need a better source than the Grand Lodge of South Africa:
http://www.grandlodge.co.za/news2-3.htmlQUOTE
Freemasonry first took root in Southern Africa in 1772. The Southern point of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, was opened up by the Dutch East India Company as a trading station to supply ships en route to the East Indies with fresh produce.
Freemasonry in the Netherlands, founded in 1756, was expanding rapidly and with many master of ships being Freemasons it was natural for a Lodge to be founded at this halfway station under the banner of the Grand East of the Netherlands. (G.E.N.)
Still, since the whole jist of this and other of my posts pertains to my curiousity about the historical ties between Judaism and the Gnostic traditions of the Templars, Cathars, Paulicians etc. and the observation that the elite of these two communities - emphasis on "ELITE" - are often found operating together or allied, I think it's relevant.
There are people out there in cyberspace who claim the Dutch East India Trading Company was a Jewish operation. It wasn't, a more accurate estimate would probably be that Jewish investors in Holland (many of them diamond merchants) accounted for about
25% of the stockholders.
It needs to be said that usury was forbidden in the Christian world and banking and the gem trade (including gem-polishing) were about the only professions open to the Jewish population in Europe. The Templars (prior to their expungement) got around these usury rules by virtue of their great power and special papal approval. I would speculate that this put them in a unique position to become natural allies (or competitors) with Jewish money-lenders.
The Dutch & British
West India Companies were heavily involved in the slave trade, and here we have another example of collaboration with wealthy Jewish investors. According to this guy (Rabbi of Bet Aviv and Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at The College of William and Mary), auctioning activities were suspended on Jewish holidays.
http://www.geocities.com/earlofdonegal/HEBREWS.htm If you look at the owners listed of various slave-ships at the bottom of that you'll see John and Jacob Roosevelt listed. (If the Roosevelts were Jewish, that's news to me ... but it doesn't detract from where I'm trying to go with all this either way.) There were two Jacobs, one of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts (ancestors of Teddy Roosevelt) and one of the Hyde Park Roosevelts (anscestor of FDR) and I don't know which one that would be, but John is obviously Johannes, Teddy Roosevelt's great-great-great grandfather. I point again to the intimacy of the Roosevelt family with the Opium-trading Delanos and Astors.
There were a couple of other significant companies which had a history of slave trading, Alexander Brown & Sons - the anscestor of Brown Brothers Harriman, along with two companies which would evolve into the Morgan empire - Beebe, Morgan & Company and Peabody, Riggs & Company. All three of these companies which formed the sphere of Rothschild influence in America and became the backbone of the modern banking industry were originally dry-goods/slave-trade houses. Eustace Mullins:
http://truedemocracy.net/td13/19.htmlQUOTE
Tourists today gape at the magnificent mansions of the very rich in Newport, Rhode Island, without realizing that not only do these "cottages" stand as a memorial to the baronial desires of our Victorian millionaires, but that their erection in Newport represented a nostalgic memorialization of the great American fortunes, which had their beginnings in Newport when it was the capital of the slave trade. ... The pre-eminence of J.P. Morgan and the Brown firm in American finance can be dated to the development of Baltimore as the nineteenth century capital of the slave trade.
I could just state that both Jews and Templar descendents (now identified as Freemasons) migrated in large numbers from Portugal/Spain to Holland in response to the Spanish Inquisition and so precipitated the formation of the Dutch East India Trading Company and loss of Portugese dominance in the spice-trade to the Dutch and be done with it, but there's more to it, namely, why the Templars were there in the first place. This leads us to an ancient connection between Scotland, Spain/Portugal, and the Caucasus/Scythia.
Again, my whole premise revolves around what I perceive to be a linking of two ancient branches of a (percieved) royal blood line which eminated from Sumer (roll your eyes if you like), one which pooled around the Black Sea, another which led to Egypt and back to the Levant and Greece, where they met again. One of the results of this collision was the battle of Troy, the losers (proto-Vikings, proto-Goths etc.) leaving the area for points north. I point out that London may have been started as '
New Troy', and that some of the first Templars hailed from Champagne, which had previously been called Troyes. I think I mentioned earlier how many Greek myths, once decoded, detail this mixing. There's a huge body of work on the web called Ladon-Gog which tries to do just that. There are some other important intances where these two branches met, one of which being the emmigration to Languedoc (southern France) by Rabbi Makhir at the request of Charlemagne which I mentioned earlier. That in fact was preceded by the Merovingians' claim of a blood relation to Mary Magdalene. Forget whether you buy the heresy that Mary and Jesus were married or not, or even if there was such a person who fled Israel for southern France ... the biblical Mary of Magdala herself was of royal blood and so a descendent of the Davidic line, which is really why the Merovingians were interested in advertising this claim, whether true or not. This (alleged) blood connection was all but severed when the Carolingians took over, and so Charlemagne imported a fresh injection of Davidic blood in the form of Rabbi Makhir.
Prior to all this, there was a strong Scythia-Levant connection, which is evidenced by three things I know of ... Phoenician trade with Scythia (north of the Black Sea - would later become Khazaria), the fact that there is a city in Israel formerly called Scythopolis, and the confusing business of Tamar Tephi. Tephi was the daughter of King Zedekiah and hence of the royal Davidic line, and allegedly travelled from Egypt to Ireland by way of Spain. One source I read has her married to one Eire-Ambion of Scythia. This makes me wonder if this story didn't get mixed up somehow with that of Scota, the Egytian princess who married a Scythian king and also made it to Ireland with her sons, also by way of Spain. This migration of Scota describes (in myth) the historical movement from the Black Sea area to Ireland via Spain of the Melesians. The Picts were the next big movement from the same general area to Britain, this time to Scotland - they may have followed the same route as the Milesians passing though Spain as well. The Picts can be identified with the Caldonians of Greece, who's Black Sea connections are described in myth (the Caledonian Boar Hunt) and their religious rites which originated in Phrygia and the Caucasus, specifically Colchis. (This is the Cult of Cybele, which arguably shared common origins with Kabbalah.) It is due to the Picts that Scotland was called Caldonia by the Romans. All of this is better expored and explained in my dragon thread, albeit torturously.
There is one other instance of place names providing a record of this link, the land of Portugal and Spain is correctly called the Iberian peninsula - and in the Caucasus next to Colchis (now comprising the country of Georgia) was the Kingdom of Iberia (!!!).
When the Templars were attacked by Philip IV they fled mainly to two places, Spain/Portugal, and Scotland (I think many also wound up in Switzerland). I can only guess that their choice of Iberia (Spain/Portugal) maybe had something to do with the area's historical connection with the Black Sea region (as their own roots traced back there too) and more to do with it being marginally outside the sphere of Catholic influence (that of course changed with the Spanish Inquisition).
As for Scotland, the Templars had allies there in the Sinclairs (with whom they would build Roslin Chapel). Some theorise that a few of the original Templars were blood related to the Sinclairs, which is probably true, Champagne (Troyes) was in Norman territory.
That's about as far as I can go tonight.