The Bible—without question the most influential book ever produced—was written by men with secrets to conceal both from the Roman and Jewish authorities and from other competing sects.

   Until archeological advances beginning in the nineteenth century, virtually everything humans knew about their origins came from the Bible filtered through the church priesthood. Individuals were both canonized and executed, cultures built and destroyed, and wars fought—all based on this one book.

   Today it is clear that the Bible—inspired as it may be—is a hodgepodge of myths, legends, and parables from various cultures cobbled together with bits of history and philosophy.

   Many passages were originally written using code words whose meanings were lost over time, causing misinterpretations. In other instances there was just plain tampering to advance some then-current dogma or political agenda.

   Bible scholar and former intelligence analyst Pat Eddy wrote,

"One of the most important purposes [of this tampering] was to support the aims of those who sought to make Christianity more attractive to potential Jewish converts by proving that the events of Jesus’ life fulfill prophecy from the Old Testament. . . . Christians have all been told, from their earliest trips to Sunday School, that the birth, death, and important events in the life of Jesus were all foretold in the Old Testament. Few have ever questioned this assertion."

   What Bible scholars euphemistically term "redactions" are nothing less than editing. Such editing of the Bible has contributed to misunderstandings and erroneous translations, keeping many of its messages a secret from the uninitiated. Often such secrets were suppressed by the Roman church because they contradicted its dogma.

   Within the New Testament, there are tantalizing hints that even Jesus kept some secrets. Matthew 13:10 (Revised Standard) states, "Then the disciples came to Him |Jesus| and said to him, ’Why do you speak to them | the public] in parables?’ And he answered them, ’To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to him who has [knowledge] will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing, they do not hear, nor do they understand."

   Mark 4:33 added, "With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything." Explained everything? What did Jesus explain? Since only the parables are presented in the New Testament, it is clear that not all his secrets were given to the public.

   Many secret societies and sects existed in biblical times that claimed to possess ancient knowledge. Like the religions of today, these groups vied with one another for control over these ancient secrets. Much like the later "Invisible College," these societies collectively were known as Mystery Schools, reservoirs of esoteric knowledge that was largely incomprehensible and thus fear-inspiring to the general public. Their literature was carefully constructed to both conceal and reveal some of their knowledge.

   "In the ancient world, nearly all the secret societies were philosophic and religious. During the medieval centuries, they were chiefly religious and political, although a few philosophic schools remained. In modern times, secret societies, in the Occidental countries, are largely political or fraternal, although in a few of them, as in Masonry, the ancient religious and philosophic principles still survive," explained Hall.

   Eddy wrote,

"In order to completely understand the dynamic of tampering with Jesus’ pronouncements, the reader must understand how the minds of the first-century religious protagonists worked. The tamperings were not random events like some form of intellectual graffiti. There was a pattern, and therein lies the story."

The road leading back from the fully established Roman church of the second millennium to the time of Jesus was a rocky one, filled with controversies, schisms, and contentiousness.

   Even before the crucifixion there was an intense rivalry between the followers of Jesus and those of John the Baptist. The end result was the Johannite heresy—the idea that John was the true messiah rather than Jesus. Although largely exterminated by the early church, this concept continued up to modern times within certain elements of Freemasonry as well as the Mandaeans of Iraq.

   Following the crucifixion, the rivalries between the Jewish community and the early Christians—and even within Jesus’ own followers—intensified.

   There was a growing schism between the fundamentalist Jewish Christians belonging to the Essene sect and the Greek or Hellenized Christians in first century Jerusalem. Sounding much like the fundamentalists in America today, pious Jews attacked these foreigners for abandoning religious services for a Greek-style sports arena filled with wrestlers and discus throwers.

   James and Mary Magdalene, as leaders of the Jerusalem church, were even at odds with Paul, who was bringing his Christian message to the gentiles to the north. There were immense squabbles over the most minute issues. In Galatians 5:12, Paul had become so exasperated with a continuing argument over circumcision that he expressed the hope that those initiating the controversy would emasculate themselves!

   "The first Jewish Christians believed that obeying all of the stringent Jewish religious laws, including circumcision and eating only Kosher food, were necessary for salvation," noted Eddy. "Paul preached that salvation could be attained through faith and that the Jewish religious laws should not be allowed to impede people from becoming Christians. Paul’s view eventually won out, as more and more gentiles converted to Christianity. By the third century they outnumbered the Jewish Christians by a large margin, defined Christianity according to Paul’s theology, and began castigating the original Jewish Christians as heretics."

   Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, by the middle of the second century condemned as heretics the followers of Jesus and James known as Nazarenes or the "poor."

"They, like Jesus himself, as well as the Essenes and Zadokites [followers of King Solomon’s chief priest Zadok] of two centuries before, expound upon the prophetic books of the Old Testament," Irenaeus complained. "They reject the Pauline epistles and they reject the apostle Paul, calling him an apostate [rejecter] of the Law."

  Gardner noted, "The Nazarenes . . . denounced Paul as a ’renegade’ and a ’false apostle,’ claiming that his ’idolatrous writings’ should be ’rejected altogether.’"

   Dr. Elaine Pagels, who chaired the Department of Religion of Barnard College at Colombia University, reported,

"Diverse forms of Christianity flourished in the early years of the Christian movement. Hundreds of rival teachers all claimed to teach the ’true doctrine of Christ’ and denounced one another as frauds. Christians in churches scattered from Asia Minor to Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome split into factions, arguing over church leadership. All claimed to represent ’the authentic tradition.’"

   "Far above the wrangling in the local churches sat the Roman church, unconcerned, untroubled, and probably, uncomprehending," Eddy wrote, adding that the church at this time was primarily concentrating on missionary work in Europe, an activity which paid unexpected benefits. "Unwittingly, the Christianization of these heathen ultimately saved the Roman church because the barbarians and their priests regarded the Roman church as the authority for their religious beliefs. When the barbarians overran Rome, the Roman Church was spared."

   Though spared by the barbarians, the church still had to contend with a variety of sects, each with its own version of Christianity.

   One such group was the Gnostics, who claimed to have an intuitive understanding of the mysteries of God and Earth. It was an understanding that resulted from rigorous training, initiation, and intuitive experiences, not simply intellectual study. The church found Gnostics particularly dangerous, for they disdained the need for a hierarchy of priestly officials to interpret the word of God.

   Far from dangerous heretics, these passive Christians claimed to be the keepers of secret knowledge as indicated by the Gnostic papyrus books discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. It was this discovery which first afforded any view of Gnosticism other than the damning rhetoric of the church.

   Gnosticism, derived from the Greek word gnosis or knowledge, reportedly was founded in the first century by Simon the Magician, a contemporary of Jesus later known as the "Father of All Heretics." He advanced the ideas of the Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, who taught that the human soul exists outside the physical body and therefore has access to universal knowledge and that wisdom (Gnosis) was brought down to Earth from the heavens.

   Another important Gnostic was Basilides, an early Egyptian Christian who through his Alexandrian cult sought to blend into Christianity tin1 ancient mysteries of Mesopotamia. These Alexandrians believed that strange extraterrestrial beings called "aeons" acted as messengers between the heavens and Earth. The Persian Zoroaster began his own form of Gnosticism about five hundred years before the time of Jesus. Known as Zoroastrianism, this movement spread widely until pushed out by invading Muslims in the seventh century.

   Occult author Andre Nataf stated that Gnosticism originated in Mesopotamia, first in the area of Iran then spreading into Asia Minor, Syria, and Babylon, where it was picked up by the Israelite captives and carried back to Palestine and Egypt.

"Certain details prove that the Gnostic holy books [from Qumran and Nag Hammadi] must be assigned such an early date that Christianity itself may be seen as no more than a ’branch of Gnosticism,’" wrote Nataf. "But Gnosticism could equally be compared to any religion at all. All religious knowledge develops, after all, from an ancient primitive origin, lost in the ’mists of time.’"

   According to the Hebrew Cabala, Gnostics seek to know the "secrets" of God, looking for answers within the sacred texts of whatever religion they accept. They seek the understanding of existence through interpretation of what they perceive as deeper meaning within the symbology of religious literature. "Gnosticism is religious existentialism," commented Nataf. Gnosticism flourished until declared a heresy by a council of bishops of the Roman church in A.D. 325.

   Gnosticism was an integral part of the Ancient Mysteries since both involved the belief that only personal inner enlightenment could bring understanding. According to the Masonic philosopher Manly P. Hall,

"This knowledge of how man’s manifold constitution could be most quickly and most completely regenerated to the point of spiritual illumination constituted the secret, or esoteric, doctrine of antiquity."

   Hall said such enlightenment and awareness had to be jealously guarded from "profane" persons who might abuse or misuse such knowledge. So lengthy periods of initiation were instituted and the most sensitive ancient knowledge was shrouded in symbols and allegory. "Christianity itself may be cited as an example," he wrote. "The entire New Testament is in fact an ingeniously concealed exposition of the secret processes of human regeneration."

   Gardner wrote that such regeneration, specifically of the human spirit or energy, involved elevated consciousness which took place by degrees through (he thirty-three vertebra of the spinal column. "The science of this regeneration is one of the ’Lost Keys’ of Freemasonry," he explained, "and it is the reason why ancient Freemasonry was founded upon 33 degrees."

   In the process of knowing, the Gnostic felt a sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

"This meant that they could subscribe to the outward doctrines of any religion, and could continue to operate under many different politico-religious systems," explained Daraul. "Gnosticism profoundly influenced men’s minds even in Europe up to and after the Middle Ages, and its basic way of thinking is probably an underlying factor in other secret societies whose members would be surprised to know it."

   Gnosticism also played an important role in an early Jewish ascetic sect known as the Essenes. The Essenes provoked such conflict with religious leaders of the other major Jewish sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees—they even argued that the established Hebrew lunar year was inaccurate—that the sect finally moved out of Jerusalem and established a monastery at Qumran on the north end of the Dead Sea which they called "the Wilderness." The Essene community was divided into two parts—married and unmarried members. All property was communal. In fact, the animosity of many modern Christians toward the Essenes largely came as a reaction to their overtly communistic lifestyle. These critics apparently forgot that all early Christians lived in much the same manner.

   Members spent their days working and their nights in prayer. They taught the immortality of the soul and also tended toward a dualist outlook, believing in a spirit of goodness or light and one of evil or darkness.

   The Essenes may have carried on the hermetic traditions of the Greeks. In the early twentieth century, a Russian-born train engineer named Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff claimed to have found the intact manuscript of an Essene master in an Indian monastery which explained the relationship of musical rhythms to the human body as taught by the sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Pythagoras. A great influence on the later Plato— that guiding light of Freemasonry, the Illuminati, John Ruskin, and Cecil Rhodes—Pythagoras offered the prescient idea that the Earth travels around the sun and was noted for his concept concerning the vibrations within celestial mechanics which he called the "harmony of the spheres."

   Interestingly enough, it was Pythagoras, well known for his accurate prophecies, who may have been the first to predict a "New World Order." Some researchers interpreted this to mean the arrival of the messiah.

The word Essenes was derived from the Greek words essaios meaning secret or mystic, and essenoi, indicating healing or physician. According to Gardner, the Essenes were connected to esoteric healing traditions as a later branch of an Egyptian mystery school called the Great White Brotherhood of the Therapeutate.

"It was into this White Brotherhood of wise therapeutics and healers—the original Rosicrucians—that Jesus was later initiated to progress through the degrees and it was his high standing in this regard which gained him the so often used designation of ’Master,’" added Gardner.

Other authors also state that Jesus was an Essene and Hall added that so were his parents, Mary and Joseph, along with his brother James. Most modern fundamentalists tend to dismiss this connection because tying Jesus to Gnosticism and the Essenes disturbs their rigid dogma.

   It would further disturb them to hear Gardner’s claim that, despite the interpretation of Bible translators, Jesus did not come from Nazareth. He said the word "Nazarene" and its variants came from the Hebrew word Nozrim, "a plural noun stemming from the term Nazrie ha-Brit ’Keepers of the Covenant,’ a designation of the Essene Community at Qumran on the Dead Sea. It is actually a point of contention whether the town of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus’ lifetime, for it does not appear on contemporary maps, nor in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period."

   "It is generally supposed that the Essenes were the custodians of [esoteric] knowledge and also the initiators and educators of Jesus," wrote Hall. "If so, Jesus was undoubtedly initiated in the same temple of Melchizedek where Pythagoras had studied six centuries before."

The Bible tends to confirm this in Hebrews 6:20 stating, "... where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek."

   Gardner claimed the name Melchizedek—acknowledged as one of the most mysterious persons in the Bible—is an Essene composite of the archangel Michael and the Hebrew high priest or Zadok, hence Michael-Zadok. At least one author on this subject believed Melchizedek actually was the Sumerian deity Enki.

   "The Essenes were regarded as among the better educated class of Jews," said Hall. "The fact that so many artificers [craftsmen] were listed among this number is responsible for the order’s being considered as a progenitor of modern Freemasonry."

As with both Freemasons and the followers of Pythagoras, a prominent Essene symbol was the mason’s trowel. And like the Freemasons, the Essenes produced literature involving intricate codes and allegories to protect their knowledge from the uninitiated as well as from the Roman authorities.

   For example, when writing about the Romans, they used the term Kit-tim, thought to refer to the ancient Chaldeans of Mesopotamia.

"The Essenes resurrected the old word for use in their own time and enlightened readers knew that Kittim always stood for ’Romans,’" explained Gardner, adding, "Study of the Scrolls . . . reveals a number of such coded definitions and pseudonyms that were previously misunderstood or considered of no particular importance."

Another example was the use of the term "the poor," which most people conclude meant people of few resources. The Scrolls make it clear that the early Christian church in Jerusalem referred to their members as "the poor," indicating their humble lives.

   According to Gardner and others, the terms "leper" and the "blind" were used to signify persons not initiated into the Essene traditions or "Way."

"Texts mentioning ’healing the blind’ or ’healing a leper’ refer more specifically to the process of conversion to the Way," Gardner explained. "Release from excommunication [by the community] was described as being ’raised from the dead.’ The definition ’unclean’ related mostly to uncircumcised Gentiles, and the description ’sick’ denoted those in public or clerical disgrace." (emphasis in the original)

   Several modern researchers, following in the steps of the Essenes and Cabalists, agree the Bible is a coded message. Michael Drosnin, formerly a reporter with the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, caused a stir in 1997 with the publication of his book The Bible Code. Drosnin wrote that Israeli mathematician Dr. Eliyahu Rips believed he had found a hidden crosswordlike code within the Bible, which accurately foretold of both Kennedy assassinations, World War II, the moon landing, the bombings of Hiroshima and the Oklahoma City federal building, and the election of President Bill Clinton. He wrote that a skeptical senior code breaker for the U.S. National Security Agency, Harold Gans, was shocked when he verified this Bible code using his own computer program.

   C. L. Turnage, a diligent student of this concept, wrote,

"Whether it be the obvious prosaic literal interpretation, gematria, symbolic, or a hidden computer code, the Bible appears to be a book unlike any other. People down through the ages have interpreted its pages according to their degree of technological advancement and their limited understanding of the Mesopotamian origin of the Hebrew religion."

According to Turnage, the Bible’s code involved symbolic references to multiple deities.

"These coded references pointed the way toward an understanding that such beings were the gods, or Elohim, of the Bible, whose worship began in Sumer," she noted, "and who ultimately originated on another world."

   It is easy to see how the many translators and interpreters of the Bible went astray. Down through the years, interpretations of the Bible were made by men and women unfamiliar with either modern technology such as flight or with the allegories and codes employed by the original authors.

   The Essenes also were one of the most effective of the ancient secret societies. Although undoubtedly known to their neighbors, their presence was either not recorded in the New Testament or later excised. Some researchers have referred to the Essenes as the protectors of "Mystic Christianity," the earliest form of Christianity which was based on the Ancient Mysteries.

   Little to nothing was known regarding the Essenes until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, just two years after a Gnostic library was found in mountain caves near the upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. Between 1947 and 1960, eleven caves eventually yielded about 800 manuscripts, 170 of them fragments of Old Testament works.

   Apparently, as the Roman armies advanced during the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 70, the Essenes fled from Qumran after hiding their sacred texts in earthen jars buried in nearby caves. This literary treasure was discovered by two Bedouin shepherds who sold a few parchments to an antique dealer.

   Eventually word of the discovery reached the ears of Hebrew University archeologist Yigael Yadin, who mortgaged his home and traveled into dangerous Arab areas seeking the scrolls. He managed to secure seven of them for his university, which promptly published them.

   "Not so for the remaining scrolls," reported Eddy. "The Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Palestine soon became involved and managed to acquire the rest of the scrolls from the government of Jordan . . . who stipulated that the Jewish scholars be allowed access to the ancient Jewish texts. Today, Israel controls the scrolls as a result of overrunning the place where they were stored during the Six Day War of 1967. These scrolls are largely unpublished today [and] no one knows if all of them have been obtained. There is the possibility that others are in the possession of, or have been destroyed by, the Bedouins."

   The Essene authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls had a profound effect on the first Christians in Jerusalem, who soon were differing in theology from Paul and his followers outside Palestine. This is evidenced by the fact that the interpretations of the Old Testament found in the scrolls are similar to the interpretations of James and the Jerusalem Christians.

   The conflicts both within and without Christianity were settled by the Roman emperor Constantine in what Gardner described as "a strategic buy-out by the enemy."

"Apart from various cultic beliefs, the Romans had worshipped the Emperors in their capacity as gods descended from others like Neptune and Jupiter," he explained. "At the Council of Aries in 314, Constantine retained his own divine status by introducing the omnipotent God of the Christians as his personal sponsor. He then dealt with the anomalies of doctrine by replacing certain aspects of Christian ritual with the familiar pagan traditions of sun worship, together with other teachings of Syrian and Persian origin. In short, the new religion of the Roman church was constructed as a ’hybrid’ to appease all influential factions. By this means, Constantine looked towards a common and unified ’world’ religion—Catholic meaning universal—with himself at its head."

   This attempt to co-opt Christianity was sealed at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, the same council where Arias was punched and tossed out. It was here that the Arians were banished and the Nicene Creed established, which formally defined God as a deity of three equal and coexisting parts—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or Ghost.

   One year later, Constantine ordered the confiscation and destruction of all works which questioned the newly constructed orthodoxy and opened the Lateran Palace to the bishop of Rome creating an early Vatican of sorts. In A.D. 331 the emperor ordered new copies made of Christian texts, most of which had been lost or destroyed during the previous persecutions.

"It was at this point that most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since," noted Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln.

   Based on the recent discoveries which made available such ancient texts as the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Thomas, the Testimony of Truth, the Gospel of Mary, and the Interpretation of Knowledge, researchers today have a much broader and more complete knowledge of biblical times than ever before in history, despite the fact that much of this new information has still not reached a general audience.

   Author Nesta Webster, a passionate Christian writing in 1924, long before the recent finds, deplored the connection between Jesus and the Essenes as well as their source of knowledge.

"The Essenes were therefore not Christians, but a secret society . . . bound by terrible oaths not to divulge the sacred mysteries confided to them," she declared. "And what were those mysteries but those of the Jewish secret tradition which we now know as the Cabala? . . . The truth is clearly that the Essenes were Cabalists, though doubtless Cabalists of a superior kind. . . . The Essenes are of importance ... as the first of the secret societies from which a direct line of tradition can be traced up to the present day."

   Some of today’s recently acquired knowledge in astronomy and philosophy may have been commonplace to the Gnostic Essenes of Jesus’ time. Furthermore, Gardner observed,

"Entirely divorced from the fabricated Christianity of the Roman Empire, their faith was closer to the original teachings of Jesus than any other. ..."

   Of all the Christian factions, the Essenes may indeed have had the purest of the ancient traditions at that time, thanks to the ancient Hebrew writings known as the Cabala.

Back to Top

Predominately of Jewish origins, the Cabala, also written as Kabbalah or Qabbalah, means "tradition" and, like recent claims about the Bible, was supposed to contain hidden meanings. Such cleverly coded knowledge was thought to be found within the Torah and other old Hebraic texts such as the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation) and the Sefer HaZo-har (Book of Light).

   These books, which predate the Talmud, a compilation of elder Jewish laws and traditions first written in the fifth century A.D., were produced centuries before the time of Jesus. According to the Book of Light, "mysteries of wisdom" were given to Adam by God while still in the fabled Garden of Eden. These elder secrets were then passed on through Adam’s sons to Noah on to Abraham long before the Hebrews existed as a distinct people.

   According to Nataf, "The mysterious Cabala is a form of Gnosticism [in which] man seeks to find divinity within himself."

   The author of the HaZohar wrote that "the human dimension contains all things, and all that exists in accordance with that... Man contains all that is in heaven above and on earth below...." Here the Cabala exhibits an obvious connection to the celebrated proclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, also known as the Egyptian god Thoth, who proclaimed, "As above, so below."

   The connection between Hebrew traditions and Egyptian mysticism may be even stronger than previously believed, as many authors, including Jewish scholars, now believe the Cabala was an oral tradition concerning ancient Egyptian "mysteries" handed down from Moses through the leadership level of the Israelites.

   The idea of ancient secrets being passed down to Moses from the earliest times was strongly supported by Eliphas Levi, a pen name of the nineteenth century French Bible scholar Alphonse Louis Constant.

"There is a tremendous secret which has already turned the world upside down, as shown by the religious traditions of Egypt, which were symbolically resumed by Moses in the early chapters of Genesis," wrote Levi, who claimed that the Cabala contained knowledge carried out of Sumer by Abraham, "the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch and the father of initiation in Israel."

   The biblical patriarch Abraham, a native of Sumer known early on as Abram, by some traditions was said to possess a tablet of symbols representing all of the knowledge of humankind handed down from the time of Noah. Known to the Sumerians as the "Table of Destiny," it was this table of knowledge—known to the early Jews as the Book of Raziel—which reportedly provided King Solomon with his vast wisdom.

"The philosophical cipher of the Table became known as Ha Qabala [light and knowledge]," reported Gardner, "and it was said that he who possessed Qabala also possessed Ram, the highest expression of cosmic knowing-ness. The very name Ab-ram—or Av-ram—means ’[He] who possesses Ram,’ and the expression was used in India, Tibet, Egypt and in the Celtic world of the Druids to denote a high degree of universal aptitude."

   The Sumerian "Table of Destiny" is thought to be the same as the "Tables of Testimony" mentioned in Exodus 31:18. Other Bible verses—Exodus 24:12 and 25:16—make it clear that these tables are not the Ten Commandments.

"This ancient archive is deeply associated with the Emerald Table of Thoth-Hermes and, as detailed in alchemical records of Egypt, the author of the preserved writings was the biblical Ham. ... He was the essential founder of the esoteric and arcane ’underground stream’ which flowed through the ages and his Greek name, Hermes, was directly related to the science of pyramid construction, deriving from the word herma, which relates to a ’pile of stones’. . . . Outside Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Table was known to Greek and Roman masters such as Homer, Virgil, Pythagoras, Plato, and Ovid, while in much later times the 17th century Stuart Royal Society of Britain was deeply concerned with the analysis and application of the sacred knowledge [in] conjunction with the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucian movement," explained Gardner.

   Much like our understanding of history and religion today, the information within the Cabala became garbled over the centuries through both misinterpretations as well as foreign influences.

"The speculative side of the Jewish Cabala borrowed from the philosophy of the Persian Magi [magicians in the occult sense], of the neo-Platonists, and of the neo-Pythagoreans," noted Webster. "There is, then, some justification for the anti-Cabalists’ contention that what we know today as the Cabala is not of purely Jewish origin."

   Pure or tainted, the mystical knowledge of the Cabala passed from Mesopotamia through Palestine into medieval Europe where it first appeared in writing at the end of the thirteenth century. It was scribed by a Spanish Jew named Moses de Leon, who may have devised the title HaZohar, a literary creation which caused critics to accuse him of fabricating the entire work. Today, most scholars—both Jewish and gentile—agree that the content of the Cabala legitimately predates the Christian era.

   "We are looking at a point in history which was to define and control the world from then until now," wrote Icke. "The knowledge the [Hebrew] Levites stole from Egypt and expanded as a result of their stay in Babylon, became known as the Cabala... The Cabala is the secret knowledge hidden in codes within the Old Testament and other texts. Judaism is the literal interpretation of it."

It has been stated how the Knights Templar brought Cabalistic knowledge back to Europe from the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades and that this knowledge was passed along through the alliance of the order and mason guilds. Masonic historians have acknowledged that the first evidence of "Judeo-Christian mysteries" introduced into Freemasonry came during this very time. It has also been documented that the hidden knowledge within the Cabala has been utilized through the centuries by nearly all secret societies, including Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, and through the Illuminati on into modern groups.

   Masonic historian Wilmshurst confirmed this, stating,

"Since the suppression of the Mysteries . . . their tradition and teachings have been continued in secret and under various concealments, and to that continuation our present Masonic system is due."

   According to Picknett and Prince, Cabalistic thought was also introduced to Europe within the banker/ruler court of the de Medicis in Florence, Italy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notably through a Cabalist named Pico della Mirandola.

   Author Webster cites nineteenth-century literature claiming that Moses Mendelssohn, the noted Jewish philosopher and Bible translator who did so much to liberate Jews from repressive German laws, not only was a Jewish Cabalist but one of those men who inspired and mentored Illuminati leader Adam Weishaupt. Mendelssohn, who came to be known as "the German Socrates" after being favorably portrayed in a drama by his Masonic friend Gotthold Lessing, may have also been a link between Weishaupt and banker Mayer Rothschild. Another may have been Michael Hess, the tutor of Rothschild’s children and a "follower of Moses Mendelssohn," who later headed the Philanthropin School for needy Jewish children established by Rothschild.

   This blending of Cabalistic teachings with later secret societies was further confirmed in 1984 when more than five hundred papers of a John Byrom were discovered in England. Byrom, who lived from 1691 to 1763, was a Freemason, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a leader of the Jacobite movement to restore the Stuart monarchy. He was a member of a group called the "Sun Club," also known as the "Cabala Club." His papers, according to Picknett and Prince, were "chiefly concerned with sacred geometry and architecture, and cabalistic, Masonic, hermetic and alchemical symbols."

All of the early societies—including the Mystery Schools of Greece and Egypt—sought to penetrate the secrets of the past.

The industrial revolution as well as the evolution theories of Charles Darwin have led most people to believe in the "progress of man"—that humankind evolved from tree-climbing primates to moderns with high technology. Today, recent discoveries and new interpretations of ancient literature and artifacts are leading many to believe the opposite—that humankind "fell" from a golden age into barbarity and is only now regaining lost knowledge.

   Even world population figures suggest an early decline rather than growth in the human species.

"Global population figures between 6000 B.C. and the beginning of our era are extremely significant," wrote Tomas. "There were about 250 million people on earth 2,000 years ago. The population of the planet in 4800 B.C. was 20 million. In the year 5000 B.C. there were 10 million on all the continents. One thousand years earlier— in 6000 B.C.—only 5 million people inhabited the earth. On the basis of these figures, the population of the globe was well under 1 million about 10,000 B.C.—an astonishingly low figure. Why was man such a rare creature if he has had a continuous existence as a primate and then as a rational being for at least 2 million years?"

   According to the records of the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, civilized humankind has been on Earth for more than 500,000 years. Yet the archeological record indicates that man may have actually regressed in knowledge and abilities until beginning a slow advancement some 13,000 years ago. Obviously, a new model of history is necessary.

   Masonic philosopher Hall wrote that the Mystery Schools were created as secret societies to prevent outside interference as initiates attempted to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual worlds.

   He explained that,

"when our solar system began its labors, spirits of wise beings from other solar systems came to us and taught us ways of wisdom that we might have the birthright of knowledge which God gives to all His creations. It was these minds which are said to have founded the Mystery Schools of the Ancient Wisdom... Gradually a separation took place among the schools of the Mysteries. The zeal of the priests to spread their doctrines in many cases apparently exceeded their intelligence... The result was that these untutored minds, slowly gaining positions of authority, became at last incapable of maintaining the institution. ... So the Mystery Schools vanished... while the colossal material organizations, having no longer any contact with their divine source, wandered in circles, daily becoming more involved in the rituals and symbols which they had lost the power of interpreting,"

   If the religious institutions could not correctly interpret their own theology, the same could be said of their scientific counterparts, who even today cannot explain artifacts still in existence. Recently, open-minded members of both the public and the sciences are taking a second look at some of this planet’s most intriguing anomalies and mysteries.

Back to Top

The world’s first secrets dealt with the true origins of mankind. Neither of the two most prevalent theories of today—Darwinism and Creationism—can fully account for human origins and development.

   Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest fails to explain how humans overcame the thousands of deficiencies within the human DNA structure, while Creationism overlooks an impressive fossil record. Clearly a new model is required.

   Recently, the theories regarding the origin of modern humans were further confused by the discovery of fossils indicating that Neanderthal, a primitive man, lived side-by-side with Cro-Magnon, modern man, in what is now Israel. Yet mysteriously, these two races apparently did not interbreed.

"Only one solution to the mystery is left," reported James Shreeve, author of The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins. "Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not. They were reproductively incompatible, separate species. ..." (emphasis in the original)

   Furthermore, scientific testing showed that modern human remains in prehistoric Israel predated Neanderthal remains by as much as forty thousand years, presenting a severe blow to the theory of continuous evolution.

   These findings also may have resolved the question of the infamous "missing link" between primitives and modern mankind—namely, that there is no such link. There appear to have been two separate species. Again, this requires a new model for human origins.

   New models are today being expounded by a growing number of archeological, theological, and historical revisionists who are contesting the pat answers offered by conventional science over the past several decades.

   Human nature being what it is, mainstream scientists and theologians are circling the wagons to defend their long-cherished theories. With the same intransigence of those who once proclaimed the Earth was flat, they are determined to defend their positions to the end despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

   Such evidence is not a recent phenomenon. Many of this planet’s deepest mysteries involve artifacts dating back thousands of years. They include:

• A number of unusually small ancient Chinese porcelain "seals" discovered all over Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when there was no known commerce between the Emerald Isle and China.

• Mysterious life-size crystal skulls dated to at least 3,600 years ago found in South America. According to the staff of the British Museum Laboratory, the skulls give indications of being made with some sort of powered cutter.

• Numerous giant stone balls found in Costa Rica in the 1930s were from granite not found in the area, and their symmetry was so perfect as to defy explanation of who made them or how.

• Throughout England, France, and Germany today stand many ancient stone forts—there are at least sixty in Scotland alone— built with large rocks which at some point were "vitrified," melted from such heat as to become fused and glassy. The heat necessary to produce such an effect—up to 1,100 degrees Celsius—ruled out the possibility that the stones were melted by conventional fires.

• What for all purposes appeared to be a computer dated almost one hundred years before Jesus discovered in 1900 off the island of Antikythera near Crete. Known as the "Antikythera Mechanism," the device contained a system of differential gears not known to have been used until the sixteenth century.

• A small vessel containing a copper cylinder with an iron rod inside, discovered in an Iraqi village and dated from at least 220 years B.G., turned out to be nothing less than a battery. When alkaline juice was added to the strange object, it produced a halt volt of electricity.

• Unexplained manufactured sites such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill in Britain, the huge heads of Easter Island, the Peruvian Nazca lines, the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio, and the controversial prehistoric "Rock Wall" east of Dallas, Texas, seem to indicate a technology lost in prehistory.

• Former NASA official Maurice Chatelain wrote of thirteen mystical sites within a 450-mile radius of the long-venerated Greek island of Delos which, connected by straight lines, produce a perfect Maltese cross, emblem of the Crusader knights. Chatelain said such a gigantic pattern could only have been created from a vantage point in space.

• According to Chatelain, coins of exactly the same weight have been found in geographic locations thousands of miles apart and in different cultures separated by thousands of years.

• In 1996 Han Ping Chen, an authority on the ancient Chinese Shang dynasty, confirmed that markings found on Central American Olmec figures dated to more than three thousand years ago were clearly archaic Chinese characters. Puzzled archeologists admitted that identical writing systems cannot be independently invented.

• Carvings located twenty-five feet above the floor in the ancient Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt, resemble nothing less than two jet airplanes and an Apache attack helicopter. Their presence has been noted by recent travelers and reportedly were mentioned in an 1842 report, yet no one knows what they truly represent.

• Cuneiform Babylonian tablets in the British Museum described the phases of Venus, the four moons of Jupiter, and the seven satellites of Saturn, none of which could have been seen in ancient Babylon without the aid of modern telescopes.

• The maps of Turkish admiral Piri Reis, dated from the early sixteenth century and said to be based on earlier maps predating Alexander the Great, accurately depict the Amazon basin of South America and the northern coastline of Antarctica, neither of which was surveyed until after the advent of aircraft in the twentieth century. The accurateness of these maps regarding Antarctica are especially puzzling since it has been under an ice cap for at least four thousand years.

• A rectangular ziggurat built before 8,000 B.C. recently found near Okinawa, points to people with advanced technologies living long before the generally accepted date of the first civilizations.

   Why don’t we know more about our past and such artifacts as those few mentioned above? The answer lies in the destructive nature of humans. Only a few of Homer’s poems survived the destruction of his works by the Greek tyrant Peisistratus in Athens. Nothing survived the destruction of the Egyptian library in the Temple of Ptah in Memphis. Likewise, an estimated two hundred thousand volumes of priceless works disappeared with the destruction of the library of Pergamus in Asia Minor. When the Romans leveled the city of Carthage, they destroyed a library said to have contained more than five hundred thousand volumes.

Then came Julius Caesar, whose war against Egypt resulted in the loss of the great library at Alexandria, considered the greatest collection of books in antiquity. With the loss of the Serapeum and the Bruchion branches of that library, a total of some seven hundred thousand volumes of accumulated knowledge went up in flames. What little survived was destroyed by Christians in A.D. 391. European libraries also suffered under the Romans and later from zealous Christians. Between the sacking of Constantinople and the Catholic Inquisition, an inestimable number of ancient works were irretrievably lost. Collections in Asia fared little better, as Chinese emperor Tsin Shi Hwang-ti ordered wholesale book burning in 213 B.C.

   "Because of these tragedies we have to depend on disconnected fragments, casual passages and meager accounts," lamented Australian author Andrew Tomas. "Our distant past is a vacuum filled at random with tablets, parchments, statues, paintings, and various artifacts. The history of science would appear totally different were the book collection of Alexandria intact today."

   The mystery of humankind’s past can be symbolized by two of the planet’s oldest edifices.

   Conventional wisdom tells us that Egypt’s Great Pyramid and Sphinx were built by the Egyptians some 4,500 years ago. However, the recent discovery on both of erosion from heavy rainfall—an event which could only have occurred more than 10,000 years ago prior to the Giza Plateau becoming a desert — is evidence that these famous structures were built thousands of years before the ancient Egyptian civilization came on the scene. Maverick Egyptologist John Anthony West, who two decades ago took the lead in publicizing the prehistoric origin of the Sphinx, has been supported in recent years by the work of Boston University geologist Dr. Robert Schoch. Following scientific study in the early 1990s, West, Schoch, and other experts concluded that the Sphinx was constructed no more recently than 7,000 to 5,000 years ago—and this was considered by some a very conservative figure.

"I remain convinced that the Sphinx must pre-date the breakup of the last Ice Age. ... If technology of that order had been available in Egypt, I think we’d see evidence of it elsewhere in the ancient world," wrote West.

   Despite recent scientific work on the Sphinx that supports West’s theories and the popularity of a 1993 NBC special on the subject, Egyptian authorities—apparently at the behest of traditional Egyptologists if not more secret groups—continue to deny researchers like West access to the antiquities they study.

   The famous psychic Edgar Cayce in 1934 stated that the ancient Egyptians were the descendants of a previous civilization who constructed the Great Pyramid and Sphinx as a "Hall of Records"—their version of a time capsule—for the purpose of imparting scientific knowledge to future generations. Cayce even said that this library of knowledge would be found beneath the paws of the Sphinx. In the early 1990s, ground-penetrating radar confirmed what Cayce and some modern remote viewers have stated—that a chamber exists beneath the paws of the Sphinx. Oddly enough, no one has been authorized to excavate the site.

   If the Sphinx was built before the end of the last Ice Age, it would date completion of the structure to some time prior to 15,000 years ago, which certainly excludes the Egyptians as its creators. Others are now admitting that a much older and even more sophisticated civilization predated the Egyptians.

   "The workmanship level of jewelry as well as architecture in ancient Egypt was higher in the earlier periods," noted Tomas. Clearly, the Egyptian civilization did not spontaneously appear. It was the legacy of a predecessor.

   The famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, in a passage containing a confession to the "Lord of Righteousness," reveals a remarkable correlation to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament:

   This comparison provided compelling support for those who claim that the biblical Israelites drew heavily from the ancient Egyptian texts. The Egyptians, in turn, gained their knowledge and beliefs from the older cultures of Babylon and Sumer.

   Many authors in recent years have detailed a widely disparate number of archeological anomalies reaching from Tibet and India to South and Central America on into the Middle East. A reconstructed human called "Kennewick Man," whose remains were found in Washington State in 1996, more resembles Star Trek’s Captain Picard than he does an Indian. An archeological dig in 1977 found that Monte Verde, Chile, was inhabited at least 12,500 years ago—1,000 years prior to when the original Americans were supposed to have crossed the Bering Strait ice bridge.

   "The emerging answer suggests that [prehistoric Americans] were not Asians or Mongoloid stock who crossed a land bridge into Alaska 11,500 years ago, as the textbooks say," reported Newsweek, "but different ethnic groups, from places very different from what scientists thought even a few years ago."

So far, conventional science is at a loss to explain where these people came from or how they got to the Americas in prehistoric times.

   The signs of advanced prehistoric civilizations are worldwide and unmistakable, yet do not easily fit in the conventional view of history. Recent discoveries and new interpretations of available data both add to a growing body of evidence indicating that civilizations with advanced technology existed long before written history.

   In a book little known in America, Gods of the New Millennium: Scientific Proof of Flesh and Blood Gods, British author Alan F. Alford wrote, "A shadowy pre-history seems to exist as a legacy in the form of stone, maps and mythology, which our 20^th century technology has only just allowed us to recognize."

   Who were these people and where did they get their technology? Could such a prehistorical advanced civilization be the basis for the legends of Atlantis and Mu?

   Many blame the fact that these issues have been ignored for far too long on the specialization of fields of study. Both science and religion rarely give any serious consideration to each other. Archeologists rarely mix with linguists or geologists with historians. Hence much of mankind’s history has been left to those who present it from their own limited perspective. The more suspicious see it as a conspiracy by the wealthy elite to maintain power and control by keeping the public ignorant of their true origins and potential.

   The idea that the origins of man are still largely hidden from us by both time and design is naturally quite disturbing to those who have spent lifelong careers presenting mankind’s history as one long evolution from savage to civilized man. Yet it is apparent from the available evidence that modern man may just now be regaining knowledge lost millennia ago.

   It appears that bits and pieces of prehistoric knowledge survived in various esoteric forms through secret societies such as the Mystery Schools of Egypt and the schools of Pythagoras. These little-understood groups passed along not only religious concepts such as reincarnation or the transmigration of souls, but also real knowledge in architectural design, construction, astronomy, agronomy, and history. One of the underlying and unifying concepts of these early groups was monotheism, the belief in only one universal creative god.

   The Hebrews are among the most well-documented peoples of the ancient world, yet there is no mention of working on the Great Pyramid in the otherwise detailed records of their time as Egyptian slaves. By all traditions, Hebraic knowledge stemmed from their patriarchs Abraham and Moses. The latter not only led them from Egyptian bondage but presented them with a lengthy list of laws and social customs.

Back to Top

Considering the material covered thus far, it is clear that the knowledge hidden within the secret societies, both ancient and modern, can be traced back to ancient Egypt.

   According to the Bible, it was Moses and his exodus from Egypt with the Hebrews that set world history on the course that we all know. According to Webster, Moses gained the oral tradition of knowledge from the Egyptian Mystery Schools, which he handed down through subsequent Hebrew leaders. Many researchers believe pieces of this knowledge were passed along to the Western world through cryptic passages in the Talmud, the Jewish Cabala, and the Old Testament along with an oral tradition handed down through the secret societies.

   Many thoughtful people have questioned both the origins and accounts of Moses. Sigmund Freud, in his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism, proposed that Moses was not a Jew but a ranking Egyptian connected to the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. One argument used by Freud was that many of the laws Moses presented to his Jewish following were of Egyptian origin. The similarity between the Ten Commandments and the Egyptian Book of the Dead has already been noted. Freud also questioned why any Jew would have wanted to retain any Egyptian customs once free of slavery.

   Freud was not the first to question Moses’ Hebraic lineage. The author of the Old Testament book of Exodus (2:19) describes Moses as an Egyptian. Manetho, a priest and adviser to Pharaoh Ptolemy I some three hundred years before the birth of Jesus, wrote in the Aegyptiaca or History of Egypt, that Moses was a ranking Egyptian priest educated in the Ancient Mysteries at the lower Egyptian city of Heliopolis.

   Gardner offered an even more startling supposition. He was puzzled that, considering Moses’ high position in Egypt as stated in the Old Testament, there appears to be no mention of him in the vast quantity of Egyptian literature now available. After careful study, he made a compelling argument that Moses and the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, of Amenhotep IV as he was officially known, were the same person. This was not an entirely new concept, as it was advanced by the Rosicrucians as far back as the eighteenth century.

   Akhenaten, the most mysterious and little-known of the pharaohs, incurred the wrath of the Egyptian religious authorities when he closed the various Egyptian temples and built new ones to the vague and faceless god Aten. The omniscient Aten appears very close to the Mystery Schools’ view of one universal god. Furthermore, according to Gardner, Aten is the equivalent of the Hebrew Adon. Aten may have transliterated into the Hebrew Amen, meaning "so be it," a term still used in churches today, which evolved from the name of the supreme Sumerian god Anu.

   Akhenaten’s childhood parallels that of Moses. When Pharaoh Amen-hotep Ill’s second wife Tiye became pregnant, it was decreed that if the child was a son and hence a pretender to the throne, he should be killed. Her first child was indeed a son, Tuthmosis, who died prematurely. Gardner said a second son was saved when "the royal midwives conspired with Tiye to float the child downstream in a reed basket to the house of her father’s half-brother Levi." Here the child was nursed by Tey, of the house of Levi. This youngster, named Aminadab, then was reared by these Hebrews. He received a religious education at Heliopolis and later married his half sister Nefertiti, which placed him in line for the throne.

   The story of a child being saved by a basket of bull rushes in fact can be traced back to the Sumerian Sargon the Great who claimed, "My changling mother ... set me in a basket of rushes, and with pitch she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river, which . . . carried me to Akki, the drawer of water."

   When the old Pharaoh Amenhotep III died, he was succeeded by his son Aminadab, now proclaimed Amenhotep IV. Amenhotep meant "Amen is pleased" and Aminadab, who had been taught of the Hebrew’s one god, soon changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning "Glorious Spirit of the Aten."

   Akhenaten’s support of Aten was unpopular with the people, particularly the powerful priesthood, and he was forced to abdicate the throne, which passed to his cousin Smenkhkare. Banished from Egypt about 1361 B.C., Pharaoh Akhenaten gathered his friends and relatives—mostly the Hebrew relatives of Tey—and fled. The worship of Aten was eventually suppressed and any mention of Akhenaten’s name was forbidden, adding to the enigma concerning his life. According to Gardner, Akhenaten’s son by a deputy wife named Kiya later became the famous boy pharaoh Tutankhaten, who was forced to change his name to Tutankhamen to reflect the return to the worship of Amen rather than Aten.

   Linking Akhenaten to the biblical account, he and a "brother," Aaron the Levite, returned to Egypt on orders of the "God of Abraham" to retrieve the Hebrews. After a duel in magic with Egyptian sorcerers, they departed with the remaining Hebrews.

   "Evidence from Egypt indicates that Moses/Akhenaten led his people from Pi-Rameses—near modern Kantra—southward, through Sinai, to Lake Timash. This was extremely marshy territory and, although manageable on foot with some difficulty, any pursuing horses and chariots would have foundered disastrously," Gardner observed.

He also noted that Akhenaten’s supporters still believed him the rightful heir to the throne and called him Mose, Meses, or Mosis, meaning "heir or born of." Thus, Moses might denote a title rather than a name.

   Even in the Middle Ages, scholars pondered over the similarities of Moses, Hermes, and Thoth, all of whom were great leaders who obtained their knowledge directly from God. Tile work in the Siena Cathedral in Italy bears an inscription reading, "Hermes Mercury Tris-megistus, Contemporary Moses."

   Further support for the Moses/Akhenaten theory may be found in Miriam, the woman most closely associated with the prophet and who was so instrumental in the Exodus from Egypt and subsequent events. In her we may find further support for the "Moses as Pharaoh" theory.

"All records indicate that toward the end of Akhenaten’s reign, Mery-kiya—Beloved of Khiba—had become the dominant queen [under the name] Mery-amon—Beloved of Amon—carrying a dual legacy from the kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia," stated Gardner. "It was she who moved into exile with Akhenaten/Moses to become known to the Israelites as Miriam... and it was her royal blood which, through her daughter—the sister of Tutankhamen—cemented the succession for the eventual Royal House of Judah."

   If Moses was Akhenaten, this makes the connection between the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews much stronger than previously suspected, and it goes far in explaining the obvious blending of Egyptian beliefs into Hebrew theology. Even if Moses and Akhenaten were not the same person, it is documented that Moses was well schooled in ancient knowledge and gained high status while living in Egypt. The New Testament book of Acts (7:22) stated, "And Moses was learned in all of the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in words and in deeds."

   Moses, by the biblical account, became the patriarch of the Hebrews after receiving messages and commandments from God while visiting Mount Sinai. While he met with Jehovah, his followers watched from a safe distance. What they saw was described in Exodus 19:18 (New International),

"Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently."

   This description is quite compatible with the prophet Elijah’s later account of a meeting with Yahweh in 1 Kings 19:9-13. Elijah recounted that as he stood on the holy mountain, the Lord passed by him with a great wind, flying dust and rocks and trembling earth.

"There was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire," said Elijah, "And after the fire, there was the sound of a gentle whisper."

The prophet proceeded to hold a conversation with his god.

   When Moses returned from his mountaintop experience, he carried with him tablets of stone. Once again there is a question of translation. Since all this occurred prior to the advent of the written Hebrew language, authors Knight and Lomas explained,

"These tablets could only have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics as Moses would not have understood any other script [as Hebrew did not become a written language for another 1,000 years]. The idea of messages materializing out of marks on stone amazed ordinary people and the scribes who could make ’stone talk’ were considered to be holders of great magic. This is easily appreciated when one realizes that the Egyptians called hieroglyphics ’the Words of the God,’ a term that would often be repeated throughout the Bible."

   Jehovah is an English transliteration of the Hebrew Yahweh or Lord, a word which itself was early on expressed only by the consonants YHWH to prevent verbal misuse of the name. YHWH is an acronym of the famous Hebrew words in response to Moses’ question regarding how he was supposed to name his Lord: "I am that I am." (Exodus 3:14) The Canaanite term for Yahweh was Elohim, a plural noun derived from El or Eloh, meaning "Lofty One."

Yet the Bible continued to used the plural Elohim for the one God. Another Hebrew word for "Lord," meaning the one true God, was Adon or Adonai. In the earliest texts, the term "El" or "El-Shaddai (Lord of the Mountain) is used 238 times. El, used biblically as a synonym for Elohim, derives from the ancient Sumerian Enlil or Great Mountain Lord. It is clear that the original biblical authors were referring to a definitive single male personality rather than some vague and hypothetical god.

"From the dawn of the subsequent Hebrew culture, however, everything changed as Jehovah became ever more rationalized as an individual ’absolute’—a unilateral overlord of all things," noted Gardner. "The Hebrew perception of Jehovah also became totally abstract, so that all physical connection with humankind was lost."

   "In Hebrew religion—and in Hebrew religion alone—the ancient bond between man and nature was destroyed," explained Middle East expert Henri Frankfort. "Those who served Jehovah must forego the richness, the fulfillment, and the consolation of a life which moves in tune with the great rhythms of the earth and sky."

   Moses displayed to his people stone tablets containing a set of laws given by Jehovah, many of which were promptly broken on orders of this same Lord. After admonishing Moses and his people not to kill, steal, or covet another’s property, Jehovah ordered them to the lands of the Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites, and others to kill men, women, and children and take their lands and possessions. This harsh order seems unworthy of a loving and merciful god and may be explained by the Egyptian priest Manetho, who wrote,

"The wonders which Moses narrates as having taken place upon the Mountain of Sinai, are in part, a veiled account of the Egyptian initiation which [Moses] transmitted to his people when he established a branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood. ..."

In order words, these orders came from a physical person rather than from some spirit.

   An even more controversial interpretation was made by author Dr. Joe Lewels, former chairman of the Department of Journalism at the University of Texas at El Paso, who opined in his 1997 book The God Hypothesis that Jehovah was indeed a being of flesh and blood who flew in a craft that created fire, wind, and noise. This vehicle was used to transport Moses to the summit of Mount Sinai as stated in Exodus 19:4,

"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you [as] on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself."

   Lewels also noted that Moses and the Israelites were never allowed to see Jehovah’s face and wondered if his countenance was so non-human as to provoke fear and loathing.

"It should be pointed out that this is not in the least an original idea," wrote Lewels, who mentioned the Mandaeans, an early Jewish sect who believed in a dualistic universe, divided equally into the worlds of light and darkness. "To them, the physical world, including the Earth, was created and ruled over by the Lord of Darkness, a reptilian being . . . variously called Snake, Dragon, Monster and Giant . . . thought to be the true creator of humanity," noted Lewels.

   This same concept was also advanced by researcher and author R. A. Boulay, who noted that from all cultures of the world have come stories of dragons or reptilians who coexisted with man—even created man— and were associated with powerful gems or crystals, walked on legs, flew in the air, fought each other over territory, and were revered by humans as "gods."

"The world-wide depiction of flying reptiles makes it abundantly clear that our creators and ancestors were not of mammal origin but were an alien saurian breed," concluded Boulay in his 1997 book Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind’s Reptilian Past.

   Recent writers such as Lewels and Boulay concluded that the biblical Jehovah was actually one of the ancient Sumerian "gods" who took a special interest in the descendants of the Mesopotamian patriarch Abraham.

   "From the beginning of his relationship with the Hebrew people, Jehovah used every means at his command to exert authority and control over his flock," said Lewels.

In referring to the Genesis 17 covenant between Jehovah and Abraham, Lewels saw the command that all males be circumcised as a marking system, much as ranchers today notch the ears of their cattle.

   Needless to say, it is extremely difficult to attempt to interpret concepts dating back thousands of years. One of the biggest problems in trying to sort out the truth behind the old stories and legends is the fact that many different names were used by different people at different times for the same person, place, or concept in symbolic stories called allegories or parables.

   Such allegories, usually passing as myths, are the backbone of the Western world’s early religious and philosophical beliefs. Popularly thought to be separate pantheons of mythical characters, a close study of the ancient "sky gods" of major cultures clearly indicates that all stem from a common source. Indeed, when the earliest text from the Minoan culture was translated, it was found to contain a Semite dialect from Mesopotamia. It has been established that the Greek culture—the foundation of Western civilizations—stemmed from the early Minoans on Crete.

   No one will agree on these specific connections between the "gods" because of the large amount of incidental material that grew up around them. But a general comparison of mythologies indicates common features which appear to go beyond coincidence and reveal the striking similarities between the ancient "gods":