Man's Search For Spirituality - E Christopher Reyes (jenna bush book club .TXT) 📗

no longer included in the plunder from raids to Syria and Nubia, they convinced the Pharaoh to levy taxes on the people of Thebes and revenues from the city.
The people found it difficult to support the priesthood and the vast lands that they controlled and resorted to robbery of the Royal Tombs. It is now a documented fact, that corrupt government officials looked the other way in exchange for tributes while the treasures of their kingdom were pilfered and desecrated.
14. Halos, nimbus, are used to portray divine figures in earliest Egyptian works. This creation of a glowing inner spirit from the paintings is used to communicate a power more powerful than the layperson.
15. Later civilization such as the Greeks, Romans, Native Americans, and Indians would also incorporate the Halo to depict divinities.
16. The Halo also signifies a higher level of consciousness in this material world.
With circles about their heads, the portraits of Christ are also frequently surrounded, and in the case of Jesus, if His head had been merely surrounded with rays, there might have been some pretense for saying that it was borrowed from the Evangelic narrative, where it is stated, that on the Holy mount His face became resplendent with light.
But nowhere, in the whole compass of Scripture, do we ever read that His head was surrounded with a disk, or a circle of light, yet what will be searched for in vain in Biblical Scriptures, is found in the artistic representations of the great gods and goddesses of Babylon. The disk, and particularly the circle, were the well known symbols of the Sun-Divinity, the Pagan Sun God, and figured largely in the symbolism of the East. Some anthropologists felt that there was direct communications between the ancient worlds due to the similarities in beliefs. Due to the annihilation of religious matter by Catholic zealots, little did they know then the borrowing of religious texts from more ancient ancient civilizations was purposeful in order to build a new faith. Apollo, the child of the Sun, was often thus represented. Goddesses [the mothers], that claimed kindred with the Sun were equally entitled to be adorned with the nimbus or luminous circle.
Compare the nimbus around the head of the ancient goddess Circe, the sorceress daughter of the ‘Sun God,’ Helios, and the sea nymph Perse, whose mystical potions and incantations were alleged to be able to turn people into beasts with the ‘Halo’ around the head of the Catholic ‘Perpetual Virgin.’

“But although death was very important to the Egyptians, life was considered to be more desirable. One sage of the period advised: “Enjoy your days. Delight your nose with balm and sweet perfume, offer lotus garlands to your wife to adorn her arms and neck. Let her whom you cherish be seated at your side, and let singing and music delight your ears. Cast care from you; think only of your pleasure until the day comes to enter into a world where silence reigns... For you must understand that no-one can take his worldly goods with him, and no-one has ever returned after his departure.” ~From: The Egyptian Way of Death, Mummies and the Cult of the Immortal, Ànge-Pierre Leca, Translated by Louise Asmal, Doubleday, 1981 (1979) (1976 French).
The worst fear though was that the corpse might be destroyed, which would also destroy its chance of eternal life. “Die not a second time” was written hopefully at the bottom of some coffins. “Palestine was so closely linked geographically with Egypt that the influence of that great civilization must have been immense on the smaller and less civilized country. But to the jealous and barbarian Hebrews the splendor of Egypt was an offence, though they borrowed largely from the ideas and ideals, and even the very language, of the Egyptians. Yet in spite of hatred and malice, the influence of Egypt on the religion of both the Canaanites and Hebrews can be clearly seen, and through the Hebraic Scriptures that influence is found in the later religions, Christianity and Islam.” ~From: Egyptian Religious Poetry, Margaret A. Murray [1863 - 1963], Pub. John Murray, 1949.
BC 2545-2520-Pyramid of Khufu [known as Cheops in Greek] 756’ x 756’ square at the base at an angle of 51° 52´, with its sides running north/south and east/west, with 2,300,000 stone blocks weighing 6,500,000 tons of stones transported from Aswan, six hundred miles away [Napoleon calculated the materials in the pyramids to be equivalent to a wall ten feet high and one foot thick around the country of France]. Newly discovered Egyptian documents tell of magicians performing before the Pharaoh Cheops. Magicians were part of the priesthood and practiced their magic to both entertain and to mystify the ignorant masses by revealing only enough of their mystical powers to keep the masses in fear of them. -Genesis 41:8, Exodus 7:11, 9:11, Daniel 1:20, 2:2, 4:7, Isaiah 2:6.
BC 2530-2150-The Solar Barge journeys across the night sea beneath the earth carrying the “Tree of Life” in Akkadian religious beliefs. Isis, the benefactor of magical arts and the resurrectress of Osiris [Resurrection is not a Christian invention, but dates back to ancient Egyptian mythology, which also borrows from other cultures, at least 2500 years before the advent of Jesus Christ] .
Apepi is a huge serpent, living in the Nile, who tried to intervene in the ‘Sun-god’ Ra’s traveling across the sky in his boat. Representing darkness and the evilness that pervades mankind, Apepi is now associated with the left-hand path [alternative to the followers of goodness].
The Old Testament is revised by the inheritors of the new priest craft in an attempt to show the Egyptian priests that the new God of the Hebrews is more powerful than their ‘Sun God’ Ra. ~See Exodus 10:21-23, and 2 Kings 10:26-28, where Jehu destroys the Baal idols.
17. The Egyptians believed in the Immortality of the Soul: a concept interpreted as transmigration of the soul by Christine Doctrine.
18. Redemption of the soul of man is what mummification was all about.
19. The hieroglyph for the material body of man after the departure of his soul is symbolized as the fish, and two thousand five hundred years from this era the symbol most often used by Christians to represent the spiritual manifestation of Jesus will be the fish.
20. It is written that Ra, the God of the Sun, Lord and Creator of the World, God of Birth and Rebirth, in his old age becomes senile and orders the destruction of mankind on earth.
21. The goddess Hathor is sent along with the god Sekhmet to destroy man.
Hathor is also called the “Queen of Heaven.” ~cf. Jeremiah 44:17, 18, 19, 25. In Egypt, the goddess Athor, “The Habitation of God,” signifies that in her dwelt all the “Fullness of the Godhead.’
‘Athor,’ the Venus of Egypt, is represented as a cow, to indicate the light complexion of the goddess that the cow represented, the cow's head and neck being gilded [made to look like gold or Yellow Hair]. The most famed pictures of the Virgin Mother in Italy represent the mother of Jesus, from a dark race, as of a fair complexion and with golden hair.
To point out the great goddess-mother, in a Pantheistic sense, as at once the Infinite and Almighty one, and the Virgin mother, this inscription was engraven upon one of her temples in Egypt, “I am all that has been, or that is, or that shall be. No mortal has removed my veil. The fruit, which I have brought forth, is the Sun.” ~The Two Babylons by The Late Rev. Alexander Hislop.
Watching the slaughter of mankind becomes too much for Ra [the Sun-God] to bear and he Floods the land with beer dyed with red ochre. Thinking the beer dyed red is blood, Hathor and Sekhmet partake of it and become intoxicated forgetting about the killing of mankind and thus saving the world from destruction.
The Egyptians allegedly surrounded the mummy with a mystical aura, a cosmic force of god, of which we know nothing about at present, because man in his ultimate wisdom could not deal with a metaphysical world that challenged his newly found religion or simply wanted to eliminate the competition.
Along with the sun, as the great ‘Fire-God,’ and, in due time, identified with him, was the serpent, which was also worshipped. “In the mythology of the primitive world,” says Owen, “The serpent is universally the symbol of the sun.” In ancient Egypt, one of the commonest symbols of the sun, or ‘Sun-God,’ is a disc with a serpent around it, representing the sun, the ‘Great Enlightener’ of the physical world, so the serpent is held to have been the ‘Great Enlightener’ of the spiritual ddomain, giving mankind the “Knowledge of good and evil.”
Millenniums later the Egyptian gods will be given a new name, their miraculous feats will be combined into one, their divine given powers will be claimed by a newly created god, one who will have universal acceptance, one who takes on the attributes of man made gods from all over the world, one who will assimilate into all societies, cultures, and religious spectrums, one who will be the god for all mankind, one who will be a man-god like the Egyptian Pharoahs, one who will be claimed to offer salvation to man, one who will be called Jesus, the Savior, and woe unto him who does not accept this new universalized god. The temples, statues, and libraries of older cultures, older civilizations, and gods will be destroyed so that none may practice, read, or see the god of their fathers.
For knowledge of the past will be forbidden by claiming the evil satanic spirit traveled back into the past to deceive the faithful and new laws of this alleged pure faith will be called ‘Catechisms,’ ordering the faithful not to read or listen to anyone who could potentially sway them from their faith.
In the ancient Egyptian culture, the worship of the serpent began side by side with the worship of ‘Fire’ and the ‘Sun,’ and the inspired declarative statement of Saint Paul seems decisive on this subject, as he states, “When men knew God, but glorified Him not as God.” The glory of God, was transformed not only into an image made like corruptible man, but into the likeness of “Creeping Things,” or, that of the serpents. ~Romans 1:23.
Of profane writers, Sanchuniathon, the Phoenician, who is believed to have lived about the time of Joshua, says, “Thoth first attributed something of the divine nature to the serpent and the serpent tribe, in which he was followed by the Phoenicians and Egyptians. For this animal was esteemed by him to be the most spiritual of all the reptiles, and of a fiery nature, inasmuch as it exhibits an incredible celerity, moving by its spirit, without either hands or feet... Moreover, it is long-lived, and has the quality of renewing its youth, as Thoth has laid down in the ‘Sacred Books;’ upon which accounts this animal is introduced in the sacred rites and Mysteries.” ~The Two Babylons by Reverend Alexander Hislop.
The "Great Fiery Serpent" is, in addition, represented with all the emblems of royalty, with all its heads encircled with "crowns or diadems;" and so in Egypt, the ‘Serpent of Fire,’ or ‘Serpent of the Sun,’ in Greek was called the ‘Basilisk,’ that is, the “Royal Serpent,” to identify it with Moloch, whose name recalls the concepts both of fire and blood, and properly signifyiing “The King.”
The Basilisk was always, among the Egyptians, and among many nations besides, regarded as "The very type of majesty and dominion.”
The image of the serpent was worn affixed to the headdress of the great Egyptian