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What are you reading?
- Thread starter hjmick
- Start date
just started "Cold Days" by Jim Butcher......
Let me know what you think!
have you read it yet?....
Let me know what you think!
have you read it yet?....
I always read his books immediately upon release.
i just started this one and am already 3/4 of the way through it.....so far one of the better stories.....ill let you know when i am done what i thought overall....
Esmeralda
Diamond Member
The Great Gatsby
Esmeralda
Diamond Member
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
My cellphone.
sycamore row grisham
- Sep 14, 2011
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12 Years A Slave
hangover
Gold Member
- Oct 8, 2013
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Edens, Serpents, and Dragons.
Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term “Eden”? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled.*
It was said that: “The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the Hebrew image_il Gan-Eden, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraean sea.” (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.) In the Chaldean “Book of Numbers,” the location is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets it is rendered Gan-duniyas. “Behold,” says the image_il (Elohim) of Genesis, “the man is become as one of us.” The Elohim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and in another for Aleim, or priests — the hierophants initiated into the good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants was known as Java-Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent (Woman and matter), tastes of the Tree of Knowledge — the esoteric or Secret Doctrine — unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth, the “Lord of the Eden,” all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his wife image_il ‘Chitonuth our.’ ” The first Hebrew word, “chiton,” is the Greek [[Chiton]], Chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
“Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria were in
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* Vol. I., pp. 575, et seq.
Vol. 2, Page 203 THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COLLEGE.
any way cognate with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahminical Hindus.”
And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India.
“Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or proto-Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together.”
Here, the Akkadians are called “non-Semitic,” as we had insisted they were in “Isis,” which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people’s history in Jewish garb — Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle — or rather one of the chief cradles — of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim.
But this “college” and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [hedone], signifying voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra’s heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the Initiates. And according to Klaproth,
Vol. 2, Page 204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of Fo-kone-ky, places its “Garden of Wisdom” on the plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers — Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo — flowing from a common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.”
But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former — Eden Illa-ah — means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good and evil: man being the Knower thereof.
Renan and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity “on the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the Asiatic Journal* concludes that: “All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.”
That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “four-mouthed Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first mind-born sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “bower of voluptuousness” of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man occurred after the “separation.” The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldean copy.
That the Fall of man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve’s incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only a Jewish but an universal idea.
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* “Journal Asiatique,” seventh year, 1855.
Vol. 2, Page 205 FLYING CAMELS.
Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel ([[kamelomorphon]]).
A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description:* for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall “its nature and its name,” and is described as a huge serpent with a camel’s neck.
“There are no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons,” asserts Salverte,† “. . . grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents.”
There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to “flying camels.” Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, “if anything can justify the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus.”‡
We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, “the Pterodactyl” (found in Germany), “78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body.” That fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the “flying camel” of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability to build a “flying camel,” or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.
And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed palaeontography and palaeontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* See Moses Maimonides, “More Nevochim.”
† “Science Occulte,” p. 646.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, Edens
Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term “Eden”? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled.*
It was said that: “The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the Hebrew image_il Gan-Eden, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraean sea.” (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.) In the Chaldean “Book of Numbers,” the location is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets it is rendered Gan-duniyas. “Behold,” says the image_il (Elohim) of Genesis, “the man is become as one of us.” The Elohim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and in another for Aleim, or priests — the hierophants initiated into the good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants was known as Java-Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent (Woman and matter), tastes of the Tree of Knowledge — the esoteric or Secret Doctrine — unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth, the “Lord of the Eden,” all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his wife image_il ‘Chitonuth our.’ ” The first Hebrew word, “chiton,” is the Greek [[Chiton]], Chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
“Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria were in
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* Vol. I., pp. 575, et seq.
Vol. 2, Page 203 THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COLLEGE.
any way cognate with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahminical Hindus.”
And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India.
“Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or proto-Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together.”
Here, the Akkadians are called “non-Semitic,” as we had insisted they were in “Isis,” which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people’s history in Jewish garb — Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle — or rather one of the chief cradles — of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim.
But this “college” and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [hedone], signifying voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra’s heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the Initiates. And according to Klaproth,
Vol. 2, Page 204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of Fo-kone-ky, places its “Garden of Wisdom” on the plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers — Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo — flowing from a common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.”
But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former — Eden Illa-ah — means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good and evil: man being the Knower thereof.
Renan and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity “on the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the Asiatic Journal* concludes that: “All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.”
That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “four-mouthed Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first mind-born sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “bower of voluptuousness” of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man occurred after the “separation.” The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldean copy.
That the Fall of man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve’s incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only a Jewish but an universal idea.
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* “Journal Asiatique,” seventh year, 1855.
Vol. 2, Page 205 FLYING CAMELS.
Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel ([[kamelomorphon]]).
A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description:* for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall “its nature and its name,” and is described as a huge serpent with a camel’s neck.
“There are no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons,” asserts Salverte,† “. . . grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents.”
There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to “flying camels.” Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, “if anything can justify the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus.”‡
We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, “the Pterodactyl” (found in Germany), “78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body.” That fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the “flying camel” of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability to build a “flying camel,” or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.
And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed palaeontography and palaeontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas
Footnote(s) ———————————————
* See Moses Maimonides, “More Nevochim.”
† “Science Occulte,” p. 646.
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, Edens
Bill Angel
Gold Member
I just finished reading "Inferno" , The World at War (1939-1945) by Max Hastings. It is an excellent book that covers the complete history of the Second World War, and includes incisive assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of all of the combatants, especially their Generals and Admirals. The book also includes graphic first person accounts of the suffering and deprivations inflicted on the various civilian populations. Highly recommended.
Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
Nothing new, rereading "Eon" by Greg Bear. Fave sci-fi novel ever (about a future version of humans who come back to pre-21st century Earth touching off 'The Death' which was WWIII.)
Nothing new, rereading "Eon" by Greg Bear. Fave sci-fi novel ever (about a future version of humans who come back to pre-21st century Earth touching off 'The Death' which was WWIII.)
Love that book, good choice.
hangover
Gold Member
- Oct 8, 2013
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I'm reading up on how to install radiant floor heating in a house I'm building.
Very cool dude, er I mean warm. I lived in a house once that had that. It's the best. But can you have it if you have more than one floor?
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