Part Iii

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BIBLE

Before moving on to Revelation and how the imagery to be found t here relates to the Great Seal's portrayal of history, I think it is important, as an introduction, to review the path which the Bible followed to acquire this imagery, thereby establishing that it was not the product of divine intervention but of natural forces of history that were misinterpreted by its authors as the handiwork of a living entity.

In fact, the full title of this site should be How the Pyramid on the Dollar Has Been Following American History and Leads to the Decipherment of the Bizarre Imagery in Revelation, because an unintended consequence of the major arcana's relationship to the 22 intervals is that it causes much of the weird allusions in Revelation to make sense.

This overview is rather involved, so those who wish to skip over this section, and move on directly to the Seal's relationship to the imagery in Revelation, may do so.

The book in which this imagery appears is one of the most enigmatic in the history of literature. It is, in fact, so controversial that it was rejected by the Catholic Church for inclusion in the Bible many times during the Bible's creation in the 4th Century before it was finally accepted.

Presumably authored (with no degree of certainty) in the 1st or 2nd Century by a scribe who has come to be known as St. John of Patmos, Revelation is presented in a literary style known as an apocalypse, wherein a scribe professes to have received a surprise visitation from an angel who then proceeds to peel back the veil of secrecy from the future and impart to him some special knowledge or divine criticism. A once-common literary device, an apocalypse was never meant to portray actual events, but to provide a framework upon which the author could present his own personal viewpoints and give them legitimization.

In the case of Revelation, the knowledge to which its author claims to have been exposed involves events surrounding the end of the world, for which reason the word apocalypse itself has evolved to mean any world-terminating event. Rife with allusions to dragons, cosmically-attired maidens, and angels, it stands alone in the New Testament canon for its usage of surreal images.

It is also the book with the most tempestuous path to acceptance.

The earliest known reference to Revelation comes from about 210 A.D. when the presbyter Origen prepared a catalogue of texts that were in common use by Christians of the day.

In about 215, the Catholic Bishop Eusebius Pamphilus produced a similar catalogue, but provided the notation that a number of texts, including the Epistles of James; Jude; 2nd Peter; 2nd and 3rd John; and Revelation, were not universally accepted; also in that year, Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius prepared an identical catalogue.

Meanwhile, the Bible itself had not yet been put together. A Christian writer by the name of Marcion had proposed one at the end of the 2nd Century, but with the stipulation that if Christians did indeed get a holy book it should leave out Hebrew scripture, on the grounds that the God of the Hebrews — portrayed in their scripture as a God of “vengeance and wrath” and “wrath and fierce anger” — was not the same as the Christian God. However incontestable his argument may have been, his recommendation was soundly rejected by the newly formed Catholic hierarchy, which ultimately declared him a heretic.

By the end of the 3rd Century, two collections of Christian scriptures had evolved, the so-called Western canon, which was used principally around Italy, Gaul [Spain], and North Africa, and the so-called Alexandrian canon, which was used mostly around the western end of the Mediterranean. But neither of these collections was standardized, causing their content to vary wildly from edition to edition, as did the wording of the texts contained within it. A presbyter by the name of Lucian did attempt to fuse the different versions into a composite which cam to be known as the Byzantine or "Received" canon, and --- for a time, though not the Bible --- this became the favored compilation within the Christian community.

Events that would lead to the creation of a bona fide Bible did not begin until 312 A.D. when, at the end of the tyrannical reign of the Emperor Diocletian, two Roman generals, Constantine and Maxentius, opposed each other on the field of battle for the right to sole rulership of the Western Roman Empire.

On the night before the encounter that would decide which of the two would sit upon the throne, Constantine had a dream (or so he would claim later) in which he saw the clouds part and from a flaming cross in the sky came a voice which said, “By this symbol you shall rule” (or words to that effect). The following day (or so he claimed) he had a version of the cross painted on the shields of all of his men and, sure enough, he won the Battle of Milvan Bridge with a smaller force.

The following year, out of gratitude for winning the battle, Constantine legalized Christianity. For the first time in 250 years, Christians were free to practice their religion openly. But as congregations came out of hiding, he was shocked to discover that nobody seemed to know what it was all about.

At the time, there was no one single group calling itself Christian. Being separated from one another, congregations had evolved along different lines: there were the Manicheans, the Marcionites, the Ebionites (the last of the Jewish Christians), the Montanists, the Gnostics, the Catholics, and groups whose names I cannot even pronounce. In addition, there were over 30 Gospels in circulation — not just the four with which Christians today are familiar with. There was the Gospel of Basilides, the Gospel of Bartholomew, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Egyptians, and the Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus, to name a few. There were also texts of other kinds, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Book of Judith, and so on — and no two texts portrayed Jesus or Christian doctrine in quite the same way, or agreed with one another on the nature of his sacrifice.

It did not help that two schools of thought had developed regarding the very nature of Jesus himself. Arius, a monastic from Alexandria, believed Jesus to have been the "highest created being" but not of a divine nature, and certainly not God in human form. A rival, Athanasius, Bishop of the Alexandrian church (not the same as the previous Bishop Athanasius of the 3rd Century), held the contrary view that Jesus was both man and god. Each garnered a devoted following.

Meanwhile, in the Gentile world, there were some three dozen religions with a distinct feature in common: each was built around the worship of a pagan savior who was born to a virgin, whose father was a god, who could perform miracles, whose birthday was celebrated every December 25th --- in short, who sounded remarkably like Jesus but with different details. And all of these religions were centuries older than Christianity.

By 325, Constantine had consolidated his power to become Emperor of both the Eastern and Western halves of the Empire, but he still ruled an Empire that was divided by religious and cultural diversity reflecting the Empire's history of conquest. What Constantine wanted was a universal belief system that would consolidate the Empire under his rule. As most Romans were Christian by this time, Christianity seemed to be the best prospect for achieving his goal.

Ultimately, in 325, Constantine (who by then had consolidated his power to become Emperor of both the Eastern and Western halves of the Empire) called for representatives of the various congregations across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire to meet at his summer palace in Nicea, Greece, and there to settle the matter once and for all — what exactly was Christian doctrine? He even offered to pay their way (which he did).

The proceedings were documented. They met in a long rectangular hall. 318 delegates showed up, along with thousand of onlookers. This was a pivotal moment in Christian history, for it would decide the direction of the religion for the next seventeen centuries. Constantine himself sat on an elevated throne; delegates representing the congregations sat in chairs around the perimeter of the room and, one by one, each one stood up and stated his case for why he believed his congregation’s version of Christianity was correct, and those of all the other congregations were wrong. There were even reports of fist fights among the attendees. But after the smoke cleared, Constantine arbitrated the matter and decided that only the Catholic point of view was correct, and that the doctrines of all the other congregations were heretical. This decision would establish Catholic Christianity as the only version of the Christian religion for the next twelve hundred years, and mark the first step in Constantine's push to establishing a universal religion for the Empire.

One can imagine how this must have gone over with the non-Catholic representatives, seeing as how Constantine himself was Catholic, as was the man overseeing the proceedings, the Bishop Hosius.

Subsequently, the council disbanded and attendees departed, leaving copies of the texts from which they taught for review by the Church fathers.

The matter settled, Constantine decided that what Christianity really needed was a guide book, a “holy book” that would standardize Christian teaching, so that the Church would no longer be plagued by this situation of having so many groups with different doctrines all calling themselves Christian; all Church fathers would have to do was compare the doctrines of any congregation against the teachings of the holy book, and any whose doctrines did not align with them would be deemed illegitimate. He even had a name for it: he wanted it called The New Roman Testimonies, which later got shortened down to simply The New Testament.

Fortunately, candidates for inclusion in his holy book had already been selected by Eusebius, the Bishop of Cesarea in Palestine, long before Constantine had proposed the creation of one. Ransacking the body of Christian documents in the libraries at Cesarea and Jerusalem, Eusebius had settled upon 18 texts for inclusion in a Christian canon, and cited them by name in a 10-volume history of the Christian religion which he had produced in the same year as the Council of Nicea. Among the texts on his list was the Book of Revelation, although its violent imagery was deemed by some at the time to be contrary to Jesus' message.

According to Eusebius --- who would, by some accounts, come to be seen as Constantine's right hand man, best friend, and spiritual adviser --- the criteria for selecting texts as acceptable were threefold: a text could be old; it could be popular; or it could express contemporary Catholic Christian teaching --- not Christian teaching as it was in Jesus' time, not as it had been in the 1st Century, but as it was in the 4th Century, by which time Christianity had evolved different doctrines, such as excluding women as teachers; embracing the concept of an afterlife, which orthodox Temple Jews had not accepted; and recognizing the Virgin Birth, originally a pagan concept. One qualification a candidate did not have to have was legitimacy --- it could have been written yesterday, but as long as it expressed Catholic Christian teaching in the 4th Century, whether it had been written by the person whose name was signed to it or not, it was acceptable for inclusion in the Bible.

In 331, six years after the Council of Nicea, Constantine sent a letter to Eusebius assigning him the task of producing a canon. “I have thought it expedient,” wrote Constantine, “to instruct your prudence to order 50 copies of the sacred scriptures to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner and in a convenient portable form by professional transcribers thoroughly practiced in their art.” To this end, Eusebius combined his collection of 18 texts with a selection of Hebrew scriptures, giving his vision of Constantine’s holy book an Old as well as a New Testament. By all accounts, his Bible was ornately rendered, but it has not survived, so the precise list of texts which it contained has been lost to time.

Eusebius died in 339, just two years after Constantine, but his proposal apparently did not satisfy Church authorities or represent the final word on a holy book on a Biblical canon, for work continued in the race to fulfill Constantine's vision of a holy book for the Christian religion. With this in mind, Church fathers went to work sifting through the dozens of documents which had been left after the Council of Nicea, selecting those which they deemed acceptable for inclusion in Constantine's proposed canon.

The people did not vote on which texts should be included inthe Bible, the Bishops did, and they were Catholic, representing a Catholic point of view. From the Council of Nicea to the final adoption of the Bible, the creation of a Bible took 72 years, or most of the 4th Century. Along the way, a succession of conclaves comprised solely of Catholic bishops selected by shows of hands the texts which were to be included. One candidate, the Gospel of Peter, supposedly missed out on inclusion by a single vote — had Bishop Serapion of Antioch voted differently, the New Testament might have had five gospels instead of only four.

Applying Eusebius’ criteria, the bishops suspected many texts that would turn up in its pages of being phony, but were accepted for inclusion anyway because they got the job done — at least in the eyes of the Church. These included the last half of the Epistles of Paul; 1st and 2nd Timothy; Titus; 2nd and 3rd John; 2nd Peter; James; and Jude. All of these were considered fake, or not written by the men whose names they bear, yet were included as part of the canon.

One of the texts which barely escaped omission was Revelation. Due to its bizarre imagery, some congregations — such as the one at Damascus — refused to accept it. As an example, in 340, the Bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, produced a catalogue in which Revelation was for the first time wholly excluded.

By 360, candidates for the new holy book had generally been decided, whereupon the Roman government, on behalf of the Church, began a campaign of disenfranchising competing versions of Christian by authorizing the arrest of anyone who owned texts other than the ones approved of by the Church. The ban was imposed on dozens of gospels, epistles, and texts of other kinds which had not made the cut — the so-called “apocryphal” works, which were declared heretical and ordered destroyed. Violators of the ban could be imprisoned or beheaded. Such action would begin a tradition of institutionalized hypocrisy that would prevail in the Christian religion for centuries. The beheading of fellow Christians owning unauthorized gospels would soon give way to the burning of pagan temples and the murderof anyone whose beliefs simply did not conform with the dictates of the Church.

It was at this point that those groups which had embraced the apocryphal works began hiding their favorite texts in various locations to prevent them from being lost. In 1945, a library of such works was uncovered in the Egyptian desert. A few years ago, a gospel was found buried in the wall of a building dating to the same time period. And it has not been uncommon since the 1800's for archeologists to open the crypts of non-Catholics from those times and find they had been buried with their favorite apocryphal gospels lying across their chests.

Meanwhile, back in the 4th Century, work on the Bible and the journey toward the acceptance of Revelation continued.

In 364, the Council of Bishops at Laodiceae produced yet another catalogue in which Revelation was omitted. In the same year, however, the Bishop of Salamis generated a list in which Revelation was conversely accepted as legitimate.

Subsequent catalogues of apocryphal and non-apocryphal texts used by Christians appeared in 375 and 380, but these, like Cyril's omitted the Book of Revelation. The former was compiled by Gregory Narianzen, Bishop of Constantinople, and the second by Philastrus, Bishop of Brixia in Venice.

In 382, 390, and 394 appeared lists by Jerome; Ruffin, Presbyter of Aquilegium; and Austin, Bishop of Hippo in Africa. These contravened the last two lists by accepting Revelation and wholly agreed with modern lists.

Constantine's vision of a universal religion was finally achieved when, in 387, 50 years after Constantine's death, Catholicism was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire. Thanks to Constantine, the Church was evolving, even at this early date, into the monster that it would become in the Middle Ages. This was followed by imperial decrees in 391 and 392 outlawing all the pagan religions which had been a part of the Roman landscape for centuries longer than Christianity. Finally, in 393, a council held at Hippo, a rough draft of the New Testament was presented for final consideration, and in 397, at the Council of Carthage on the North Coast of Africa, the final version of the Bible was adopted as the official holy book of the Christian religion.

Included in this Bible was an Old Testament which had originally been proposed by Eusebius, but the Old Testament adopted by the bishops was not Hebrew scripture but a Greek mistranslation of Hebrew scripture called the Septuagint, which had originally been put together sometime in the 3rd through the 1st Centuries B.C. by rabbis for the benefit of Hellenized Jews, or Jews who had become so absorbed into Greco-Roman society they had lost their ability to read or speak Hebrew. Because the rabbis could barely speak Greek, they made a number of errors in translation. By the 2nd Century, the Septuagint had been rejected by Jews but embraced by Christians, mostly because its mistranslations supported Christian ideas about Jesus when the original Hebrew texts would not. Recognizing its popularity, the bishops adopted the Septuagint as the official version of Hebrew scripture.

The completed Bible of 397 A.D. consisted of seven texts more than what the King James contains today, three of which would be dropped by a subsequent council in 419; the remaining four would be removed during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century. Today, for this reason, the Catholic Bible contains 70 texts and the Protestant Bible only 66. (What constitutes the "Word of God" would seem to depend on who you talk to.)

Thus, only at the end of the 4th Century A.D. did anything resembling the final form of the Bible come into being. It had not magically appeared on a rock at the end of a shaft of golden light with an angel choir singing in the background, nor had an angel come flapping down to earth with the Bible tucked under its arm, whole and complete and exactly as we see it today. Nor were all of its books, notably Revelation, recognized immediately as legitimate.

Almost immediately, the Bible went through an editing process to remove some of the more embarrassing elements of the original draft, such as references to astrology, which was accomplished by changing the Magi in Matthew to the more generic "wise men from the east," and changing the star they were following from a "star at its rising," referring to a planet in the Ascendant of a horoscope, to a "star in the east," which made no sense, since "wise men from the east" following a "star in the east" could never find their way west to Palestine --- they would end up in China. They also added a "resurrection"" story to the end of Mark, which originally did not have one; in fact, two different versions of this ending circulated in Bibles in the coming centuries. Four copies of the Bible from the 4th and 5th Centuries, the centuries in which it was put together, have survived to the present day, and comparisons of them with modern Bibles reveal the changes.

The result was a highly interpretative work, made so because it was delivered to mankind through one of the worst forms of communication, human speech. It has a front and back cover, a spine, and pages, and on those pages are words, and the words are not in some alien language that only a god would understand, they are in the same language that you and I speak. Unfortunately, there are words in every language that can have multiple meanings, making men armed with quill pens and scrolls using the language of mortals a strange choice through which a Supreme Being, after thousands of years of silence, should choose to deliver what is supposed to be the most important message in history --- as if an omnipotent god with unlimited options at his disposal had no alternative. He looked around for the most efficient way of delivering his message, and for the life of him simply could not come up with anything better. It does not glow in the dark or emit a high-pitched sound when touched that forces believers to grab their ears, and it does not strike anyone dead who lays hands on it, like the Ark of the Covenant. It has no more special powers beyond those which human beings impose upon it. It did not appear on a rock at the end of a shaft of golden light with an angel choir singing in the background, nor did an angel come flapping down to earth with the Bible tucked under is arm, whole and complete and exactly as it is today. It has been edited many times.

By the Middle Ages, the Bible's vagueness was being used by the Church to justify its own existence, arguing that believers needed the Church to interpret it for them because it was difficult to understand. It was only with the passage of time, as believers developed amnesia as to how the Bible came into being, that the Bible came to be seen (with the Church's encouragement) as the "Word of God," with every word intended to be taken literally, despite the mistranslations, errors, contradictions, and outright fabrications that permeate its pages. Adding to the controversy is the fact that it has not remained unchanged, a many theologians claim, but has gone through many incarnations.

In the seventeen centuries since its adoption, numerous attempts have been made to understand the more confusing portions of its message. Indeed, the vagueness of the Bible has served as the basis for some of the most heinous acts in Christian history. Because of its surrealistic imagery, this has been particularly so of Revelation. A notable example is the interpretation of the Seven Seals of Chapter 6 proposed by David Koresh during the siege on Mount Carmel by government agents at Waco in 1993.

Constantine never lived to see the finalized Bible; he died in 337 A.D. As he was approaching death, he had himself baptized, meaning that — even while he was deciding the direction of Christianity for the next thousand years — he had not technically been a Christian. This set a precedent that would be followed for generations to come of monarchs waiting until they were approaching death to have their sins washed away, thereby freeing them to commit whatever sins they might in life and still gain admission to heaven. Constantine himself was responsible for three people being murdered during his reign — his eldest son, his second wife, and a nephew, the first of these crimes having been committed only a year after he had overseen the pivotal council at Nicea.

Besides authorizing the creation of the Bible, Constantine also gave Christianity its first Church buildings. While members of an outlawed religion, Christians had been forced to meet in catacombs, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, or wherever they could. Deciding Christians should have temples the same way pagans had temples, he put his court architects to work designing the first churches. The design which his architects came up with is still used by Catholics today — simply remove the ornamentation and the stained glass windows and you pretty much have the design which Constantine’s architects came up with.

Another contribution by Constantine was the standardization of Sunday as the official day of the week on which Christians would worship. Before that, being a persecuted sect, Christians had not had a set day of the week on which to worship, but had met whenever they could. Constantine standardized Sunday by enacting the world’s first Sunday closing law — businesses across the Empire were required to close on Sundays to free Christians to conduct their services. He chose Sunday because — at the same time he was supporting Christianity — he had never renounced his affiliation with the cult of Apollo, a pagan cult. Since his vision before the Battle of Milvan Bridge, at which time he claimed to have seen a “flaming cross in the sky,” Constantine had come to equate Jesus with Apollo. The day of worship for the cult of Apollo was Sunday — that is why the Romans named it Sun-day.

THE SEAL AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

The relationship of the Bible to the Seal begins with the observation that the structure of the New Testament is identical to that of the Seal.

If Luke and Acts are taken to have been written by the same hand (as many Biblical scholars do), the first five books of the New Testament may be portrayed on the Seal by the four corners of the pyramid's base thus:

BOOK PG 60nu-nu-nu-nu [Seal base as MMLJ] (2).jpg

The remaining 22 books can then be represented thus:

BOOK PG 61nu-nu-nu-nu [Seal pyramid as NT] (2).jpg

If I am right, the Bishops who compiled the New Testament had the same structure in mind as those who would assemble the components of the Great Seal, essentially foreseeing a future that would be played out in real time centuries later.

THE STRUCTURE OF REVELATION

Before going over the discoveries I made about the imagery in Revelation, it is best to examine its construction.

It can be divided into sections:

Introduction (Rev. 1:1-3)

Criticisms of the Seven Churches (Rev. 1:4-3:22)

The Twenty-Four Seats and the Four Beasts (Rev. 4:1-5:14)

The "Seven Seals" (Rev. 6:1-17)

The Twelve Tribes (Rev. 7:1-17)

The "Seven Trumpets" (Rev. 8:1-9:21 & 10:7-11:19)

The "Seven Thunders" (Rev. 10:1-6)

The Cosmic Battle Between the Woman and the Dragon (Rev. 12:1-13:18)

The 144,000 (Rev. 14:1-5)

The "Seven Angels" (Rev. 14:6-15)

The "Seven Vials" or "Plagues" (Rev. 16:1-21)

The Woman on the Scarlet-Colored Beast (Rev. 17:1-18)

The "Fall of Babylon" (Rev. 18:1-24)

The White Horse (Rev. 19:1-21)

The First Death (Rev. 20:1-8)

The Second Death (Rev. 21:1-27)

The "New Jerusalem" (Rev. 21:1-27)

The "Tree of Life" (Rev. 22:1-7)

Conclusion (Rev. 22:8-21)

THE PLAGUES

And now to Revelation, which --- in keeping with my belief that each of us has within his subconscious a road map of future history --- I see as collection of foreglimpses of future events (similar to what the Founding Fathers foresaw as they were creating components of the Seal) that have simply been given misinterpreted --- that is, interpreted in the only way that a man of deep religious conviction would interpret them --- invoking God, angels, Plagues, and Trumpets and the like, when in fact no supernatural elements were necessary.

The relationship of this book to the Seal begins with the observation the last four of the Seven Vials of Chapter 16, also known as the “Plagues,” follow the trends of history in the four intervals of the Eye.

The first 12-year interval, the years from 1945 to 1957, began with the detonation of the first Atomic Bomb over Alamogordo, New Mexico, in ‘45 and ended with the launch of the first communications satellite, Sputnik, in ‘57. In the intervening years, the world was rocked by the Nuclear Arms Race: as nation after nation gained access to the Bomb, the prevailing fear was that the world was inching toward nuclear annihilation. The principal players in the drama were the United States and the Soviet Union. In the former, children were required to conduct duck-and-cover drills and to watch nuclear preparedness films in their schools. Some households even had bomb shelters constructed in their basements.

Sure enough, the fourth Plague reads: “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun, and power was given him to scorch men with fire….” (Rev. 16:8‑8)

The second interval of the Eye began where the first one left off, with the orbiting of Sputnik, and ended with the first manned landing on the moon in ’69. This interim saw the arms race augmented by a new contest to see which nation could get to the moon first, the thinking being that whichever one did so would be in a position to train its nuclear missiles back onto the earth. The resulting Space Race concluded with the launch of Apollo 11 and the placement of the first man on the moon, after which, ironically, the financial and political interests in continuing the race faded.

The fifth Plague reads: “And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was filled with darkness….” (Rev. 16:10‑11)

The third interval saw the landscape shift, in that it was dominated not by a race to the moon but by oil shortages brought about by an Arab Oil Embargo, sponsored by Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the United States’ support for Israel in the ongoing war with the Palestinians. Regions of the country saw long lines at the gas pumps, with stations routinely running out of gas altogether. Inevitably, the price of gas soared. The embargo ultimately ended when Ronald Reagan came into office. Having learned nothing from the experience, however, the United States subsequently went right back to importing 55% of its oil from the Middle East. Much of the conflict which the United States has been experiencing in that part of the world to this day began during this interval.

The sixth Plague reads: “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared….” (Rev. 16:12)

The final twelve years of the Eye (1981-1993) — the interval corresponding to the eye itself at the center of the eye-and-triangle — saw the rise of Saddam Hussein, culminating in ‘90 with the First War with Iraq, which was also known as Operation Desert Storm.

The seventh Plague begins: “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air, and there were thunderings, and lightnings, and…a great hail out of heaven…” It is describing a storm. (Rev. 16:18-21)

In tabular form, these four intervals and the trends that defined them were:

The one-to-one correlation between these intervals and the Plagues is obvious:

The first interval was dominated by the Nuclear Arms Race. The accompanying Plague refers to fire.

The second interval was dominated by the Space Race. The corresponding Fifth Plague refers to darkness.

The third interval was dominated by an Arab embargo on oil to the United States. The Sixth Plague mentions the "way" of the kings of the east.

And the fourth and last interval of the Eye was dominated by the rise of Saddam Hussein, culminating in Operation Desert Storm. The accompanying Plague refers to "thunder and lightning and a great hail out of heaven."

I am not making any of this up. As an atheist, my first instinct is to reject it. But objective inquiry is not about the automatic dismissal of an idea simply because it does not fit into one's preconceived notions, and we cannot see how they could be true, in the context of what we know at the current time. The consensus of the day does not determine the truth. It is about keeping an open mind to alternate possibilities until we have more information on which to base a conclusion, and accepting no explanation as true without adequate evidence to support it. The universe is a big place, waiting to be explored; there is more than adequate room in its boundaries for radical discoveries that haven't been made yet.

The above parallels do exit. They are there. What am I supposed to do --- ignore them?

By way of review, here is how these intervals stacked up against the last four of the Seven Plagues:

1945-1957

1957-1969

BOOK%20PG%20103%20(original)_edited_edited.jpg

1969-1981

1981-1993

1957-1969

In tabular form, the first five parts of the Plague and the events with which they correlate were:

BOOK%20PG%20122new%20(7th%20Plague)_edit

THE FIRST THREE PLAGUES

Altogether, the last four Plagues have very well described, at least in symbolic terms, the trends of history in the four intervals of the Eye.

But if the last four Plagues corresponded to the four intervals of the Eye, then the first three Plagues must have aligned with the three 12-year intervals immediately preceding those four.

Amazingly, these same three intervals just happen to have been the intervals which gave us World War I, the Stock Market Crash (with the ensuing Great Depression), and World War II.

These “Plagues," and the intervals with which they have aligned, were as follows:

THE SEVEN SEALS/TRUMPETS/ANGELS/THUNDERS etc.

Besides describing seven Plagues, the Book of Revelation also contains references to seven Seals, Trumpets, Angels, Thunders, etc. Comparisons of these with trends of history in the same seven intervals suggest that these too describe the same intervals, albeit from different vantage points.

1909

This outcome has the seven intervals of the Plagues, Seals, and Trumpets beginning from the year 1909, which those familiar with the predictive nature of the Great Pyramid will recognize as the Great Pyramid Scale Shift.

For those who are not familiar with this subject — the facts in brief are these:

The Great Pyramid, the last of the Seven Wonders of the World still standing, is located alongside the Nile River at the northernmost end of Egypt, just inside the crescent formed by the Nile Delta. It is the largest and most northerly of three pyramids on the ground-level Giza Plateau three miles west of Cairo. Its base is almost precisely aligned with the earth’s rotational axis, so precisely in fact that any variations therefrom may be attributed to the gradual tectonic rotation of the African continent through the ages. Its descending entrance passage is said to point directly toward the position in the sky in 2144 B.C. of the onetime pole star alpha Draconis, the last star in the tail of the constellation Draco the Dragon.

Egyptologists believe the Pyramid to have been built by the Pharaoh Khufu (ca. the 26th Century B.C.), due in part to the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), and in part to a solitary upside-down quarry mark in a secret cavity above its largest and most elevated chamber; otherwise, it bears no inscriptions.

Conventional archeology contends that the Pyramid had been intended as Khufu’s tomb, yet when opened in 820 A.D. by the Arab Caliph Abdullah al‑Ma’amun, a treasure-seeker, it was found to have been sealed empty by its builders: no treasure, no body, no hieroglyphics — not even an inscription providing the name of the Pharaoh who built it. The Caliph and his men had to bore around a train of granite plugs blocking its entrance, and when it was finally breached they found the Pyramid had been sealed with nothing inside. Why would a Pharaoh go to all the trouble of building the largest pyramid ever constructed without leaving some kind of calling card to show who was responsible?

Relieved of its gleaming white Tura limestone shell, the Pyramid lay virtually unexplored save by the occasional passerby until 1798, when the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, conquering Egypt, committed a team of archeologists to exploring its dimensions. Increasingly accurate surveys throughout the 19th Century determined its near-perfect alignment with the earth's axis, and that it is positioned at the exact center of the arc produced by the Nile delta:

Furthermore, the perimeter of its base, when divided by twice its height, produced the exact number of days in a Solar year (365.2422) if measured using a unit that was slightly larger than the British inch. This unit was accorded the name pyramid inch (1.0011 British inches). It is not surprising that the inch should have existed in ancient times, since it is based on the length of one of the digits of the human finger.

In the 19th Century, successive investigators Robert Menzies, Piazzi Smyth, and David Davidson carried the research further by observing that, when the floor of the ascending internal passage was measured using this scale, floor markings and ceiling lines projected to the floor supposedly produced dates of importance to human history — in essence prophesying the future course of mankind. At the top of the passage, where the passage encountered a solitary step, the scale purportedly shifted to 1 pyramid inch equals 30 days, beyond which a ceiling protrusion, when projected to the floor, produced the exact dates for the beginning and end of the British theatre of World War I — 5 August 1914 and 11 November 1918, respectively. The exact date produced by the Pyramid’s floor for this Shift in scale was 2 August 1909.

(Strangely, counting the number of days [151] from this date to the end of the year 1909, then projecting that number backward from 2 August, yields 4 March, which at the time was Inauguration Day in the United States.)

Not surprisingly, Egyptologists are unconvinced of the Pyramid’s prognosticative abilities and have attributed the absence of remains or identifying statuary in the structure to grave robbers, though how intruders might have entered the sealed monument has never been satisfactorily explained; even so, the neatness of the Pyramid’s correlations with history and the enigmatic nature of its other dimensions have continued to attract followers.

Today, why it was constructed remains a mystery. Archeologists have extrapolated that it was a tomb only because all of the other pyramids in Egypt were tombs — but there is actually no on-site incontrovertible evidence to suggest that it was ever intended for that purpose.

The Pyramid’s connection to the pyramid on the Great Seal devolves from the conscious effort made in the 19th Century to more closely liken the Seal pyramid to its Egyptian counterpart, which — like the Seal pyramid — has no capstone.

Preparatory to an engraving of the Seal in 1885, State Department archivist Theodore F. Dwight inquired of engraver Louis Comfort Tiffany & Company of New York if the pyramid on the new die would be the Great Pyramid wrought to scale. Tiffany responded that it would; though that engraving of the Seal pyramid never materialized — only the Obverse was cut — artistic renderings of the Reverse articulated Dwight’s design.

Visual evidence suggests that some elements of Dwight’s proposal were inspired not by the Great Pyramid but by the second of the three pyramids at Gizeh, the pyramid of Khufu’s son Kephren — the disproportionately large portrayal of the Eye suggesting the surviving remnant of the once all‑inclusive mantle which once covered Kephren’s pyramid:

Even before Dwight’s proposal, however, the Seal pyramid had been modeled on the edifice from Francis Hopkinson’s 50-dollar bill of 1778, which in turn had itself shown an obvious pedigree in the Great Pyramid, as Hopkinson’s inclusion of the Giza structure’s entrance shows — and, like the Great Pyramid, Hopkinson’s pyramid was missing a capstone:

On a side note, the Pyramid in Egypt is separated from the Mayan Chichen Itzu pyramid of upper Yucatan by exactly 120 degrees of longitude, or a third of the earth longitudinally. No proof has ever surfaced, however, that the Mayan and Egyptian cultures had ever had contact, although the mummy of the later pharaoh Rameses II has been found to contain traces of cocaine, which is derived from the South American coca bean.

While the coincidence of the Scale Shift with the beginning of the Seven Plagues does not exactly validate claims about the Pyramid’s predictive nature, it nonetheless is curious that the Plagues/Seals/Trumpets etc. of Revelation seem to have begun from this iconic beginning of the Pyramid’s supposed timetable.

More on the Pyramid and its predictive architecture will be covered in an upcoming section.

JUDGMENT BY GEOMETRY

So what is "Judgment" in the context of a world in which events are geometrically placed? In religion, "Judgment" is defined as the verdict or verdicts rendered by an all-powerful being. In a world in which the placement of events in history is determined by geometry, "Judgment" would have to be the natural consequence of the course upon which the geometry responsible for those events has set those involved, whether it be an individual, a nation, or all of mankind. What that consequence is depends upon the direction in which the geometry is going.

In other words, to one who is devoutly religious, events which traditionally might be seen as the handiwork of a Supreme Being would in reality be the products of the structure of history misinterpreted as something else. The imagery portrayed in the Bible may itself be an example of this --- merely the misinterpretation of its author's foreglimpse of the future structure of time in terms that he could understand.

THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

Preceding the Seven Plagues in the Apocalypse or Revelation is a "cosmic battle" between a "woman clothed with the sun" and an equally ethereal "dragon whose tail draws the third part of the stars of heaven and casts them to the earth." This imagery appears in Rev. Ch. 12.

Since no such creatures exist, both must be allegorical or completely made-up. Since we can go nowhere with the allusions if we assume they are made up, let us assume that they are allegorical.

If we assume they are allegorical, this is what we find:

In the alignment of cards to intervals, the cards corresponding to the first three intervals after 1993 perfectly parallel the components of the “woman” when the cards of the major arcana are aligned with the intervals into which the Seal divides American history.

In consecutive order, these cards are THE MOON; THE SUN; and JUDGMENT:

The cards with which these intervals align are:

BOOK%2520PG%252048%2520(original)_edited

When these are juxtaposed against the components of the woman in Revelation, the parallel between them becomes obvious:

The order of the woman's components is the same as the order of the three cards --- with the sun in the middle, the moon at the bottom, and the crown of twelve stars (a specific twelve-year period) on top.

Aligned with the intervals with which these cards also line up, the woman's components become representative of the intervals as well:

Ultimately, with the woman's components defined this way, the relationship between the intervals, cards, and components of the woman becomes:

Thus, in the same way the Treasure of Treasures parallels the eagle side of the Seal, the "woman clothed with the sun" parallels the cards representing the first three intervals after 1993, thereby identifying the "woman" with a timeframe --- the first 36 years after 1993.

THE DRAGON

The parallel of the “woman clothed with the sun” to the cited cards gives meaning to the woman. But a second discovery, independent of her parallel with the cards, gives meaning to her cosmic adversary, the dragon.

It comes in two parts.

First, no one seems to have noticed, but the United States sweeps out exactly one-third of the globe longitudinally: from the easternmost edge of Maine, at 67 degrees West Longitude, to the last island in the Aleutians belonging to Alaska (Attu) at 187 degrees West Longitude. (Actually, Attu falls at 173 degrees East Longitude, or 7 degrees over the line into the Eastern Hemisphere, but the latter is equivalent to 187 degrees West Longitude.) 67 degrees West Longitude to 187 degrees West Longitude — the difference is exactly 120 degrees, or exactly one-third of a circle.

Why no one ever seems to have noticed this is beyond my comprehension — an alien from another planet would think we had laid out the United States this way on purpose, in homage to some god or something.

A consequence of this phenomenon is that the earth can be divided into three equal portions or “tritaspheres,” like slices of an orange, with the United States representing one complete third. If done, the dividing line between the remaining two thirds will turn out to fall almost precisely on the Ural Mountains — a North‑South mountain range which separates Asia from Russia.

120 degrees from 67 W Longitude to 187 W Longitude

At the time of this discovery, I did not know what to make of it — so I filed it away and forgot about it.

Several years later, however, while I was looking over a map of the Northern and Southern constellations, my eye was drawn to the constellation DRACO THE DRAGON snaking across the night sky. From childhood, I remembered that DRACO was special in that it wraps around the earth’s precessional axis.

So what is that?

As the earth spins on its axis of rotation, it simultaneously “wobbles,” like a top. One 360-degree revolution or “precession” takes about 26,000 years. The axis around which this action takes place stands exactly perpendicular to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and is aimed at a particular constellation — DRACO THE DRAGON.

The effect of this on the heavens is that — of all the constellations — DRACO alone stands in place, spinning round and round through the passing millennia while all the other constellations revolve around it like a carousel. The spot around which DRACO rotates is the point upon which the precessional axis converges, and it is DRACO alone that occupies this place of honor.

The relevance of this constellation to my second discovery is that — just as the United States sweeps out one-third of the earth longitudinally — DRACO sweeps out one-third of the night sky: from the last star in its tail to the mean bend in its neck, DRACO sweeps out 8 hours of Right Ascension out of 24 — the astronomical equivalent to a third of the sky longitudinally.

This begs the question — what would happen if the third of the night sky swept out by DRACO were aligned with the third of the earth swept out by the United States? What places on earth would DRACO and the other constellations correspond to?

So I tried it — I tried aligning DRACO with the third of the earth swept out by the United States — and the experiment went nowhere. For one thing, DRACO did not fall directly on the United States but on the boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Moreover, just as DRACO produced no spectacular alignment, there were no spectacular correlations between the other constellations in the night sky and places here on earth, as I had hoped.

I was about to give up on the idea when I remembered that there were still two more “thirds” on the other side of the world apart from the one swept out by the United States. So I tried rotating the earth one third-turn to the west and aligning DRACO with the next third of the earth west of that swept out by the U.S.

And that was when the magic happened.

Do this, and DRACO ends up spanning the third of the earth occupied by Asia --- encompassing North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Siberia.... Have you ever seen a Chinese parade that did not have a dragon? The Gobi Desert is also there; one can walk along the ground anywhere there and see dinosaur skeletons exposed to the eye by erosion. Some historians have even surmised that the Chinese fixation with dragons originated with these skeletons.

But the correlations do not end there. Aligning the third of the night sky occupied by DRACO with the third of the earth swept out by Asia results in DRACO and three adjoining constellations corresponding to places here on earth that are associated with the same four animals; to wit:

DRACO, as stated, ends up aligning with Asia.

URSA MAJOR, the “Great Bear,” ends up falling over Russia; Russia is traditionally known as the “Russian Bear.”

LEO the Lion ends up corresponding to Africa — so where do lions come from?

And LYNCIS, “The Lynx,” ends up falling over Europe; the animal after which it is named is native to Europe and is also known as the “European Wildcat.”

THE DRAGON'S COMPANION

Evidence that we are on the right track came from Rev. 13:1-2, which goes on to describe the dragon as having a tripartite companion made up of the components of three other animals:

By a strange coincidence, these are the same three animals portrayed by the foregoing constellations adjoining DRACO: the Lynx, the Bear, and the Lion --- with the leopard standing in for the Lynx. (Note: throughout the Bible, all cats are called leopards except lions.)

From space, this is how the four constellations would align with places on earth:

THE CARDINAL SHIFTS

Ultimately, the dragon and its three-part companion are recounted in greater detail in Daniel 7:1-28:

The exact meaning of this imagery is debatable, but the introductory reference to the “four winds of heaven” adds a dimension to the sky-to-earth projections of DRACO, URSA MAJOR, LYNCIS, and LEO onto Asia, Russia, Europe, and Africa: by observing the ways in which the four constellations come down on the regions with which they align we see that the constellations do not hover directly over the places to which they correspond, but are slightly offset by the four cardinal points of the compass: for instance, DRACO does not come down on Asia exactly, but stands over northern part of Asia; the GREAT BEAR, “Ursa Major,” does not stand directly over the heartlands of central Russia, but looms over southern Russia; the LYNX is not suspended over central Europe, but hangs over western Europe; and LEO does not straddle central Africa, but stands over eastern Africa (or at least the eastern portion of as much of Africa that is north of the Equator); in other words, each constellation drifts from concentric alignment with the land with which it is associated by one of the four cardinal points of the compass, or the “four winds…of heaven.” And Daniel, in the first line, does in fact connect the four “creatures” with the four cardinal directions.

STANDARD MAP REARRANGED etc w DRACO, URSA, LEO, & LYNX w lbls &.jpg

THE DRAGON REVISITED

So --- how again is the dragon described in Rev 12?

It is an instruction! It is telling you to (A) align DRACO with a third of the earth in a certain way and then (B) project it down onto the earth. When you do this you get a correlation between if you do this you will get a correlation between DRACO, along with three adjoining constellations and places here on earth that are associated with the same animals. If the dragon in the cosmic battle is DRACO, then DRACO in the imagery becomes a part of the world — Asia.

Substitute this back into Rev 12 and 13, and the story takes on a wholly different meaning:

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

Take the dragon to be Asia, and the “woman” to be the first 36 years after 1993, and the entire “cosmic battle” can be taken as a prognostication — that, sometime within the first three 12-year intervals after 1993 (the "woman"), a leader will be born (or come onto the scene in some way) who will somehow come to rule the world with a “rod of iron,” but that some faction in Asia (the dragon) — or some nation inside Asia — will do something to try to stop it from happening. It does not specify, however, whether this leader will be good or evil.

The story goes on to say that, after the child is “born,” the “woman” will take some sort of evasive action to protect him, and that the duration of this action would be some 1,260 days:

If the “woman” is the timeframe between 1993 and 2029, the message conveyed here could be that something is supposed to happen lasting 1,260 days that will assist the “woman” after this ruler has made his appearance.

Of course, no proper interpretation is possible without more information, but the "eagle" in the portent is reminiscent of the United States which, through much of its history has been regarded by the rest of the world as mostly a wilderness; in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west to explore it. The "time, and times, and half a time" comes off as simply a reiteration of the 1,260 days, which is equal to three-and-a-half years measured in 30-day months.

THE FLOOD FROM CHINA

Ultimately, the story stipulates that what the dragon is supposed to do is try to stop this ruler from coming to power.

Needless to say, only time will tell if these interpretations are accurate, or if the allusions in Revelation are portents at all, but events at this writing make the flood sound eerily familiar. Since January 2020, a global pandemic originating in China (Huanan province) has swept the world, killing about a million people worldwide.

If the “flood” is this pandemic from China, the 1,260 days could be the length of time of its duration before it ends, or before the earth "opens her mouth and swallows it up.” The dragon — identified here as Asia — is then said to go off to engage in some kind of war.

PART IV

THE DAY OF THE BEAST

For PART IV, return to the HOME page, then go to PART IV