Book Blog: The Jesus Mysteries

Jesus Mysteries

The subject of this book blog is ‘The Jesus Mysteries,’ by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. Subtitled ‘Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God?’ the answer is an overwhelming and incontrovertible ‘YES!’

The myth of a dying and resurrecting ‘Godman’ is one that can be traced back to the very dawn of humanity. Shamans would undergo a mystical experience in which they would be spiritually killed and then reborn, opening them up to higher planes of consciousness, which they would use to heal and educate their tribes.

But this myth did not disappear, only to be rediscovered 2000 years ago – it was present in just about every religion in the ancient world: mystery religions that would tell myths to the public, but only reveal the truths they encoded to the initiated.

The Godmen who prefigured Jesus, and from whom his entirely fictitious biography was cobbled together, are too numerous to list, but here are the names of just a few:

  • Dionysus
  • Osiris
  • Attis
  • Adonis
  • Mithras
  • Serapis
  • Pythagoras
  • Socrates
  • Tammuz

Jesus Christ was not an historical figure – rather, he was (and still is) a spiritual principle. He embodies the spiritual death we must all undergo, killing our lower selves, so that we can become unified with The One. None of the Pagans who worshiped the gods listed above believed them to have been historically real. They understood that they were just useful myths, symbolizing the spiritual transformation of man into immortal, all equally interchangeable.

But how was it that these great spiritual truths got corrupted into dogmatic history? The authors suggest that as Jews of the Diaspora become more intermingled with the pagan cultures in which they found themselves, they sought to make Judaism into its own mystery religion, whilst still remaining faithful to their extant scriptures. So they fabricated a Messiah, based on a reworking of Joshua from The Old Testament, to become their own Judaized godman. These original Gnostics and Essenes preached a truly mystical and spiritual version of Christianity, based on personal experience and transformation, instead of blind faith and dogmatic fervor. They were in existence centuries before Christ was even claimed to have been born.

So, if Christianity was just a recontextualization of an ancient pagan myth, why did it come to vilify paganism so thoroughly? As Christianity became corrupt, and spirituality got perverted into an inflexible, and watered-down history, it inherited the intolerance of the evil old god of The Old Testament. To the citizens of the ancient world, it was obvious that Christianity was just a re-working of pagan myths. The only way Materialist Christians could succeed was by destroying every last pagan culture and religion they had stolen their ideas from, so that their claims did truly seem to be authentic. It’s very easy to corner the market when you’ve killed the competition. And once Constantine made Christianity the state religion (without actually embracing Christianity himself,) and the emperors that proceeded him followed suit, it became easier and easier to make this happen.

And thus, The Dark Ages were born, as all the learning, philosophy, science, and attainments of the ancient world were condemned as heresy, and destroyed. Science isn’t something we invented in the last few centuries – it is something we have rediscovered from the past – a revived gift left to us by our supposedly ‘primitive’ and ‘devil-worshiping’ ancestors. It is hard not to read of the widespread destruction and intolerance authorized by the Roman Church and not feel utter horror and indignation at the righteous lies that are still being bequeathed to us. Every time I hear of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, I want to weep. And all in the name of a made-up man who openly preached compassion, tolerance, and universal love.

Just imagine how history might have played out if Gnostic Christianity and Paganism had carried on living harmoniously side by side, without being corrupted into a literal account by the Roman Church. Untold amounts of death could have been prevented; the mysteries of the past could have been preserved; the Jews would have been spared millennia of persecution and The Holocaust; Spiritualism may well have trumped over materialism; and people may have recognized that they themselves are Christ, and not been killed as blasphemers for coming to that realization.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the Truth about our past.

May all beings recognize the Christ within.


Blog: Totem Poles and The Unity of Life




This week, I had the privilege to visit The World Museum in Liverpool, where an entire exhibit on the third floor is devoted to preserving artifacts of ancient cultures all around the world. On this magical and spiritual journey, I was able to look directly into the eyes of African dance masks; tremulously admire Congolese idols used for black magic and sorcery; and regard with wonder the fold-out books of a hieroglyphic Mayan ‘dream book.’ I came face to face with statues of Vishnu and Ganesha; priceless suits of samurai armor; Buddhist hanging scrolls and Tantric deities straight from Tibet; and beheld with awesome fear relics that were never meant to be witnessed outside of ancient secret societies and mystery schools.

I was in this large, circuitous exhibit mostly by myself, with the pregnant silence only occasionally interrupted by tribal drumming and chanting bursting out of the speaker system. As in the Egyptian exhibit at Bristol, I once again had the mystical experience of being confronted with a spiritual presence far greater than myself, overwhelming me with raw emotion. This presence commanded great awe and respect, and I was repeatedly moved to press my hands together, bow, and chant, in order to properly express my deference.

But, overwhelmed and humbled though I was, nothing could have prepared me for The Totem Pole. As I rounded the corner, and was confronted with a deific figure towering above me, its face frozen in a martial rictus, I was so frightened that I had to retreat for a moment to sit down, and stitch back together the thread of my courage.

Composure regained, I tentatively re-entered the room, building myself up to it by looking at the other exhibits. But towering at between 15-20ft tall, it really was the proverbial elephant in the room, commanding every part of my being to kowtow to it with my attention.

The totem itself was a chimaerical hybrid of human, animal, and spiritual elements, effortlessly fusing a man, a killer whale, a serpent, and two mythical giants into one single, phallic entity.

Once I observed this unity, my fear began to subside. Despite its fearsome appearance, I realized that the pole was not an apotropaic structure, but a potent symbol eloquently depicting the holographic truth of the ineffable unity of all things. Man, Nature, and Heaven are not separate from one another, but are one another, interwoven so that all things are within them, and they are within all things – a true hologram.

This truth was so evident to the Native Canadian artist, Richard Hunt, that I was amazed to learn that the human head on top was actually a self-portrait. These animals, these ancestors, these myths were so much a part of him so as to actually constitute his very being.

If only we were all so in-tune with the world as to recognize it as our being, and to recognize our being as the world.

Prometheus Revisited: Stealing the Fire Without Getting Caught


Everyone is familiar with the Ancient Grecian legend concerning Prometheus’s storming of Olympus in order to bring the gift of fire down from the Heavens. But the story is by no means endemic to the mythological world of the Ancient Greeks. Parallel stories can be found on every corner of the globe. The Zulu Shaman, Credo Mutwa relates an almost identical story in his book, Song of the Stars, in which a trickster hero ascends to the heavens to get fire to warm the people, following a global cold spell in which the sun could no longer be seen as a consequence of a row with his wife, The Earth.

While this particularly variation of the story may be attributable to an historical period in which we were starved of sunlight following a massive ancient cataclysm between the earth and Venus, as posited by Immanuel Velikovsky – the traditional explanation that ethnologists and anthropologists attribute to it as an explanatory story regarding the invention of fire is absurd, and insulting to its deeper symbolic meaning.

‘Storming the Heavens’ was an important pastime to the ancients. In the classic Chinese book Journey to the West, a mischievous monkey king breaks into the palace of Heaven to gain heavenly powers, and to eat from a peach tree that will give him immortal life (sound familiar?) but gets caught by the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin and trapped inside a mountain for an immeasurable span of time, in the same way that Prometheus is tied to a rock for the rest of eternity, and is punished for his intransigence by having his organs ripped out and renewed on a daily basis.

As entertaining as they are, these are both incredibly meaningful stories, super-abundant in esoteric meaning.

“Storming the Heavens” is a reference to the astral flights of both modern and ancient shamans, achieved by meditation, drug ingestion, or torturous shamanic rituals. The shaman is a mediatrix between the astral world and his earthly community. He ‘storms the heavens’ to attain knowledge from the Akashic records, or Library of Babel, which he can use to heal and enlighten his people.

The fire he ‘steals’ is not earthly fire – why would anyone travel to space to steal fire, when it is easy to generate on Earth? – But the fire of illumination and enlightenment that is the aspiration of every spiritual seeker, which he will use to bring light into a world benighted by ignorance.

The turning away of the sun is a reference to this original period of ignorance (the true meaning of ‘original sin’ which, regrettably, mainstream Christianity has taken to mean ‘terminal sin’) – but also alludes to the necessity in meditation to turn attention away from the external world, and to focus one’s inner light on the darkness within, to the find the palace of heaven inside.

The fact of Prometheus being punished was probably a later addition by storytellers who sought to stigmatize the story’s shamanic origins and message. But it is also illustrative of one of the main pitfalls and difficulties of spiritual practice: it is not enough just go to heaven within during meditation – unless we bring it back with us, and find away to incorporate what we have learned into our lives, and the lives of everyone, then we are still chained to the rock, having our organs pecked out by the vultures of time. We must make regular trips to heaven if we are to fully understand or make sense of its infinite realms.

Interestingly, the fact of Prometheus’s disembowelment also makes it a precursor to Alien Abduction Syndrome. As many other researchers have noted, when shamans ‘storm the heavens’ whether from consuming Ayahuasca or any other method, they commonly report being operated on by spiritual beings who disembowel them, and replace their innards with crystals. Recent ingestors of the substance, as well as its chemical compound, DMT, also report being operated on by aliens, and having some sort of surgery performed on them.

Truly, the legend of Prometheus is a shamanic story, as these findings show.

Steal the fire as often as you want.

The only person who will ever punish you is yourself.