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An Omen For Armageddon

by Vincent Bridges

Table of Contents

Part One - Signs And Portents In The Sky

Part Two - The Unique Creation, Strange Life & Sudden Death Of The Goddess Columbia

Part Three - Weishaupt's Illuminated Goddess

Part Four - 23 Skidoo And Kick Out The JAMs: The Illuminati Elves At Work And Play...

Part Five - Young, English And Rich: Cairo, 1904, On The Eve Of Armageddon...

Part Six - "Tsadi is NOT the Star..." The Star Goddess Speaks...

Part Seven - The Center of the Labyrinth

Omen Update - Nostradamus' Comet

I am a child of the space age, starry eyed and wonder fuelled on all the science fiction archetypes a 1950s childhood could produce. To me, it was always obvious that we were living in mythological times.

On Saturday morning, February 1st, 2003, at just after 9 AM eastern time, our space age aspirations created a mythic event with cosmic ramifications, visible in the skies as a comet-like arrow of fire exploding and dissolving into a rain of death. Our collective unconscious, numbed by the impending rush to what could be an apocalyptic conflict in the Middle East, has yet to absorb the implications of what we all witnessed via television. The mythic symbolism is so powerful we feel an innate taboo against talking about it directly. And so it seeps deeper and deeper into the unconsciousness of us all.

By Monday, some folks out there, from very different perspectives, were beginning to suspect that there was indeed a mythic level to the space shuttle disaster:

"It is time for the American people to begin meditating about what USA policies in the Middle East are doing to the Palestinian people and about what George Bush is about to do to Iraqi civilians. There is a God! Many call him Dios and others call him Allah. Dios, Allah and God is the one supreme universal being, Creator of the entire universe. He does from time to time intervene in our affairs. He works in mysterious ways but always He gives signs.

"The brilliant Jewish (sic) 'explorer of inner space' Carl Jung wrote of synchronicities in the lives of human beings and of the 'collective unconscious.' Synchronicities, according to Jung, are those pesky little 'meaningful coincidences' that often occur during times of crisis. Perhaps the 'meaningful coincidence' involving the Jewish astronaut and Palestine, Texas is a way of God talking to us." (Ernesto Cienfuegos - La Voz de Aztlan, 2/3/03)

And later that day, John Hogue, one of the world's foremost Nostradamus scholars, chimed in with this:

"It is my belief that last Saturday's space shuttle disaster (1 February.) is the first illumination of a succession of events coming in the next few months concerning Century 2 Quatrain 62."

"Nestled in the grass in a field in eastern Texas, lies a mission patch from the fallen space shuttle Columbia. It somehow had miraculously survived its fiery fall out of the morning sky. The names of the seven heroic astronauts who died make an outline of their space shuttle. A glowing trail like a comet's tale streaks through the shuttle's outline ending in a many-pointed star. It is a star very similar to that filmed by a hundred amateur video cameras across Texas as it fell to earth like a flaming comet. Mabus will soon die, then will come, A horrible undoing of people and animals... when the comet will pass.

"Is this the chilling portent of things to come for America if they should hurry off to war?

"Destiny holds it breath as America primes its war machine." (John Hogue, email from Hogue Prophecy Bulletin, 2/3/03)

Interesting isn't it, that such different perspectives and ways of organizing the synchronistic component of the archetypal event could arrive at basically the same conclusion? It is a bad omen, an ill augury, for America and its on-rushing charge to war.

Last fall, just after the equinox, I wrote an article entitled After Judgment Day. I planned to post it on the follow-up page to the Djed Raising event, but kept hesitating. Now, I think I know why...

In the spring of 1999, soon after I returned from a research trip in France, I followed and matched events in the Balkans to Nostradamus' quatrains and thereby had a revelation. The quatrains were not designed to predict events, but to point to places and events where the larger forces that drive history took one path rather than another. Which path was which could be determined by studying the events in terms of the prophetic pattern of possible futures laid out by Nostradamus.

Nostradamus then was giving us a blueprint to the convergence points of possible histories. By being aware of which events described in the quatrains actually occurred, it should be possible to determine which stream of the future we were heading down. The Balkan conflict was a key switch point, and as the events played out, we could see the range of possible future actions taking shape around us. Nostradamus' "fantasy "of a possible world conflict erupting from the Middle East was rapidly becoming more and more a reality.

It was also not lost on me that the only two numerical dates given by Nostradamus, 1792 and 1999, were significant in the pattern we had uncovered. The first date, 1792, is very close, just slightly more than 1/36th of a degree, to the point where the galactic meridian and the zenith/nadir of the sky at the latitude of Cairo began to align. This would be easily discernable with a good armillary sphere and so within the reach of Nostradamus or any other astronomer. The second, 1999, no matter how we count it, falls within the critical period described by Fulcanelli as the season of the catastrophe. If we consider that the MABUS archetype, Nostradamus' Third Anti-Christ, is a contraction of the names of the three principle players, OsaMA, SaddAM and BUSh, then the events of 9/11/2001 and afterward indicate that the future is collapsing into the very dire pattern glimpsed by Nostradamus.

Adding to this is the fact of America's emergence as a new imperial power on a level that goes far beyond anything ever seen before. By considering a pre-emptive strike on a sovereign nation because it might, at some future point threaten the country's security, America reveals itself as just another power hungry Empire as morally bankrupt as it is politically corrupted. And this action of course appears destined to bring on the global conflict with Islam foreseen by Nostradamus. Some of the worst-case scenarios for our unilateral action against Iraq read much like the worst future described by Nostradamus' quatrains. Is this accident, synchronicity, or what?

Nostradamus, however, does give us a few clues, signposts to watch out for as the momentum for war builds. In Century II, Quatrain 62, the quatrain where Nostradamus dubs the Third Anti-Christ Mabus, we are given a sequence. First a "comet" then the death of Mabus triggers a grisly vengeance. This suggests Century VII, Quatrain 77, where the death of the Third Anti-Christ either ends or provokes a 27 year long Armageddon.

MABUS, our unholy trinity of protagonists, appears to be intrinsically linked. The death of any one of them, or at least the sudden death of either Bush or Saddam, might just provoke a vengeful cataclysmic confrontation that would end in the very worst of all Nostradamus' possible futures. The "comet" could be the leading edge of the galactic superwave, or it could be a missile attack on Bagdad or Jerusalem, or perhaps, even Washington...

But this is not the only quatrain about a "comet." One of the most interesting such quatrains, and one that perhaps dates the comet referred to in II/62, is Century II, Quatrain 46 (46-62 inclusive = 17). It speaks directly of renewing the "great motor" of the centuries, a reference to the equinox and the galactic alignment, and says that after a cycle of great misery, an even greater one approaches. Blood, iron and milky-looking toxic materials will rain down as a fire is seen streaking across the sky with a blazing trail of sparks. This clearly suggests a rocket, and even the number of the quatrain, 46, points to 1946, the year America appropriated Von Braun and the German V-2 program, the precursor of both the ICBM and the Atlas V.

Therefore, Nostradamus is presenting a schema or template for the immediate future. A sign or portent in the sky will signal the beginning of the Final Crusade, our ill-conceived aggressive war on Iraq and its consequences. Perhaps it will be the close approach of a comet, or even more likely it will be a missile strike launched by one side or the other that leads to the death of Mabus and the resulting terrible consequences. Quatrain II/46 suggests that it will happen soon, perhaps, given the necessities of war in the region, in January or February... (written 10/12/2002)

If, as John Hogue speculates, the space shuttle disaster was the "comet," which seems likely given II/46, then sometimes in the next hundred days or so (02/01/03 to 05/10/030), we can expect that one of the three Mabuses will die, and that the resulting vengeance will touch off the catastrophe of the Final Crusade, Armageddon itself. A chilling thought to be sure...

However, the symbolic harbinger of that approaching disaster is in its way a message. The space shuttle disaster happened for reasons that we may never fully understand, but the event itself crystallized a pattern of synchronistic occurrences, facts, numbers, connections and connotations, that gave it a mythic proportion in and of itself. Nostradamus used, in his cryptic way, this mythic dimension to mark an unmistakable turning point in human existence. As we live through it, we could not help but be aware of the meaning of the "comet." This, Nostradamus considered, could only help us understand, and perhaps avoid, the cataclysm so quickly approaching on its heels.

The hidden 17 connecting the two quatrains in Century II demonstrates that Nostradamus had an eerie degree of insight, or a powerful sense of synchronicity. By following this strange numerical clue, and others like it, we can unravel the mythic meanings behind the space shuttle Columbia's explosive end between Palestine and Tyler, Texas. And by doing so we find echoes and symbolic reflections of all the forces at work in the approaching Armageddon.

Part Two - The Unique Creation, Strange Life & Sudden Death Of The Goddess Columbia

Almost from the moment the New World was discovered, it was seen in mythological terms as an exotic goddess, an Indian Queen dressed in feathers and furs ridding an exotic beast like an armadillo and armed with a tomahawk. She summed up the desires of the 16th and 17th century European conquerors for adventure and strangeness, and of course, freedom and eroticism unavailable at home. The wealth and power created by the conquest of this New World Goddess would first enrich the Old World and then turn it upside down, generating a series of world conflicts, beginning in the mid 18th century, that continues in the confrontations of today.

The Catholic south adapted the idea of the Goddess of the New World into the ever-expanding hagiology of the Catholic Church. The Virgin of Guadeloupe allowed the archetype to become personal, a connection to the land and its ancestors, while joining a larger universalist vision inside the Church. In the largely Protestant north, things went quite differently.

The 17th century's Indian Goddess became a tamer Indian Princess, modelled on the archetypal story of Pocahontas. This version, while remaining exotic, was accessible and nubile, open to the embraces of the conqueror. As the 18th century passed, and America grew more developed and its people more educated, the Indian princess gained a touch of Greek elegance. "By the late 1790s," folk-art historian Nancy Jo Fox comments, "it was not clear whether a feathered Indian Princess had changed into a Greek goddess or whether a Greek goddess had placed feathers or plumes in her hair."

Liberty & the Eagle, which stands above and behind the speaker's chair in the House of Representatives.

This transformation coincided with the revolution in America. As a new kind of society in the New World struggled for its life against the power of the Old World, a new archetypal goddess figure emerged in the American collective unconscious. This transformation was guided and shaped by the esoteric awareness shared by the core group of the Founding Fathers. The occult history of the American Revolution has yet to be written, but there was indeed a preponderance of Masons involved on both sides of the conflict. Washington, Lafayette and Cornwallis, for instance, all belonged to the same regimental Masonic lodge.

These esoterically minded Founding Fathers saw "America" as a kind of magical future for the human race, when the archetypes that had in the past been mediated by King and Church would be democratically available to all citizens. This would in fact create, if successful, a kind of psychic protection against "tyranny." No king or demagogue could grab the symbolic current of a freely archetypal democracy and make it subservient to his will. Or so they thought...

The archetype of a new goddess of liberty first emerged in relation to George Washington. In 1775, Phyllis Wheatley, a slave in New England, wrote a poem praising George Washington as a true son of the goddess of Freedom. In the early years of the revolution, this Lady Liberty meshed with the Indian Princess and the Greek goddess Athena, patron of the classical models of democracy such as the city-state of Athens to become, in the poetry of Phillip Freneau, the synthomorphic goddess Columbia.

This new image of the goddess Liberty struck a responsive chord in the collective unconsciousness, both in America and in Europe. France would eventually reply with her own version of the new goddess, monumentally mounted in New York Harbour as the Statue of Liberty, with smaller versions in Manhattan and Paris. This Liberty has a torch, a stone tablet and a halo of sun spikes echoing the Apollonian Colossus of Rhodes that inspired it. It is a very classical Liberty, with few attributes specific to the New World.

But the American view of Lady Freedom, the new goddess Columbia, retained a more deliberate kind of synthetic form. The ideas that animated Columbia can be seen in her attributes, that is the objects or symbols that are displayed with her. She is most often shown with an eagle, broken chains and pottery, a cornucopia, images of George Washington, a laurel wreath, a liberty pole and cap, a liberty tree, an olive branch, a rattlesnake, a shield and a stone tablet. The statue of Columbia behind the speaker's chair in the House of Representatives is a fine example. In this one we see the Eagle, and on the other side a snake coiled around a Greek column.

By the 1850s, the archetype of Lady Freedom, the synthetic goddess Columbia, had come to represent America itself. As the designs were finalised for the new dome of the Capitol Building, the new temple of democracy, the architect, Thomas U. Walker, included a monumental statue of the goddess Columbia to cap the dome. Thomas Crawford, a classically trained American sculptor living in Italy, submitted a design for "Freedom triumphant in War and Peace" which, after modification by then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, was accepted. Crawford's original design included a Phrygian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, and the very idea of freed slaves was hard for Davis to swallow. Crawford changed it to a Roman helmet, crested with eagle feathers, thereby retaining some of the original native flavour of the Indian Goddess.

A full size plaster model was finished just before Crawford died in 1857. The model's subsequent adventures before arriving in Washington are nothing short of miraculous, surviving shipwrecks and other disasters. Work on the casting of the statue began as the United States lurched unevenly toward civil war. Halted in 1861 as war erupted, the casting was completed by late 1862. Work on the Capitol Dome was finished enough to allow its erection on top of the dome to be symbolically completed at precisely 12 noon on December 2nd, 1863.

A quick glance at the astrology of that moment in time explains why it was so carefully chosen and orchestrated. At that moment, a grand square is formed of the Moon, the North and South Moon nodes and the ascendant, all falling on the proper kerubic signs to form the cube of space of the galactic alignment, the cusps of Aquarius/Pisces, Leo/Virgo, Sagittarius/ Scorpio, and Gemini/Taurus, and highlighting, with the head and tail of the dragon, the Moon nodes, the dragon axis of the galaxy. Overlaid on this is a grand trine of Venus, Uranus and the ascendant.

This strange arrow shaped telescoping of seven points into six is echoed in the odd shape of the neo-Roman headdress on the statue, and at noon on December 2nd 1862, as the head was being bolted in place facing east toward the ascendant horizon, this shape was mirrored in the stars. To the east lay the rising cusp of Aquarius/Pisces, symbol of the new age, the new aeon. Above, at its zenith, was the Sun, conjunct with Mercury, combining power with wisdom. Behind, to the west, was the waning Moon, just on the horizon at the cusp of Leo/Virgo. And just in case we didn't completely understand the metaphor, the rising horizon of the new age, the ascendant, is tied in to the trine of Venus and Uranus, saying that this moment is the dawn of the goddess, Venus, of the new age, Uranus, discovered in 1782 just as the Revolution in America was won.

This synchronicity could hardly have been an accident, yet who could have planned it, and who chose the exact time, is lost in the bureaucratic mists of time. Keep it in mind though, because it is a strangely synchronous symbolic code for the moment in time when Columbia would begin to awaken...and perhaps a clue to the moment of her sacrificial destruction.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Columbia became more of an icon than an archetype; her form graced everything from political cartoons to flatware. As late as the 1940s, Columbia was still a viable symbol of America, used on coins and in official art. In the post-war world however, it was Columbia's eagle that faced down the Communist bear and won both the space race ("The Eagle has landed...") and the Cold War, while Columbia herself became ever more remote and removed from the world.

This was symbolised in 1981 when the first of the new fleet of reusable space shuttles was christened "Columbia." The goddess of Freedom, "triumphant in peace and war," became the new symbol of our military and commercial exploitation of space. The Newer World was out there, in space, just waiting for a new generation of conquistadors to discover it. Columbia, as a symbol, had come full circle.

The space shuttle Columbia performed flawlessly, flying the first five missions and alternating thereafter with the newer craft as they came on line. She was on her 28th flight when she exploded, completing as it were a moon cycle of missions, remaining a goddess to the very end.

But, a few months before her fiery end over Texas, the goddess had begun to awaken, at least on an astral level...

Over the fall equinox of 2002, Fulcanelli's mid point of the season of the catastrophe and Nostradamus' turning of the great motor of the centuries, a mystic by the name of Steve Prellwitz had an encounter with the newly awakened goddess Columbia. Mr. Prellwitz, whose work can only be found in the most obscure lacunae of the Internet, is completely sincere and apparently honest in his reporting of his experiences.

This suddenly made complete sense to me, as I remembered that the city of Washington, DC was in fact constructed as an energy grid designed to give birth to the sleeping Goddess, Columbia, who was to be the new consciousness of the Earth itself.

I came to the bottom of the steps and found myself in a large circular chamber. The floor was a huge map of the stars, laid out to express the galactic center alignment now occurring. The light within the torch was now blazing like a star, and the third frequency of my perceptions was filling almost all of my mind's eye.

Even though I was not exactly clear on where that would be, the torch seemed to be pulling me to the right spot.

Again I was fed the strange words of an unknown tongue. As I spoke them the figure of a beautiful naked woman appeared on the floor next to me. She had long blonde hair, which seemed to glow of if it were really made of light.

"Columbia!" I said forcefully. As I spoke, that weird third level of my awareness ceased, faded away, and she opened her magnificent blue eyes.

The Goddess rose and stretched, Her bare breasts a sight of perfect beauty too wonderful to describe. Light glowed from Her head, Her pubic region and under Her arms, casting Her form in a soothing aura. As I stood there in awe, She smiled.

"America," She said in soft, musical voice. Then She came to me and grasped the torch. Her hands closed over my own and we shared a moment of silent communion. Inside the light, my second self seemed more real to me. I was more looking at Steve than looking AS Steve.

Columbia took the torch from me. I made no effort to resist. In the light, the other me knew that it was the right thing to do.

She held it in Her right hand, raising it above Her head. As She did this, a book appeared in her other hand. It was silver and had the year 2002 written on its cover in gold.

Then I heard a tortured, frantic scream from above. Adam Weishaupt fell from the darkness and landed in a confused heap next to us. He writhed on the floor, hissing and spitting, as he metamorphosed into his evil reptilian form, which resembled a velociraptor.

Columbia looked down, as the light from Her torch flowed out and then engulfed him. As She continued to smile the light increased, causing the raptor-thing to squirm even more, fighting for his life against the powers of the awakened Goddess. Then there was a startling explosion as the reptilian creature split from its human host. The soul of President Weishaupt, looking again like his normal form, was separated from the raptor, which melted into a heap of goo.

"Free at last!" he screamed with joy, and turned to Columbia, kneeling at her feet.

As the goddess noted to Steve, the fall equinox of 2002, with its galactic cube alignments, acted as the trigger to release the sleeping or imprisoned goddess. Remember, the moment of her binding to the US Capitol dome marked a lunar arrangement of the cube of space, over laid by a Venus/Uranus trine with the ascendant. The fall equinox marked a solar alignment of the cube, thus signalling a transition from passive binding to active engagement. The key feature, astrologically, of the fall equinox was the double grand trine in Air and Fire forming a near perfect hexagram. Between two points of the hexagram, Venus formed a square aspect with Neptune and Jupiter, key planets in the double trine. This reproduces the arrangement at Columbia's installation, except instead of the ascendant as the central point, signifying a focus on the future, the focus here is on Venus, the goddess herself, signalling an awakening or animation of the archetype.

The ascendant on the fall equinox of 2002 was also important to the Columbia arrangement. The alignment of Moon nodes, head and tail of the dragon, on the ascendant also falls along the galactic axis, but on the fall equinox, the alignments are reversed in both orientation and alignment - that is upside down and backwards as if viewed through a refracting globe - from the moment of Columbia's installation. We can think of this as turning a key in a lock, or reversing the polarity of the flow. The astrology, even in this simplistic way, clearly shows that the moment of the archetype's activation, its release from bondage, was keyed to a reversal of the energetic pattern of its binding..

But there was a disquieting note. On the fall equinox, Pluto was conjunct the south Moon node in almost the same position the Sun/Mercury conjunction occupied in the installation chart. This sounds a cautionary note; the next Venus/Pluto conjunction on the natal Sun could be very bad for the newly emerging goddess... Such a conjunction occurred on January 23, 2003, one week after the shuttle was launched.

The astrology of the moment the space shuttle Columbia reached orbit, calculated as midnight, January 17th, GMT, also eerily echoed the moment of the monument's installation. A grand trine of the ascendant, Uranus and Saturn formed, overlaid by the grand square of Sun, Moon, the asteroid Lillith and the ascendant. The major shift from the moment of installation falls in the grand trine. Uranus and Venus trine symbolized the goddess in service to the new age, "novus ordo seclorum," but Uranus and Saturn trine can be seen as a warning that the karma of the New World Order is about to come due.

And so it does. The astrology for the moment of the space shuttle Columbia's fiery end shows the signs of disaster when related to the moment of Columbia's installation. First Mars in fiery Sagittarius falls on the installation's natal conjunction of Sun, Mid-Heaven and Mercury, directly pointing to a disaster for the symbolic reality of Columbia. From the original grand trine, Venus and Saturn have traded places with Uranus, indicating a sacrificial quickening of karma involving the goddess. And most unsettling of all, Venus had almost passed the conjunction with Pluto, which occurred on the 23rd of January and was linked to Pluto only by their mutual conjunction to the Mid-Heaven. We can perhaps think of this last connection as putting a stop or an end to the transit itself; and also bringing the end of the shuttle Columbia, and perhaps, the archetype from which it was drawn.

Since the instant of the disaster also sported a conjunction of Sun, Moon and Neptune, we can see how it had such a deep and universal impact. Our conscious and unconscious minds are both engaged, and joined at that instant to the mass consciousness of the planet. The destruction of the space shuttle Columbia could not fail to have vast and long reaching consequences on the psyche of humanity. It was foreshadowed in its stars.

We have progressed from the prophecies of Nostradamus to the astrology of a synthomorphic goddess' birth, awakening and death, and yet we have taken only the first few halting steps into the labyrinth of synchronicity and strangeness surrounding the space shuttle disaster. Sensing greater wonders still to be found in the grisly deaths of seven of the planet's brightest minds, let us arm ourselves with the irrational and plunge ahead toward the beast at the epicenter of the maze.

Mr. Prellwitz' account of his encounter with the goddess Columbia concludes with a climactic confrontation between the goddess and President Weishaupt in which Weishaupt is freed from alien lizard-like beings who are controlling him. In this one metaphor, we glimpse the true genius of Prellwitz' vision. In the realm of the collective unconscious, any symbolism with juice is fair game.

The introduction of Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, takes us around another corner of the maze, and strange as it may seem, we can now begin to sense a larger pattern. Suddenly, the bare facts of history, the esotericism of the founding fathers, the creation of a faux goddess identified with the new republic, the care lavished on the installation of the statue on the Capitol Dome, and the number of synchronicities concerning the space shuttle Columbia's last flight, loose their solidity and became vague wisps of mysterioso steam marking the passage of the Illuminati elves as they arrange and re-arrange reality for their amusement, and our amazement.

The Apotheosis of George Washington, in the top of the dome in the U.S. Capitol.

And so, ever vigilant for the whisper of the elves and the sharp burnt metal tang of mystery on the breeze, let us go even deeper into the labyrinth...

Perhaps the most curious part of the creation of the goddess Columbia is the immediate and passionate association of the archetype with George Washington. Phyllis Wheatley wrote her poem while Washington was still a simple member of the Continental Congress from Virginia. Washington however was a Master Mason of the Alexandria 22 lodge, chartered as a Scottish Rite, Royal Arch Temple in the tradition of the French lodges founded by the Chevalier Ramsey. This branch can only be called "Illuminationist," that is expressing a connection to or sympathy with Rosicrucian or Illuminati philosophy. Its practices and initiations, spiritually, would be more along the lines of what today would be called Ceremonial Magick. Washington would have felt right at home in a Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Temple circa 1900.

This Illuminationist connection brings us to the aforementioned Adam Weishaupt and the Bavarian Illuminati. Weishaupt, a professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit, had an Illumination over the night of February first/second, 1776. This flash of insight led to the founding, on the second of May 1776, of the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society within the secret society of Masonic Orders. By 1785, when they were banned by the government of Bavaria for plotting the overthrow of all the crowned heads of Europe, starting with the Hapsburgs, they had infiltrated Masonic groups in a dozen countries, including France, Britain and the fledgling United States of America. No one knows precisely what happened to either Weishaupt or the Illuminati after that.

This of course is a very good thing for the conspiracy theorists. More outright nonsense has been written about the Illuminati than any other such secret society. Which is a shame, because its real history is quite extraordinary enough. An unbiased look at the documents we do have from Weishaupt and his fellow travellers reveals something quite different from what most of the Illuminuts have been prattling about.

From Weishaupt's early writings, we find an amazing awareness of the pagan mysteries, particularly those of Eleusius and the Kabiroi of Argos and Samothrace, as well as familiarity with the theories of Pythagoras. We even have a draft for a secret society based on those pagan mystery schools done by Weishaupt while a student at Ingoldstadt. After graduating and a brief stint in the College of Jesus, Weishaupt found his way in 1774 to a neo-Templar Masonic Lodge in Hanover. While not overly impressed by the quality of the vibe at the local lodge, its superiors soon passed Brother Adam on to the Head of the Order, one Johann Augustus Starck.

Starck was a key figure in the neo-Templar revival of the mid 18th century. His patrons included such royal figures as Gustav III of Sweden and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Under his influence, Frederick of Prussia founded several occult societies in the late 1760s. One of them, The Knights of Light, practiced magick and alchemy, and used the grade name "Illuminati" for an adept. Around the time Phyllis Wheatley addressed her poem to George Washington, Weishaupt met Starck and was initiated into his peculiar blend of neo-Templar illuminism.

Peculiar because Starck claimed to have met, and been initiated and instructed by, a group of Catharist Templars surviving in southern France. From them Starck learned that the original Templars inherited their occult wisdom from an secret society of Essenes in Jerusalem who were in fact identical with the Cathars of southern France. Starck's Cathars, however, were a pagan goddess-worshiping cult, who hated the Roman Church because it stole the true identity of Christ, held by them to be St. John. It was this magickal blend into which Weishaupt was plunged by his initiation, and to his credit, he seems to have risen to the occasion.

His Illumination on the night of the first/second February 1776, the ancient pagan feast of Imbolc, is our first clue. To clinch it, Weishaupt founded his order, called originally the Order of the Perfectibilists as nod to his Catharist sources, on the first of May, Beltane in the pagan calendar. And to make the point even more obvious, the holiest day of all in the Illuminati order is The Feast of St. John on June 23rd/24th, mid-summer night's eve in the northern latitudes and marking another pagan feast, that of the summer solstice. Curiously enough, due to the calendar change in the mid 18th century that added eleven days, what in the Old Style was June 24th is now in the New Style July fourth. Since the Declaration of Independence was not signed or ratified or anything else on July fourth, we might wonder at how it became Independence Day.

This has led some conspiracy theorists to call July fourth Illuminati Day, and some have even gone so far as to claim that Weishaupt immigrated to America and whacked Washington while he was working out back of Mt. Vernon on his private hemp patch and took his place, resulting in Weishaupt as our first president. Needless to say, this is one of the more imaginative fantasies generated around the Illuminated, but it does, in a mythic sense, have the ring of truth.

Washington was thoroughly familiar with, and probably quite sympathetic to, the basic concepts of Illuminism as preached in the Masonic Lodges of the day. Alexandria 22, Washington's home lodge, was affiliated with several German Illuminist lodges, including the neo-Templars of Johann Starck. It's French connections led through Lafayette and the Comte de Mirabeau, both prominent Illuminists, back to the Templarisms of the Scottish Chevalier Ramsey. Although we can't say for sure - the records are incomplete - Washington's election to Master Mason status in Alexandria 22 may have reflected this new Illuminist shift of focus.

But even more than Washington, it is Thomas Jefferson who connects Illuminism, and pagan goddess worship, with the beginning steps toward the creation of the goddess Columbia. The Federalists prior to the election of 1800 of course branded Jefferson an Illuminati stooge. Their evidence was flimsy, and probably meaningless in any case as the anti-Illuminati forces did not completely understand the Illuminist agenda, but Jefferson, along with Franklin and Washington, did indeed have such connections and inclinations.

Jefferson was also friendly with Phillip Freneau, who popularised the idea of Columbia as the Goddess of Freedom in the 1780s and 1790s. And Jefferson was instrumental in having the US Capitol building designed as the Roman Parthenon, complete of course with a goddess on the dome. The goddess Minerva, in a form very close to that of Columbia, appears on the seal of the University of Virginia, designed by Jefferson. The Great Hall of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, which houses Jefferson's books, is a miniature shrine to the goddess.

If there is one piece of art in all of Washington that sums up the basic Illuminist idea behind the goddess Columbia and her role in America, it is in the top of the dome of the U.S. Capitol; a fresco entitled "The Apotheosis of George Washington," painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 soon after the dome was completed. The central grouping in the highest part of the dome depicts Washington being taken up to heaven, done by Italian artist Brumidi in a style strongly reminiscent of paintings of the Assumptions of Jesus. In this case, it is not angels of God who accompany Washington in his assumption, but the female figures of Liberty and Victory. Surrounding these three figures are thirteen female figures representing the original thirteen states. Around the edge of the dome are painted six groups of figures representing war, commerce, marine, agriculture, science, and mechanics. Included in these groups of figures are the gods Mercury, Neptune, Ceres, Minerva, and Vulcan.

Detail from The Apotheosis of George Washington, showing Liberty, Victory and thirteen female figures that represent the original thirteen states..

Aside from the obvious paganisms, there are two fascinating Illuminati clues here. The first is Victory, the Samothracian mother goddess of the Kabiroi, who often shows up alongside Columbia. Weishaupt and Starck thought her to be the original Mother Goddess on which all the pagan mysteries were based. The second is that numerical arrangement of figures. If we take the six figures of the outer rim and multiply by the thirteen figures on the second rim, we get 78. Among the papers seized by the Bavarian government in 1785 was an alphabetic code based on three times 26, or 78. This is also the number of cards in a Tarot deck, leading this type of code to be called the Tarot Cipher.

This is not to say that the United States of America is an Illuminati plot, and by no means am I saying that the Illuminati control any part of the US government. But it is a fact that the Founding Fathers had such inclinations and that somehow those aspirations were transmitted through the years into many of official Washington's finest works of public art. Call it an accidental conspiracy if you like, a synchronicity born of similar inclinations and understandings concerning the meaning of "America" as the New World for the New Age.

Weishaupt's view of a perfect society is very similar in many respects to Adams, Jefferson and Washington's view of America. Weishaupt foresaw a utopian world state where property, authority and nationalism had been abolished. In this pre-Eden natural state, mankind would join in the brotherhood of man, based on free love, peace, spiritual wisdom and equality of classes and sexes. At the spiritual center of this society was the great goddess of Freedom and Reason. One of Weishaupt's French followers, the Comte de Mirabeau, would preside during the revolution in Paris over the enthronement of a new Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris, newly renamed the Temple of Reason.

And so, Weishaupt's ideas and influence seems to have had a profound effect on the creation of the goddess Columbia, and the general iconography of the archetype of America. In the immediate post-revolutionary era, this is not surprising given the many and well-documented connections and sympathies between the Founding Fathers and the Illuminist underground. What is surprising is that these ideas and practices continued intact through the 19th century. Crawford's original design for the Capitol had Columbia wearing a Phyrigian cap, the symbol of illuminated status conferred in the Adeptus Major grade of both Starck's neo-Templars and Weishaupt's Perfectibilists. And someone worked out very carefully the astrology of the monument's installation on the Capitol Dome back in 1863.

Wouldn't that same person, or group of initiates, have also worked out the future astrology of Columbia? Did they see the moment of awakening on the fall equinox of 2002? And even more important, did they see the moment of danger on January 23rd 2003?

Perhaps they did, because there is one curious clue that takes us directly into the number synchronicities of the Illuminati elves themselves. The statue of Columbia was first displayed to the public on the Capitol grounds on October 23, 1862. Added together, 10 + 23 = 33, and 1 + 8 + 6 + 2 = 17. Now, 17 is a very curious number, as we will get to in a moment. But first, the mystery of 23...skidoo...

An Omen For Armageddon: Parts I - III

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