From the Narrow Desert

From Raphael's Council of the Gods

A correspondent recently emailed me about the upcoming Pluto Return -- the return of Pluto, for the first time, to the precise zodiacal position it occupied on July 4, 1776 -- and I mentioned in reply that I had previously associated Biden with Pluto because his name resembles bident, the two-pronged spear traditionally associated with Pluto.

On December 18, I received two emails in reply. The first asked me to send links to the blog posts where I had mentioned the Biden-Bident-Pluto connection, and the second pointed out an additional Biden-Bident link that I had not previously been aware of.

I've been researching about Pluto and the Bident and found this interesting connection from Wiki: "In Roman agriculture, the bidens (genitive bidentis) was a double-bladed drag hoe." . . . I don't know if you've read this or not on social media / urban slang, but Biden and Harris are often referred to as JOE AND THE HOE. Harris being the Hoe because of allegations that Harris 'slept' her way up to her positions in politics, especially with her alleged relationship with Willie Brown.

Thinking about the Bident again today, I realized that there is another prominent person whose name is associated with a two-pronged fork: David Hume.

And doesn't the name Hume strongly suggest Pluto? To exhume a body is to remove it from the grave, so by implication hume is the common grave of mankind, Sheol or Hades. Hume's name was originally spelled Home, but that is appropriate as well. "Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Or, as They Might Be Giants put is, "We long to swim for home, but our only home is bone."

Exhume actually derives from humus, "earth," whence also humanus, "earthling." Thus the etymology of human parallels that of Adam, from adamah, "earth."

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In my "Green Manalishi" post of exactly a year ago, I associate the two-prong crown of the Manalishi with the two-prong bident of Pluto. (The song was supposedly inspired by a drug-induced dream of being barked at by a long-dead green dog that represented money. Pluto represents both money and death, and he has a dog.)

The two-prong crown made me think of the "two-horned man" of the Quran, recently mentioned both by myself and by Chris Knowles, as described in my post "Ye Cannot Serve God and Ammon?" The title of that post alludes to Knowles's theory that Mammon (money) derives from Ammon -- but money is more an attribute of Pluto than of Jupiter.

The two-horned man is Alexander the Great, portrayed with horns because he was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon -- a combination of Zeus with the Egyptian god Amun, who was sometimes given a ram's head or four rams' heads. This four-headed "Ram of Mendes," later considered to be a form of Amun, was called Banebdjedet. The Wikipedia article on this god begins thus:

Banebdjedet (Banebdjed) was an ancient Egyptian ram god with a cult centre at Mendes. Khnum was the equivalent god in Upper Egypt.

And who is Khnum? Well, it turns out he is none other than the Green Manalishi with the two-prong crown.

That's right, Khnum (the god of the Nile, later assimilated to Zeus Ammon as Jupiter Nilus) is specifically a green god with two horns.

The second of the demonic beasts of the Apocalypse -- the one that comes from the earth rather than the sea and would thus be associated with Pluto rather than Neptune -- also wears the two-prong crown.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men (Rev. 13:11-13).

The horns of this beast are specifically those of a sheep, but the beast's true nature is that of a dragon. Compare this two Khnum, who has the horns of a ram but is green -- a reptilian, not a mammalian, color.

The association of the apocalyptic Manalishi with supernaturally produced fire is also interesting, given the inexplicable but persistent way in which the sync fairies keep connecting Joe Biden with the idea of spontaneous human combustion.

In my November 23 Magician's Table post "Four rams' heads," I discussed Amun in his character as Zeus Ammon and particularly as the four-headed Ram of Mendes (Banebdjedet), and I mentioned ancient coins that depicted a horned Alexander.

Alexander the Great, a prototype of the "emperor" figure, was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon, and ancient coins depict him with ram's horns. (The personage called the "two-horned man" in the Quran is generally believed to be Alexander.)

On November 26, Chris Knowles at The Secret Sun (who I'm pretty sure does not read my blogs) posted "He Walks Ammon Us: Egypt's Restoration Ritual at Luxor," writing that

the big daddy of the gods is Amun, AKA Jupiter Ammon, AKA Banebdjedet, AKA Baphomet, AKA you name it. All the same thing, really: the Horned and Hidden God of kings and conquerors.

If you're wondering about the Baphomet connection, the modern goat-headed Baphomet figure (as opposed with the severed head supposedly worshiped by the Templars) was invented by Éliphas Lévi and associated by him with the "Goat of Mendes" -- i.e., Herodotus's distorted account of Banebdjedet, who was properly the Ram of Mendes. Knowles goes on to mention Alexander as the "two-horned man" of the Quran, and then he offers this interpretation of "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

This is another one of those hiding-in-plain-sight kind of deals that eluded scholars looking for something more contrived. But it's very simple: Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage that Jesus and the Apostles would have been familiar with. It was rendered "Mammon" as was typical of the transliteration of the time.

Well, no, I don't think adding a random M to the beginning was "typical of the transliteration of the time." Nor is it true that "Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage" in Jesus' time. When Jesus held up a Roman denarius and asked, "Whose is this image and superscription?" they answered, "Caesar's." I have looked at many pictures of denarii from the reign of Tiberius, but none of them feature the horns of Ammon. But even if some of them did have horns, it's pretty clear that Jesus and his contemporaries thought of the bloke on the coins as "Caesar," not "(M)ammon."

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In my post "John, the Bear Witness," I connected John the Baptist with the Great Bear constellation and mentioned that pun I used as a title: It is said in the Fourth Gospel that John came "to bear witness." The Greek word for "bear witness" is marturese (whence martyr), and it occurred to me that if you dropped the initial letter, it looked a lot like Arthur or Arcturus ("bear" names both) -- but the connection is a stretch even by my standards, so I didn't mention it in the post. Later I find Knowles doing exactly the same thing, even the same letter.

Actually, come to think of it, Arabic at least does form words by prefixing m- to a root (Muslim from Islam, maktab from kataba, etc.). Is there anything similar in Hebrew or Aramaic? (A pseudo-example from English would be meat, originally meaning "food," from eat.)

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After writing part of this post, I had to go to work. While on the road, I was thinking about the idea of a horned god and how it contrasted with the Elizabethan use of horns as a symbol of cuckoldry and a mark of shame. I remembered how back in 2020 Francis Berger had posted a photo of himself sitting in front of a deer-antler trophy so that he appeared to have antlers coming out of his head, and how I had commented about the Elizabethan meaning of such. This led me to thinking about the white stag and how Frank had adopted it as a sort of personal symbol.

Just then I turned a corner and saw that a new billboard had been put up -- showing an enormous white stag with a crow or raven perched on either antler. So, that was weird.

Looking up Frank's old post now, I find (which I had not remembered!) that in the comments we even talk about rams' horns, Jupiter Ammon, and Alexander the Great.

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Note added Dec. 2: I asked one of my staff to put something Christmassy on the small blackboard in front of our school. I didn't say anything more specific than that, but by chance she decided to make a drawing centered on a large white pair of antlers.