Tupper Saussy: Abiding Religious War #4

Abiding in Religious War / 4
by Tupper Saussy

7. The aim of religious war is always "new world order."

In about 37 B.C., the Roman poet-propagandist Virgil published lines containing a rophecy from the “Sibyl,” a mystical personage who told the fortunes of Rome.

According to ancient tradition, this Sibyl (there were several stationed around the classical world) was a thousand years old.

In Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the Cumaean Sibyl divines that magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo, “a mighty order of ages is born anew.” At the birth of this new order, “Justice returns, returns old Saturn’s reign, with a new breed of men sent down from heaven.” And a virgin gives birth to a new Apollo who will do away with human wickedness. This messia

Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.

He shall receive the life of gods, and see

Heroes with gods commingling, and himself

Be seen of them, and with his father's worth

Reign o'er a world at peace.

Who was Virgil’s (or the Sibyl’s) messiah? Since the verses are addressed to the consul Asinius Pollio, many believed it was the son of Pollio, in whose consulate or presidency the mighty new order of ages would begin. But this theory proved wrong when Pollio’s son was born sickly and died in his infancy.

People then centered on a son that might be born of Mark Antony and his wife Octavia, but this possibility was excluded when Mark left Octavia for Cleopatra.

Four centuries later, the Emperor Constantine the Great presented a paper saying that Virgil had really prophesied the advent of Jesus and his new breed of men, the Christian, but had couched his prophecy in disguise to avoid offending Roman priests.

This theory still has adherents today.

The most logical Virgilian messiah, it seems to me, would be Augustus Caesar. We know Virgil’s career was subsidized by the billionaire Caius Maecenas, and that Maecenas had funded the rise of Julius Caesar. Following Julius’ bloody sacrifice by the conspirators in 44 B.C., there ensued a long religious war for command of the empire.

The rivals were Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Julius’ grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian Maria.

We know that Maecenas put his money on Octavian. We also know the Fourth Eclogue was published following the Peace of Brindisi, which reconciled Antony and Octavian and gave tremendous hope that Octavian would triumph. We know, too, that Octavian’s interests at the Brindisi negotiations were represented by none other than consul Asinius Pollio, who introduced Virgil to Maecenas. And we know that the ultimate payoff of Brindisi would be the rise of Octavian to the supreme position of Pontifex Maximus of Rome in 28 B.C., with the holy name Augustus Caesar.

We know that Octavian Caesar Augustus claimed to be the offspring of a union between a virgin the sun-god Apollo. And finally, we know that Virgil’s final masterpiece of propaganda identified Augustus as messianic. In the Aeneid (19 B.C.), set in a time prior to the founding of Rome, we see in Book 6 (lines 791-94) Anchises, father of the Trojan Aeneas, pointing out to his son the coming generations of Romans yet to be born and identifying one in particular: “This man, this is he whom you hear more and more often promised to you, Augustus Caesar, the seed of divinity, who shall establish golden ages for Latium through the fertile lands once ruled by Saturn.”

Since the publication of Virgil’s messianic prophecy coincided with the strategy of a billionaire to place his man at the head of the universal Roman Church and State, how could the prophesied messiah have been anyone but Augustus Caesar?

This is important, I think, because the Sibylline prophecy is part of the American political heritage. In 1782, Charles Thomson, the Perpetual Secretary of the Continental Congrss, borrowed from the Fourth Eclogue and gave the United States its national motto Novus Ordo Seclorum. Thomson wrote that the motto signifies “the beginning of the new American Æra, which commences from [1776].”

The American Æra was a new ordering of power in the world, a new republic that issued in a new kind of worldly order, which has been colloquialized to “new world order.”

In credible though indirect testimony cited in Rulers of Evil, Charles Thomson himself indicates that novus ordo seclorum might define the United States government as Rome’s – the Church Militant’s – leading agency for the universal reordering of temporal or worldly power.

Indeed, worldly power has been ordered anew many times since the days of Augustus Caesar. New orders are necessary because evil is evasive and creative. Ruling a planet largely populated and often disrupted by evildoers requires the cyclical extermination and rebirth of human-management systems. This is not easily done.

A 65-year-old person has experienced the reordering of the world by the United States at least three times. Each of these reorderings, as with that of Maecenas and Octavian in 28 B.C., was precipitated by elegant slaughter suggestive of human sacrifice.

With Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, World War II established the United Nations and a fundamental international currency, the US dollar. The Coinage Act of 1965, received uncritically by an electorate still disoriented from JFK's assassination, absolved banks and the national treasury of any responsibility to redeem the fundamental international currency in gold and silver coin, enabling

Congress to create (by borrowing into circulation) money to pay its debts domestically and globally. President Bush the Elder’s Persian Gulf War, punctuated by the Younger's War on Terrorism, beckoned all nations to marry America at gunpoint and together bring the whole world under an increasingly dynamic rulership of the Roman Pontiff. This most recent reordering – the subject of what I’m writing here – can conveniently be traced to the elder Bush’s first act as President, which was the uttering of a prayer.

On the day of his inaugural, January 20, 1989, George H.W. Bush was a virtual Roman Catholic due to his confirmation into a church – the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States – whose first bishop was ordained in 1784 at Aberdeen, Scotland, by three bishops who notoriously declared allegiance to the Roman Pontiff.

Most of his adult life, G.H.W. Bush had been a member, and for a while director, of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization founded in 1947 by William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan for the purpose of providing “special means” to insure Vatican influence over the secular world and subsidized by American taxpayers. Donovan was a devout Roman Catholic, decorated in July 1944 by Pope Pius XII with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester, “the Vatican’s highest award, for a lifetime of public and secret service to the [Roman] Catholic Church.”

It is said (and I can only speculate) that Mr. Bush was also a 33rd-degree Freemason, and a member as well of Propaganda Dùe (P2), the shadowy masonesque society made up of leading French, German, Italian, and American business, political, and media leaders dedicated to the Roman Church Militant. (If anyone knows of an authentic proof or denial to either association, please notify me. Proving secret memberships is a hard task, since rulers of evil engage in activities that must of necessity be concealed. I believe I do my subject no harm by relying on Christ’s teaching how to discern: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Mr. Bush bears the fruits – many good, many evil – of one secretly associated with powers that work in darkness.)

There is no doubt, however, that on inauguration day 1989, President Bush had amassed a fortune in oil, principally through his Zapata Offshore Petroleum, a company whose global network of offices fed information to and from the CIA. One of Zapata’s most prosperous clients was the tiny Muslim emirate of Kuwait.

Qualified by the above, George Bush the Elder began his presidential inaugural address, and his presidency, with a prayer in the following words:

Heavenly Father...Make us strong to do Your work, willing to heed and hear Your will, and write on our hearts these words: ‘Use power to help people.' For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us to remember it, Lord. Amen.

President Bush then went to the Vatican City to have an audience with Pope John Paul II. At the conclusion of the audience, His Holiness cited the President’s first official act, that inaugural prayer.

“Mr. President,” said the Pope, “you made reference to power as existing to help people, to serve people. This is true at different levels, including power at the political and economic level.

We see this, too, at the level of each community, with its power of fraternal love and concern. In all these areas, an immense challenge opens up before the United States in this third century of her nationhood. Her mission as a people engaged in good works and committed to serving others has horizons the length of your nation and far beyond – as far as humanity extends.

Today the interdependence of humanity is being reaffirmed and recognized through world events. The moral and social attitudes that must constitute a response to this interdependence is found in worldwide solidarity.

In treating this question in a recent encyclical, I have stated that solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. Truly, the hour of international interdependence has struck. What is at stake is the common good of humanity.

Can anyone deny that on May 27, 1989 the Pope was summoning America to use its power to help people achieve a new worldwide solidarity?

In the 18th century, achieving worldwide solidarity meant stirring up internal strife to divide English-speaking Protestantism into British and American factions and creating the right of Catholics to hold office in the latter. In our present time, achieving worldwide solidarity means dividing the Muslim nations by internal strife, conquering them by an alliance of governments led by the United States, and subjecting them to the Catholic process known as “missionary adaptation.” This term is explained by the 1989 Catholic Almanac (p175) as “the adjustment of the mission subject to the cultural requirements of the mission object” so that the Pontiff’s needs will be brought “as much as possible in accord with existing socially shared patterns of thought, evaluation, and action, so as to avoid unnecessary and serious disorganization.” In simpler terms, the Pope on May 27, 1989 called on America’s secular might to lead the Middle East into a new culture structured, like Japan after Nagasaki, on the Roman Catholic invention of debt-instruments circulating and enforced internationally as money.

September 11th catapulted the world toward achieving this order. But the momentum began in Kuwait, of which the elder President Bush was a venerated patron. Do you recall how the Persian Gulf War started in Kuwait?

During 1989, Kuwait launched an unprovoked economic aggression against its much larger neighbor, Iraq. Kuwait began overproducing oil, which drove oil prices downward, a policy that would ultimately cost Iraq some $14 billion in lost revenues.

At about the same time, for no apparent reason, America's allies began imposing de facto sanctions on Iraq. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ramadan would tell the Muhammad Ali Peace Delegation on November 30, 1990 that “by 1990, hundreds of major scientific, engineering, and food supply contracts between Iraq and western governments were cancelled.”

Finally, on May 28-30, 1990, Iraqi premier Saddam Hussein formally complained of Kuwait’s economic warfare at a meeting of the brotherhood of Muslim nations known as the League of Arab States.

Saddam hinted at military action if the situation was not corrected.

The Emir of Kuwait, whose country is one-tenth the size of Iraq, ignored Saddam.

Students of the Gulf War are generally agreed that the Emir had received assurances from American officials that his advantages over Iraq would be protected by American armed forces.

Kuwait further aggravated Iraq. On July 15-17, Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of using

slant drilling technology to steal oil from Iraq’s Rumaylah oil field. Waging economic war against and stealing from a brother are both counted sins in Islamic law, which held correctional procedures.

On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Photos from Soviet commercial satellites show that no more than a few thousand troops were deployed – a sufficient number to hold Kuwait City.

Next day, in accord with Islamic law, the council of ministers of the Arab League resolved to (a) condemn the invasion, (b) convoke an extraordinary summit to find a

Muslim solution to the crisis, and (c) reject foreign intervention, whether direct or indirect, in Muslim affairs.

Saddam Hussein made it clear that he was willing to withdraw if his claims against Kuwait could be satisfied. There was no reason why Muslim brethren, acting in good

faith, could not settle the matter. In fact, on August 4th Saddam was so confident of peaceful resolution that Baghdad radio announced that Iraq was ready to pull out of Kuwait the next day.

But peaceful resolution between Muslim states would not serve the Roman Pontiff’s grand agenda for “worldwide solidarity.” For this, political Islam must be divided and conquered.

Which exactly occurred when two crucial members of the summit, Egyptian President osni Mubarak and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, turned against Iraq. They did so, according to a study by Hugh Roberts of the London School of Economics & Political Science, under pressure from U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

“What then happened,” wrote Roberts, “was a massive escalation of the crisis engineered wholly and entirely by the United States, which split the Arab world down the middle, destroyed the credibility and influence of the Arab League and scotched all chance of a peaceful settlement.”

On August 7, President Bush despatched aircraft and 4,000 American combat troops to Saudi Arabia. This was not an invasion of Iraq. The troops were “strictly defensive,” sent to protect Saudi Arabia from an imminent Iraqi invasion.

However, King Hussein of Jordan would inform the New York Times that American troops were being deployed to Saudi Arabia long before Saddam moved on Kuwait. [Times, Oct. 16, 1990] Furthermore, King Hussein would say in the same report that he was told by Saudi King Fahd that there was no evidence of a hostile Iraqi build-up on the Saudi border; and that despite American assertions, there was no truth to reports that Iraq planned to invade Saudi Arabia.

Fahd’s remark is corroborated by Soviet satellite photographs taken on August 8 which show light sand drifts over patches of roads leading from Kuwait City to the Saudi border – and no evidence of an Iraqi buildup.

Seeing that the United States was interceding to prevent a Muslim solution, Saddam declared the annexation of Kuwait on August 8. This did not mean that Iraq was no longer willing to consider a withdrawal. On the contrary, writes Hugh Roberts, it was

Saddam’s way of preserving the issue until the summit could entertain fresh proposals during its August 9-10 meeting in Cairo.

But when the summit convened, delegates sat down to find the issue already decided by a “draft resolution” presented by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, written in English and translated into Arabic, and pre-supported by 10 other states, constituting a majority. (Iraq was not present.)

The resolution condemned the Iraqi decision to annex Kuwait, called for the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, affirmed Kuwaiti sovereignty, and agreed to respond positively to the requests of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to send Muslim forces to Kuwait’s defense. It was made clear, at the insistence of the Bush administration, that “international law” was going to be enforced on Iraq, despite the fact that many previous acts of aggression by other Muslim states had gone unpunished under international law.

Hugh Roberts writes: “The unity which had existed within the Arab world on August 3 had been shattered by August 10. The possibility of a peaceful, negotiated, [Muslim] solution to the Gulf crisis was dead, killed by US pressure.”

Saddam Hussein’s reaction was to submit proposals on August 12th (and again in December, as reported by Knute Royce in Newsday) for a comprehensive settlement of all outstanding Islamic territorial conflicts according to international law. He proposed that the Muslim states be judged equitably. He was willing to let Iraq’s transgressions be judged by international law if the Muslim leaders who claimed to be upholding it would let their national transgressions be judged by the same standard.

Saddam’s proposal was rejected out of hand by the United States. “From that moment on,” states Hugh Roberts, “the Anglo-American and UN position lacked all legal and moral authority in the eyes of the vast majority of the Arab and Muslim world.”

In my opinion, what the Muslim world did not understand is that it is lawful for the Church Militant, pursuant to its building "worldwide solidarity" for better rulership

of evil, to immunize favored subjects from the rigors of equity and international law. The Gulf War facts bear out the proposition advanced in Rulers of Evil that God rules by a single standard, which provides that evildoers – persons who deny the deity and unique saving power of Christ – deserve to be ruled by a double standard.

This is the fundamental fact of human life. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

On August 15, 1990, John Paul II announced his Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities. In this decree, the Pope made Catholic teaching, research and service

responsible for administering the new world order under construction by the United States in the Middle East. Distinguishing a Catholic university “by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God,” of which “the present age is in urgent need,” His Holiness directed that the whole Catholic university system, holding “fidelity to the Christian message as it comes to us through the Church,” should aim for "a more just sharing in the world's resources, and a new economic and political order that will better serve the human community at a national and international level."

Within three weeks, President Bush explained to a joint session of Congress that he only acted to check Saddams aggression after “120,000 [Iraqi] troops with 850 [Iraqi] tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.” However, Jean Heller would report several months later in the St. Petersburg (FL) Times that Soviet

satellite photos shot on the very day the President had addressed Congress failed to back up his claim of an imminent Iraqi threat. In fact, there was no sign of any massing along the Kuwait-Saudi border whatsoever.

The Pentagon was claiming some 250,000 Iraqi troops were occupying Kuwait, yet refused to show evidence that might contradict the Soviet satellite photos. In these photos, American forces, encampments, aircraft, camouflaged equipment dumps, staging

areas and tire-tracks across the desert can easily be seen. But analysts could find nothing like this to indicate an Iraqi presence anywhere in Kuwait.

Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan administration, and a former image specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency, analyzed the satellite photos for Heller’s article in the St. Petersburg Times and concluded:

We don’t see any tent cities, we don’t see congregations of tanks, we can’t see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti air base appears deserted. It’s five weeks after the invasion, and from what we can see, the Iraqi air force hasn’t flown a single fighter to the most strategic air base in Kuwait. There is no infrastructure to support large numbers of [soldiers]. They have to use toilets, or the functional equivalent. They have to have food. But where is it?

One week later, the Pentagon was issuing reports that Iraqi forces in Kuwait had grown to 360,000 men and 2,800 tanks – yet the satellite photos of southern Kuwait show no evidence of such. Nor did the Pentagon ever support its claim with evidence. Jean Heller’s revelations would never be picked up by the national media. Huda al-Yassiri would report in The Baghdad Observer for June 8, 1996 that “the St.Petersburg Times editors approached the Associated Press twice about running her story on the wire, but to no avail. Likewise, the Scripps-Howard news service, of which the St. Petersburg Times is a member, chose not to distribute the story.”

Of course, Iraqi troops eventually appeared at the Saudi Arabian border. But “they were sent there as a response to U.S. buildup and were not a provocation for Bush's military action,” reported Brian Becker, an investigator with the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal.

On December 17, the U.N. set a January 15, 1991 deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. President Bush promised to send Secretary of State James Baker to meet Saddam Hussein before the deadline, but reneged. Saddam rejected January 15 and offered to withdraw by February 15. President Bush ordered American planes to incinerate hundreds of women and children sleeping in the al-Arneriyah bomb shelter, and two days later rejected Saddam’s offer of a February withdrawal.

On the 16th of January 1991, the President launched what has been called “the Gulf Massacre,” in which between 85,000 and 100,000 Iraqis were killed because the United States (a) refused to countenance either a diplomatic or a legal solution to the Gulf crisis, and (b) acted between August 2 and August 10, 1990 to make both impossible.

Concludes Hugh Roberts, “The true number of Iraqis who have been slaughtered in the greatest act of western folly and murderous arrogance in living memory may well be very much higher than this, of course.”

On February 27th, coalition forces entered Kuwait City, and President Bush declared Kuwait liberated.

Less than a week later in Rome, on March 4th, some 15 Catholic leaders from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and America held a “postwar Gulf summit meeting.”

Pope John Paul II addressed the opening of the summit saying that the war had only sharpened tensions in the region and “awakened distrust and rancor inherited from the past.” He denied that any religious war had taken place, yet rebuked Muslim countries that “do not allow Christian communities to take root, celebrate their faith and live it according to the demands of their confession.” Likewise, the summit’s final communique rejected all efforts to cast the war as “a conflict between Islam and Christianity.” Indeed, the war was not a conflict; it was an exercise in missionary adaptation to establish the new solidarity ordered by the Roman Pontiff.

The summit’s final communique, issued on March 6th, provided Catholic believers, for the first time ever, with an agenda to work for secure boundaries for Israel, independence and unity for Lebanon, a homeland and self-determination for the Palestinians, multilateral demilitarization and economic development of the region, and the establishment of Jerusalem as the international “holy city” of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

David Scott opined in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that the Vatican Summit “may one day be recalled as an historic turning point in the Catholic Church’s involvement in the Middle East.” But we must remember that the turning point was the Persian Gulf War, an event created by deception and brute force. Had there been no Gulf War, there would have been no Vatican Summit. And had the American people heeded Christ's oft-repeated command "Be not deceived," there would have been no Gulf War.

Significantly, it was on the Vatican Summit’s final day, March 6th, that President Bush delivered a speech before Congress that sounded more like a reassurance to the papacy than a report to the representatives of the American people: “Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order."

8. Human sacrifice is essential in religious war.

Saturn Devouring His Child by Francisco Goya

According to Polybius, who lived and died more than a century before the Christian era, human sacrifice served a valid political purpose. Lives of human beings were ritualistically taken by priests “to maintain the cohesion of the Roman state,”– that is, “to hold the common people in check.” [See B. Twyman, The Ancient History Bulletin, 11.1 (1997) 1-11]

But as Roman civilization imbibed Greek moral values, human sacrifice began offending the Roman sense of decency. The practice was finally banned by senatorial decree in 97 B.C., and prohibited among all peoples conquered by Rome.

Human sacrifice became the indicator that distinguished Roman from barbarian. Livy called human sacrifice “a most un-Roman rite.” Yet the form wouldn’t quite go away. The people, encouraged by the priests, regarded gladiatorial deaths as sacrifices to deified spirits of the dead known as Manes. And Livy’s contemporary, the outwardly decent Octavian Maria, upon assuming the title of Caesar Augustus in 28 B.C., sacrificed three hundred Roman senators on an altar in Perugia to atone for the assassination of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar. [A. Del Mar, The Worship of Augustus Caesar, p 318]

This “most un-Roman rite” was just too politically expedient to give up entirely. Rulers periodically contrived sacrificial offerings of human flesh because it was the most efficient means of bending the naturally individualistic human species to the monarchic will.

Witnessing violent human death can be deeply traumatizing. The spectacle informs the imagination, where thought begins. In its own emotional language, human sacrifice brutally and memorably implies two classes of mankind – the all-powerful and the all-helpless.

Watching the all-helpless die creates in the viewer an emotional debt to the all-powerful. This debt permeates our thinking, and to stay alive we cannot conceive of disobeying the all-powerful sacrificer. Remember Polybius: humans were sacrificed “to maintain the cohesion of the Roman state...to hold the common people in check.”

September 11th meets the criteria of human sacrifice except for one important element: the all-powerful sacrificer. If the sacrificer was the high priest of Muslim suicide, Osama bin Laden, as President Bush the younger seems to have convinced the nation and the world he is, who among its viewers is cohering in Osama's omnipotence? What population is being held in check by the Al-Qaeda or their god Allah? I know of none.

So, either September 11th was not a classical human sacrifice or we have mistaken the sacrificer’s identity. Presuming human sacrifice, and bearing Polybius in mind, let’s approach it from the other end. Which state has achieved cohesion from September 11th? Which people are being held in check by its results? The answer to both questions is every nation within Rome’s sphere of influence, principally the United States.

If one takes seriously the signs, symbols, and allegories with which American government publicly identifies its nature, purpose, and link with antiquity, some startling evidence appears. Of course, it could be argued that these elements are mere decoration and rather dated attempts to breathe poetic nobility into the federal enterprise. But the ROE filter does not presume the framers of American government were frivolous or irresponsible in communicating vital information through their official utterances. The ROE filter presumes competence and proficiency in every official act.

We owe Congress the presumption that it knew what it was doing when it officially approved a national motto, novus ordo seclorum, borrowed from a Roman prophecy announcing the return of Saturn to power – “Justice returns, returns old Saturn’s reign.”

If the American Æra (1776-to present) reintroduced the reign of Saturn, it’s not surprising that very few would notice. This is due to the fact that historically the character of Saturn maintains nearly no profile. His name is synonymous with secrecy, deriving from the Babylonian word stur (pronounced “satur”) meaning “hidden.”

Stur was the earliest known deity of the Babylonian church/state. He was the “hidden god” whom only the initiated priests of the Babylonian Mysteries could access. Biblical scholar Alexander Hislop has noted that the letters of the hidden god in the Hebrew numeric alphabet add up to the number of the Beast in Revelation 13:18:

S=060

T=400

U=006

R=200

_____

000666

Stur’s relationship to Rome is well established by Roman authorities. Ovid, Pliny, and Aurelius Victor all tell us that the city Rome was built upon in the 8th century B.C. was called Saturnia, “city of Saturn.” Likewise, before the founding of Washington, D.C. in 1790-3 the land on which the Capitol building arose was listed in Maryland property records as “Rome.” This is made considerably more interesting by the installation in 1863 of the bronze “Freedom” atop the Capitol, D.C’s highest and most honored edifice.

The statue stands exactly 19 feet, six inches in height, which works out to 6+6+6 feet, 6+6+6 inches. Designed and sculpted in Rome, it was considered by its creator to represent Persephone, a virgin goddess celebrated for her immaculate conception. Persephone is intimately bound to Saturn in pagan theology. She attracted the attention of Hades, who had been eaten alive by his father Saturn but saved and reconstituted by the heroic efforts of his brother Jupiter, and given dominion over the underworld, while Jupiter took the sky. Hades desired to marry Persephone, and when Jupiter forbade him, Hades kidnapped the beautiful goddess and made her his queen of gold, oil, and the rest of earth’s hidden wealth, including petroleum and pharmaceuticals. In some mythologies, Hades is identified with Saturn. And throughout Rome no structure was called “capitol” unless it was a temple to Jupiter.

The sum of these facts strongly suggests, to me at least, that Virgil was prophesying for imperial Romans the same thing Congress was declaring to the inhabitants of the United States: a “golden-age” rulership in the style of ancient Babylon under a hidden god known only to his initiated priests.

If Hislop’s calculations are right and Stur is indeed the Beast of Revelation whose name is “the number of a man,” Scripture may be telling us that Saturn began life as a man. The ancient historic person whose known attributes most resemble Saturn’s is, of course, Cain. Scripture describes both Cain and his parents as “hidden.” Adam and Eve, acquiring knowledge of good and evil by sinning, “hid” their nakedness from God. Cain prophesied that his punishment for murdering Abel was to be “hid” from the face of God.

However, it was not Adam and Eve but Cain who established a city, the first historic city, Unuk, as its 19th-century discoverers spelled the word, named for Cain’s son Enoch. To build a city requires a central authority able to (a) maintain the cohesion of the state and (b) hold the common people in check – which, as we recall from Polybius, are the twin political justifications for human sacrifice.

That Unuk was founded on human sacrifice is not an unreasonable supposition, since Cain owed the very existence of his city to a human sacrifice – his own sacrifice of Abel, which resulted in the vagabondage which sent him to the land of Nod. (See Rulers of Evil for a discussion of Abel’s murder as a sacrificial offering.)

But to achieve the political benefits of human sacrifice one must be all-powerful, one must be feared as a god. Can we account for Cain’s transformation from a wicked murderer permanently exiled from his homeland to an all-powerful and “hidden God”? Scripture holds the key. God made Cain seven times more powerful than any man who might want to rid the earth of him, and sealed this unique grant with a mark. Here are the actual words at Genesis 4:15:

And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

The mark was limited strictly to assuring God’s vengeance against anyone who would threaten Cain’s life. When it came to matters of wisdom, correction, and instruction in righteousness, Cain could seek God’s counsel or, since he was hidden from the face of God, make up his own. Under no circumstances was he permitted to attack those who “called upon the name of the Lord.” The mark signifies a covenant of retribution only; nothing else.

And so, early on, Cain encouraged attacks upon his life so that he might infallibly defend himself. He found great profit in provoking enemies. The more enemies, the more spectacular the displays of vengeance. The more vengeance, the more justice. The more justice, the more power to Cain. A more powerful Cain could do more excellent public works. Thus, it became essential to the self-interest of the bearer of the mark – which to this day remains a first principle of ordered government – to provoke and encourage evildoing, particularly the form that manifests itself in rebellion.

Archaeological discoveries at Unuk validate the sudden appearance, early in the third millennium B.C., of what we might expect of a man whose enemies would be divinely avenged sevenfold, of a man who was also the first child of parents who had eaten fruit of the tree of divine knowledge of good and evil. According to the Oxford scholar charged with examining the ruins of Unuk, Cain’s city was the seat of a vast empire, founded on slavery, “full of schools and libraries, of teachers and pupils, and poets and prose writers, and of the literary works which they had composed.”[Sayce, Babylonia & Syria] The empire was bound together by roads, along which there was a regular postal service, and you can see in the Louvre clay postage stamps bearing the name of Cain and his son Enoch. The library Cain built at Unuk housed the first collection of astronomical observations and terrestrial omens. There was incredibly artful metalworking, and Encyclopedia Britannica adds that “transparent glass seems to have been first introduced in the reign of [Cain].”

And it all appeared suddenly. The London Times’ Historians’ History of the World grumbled “Surely such a people as this could not have sprung into existence. It must have had its history...” But Unuk as a social organization had no previous history – except that the parents of its founder had ingested the fruit of a tree that infused their DNA, and subsequently ours, with divine intellect at the expense of eternal life.

Cain’s religion wrote the name of its “god of heaven” in cuneiform. The symbol is pronounced “Annu.” This “Annu signature” may be the very mark God set upon Cain to seal his authority.

In any case, we find it consistently present in claims to rulership through its fifty centuries of existence. We find the Annu signature in the flag of Great Britain and in the United Nations logotype.

We find it in the U.S. Supreme Court Building, where it forms the central decorative motif. We find it inlaid in the pavement surrounding the Obelisk of Caligula in St. Peter’s Piazza, where the multitudes stand to receive papal edicts and blessings.

If you would like to test whether or not an institution identified with this mark avenges its enemies sevenfold, try to rid the earth of the Roman Pontiff, or his two delegated powers, the U.S. and the U.K. or any of the powers under their protection. You will quickly find that the mark of the hidden god, Cain or Stur, is quite alive and well, still doing today what it was doing in the early days of Unuk – still avenging its enemies sevenfold or more; still creating, preserving, honoring, terrorizing, judging, and punishing evildoers; still sacrificing its own in order to solidify world order and hold people in check.

Next: Muslims as villains...

Tupper Saussy: Abiding Religious War #5 (of 5)