Gobekli Tepe
Page 33
Figure 37.1. Eve at the Fountain, by English visionary painter John Martin (1789–1854), one of twenty illustrations done in mezzotint for the 1827 edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Even though the whereabouts of the land of Siriad, or Seiris, is nowhere given in the Gnostic gospels, Adam’s secret writings are repeatedly said to be hidden in a holy mountain. The work known as the Allogenes, for instance, proclaims: “Write down [the things that I Allogenes, a name of Seth] shall [tell] you and of which I shall remind you for the sake of those who will be worthy after you. And you will leave this book upon a mountain and you will adjure the guardian ‘Come, O Dreadful One.’”18
THE GOSPEL OF THE EGYPTIANS
Then in The Gospel of the Egyptians, also from the Nag Hammadi library, we read:
This is the book which the great Seth wrote, and placed in high mountains on which the sun has not risen, nor is it possible. And since the days of the prophets, and the apostles, and the preachers, the name has not at all risen upon their hearts, nor is it possible. And ear has not heard it.
The great Seth wrote this book with letters in one hundred and thirty years. He placed it in the mountain that is called Charaxio, in order that, at the end of the times and the eras . . . it may come forth and reveal this incorruptible, holy race of the great savior, and those who dwell with them in love.19
These words are greatly enigmatic, for they speak of a book concealed “in” a mountain, the location of which, and even the name thereof, has not been uttered since the time of Seth. Yet then, as if pronounced as part of some magical spell, the name of the mountain is finally revealed: Charaxio. But where is Charaxio? Was this the true hiding place of the secrets of Adam?
THE SEARCH FOR CHARAXIO
Charaxio is said to be located “where the sun has not risen, nor is it possible,” a clear allusion to the Land of Darkness, the otherworldly realm in the extreme north associated with Alexander the Great’s quest to find the Fountain of Life and Gilgamesh’s search to find the plant of immortality. It was here too that the god El had his abode and the two hundred rebel Watchers made the decision to descend to the plains below and take mortal wives. As Belgium-based Near Eastern scholar Edward Lipinski determined, the Land of Darkness existed beyond the virtually impenetrable barrier created by the Eastern Taurus Mountains in Armenia Major.
Guy G. Stroumsa, a Gnostic scholar with the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Oxford University, England, has made a study of the mysterious mountain called Charaxio. He says that various attempts have been made to find its location. However, because Charaxio appears under this name only in The Gospel of the Egyptians, it has proved near impossible to trace. This said, the abbreviated form, Charax, does appear in antiquity.20 John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica: A Classical Dictionary, published in 1788, reveals just one entry under this name, which is “a town in Armenia.”21
That Charaxio might have been situated in Armenia makes sense of the fact that it was said to exist where the sun doesn’t shine; that is, in the Land of Darkness, in the far north. Stroumsa himself took note of this, comparing Charaxio’s description with “the dark regions mentioned in 1 Enoch 78:3”22; that is, the book of Enoch, which, as we have seen, can be linked with the Land of Darkness beyond the Tigris Tunnel. Realizing this, Stroumsa alludes to traditions regarding the prophet Enoch being handed books from his forefathers Adam and Seth, which he says were concealed on Mount Ararat in Armenia, so that they might remain safe during the coming deluge.23
MOUNT SIR
Pushing the matter still further, Stroumsa notes that “the link between Seiris (the land of the sons of Seth and the place of the Steles) and Mount Ararat” finds expression in another Gnostic text called The Hypostatis of the Archons, which is also found in the Nag Hammadi library. He continues: “Noah is asked by the demiurge (the creator of the physical world) to set the ark upon Mount Sir. . . . In some milieus, the mountain could have been given the name of the land in which the books were written Σειρ(ις)”24; that is, Seir(is).
So Guy Stroumsa proposes that Charaxio, Seiris, and Mount Sir (Seir) are all one and the same or that they are conflated forms of an original mountain of Seth, which he identifies as Mount Ararat, since this would have been the safest place for something to have been hidden with foresight of the coming conflagration and deluge. This is, in my opinion, smart thinking, yet once again we are back to Mount Ararat sucking up every legend and tradition that comes along, simply because of the Christian fixation with its being the Place of Descent of Noah’s ark. Just one Gnostic work actually mentions Mount Ararat by name, this being the Pistis Sophia contained in the Askew Codex, a fifth-century parchment manuscript of Coptic origin now in the British Library. Yet it speaks only of Jesus in his spiritual form causing the patriarch Enoch to write the so-called Books of Yeu (or Jeu) when in Paradise, and then getting him to deposit them for safekeeping “in the rock Ararad,” where a heavenly ruler is appointed to watch over them during the coming flood.25 It does not mention Adam or Seth, and certainly makes no direct reference to Charaxio, Seiris, or Mount Sir.
So I looked again for any elucidation on the place-name Charaxio and found something very interesting indeed. I discovered that the Araxes River, which was also known by the abbreviated form of Arax, was itself once called the Charax,26 making sense of John Lemprière’s entry in his Bibliotheca Classica regarding a town called Charax in Armenia. Since we know that the Araxes takes its rise on Bingöl Mountain, the Abus Mons of antiquity, there has to be a good chance that it is also Charaxio, which with the –io suffix gives it the meaning “belonging to Charax”; that is, the Araxes River.
Charaxio’s identification with Bingöl Mountain is strengthened by the words of Stroumsa himself, who concludes for perfectly good reasons that Charaxio, Seiris, and Mount Sir are all synonymous with Bingöl’s main rival, Mount Ararat. Take Mount Ararat out of the picture and you are still left with his firm conviction that somewhere in Armenia Major is the real Charaxio. So was Bingöl Mountain really where Seth concealed the secrets of Adam on pillars or steles in order that they might be revealed in the final days? It is interesting that John Lemprière’s entry for Abus Mons reads “a mountain in Syria, where the Euphrates rises.”27 It confirms that in classical times this region of Armenia Major was still classed as Syria, the ancient land of Siriad or Seiris, where Josephus tells us that Seth concealed his pillars of knowledge and his descendants continued to live after this time. Yet what about Mount Sir—where was that located?
MONS VICTORIALIS
A tract entitled Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, which circulated among a Christian sect known as the Arians during the fifth century, alludes to a lost book or books of Seth. It states that once a year a group of twelve scholars would climb a mountain called Mons Victorialis, the “Victorious Mountain” or “Mountain of Victory,” on which were abundant “fountains” and beautiful trees, and here they would enter a cave and examine an original work written by Seth.28
An eighth-century Syriac text known as the “Revelation of the Magi”29 contains the same basic story, although here the twelve scholars are twelve Magi, who are both kings and “wise men,”30 descendants of Seth,31 who live in the land of Shir (i.e., Sir or Seiris).32 The book takes the form of commandments given by Adam to Seth, who records them in written form. It speaks of a sign that will herald the birth of a god in human form, with that sign being a star in the likeness of a small child.33
Every year the Magi would purify themselves in a spring and then ascend the Mountain of Victory and pray in silence before entering the cave, which is identified as the Cave of Treasures of the Hidden Mysteries.34 (See figure 37.2.) Here Adam and Eve had lived, just beyond the Garden of Eden, and after their deaths it had become the home of Seth, his family, and their descendants.
This same settlement of the antediluvian patriarchs, as we have already seen, was said by Pseudo-Methodius to have been located near Mount
Cordan, in the Eastern Taurus range, close to the Yeghrdut monastery and the plain of Mush.
Inside the cave the Magi consulted the books of Seth containing the secrets of Adam and watched for the prophesied sign before returning to their kingdoms to instruct those of their people who wished to learn of the “hidden mysteries.” The whole process was repeated across many generations, and when one of the twelve died, either a son or a close relative would replace him.35
The text alludes also to a book of revelations written by Seth, which states that Adam had originally seen the sign, the original star child, hanging over the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, but that it had disappeared when he committed the first sin.36 The “Revelation of the Magi” then reveals how a star appears in the sky, before entering the cave, inviting the Magi to do the same. Inside they find not a star, but the likeness of a small child, who introduces himself as the Son of God. The wise men are instructed to follow the star so that they might worship him in human form. They are then led in a quite fantastic manner first to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem, where the star enters a cave and becomes the infant Jesus, at which point the story reverts to the account of the Nativity as told in the gospel of Matthew (2:1–12). Eventually, the Magi return to the land of Shir, and in time the apostle Judas Thomas arrives to convert the people through “mighty deeds”37; and here he now baptizes and anoints the Magi.
Figure 37.2. Twelfth-century representation of Adam and Eve inside the Cave of Treasures, located within Mons Victorialis, the Mountain of Victory. Here lived the “children of Seth” until the time of the Flood. Its discovery will reveal the books of Seth containing the secrets of Adam.
Although there have been attempts to identify the land of Shir with locations as far away as northeast Iran and even China,38 it was likely located in the vicinity of the Cave of Treasures and, of course, the Garden of Eden. What is more, the Mountain of Victory, or Mons Victorialis, features in the sixth century Syriac text entitled the book of the Cave of Treasures as a name of the “Mountain of God” on which Adam, Eve, and their extended family—the “children of Seth”—live prior to the time of the Flood. These “children” constitute the entire line of early patriarchs and their families, from Seth right down to Noah.39 Enoch is there also, ministering unto God inside the cave and burying his father, Jared, all this coming before his celebrated translation to Paradise in the company of angels (see figure 37.3). According to the book of the Cave of Treasures, at the time of the Flood, Shem, the son of Noah, returns to the cave to retrieve the body of Adam, which is then taken aboard the ark—the bodies of the other patriarchs being left behind in the cave.40
So was the land of Shir to be found somewhere in the vicinity of the plain of Mush, the most obvious site of the Garden of Eden? Was it to be identified with Sim Mountain, where Shem is said to have established a settlement after leaving the ark and where Thaddeus deposited the holy relics beneath Yeghrdut’s evergreen tree in the first century AD? Remember, the alternative form of the Sumerian word for snake, muš, which might well be the root behind the Mush place-name, is šir, pronounced shir in the Akkadian language. Was the ancient Armenian kingdom of Taron, which included the plain of Mush, once known as the land of Šir, or Shir; that is, the land of the snake? This has to remain a very distinct possibility indeed.
If not in the vicinity of Yeghrdut, was the Mountain of Victory synonymous with Bingöl Mountain and Abus Mons, the best candidate by far for Charaxio, the mountain where The Gospel of the Egyptians tells us Seth hid his holy book, or books, containing the secrets of Adam? Is this where the Cave of Treasures will be found? Both sites, Yeghrdut and Bingöl, which are visible from each other, might easily have played some dual role in the construction of the Jewish, Gnostic, and later Christian myths concerning the true location not only of the original Garden of Eden but also where Adam and Eve’s descendants, the “children of Seth,” are said to have lived on the “holy mountain” of God. No other geographical region makes sense of all of these disparate stories, showing us quite clearly that in Judeo-Christian tradition this was where the events of the book of Genesis were played out, no more than a couple of hundred miles away from Göbekli Tepe.
So what exactly are the secrets of Adam? Can we go on to determine what Seth actually recorded, either in book form or in stone? As we see next, Adam’s secrets might well turn out to contain forbidden knowledge regarding the angelic origins of humankind.
Figure 37.3. The patriarch Enoch is translated to Paradise after being anointed by the angel Michael and becoming like an angel himself.
38
AS ANGELS OURSELVES
What exactly are the secrets of Adam? What might they pertain to, and what relevance has any of this to Göbekli Tepe and the Yeghrdut monastery located in some quiet corner of the terrestrial Paradise? The first clue is The Gospel of the Egyptians, which tells of the creation of the Sethians. They, we are told, constitute “earthly counterparts of a heavenly church of angelic beings, the prototypical Sethians.”1 Moreover, we learn that when the book or stele that Seth placed in the mountain Charaxio is found, “it will identify the true race of Seth.”2
There is little question that this “true race of Seth” is to be seen as the incarnated souls of the aforementioned “angelic beings, the prototypical Sethians,” meaning that the secrets of Adam supposedly reveal the angelic nature of humankind.
LIKE THE ANGELS
What exactly does this mean? How can humans become like angels, especially if the rebel Watchers of the book of Enoch represent, arguably, a memory of the real prime movers behind the genesis of civilization? The key is that the angels were said to have inhabited Paradise itself and so benefited, like Adam and Eve before the Fall, from the presence of the Tree of Life, which conveys eternal life to whoever or whatever is in its presence.
Before the Fall, according to Gnostic tradition, Adam and Eve had spiritual bodies, “like the angels,”3 but after their expulsion, their bodies grew more and more dense and languid until they were no more than “coats of skin.”4 Only with the “sweet odour of light,” the perfumed oil from the Tree of Life, would they ever be able to regain their original divine body.5
Not only does any fragment from the Tree of Life remain “true and living,” a concept reflected in Yeghrdut’s holy tree being “evergreen,” but the Oil of Mercy from the Tree of Life is said to bestow eternal light and life through the sacred process of anointing. Indeed, early Christian tradition asserted that Jesus was himself anointed with oil from the Holy Wood of the Tree of Life before incarnation in order that he might become Christ,6 a word taken from the Greek Xριςτός (Christos), meaning “the Anointed One.”
As I already knew, the Tree of Life was anciently believed to have been an olive tree,7 an evergreen that gave forth a fragrance or perfume,8 a belief connected with the story contained in the book of Enoch in which Enoch, on his visit to Paradise in the company of two angels, is anointed with an oil fragranced by myrrh:
And God said to Michael: “Approach and remove Enoch’s earthly garments! Anoint him with My blessed oil and dress him with garments of My glory! Michael did what God told him; he anointed me and dressed me. The appearance of the oil was greater than a great light and its lubricant was like blessed dew, and its fragrance was like myrrh shining like the sun’s rays. I looked at myself and saw that I was like one of His glorious ones and there was no obvious difference.9
So the removal of Enoch’s physical garments and his anointing with perfumed oil have the purpose of taking away the patriarch’s earthly skin and replacing it with divine garments that are symbolic of his transformation from a mortal person into an angelic being. This is the prerequisite for his permanent translation to Paradise, the story told in the book of Genesis.10 Yet it is also a reference to the spiritual bodies, or “garments of light,” that Adam bore before the Fall. So through this anointing process Enoch becomes as Adam was in Paradise, a person restored to his original state of divine glory, no d
ifferent from the angels themselves.
THE HOLY MYRON
The perfumed oil used by the angel or Watcher named Michael to anoint Enoch can be compared with the Myron (or Muron), also known as the Chrism, used even today to anoint the Catholicos during his inauguration as spiritual head of the Armenian Church. It is obtained by mixing together pure olive oil with some forty or so herbs and spices, including myrrh, which is then exposed to the surviving essence of the original holy anointing oil made by Moses under Yahweh’s instruction and brought to Yeghrdut in Taron by Thaddeus in the first century.
The Myron is considered to convey wisdom through the Holy Spirit or divine light of God since it bore the similitude of the heavenly Oil of Mercy from the Tree of Life. This is brought out in teachings attributed to Saint Peter, the founder of the Church of Rome, which state that one day Christians will be able to receive oil that comes directly from the Tree of Life and not simply from some created imitation: “If the oil blended by men had such power, think how great is the oil that was extracted by God himself from a branch of the tree of life.”11
Very similar ideas are behind the anointing not just of church leaders worldwide but also of kings and queens. At a coronation, it is the anointing of the candidate that conveys kingship, not the crowning; the placement of the crown is merely a visible sign of the monarch’s authority to rule in the eyes of God and of his or her newfound divinity.
From this it might be assumed that the secrets of Adam, written down by Seth, contain the manner in which we, as mortal humans, are able to regain our spiritual bodies of light lost at the time of the Fall. To do this and become as angels ourselves, we have to be anointed by the perfumed oil that bears the similitude of the Oil of Mercy from the Tree of Life. Within the influence of this divinely prescribed substitute for the Oil of Mercy, immortality is assured.