The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

a state religion. It crystallized into the Greek Mysteries of Orphism, the
Eleusian Mysteries and even the Pythagorean movement. 748
The Radical Gnostics had their own form of the Emerald Tablet
called the pearl of great price. The Ethiopian Legends of Our Lady sets
out their belief: 749
Hannah, Mary and Sophia were three sisters and Hannah was the
Virgin Mary's mother. 'The Virgin first came down into the body
of Seth, shining like a white pearl.' Then successively entered
Enos, Cainan .. Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah ..
Abraham, Isaac, Joseph .. David, Solomon .. and Joachim. 'And
Joachim said to his wife Hannah "I saw Heaven open and a white
bird came therefrom and hovered over my head". This bird had
its being in the days of old .. It was the Spirit of Life in the form of
a white bird and .. became incarnate in Hannah's womb when the
pearl went forth from Joachim's loins and .. Hannah received it,
namely the body of our Lady Mary. The white pearl is mentioned
for its purity, and the white bird because Mary's soul existed
aforetime with the Ancient of Days .. Thus bird and pearl are
alike and equal.' From the Body of Mary, the pearl, the white
bird of the spirit then entered into Jesus at the Baptism.'
In Europe, the Papacy called the Radical Gnostic-dualist tradition
the Great Heresy of the Bogomils. The origin of the Bogomils is still
unknown. They emerged from the Indo-Hittite crucible and developed
close ethnic and cultural affinities with the northern Iranians. By the
seventh century CE, their great Bulgarian Empire spread from the
Ukraine to the Adriatic and Albania. 750 The Ottomans eventually
conquered this empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE.
Misrepresentation was common ploy in the Roman Catholic
Church’s struggle to eradicate competing strains of Christianity. Their
accusations of buggery vilified the Bogomils. If the accusations had any
basis, it may have been the infamous ritual kiss in ano practiced by a
number of esoteric societies to inculcate humility. Even today, the
Bulgarians remain smeared with the accusation of this unnatural vice. In
stark contrast to this reputation, the Bogomils may well have been the
greatest puritans of the Middle Ages.
The real sin of the Bogomils was to claim they represented the
true and hidden church, the Nazarenes of Bethlehem and Capernaum. 751
Underlying this dangerous claim seems to have been the legitimacy of the
Melchizedek tradition as with the Cathars in Southern France. To the
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