The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

y that path can men truly enter into the knowledge of God. These men, I
consider, were represented in the days of Josephus by the Essenes.
Let us now concentrate on what the Adonis Rites were:
(1) There was a tree and the slaying of a God-man; which
ceremony may in times of prosperity have been merely a dramatic
representation, but in times of stress, as even to-day in India, 32 no doubt
men were slain.
(2) There was a ceremony with a cauldron.
(3) The women offered cakes in the form of the phallus to
Astarte, and wept for Tammuz, the cakes being clearly a substitute for the
male organs of their husbands.
(4) Meanwhile in a secret cave under the altar of sacrifice the
Elders were endeavouring to raise the slain man to life.
(5) In front of the altar, and facing the rising sun, twenty- five
other Elders were invoking the Sun, waiting for it to rise, as that was the
sign that he who had died as a man had entered into Heaven as a God.
(6) After that a branch of a tree played an important part and was
sniffed by some of the worshippers. This branch was apparently growing
out of the grave of the dead man.
(7) There was a sacramental meal consisting of bread and wine,
symbolising the body and blood of the Vegetation God, which in all such
Rites replaces a more cannibalistic feast, hinted at in the presence of the
cauldron, which later appears in the Graal legend, even in the 12th
century. This feast seems to have been an integral part of the Essene
Rites.
Now all these features were, as we have seen, characteristic of the
Rites of the Great Mother and her lover Son all over the world, and most
32
In January 1915, I stood in the Kaligat at Calcutta and saw the goats
being slaughtered as a sacrifice in front of the door of the Temple of Kali. My
Brahmin guide said, “Before the British came they sacrificed men to her, and
even now when famine visits the land the people secretly offer a man to the Great
Goddess.” Kali represents the destructive side of Shiva, but she is also the Great
Mother. She is the only Divinity in India still worshipped with blood sacrifices.
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