Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 397
Seir. But Jacob hemmed and hawed and finally told Esau to go on ahead. Then,
after Esau had left, Jacob went in a completely different direction where it is said
he, “built himself a house, and made booths or places of shelter for his livestock;
so the name of the place is called Succoth”. (v. 17)
When we investigate this word, we discover that the archaic meaning of it was
that of a small cubicle set up by a “temple prostitute” along the side of the road as
in the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38:14, from the J document!
This brings us back to the question of what was the Canaanite Festival of
Tabernacles?
The ancient Greek civilization dedicated one of their harvest festivals to the
goddess of the earth and all grain, Demeter. The festival, known as the
Thesmosphoria, was celebrated for three days and featured the building of shelters
by married women, fasting and offerings to Demeter. The connection between
married women and the festival may point to a belief that childbearing and healthy
crops were interconnected. The word Mete is, of course, related to mother, and De
is the delta, or triangle, a female genital sign. This letter in the ancient alphabets
originally represented the Door of birth, death, or sexual paradise. Thus, the
“booth” or Tabernacle, was little more than a structure set up to manifest a
“doorway”. Doorways in general were considered sacred to the Goddesses, and in
Sumeria they were painted red to represent the female “blood of life”. In Egypt,
doorways were smeared with real blood for the religious rites of the goddess.
Where have we heard of that before?
The cult of Demeter which celebrated the Eleusinian rites was well established
in Mycenae in the 13 th century BC, and it is more than likely that the Feast of
Tabernacles in Canaan was an offshoot of this activity. Our sources of information
regarding the Eleusinian Mysteries include the ruins of the sanctuary there,
numerous statues, bas reliefs, and pottery. We also have reports from ancient
writers such as Aeschylos, Sophocles, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Plutarch, and
Pausanias - all of whom were initiates - as well as the accounts of Christian
commentators like Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Astorias,
who were critics and not initiates. Yet for all this evidence, the true nature of the
Mysteries remains shrouded in uncertainty because the participants were
remarkably steadfast in honoring their pledge not to reveal what took place in the
Telesterion, or inner sanctum of the Temple of Demeter. To violate that oath of
secrecy was a capital offense. 277 For these reasons, scholars today must make use
of circumstantial evidence and inferences, with the result that there is still no
consensus as to what did or did not take place.
277 Aeschylos, for example, once had to fear for his life on account of coming too close to revealing
forbidden truths.