Chapter 20 AMERICAN GRAFFITI

THERE IS A UNIVERSAL legal tradition that requires acts of a governmental authority to be marked by a seal – otherwise the acts are not authentic. Typically, a seal discloses the character of the authority it represents by means of an image which can be, and usually is, amplified by some sentence, phrase, or word.

The first seal of the United States of America, designed to authenticate all governmental actions under the Declaration of Independence, was presented to Congress in August 1776. Created by an official committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the seal illustrates an event based on Exodus 14:19-27. It is a cameo of Moses leading the Israelites through the parted waters while a chariot-bound Pharaoh, wielding a sword and wearing the crown of tyranny, perishes in the maelstrom. Framing the picture are the words “REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD.”

When I first became aware of this seal many years ago, I thought it demonstrated how intensely biblical was the faith of the founding fathers. But once I began discerning the hidden makers of American nationalism, my thinking changed radically. I now see this seal, despite the biblical glow of the committee that designed it, as the profession of an intensely Roman Catholic faith. For there is a great disparity between biblical faith and Roman Catholic faith. Indeed, this disparity was the crux of the Protestantism which Pope Paul III commissioned the Society of Jesus to extirpate.

Biblical faith regards the Bible alone, sola scriptura, apart from any other source, to be a sufficient and infallible rule of life. In the Bible’s own words: “All scripture is God-breathed, and is profitable for teaching, for counseling, for correction, and for training in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, completely outfitted to perform good works” (2 Timothy 3:16).

Roman Catholic faith, on the other hand, while agreeing that the Bible is God-breathed, considers scripture neither infallible nor sufficient in itself as a rule of life, unless so interpreted by the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church), and then so pronounced by the infallible pope.

At Paul Ill’s Council of Trent (1545-63), which we have learned was closely supervised over its eighteen years of existence by the Jesuits, it was decreed that the Magisterium “receives and venerates, with a feeling of piety and reverence all the books of the Old and New Testaments, also the traditions [italics mine], whether they relate to faith or morals, as having been dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church in unbroken succession.”1 Over the centuries, Roman Catholic faith in Scripture, as modified by tradition, as pronounced by the Magisterium and pope, has bound millions of consciences to a thousand doctrines not found in scripture and either unknown or rejected by the apostles and early Christian fathers.²

The 1776 seal agrees with Roman Catholic teaching as much as it disagrees with the Bible. Whereas the caption “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” is found nowhere in Scripture, it is the cornerstone of Bellarminian liberation theology. The Bible never condones rebellion, not even rebellion to those tyrants under whom God’s own people, the Israelites, were obliged to suffer continuously. When Scripture mentions rebellion, it is almost always referring to the disobedience of the Israelites toward their God Yahweh. The seventeenth chapter of Proverbs teaches that “the evil man seeks rebellion,” and 1 Samuel 15:23 admonishes that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” The God of Scripture cannot be obeyed by evil-doing and witchcraft. He will not be honored in the breach. However, sacred tradition authorizes anything in the service of Rome – Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita, the end justifies the means.

Depicting rebellion as a salvational act, the 1776 seal further harmonizes with the Magisterium on how the sinful soul of man is saved from eternal punishment. The Magisterium concurs with the Bible that salvation is the free gift of God’s grace, but adds the nonscriptutal teaching that salvation can be lost if good works are not performed through the “sacred channels” of Baptism, Confession, and the Mass. Scripture (Ephesians 2:8-10) says that Jesus Christ does not shate his saviorhood with anyone or anything (“You have been saved by grace through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one should boast”), yet the Magisterium says that Christ is no savior without the sinner’s cooperation with the Church and its traditions.

In fact, Scripture’s account of the Exodus shows the departure from Egypt not to be a rebellion at all. When called by Yahweh to represent Israel before Pharaoh, Moses pled himself incapable (Exodus 3:11), uninformed (3:13), unauthorized (4:1), ineloquent (4:10), unadapted (4:13), unproven (5:23), and uncredentialed (6:12) – hardly the audacious mindset of a great rebel leader. What Moses led was no rebellion but a sociological deliverance for which Yahweh alone claimed responsibility: “Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh so that you can bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt…. And I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof: and after that he will let you go” (Exodus 3:10, 20). If Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson had wished the 1776 seal to express the true teaching of Scripture, they might have written “YAHWEH REMOVES TYRANTS FOR HIS FAITHFUL.”

But even with a biblically correct motto the seal fails the biblical standard. For it is after all a seal, authority represented by a graven image. Although the use of seals and images is one of Roman Catholicism’s proudest sacred traditions, Scripture prohibits it. The only Israelite shown to rule with a seal is king Ahab, who “did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him” (1 Kings 16:30). Ahab’s seal, apparently appropriated from ancient pagan tradition, was employed by his wife, the quintessentially wicked Jezebel, to commit fraud and murder (21:8-16). Scripture warns of an unlimited potential for evil inherent in graven-image seals. The apostles of Christ understood this principle well. They saw the pharisees demand Jesus show them a token of His authority, and what Jesus showed them was not an image but Scripture – the book of Jonah (Matthew 12:39). Paul the apostle had no seal except the people he’d evangelized: “for the seal of my apostleship are those of you in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 9:2). Indeed, the seal of the Body of Christ is represented in Scripture not by the miter and crossed keys of the Holy See, or the doves, flames, Bibles, bare crosses, and sunbursts of the Protestant denominations, but by Scripture alone: “The foundation of God stands sure, having this seal: THE LORD KNOWS HIS OWN; AND LET CHRIST’S FAITHFUL DEPART FROM INIQUITY” (2 Timothy 2:19).

The early Christian leaders, whose faith is historically regarded as the best-informed of any generation’s, rigorously opposed the making of images or likenesses of any kind. Scripture had taught them well that Yahweh’s people always suffered terrible calamity whenever they violated the commandment not to identify themselves or their God with “any graven images or any likeness of any thing” (Exodus 20:4). Edwyn Bevan’s Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christianity cites three important early churchmen who forbade images. Clement of Alexandria taught that images were “not true,” and were forbidden by Yahweh “in order that we might not direct our attention to sensible objects, but might proceed to the intelligential.” Origen held that images “drag the soul down instead of directing the mind to a divine invisible reality.” Tertullian instructed the servants of God to avoid every form of imagery, even secular art. Indeed, as Bevan points out, Christians of the first and second centuries placed visual artists in a class with harlots, drunkards, brothel-keepers, and actors.

But for thousands of years Mediterranean cultures had been receiving their religious and political information from myths narrated by visual art. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, said of his congregations, “They are not devoid of religion, but not able to read.” This was Paulinus’ excuse for beseeching the Bishop of Rome to permit him to teach with graven images. Paulinus had forgotten, or perhaps had never learned, that the basis of the Gospel of Christ was above all literary – else why had its Author prohibited graphic likenesses? Knowing this, the apostles devoted a large part of the evangelical process to spreading literacy – “blessed is he who reads” (Revelation 1:3). Even so, the apostle Peter foresaw the time of Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, a time when “false teachers among you shall bring in damnable heresies denying the Lord” (2 Peter 2:1). What more damnable heresy could there be than depicting a God who condemns images… with an image? Could such a God even be depictable by an image? Wouldn’t an image purporting to be Him have to be in reality, by sheer force of logic, the image of another God? The apostle Paul, aware of the compelling nature of images, and their definitive incapacity to teach Jesus and the Gospel, warned the Corinthians how easily a false teacher could lead them to “another Jesus, another gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4). The time was very close, Paul knew, when Christians “will not endure sound doctrine, but will heap to themselves teachers who will switch them from truth to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3,4). And what are graven images but the very grammar of myths?

The switch began noticeably happening in the third century, when teachers like Paulinus of Nola began instructing from pictures (for which Paulinus was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church). With Constantine a century later, as we’ve seen, a powerful new “Christian” visual language developed. Old mythic icons were renamed to fit Bible stories, and an iconic Christianity was spread through pagan images processed by missionary adaptation. What the new converts were not taught is that Scripture categorically rejects such attempts to iconize its contents, and that therefore (again, by sheer force of logic) the likenesses upon whom they reverently gazed were no more than the gods and goddesses originally pictured, other gods of other gospels. Archaeology traces these gods and their gospels back to the very earliest Babylonian cathedrals. It was in these cathedrals, erected nearly four thousand years before the Christian era, that the Roman Catholic sacred iconographic tradition was born. We shall explore this subject in some detail in a forthcoming chapter.

CONGRESS refused to adopt the 1776 seal. We may never know why. There is no record of any debate, only the notation that the seal was ordered to lay “on the table.” Five years later, in the summer of 1781, a fleet of twenty-five French war vessels arrived in Chesapeake Bay with more than twenty thousand soldiers accompanied by ninety Roman Catholic chaplains and God only knows how many secularized Jesuits. A month later, the British army surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown. The legend- spinning visible war was over at last.

In June 1782, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were meeting in Paris to perfect a treaty with envoys of the newly-elected British Prime Minister – Robert Petty. We recall Petty, Lord Shelburne, the ubiquitous “Jesuit of Berkeley Square” who teamed with Lord Bute to conclude the French and Indian Wars in terms that had made the Revolution inevitable. Franklin and Adams found themselves approaching the negotiating table without a national seal. Nothing they might do on behalf of the United States could be valid without a seal. This was the exigency that moved Congress to adopt, on June 28, the seal designed by Charles Thomson and William Barton.

The Great Seal is “written” in cabalah, that style of allegorical communication composed of seemingly unrelated symbols, numerals, and phrases. A piece in Le Charivari No. 18 (Paris, 1973), discussing certain symbolic motifs used by the enlightened French artist Nicolas Poussin, explains the practical advantage of cabalistic works:

A single word suffices to illumine connections which the multitude cannot grasp. Such works are available to everyone, but their significance addresses itself to an elite. Above and beyond the masses, sender and receiver understand each other.

Cabalah goes beyond mere secret communication. Supposedly, it thrusts the sender “into direct contact with the living powers and forces of the Universe, and through them with the eternal source of all manifestation,” explains Henrietta Bernstein in her Cabalah Primer. “In other words, you make contact with God.” To a cabalist gnostic illuminatus whose special knowledge has liberated him from the clutch of matter and is speeding him toward the pure light of godliness, cabalah is “the royal art, a closed body of knowledge sacred to the elect.”

Since the Great Seal is written in the language of cabalah, it appears to be a veritable Gnostic Constitution. In terms well known to initiates and God Almighty, it sets forth the origin, nature, purpose, and plan of American government. Of course, as Charles Thomson and Manly Hall have intimated, the initiates will never disclose to outsiders the meaning of the Seal’s elements. But God Almighty is not so aloof. He does not resist inquiries. Nor is He a respecter of persons. Contrary to the cabalist’s boast of privileged access, Scripture promises more light to any mind that seeks it from God in person. Shining that light on commonly available histories of rulers and religions, anyone can trace the Seal’s elements back to their ancient origins and in the end know as much as, if not more than, the gnostics.

On the front or obverse side of the Seal we find an eagle clutching an olive branch and thirteen arrows, with a banner in his beak inscribed with the motto “E PLURIBUS UNUM .” The earliest images of sacred eagles have been found in that region of present-day Iraq once known as Babylon. The eagle was identified with the Babylonian sky-god Annu. When Annu entered sacred Roman iconography as Jupiter, the eagle was still his mascot. For the more than two thousand years since the death of Rome’s first emperor, Julius Caesar, Jupiter’s eagle has signified Rome’s imperial power – “imperial” meaning the right of the Caesars to make laws and enforce them. In many a church, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, the Bible from which lessons are publicly read rests on a hardwood lectern carved in the shape of a magnificent eagle. Yet in the pages of this very Bible, God forbids carved images of eagles. What, then, does the eagle signify, if not a power indifferent to Scripture?

The brilliant cloud hovering over the eagle’s head in the Great Seal is the aegis. The aegis is a goatskin. (We have already examined how Scripture equates the goat with worldly power and separation from God.) When Jupiter was a baby he was nursed by a she-goat named Amaltheia. (The priestly artists often portrayed the adult Jupiter as a satyr, having a man’s body with the horns, hair, and legs of a goat.) When Amaltheia died, Jupiter made the aegis out of her hide.

The aegis of the Great Seal glorifies thirteen five-pointed stars, or pentagrams. Each pentagram represents an original State. In gnostic symbology, the pentagram is identified with Jupiter’s wife, Venus. There is a natural reason for this. A dedicated observer, from a fixed location over an eight-year period, will discern that the planet Venus travels a unique celestial pathway that exactly describes a pentagram. Carl Ljungman, in Dictionary of Symbols, has written:

As the orbit of Venus is closer to the sun than the earth’s position, she is never seen more than 48 degrees from the sun. During a period of 247 days, Venus is visible as the Evening star that is, within 48 degrees or less of the sun after the sun has set. Then Venus comes too close to the sun for us to see her. She remains invisible for 14 days, then reappears as the Morning star (or Eastern star) immediately before the sun rises in the east. For 245 days we can see Venus each morning at dawn before she again disappears into the sun’s light by getting too close to the sun. Venus is now invisible for 78 days. On the 79th evening, she appears again in the west immediately after the setting sun. Now she is the Evening star once more.

If one knows the ecliptic [that is, the great circle of the celestial sphere that is the apparent path of the sun among the stars] and can pinpoint the present position of the planets in relation to the constellations of fixed stars in the zodiac, one can mark the exact place in the 360 degrees of the zodiac where the Morning star first appears shortly before sunrise after a period of invisibility. If we do this, wait for the Morning star to appear again 584 days later [the synodic orbital time of Venus] and mark its position in the zodiac, and then repeat this process until we have five positions of Venus as the Morning star, we will find that exactly eight years plus one day have passed. If we then draw a line from the first point marked to the second point marked, then to the third, and so on, we end up with a pentagram.

Only Venus possesses the five-pointed star sign. Not one of the innumerable stars above us can recreate this by its own orbit.³

Charles Thomson, the Great Seal’s co-designer, led a group of dedicated observers of Venus. The first coordinated scientific experiment of the American Philosophical Society, the club Thomson founded for politically radical young professionals, focused on Venus’ celestial pathway. On the evening of June 3, 1769, with colleagues stationed at three sites in Pennsylvania and Delaware, Thomson and five others watched, from the Public Observatory on State House Square in Philadelphia, an eclipse caused by “the transit of Venus across the Sun.”⁴

The goddess Venus, as we’ve seen, was absorbed by missionary adaptation into the Roman Catholic sacred tradition as the Virgin Mary. The adapters even ascribed to Mary the Venusian epithet “Queen of Heaven,” a title never ascribed to Mary in the Bible.

“Queen of Heaven” in Scripture names only one personage, and that is Ishtar, the Babylonian Venus. Most faithful Catholics, historically insulated from Scripture by the Magisterium and the Inquisition, have not known this. Jeremiah 44 explains how the Israelites violated their covenant with Yahweh by praising the Queen of Heaven, and in turn lost their dignity, property, freedom, everything to the Babylonians. Scripture teaches, also, that the Babylonian interests have much to gain from inducing souls to praise the Queen of Heaven. And as we shall later see, their gain is divinely approved.

The term “Queen of Heaven” appears nowhere else in the Old and New Testaments but at Jeremiah 44, and there exactly five times. Did Jeremiah know that Venus’ celestial trail delineated five points? And did the other thirty-five writers of the Bible’s sixty-six books know as well? Did all these men, who wrote in different languages over a period of more than a thousand years, conspire not to mention “Queen of Heaven” in order to preserve Jeremiah’s five mentions, so that the link between (a) the Queen of Heaven, (b) the five-pointed path of Venus, and (c) the curse resulting from praising her would stand as a divine lesson for the rest of eternity? Or did it just happen that way by accident? Or, as the Bible teaches, were Jeremiah and his co-authors inspired by the Author of all creation to say (and not say) things for reasons beyond their individual understanding?

THE Great Seal’s eagle holds a banner in its beak inscribed “E PLURIBUS UNUM.” This phrase, which appears on American coinage as well, is popularly understood to signify the melting of many people into one nation, “of many, one.” Or to identify the coin as one of many identical coins. The gnostic understanding of this phrase, however, borders on the psychedelic. According to Manly Hall, e pluribus unum refers to the ancient Bacchic Rites, which he says was “a forerunner to Freemasonry.” Mysterious and fantastic, the Bacchic Rites are built upon the following story line:

In a time before the creation of mankind, the twelve Titans cause Bacchus, Jupiter’s beautiful son, to become fascinated by his own image in a mirror. Enthralled by himself, Bacchus is seized by the Titans. They kill him, tear him to pieces, boil the pieces in water, and afterwards roast and eat them. This grieves all his loved ones, hence his name, from bakhah, “to weep” or “lament.” The strewn body parts of Bacchus become the four elements of matter.

One of Bacchus’ sisters, the virgin Minerva, rescues his sacred heart from the four elements and places it before Jupiter in Heaven. From Heaven, Jupiter hurls thunderbolts at his son’s murderers and reduces the Titans to ashes. The rains further reduce the ashes, mingling with the four elements, to slime. From this evil slime Jupiter forms mankind, a “Titanic embodiment” from which the “Bacchic idea,” or rational soul, must be released. The Bacchic idea is released by evil slime’s sexual energy, especially when facilitated by alcoholic drink – hence Bacchus is associated with grapevines, wild dancing, phallic symbols, and fornication.

When death and sex have rescued the rational soul from the four slimy corners of the earth, a transfigured, eternal Bacchus is resurrected as the flaming Sun. He is E PLURIBUS UNUM, One from Many, a resurrection symbolized by the pentagram, the one rising out of the four to make five. This, says Manly Hall, is “the magical formula of man,”

the human soul rising from the bondage of the animal nature. The pentagram is the true light, the Star of the Morning, marking the location of five mysterious centers of force, the awakening of which is the supreme secret of white magic.

With “E PLURIBUS UNUM” flowing from his beak, Jupiter’s eagle preaches the Bacchic Gospel. It is a gospel of salvation that antedates that of Jesus Christ by many, many centuries. The Bacchic Gospel was preached and played out in the pagan cults. A Holy Virgin would ritually rescue the Son of God’s Sacred Heart from the slime of humanity imprisoning the Son’s soul. Each cult initiate – a fractional part of the Son’s soul – supposedly gained increasing amounts of knowledge from mind-altering substances and sexual ecstasy administered for money, of course, by the temple priests and priestesses. The initiate looked forward to being released from his slimy humanity by ever-increasing knowledge. He yearned to be reunited ultimately with the Sacred Heart in Heaven, resurrected and transfigured for all eternity.

This salvational plan, or some variation of it, can be found at the core of all the secret or mystery religions – cults of empire. It persists from the earliest Babylonian prototype right on down through the Great Seal. It has succeeded not because it calls for repentance from sin, but because it makes sin an asset in a process of self-deification. The Bacchic Gospel serves an economy of sin management, in which sins are forgiven upon the payment of money or performance of some act of contrition valuable to society. It is about people control. Because it prospers on the addictive nature of fornication and mind-altering substances, it naturally facilitates sex and booze and drugs and all their destructive fallout in order to have a context in which to make itself useful. Unlike the Christian Gospel, which conditions forgiveness of sins upon repentance – “and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3) – the Bacchic Gospel forgives upon the tendering of appropriate sacrifices to the priest of the appropriate deity. The congeniality of this gospel to secular government and Roman Catholicism speaks for itself.

THE reverse side of the Great Seal contains four elements. First, the motto “ANNUIT COEPTIS;” second, a thirteen-coursed topless pyramid with MDCCLXXVI engraved in the foundation; third, a disembodied eye forming the pyramid’s capstone, and fourth, the motto “NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM.” These elements define exactly the “divine providence” upon whose protection the signers of the Declaration of Independence firmly relied.

The land of the Pyramid, Egypt, is where Caesarean Rome was inaugurated. By “Caesarean” I mean the empire whose head commands not only affairs of state but those of religion as well. Caesarean Rome officially began in Alexandria, Egypt, at the temple of Jupiter, on the winter solstice – December 25 – in the year 48 BC, when a fifty-two-year-old priest of Jupiter was declared to be Jupiter’s incarnation, thus “Son of God.” His name was Caius of the family of Marius, Caius Maria. After deification, and occasionally before, Caius Maria was referred to as “Caesar,” a cabalism formed by the letter “C” (for Caius) attached to “Aesar,” the Etruscan word for “God.” The God Caius. (Suetonius, the first-century biographer of the Caesars, suggests that the title was formed from prefixing Aesar with the numeral “C,” meaning “hundred.” God of the Hundred, or Hundreds.)

According to Scottish theologian Alexander Hislop, Caesar consented to deification in order to inherit the huge kingdom of Pergamum.5 Consisting of most of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), Pergamum was bequeathed to the Roman people in 133 BC by its king, Attalus III. But there was a catch: the people of Rome had to regard their leader as God.

The Pergamenian kings had begun ruling as God when the title of Pontifex Maximus fled the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. In that eventful year, Persian invaders assassinated the Babylonian king Belshazzar. Just moments prior, Belshazzar had seen his assassination prophesied by the famous handwriting on the wall: “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin,” (“the Numberer is numbered”).6 Ruling as God by divine appointment, Belshazzar had profaned the sacred vessels of the Israelite temple. This was the unpardonable sin of blasphemy, for which God sent the Persians to destroy him.

Belshazzar’s priests were evidently spared. Rather than submit to the Persian conquerors, they furtively gathered together all their portable treasures, entitlements, codes, inscriptions, astrology, sacred formulae, and insignia and fled with them northwesterly to Pergamum. Since the rulers of Pergamum were already practicing Babylonian religion, they were honored to receive the fugitive Babylonian College and their great endowment.

Pergamum, the new residence of Pontifex Maximus, became a showplace for despotism. The neighboring Greeks reflected its sudden transformation with the myth of Midas, the king whose touch turned everything to gold. Babylonian rule graced Pergamum with the world’s greatest medical complex, the Asklepion, dedicated to the god of pharmacological healing, Asklepios. Pergamum became the most important humanist learning center, its library housing more than two hundred thousand scrolls. (Marc Antony would later move these assets to Alexandria as a gift to Cleopatra. Many of them eventually found their way from Alexandria to the Medici Library in Florence.)

When Attalus III died in 133 BC, he bequeathed all his kingdom’s Babylonian grandeur to the Romans. But no Roman emperor was deemed fit to receive it because the Roman constitution had never suffered a man to be deified. The bequest lay unclaimed until 48 BC, when Caius Maria Caesar was declared God Almighty in the Serapion, Alexandria’s temple of Jupiter.

Deification entitled Caesar now to assume the title Pontifex Maximus. To indicate his infinitely holier status, he took the name “Julius.”7 The name was a claim of descent from Julius Ascanius, the legendary son of legendary Aeneas, Virgil’s maritime hero who sailed westward with a band of his Trojan fellow-countrymen fleeing the sack of Troy by Greek marauders. Assisted by the whole heavenly network of mythic deities, Aeneas led his followers to sacrifice their individuality for a glorious collective existence that would one day be called “Rome.”

Aeneas was considered the offspring of a union between a human being, Anchises, and Jupiter’s wife Venus. (When Anchises boasted of his intercourse with the goddess, Jupiter struck him blind with a thunderbolt. The Aeneid opens with Aeneas carrying blind old Anchises out of Troy on his shoulders.) By taking the name of Aeneas’ son Julius and claiming descent from him as well, Caesar was able to trace his lineage back to the Queen of Heaven. The divine lineage supposedly flowed through his mother, Maia, who was purported to have conceived him without losing her virginity. Maia also claimed to have remained a virgin even in childbirth by having her son delivered from the side in a surgical operation that still bears Caesar’s name.

All of this “fable and endless genealogy,” which Paul taught the church not to heed, is foundational to American secular government. For it is Julius Ascanius, grandson of Venus and claimed ancestor of the original Caesar, who inspired “ANNUIT COEPTIS,” the upper motto on the flip side of the Great Seal of the United States. The phrase, which the U.S. Department of State interprets to mean “God hath favored this undertaking,” was spoken by young Julius Ascanius in the Ninth Book of Virgil’s Aeneid.

The scene is a battleground. The Trojans are outnumbered and fearful. Young Julius Ascanius takes a position in front of his shrinking countrymen. He looks up at an evil giant named Remulus, King of the Rutulus. Remulus mocks the Trojans for sending a boy to fight him. While the giant quakes with derisive laughter, Julius slips an arrow onto his bowstring and cries toward the heavens:

Almighty Jupiter, favor this rebellious undertaking (AUDACIBUS ADNUE COEPTIS)! Each year, I shall bring to thy temple gifts in my own hands, and place a white bullock at thy altar!

Jupiter then hisses an arrow from the sky that strikes Remulus in the head with such force that it passes clean through his temples. The Trojans “raise a cheer and laugh aloud; their hearts rise toward the stars.” Apollo, from his throne of cloud, shouts the gnostic credo: “By striving so, men reach the stars, dear son of gods and sire of gods to come!”

A thrilling story. And one that leaves no doubt as to the identity of the god who favored the undertaking of the United States. It was a pagan deity, the god of Julius Ascanius, and not the God of the Bible. Surely, if Congress had wanted to show that the new nation was underwritten by Yahweh, God of the Bible, it could have referred to the boy-downs-giant story told in the Old Testament. Who doesn’t know David and Goliath? Charles Thomson’s biblical scholarship could easily have produced a motto based on I Samuel 17:47, where David says to Goliath:

“The Lord saves not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord’s, and He will give you into our hands!”

Reduced to an original-language motto at least as comprehensible as “ANNUIT COEPTIS,” the passage might have appeared in the Seal as the Hebrew

ENEMN EFEF

or even in translation, “THE BATTLE IS THE LORD’S.” But establishing a national government directly on biblical scripture was not the intent, I believe, of the founding fathers. Far more useful to them, and acceptable to the souls they knew would be populating America in good time, were the fabulous vanities of Roman religion. These souls required the sacred icons of burgeoning humanity and uninhibited sexual energy, legends that inspired hotblooded heroism and patriotism. Consent to images of this character presumed obedience to the omnipotent intelligence hovering inscrutably above the ESTABLISHMENT of ancient, stone- heavy, well-ordered pyramidic hierarchy.

LESS than four years after his deification, Julius Caesar was assassinated by an executive conspiracy. For another four years, civil war raged as two of the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, struggled for control against Caesar’s immediate successor, a Triumvirate comprised of Lepidus, Marc Antony, and Caesar’s adopted son (his biological grand-nephew), Caius Octavian Capias. The Triumvirate defeated the assassins only to war against each other. Poets lamented that Rome, against whom no foreign enemy had ever prevailed, was being destroyed by the strength of her own sons. Obligations of every kind dissolved. Class fought against class. A fog of guilt and despair settled in. The poets yearned for escape beyond the world’s borders, to a place of innocence and peace, perhaps to a new order of things. In his book about Rome’s revolution from republic to Babylonian autocracy, Oxford historian Ronald Syme writes:

The darker the clouds, the more certain was the dawn of redemption. On several theories of cosmic economy it was firmly believed that one world-epoch was passing, another was coming into being. The lore of the Etruscans, the calculations of astrologers and the speculations of philosophers might conspire with some plausibility and discover in the comet that appeared after Caesar’s assassination the sign and herald of a new age. Vague aspirations and magical science were quickly adopted for purposes of propaganda by the rulers of the world. Already coins of the year 43 BC bear symbols of power, fertility and the Golden Age.^s

The most influential and enduring celebration of Golden Age optimism was Virgil’s prophetic-sounding Fourth Eclogue. This work was addressed to one of Virgil’s chief benefactors, Caius Asinius Pollio, who was Consul (roughly equivalent to the office of President) when Caius Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus were reconciled in 40 BC by the Peace of Brindisi. Pollio, who represented Octavian at the Brindisi negotiations, introduced Virgil to Caius Maecenas, the media mogul of his day. He had risked his fortune supporting Julius Caesar’s rise to absolute dictatorship, and he would risk no less to put Caesar’s adopted son, Caius Octavian, in the same place. He scouted and subsidized the most highly talented artists, sculptors, and poets to create a totally new kind of communication. Virgil gave him the most for his money. Virgil developed a new “civic” literature whose pious rhetorical style gently guided public opinion toward accepting the rule of a deified Babylonian autocrat. In writing the Fourth Eclogue, Virgil borrowed heavily from the messianic verses of Isaiah, whose writings were freely accessible through the Jewish rabbis of Rome:

Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and call his name ‘God With Us’…. [Isaiah 7:14] For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. [9:6]

Six hundred years after Isaiah, Virgil solemnly announced in the Fourth Eclogue that the Prince of Peace would be produced by the unrolling of a New World Order (“NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM”):

Now returns the Golden Age of Saturn, now appears the Immaculate Virgin. Now descends from heaven a divine Nativity. O! Chaste Lucina [Goddess of Maternity], speed the Mother’s pains, haste the glorious Birth, and usher in the reign of thy Apollo. Thy consulship, O Pollio, shall lead this glorious Advent, and the new world order [NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM] shall then begin to roll. Thenceforth whatever vestige of Original Sin remains, shall be swept away from earth forever, and the Son of God shall be the Prince of Peace!

The billionaire Maecenas exploited the Fourth Eclogue in the media as though it were a divine summons for Caesar’s adopted son Octavian to take the throne and begin sweeping the world free of Sin. A fabulous resume of Octavian was already going around – about how a thunderbolt had blasted the city wall of his birthplace, Velitre, just prior to his birth. And how the priests interpreted this to be Jupiter’s way of saying the future ruler of the world would arise from the spot. And about how the Senate, upon hearing this, had decreed that all male babies should be executed. And how Octavian was saved by his mother, who pilfered the stone tablet on which the decree was engraved.

Octavian’s mother was Atia of the family of Marius, Atia Maria, a vestal virgin, niece of Caius Maria, the man who would become Julius Caesar. When Octavian reached the age of twelve, great-uncle Caius became his legal father through adoption. Three years later, in Octavian’s fifteenth year, his adoptive father was deified as Julius Caesar, Pontifex Maximus. That’s when the propagandists of Maecenas got busy promoting the Son’s divine origins – about how the child was born September 28, 63 BC in humble circumstances: the butler’s pantry at his grandfather’s mansion at Velitre. About how he had been conceived on December 25 by Apollo, who came in serpent form and impregnated the virgin Atia Maria as she lay sleeping on the floor of the Apollonian temple. About how, just prior to the child’s advent, the virgin Maria had dreamed that her body was scattered to the stars and encompassed the universe. About how her husband, too, had dreamed that from within her shone the bright beams of the sun, which then “rose from between her thighs.” About how the toddler Octavian’s head was often seen being licked by golden solar flames.

The propaganda circulated the story of how the great astrologer Theogenes, when told Octavian’s birth sign (Capricorn), rose and flung himself at the lad’s feet. Theogenes knew the astrological ruler of Capricorn was Saturn, whose second Golden Age was at hand – Saturn, the celestio-mythical Father-God of Rome and father of Jupiter. Octavian, as the incarnation of Jupiter, would be ruled by Saturn, the most dictatorial house in the zodiac, terrible for his restriction, limitation, control, even to the excesses of fornication and cannibalizing of his own children. No wonder Theogenes flung himself at Octavian’s feet!

In 28 BC, twelve years after the publication of the Fourth Eclogue, Octavian entered Rome triumphantly as the Prince of Peace. Like Julius had done, the new Pontifex Maximus received a new and holier name, Caesar Augustus (“since sanctuaries and all places consecrated by the augurs are known as ‘August,’” according to Suetonius). And like Julius, he was hailed as “Son of God.” Historian Alexander Del Mar describes the universal acceptance of the divine Octavian in these excerpts from his landmark exposition of Roman political deification, The Worship of Augustus Caesar (1899):

In the firm establishment of the Messianic religion and ritual, Augustus ascended the sacred throne of his martyred sire and was in turn addressed as the Son of God (Divi filius), whilst Julius was worshiped as the Father…. This claim and assumption appears in the literature of his age, was engraved upon his monuments and stamped upon his coins…. It was universally admitted and accepted throughout the Roman empire as valid and legitimate, according to chronology, astrology, prophecy, and tradition…. His actual worship as the Son of God was enjoined and enforced by the laws of the empire, accepted by the priesthood and practised by the people…. Both de jure and de facto it constituted the fundamental article of the Roman imperial and ecclesiastical constitution.

As supreme pontiff of the Roman empire, Augustus lawfully acquired and exercised authority over all cardinals, priests, curates, monks, nuns, flamens, augurs, vestal virgins, temples, altars, shrines, sanctuaries and monasteries, and over all religious rites, ceremonies, festivals, holidays, dedications, canonizations, marriages, divorces, adoptions, benefices, wills, burying grounds, fairs, and other ecclesiastical subjects and matters…. The common people wore little images of Augustus suspended from their necks. Great images and shrines of the same god were erected in the highways and resorted to for sanctuary. There were a thousand such shrines in Rome alone.

Augustus wore on his head a pontifical mitre surmounted by a Latin cross, an engraving of which, taken from a coin of the Colonia Julia Gemella, appears in Harduini, de Numiis Antiquis [1689], plate I…. The images of Augustus upon the coins of his own mintage, or that of his vassals, are surrounded with the halo of light which indicates divinity, and on the reverse of the coins are displayed the various emblems of religion, such as the mitre, cross, crook, fishes, labarum, and the Buddhic or Bacchic or Dionysian monogram of PX [the Greek chi-rho, “Cairo,” site of the great pyramid].

The Augustan writers furnished materials showing that [Augustus’] Incarnation was the issue of a divine father and mortal mother, that the mother was a wife-virgin, that the birth occurred in an obscure place, that it was foretold by prophecy or sacred oracle, that it was presaged or accompanied by prodigies of Nature, that the divinity of the child was recognized by sages, that the Holy One exhibited extraordinary signs of precocity and wisdom, that his destruction was sought by the ruling powers, that his miraculous touch was sufficient to cure deformity or disease, that he exhibited a profound humility, that his deification would bring peace on earth, and that he would finally ascend to heaven, there to join the Father.

So universally were his divine origin and attributes conceded, that many people, in dying, left their entire fortunes to his sacred personal fisc, in gratitude, as they themselves expressed it, for having been permitted to live during the incarnation and earthly sojourn of this Son of God. In the course of twenty years he thus inherited no less than 35,000,000 gold aurei [nearly $1 billion at 1996 values]…. Many potentates bequeathed him not only their private fortunes, but also their kingdoms and people in vassalage…. The marble and bronze monuments to Augustus still extant contain nearly one hundred sacred titles. Among them are Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Apollo, Janus, Quirinus, Dionysus, Mercurius, Volcanus, Neptunus, Liber Pater, Savus [Saviour], and Hesus.

At his death, Senator Numericus Atticus saw his spirit ascend to Heaven. The Ascension of Augustus is engraved upon the great cameo, from the spoils of Constantinople, presented by Baldwin II to Louis IX, and now in the Cabinet of France. A facsimile of it is published in Duruy’s History of Rome….

America’s Great Seal, with its obsessive fidelity to Caesarean Rome, cannot represent a nation more moral than the source of its scripture. The icons and mysterious cabalistic language of this Seal introduce a preposterous Babylonian gospel. Taken seriously (and shouldn’t a government’s solemn statements be taken seriously?), the Seal’s gospel teaches that America’s high spiritual purpose is to assist in the resurrection of the Son of God’s mutilated parts from the evil slime of human flesh. It tells us that already the Holy Virgin has rescued the Son’s Sacred Heart from the slime – E PLURIBUS UNUM, “one from many” – and has placed it high in the vault of Heaven, as her five-pointed celestial path describes for all to see. It calls for America to exert fervent sexual energy so that the Son’s many parts on earth might be reunited with the UNUM in Heaven. It promises that America will rise toward the pure light of sinlessness and Godliness, into eternal life as part of the solar body of the Son – the Sun – of God. It signifies that this cosmic resurrective process is administered by a pyramidic hierarchy conceived in ancient Babylon, exported to Asia Minor, and bequeathed to Rome. At the top of the hierarchy sits an unseen chieftain, an unknown superior, a God of the Seal who possesses universal intelligence and authority over every soul who confederates with, or subscribes to, the Seal.

The God of the Seal wields the fasces to sweep the earth clean of the last traces of Original Sin. He is assisted by a new priestly order, a “new world order” charged with destroying all individual identity deemed inconsistent with the resurrection to godliness. Uncooperative governments and dissident citizens alike are cut down by arts of war so frugal that the liquidation increases popular faith in the fasces. Because they function in a Golden Era of Saturn, the chief and his hierarchy can be depended upon to mimic Saturn’s strictness, cruelty, licentiousness, even cannabilism as the situation requires. To the charge that such is impossible in America, one comparison should be sufficient. No sooner was Augustus Caesar deified than he sacrificially murdered three hundred Senators in Perugia to atone for the assassination of his adoptive father Julius.9 Likewise, no sooner was an American president inaugurated than he, as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, authorized the sacrificial murder of nearly a hundred misguided Christians near Waco, Texas, to atone for what? A growing popular disenchantment with federal government?

What the Seal of the United States of America represents, to anyone who takes it seriously, is a Ministry of Sin. A speech by Jesuit political scientist Michael Novak, published in the January 28, 1989 issue of America, the weekly magazine of American Jesuits, sums it up eloquently enough:

The framers wanted to build a “novus ordo” that would secure “liberty and justice for all”…. The underlying principle of this new order is the fact of human sin. To build a republic designed for sinners, then, is the indispensable task…. There is no use building a social system for saints. There are too few of them. And those there are are impossible to live with!… Any effective social system must therefore be designed for the only moral majority there is: sinners.

In the next chapter, we shall examine how faithfully the founding fathers reconstructed Babylonian Rome on the banks of the Potomac.