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This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with Ernest Hancock, a seasoned libertarian activist based in Arizona, and host of the show Declare Your Independence on the Liberty Radio Network every weekday from 4pm-7pm CT. Among his many accomplishments, Hancock is responsible for designing the Ron Paul Revolution logo, with the word “Love” encoded into it. His activist group “Freedom’s Phoenix” has been influential in protests against photo radar, warrantless checkpoints, and other abuses of corporate government power. Freedom’s Phoenix maintains a facility at an undisclosed location where signs, posters, DVDs, pamphlets and other materials are produced in great quantity to propagandize on behalf of freedom.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

• The USA’s credit rating is once again being threatened publicly, this time by the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. In an interview with Dow Jones newswire, published August 26th, David Beers, global head of S & P’s sovereign ratings, warned the US Congress that they had better do everything suggested to them by President’s Obama’s commission on fiscal responsibility, or else.

  This comes shortly after Ireland was downgraded to AA- by S & P because of all the bank bailouts that government has financed. The rating agency said that it does not consider the bad mortgages, purchased en masse by the Irish government, to be real liquid assets. This bodes ill for the US government, which is holding trillions of dollars worth of such toxic assets after the TARP bank bailouts of ’08 and ’09.

• On the same topic, Arnaud Mares, an executive director in the London office of Morgan Stanley, has written a report projecting the inevitable default on sovereign debt on a global scale. He said:
  

  “Governments will impose a loss on some of their stakeholders. The question is not whether they will renege on their promises, but rather upon which of their promises they will renege and what form this default will take.”

  The form it’s most likely to take, according to Mares’ predictions, is a “soft” default, with governments paying back creditors with devalued currencies printed out of nothing through quantitative easing. What that means to the average person is looming hyperinflation.

  Mares foresees the aging population in the US as a major pressure on the situation. As people retire or become too infirm to work, government revenues drop and there is greater pressure for increased expenditures for the aged, whom the report refers to as an “influential political [constituency].” Writes Mares:

  “The conflict that opposes bondholders to other government stakeholders is more intense than ever, and their interests are no longer sufficiently well-aligned …”

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government may, without a warrant and without your knowledge, plant a tracking device on your car as it sits in your driveway and then use it to survey you indefinitely from that point onward. As Time Magazine reports, the court found no reasonable expectation of privacy in the “curtilage,” or immediate environs surrounding a person’s home.

  This would only apply, they found, if the area is surrounded by a locked privacy fence. If the postman can get to it, they ruled, the feds can put a GPS unit there and use it to watch you. Presumably cameras and microphones would be acceptable as well. Only those who can afford elaborate security measures have the right to be secure from warrantless search and seizure, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski dissented with the following words:

  “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last … Some day soon, we may wake up and fine we’re living in Oceania.”

• The ACLU is objecting to the new “enhanced pat-down procedure” being applied by the Transportation Security Administration. This is the new term for what is done to passengers who refuse to be irradiated and undressed by the so-called “naked body scanners” now appearing in airports. Fliers going through airports in Boston and Las Vegas who won’t use the scanners are being subjected to what is described by a TSA official as “a palms-downward, slide-down procedure.” More than just a pat-down, this is a glom-on.

  The term “enhanced pat-down” implies that airline passengers are typically subjected to a non-enhanced pat-down. In fact, until now, people just went through the metal detector, and may have been “wanded” for additional metal detection. But a “pat-down” or “frisking” is something that more typically happens to newly-arriving prisoners. The Supreme Court has ruled that pat-downs necessarily include:

  “… a search .. of the prisoner’s arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and the entire surface of the legs down to the feet…”

  Lately at airports, women are also having their breasts squeezed to ensure that they aren’t concealing bombs, and even going through the full-body scanner won’t protect you from that. The ACLU has objected to what they termed “the seemingly constant erosion of privacy.”

• The Environmental Protection Agency is looking into a possible ban on the ammunition that most people use: lead bullets. They are presently considering a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity to outlaw the use of lead in all bullets, shot, and fishing sinkers. Since 90% of bullets purchased in the US are made of lead, this would have a significant impact on the industry. Non-lead alternatives like tungsten and copper are appreciably higher in price. The EPA has published a notice on its website seeking public comment on the proposed ban.

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This episode of The Invisible Hand I bring you the second installment of “Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge” (see Part 1), and interview William H. Kennedy about his new audio book, The Occult World of Jackie Gleason.

I also talked about how the coining of money was a sort of Promethean act. Money is traditionally issued by a sovereign entity, such as a king, and it is an expression of his sovereignty. It defines the relative value of everything in his kingdom, so in a way it is like the king taking the place of God and creating his own reality. However, the actual historical roots of money are with the priesthoods of old. Money was a token that people received in exchange for their tithes to the temples. In this way, the money was metaphorically bestowed on the populace by the gods.

Now there were a few examples of predecessors, but really, historians consider the origin of coin money to be from around 3000 B.C, in the Temples of Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia. It was created for use in a public religious rite known as “sacred prostitution.” The priestesses of the fertility goddess served her by offering themselves as representatives of her to male worshippers. It was thought that if the men simulated intercourse with the goddess, this would stimulate fertility in the land.

A very important part of the ritual was the donation that occurred beforehand. The worshipper was expected to make offerings to the goddess in the form of wheat. This was fitting, since wheat was the main agricultural product that they were asking the goddess to stimulate the production of.

During religious festivals, worshippers would bring a portion of their yearly wheat crop to the temple. After being symbolically offered to the patron god or gods, the offerings were used to feed all of the priests, priestesses, and temple support staff. In exchange for their sacrifices, the men received one coin for each bushel of wheat, and each coin would entitle them to a visit with one of the priestesses.

This is how the coin got its name: “shekel” means “bushel of wheat.” The coin featured a sheaf of wheat on one side, and a depiction of Ishtar on the other. This identification of money with wheat continues into the present day, where words that translate as “bread” all over the world are used as slang terms for money.

This is exactly how and why coin money was produced by the ancient Greeks as well. Beginning in 1000 B.C., the Greeks minted coins as tokens given to the worshippers of Dionysus in exchange for the donation of a bull to the Dionysian temple. These bulls would all be sacrificed at the annual celebration known as the “sacred feast”, to which Dionysus himself was invited. Half of the meat would be burned in honor of the god, while the rest was shared by the congregants – all those who could furnish a coin as proof of their donation.

When the large-scale minting of coins in Rome began in 269 B.C., this too had a connection to the divine. The new silver coin, called the “denarius,” was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta. Juno was the wife of Jupiter. “Moneta” means “to warn.” This appellation of Juno’s stems from an incident in which the sacred geese at her temple allegedly warned the Romans of an impending attack from the Gauls.

The Romans saw Juno as the protectress of the state. The issuance of money was one of the activities in Rome that she was thought to preside over. It is from Juno’s title of “Moneta” that the English words “money”, “monetary”, and “mint” are derived.

So that is the origin of coin money. In the ancient world, the amount of money circulating in a society was necessarily limited by the amount of gold and silver available to them to mint. This restricted the velocity of money, and thus, the economic growth potential. And even if you did obtain economic growth through the increased availability of money, it could easily vanish if the coins were used to purchase imported goods.

Thus the Spanish, who looted the ancient temples of South America, covered with gold and silver, ended up losing it all within a few decades by trading with Holland and Britain. The Spaniards ended up cash-poor, and the huge influx of coin created a historic period of inflation for Britain called “the Great Price Revolution.”

Now this is both the blessing and the curse of coin money: the value is in the coin. So if you spend it, lose it, or have it stolen from you, that value is no longer in your hands. This was a major problem in the ancient and medieval world: highway robbery. Every time you went anywhere, there was some thug waiting around the corner to rape your women and steal your silver. Robin Hood and his Merry Men couldn’t have robbed from the rich if the rich didn’t go around carrying hefty sacks full of cash. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, someone finally invented a solution to this problem, and, no surprise, it came from a religious “temple” of sorts: specifically, the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon.

Official Seal of the Knights Templar

Known in common parlance as the “Knights Templar,” this was an elite fighting force of Catholic monks at the forefront of the European struggle to capture and control the Holy Land in the twelfth century and thirteenth centuries. Some of their original founders and patrons were the very people essentially responsible for getting Europe involved in the Crusades in the first place. The Church granted them a charter that basically established the Templars as a law unto themselves, accountable to no one but the Pope. Thus they were able to operate autonomously at their various bases throughout Europe.

Templars fighting the Crusades

The Templars began to amass wealth and power quickly. Their membership was taken from the cream of European aristocracy, and they were expected to take a vow of poverty upon joining, so each new initiate remitted to the order what was often considerable money and property. Wealthy families from all over Europe also donated lands and money as the Second Crusade mounted. The Templars set up “preceptories” throughout the continent.

These were conducted like semi-autonomous city-states, where the knights farmed their own food, ran their own hospitals, and engaged in the manufacture of arms, textiles, and other goods. Perhaps most importantly, this allowed them to issue loans with interest, circumventing the rules against usury in other Christian nations.

Previously, only Jews in Europe were permitted to charge interest, since their souls were considered lost already. At various times and places there were even laws actually forcing Jewish merchants to engage in no other trade except banking. It was a role the community needed someone to play, but the Jews became the scapegoats when the debts got too high and people needed to default. This happened frequently enough, and was the true cause for many medieval anti-Semitic pogroms. This is the role that the Templars essentially took over, with the blessing of the Church, at least in the beginning.

Medieval depiction of Jews practicing moneylending

The Templars were, first and foremost, the official guardians of pilgrims en route to the Holy Land. This was supposedly the reason why the Order was created in the first place. In this capacity, they devised a system to protect pilgrims from robbery. Instead of loading themselves down with gold and provisions, which were likely to be stolen, the pilgrims would simply deposit some money in the form of gold or silver at the Templar preceptory nearest to their point of departure. From there they would make their way to Jerusalem along a pre-selected route consisting of a series of churches and cathedrals, which were themselves associated with nearby Templar preceptories, each featuring banking services.

At this point the pilgrim would present the banker with a “chit”: a piece of paper that was encoded with ciphered information regarding the pilgrim’s deposit at the originating bank. The pilgrim could then withdraw from the bank at his current location the amount of money he needed to pay for his stay at that particular stop on the route, or to make donations to the various churches, and could leave the rest in his “account.” He could also make direct charges to the account for any goods or services which the Templars themselves were able to offer the pilgrim. The complex ciphers used by the Templars to encode their chits became famous, and one is still in use in Masonic lodges all over the world.

A Templar cipher

It is thus that the word “cheque” entered into the English and French languages. Indeed, a great many Middle English words pertaining to banking and commerce seem to have originated in one way or another with the Templars. In the case of “cheque”, it came from the chequerboard clothe which Templar merchants and bankers used to square their accounts – to “check” their assets and liabilities.

An exchequor board

It was thus by donations, money-lending and industrial trade that the Templars were able to expand their empire and become Europe’s most powerful economic force. They were able to maintain this even after the Holy Land was finally lost in the Eighth Crusade in 1271.

But now they were without a cause. Some of Europe’s kings and nobles, as well as many within the Church, began to wonder what the Templars were going to do next. They had money, property, authority, horses, weapons, and a standing army with nothing to do. Many European crown heads were heavily indebted to the Templars financially, and since they were also banned by papal decree from exercising any political authority over the knights, many of these kings understandably felt threatened.

There was another potential threat as well, of a more metaphysical nature. Not everyone understood exactly how the Templars had become so wealthy and powerful. It was thought that there must have been a secret to this. One rumor was that the original nine founding Templars had discovered a treasure within or beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where they had once housed their headquarters.

Theories of a secret Templar treasure have been the subject of hundreds of books throughout the years, and this idea is even at the heart of some rituals performed by modern Freemasons. It is often suggested that the knights might have found the lost Ark of the Covenant underneath the Temple Mount. How this would have made the Order wealthy, however, is something that still remains unexplained by the theorists.

Another rumor floating around at the end of the thirteenth century was that the Templars acquired their wealth because their founders had made a pact with the Devil. According to this theory they allegedly kept the Pope under their control, and compelled others to give them money, through the power of witchcraft. Stories had begun to leak from disgruntled ex-knights about secret initiation rituals. Word was getting around that there was an inner circle of Templars running the show with a hidden agenda. They were said to practice bizarre rituals of idol worship.

At dawn on Friday the Thirteenth, 1307, the Knights Templar in France were arrested en masse by King Philip IV’s seneschals. Philip was out to get the order. He owed them a lot of money, and they had embarrassed him by refusing him membership to their club. Now he planned to use his influence on the papacy to have them disbanded. He had already sent in spies to join the Order and see if the rumors were true–that there was something unholy about the Templar initiation ceremony. What his spies reported back would make anyone’s hair stand on end.

Philip the Fair

When the stories of the spies are combined with the confessions of the tortured knights, a remarkably cohesive, if horrific, pattern begins to form. At initiation, new recruits were forced to kiss the naked behind of one of their new brothers, although sometimes the backside of a goat or a cat was used. They were made to spit upon the Cross and revoke their Christian baptism. Some confessing knights said they were taught by their superiors that John the Baptist was the true Christ, not Jesus. They were then introduced to their new savior, whom they were to worship. It was a “head” of some sort named “Baphomet.” None of the inquisitors knew what that meant at the time, and no translation was offered by any of the confessors.

Templars defiling the Cross

This “Baphomet” head was variously said to be that of a goat, a bearded man, a woman, or an androgyne, and it was said that it had leathery skin. Some said that it had two or three faces, or that it had “feet.” While it was generally described as a mummified flesh-and-blood relic of some sort, others said that it was a skull, or that it was made of brass or gold, or that it was merely a painting of a head. All witnesses agreed that it was terrifying to behold. They said that the head “prophesied” to them during the ceremonies, and gave them “wisdom.” They believed that it “made them rich” and “caused the land to germinate.”

Image of a male head found on Templar property

By November 1307, even the Grand Master of the Templars himself, Jacques de Molay, had confessed to these charges, and more. Pope Clement had heard enough. He issued a bull ordering the arrest of all Templars in eight countries, including England, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Germany. On August 12, 1308, he drew up a list of 127 offenses with which they were charged. In addition to the various acts of blasphemy and heresy already discussed, they were also accused of homosexual orgies, baby sacrifices, and of treasonous dealings with the Muslim enemy, the Saracens.

Trials dragged on for another five years. Many recanted their confessions, including the Grand Master, and those knights who did so were put to death in brutal ways. As he burned at the stake in 1314, Jacques De Molay uttered a curse against Pope Clement and King Philip, prophesying that they would both die within a year. They did.

Other knights stuck to their confessions, and were rewarded with lenient sentences of monastic penance not much different from the ascetic lifestyle they were already used to. The order was officially disbanded by the Pope, its property given over to other monastic orders. So ended what was once the greatest military and economic power in Europe.

Templars burnt at the stake

Over seven centuries later, the legend of the Templars, and the mystery of Baphomet, is alive more than ever before. Hundreds of secret societies and religious orders claim descent from the Knights Templar in some form or another. Almost all mystical Hermetic groups claim to be perpetuating the Templar tradition, including various Masonic groups, Rosicrucian groups, and ritual magic orders, such as Aleister Crowley’s O.T.O, or “Order of Oriental Templars.” Rituals involving references to goats are still performed by Masons, and many Masonic scholars have written about Baphomet as being central to their mystic rites. Crowley even took on the name Baphomet as his own magical title for ritual purposes. Later, Anton LaVey from the Church of Satan made use of an image of the Baphomet goat-head within a pentagram as a logo for his pop culture devil cult, The Church of Satan.

But how did this image come to be the personification of the heinous Templar idol? The writer responsible for our modern understanding of Baphomet was a mid-nineteenth-century occult author named Eliphas Levi. Monsieur Levi’s main thesis was that all forms of occultism and mysticism held a common, secret doctrine. Ritual magic, he said, utilized the existence of what he called the “Astral Light,” defined as:

“ … a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of nature.”

It was this agent which, he said, reflected the magician’s will, expressed during a ritual, and actualized it into existence. He illustrated this concept with a hieroglyphic form which he called “Baphomet,” claiming that this was the spiritual principle secretly revered by the Templars. Levi used this picture as the frontispiece for a number of his books.

Levi’s image of Baphomet is virtually synonymous in the common mind with the image of Satan enthroned in Hell. That’s only because most modern depictions of the Devil are based on the card of the same name in the popular Rider-Waite tarot deck, and this card is itself based on Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. Certainly the creature presented by Levi looks demonic and evil, with the head and legs of a goat, along with a human torso sporting both male and female sexual organs. On its forehead is that foremost symbol of witchcraft, the pentagram, and between its horns issues forth an enflamed torch.

Depiction of Baphomet appearing before the Templars

Levi repeatedly stated that Baphomet was not the same as the Devil, however. Rather, it was a symbol of a transcendental power beyond good and evil, man and beast, or male and female energies. Baphomet was, in Levi’s view, the synthesis of all energy, both on Earth and in Heaven, forming something greater than the sum of its parts, capable of performing any transformation of matter which the human mind could conceive.

Depiction of Baphomet appearing in a Masonic lodge

It is really by looking at the architectural motifs that decorate the Templar properties, and the items left within them, that we can get a clue as to what their secret doctrine actually was. The first place to look to is a series of depictions of similar creatures discovered on Templar properties by a nineteenth-century Austrian Orientalist scholar named Joseph, Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, presented in his book Mystery of Baphomet Revealed. In it, he documented a number of objects discovered at Templar properties throughout Europe.

Von Hammer-Purgstall’s “Baphometic Idols,” as they were later called by other authors, consisted mostly of statuettes, coffers and cups presenting strange images of inhuman figures. Seven of the images show only a head, and in two of these cases it is a head with two faces, much akin to the descriptions given by some Templars of the Baphomet head. Many of them were decorated with scenes of bizarre pagan sex rites, including someone bending over and kissing the buttocks of a strange idol.

One image in particular, from the lid to a coffer found in Burgundy, looks most especially like it might have influenced Eliphas Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. It shows a female figure crowned with towers, just like the goddess Cybele of the ancient world. She is holding in each hand a chain, and connected to each chain, floating in the air and upside-down, are the figures of the Sun and the Moon. Below the figure’s feet are a 7-pointed star and a pentagram. Between these is a human skull.

This combination of images was not unique, but rather turned up repeatedly at Templar properties. In other versions the figure is shown with a beard, making it quite clear that it was meant to be taken as androgynous, just like Levi’s Baphomet.

A possible origin of the goat-headed aspect can be found in the Von Hammer-Purgstall collection as well. This is a depiction of a winged and goat-headed figure with human legs seated upon an eagle. Arabic, Greek, and Latin inscriptions were found among these images too. One in particular brings to mind the confessions of the Knights Templar about Baphomet. Von Hammer-Purgstall translated it thus:

“Let Mete be exalted, who causes things to bud and blossom! he is our root; it is one and seven; abjure, and abandon thyself to all pleasures.”

You will recall that some confessing Templars said Baphomet “caused the land to germinate.” Von Hammer-Purgstall believed that the Templars had been secret practitioners of Ophite Gnosticism. The word “Ophite” comes from the Greek word for “snake.” They revered the serpent of Genesis as the one who bestowed wisdom upon mankind.

Like most Gnostics, the Ophites believed that the physical universe was a prison created by a demon named Ialdaboath. “Boath” comes from “Bythos” or “Behut”, and means “chaos” or “the deep.” It is connected to our modern words like “bath” and “baptize.” Chaos was called “the Abyss, or “the primeval waters,” and was analogous to the “First Matter” that the alchemists believed creation came from. “Yalda” means “son of.” In Gnostic cosmology, Yaldaboath was the son of Sophia, or Wisdom. The implication is that chaos, the First Matter, is wisdom, and is the mother of creation.

There is plenty of evidence that the Templars did practice Gnosticism, including a coin that has been found with the words “Templi Secreti” or “Secret of the Temple” written upon it. On one side there is an unmistakable depiction of the Gnostic deity Abraxas. He was viewed as the “Great Archon”, the union of good and evil, masculine and feminine. Like Baphomet, he is a chimera, with a hawk’s head, a man’s body, and serpents for legs. On the other side of the coin was a serpent with a lion’s head, a common Gnostic depiction of Ialdaboath.

Abraxas

Ialdaboath

The word “Mete,” found written next to the Baphometic idols surveyed by Von Hammer-Purgstall, was a Greek word for “wisdom.” He believed “Baphomet” was an illusion to the Gnostic rite of “Bapho Metis,” the “Baptism of Wisdom.” Also, “Mete” has been connected by some linguists to the name of the sun god Mithras, worshipped by some Gnostics as an incarnation of divine wisdom. Aleister Crowley believed that “Baphomet” meant “Father Mithras.”

More recently Dr. Hugh Schonfield, known for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, also proffered an interpretation that again led back to this concept of divine wisdom or gnosis. He said that “Baphomet,” when transliterated into Aramaic and fed through a cipher, yields the word “Sophia,” another Greek word meaning “wisdom.”

Idries Shah, in his book The Sufis, wrote that the image of the goat head with a candle between its horns comes from the disciples of Abu el-Atahiyya, a famous Arab poet and mystic who led a cult called “the Revelers,” or “the Wise Ones.” Their insignia was this goat head, said to represent their tribe, the Aniza, meaning “goat.” Another one of their signs was the pentagram.

However, another thing that comes to mind with the image of a candle between the horns is that miners used to mount candles on top of their helmets when they were down in the mines. This may connect the Aniza goat with the Azazel goat, the king of the jinn, or demons, who is worshiped as the true God by the Yezidi sect in Iraq.

The jinn are thought to live underground, and are said in folk tales to have invented mining and metallurgy, which Azazel, like Hephaestus to the Greeks and Vulcan to the Romans, was considered the patron deity of. Other legends link them with the children of Cain and Tubal-Cain in the Bible, who were likewise credited with inventing these vital arts of civilization.

With this in mind, it is worth noting that Idries Shah sees the Aniza goat as the inspiration for the goat-headed god worshipped by medieval European witches. Believed by the Church to be the Devil, they reveled in their secret unions with a figure they sometimes called the “coal-black smith.” Like the Templars, their rituals also involved kissing a goat’s behind and trampling on the cross. Like the Templars, they believed their hidden deity could bestow upon them fertility and wealth.

Kissing the Devil's behind at the Witches Sabbath

This word “Azazel” also reminds me of the word “Azoth.” This was a personification of the alchemical “Alkahest,” the “Universal Agent, ” the “Philosopher’s Stone”, or the “Quintessence” — that is, the fifth element. This was the original substance from which, they said, the whole universe was formed. The alchemists believed that it was to be found within the “Prima Materia” or “First Matter” mentioned previously, the chaos or Abyss out of which the created world was formed. It was believed that this substance could be used to transform any one thing into another.

The Azoth

Again, like Baphomet, the Azoth was a chimera of difference creatures, an androgynous being in whose body all of the disparate elements of the universe were united to form a whole. The A and Z in its name represented the beginning and end of the alphabet. Aleister Crowley pointed out that “A” or “Aleph” is the first letter of both the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. “O” is like “Omega”, the final letter of the Greek Alphabet, and “T” or “Tau” is the final letter in Hebrew. So in every way possible, this creature represents the totality of existence combined, the sum of all knowledge collected all over the world in every culture. The name may be related to the Arabic “al-zā’ūq”, which means “the mercury.”

Depiction of Sophia Mercurius from an alchemical text

A variety of similar chimera creatures were used by different alchemists throughout the centuries to represent this idea. One thing that they all have in common is that they are androgynous.

The Divine Androgyne of Alchemy

Most of the archons in the Gnostic creation myths were said to be androgynous. In the Cabala, along with other Jewish and Islamic folklore, the first Adam and Eve were a united being, and only separated after being seduced by the serpent, who was also a Hermaphroditic being, made up of the male Samael and the female Lilith. There are even hints of this in Genesis itself.

The word Hermaphrodite comes from Greek mythology. Hermes and Aphrodite were said to have had a son, Hermaphroditus, whose body became merged with that of a water nymph, to become both male and female. Generally he was depicted as a woman with male genitalia.

Hermaphroditus

On Cyprus he was represented in the form of Herm. A herm was generally a pillar, on top of which was a bust of Hermes, or sometimes a full torso, and on the front there was an erect penis sticking out. Worshipers would rub it, with their hands, or worse, for good luck. I haven’t been able to find any pictures, so we can only assume that the Hermaphroditic herms had breasts or other female attributes as well.

Interestingly, Aphrodite is the equivalent of the Roman Venus, or the Babylonian Ishtar, in whose temple money was invented, as a form of payment for the sacred prostitutes that were her priestesses. In other words, it is a union with the goddess of love and wisdom with the god of commerce, communication, and wisdom. In future installments of this series, I’ll show you pictures of modern versions of this goddess holding a caduceus.

The caduceus turns up in another Greek myth of interest, that of Tiresias. He is said to have come upon a couple of serpents mating on a stick while walking through the woods and interrupted them, whereupon the goddess Hera cursed him by turning him into a woman. He stayed a woman for seven years, working as a sacred priestess or prostitute in Hera’s temple.

The staff of Hermes can be found on Eliphas Levi’s depiction of Baphomet, with his phallus forming the pole that the serpents are wrapped around. A connection between Baphomet and Hermes seems obvious, since Hermes was a satyr, half-man and half-goat. He was the father of this race of satyrs, seemingly equivalent to the seirim, or goat-demons of the Hebrews, of whom Azazel was seen as the progenitor.

Hermes

Another place the caduceus turns up is right on the frontispiece for De Re Metallica, the book about metallurgy written by alchemist Giorgio Agricola, who was in charge of the silver mining at Jachimov Valley in Bohemia, where the first talers, or dollars, were minted. In this case it’s the personal device of the printer, Johann Froben. Notice the two left hands holding the staff. The left, or sinister hand has always been associated with the Devil, whose mysteries are called the left-hand path of initiation.

Frontispiece for Agricola's De Re Metallica

We’ll follow up on these themes in the next installment.

The first “dollars” to circulate in the American colonies were actually Spanish coins. In the year 1695, the British government stopped exporting coins outside of its borders, even to its own colonies. Thus, the British colonists in North America were forced to acquire coins from the Spanish colonies in Mexico.

The coins that were circulating there had been designed in 1497, not long after their hireling Christopher Columbus had returned from his first voyage to America. At that time, to celebrate the vast wealth of gold and silver that they had just discovered and were busy hauling back home, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of the Spanish house of Habsburg had a silver coin issued called a “peso”, the value of which was an eighth of a “real.”

This coin featured the Pillars of Hercules and the words “Plus Ultra”, Latin for “There is More Beyond”), with each word written on a banner that was coiled around one of the pillars. In other words, the monarchs were saying to their subjects, “You see this piece of silver? There’s more where that came from, Baby.” When the Spaniards opened a mint in Mexico (soon to be one of the largest in the world), they began circulating these coins.

The “Plus Ultra” peso became the most widely used coin amongst the thirteen British colonies, and the Scotch-Americans who used them called them “pillar dollars” after the “taler”, the name of a type of silver coin that circulated in Europe. The Americans didn’t establish their own mint until 1794. Even after that, since gold and silver were hard to come by, and the minting process expensive, the United States continued to circulate mostly Spanish silver dollars throughout much of the 1800s. So even though the U.S. did issue its own coins, the pillar dollar remained the “coin of the realm” for some time.

It is from the image on the pillar dollar that the dollar sign ($) is said by some historians to have been derived, originally made with two slashes through the “S,” instead of one, as is commonly done now. So the dollar sign would then represent a pillar, or pillars, encoiled with a banner.

This would then encompass, within a simple glyph, all which is implied about America by the words “Plus Ultra” and the Pillars of Hercules – that it is the great New World dreamt of by the philosophers of old. It was here that Sir Francis Bacon had envisioned that we would build a “philosophic empire” that would lead the world in the pursuit of knowledge of “the 6 days’ work”– that is, the hidden secrets of God’s creation.

An earlier prototype of this design comes from shekel coins made on the ancient Phoenician island of Tyre, which feature both the Pillars of Hercules, and a serpent coiled around a tree, ala the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. It is with this that some authors, such as Ignatius Donnelly, see the true origins of the dollar sign.

However, there is still more to discover about this symbol if you go just a little bit beyond. To me, the dollar sign is more reminiscent of the caduceus, the magical wand of Hermes, a staff with a serpent entwined upon it, which has long been a symbol of alchemical transformation and healing (thus its use by the medical profession). This was its meaning in ancient Greece, as well as Rome, where it was associated with Mercury, the Roman equivalent of Hermes and the patron deity of alchemists.

The caduceus was literally a magic wand that the god used to transform reality, as an alchemist transmutes one substance into another. A simplified version of this symbol was used in astrology to denote the planetary power of mercury, and in alchemy to denote the substance of mercury, otherwise known as quicksilver. This symbol looked almost identical to the dollar sign.

But interestingly, this symbol also has a similar meaning in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is found in the story of the Nehushtan, the brazen serpent mounted on a stick that Moses used to heal the people of Israel after they had been bitten by “fiery serpents” sent by the Lord. In Christian theology, this symbol of the “crucified serpent” is seen as analogous to Jesus being hung upon the cross, which healed the sins of mankind.

The crucified serpent was one of the central images featured in the alchemical manuscript The Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, famously translated by Nicholas Flamel. It represents the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone that can transform any thing into any other thing at will. All of this is related intimately to the history of the word “dollar” and the origin of the dollar sign.

In the year 1516, just five years before the Spaniards began looting silver and gold from America, Count Stephan Hieronymus Schlick discovered major silver deposits near his ancestral home in Jachymov, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic). He began not only mining the silver, but minting it into coins as well. These coins were soon being circulated all over Europe, where they became known as “talers”, after the “tal” or “valley” from which they were minted.

In 1527, Georgius Agricola was hired as the “mine physician” for Joachimstal. Agricola had spent his education studying alchemy. Over the years he had become frustrated with his studies, but, as Jason Goodwin writes in the book Greenback, “in Joachimstal… he saw something more interesting: incontrovertible proof that men could turn dross into silver. Mining, he decided, was what alchemy was meant to be.” Agricola went on to write the first scientific treatise on the subject of mining, and became known as the “Father of Mineralogy.”

But here’s the really interesting thing: some of the talers that came out of that valley actually featured the Nahushtan crucified serpent on one side, and a crucified Jesus on the other. The alchemical connection to the later US dollar, and the most direct origin yet for the dollar symbol, could not be more obvious.

In the Bible, the invention of metallurgy is credited early on in Genesis to the figure of Tubal-Cain. He was among the accursed race of Cainites, descended from the world’s first murderer, Cain, who killed his own brother. Thereafter, he was cursed to be a “fugitive and a vagabond” for the rest of his days. Cain himself was said to be the inventor of agriculture, described in Genesis as “a tiller of the ground.” His name, which appears in the histories of many other ancient Semitic cultures besides the Hebrew, has contributed to the formation of words in English and other languages that mean “grain”, “corn”, “bread”, or “cane.”

But in Hebrew, “Cain” meant “to acquire, to create, to fashion, to produce, or to accomplish.” When used as a noun, it meant “smith”; that is, “one who makes things.” Thus it seems easy to say that “Cain” is at the root of the word “coin.” For in addition to being a noun indicating a metallic token, “coin” can also be used as a verb, meaning “to invent.” The noun “coin” is derived from the verb definition, for a coin is an object that has been “coined.”

Both Cain and his descendant Tubal-Cain are portrayed in Judeo-Christian literature as evil geniuses, too smart for their own good. There is something sinister about their accomplishments — the invention of agriculture and metallurgy — and of their selfish desire to create things, no matter how wonderful those creations may be.

This reflects an attitude displayed by God towards man throughout the Book of Genesis. Thus we read about two other seemingly positive acts: the obtaining of ultimate wisdom from the Tree of Knowledge (Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden), and the building of a magnificent tower leading to Heaven (the Tower of Babel). Both of these acts were portrayed in the Bible as sins. The message of Genesis (a word that means “creation”) is that creating things is God’s job, not man’s. Therefore mankind has no need to learn the principles of creation.

But in a sense, this rebellion, the original sin of obtaining forbidden knowledge in the Garden of Eden, was necessary for man’s development. Without it, we would have remained naïve and ignorant, never accomplishing anything. The wisdom, symbolized by the forbidden fruit, which was given to Adam and Eve made them “wise”, “opened [their] eyes”, made them see things “as gods.”

This is the very power of creation and transformation that was sought by the alchemists, and which they symbolized by a serpent on a staff. Sometimes, as with the caduceus of the Greeks, there were two serpents, just as the Jewish mystics, the cabalists, say there were really two serpents in the Garden, Lilith and Samael. Actually, they say that these were the male and female halves of a single Hermaphroditic being. Sometimes, as in the design from the Tyrian shekel described earlier, there were shown two pillars, just as in the Garden of Eden there were two sacred trees mentioned, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. The caduceus and the dollar sign both, then, really point to this same hidden wisdom that was passed down to mankind in the Garden: the power of God’s creation.

In a way, money itself is like this. It is intrinsically a Faustian, Promethean symbol of man’s rebellion against God in his quest for more knowledge of the world and control of his surroundings. In this world-view, at the extreme end of it, the invention of money could be seen as one of man’s most audacious acts: creating something and declaring it to have a particular value, from which the value of everything else in the world can be measured, and which, like the Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists, can be used to transform any one thing into another thing, through the exchange of commerce.

And just like the transcendental power of the Philosopher’s Stone, just like the Holy Grail or the Spear of Destiny, this power can be used for Good or for Evil, for it is only by utilizing this power that things like good and evil can exist in the first place. So rather than shrink from the Promethean flame that was stolen from Heaven, I say we should make full use of it, to turn it into a force of good, to defeat the evil.

In Part 2, I’m going to explore these concepts a little further.

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This episode of The Invisible Hand features part 1 of my essay, Money Grows on the Tree of Knowledge. Included as well is a follow-up interview with Delia Lopez, the Republican nominee for the Portland area Congressional District in Oregon.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

• The peasants are revolting! At least that’s what it seemed like Wednesday morning when a crowd of 8000-10,000 gathered at the Tri-Cities Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia, and fights broke out. They were all there to apply for Section 8 vouchers. The crowd had been amassing since Monday, and at a certain point, the police decided to dispatch a riot squad. It was shortly after this that the civil unrest began. When officials handing out the applications moved to another location on the premises, the crowd rushed to get to the new location, and people were trampled. Another similar problem occurred later when the line was finally closed off. Only a few people were treated for injuries, mostly heat-related.

• It looks like barter and alternative currencies are beginning to catch on everywhere, even in the Axis of Evil. North Korea has just made an unusual offer to the Czech Republic to settle an old debt: ginseng. However, as the Financial Times reports, the root, which purportedly improves energy, sex drive, and memory, is not consumed in sufficient quantities by Czechs to warrant the receipt of 20 tons of it, which is what $10 million dollars worth of ginseng amounts to. However, they area willing to accept a commodity of some sort, such as zinc, which has already been suggested.

  The debt between the two countries dates back to the time of communist Czechoslovakia, which used to keep North Korea supplied with armaments. With the latest wave of economic sanctions against North Korea, following their alleged attack on a South Korean warship in March, they have found it extremely difficult to make their payments to their creditors, which is why they are getting so creative these days.

• According to the Daily Mail, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is telling people to eat bugs in order to cut their consumption of meat. The group has issued a report stating that cows and pigs take too many resources to rear and have too much of an impact on the environment. Instead, they suggest that, like 80% of the world’s population we should all get our protein from beetles, ants, and scorpions, which, the report insists, are “highly nutritious,” and much more energy-efficient to raise. Of course, about 80% of the world’s population also lives on less than $1 a day, which is undoubtedly very green as well. The fact that the UN is suggesting that we eat insects proves that David Icke was right all along: the globalist elites are reptiles.

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This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with Todd Wynn, environmental policy analyst and Vice President of the Cascade Policy Institute. Today he talks to us about some of the extreme anti-business and anti-freedom policies of the state of Oregon, including laws against dish detergent, plastic bags, and “non-renewable energy.”

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

• The Pentagon has demanded the “return” of more than 75,000 sensitive military documents that have been released to the press by the whistleblower website Wikileaks. The Associated Press reports that during a press conference on Thursday, Defense Department Press Secretary Geoff Morrell insisted that “Wikileaks return immediately to the US government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records,” and to cease any future solicitation of such documents from the public.

  Since it is impossible to “return” electronic documents that have been copied by people throughout the world now millions of times, it is thought that the true purpose of this threat is to discourage the further release of a reported 15,000 more documents believed to be held in reserve by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. These are assumed to be even more damaging to the government than the ones so far brought to light. Wikileaks has recently uploaded to its server a 1.4 gigabyte encrypted file named “insurance,” 20 times the combined size of the previously-released 75,000 documents. Some theorize that this is the material being held as collateral against possible future recriminations toward Assange from the government.

• It is unknown whether any of this material is related at all to an alleged batch of classified State Department documents that US Army Private Bradley Manning claims to have given Wikileaks. Manning has also confessed to leaking the now-infamous video of Reuters reporters in Baghdad being killed by US troops, and is being held in a military jail in Virginia on the assumption that these confessions are accurate. On Tuesday a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee called Manning’s alleged crime treason, a capital offense, and said that he should be punished with the death penalty. Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan made the statement on a local talk radio program on WHMI:

• In a referendum passed by Missouri voters Tuesday, the public overwhelmingly rejected the key component of the health care overhaul passed by both houses of Congress last year. Proposition C, which received a “Yes” vote of 71%, prevents the federal government from forcing Missouri citizens to purchase health insurance under penalty of law. The idea was originally proposed by state Republicans as an amendment to the state constitution, but was switched to a ballot initiative after Democrats threatened a filibuster. Statutes of a similar nature have been passed by legislatures in five states already, and two more will vote on similar state constitutional amendments in November. Also, lawsuits have been filed against the new rules by public officials in over a dozen states who claim that the law is unconstitutional.

  The viewpoint of those who support the new law demanding the universal purchase of insurance was summed up by Kathy Ward, a Missouri nurse who was quoted in an Associated Press article about the recent referendum: “The fact remains”, she said. “People have a right to health care, and they should get it. It helps to make a healthier society.” It is uncertain, though, how forcing an individual to purchase a certain product results in the granting or preservation of any such right.

• The Financial Times reports that recession-strapped consumers are about to be hit with yet another financial constraint: skyrocketing food prices. Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin shocked world commodities markets when he announced a moratorium on grain exports from Russia for the rest of the year. And although the US Department of Agriculture had actually forecasted a period of deflation for cereals and baking products right now, it looks like those numbers will have to be revised to account for a recent surge in the price of several food staples, including wheat, cocoa, meat, dairy, eggs, and sugar. Coffee prices are expected to jump by about 10%.
• If you had previously believed the government’s official story that the new security x-ray machines, now in airports and courthouses and commonly called “naked body scanners,” did not permanently store nude images of passengers — well, surprise — they lied. Yes Virginia, they do have naked pictures of your Mom, and you and your kids too. Despite claims last year from the Transportation Security Administration that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded,” it turns out that not only can they, but in practice, they do. This week, spokesmen from the US Marshalls Service disclosed that a body scanner at a courthouse in Florida has already recorded thousands of these pictures. The same thing has happened with a scanner used at a courthouse in Washington, D.C., and that database of images is now in the possession of the manufacturer.

  This follows the recent accidental disclosure of an internal TSA document which proved that the scanners used at airports store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” A lawsuit has been filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, seeking an injunction against the federal body scanner program. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that the scanners will soon be rolling out at every major airport in the country.

• Good news for the inmates of America’s privately-owned prison-industrial complex: your life may have been ruined by the War on Drugs, but there’s still a place for you in the warm glow of the stage lights. Yes, you too can temporarily trade your orange jumpsuit for tap shoes and a sequined jacket. The cable network Investigation Discovery has announced the development of a new reality show called “Talent Behind Bars,” inspired by American Idol.

  Discovery President Henry Schleiff is quoted by Broadcasting and Cable Magazine as saying ‘The essence of the show is to highlight people who have been convicted of non-violent crimes and misdemeanors … it’s a chance for maybe a little bit of redemption.” A sister program is also being developed by Discovery called “Dancing Behind Bars,” modeled after ABC’s hit show “Dancing with the Stars.”

  The US has the world’s largest prison population per capita, and the vast majority of inmates are non-violent drug offenders. They typically have trouble obtaining things like work, shelter, and credit after their incarceration, which may make the allure of instant riches through superstardom all that more appealing.

• A twelve-year-old girl in Watsonville, CA has been able to trace the genealogies of all US Presidents except for Martin van Buren back to a Plantagenet monarch of England from the 13th century, King John “Lackland.” The girl, BridgeAnne d’Avignon, conducted the research for a class project at Monte Vista Christian School. This is hardly the first time that the blue-blooded pedigrees of US Presidents have been noted, however. 33 of them can be traced directly back to King Henry II of England, another Plantagenet, and all Presidents, again with the exception of Martin van Buren, can be traced as cousins to one another. This has led to the “most royal candidate” theory of genealogist Harold Brooks-Baker, who claimed that the outcome of any US Presidential election could be predicted by determining which candidate possessed the most august lineage.

From The Dragon Legacy by Nicholas de Vere:

The Red Cap of the Gnome and the Pixy is the pointed cap associated with witchcraft and shamanism, examples of it can be found in Babylonian stone bas-relief depictions of the gods, in burial sites in Takla Makan and elsewhere in the Celtic world. In relation to the Gnome or the Pixy, this headdress is of Phrygian origin, where it was once worn with the point folded towards the front of the head. A portrait of Liberty leading the French Revolution depicts her wearing this same Phrygian Cap.

The Phrygians migrated from Thrace, the original home of Dionysus, to lands adjacent to Galatia in central Anatolia around 500 BC. They were probably descended from the same stock as those earlier Scythians who migrated to Thrace from Ireland.

Returning there they became the Fir Bolg and the Phrygians revered a Goddess Queen of the same Dragon Pantheon from which the Fir Boig of the Tuatha de Danaan were descended. This deity – Cybele – was a native of mountains and forests. Originally known to the Greeks as Rhea, the Titaness and mother of Zeus by Cronos, she can be identified as the Sumerian Antu, wife of Anu, from whence the Danaan derive their name – Tuadha d’Anu.

The Phrygians also worshipped Mithras who was the Persian god often identified with Mazda. Mithras is often depicted as slaying the “world bull” which represents what the gnostic dualists call the demiurge, the subordinate creator and “Lord of this World”….

In slaying the bull, Mithras is destroying the world of form and illusion created by the language we use to interpret the stimulus received by the human senses. In one sense human beings are the bull itself, and here we enter the true meaning of the christian message. From the death of the bull is brought forth new life. From the death of the christian believer is brought forth new life in the spirit of Christ.

…

The Phrygian cap worn by Mithras, the badge of transcendence, was the same cap worn by all shamans since the Golden Age of the Titans, those Anunnaki (Anunnagi) ancestors of the Dragon Clans, from whence emerged the Fairy Race of the ancient Dragon and Grail Blood; the Gnomes, Pixies and Sprites. It was once said that the Phrygian devotees of Mithras would soak themselves in the blood of sacrificed bulls. Anciently the skull of the bull was used to symbolize the female organs.

The Horns were often tipped with round golden balls and these and the horns themselves represented the ovaries and fallopian tubes which were joined to the cranium, which symbolized the womb, a symbolic connection between the brain and the uterus, or intelligence and menstrual blood.

The nasal passage and mouth of the bull represented the vagina and to be soaked in bull’s blood, was to be soaked in the blood of the womb. The red cap of both the Phrygian and the Fairy therefore was originally colored by the blood of wisdom and a garden gnome will never look the same again.

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(Hear Part 1 of Interview)

This episode of The Invisible Hand features Part 2 of my recent interview with Christopher Knowles, artist, blogger, psychonaut, and author of Our Gods Wear Spandex, as well as The Complete X-Files. Knowles publishes The Secret Sun, a website that analyzes ancient symbolism in modern society from a Jungian perspective.

Last week we taxied through the byways of the collective unconscious to explore ancient religious symbolism in the memes of modern culture. This week we’re going to leave the launching pad and blast off into the unknown, as we ask: are the dystopian worlds of science fiction, as well as the dystopian reality of neofeudal debt slavery, hypnocratic illusion, and police state oppression we live in today really a reflection of a larger cosmic order that is also flawed? Are we enslaved just as much by our skewed perception of reality through time and space as we are by our corrupt political and economic systems? We are going to navigate through some particularly dangerous, uncharted territory today, getting into Judeo-Christian, Gnostic, and Sumerian creation myths, exploring the very nature of time, space, and reality, testing the boundaries of the experiential prison that we find ourselves trapped in, and challenging the powers, both on Earth and beyond, which keep us locked in these fetters.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

• Just barely a week after passing legislation that the President said would put an end to bank bailouts, the US government is being told by its parent company, the International Monetary Fund, that the banks may need an additional $76 billion in capital injections to keep from buckling anew. This comes after a new IMF report was issued following stress tests simulating potential problems in the coming 4 years, including a looming commercial real estate collapse. Presently there are about $1.4 trillion worth of commercial mortgages set to mature before 2014, and over 50% of these are already either delinquent or underwater. While the IMF did not formerly call for a new round of bank recapitalization through government bailouts, as the report stated, “pockets of vulnerabilities linger.”
• The CIA and Google are both making headlines this week because, as Wired Magazine’s Danger Room reports, they are both making heavy investments in the same signals intelligence firm simultaneously, prompting talk that the internet giant is merely a front for the spy agency, like BCCI or Air America once were. Just like something out of the Philip K. Dick novel The Minority Report, the company, Recorded Future, analyzes web searches and internet posts through a sophisticated cross-referencing algorithm to predict future events, which the CIA hopes to employ as an enforcement tool against precrime: crimes that have not yet been committed. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden is quoted by Wired as saying “there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem … with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.” The company uses “spatial and temporal analysis” to identify who you are, where you are and what you are planning on doing. “Sentiment analysis” allegedly identifies how you feel about it, and what your motivations are. Of course, this reporter cannot help but wonder if the government and corporate spooks can pick up on the sarcasm and incredulity of this report.
• A huge cache of secret papers in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland has been released to the public, revealing the existence of a secret anti-communist US intelligence organization during WWII that predated the CIA and existed alongside the OSS or Office of Strategic Strategies. The group, known initially as the “Special Service Branch” and informally as “The Pond”, was less an official government organization and more of an private circle of unpaid informants who operated behind the cover of multinational corporations like Chase Bank and American Express, and reported directly to the State Department. At their height, they operated a total of 40 chiefs handling over 600 agents in 32 countries. They participated in contracting mobster Lucky Luciano to attempt an assassination of Mussolini, attempted to negotiate Germany’s surrender to the Allies, and gathered intel about atomic weapons research. The group was viewed with mistrust by the OSS, and was relegated to the role of a private contractor after the war when the Central Intelligence Agency was formed. The CIA pressured the government to terminate the Pond’s contract when the group’s head. Col. John V. Grombach, began cooperating with Joseph McCarthy’s investigation in search of communist spy infiltrators, fingering several high-level CIA officers as agents of Moscow. The CIA continues to withhold several thousand pages of documents pertaining to the Pond, and has denied a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press, which is being appealed right now.
• This year’s Bohemian Grove encampment in Northern California begins tonight, kicked off with an address from the governor himself Arnold Schwarzenegger. Other speeches at the retreat, which lasts for 17 days, will also include addresses from former secretaries of state George Schultz and James Baker, along with media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The secretive resort encampment, which includes neo-Druidic rituals and a controversial mock burnt offering called the Cremation of Care, is open only to the 2000 members of the private Bohemian Club. The list includes some of America’s most powerful politicians, businessmen, and media personalities, who are all sworn to absolute secrecy about the events that transpire there. The mainstream press typically blacks out all mention of the event, and this year is no exception.
  ]]> http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?feed=rss2&p=781 0 http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=780 http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=780#comments Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:14:14 +0000 twyman http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=780

  From The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, by Hargrave Jennings:

  As a Phrygian Cap, or Symbolizing Cap, it is always sanguine in its colour. It then stands as the ‘Cap of Liberty’, a revolutionary form; also, in another way, it is even a civic or incorporated badge. It is always masculine in its meaning. It marks the ‘needle’ of the obelisk, the crown or tip of the phallus, whether ‘human’ or representative. It has its origin in the rite of circumcision–unaccountable as are both the symbol and the rite.

  The real meaning of the bonnet rouge, or ‘cap of liberty’, has been involved from time immemorial in deep obscurity, notwithstanding that it has always been regarded as a most important hieroglyph or figure. It signifies the supernatural simultaneous ‘sacrifice’ and ‘triumph’. It has descended from the time of Abraham, and it is supposed to emblem the strange mythic rite of the ‘circumcisio preputii’. The loose Phrygian bonnet, bonnet conique, or ‘cap of liberty’ may be accepted as figuring, or standing for, that detached integument or husk, separated from a certain point or knob, which has various names in different languages, and which supplies the central idea of this ‘sacrificial rite–the spoil or refuse of which (absurd and unpleasant as it may seem) is borne aloft at once as a ‘trophy’ and as the ‘cap of liberty’. It is now a magic sign, and becomes a talisman of supposedly inexpressible power–from what particular dark reason it would be difficult to say. The whole is a sign of ‘initiation’, and of baptism of a peculiar kind. The Phrygian cap, ever after this first inauguration, has stood as the sign of the ‘Enlightened’.

  More on the Liberty Cap here.

  ]]> http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?feed=rss2&p=780 0 http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=778 http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=778#comments Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:13:32 +0000 twyman http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?p=778

  Download Podcast

  (Hear Part 2 of Interview)

  This episode of The Invisible Hand features Part 1 of my recent interview with Christopher Knowles author of Our Gods Wear Spandex and The Complete X-Files, as well as the Editor of The Secret Sun, a website that analyzes ancient symbolism in modern society from a Jungian perspective.

  Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

  • The New York Post reports that Wikileaks and Julian Assange have made good on their threat to release thousands of potentially damaging secret military documents about the war in Afghanistan. 76,000 or so, to be more precise. 15,000 more are being held in reserve for future release, although it is suspected that this is actually being done at the request of White House officials, who were concerned that information in certain documents might endanger the lives of the troops.

    The once-secret reports reveal the truth behind thousands of incidents where the number of civilian casualties and the circumstances of their deaths have been misrepresented in the official public reports. They also reveal what journalists have already known for a long time: that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, has been directly aiding the Taliban whilst simultaneously receiving billions of dollars of payoffs from the US for being our “allies” in the region. Former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning has been detained in Baghdad on suspicion that he is the source of the leaked documents. The Department of Defense says it will take weeks to assess the potential damage of the exposure.

  • The leaky oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped, and now ABC news reports that the millions of gallons of crude that leaked out has simply disappeared. Or, at least, clean-up crews are not finding as much of it on top of the water as they were before. They say that the slick on the surface has gone from the size of Kansas back down to the size of New Hampshire in just over a month. Skimmers have gone from picking up 25,000 barrels of oily water a week to just 200 barrels, and ABC says that they couldn’t see any surface oil when they recently flew over the site in a Coast Guard helicopter. A direct quote from ABC news reads: “experts say an astonishing amount of the oil has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.” ABC also quoted Professor Overton of Environmental Studies at Louisiana State University, saying “It’s mother nature doing her job.”

    Towards the end of the article they finally mention that the chemical dispersants used by BP may have played a role, and admit that there is still oil beneath the surface. But we know from past reports from other news outlets that most of the oil is and always has been underneath the surface. Furthermore there have been complaints all along from environmental groups that the dispersants would merely break the oil down into smaller globules that could easily be breathed or swallowed by animals in the ocean, and that this would make it impossible to skim the oil out. Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that the oil has been absorbed by nature: through the gills and mouths of the sea life! Just a couple of weeks ago, the local news on WKRG in Alabama tested water samples on the beach and proved that even water that looks clear can actually contain a highly toxic level of petroleum that is invisible to the naked eye. So, as always, listen to the mainstream media at your own risk.

  • In other news, among the many dirty tricks and hidden provisions tucked into the recently passed health care legislation is a provision requiring small business owners and self-employed people to report to the IRS all sales and purchases of goods and services exceeding $600 in any given year. This includes the purchase of gold and silver coins and bullion. The IRS suspects that tapping into this new reservoir of previously unreported income and expenditures will generate an extra $17 billion over the next 10 years. Yes — 17 BILLION DOLLARS … OVER 10 YEARS!

    To put that number in perspective, in 2007, the war in Iraq alone was costing $720 million a day. So the tax revenue generated by forcing millions of Americans to sacrifice their valuable time, effort and money to keep track of meaningless minutia that heretofore nobody even bothered to write down will, over the next decade, accumulate enough to pay for about 23½ days of war in Iraq when calculated in 2007 dollars. Just today the Defense Department announced that just over half that amount, $8.7 billion dollars of Iraq development funds have mysteriously gone missing. The initial TARP bank bailout package was $700 billion, and has since grown to several trillion.

    So is the collection of revenue in the form of US dollars even the real motivation behind this legislation? Diane Pinet of the Industry Council for Tangible Assets thinks the new rules will have a particular impact on the trade of precious metals. One gold buyer from Michigan told ABC news that he will now have to fill out 10,000-20,000 new tax forms per year because of this. Considering that the last major bankruptcy of the United States federal government in 1933 resulted in the seizing of all private gold assets by force, some commentators fear that a similar plan is afoot right now, and that this is the real purpose of generating all this new intelligence on who is buying and selling precious metals. It remains to be seen whether the American public will voluntarily comply.

  ]]> http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?feed=rss2&p=778 0