Thursday, May 26, 2011

Secret Solis Dei Cult – the Vatican



Nothing in Catholic church architecture to left to chance. Everything has a place and a reason for its placement in RC churches (and with a meaning, overt or otherwise). What is out in the open under the umbrella term of Sacred Tradition might surprise some.

Something occurs to me looking at both the floor plans of the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome with the Disneyesque RC mandated Baroque fun house – the new St. Peter’s Basilica. After the Reformation, Roman Catholicism got turned into smoke and mirrors. Got turned into PR rhetoric propaganda and not substance.

Few realize that St. Peter’s is not a Cathedral or chair or a bishop as in the bishop of Rome. The bishop of Rome’s seat is in the cathedral of St. John Lateran, a building, or its foundations, that is as old as Constantine’s religion itself.

And Constantine, was perhaps one of the first or earliest of many Universalists of history, following Akhenaten, Amranmosis (mosis – son of - Amran or just plain Moses), Saul of Tarsus and maybe even Jesus of Nazareth as well.

What caught my eye was the Chair of Peter thingy in both the old and the new St. Peter’s. Not much historical detail or paintings of the old St. Peter’s. But the new St. Peter’s has the smoke and mirror stained glass window of a dove surrounded by a sunburst above this mythical chair of Peter. Why all this emphasis on the power of Peter? He is not even buried there. He was buried in Jerusalem and never traveled outside of Palestine in his entire life?

The problem with a Universalist agenda then was that you had to tie all the strings together, just like string theory theology these days in the new secular religion of science.

Well back to placement of Significant Statues surrounding the main altar at the new St. Peter’s where there are two rather curious statues out of four.

One of course is of St. Helena, Constantine’s mom. It was mom’s lap pet religion of Christianity that caught his eye in terms of consolidating and merging all religions in the Roman Empire into one. It was mom who did the big Asian tour to Palestine and decided on which antiques from Rodeo Drive type antique shops she visited that became the official relics of her pet religion, now trading up under sonny’s growing patronage.

It was the bones, partial skeleton, which St. Helena signed off on, on Vatican Hill that became the present bones of “St. Peter” under the high altar at St. Peter's Baroque theme park/church.

But the one Statue, the first one at the right, facing forward towards the Chair of Peter Bronze sculpture below the sunburst stained glass window is St. Longinus. St. Longinus - all fifteen odd feet of him in height and gazing into the oculus.

St. Longinus is one of those verbal tradition things that you have to blindly believe in as a RC. Longinus is the so-called Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus on the cross.

No name mentioned of him in the NT but it is a tradition thingy.

If I were to analyze a myth, I would have to say that the statue of whomever (St. Longinus) carrying a long lance (and or of a ray of light) in his right hand gesturing in the direction of the chair of Peter below the Oculus stained glass window (the sun god), that statue is also guarding the stairway down into the grotto where ancient Romans like Constantine worshipped his sun god, Roman army cult god Mithra, born December 25.

More on this centuries old, sacred, secret global Solis Dei cult later on.

Whatever.

The old and new Pantheons in Rome

I love architecture. Everybody knows about the Pantheon in Rome. It is almost two thousand years old and it is virtually intact.

It is the only intact ancient Roman, still functioning, original building in existence.

The Pantheon and the name imply was a home or a temple to all the gods of Rome.

It of course got turned into a church somewhere along the way. The pagan idols got scraped away and replaced with Christian idols of the saints etc. It also got an interior face lift during the Renaissance with a lot of marble and design and whatever.

The most important feature of the Pantheon is the Oculus, the eye open to the sky in the center of a vaulted circular concrete ceiling/roof.

Hadrian designed the Pantheon to be a solar calendar. Indeed the sun, through the oculus, goes through the front door on the June 21st Solstice.

The only thing that saved this pagan temple from destruction was its construction, very hard to destroy, and its being dedicated to the catholic earth goddess Mary in 609 by bishop/pope whomever.

What I find interesting is that when it got its Renaissance makeover was that Rome’s Pantheon moved across the Tiber River to the new Saint Peter’s being built.

Of course you are going to say that Saint Peter’s is filled with statue after statue of Christian saints and not pagan idols.

If a second century Roman got swept up into a UFO and was frozen and came back to today, deposited back onto the streets of Rome in his toga and he saw the present church of Mary and the Martyrs, he might wonder what had happened to the gods.

If our ancient visitor might by chance catch a glimpse of the one of the tallest structures in Rome today, if he walked there into present day St. Peter’s he would cry and realize that they moved the Pantheon across the river to Vatican Hill.

Whatever.