In the following article, Dungeonposting arrives at a gnostic vision of the universe by using the symbol found above the revification springs in the third installment of the Final Fantasy video game series as a launch-pad. Buckle in, this shit is downright labyrinthine!
Setting the Stage
I conceived of this series while writing about the Garland Time-Loop. I don’t know if there will be another installment, but it’s been an extraordinarily fruitful experiment.
Every installment of the Final Fantasy series is cooked in this rich broth of mythological references that span the world and the eons. The default assumption has been that it’s just for fun. As I was toying with the implications of the Garland Time Loop, I felt genuine insights coming into my awareness; sacred geometry and comparitive mythology glanced off of each other in the crystal mirror of Final Fantasy I‘s narrative strucutre, and I was so stoned that it that led me to ask myself-
How much did the game writers really know?
What other insights might we find encrypted in the world’s most famous JRPG franchise, provided we know where to look? How deep down can we go, how far can we carry this thought experiment?
Today’s subject is the symbol that looms over the revification wells in the original distribution of the third Final Fantasy title:
This is where we go to have our dead party members resurrected. Fenix Downs are rare in this title, and cannot be purchased anywhere.
The symbol hanging above the well looks pretty benign, but right away it reminded me of something:
The Tesla logo, which is looks like an economical version of the satanic rams-head emblazoned on the front of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s famous leather suit of armor:
The Tesla logo also looks like the zodiacal glyph for the sign of Aries, which has a lost in common with the zodiacal glyph that represents the meteor-planet Vesta. We’ll return to this later.
I know it’s problematic to conflate Satanism with Islam, or to take issue with either, but it’s certainly true that they are united in their distaste for Christianity. I thought it was interesting, then, that the symbol on the back of Mehmed the Conquerer’s leather cuirass at the end of the Netflix series Rise of Empires: Ottoman, if inverted, would look like the skull of a ram or a goat:
In the last moments of the last episode, the victorious Ottoman leader strides across the floor of the Hagia Sophia in triumph. At the time, the Hagia Sophia was the largest building in Europe. It is the year 1453 and, after standing firm against the Saracen armies for over half a millennia, the Christian stronghold of Constantinople has fallen.
The rams-head is an element we find above the fireplaces in the third Final Fantasy game, and it looks quite similar to the symbol that hangs above the revification springs:
The first stone to lift on our way to exposing the deeper levels of symbolism, then, is the sign of the Ram.
The Waters of Dumuzi and the Ram of Amun
The ram is, of course, the emblem of Aries, the zodiac sign that rules over the onset of spring. Aries is said to be ruled by Mars, the red planet and the God of War. In the ancient world, spring was not only a herald of the beginning of the planting season; it was also a time when kingdoms would embark on years’ first military campaigns. The red light of Mars is similar in hue to glinting copper or bronze. The first efficient plows were made from bronze, and bronze weapons and armor were the standard implements of organized warfare.
The sacrifice of rams was common in the ancient New Year festivities of the Near East and is still practiced in some parts of the world today. The observation that blood nourished the soil might have had everything to do with it; the New Year once corresponded with the beginning of spring and the planting season. It’s very likely these traditions were the wellspring of the modern Easter holiday, and that the blood of Jesus is called ‘the blood of the lamb’ because his sacrifice was substituted for the earlier sacrifice of the ram.
On the subject of Christ, the story of Dumuzi might sound familiar to you. A god of the Sun, shepherds, and subterranean water, Dumuzi was the son of the Mesopotamian high god who was sacrificed and resurrected. Also called Tammuz or Marduk, his symbol was the double-planked cross; a symbol the Egyptians believed held the secrets of eternal life.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the Sacred Marriage Rite of Dumuzi and Inanna was re-enacted every spring. The king would disappear with the idol of Dumuzi for seven days, during which time the people would bitterly mourn the death of the solar deity. His re-emergence was likened to the mythic resurrection of Dumuzi, and this resurrection was consecrated when the king coupled with the priestess of Inanna, who was looked upon as the avatar of the goddess of love, sex, and war. Whether or not their union was symbolic or involved actual sex is a matter of conjecture, but the consequences of the ritual were real; the floodgates were then raised to irrigate the fields. Thus the resurrection of Dumuzi brought water and life back from the underworld.
We see this symbolism reflected in the revificication wells of Final Fantasy 3; under the aegis of a stylized rams-head (the sign of Aries, the ram, presides over the spring equinox) our party members are brought back from the realms of the dead by Dumuzi the Sun-God’s subterranean waters of life.
Driving home this identification of the Ram with the sun is a story we find in book two of the histories of Herodotus. At the of Zeus at Thebes, the priests say Heracles spoke to Zeus in the flesh. To facilitate this, Zeus disguised his divinity by holding up the decapitated head of a ram as a mask:
‘Heracles… wished above all things to see Zeus. Zeus, however was unwilling that his wish should be gratified. Heracles persisted, and Zeus had to devise a means of getting out of the difficulty*. His plan was to skin a ram and cut off it’s head; then, holding the head before him and covering himself with the fleece, he showed himself to Heracles. This story explains why the Egyptians represent Zeu with a ram’s head— a practice which has extended to the Ammonians… So far as I can see, the Ammonians took their name from this circumstance; for Amun is the Egyptian name for Zeus.’
[** Zeus’ mortal lover Semele met her end by demanding to see that god as he truly was. Bound by a promise, Zeus was forced to comply with her wish. The maiden died in thunder and flames the moment she laid eyes on him. The disguise was necessary because the sight of Zeus in his true form was fatal for a mortal to behold, even for a demi-god like Heracles. Presumably Zeus opted to satisfy Heracle’s request becuase the god showed favor to all of his children, and Heracles was one of them. ]
During the Ptolemaic rule of Egypt, Ptolomy I Soter (305-282 BC) originated the cult of Serapis. This was an attempt to syncretize Greek and Egyptian religions to produce something mutually intelligible. The cult of Serapis would act as a bridge uniting the religious identity of the culture of the subject population and that of their rulers. Below is a Roman bust that attests to the immense popularity of the cult of Serapis. Dated to about100 CE, or about four hundred years after the cult’s inception, it depicts the composite god Ammon-Serparis with ram’s horns:
The Goat of Mendes: Pan, Baphomet, and Hell at Ceasarea Phillipi
Shortly after relating the legend of Heracles at the Temple of Theban Zeus, Herodotus tells us something of the religious observances in the ancient Egyptian city of Mendes:
‘the Mendesians will not sacrifice goats, either male or female. …[for] they believe Pan to be one of the eight gods who existed before the subsequent twelve, and painters and sculptors represent him just as the Greeks do: with the face and legs of a goat.’
During the trials that resulted in the Knights Templar being executed en masse in the March of 1314, the membership of the world’s most powerful knightly order was accused of worshipping a deity the court records call ‘Baphomet’.
French hair-dresser turned occultist Eliphas Levi’s 19th century illustration of the mysterious Baphomet was designed as a visual representation of the operations of sorcery, but it must have been based at least in part on Herodotus’ description of the ancient Egyptian cult of Pan; for Levi gave his Baphomet the appellation ‘the goat of Mendes’:
Further scholarship reveals a so-called ‘triad of Mendes’ in with religious paradigm of the ancient Mendesians.
Their ram-god Banebdjedet was said to be the Ba, or personality, of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld; and Banebdjedet took as his consort the fish-goddess Hatmehit.
Their union produced the infant Horus, considered another manifestation of the sun god. The English word ‘hours’ is thought by some to derive from the name of Horus; in the ancient world, the length of the shadows cast by the sun were used to mark the passage of time.
The union of a ram and a fish resulting in the birth of the sun is a clear indication that the Mendesians held the spring equinox in reverence, and the fecundating properties of the Goat of Pan were only part of the equation; because the time of the spring equinox, when the sun begins its increase, lands on the cusp of Pisces and Aries, or at the union of the ram and the fish.
The conventional depiction of Satan, the Christian Devil, as a satyr or pan-like figure, is established in the gospel of Matthew.
Here, Christ and his apostles take a field trip to the gates of Caesarea Phillipi, an ancient shrine dedicated to the worship of Pan, the wild god. As the followers of Pan revel in the sins of the flesh within the grotto, the apostles gaze in awe and horror at the lost and fallen nature of the world and it’s people. It is here that Christ at last reveals his true identity and mission; he is the Messiah, who has come in the flesh as the world’s salvation.
The symbolism is profound, for the cave-grotto at Caesarea Phillipi had been likened to the gates of hell itself from the earliest times. The Canaanite priesthood had used it as a center of Baal worship, and their blasphemous rites so scarred the minds of biblical writers that the religion of Canaan remains the working standard for the foulest of spiritual practices. Later, the cult of Pan would use the cave to engage in the worst prostitutions of body and spirit, even copulating with goats to entice the Great God Pan to return to the human world.
In the time of Christ, the shrine was devoted as much to the cult of Pan as to the cult of the Imperium. But the evil of this place transcended memory, for this was ground zero of the events recorded in the book of enoch, where the fallen angels, the Elohim, had deigned to impregnate the daughters of men. The land around Ceasarea Phillipi was believed to be haunted by the disincarnate ghosts of the Nephilim, those wicked, half-divine children for whose sake God had flooded the earth in Genesis.
Canaan is the name of one of the towns you visit early on in Final Fantasy III. This caught my eye for several reasons; for one, it’s uncommon to find a direct biblical reference that isn’t veiled in some kind of metaphor or euphemism. For another, the aforementioned reputation of Canaan and the Canaanites for spiritual evil.
Maybe it was all propaganda.
The notorious religion of Old Canaan might have been an excuse for the Isrealites to clear house. After all, they had just returned from their long Exodus to find the land God had promised them already inhabited.
Either that, or what they did was really, really bad; a righetous God doesn’t order a wholesale genocide for nothing, and if he does, he isn’t righteous.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.
Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.
This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
In Final Fantasy III, Canaan is where we heal Cid’s sick mother, and learn about a young vagabond named Desh.
Desh is a smooth talker and a rambler that stole a young woman’s heart and then hit the road after buying the last Mini scroll. Mini is a goofy spell that makes you really, really tiny. I guess he needed it to escape his commitments.
We’ll catch up to Desh in the next scenario when we are abducted by Bahamut the Dragon King, but as the story unfolds
it turns out that Desh couldn’t commit to a relationship with a Canaanite woman because he had a higher calling in life.
He will eventually save the day through bodily sacrifice by throwing himself into the fire at the heart of the Tower of Owen, preventing a total meltdown that would have sent the Floating Continent to the bottom of the ocean.
The land of Canaan is united to the theme of human sacrifice by fire and flame, and the leads us to the next stop in our strange journey through the cultic symbols of the ancient world through the lens of an old Nintendo game:
The Lake of Fire and the God of Canaan.
The Lake of Fire and the God of Canaan
That Biblical Christianity teaches reincarnation is not widely accepted. Those who have found evidence of this doctrine in biblical texts employ many of the same passages that have been used to support a vision of the afterlife suffused by hell-fire and eternal damnation.
One of the key passages is 2 Kings 23:10:
“And he defiled Tophet, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.”
This passage is usually resolved by referring to other historical sources. Roman historian Diodorus Sicculus, writing in the last century BC, tells us in book twenty of his monumental Library of History that the Carthiginians sacrificed their children by placing them in a fire beneath a colossal bronze image of the Phoenician god Baal-Hammon, which Sicculus equated to Cronos, a Greco-Roman divinity known for devouring it’s own children.
The conventional interpretation of 2 Kings is that gruesome rites of human sacrifice are being carried out in a place called Tophet. Isaiah 30:33 is the nearest we get to a biblical disambiguation of the identity of Tophet:
“For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.”
A later translation exchanges ‘tophet’ for something more terrestrial:
“For a hearth is ordered of old; Yea, for the king it is prepared, Deep and large; The pile thereof is fire and much wood; The breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.”
The hearth is the key to unlocking the mystery of biblical reincarnation, but to do so we have to rely on more external evidence.
Biblical scholars equate the Roman goddess Vesta to Tophet:
“…it is well known that the Romans had their goddess Vesta, whom Velleius Paterculus calls the keeper of the perpetual fires; and there were certain virgins, called the "vestal" virgins, whose business it was to take care that the fire never went out; and is by Virgil called the eternal fire..."
Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, and a hearth is just a fireplace.
Before natural gas or the advent of the stove, the hearth would have been the heart of every home. Indeed, it’s where we get the English word ‘heart’ from. The Vestal College was an important state religious institution in Ancient Rome. The Vestal Virgins were tasked with maintaining the perpetually burning and sacred flame that burned at the heart of the city. They were also tasked with maintaining their virginity.
The flame they tended stood for the unwavering heart of the empire, and the virginity of the priestesses represented Rome’s impenetrability. Discipline and self-control were key factors in the empire’s military dominance, and so these faculties were demanded of the priestesses who embodied the highest virtues of the Roman identity.
For a Vestal to break her vow of chastity was considered a grave offense, and it was met with ultimate punishment; the woman would be buried alive next to the walls of the city.
Vesta was called Hestia in Greece; Hestia was a sister of Hades. Hades is mentioned in the Book of Revelation:
"Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death."
The astrological symbol for Vesta looks like a vaginal cleft because Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, is a euphemism for the womb.
Like the flame at the heart of the Tower of Owen, the flame at the Vestal College burns perpetually.
The phrase ‘everlasting fire’ appears in the book of Matthew, in a passage that is among the handful used demonstrate that the doctrine of eternal damnation is sciptural:
"Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels"
** This is not original research on my part, even if the commentary is my own. I’m pretty much copying and pasting from this forum. You can find a more detailed break-down there.
Following the chain of inference,
the eternally burning lake of flames promised to those who die without the grace of salvation is topeth, ‘the hearth’. ‘The hearth’ is a euphemism for the female reproductive organs. The second death, then, is a second birth— reincarnation in the flesh.
Taking this approach, the underlying worldview and aim of Christianity is the same as that of Buddhism: hell is endless suffering in the flesh, and to be saved is to break out of the endless cycle of birthing and dying.
This is exactly the theology we find in the Gnostic gospels of the Nag Hamadi library.
The Gnostics were a radical Christian sect that flourished in the early centuries after Christ’s ministry. Gnostic teachings have long been held in contempt by other Christians. At best they are considered non-canonical; at worst, heretical. More on the Gnostic World-view later;
By delving into the identity of Molech, we can braid together all these loose ends into a rope strong enough to pull us through the fires of Tophet.
Molech, Baal-Hammon, Ammon, Amun-ra
The Molech referenced in 2 Kings is usually depicted as a bull-headed idol the the body of a man, before whom children are ‘passed through the flames’, similar to the sacrificial rites of the Carthaginians. This image of Molech is not found in any biblical text and was probably arrived at by compositing historical sources.
The legend of the minotaur has been cited as a possible influence. Like the passage in 2 Kings, it is a tale rooted in the ancient communal practice of child sacrifice.
As the story goes, the people of Athens were forced to give up seven of their best sons and seven of their best daughters as an annual tribute to the Minotaur— the monstrous, bull-headed son of Poseidon who would devour the children as they wandered the labyrinth of King Minos.
An ancient torture device called the ‘brazen bull’ may have also had bearing on the standard depiction of Molech.
Our earliest primary source for the legend of the brazen bull is, once again, the Library of History by Diodorus Siculus. As an anthologist, he seems to have had an attraction to the novel and the morbid. He tells us an Athenian named Perilaus designed the brazen bull under the patronage of Phalaris, a tyrant of Sicily who ruled between 570 and 554 BC.
Victims were locked inside the belly of the bronze animal and slowly roasted to death. As they cooked, the smoke of their bodies would rise from the nostrils of the bull as a cloud of incense. Their screams would pass through a series of pipes and baffles in the bull’s throat, emerging as sweet and melodious bellows. Allegedly Phalaris was so disgusted when he heard this that he ordered the bull’s inventor to be locked inside it and executed, subjected to the same sick torture he had fabricated for others. When Phalaris could no longer endure the spectacle, he had Perilaus pulled from the device and thrown from a cliff.
In one of life’s poetic ironies, the tyrant is said to have been killed inside his brazen bull when he was deposed. The bull devoured both its creators; in this way, the story of the brazen bull reverses the myth of Cronos, where the creator devoured the created.
The Brazen Bull has exercised an almost magnetic influence on the historical imagination for how neatly it parodies the unfeeling cruelty of the powerful. It’s hard to believe such a device ever existed, but if the Christian hagiographers who documented the lives of the saints are to be believed, the brazen bull was in use for hundreds of years throughout the Greco-Roman period.
In 92 Ad Saint Antipus, bishop of Pergamum, was martyred in a brazen bull during the purges of Emperor Domitian. Imagine a man roasting inside a brazen bull at the center of the grand altar at Pergamum:
Saint Eustace and his wife and children are said to have been executed in the crucible of the brazen bull under the emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138 ad, while Pelagia of Tarsus was said to have been killed in like manner in 287 AD under the orders of Emperor Diocletian.
For Christians, the bull had long been a symbol of supreme apostacy. In Exodus 32, Moses comes down from Mount Sinai bearing the stone tablets where God’s laws were recorded. After his brief absence, he steps onto a scene where the Israelites have fallen to prostrating themselves before an image of a golden calf without his spiritual guidance.
When Christians were executed inside the brazen bull by pagan emperors, the symbolism must have seemed especially loaded; here was blatant confirmation of the fallen nature of the world, and the satanic nature of the Roman Empire.
The legend of the Minotaur, the martyrs in the brazen bull, and the Carthaginian sacrifices to Cronos are sure to have influenced historical perceptions of Molech. While the depiction of a horned man is not explicitly stated in biblical texts, there is some internal evidence to suggest that the prophets of Israel were referring to a horned deity when they were talking about Molech.
Among the many neighbors of Israel whom the prophets of God promised would be punished for their idolatry were the Ammonites.
Kings 11:57 calls the god of the Ammonites Milcom and Molech, but the Romans called it Baal-Hammon- the same God alleged to have been honored by the child sacrifices of the Phoenicians. ‘Hammon’ is believed to be the same as the Egyptian Ammon, or Amun-Ra, the sun god that we previously saw was depicted with ram’s horns.
To help bring all this together, I’ve assembled this helpful visual:
We’ve dug through the ashes of the fireplaces in Final Fantasy III to emerge with some sophisticated ideas about the symbolism of horned animals, the biblical Lake of Fire, and the identity of Topeth, but how do the revification springs that set us off down this jagged path fit into this scheme? They are not filled with fire. Rather, they are filled with water.
It’s elementary, my dear; in esoteric philosophy, fire and water are the masculine and feminine sides of the same coin, and that coin is creation.
Venus/Aphrodite, Sophia, and the Cult of Mary
The Spring Equinox at the juncture of Pisces and Aries can be thought of as a meeting of fire and water; the union of Dumuzi and Inanna yields the rains and the solar radiant energy, and both are needed to make the crops grow in the holy circle of dissolution and renewal.
We can find deeper insight into the meaning of the waters of life we find flowing in the cistern beneath that strange sign in Final Fantasy III by applying a linguistic cipher to the iconography of Catholocism.
Jesus refers to living water several times in the New Testament, but we are going to gloss over that to look at something less subtle. Something so obvious it’s easy to miss.
Catholicism has been accused of many, many things. Least among these accusations is the charge that the Catholic Church is not consecrated to the worship of Jesus at all. In this school of thought, Christ is subordinated to his mother. Covertly, Catholcism is a Cult of Mary.
The latin root ‘mar’ is rendered in English as ‘the sea’. Remember in Greek mythology how Aphrodite was immaculately conceived when the castrated testicles of Uranos were cast down from heavenand into the sea? It’s telling that Aphrodite predates the birth of all of the Olympians; after the generation of the Titans are shut up by the new gods, Aphrodite is the only member of the elder generation left free. There is every indication here that Venus has always been a chief diety.
In the gnostic interpretation of reality and creation, the material universe was born from the goddess Sophia in imitation of the architecture of the heavens. In latin, the root ‘mater’ means ‘mother’. As a cult of Mary, the catholic church is consecrated to Sophia, the mother of matter, the Prima Materia.
Excuse me if this is vulgar but,
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see in the symbol that hovers above the revivication wells a stylized representation of the female genetailia, with the ‘waters of life’ that run beneath it representing the cosmic amniotic fluid that issued from what the Nag Hamadi texts called the ‘abortion’ of Sophia. The shape of a Ram’s head is similarly reflected in the structure of the female reproductive system, and the glyph of Aries can be taken to represent the vulva. As the first sign of the Zodiac, Aries is assigned the first color in the rainbow— the color red, the color of blood and flesh. Aries also oversees the return of the Waters of Life.
Maybe this is redundant.
The vesica piscis is a shape derived from the overlapping of two perfect circles, and it is a significant element in sacred geometry. It’s easy to imagine in the vesica piscis the shape of a dilating vagina:
In a lot of catholic iconography, we find the figures of jesus and mary both emerging from the vesica piscis:
‘Madonna’ was adopted as a name for Mary by the catholic church in the 17th century. It means simply, ‘my lady’ in Italian.
American pop artist Madonna released the album ‘Like a Virgin’ in 1984. One of the hits of that epoch-making record was, of course, the song ‘Material Girl’. Remember that in the Gnostic genesis story, the material world was created ex nihilo from the virgin birth of Sophia.
A heavy-handed Christian gnostic or buddhist interpretation of all of the above might lead one to conclude that, as a church secretly consecrated to the worship of the mother of matter and the material universe, the entire goal of catholic canon is to keep human souls trapped in the endless cycle of death and reincarnation.
As if to confirm our paranoid gnostic suspicions about the church and, by extension, the world, we find the symbol of the Dragon prominently featured at the Vatican:
(Notice the labial shape of the elements framing the dragon)
Allegedly, the Dragon is represented without it’s tail because it has been cut off. The tail was the bad part of the dragon, the part that drew down a third of the host of heaven in the passage of the bible where the dragon is identified as Satan:
And his tail drew down a third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the Dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Officially, then, the dragon emblems found all over the Vatican and in the coat-of-arms of several notable aristocratic families with ties to the papacy represent, not Satan, but victory over Satan.
Oh yea? Then what’s this little dude behind Pope Gregory XIII doing with his tail on?
The Nag Hamadi library describes Yaeldebaoth, a lion-headed serpent that was born in the material chaos that issued from the aeon of Sophia. The early Gnostics thought of Yaeldebaoth as the principle demiurge and the lord of the observable world. In the representations of Yaeldebaoth that have survived into posterity, all you’d have to do is tack some wings on them to end up with a creature not unlike the one hiding in the robes of Pope Gregory XIII up there.
The Nag Hamadi library tells us that the name Yaeldebaoth meant ‘come here, little child’, for he was a blind, foolish, and arrogant god.
In the Gnostic genesis , Sophia shrouded her child and it’s creation from the sight of the other heavens. She was protective of Yaeldebeoth, and did not wish for it to recognize it’s deformity.
Notice how Santa Maria is always carrying the baby Jesus:
In the course of writing this, I’ve successfully convinced myself that the Catholic Church is actually a gnostic church, but instead of working to unite Sophia’s creation with the higher Aeons it is actively collaborating with the Demiurge.
That’s a crazy idea,
But it’s one my dreams saw fit to elaborate on.
