Queen of Heaven in the Comments Section: Venus, Lucifer, and the Gnostic World-View

Queen of Heaven in the Comments Section

Being an internet sleuth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a thankless job where you spend sleepless nights staring at screens, and the quality of sleep you do get is often garbage (yes, I have blue light glasses. No, I don’t use them).

Do I even have time for these experiments?

The answer is a resounding definitely not.

This website averages eight organic hits a month, I’m on unemployment, and I haven’t kissed a girl in half a decade. I am so fucking lost in life. It’s just that doing anything else would feel disingenuous.

Still, the doubts persist. So I’ve been asking, praying to God and his Angels for something like a sign, something to nudge me in the right direction.

This morning in the half-light between dreaming and waking, between the 6:30 alarm and the ‘ten more minutes’ of the gleefully undisciplined, I saw a Facebook comment that elaborated on a body of research I had recently compiled.

The Facebook comment I am referencing doesn’t exist; I dreamed it. But it’s the closest I’ve gotten to divine guidance, so it seemed important to tell you about it. But you must brace yourself; for the message I received seems to have come straight from the most schizophrenic corners of the internet.

‘It’s called the 'astral plane' because it’s another layer of the hell dimensions. It's in the name: Astaroth in the Bible is called ‘the Queen of Heaven’.

-The Facebook Comments at The Gates of Dawn

In the habit of a terminal Facebooker, I was reacting before I had even finished reading the comment. My brain was crushing out data as fast as my fingers could type. Pieces of information started combining like amino acids as I developed the protein structure of a brilliant argument.

I started to wake up when I realized I wasn’t even holding my phone. Sitting up in bed and digging the sleep out of my eyes, there is something else I realized: whoever they were, they were right.

ASTAROETH and the QUEEN OF HEAVEN

The Bible introduces Astaroeth as a corrupting influence, a foreign deity so seductive that it tempts even wise King Solomon away from the god of Israel:

Solomon worshiped Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites.

Kings 11:5 NLT

In a weird numerical correspondence that might have been intentional on the part of the bible’s compilers, psalms 115 describes the dead idols of those religions that strayed from the living god of Israel:

Where is now their God?
But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not:
eyes have they, but they see not:
They have ears, but they hear not:
noses have they, but they smell not:
They have hands, but they handle not:
feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.

Psalms 115, KJV

In some translations, Astaroth is mentioned by name as the god whose images are being described in this psalm.

Biblical scholars have long been in agreement that the ‘queen of heaven’ mentioned in Jeremiah 44 is also Astaroth:

As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee.

17 But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil.

Jeremiah 44:17 KJV

Who was this ‘Astaroth’ that so plagued the children of Israel?

Ashtoreth is the Phoenician name of a goddess whose roots can be traced back to the ancient Sumerians, who knew her as Inanna. The Babylonians called her Ishtar, and the Greeks called her Astarte. ‘Asteri’ is the Greek word for ‘star’, and the proper name ‘Astarte’ referred to a particular star: the star of Venus, the star that had represented the Goddess since the time of the Sumerians.

A goddess of sex, love, fertility, and war, she was sometimes honored by ritual acts of prostitution, as recorded in Herodotus (I.199) . It was this goddess who was honored by the Asherah poles of the Canaanites, and who helped provoke God to order a genocide in Genesis 15:8-21.

Beltaine is the Gaelic name of the spring holiday that lands on May 1, halfway between midsummer and the spring equinox. It’s a holiday famously associated with the ‘May Pole’ ritual; a fertility rite in which boys and girls hold long ribbons tied to a pole and dance around it in circles. The provenance of the May Pole is uncertain; some trace it back to the Festival of Flora and the Roman Republic; some, to the Celts and the Druids; some to the Germanic tribes on the far side of the Rhine; and some, to the Asherah poles of the Canaanites; but pole dances are also found as far afield as India, in the spring festivals of Indrahhvaja.

In Johann Goethe’s 1808 literary masterpiece Fauste, the sign of the pentagram is called ‘drudenfuss’ (literally, ‘druids foot’). Today the symbol is most commonly employed in it’s Faustian sense, being associated with paganism, witchcraft, and the occult; but it was once a common symbol of protection and benediction, and could be found on Christian churches throughout Europe.

The five-pointed star of the Church has been taken to symbolize the five wounds of Christ (the nails in his feet, the nails in his hands, and the Crown of Thorns), but the star with five points has long been associated with the planet Venus.

When her inferior conjunctions are charted over an eight year period from a geocentric perspective, the shape of a pentagram emerges. A more exact depiction of the planets movements reveal five lobate, or heart-shaped, petals. This shape is called ‘the Rose of Venus’, and it is almost certainly what the Templars had in mind when they carved the Pentagram of Hearts at St. Bartholemew.

One of Venus’ solar conjunctions takes place in Capricorn, the sign at the bottom of the Zodiac. The inverted pentagram is ‘crowned’ by Capricorn, the goat-headed sign ruled by Saturn. Capricorn a winter sign; more specifically, it is the sign of the solar apogee, when the sun is furthest from the earth.

In Dante’s Inferno, the 9th circle of Hell where Satan sits enthroned is a frozen wasteland:

If Goethe is correct in calling the pentagram ‘the druids foot’, it’s intriguing evidence the druidic priesthood had originally come to Europe from the south-east to proselytize for the church of Astharoeth. In this paradigm, the May Poles of Beltaine, the Gaelic fertility holiday, were always the same as the Asherah Poles of Genesis.

The very name of the May 1^st holiday might betray such origins;

The early medieval Sanas Cormaic (‘Cormac’s Narrative’), a Gaelic text of the 10^th century, tells us that Beltaine, ‘May-day’, was the same as ‘Bil-Tene’; the day of Bil, or Bial. On this day, the druidic priestcraft would light two great fires and address great incantations to the Idol god Bil, or Bial; the chieftain of the gods, the fountain of fertility, who wields storms in one hand and fire in the other.

I can’t help but notice the similarity of this god, both in name and in provenance, to Baal, the Phoenician consort of Ashtoreth.

Asherah and Ashtoreth would develop into the Aphrodite of ancient Greece; indeed, in the canon of Greek myth, the existence of Aphrodite predates that of all the other Olympians.

She began her journey through the Hellenic world as Astarte, a word that means ‘star’ in Greek.

As Aphrodite, she was born from the sea foam when Saturn, the leader of the generation of the Titans, castrated the sky-god Ouranos and cast his testicles down from heaven into the sea.

Picture the nuts of Uranos streaking across the night sky like comets, and diving into the ocean with a sizzle and a hiss.

Here we see Astarte, ‘the star of Venus’, falling to earth from heaven. And the Greek Aphrodite is immaculately conceived (‘immaculate’ because without intercourse) from the meeting of the heavenly seed and churning sea.

Hold this image in your mind as we review the bible passage to which we owe the figure of Lucifer:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:
I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

Isaiah 14:12-15

That’s it; the sole biblical mention of the dark figure of Lucifer that has done so much to terrorize the Western imagination.

Lucifer is also the name given to the planet Venus in its morning star aspect. The word means ‘light-bringer’ in Latin.

As the morning star, Lucifer is the herald of the dawn; it rises before the sun, announcing the new day like a celestial cock’s crow. Is this also the origin of the standard depiction of the Gnostic thought-form called Abraxas, the rooster-headed caricature of the creator-god who called the sun, the moon, and all life and materiality into being from the void of night?

In the biblical interpretation, Lucifer’s early rising is seen as an act of presumption. When the bold little star is overcome, this is seen as the inevitable triumph of God the Almighty over the rebellious; the Prodigal Sun called Lucifer, Sun of the Morning.

Stella Maris

In the Catholic tradition, the holy Mother Mary is also referred to as the Queen of Heaven. In Catholic iconography, she is often shown wearing a crown of stars:

This relates Mary directly to Ashtaroth, and her relationship to Aphrodite and Venus is something else that sits right on the surface. In Latin, ‘mar’ means ‘the sea’. The Blessed Virgin has long been invoked as ‘Stella Maris’, the Star of the Sea, by sailors seeking her protection. Remember that Astarte, the Star, became Aphrodite, born from the sea.

Jesus Christ is also called a lucifer, a light-bringer, in some latin translations of the bible and in certain iterations of Catholic Mass. Quroa is full of believers and interested sceptics both insisting that this has never happened, but I saw this video on Youtube before the advent of AI and deep fakes. It’s still up:

Make of it what you will.

From where I’m sitting, it all nests together— Lucifer and the Virgin Mary venerated by the Catholic Orthodoxy are the same entity: Astaroeth, Venus, Inanna: the Queen of Heaven honored from the time of the Sumerians.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable:

In Final Fantasy Conspiracy-posting Volume 2 we showed the relationship between the sign of the Ram, the biblical doctrine of reincarnation, Catholic Orthodoxy, and Christian Gnosticism. It’s a lot to go over again, and the leap I’m about to make isn’t going to make a lot of sense without having that background, but basically—

The Astral Realm, ruled by Ashtaroth, is just another level in the Gnostic Hell, and Gnostic Hell is the same as the Buddhist Samsara. The reason Elon Musk wears the Rams Head of Baal-Hammon, the consort of Asteroth, on the leather armor in his profile picture on twitter, is because he knows there is no way for the human soul out of this mess. The earth is a closed system, a trap. That’s why the Tesla logo has the dome of the impenetrable firmament arcing over a stylized ram’s head on it: we are stuck here, and he knows it.

The Astral plane and the magical systems that hack the reality-code are evil in the Gnostic sense because they do not show us the way out of the hell-system; instead, they show us the way in.

To master the zero sum game of the reality system is to become one with it.

I’m not going to lie; the thought of bending reality to my will instead of being subservient to static conditions beyond my control makes my mouth water.

The power to change when I could never change before; the power to turn inexorable tides in my favor. Some say this can be accomplished through magic; others by prayer. I say,

‘what’s the difference?’

In the Gnostic world-view laid out in the Nag Hamadi Scriptures, reality is a crucible: a predatory engine powered by cum and blood. That includes the Astral Realm- it’s just another haunt of the thrones and principalities of Yaldabaoth, the Blind Child and arch-tyrant of the Fallen World.