Thursday 18 May 2023

Astrological Symbolism: Aries, part 2

Karnak Temple in Luxor

Part  1 

Egypt

For the Egyptain gods related to the symbol of the ram, Blavatsky mentions Ammon, Khnoum, and Kneph.

Champollion lists the following as forms of Amon:Amon-Ra, Nef, Noub, Noum, Cnèph, Cnouphis-ilus, Cnoubis, Chnoumis, Agathodaemon, Mendes. (Panthéon égyptien, collection des personnages mythologiques de l'ancienne Égypte, d'après les monuments, Firmin Didot (pp. 1-24).

According to Mythopedia, Amon is one of 'the most important gods in the Egyptian pantheon, ram-headed Amun was a key member of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad and the Theban Triad. Amun was often combined with Ra, with whom he shared many cosmological similarities. In their respective cults of worship, each was hailed as a creator deity and the head of the Egyptian pantheon.

Amon-Ra (1)
Amun was somewhat unique within Egyptian theology, as he possessed many characteristics emphasized in modern monotheistic deities (such as Christianity’s God, Judaism’s Yahweh, and Islam’s Allah). Omnipresent and all-powerful, Amun was unknowable even to his fellow gods and goddesses.

Amun was depicted in a variety of ways, with the most common being that of a bearded man wearing a dual-feathered plume. He often wore a short kilt and a feather-patterned tunic. While Amun was frequently depicted as having blue skin, later representations used red as well.

Amun’s other representations included a ram-headed man, a ram-headed serpent, a primordial goose, and a ram-headed sphinx.' (Meehan, Evan. “Amun.” Mythopedia, November 29, 2022)

According to Blavatsky: 'Ammon or Mon, the “hidden,” the Supreme Spirit.  Ammon-Ra, the generator, is the secondary aspect of the concealed deity. Khnoum was adored at Elephanta and Philoe) The same with Khnoum and Ammon;§ both are represented ram-headed, and both often confused, though their functions are different. Khnoum is “the modeller of men,” fashioning men and things out of the Mundane Egg on a potter’s wheel;' (Isis Unveiled 2, 465)
Cnouphis, Chnoubis, Ammon-Chnoubis (2)

She gives certain elaborations on the various forms of Amon in her Theosophical Glossary:

Ammon (Eg.). One of the great gods of Egypt. Ammon or Amoun is far older than Amoun-Ra, and is identified with Baal. Hammon, the Lord of Heaven. Amoun-Ra was Ra the Spiritual Sun, the “Sun of Righteousness”, etc., for—“the Lord God is a Sun”. He is the God of Mystery and the hieroglyphics of his name are often reversed. He is Pan, All-Nature esoterically, and therefore the universe, and the “Lord of Eternity”. Ra, as declared by an old inscription, was “begotten by Neith but not engendered”.

Kneph (Eg.). Also Cneph and Nef, endowed with the same attributes as Khem. One of the gods of creative Force, for he is connected with the Mundane Egg. Deveria writes: “His journey to the lower hemisphere appears to symbolise the evolutions of substances which are born to die and to be reborn”. Thousands of years before Kardec, Swedenborg, and Darwin appeared, the old Egyptians entertained their several philosophies. (Eg. Belief and Mod. Thought.)

Chnouphis
 Khnum creating man and woman (3)
(Gr.)(here she seems to be describing the form of Khnoum) Nouf in Egyptian. Another aspect of Ammon, and the personification of his generative power in actu, as Kneph is of the same in potentia. He is also ram-headed. If in his aspect as Kneph he is the Holy Spirit with the creative ideation brooding in him, as Chnouphis, he is the angel who “comes in” into the Virgin soil and flesh.
He is seen on a monument seated near a potter’s wheel, and forming men out of clay. The fig-leaf is sacred to him, which is alone sufficient to prove him a phallic god—an idea which is carried out by the inscription: “he who made that which is, the creator of beings, the first existing, he who made to exist all that exists.” Some see in him the incarnation of Ammon-Ra, but he is the latter himself in his phallic aspect, for, like Ammon, he is “ his mother’s husband”, i.e., the male or impregnating side of Nature. His names vary, as Cnouphis, Noum, Khem, and Khnum or Chnoumis. As he represents the Demiurgos (or Logos) from the material, lower aspect of the Soul of the World, he is the Agathodæmon, symbolized sometimes by a Serpent ;

Chnoumis (Gr) The same as Chnouphis and Kneph.

Kneph, temple of Khnum, Esna, Egypt (4)
A symbol of creative force ;  The fact is that all these gods are solar, and represent under various aspects the phases of generation and impregnation. Their ram’s heads denote this meaning, a ram ever symbolizing generative energy in the abstract, while the bull was the symbol of strength and the creative function. All were one god, whose attributes were individualised and personified.

Esoterically, however, and as taught by the Initiates of the inner temple, Chnoumis-Kneph was pre-eminently the god of reincarnation. Says an inscription: “I am Chnoumis, Son of the Universe, 700”, a mystery having a direct reference to the reincarnating EGO. 

Greece

Phrixus & Golden-Fleeced Ram,  C 5th B.C (5)
Aries, the first astrological sign, is represented by the ram, with a general symbolism of rebirth and beginnings. Aries, which is ruled by the planet Mars, is associated with the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts.The myth tells the story of Phrixus and Helle, who were born of Athamas, a Boetian king, and the goddess of the clouds, Nephele. Athamas fell in love with a woman named Ino, and Nephele left in anger, causing a drought in her wake. Ino attempted to sacrifice Phrixus and Helle in order to end the drought that had stricken the land. Nephele prevented this from happening by sending a ram with golden wool to rescue them. The two children escaped on the winged ram’s back.The ram was initially meant to be sacrificed to Mars, but Zeus took it and placed it in the sky in his honor.
(Hyginus Fabulae 188, Krios Khrysomallos)
Roman  Jupiter Ammon, 1st c, AD (6)
According to Blavatsky, 'In his astronomical aspect Zeus-Dionysus has his origin in the zodiac, the ancient solar year. In Libya he assumed the form of a ram, and is identical with the Egyptian Amun, who begat Osiris, the taurian god. (Isis
Unveiled I, 263 )
Amun, worshipped by the Greeks as Ammon, had a temple and a statue, the gift of Pindar (d. 443 BC), at Thebes (Description of Greece. ix.16 § 1.), and another at Sparta, the inhabitants of which, as Pausanias says, consulted the oracle of Ammon in Libya from early times more than the other Greeks (Description of Greece. iii.18 § 2). At Aphytis, Chalcidice, Amun was worshipped, from the time of Lysander (d. 395 BC), as zealously as in Ammonium. Pindar the poet honored the god with a hymn. At Megalopolis the god was represented with the head of a ram (Paus. viii.32 § 1), and the Greeks of Cyrenaica dedicated at Delphi a chariot with a statue of Ammon.

Rome

Ovid describes the importance of the Ram symbol for the Romans at the Spring equinox, recounting the myth of golden fleece:

March 23: Tubilustrium: Nefas Publicus (ll. 849-876)

The last of the five days (i.e. of the Quinquatria) exhorts (us) to purify the tuneful trumpets, and to offer sacrifice to the mighty goddess (i.e. Nerio, the wife of Mars, with whom Minerva came to be associated). Now you can raise your face to the sun and say, "Yesterday, he touched the fleece of Phrixus' ram (i.e. on 22nd March the sun entered the zodiac constellation of 'Aries', the Ram)."

6th c. mosaic zodiac  in a synagogue (7)  
The seeds were parched by the trick of the wicked stepmother (i.e. Ino), and the grain had not sprouted as it usually (did): (a messenger) had been sent to the oracle to report by a sure prophecy what cure the Delphic (god) would prescribe for the barren earth. Tarnished also like the seed, he reports that the deaths of Helle and of young Phrixus are sought by the oracle. And, when the citizens, and the season, and Ino compelled a reluctant king (i.e. Athamas) to submit to these impious orders, Phrixus and his sister, covering their brows with head-bands, stand together before the altar and bewail their joint fate. Their mother (i.e. Nephele, cloud) sees (them) by chance as she hung in the air, and beats her bare breasts with her hand in shock, and, with the clouds as her companions, she dives down into the dragon-born city (i.e. Thebes, founded by Cadmus, who sowed the dragon's teeth), and snatches her children away from there; and, so that they can make their escape, a ram, gleaming with gold, is provided; it conveys the two (of them) over the wide seas. The girl held on to the left-horn (too) weakly, they say, when she called the name of the water after herself (i.e. the Hellespont, the straits that link the Aegean to the Propontis, or the Sea of Marmora). Her brother almost died with her, when he tries to help (her) as she falls, and he extends his outstretched hands as far as possible. He wept at losing his partner in their twin peril, unaware that she has been joined to the azure god (i.e. Neptune). On reaching the shore, the ram becomes a constellation (i.e. Aries); but his golden fleece arrives at the halls of Colchis (i.e. a city on the eastern sea-coast of the Black Sea). 9 (Ovid, Fastii, Book 3, March)

Judaism

Mosaic in Santi Cosma e Damiano (8)
Blavatsky posits a link between lamb sacrifice in Judaism and the symbolism of Aries (Theosophical Glossary, 'Ammon'). The Torah gives various indications: 'According to the norms regarding sacrifices in the former temple, a lamb could be offered in various situations: a common person could offer a lamb as a sin offering in atonement for his sin (Lev 4,32-35), or as part of a rite of purification (Lev 12,1-8; 14,10-32), or as a communion sacrifice (Lev 3,7-10); the Passover lamb was, in fact, a special type of communion sacrifice (Exod 12,1-14.21-28).' (The Sacrificial Symbolism of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation) According to Saul Youdkevitch: '
We said that the lamb (Aries) represents the ego, and we toast it on the good fire of enthusiastic and positive work, then we eat it with Matsa and Maror'(Nisan-Aries).

Christianity

Agnus Dei (9)
Blavatsky, referencing
H. T. Colebrooke, (Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus, London, 1837, Vol. I, p. 190. [In the one-volume ed. of 1858, this occurs on p. 119. It is an essay originally published in the Asiatic Researches, Calcutta, 1801, Vol. VII, pp. 232-85) has observed that:'it is, to say the least, a strange coincidence, remarked even by some Christian clergymen, that Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, should have the symbols, identical with the Hindu God Agni. While Agnus Dei expiates and takes away the sins of the world, in one religion, the God Agni, in the other, likewise expiates sins against the gods, man, the, manes, the soul, and repeated sins; as shown in the six prayers accompanied by six oblations.' (Cross and Fire, Collected Writings, 2:143-149; The Theosophist (1:2), November, 1879, pp. 35-36.) For a referenced connection, she gives Edward Kenealy, The Book of God : the Apocalypse of Adam-Oannes (p. 88) ('Agnus Dei (the Indian Agni, as Dr. Kenealy thinks' (The Secret Doctrine 1, 383). Jean Marie Ragon posits a connection between the Agnus Dei and the sign of Aries specifically (La Messe et ses Mysteres, 1844, p. 347).

Historically speaking, Rupert Gleadow gives some basic considerations concerning the origin of the symbol:

'For the Ram, to begin with, is definitely not a Babylonian constellation. It was also thought not to be Egyptian because on the later system of decans it fell in Capricorn. But the Ram and the Boat were both extremely important in Egypt this cannot be explained if both were invisible at the rising of Sothis. It has of course nothing to do with the later position of Aries as the first sign of the 12. The Ram was important because it culminated when Sirius rose, and the Boast as a particularly obvious sacred emblem which stood on the same occasion conspicuously high in the sky. If we accept the identity of the Boat with our own Pegasus, the Ram was an Egyptian and not a Babylonian constellation.' (The Origin of the Zodiac, 1968 212-213)

Image References 

4- See Colorful Paintings of the Zodiac Signs From an Ancient Egyptian Temple Newly restored, the Ptolemaic era reliefs were previously covered by a layer of dirt and soot April 4, 2023 Christopher Parker
5- Phrixus and the Golden-Fleeced Ram, Athenian red-figure pelike C 5th B.C., National Archaeological Museum of Athens https://www.theoi.com/Ther/KriosKhrysomallos.html
7- A 6th century mosaic zodiac wheel in a synagogue, incorporating Greek-Byzantine elements, Beit Alpha, Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac#/media/File:Beit_Alpha.jpg
PS -For a more recent use of this type of research on 19th century sources, albeit with all the more mystical, theosophical perspectives removed, Blavatsky's research, but with more conservative conclusions, if you will, see

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