The Keys to Prophecy VI: A Great Star

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© Anthony E. Larson, 2006

The Keys to Prophecy VI:

A Great Star

If we look closely at the images venerated by the ancients from the point of view that they may have been inspired by planets standing in close proximity to the Earth, we see them with new eyes.  And because we adopt this view, we can read the explanations of symbols on Egyptian papyri by the prophet Joseph Smith with a fresh perspective that also gives an entirely new dynamic to the imagery of prophecy.

This key is crucial because ancient sky gazers the world over drew remarkably similar pictures and offered stunningly similar descriptions of things that do not exist in our sky, though this vital truth has not been generally recognized.

Amazingly, when we heed Joseph Smith’s hints that the gods, goddesses, beasts and other images of antiquity all found their inspiration in Earth’s ancient heavens, some of the most mysterious icons suddenly appear to be virtual snapshots of what the ancients saw in Earth’s skies.

The star-in-crescent symbol, for example, so dominant in ancient symbology, appears to be a combination or blending of two astral elements: One is the sunlit limb of a planet; the other is an aurora-like discharge from another planet.

These images of “stars” look nothing like things seen in our present heavens.  Yet, Joseph Smith implied that these are the planets and stars of antiquity.

Hence, the confusion of a star/planet symbol with the moon and stars is natural.  The only heavenly object we see today with a bright crescent is the moon.  But if other planets hovered near the Earth anciently, they would have also manifested this same crescent feature.

Certainly, the lighted crescent on the limb of neighboring planets became the basis for a multitude of symbols: the horns of a bovine, the crescent-shaped ship of heaven or the outspread wings of a bird, three of the most common symbols in ancient iconography-all seen in the Joseph Smith papyri as well as in apocalyptic and prophetic imagery.

If the planetary god’s crescent looked like outspread wings, then it could properly be described as a great heavenly bird and subsequently illustrated as a hawk or eagle.

Of course, its planetary disk is displayed over its head as well so there is no mistaking where the image originated.  This is precisely what we see in the ancient symbols.

If the planetary god’s or goddess’ crescent was seen as horns, he or she could be depicted as the bull or cow of heaven, a commonplace description in ancient texts of gods and goddesses.  For emphasis, again the planetary disk is set between the horns.

If the planet’s crescent appeared to be a ship carrying the planet around heaven, then the god-with a disk over his head, naturally-would be depicted sitting on the ship of heaven.  This, too, was a nearly universal depiction in Egyptian iconography.

Significantly, these same images, and many more like them, can be seen in the Joseph Smith Facsimile No.2, where they are most often called stars or planets.

Moreover, there must have been much more involved anciently than the simple, pacific presence of large orbs in the sky.  They must have been active, changing, interacting and dynamic powers to evoke the expressions they inspired.

For example, Sumerian texts celebrate the “terrifying glory” of Inanna (Ishtar, Astarte, Venus), invoking the goddess as “the Light of the World,” “the Amazement of the Lands,” “the Radiant Star,” “Great Light,” and “Queen of Heaven.”  The texts depict the goddess “clothed in radiance.”  And it was said that the world stood in “fear and trembling at [her] tempestuous radiance.”

Thus, we get the picture from the texts and the illustrations of a discharging planet, emitting aurora-like rays that form the basis for all ‘star’ imagery of antiquity.

The Sumerian “Exaltation of Inanna” says, “I want to address my greeting to her who fills the sky with her pure blaze, to the luminous one, to Inanna, as bright as the sun, to the great queen of heaven.

“You make the heavens tremble and the earth quake.  Great Priestess, who can soothe your troubled heart?  You flash like lightning over the highlands; you throw your firebrands across the earth.  Your deafening command…splits apart great mountains.”

An illustration taken from an Akkadian cylinder seal shows Ishtar (star) and her symbol, a planet with aurora-like discharge.

The wheel symbol of the Babylonian god Shamash (Sun) looks nothing like the Sun and further illustrates the discharge streamer or star idea.

Both the texts and the images of the ancients tell the same story, each complimenting the other.

In fact, this more fully explains why stars and planets were interchangeable in the ancient mind: In antiquity, a great, nearby planet metamorphosed into a brilliant, awe-inspiring object that earthlings chose to call “star.”  This alone explains the graphic language and the myriad star symbols used by the ancients for their star goddesses.

This also explains why all the ‘star’ icons, familiar to cultures worldwide, look nothing like the mere pinpoints of light in the night sky that we designate as stars.

No wonder Joseph explained that all these archaic images were either stars or planets.  They were!

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The Keys to Prophecy III: The Prophets’ Language

829 words

© Anthony E. Larson, 2004

 The Keys to Prophecy III:

The Prophets’ Language

 The bizarre and mystifying images employed by the prophets-by all ancient cultures, in fact-are derived from one common source: the heavens of antiquity.

We have only to look at Hebrew history to determine this, though it is universally true of ancient cultures.

Israel strayed into the same practices as their neighbors, though their prophets strove mightily to curb that idolatry.  “And they left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal.”  (2 Kings 17:16, italics added.)

King Josiah attempted to “put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven.”  (ibid. 23:5, italics added.)

Pay particular attention to the fact that planets are listed, along with the sun and the moon, among the things designated as the “host of heaven.”  Note that calves were intrinsic symbols employed in their worship and the implication long recognized by scholars that Baal was an astral deity.

In fact, it was the worship of astral images that the Lord, speaking through Moses, condemned “… lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them ….”  (Deuteronomy 4:19.)

So, the Israelites worshipped the stars and the planets in identical fashion to their neighbors the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Egyptians.  Scholars who study antiquity have long asserted this.

Joseph Smith, too, emphasized that the Egyptians’ gods represented planets and stars when he produced his explanations of the Egyptian papyri he obtained.

It is no great leap of logic, therefore, to assume that the language of the prophets, immersed in Israelite culture, reflected that astral worship-reverence for the stars, moon, sun and planets-even though they condemned the practices associated with it.

So it is that when we turn to the scriptures, we see an abundance of such imagery in prophetic declarations-especially those concerning the last days.  Tellingly, the same imagery can be found in other biblical pronouncements, illuminating their origins for us.

Let’s look at just one example.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”  (Revelation 12:1.)

This ‘woman,’ described by John, is the same ‘woman’ worshipped by the idolatrous Israelites, their Queen of Heaven.

“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 ….”  (Jeremiah 44:17.)

Sumerians also called their sky goddess, Inanna, the “Queen of Heaven.”  She was the Babylonians’ Ishtar, the Assyrians’ Astarte and the Egyptians’ Hathor (Athyr),
Isis, or Sekhmet.

Illustrations of the Egyptian goddess Hathor always depict her either as a cow with what is called a “sun disk” between her horns or as a queen wearing a disk and horns on her head.

Of particular importance is that the very names of this goddess, Astarte, Ishtar and Athyr (the ‘s’ is aspirated), have the same root as our word ‘star,’ betraying their astral origin.  They were all ‘star’ goddesses.

More familiar names for the same star goddess would include the Greek Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis, or the Latin Venus, Minerva, and Diana.

As we learned in the previous installment in this series, Joseph Smith indicated that such symbols are representations.  “When the prophets speak of seeing beasts [a woman in this case] in their visions, they mean that they saw the images, they being types to represent certain things.”  (History of the Church, p. 343.)

In the case of the Egyptian papyri, Joseph explained that those images that did not represent some spiritual concept such as God or the priesthood, instead represented stars and planets.

This is key.  Like most Egyptian icons, the woman represents a star or a planet.  Of course, in the ancient mind, both words can apply to the same image in the sky.  But the archetype, the original image for these goddesses, was a planet.

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The Keys to Prophecy II: Joseph Smith’s Marvelous Key

893 words
© Anthony E. Larson, 2004

The Keys To Prophecy II
Joseph Smith’s Marvelous Key

The first and perhaps most crucial key to prophecy was revealed in this dispensation by Joseph Smith when he spoke on the subject of scriptural imagery.

“The prophets do not declare that they saw a beast or beasts, but that they saw the image or figure of a beast. Daniel did not see an actual bear or a lion, but the images or figures of those beasts. The translation should have been rendered ‘image’ instead of ‘beast,’ in every instance where beasts are mentioned by the prophets.” (History of the Church, p. 343.)

Joseph’s use of the term “image” makes his meaning clear. Similar terms used by today’s scholars are “icon,” or “symbol.” In this context, all three words mean the same thing.

Beasts aren’t the only images in prophecy. We read of kings, stars, mountains, highways, temples, locusts and women as well, to name just a few. Drawing on Joseph’s statement, we can infer that all these are meant to convey meaning and not depict real creatures, individuals or objects. “When the prophets speak of seeing beasts in their visions, they mean that they saw the images, they being types to represent certain things.” (Ibid., p. 343.)

The profound importance of this bit of information becomes clear when we consider that “images” were the very things that the ancients venerated. When we look at Hebrew, Egyptian or Babylonian religious art, we are confronted by nothing but images and symbols. They are everywhere in ancient cultures, overwhelming and mysterious.

Open the quintessentially prophetic book of Revelation, and what leaps out at us, given this new perspective, are some of the same images we see on the walls of ancient temples and monuments. This is a key to scriptural iconography that almost everyone has missed, even though Joseph Smith made the connection, albeit obliquely.

For example, in that same sermon, the Prophet mentioned Daniel’s vision of a four-headed beast. One looked like a lion, another a bear and the third a leopard. The fourth he described as a “dreadful and terrible,” beast with ten heads.

John apparently described seeing the same beast, although his description varies slightly from Daniel’s. “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” (Revelation 13:1.)

Further, John also described seeing aspects of the leopard, bear and lion in his beast. (Revelation 13:2.)

This suggests that they were describing the same images.
And John added this peculiar detail: “And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.” (Revelation 13:3.)

Astoundingly, this beast—wounded head and all—was depicted in Mesopotamian cylinder seal art hundreds of years before John and Daniel described seeing them in vision.

Here we see the Babylonian dragon Tiamat, clearly the archetype of John’s and Daniel’s beast, doing battle with Marduk. Note that this illustration predates John and Daniel, meaning that these were not borrowed from the Hebrew prophets.

Another example of this link of ancient imagery with prophetic imagery is found in Ezekiel, Revelation and the Pearl of Great Price.

Ezekiel also saw a creature with four heads, listed as that of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. (Ezekiel 1:10.) John listed the four as well as a man, a lion, a calf and an eagle. (Revelation 4:6, 7.)

Most stunning of all to Latter-day Saints is that these same four “beasts” can be seen in Facsimile No. 1 in the Pearl of Great Price, where Joseph describes them as “idolatrous gods.”

Some beasts of prophecy are virtually identical to the four images on Egyptian funerary jars, seen here beneath the couch.

We tend to think of scriptural imagery as unique, something completely separate and apart from that of other cultures and religions. But the above examples, and many more like them, amply demonstrate that this is not so.

The prophets’ sacred imagery drew its symbolism from the same sources as the idolatrous imagery of the pagans, hence the conspicuous similarities between mythological imagery and scriptural imagery.

As it turns out, we have been repeatedly exposed to these images. We simply failed to recognize them in the scriptures because our mindset told us they were images of things from the future, not the past.

Thus, we see that while the visions of the prophets may have been about the future, the imagery they employed was already ancient in their day.
So it is that we must first look backward in time to learn the meaning of those ancient symbols before we can properly attempt to interpret their use in visions of future events.

This is likely what Peter meant when he wrote, “We have also a more sure word of prophecy ….” (2 Peter 1:19.) That is to say, the images of prophecy were well established and understood in his day. Then, for clarity, he added, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.” (2 Peter 1:20.) In other words, guessing—the preferred method of modern interpreters—is out. Of course, to know the meaning of these symbols, “…they being types to represent certain things,” we must learn their source and what they meant to those who held them sacred.

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