Note: The following letters are reprinted with permission.

On the Forbidden Letters - by Guido Popp (pen-name)

Part 1 

1.

"In Carthago the Caduceus is almost without exception shown in combination with a capstone."[Reuter]

2.

"The caduceus is a symbol of the subtle system through which the Kundalini-fire rises. It consists of a central staff (the Sushumna Nadi of Yoga) entwined by twin serpents (Ida and Pingala Nadi's)."[Sahajayoga]

3.

"The name pyramid is Greek and means fire within or fire in there."[Otto Reich]

4.

"Cheops' pyramid was connected with alchemy in the Roman period (33 BC - 386 CE/Popp)."[Erik Hornung in the Secret Lore of Egypt (SLE hereafter)]

5.

"The egyptologist Helmuth Jacobsohn wished to recognize the benben-stone of Heliopolis as the archetype of the Philosopher's Stone."[SLE]

6.

"According to Burns 'the belief in a material resurrection was given up by the Egyptians.' Henceforth 'the material part of man would rest in earth, whilst the immortal part has its abode in heaven.'[Burns] Doing so Egypt abandoned the true core of Alchemy, i.e. the attainment of physical immortality on earth through light in a living body."[Paul Wedekind]

7.

"I am Fire, the son of Fire, to whom was given his head after it had been cut off. The head of Osiris was not taken away from him, let not the head of Osiris Ani (the deceased) be taken away from him. I have knit myself together,... I have renewed my youth; I am Osiris, the lord of eternity."[Book of the Dead]

8.

"Little after midnight: [Our man's] head is decapitated by a 'thread.' The Stone is produced about where the liver is. The Stone ignites the Kundalini-fire. (...) Arms and legs break into pieces. (...) 10:30 in the morning: Our man woke up (all in one piece again/Popp)."[The Paris 4]

9.

"The golden head referred originally to the head of Osiris who is described in a Greek text as headless. The Greek alchemists styled themselves Children of the Golden Head."[Carl Jung]

10.

"The religion of the Egyptians (...) was highly composite, the product of different races and different streams of culture and thought; and the task of uniting them all into a homogeneous whole was never fully completed. To the last, Egyptian religion remained a combination of ill-assorted survivals rather than a system; a confederation of seperate cults, rather than a definite theology."[Prof. A.H. Sayce in The Religion of Ancient Egypt]

11.

"Egypt apparently possessed amazing kernels of Alchemy, but not the script of the Great Work. That script was obviously not revealed untill the Stone of Transmutation was actually produced by the first alchemist, in all probability that gay man (of the Forbidden Letters)."[Paul Wedekind]

Part 2

"That the temple accordingly was built in seven weeks, is evident; for it is written in Esdras. And thus Christ became King of the Jews, reigning in Jerusalem in the fulfillment of the seven weeks. And in the sixty and two weeks the whole of Judaea was quiet, and without wars. And Christ our Lord, the Holy of Holies, having come and fulfilled the vision and the prophecy, was anointed in His flesh by the Holy Spirit of His Father."

Thus spoke Clement at the end of the second century CE.

The Paris 4 nowhere say that Jesus never lived. They only say that the Gospel never happened, and that the acts of Jesus are as fictional as the acts of Parzival. So if a Jesus has lived, then as a teacher of alchemy. A teacher well aware of the fact then that the Savior is a microcosmic stone, and not a person. A teacher who might have got his knowledge from Egypt.

Erik Hornung ensures us that the earliest direct teachings from Egypt on alchemy are all in Greek and stem from the second century BC. "Corresponding Egyptian texts are as yet unknown, but the Greek texts make frequent mention of Egyptian deities, especially Isis, Osiris and Horus."[SLE]

Certain members of Egypt's Ennead, the Egyptian pantheon, indeed seem to personify specific phases of the Great Work of alchemy. This they appear to have in common with some of the main characters in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.

A beautiful example is, in my opinion, given by John Grigsby here:"Within the (Grail)castle is a king, known as the Wounded or Fisher King grievously injured with a spear or sword, usually through the ‘thighs’ [or groin/Popp], a euphemism for testicles, and as long as his wound remains unhealed, the land is laid waste. It is the purpose of the Grail knight to find the castle and ask a specific question. Failure to do so results in him waking the next day with the land still blighted, and the castle gone. If, however, the right question is asked, the land and the king are healed, or he is at last allowed to die and the hero succeeds his position as the Grail King."[Grigsby]

Now, Coffin Text 228 states "that Osiris is wounded in the thigh. Horus says:'Tell him I have come thither to save myself... and to dispel the sickness of the suffering god, so that I can appear an Osiris in strength. That I may be reborn with him in his renewed vigour. That I may reveal to you the matter of Osiris' thigh and read to you from that sealed roll which lies beneath his side, whereby the mouths of the gods are opened.' - The healing of this thigh wound, the egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark says, restored fertility to the land."[Grigsby]

But even astro-symbolical cross-connections between Egypt's pantheon and the Parzival seem to exist.

Sacred Texts for example tells us that "a direct point of contact between Seth," (one of the members of Egypt's pantheon, and quite an 'alchemical' one too, as we shall see), that "a direct point of contact between Seth and Saturn can be found in the Hebrew idol Kiyon, mentioned by Amos, the planet Saturn, still being called Kivan by Eastern peoples. This idol was represented in the form of a pillar, the primeval form of deities." Symbolical pillars like that "were called Betyli, or Betulia. But sometimes the column was also called Abaddir, which, strangely enough, Bryant identifies with the Serpent-God. There can be no doubt that both the pillar and the serpent were associated with the many Sun-Gods of antiquity."[Sacred Texts]

According to the Theosophical Dictionary that God Kivan "was worshipped by the Israelites in the wilderness and probably identical with Saturn and even with the God S(h)iva."

An astro-symbolical cross-connection, because von Eschenbach ensures us in his Parzival that Anfortas' testicle-pain increases with the rise of Saturn. A planet called the black sun (sol niger) by the alchemists. A planet ruling Capricorn and thereby the 17th of January too.

Seth, whose hieroglyph, according to Carl Jung, has "as a determinative the sign for a stone," seems alchemically sometimes even more interesting than Osiris. So let's turn then to that God Seth now.

In part 2 section 3 of the Forbidden Letters we are being informed about a painful testicle, that testicle, the left one, belonging to the alchemist, the gay man of those Letters. The Paris 4 of course immediately linked that pain to Anfortas' pain in the Parzival. That pain started several months before the Resurrection (through Kundalini-fire). It was still there, although lowered, in November 2005, 19 years after that Resurrection. It got worse "during the months that lead up to" that Resurrection; the alchemist "had difficulties of walking even" and was "unable to have sex." In a physical hermaphrodite that left testicle is often missing. The Paris 4 stress though that their man is not a physical hermaphrodite.

Tantra tells us that Ida rises from the right testicle and Pingala from the left. But it nowhere mentions pain in testicles, let alone in the left one. And it doesn't have other specific information on the testicles either. But Egypt has. Because in one of the many Horus/Seth-myths Horus loses his left eye, where Seth loses his left testicle [ http://www.inspiredplanet.com/oasis.html  ].

According to Jean de Cabilis, Seth, who's name is usualy considered to mean either 'one who dazzles' or 'pillar of stability' [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_%28mythology%29  ], was, up to the thirteenth century BC regarded as "a loving and caring god by the Egyptians and only later became seen as evil.The Chaldean form of Seth was Shaitan which became the Satan of the Hebrews. At this point it may be worth to consider that Ra (the Supreme God) required the assistance of Seth (Satan) to battle against an even older adversary. Thus the jackal-god and Ra both fought together against the might of Apepi (a serpent/Popp), to hold at bay the forces of destruction. As said by Seth: 'It was I who stood in the prow of the solar barque and vanquished all the enemies of Ra and cast them back into the abyss.' - "[de Cabilis]

Otto Reich informs us that the hero Seth was "chosen by the Nicolaïtans as the type of the good man, the perfect, the prototype of Christ." The Hyksos made Seth even their Mystery-God, and on Egyptian monuments Seth's name was accompanied by the representation of a stone.

So what we have here is a...

...by times homosexual God,

...who was represented by a stone,

...who fathered Thoth (the Father of Alchemy),
[ see section 7 of http://www.world-mysteries.com/PhilipGardiner/forbidden_letters2.htm  ],

...who fought a serpent,

...who lost a testicle,

...and who was worshipped in ancient Egypt 'with obscene homosexual rituals.'[Burns] A God and Stone later possibly rejected because of these homosexual rituals. Rituals who perhaps pointed to a hidden connection between the Stone of Transmutation and homosexuality. A God and Stone then who might just have entered the Bible in Psalm 118 as the stone the builders rejected [ http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/psalms/psalm118.htm  ].

Epilogue

Some suggest Seth was demonized because he was accepted and made Mystery-God by the much hated Hyksos who occupied Egypt for almost 140 years. We can easily show though that the Hyksos accepting Seth could not have been the reason he was degraded.

The Hyksos, Greek for hiqkhase, were Palestinians. They invaded Egypt in about 1710 BC. The Pharao's of the Eighteenth Dynasty were able to overthrow their regime though and chased them out of the country. But this, for ancient Egypt violent and humiliating interlude of almost 140 years, did apparently not diminish Egypt's national veneration for Seth. Because both the sovereigns of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties continued adoring Seth long after the Hyksos had been kicked out of Egypt. It was not until the Twentieth Dynasty, centuries after the Hyksos-period, that Seth got his bad press.

Vienna, Austria, October 2007.

Copyright 2007
Note: Presented with permission