Send CathInfo's owner Matthew a gift from his Amazon wish list:
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/25M2B8RERL1UO

« previous next »
Pages: [1] 2 3 4

Author Topic: The obelisk in St Peter's Square  (Read 2654 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline cassini

The obelisk in St Peter's Square
« on: April 29, 2025, 05:43:44 AM »
With the Vatican and St Peter's Square now under the attention of millions all over the world, few know the history of the obelisk towering above the most Catholic site on Earth. 


Because of Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, many more ordinary folks are now aware of the talented Italian Baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), now famous for his legacy of beautiful sculptures and pieces of art that grace the eternal city of Rome and elsewhere. Brown however, took license to insert Bernini into his book as the one whose works in Rome contain all the clues to understanding the murders that resulted from a conflict of faith and science between Lucifer’s ‘light holding’ Illuminati and the Roman Catholic Church on the other. These clues, according to Brown’s story, are to be found in the hermetic and Rosicrucian symbols placed by Bernini in his various creations and structures. Again, we must emphasise that when Dan Brown conjured his story of Angels and Demons, he could not possibly have imagined how close to the truth he got, nor how unlucky he was in missing out on one of the most intriguing and fascinating stories attached to any of Bernini’s commissions, one that occurred when asked by Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) to redesign St Peter’s Square.

Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ is a continuation of the Mysteries, the religious institutions of the sun-worshipping pagans. Among other things, there is a common legend as the explanation for their rites and symbols. This bond, common in the hermetic, Gnostic and cabbalistic writings, is Phallicism. In all of them, homage was paid either to the phallus as an object of adoration and worship, or as a symbol of the creative principle, or to the sun as the generative principle. It therefore became the basis of their sun worship, tree-worship, animal worship, serpent worship, and man worship.

‘Phallicism, fundamentally, is the deification and worship of the procreative or self-propagating power of the life of nature, that secret mysterious energy, endowment or power that animates all vegetable and animal creatures, and which perpetually dying, renews itself in new, similar yet different forms. Phallicists view this mysterious energy as the divine nature, and usually in the conception of the divine triad, the creator, the preserver and the destroyer of life, and worship and adore it as the deity. One of the most ancient as well as the most widespread forms of phallicism was sun worship, heliolatry, or light worship, Mithraism. In view of the divine command “Increase and multiply, and fill the Earth” (Gen.1:28), the generation of human life became a most solemn privilege, a pure and holy function. The Mystery of it must have impressed most profoundly the first human pair, and doubtless the first religious act on the part of Adam and Eve was an appreciation to the Source and Author of life for the power to procreate it. In the course of time this Author and Source became associated with the organs and factors of its reproduction, and then supplanted by them as an object of veneration and worship. The mysterious rite of connubial love became perverted, the imagination of man’s senseless heart became corrupt; the power of procreating life became deified and worshipped under phallic emblems, which in turn became the deities. The perversion continued until it culminated in many places and in diverse ages, in sacred prostitution. The phallic emblems became objects of adoration.’--- Martin Wagner

Lucifer, enraged because he was created without the power to generate, tries to overcome this creative and natural deficiency by proxy. It also is the reason Satan promotes sɛҳuąƖ acts that are not intended to ‘multiply,’ that is, not to produce children in marriage. This manifested itself in pagan belief wherein the sun, not God, is given the credit for ‘generating’ life on Earth. We see above how this came about, and below, that it continues today within Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ and their rites and symbols.


‘The text goes on “To the ‘advanced enlightened ones,’ the adepts at the top, the nature worship is understood as the worship of the generative principles (i.e., the sex organs), particularly the phallus… the phallus, the male ‘generative principle’ has been worshipped as representing the Sun’s rays.’--- Albert Mackey.

‘Following from the above, it takes little imagination to see that ancient and Egyptian obelisks were also the most explicit of all phallic symbols, and what is written on them added to the mystery.’--- Dr Cathy Burns.

As a sign of its power in the world, pagan Rome transported many Egyptian monuments and artefacts for display throughout their city, more than any other conquering powers in the world. Obelisks were deemed ideal for this purpose. One such obelisk was the giant made out of solid granite, climbing 25 metres high and weighing in at over 320 tons and whose history showed it was made for ancient Egypt’s most sacred city Anu, known to the Greeks as Heliopolis, meaning ‘The City of the Sun,’ a city that had at its centre this heliocentric Sun Temple. This obelisk was unusual in that no hieroglyphics were written on it. The story goes that in 38AD, the tyrant cannibalistic pagan Emperor Caligula (12-41AD) ordered this obelisk be brought to Rome by ship and placed in the Vatican circus, a site where Christians were killed and sacrificed to demons. St Peter was martyred on this very spot thus giving the place eternal notoriety.


With the advent of Constantine the Great (272-337AD) and his concessions to Christianity throughout his empire and especially in the ancient city of Rome, the Emperor Constantine decided to allow this Vatican site to become the home of Catholicism, a special place to start its own spiritual and institutional empire. The great Basilica of St Peter’s rose from the ground here over the centuries, and other superb buildings were created for the business of running the Church. As for the obelisk of Heliopolis, well, while still on the site, providentially, it became redundant and faded into obscurity on some waste ground.

In the 15th century however, Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455), ‘whose plans were of embellishing the city with new monuments worthy of the capital of the Christian world,’ decided to do something with this obelisk, not to smash to bits this pagan symbol or have it taken out of the holy city, but to place it in front of the Basilica itself. To ‘Christianise’ the object, if such a vulgar symbolic thing could ever be Christianised, the Pope thought of placing the four Evangelists in bronze at its base and Jesus with a golden cross on the top. Providence stepped in, however, Pope Nicholas V died and this obelisk remained in the ditch where it surely belonged. A century later, Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590), named ‘the last of the Renaissance Popes,’ another pope who restored many buildings in Rome and elsewhere, was motivated to do what Pope Nicholas V was prevented by death from doing, move the special giant Heliopolis obelisk to the square in front of St Peter’s. Pope Sixtus V’s intention, we are told, differs, from the obelisk being a ‘needle pointing to heaven’ to one of a sign or display of the temporal power that the Church had at the time. On this occasion, the Pope decided to place horses around its base rather than the four Evangelists that Nicholas V intended to do. He also omitted the Christ figure on top envisaged by his predecessor, leaving instead what were regarded as remnants of the true cross in the bronze sphere already at the top of the pedestal. To this he added a star over three mountains, his own personal family crest, and finally on top, a golden cross.

   
Strange that neither pope thought of creating a worthy monument in St Peter’s Square, the greatest of all Christian reminders, a crucifix depicting the crucified Christ on the cross, like that in Brazil.



After the installation of the obelisk in 1586, a scandalous exercise we are led to believe, people being evicted out of their homes and properties to accommodate the new location (see Talisman), Pope Sixtus V decided it best to exorcise it and this was done with great liturgical aplomb. But all the blessings Rome could give this thing could not undo its original sun-god phallic symbolism. The irony of it all was that by placing a cross on the top of the obelisk, they actually recreated a more definitive representation of it when in the ‘City of the Sun,’ Anu-Heliopolis, the very place the symbolic phallic cut rock originally came from, for it too had a cross on top of it. All that was missing of the original site was a circle around its base with divisions of eight marked within it, ‘the standard pagan hieroglyphic indicator of a city.’

In 1655, the then Pope, Alexander VII, commissioned the now famous Bernini to redesign St Peter’s Square. This work was interrupted when King Louis XIV invited Bernini to Paris. On his return Bernini completed the work, marking out what looks like a circle with the obelisk at its centre point but in fact it is a ‘cosmic’ ellipse, with the phallic obelisk as its centre or generating point as Kepler, Newton and others used it to accommodate their heliocentrism. Bernini’s solution was to design a piazza in the form of an ellipse; the foci of the ellipse are indicated by marble and granite disks embedded within the pavement of the piazza. The elliptical shape also symbolizes the Church’s embrace of all of mankind, “the motherly arms of the church,” as Bernini described his Colonnade. But more than that for Bernini then filled the space with a large eight-rayed sun wheel design – a symbol of Ishtar. At the very centre of the larger wheel there was then created an inner four-pointed sun-wheel, the same symbol as found on the altar-stone in the temple of Baal.

Logged

Offline VerdenFell

Re: The obelisk in St Peter's Square
« Reply #1 on: April 29, 2025, 07:24:59 AM »
Yawn.
This is getting tiresome and so very predictable. There's always some contemporary pseudo scholar 
who thinks they have uncovered some hidden occult network or design behind everything noble
our race has ever achieved. 
I think it began with Alexander Hislop's discredited The Two Babylons that claimed the Catholic Church was 
really just the cult of Astarte reborn.
This is a Jack Chick tract level smear job on Catholicism. 
It might come as a surprise to the historically ignorant that from the days of the earliest Church many pagan 
sites and temples were reconsecrated as Christian churches(the Pantheon is a notable example) 
Similarly many objects from antiquity were repurposed for their material or for their aesthetic appeal in various
monuments. 
If you bothered to read a biography on Bernini you might learn that he was an extremely devout man, attending mass every morning before beginning work. 
Logged

Offline Ladislaus

  • Supporter
Re: The obelisk in St Peter's Square
« Reply #2 on: April 29, 2025, 07:51:19 AM »
May I ask who wrote this?  Reminds me of a Solange Hertz exercise in creative writing.

In point of fact, there's no evidence that obelisks were phallic symbols.  It's easy to impose that interpretation on them, but we actually have some descriptions of the earliest ones in Egypt as being related to the sun god Aten, where it represents a ray of the sun, pointing up at the sun.  Related to this, some also believe that they served the purpose of being an astronomical marker and effectively a sun-dial.  And they were also installed as boundary markers where something on the top would basically say, "I, Emperor Such-and-Such lay claim to this territory".  In all such cases, it would be consistent with how the Church had appropriated other pagan symbols, by re-interpreting them.  So instead of the obelisk pointing up to the sun god, they point up to the Son of God (English pun, I understand, but the import is true).  It also symbolizes, with the cross on top, that Our Lord rules over the territory.  Finally, looking at it from above and viewing the rest of the architecture, it also looks like the part of a key that gets inserted into a lock to open it, referring to the keys of St. Peter.

While I'm fine with criticizing some of the garbage at the Vatican, including the pagan gods they keep in the Vatican museum.  I'd sell that garbage to museums around the world (you could probably get billions for it).  I'd also sandblast the Sistine chapel ceiling to remove Michaelangelo's homoerotic junk.

So I'm not opposed to criticizing the Vatican art/architecture (as if these popes were infallible in that regard or it would be considered impiety to do so) ... just that in the case of obelisks, I don't believe they were originally phallic symbols based on the actual evidence.  It's easy for people to imagine that due to the shape, but there can be other explanations, and the evidence points toward those other explanations.
Logged

Offline cassini

Re: The obelisk in St Peter's Square
« Reply #3 on: April 29, 2025, 07:52:42 AM »
Quote from: VerdenFell on April 29, 2025, 07:24:59 AM
Yawn.
This is getting tiresome and so very predictable. There's always some contemporary pseudo scholar
who thinks they have uncovered some hidden occult network or design behind everything noble
our race has ever achieved.
I think it began with Alexander Hislop's discredited The Two Babylons that claimed the Catholic Church was
really just the cult of Astarte reborn.
This is a Jack Chick tract level smear job on Catholicism.
It might come as a surprise to the historically ignorant that from the days of the earliest Church many pagan
sites and temples were reconsecrated as Christian churches(the Pantheon is a notable example)
Similarly many objects from antiquity were repurposed for their material or for their aesthetic appeal in various
monuments.
If you bothered to read a biography on Bernini you might learn that he was an extremely devout man, attending mass every morning before beginning work.

Yes, like those who say Christmas day was taken over from the pagan feast of winter solstice whereas it had nothing to do with that. Personally I would prefer to see a large cross with Jesus crucified on it in St Peter's Square rather than that obelisk that has such a pagan history to it. Its installment had nothing to do with the Christian faith but with temporal demonstration. 



Logged

Offline Ladislaus

  • Supporter
Re: The obelisk in St Peter's Square
« Reply #4 on: April 29, 2025, 07:55:30 AM »
Quote from: VerdenFell on April 29, 2025, 07:24:59 AM
Yawn.
This is getting tiresome and so very predictable. There's always some contemporary pseudo scholar
who thinks they have uncovered some hidden occult network or design behind everything noble
our race has ever achieved.

As mentioned, I'm not opposed to legitimate criticism, but this was clearly a Solange-Hertz-esque exercise in creative writing without any citations or evidence, etc.

I studied a lot of ancient art / architecture, etc. as part of the Ph. D. program in Greek/Latin at Catholic University, and there were a lot of things there too where they imposed interpretations on things due to biases where the ancient people were morons, and so everything was "magic" (when a lot of it may very well have been technological), etc.  Oh, those morons worshipped phalluses.  Yes, some primitive cultures did, but the more sophisticated ones that built the great monuments ... not so much.

In any case, the objective truth is that all the evidence points to these having been related to sun-god worship, where it points up to the sun, represents a ray of the sun, attempting to pay homage to the sun, and at the same time very likely was used as a sun-dial (time tracking) and astrological tracking device.  It's why it had the 4 sides, so you could get the orientations towards the "four corners" of the earth, etc.
Logged
Pages: [1] 2 3 4
« previous next »