This shouldn't be a rhetorical question. It deserves an answer. I'd like to know why, too.
Rome’s Obelisks:
‘In his Sunday blessing, Pope Benedict XVI noted that the Vatican itself has its own meridian — an obelisk in St. Peter’s Square — and that astronomy had long been used to signal prayer times for the faithful.’ --- NCBnews.com 28/12/2008
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 pillar however, was unusual in that no hieroglyphics were written on it. The story goes that in 37AD, the tyrant cannibalistic pagan Emperor Caligula (12-41AD) ordered this obelisk be brought to Rome 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 decided to allow this site to become the home of Catholicism, a special place to start its own spiritual and institutional empire. The great Basilica of St Peter rose up here from the ground over the years and other marvelous 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 Nicolas 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 destroy the pagan symbol or have it taken out of the holy city, but to move 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 Nicolas V died in 1544 and the obelisk remained in the ditch where it surely belonged. Nearly fifty years later, Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), nicknamed ‘the last of the Renaissance Popes,’ was motivated to do what Pope Nicolas V was prevented by death from doing, move the obelisk to the square in front of St Peter’s. His reasons for doing this were not Catholic either, but seem to have been based on human pride. His intention, we are told, was similar to that of the pagan Roman emperors who brought them to Rome in the first place – as a sign or display of the temporal power that the Church had in the world at the time. In this case, the Pope decided to place horses around its base rather than the intended four Evangelists that Pope Nicolas V wanted. Thankfully he 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 of both, 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. 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 gave the thing could not undo its original symbolism. The irony of it all was that by placing a cross on the top of the pillar, they actually turned it back into a more definitive representation of what it was 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 hieroglyphic indicator of a city.'
Another such story occurred during the reign of Pope Urban VIII. Two close acquaintances of the Pope’s were Galileo and Lorenzo Bernini. Then there was Bernini’s friend, Fr Athanasius Kircher; S.J. (1602-1680), described by Frances Yates as the ‘most notable descendant of the hermetic-Cabalist tradition,’ a Jesuit who devoted his life to researching the origins of all things without distinction. A brilliant historian, mathematician and linguist (he is reputed to have known over 20 languages) Fr Kircher specialised in all things Egyptian and set up a museum for this purpose. Because of this he was invited to study and lecture at the Jesuit College in Rome in 1635, a mere two years after Galileo’s trial. One of the subjects Fr Kircher devoted his time to was trying to interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs, an understanding he believed he mastered, reading into them profound mysteries and wisdom. It was not until two hundred years later, in the 1820s, that Jean Francois Champollion deciphered the true meaning of these hieroglyphs with the help of the ‘Rosetta Stone.’ Thus the obelisks were ‘seen to enshrine not “the highest mysteries of Divinity” as Kircher thought, but rather a dull record, for the most part, of the acts and attributes of [Egyptian] kings." It was Fr Kircher then, who said the ‘writings’ and signs on Egypt’s ancient obelisks referred to the Trinity of Christians and were worthy of preservation and display. For this reason then Roman churchmen ‘embraced these prophetic obelisks’ and had no problem erecting many of them in the squares of Rome’’
Topic: Egyptian Obelisk’s??? (Read 3226 times)