HOC, THE HOST OF HEAVEN
Agrippa, Apollo, Egypt, Constantine, the Mass, and the Celestial Religion Scripture Condemns
What happens when a single Latin word opens onto an entire celestial system? In Agrippa’s occult philosophy, the letters H-O-C correspond to the Spirit of the World, the Sun, and Taurus. His Sun bears the names Apollo, Horus and Osiris; his demonology links Apollo’s Pythian title to Pytho, prince of lying spirits; and his wider system joins words, numbers, celestial signs, consecrated operators and invisible spiritual effects. When those correspondences are placed beside Egyptian astral religion, Babylonian star divination, Constantine’s solar world and Michael Müller’s own claims about the Mass, the issue becomes far larger than one suspicious word. The real question is whether we are looking at a recurring celestial religious structure—and how Scripture judges systems that seek spiritual power through the Sun, Moon, planets, heavenly signs, divination, ritual speech and spiritual intermediaries.
This investigation does not require the claim that Constantine secretly rewrote Christianity, that Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa invented the Roman Mass, or that the three letters H-O-C are demonstrably the hidden name of a demon/fallen angel. None of those propositions has been proved. The documentary evidence gives us something more defensible and, precisely because it is defensible, harder to dismiss. Agrippa explicitly constructed an occult philosophy in which letters correspond to planets, zodiacal signs, elements and a mediating Spirit of the World; his Latin table places H with that Spirit of the World, O with the Sun and C with Taurus. His Sun carries names including Apollo, Horus and Osiris. His demonology separately identifies the serpent Pytho as the prince of lying spirits from whom Apollo receives the title Pythius. He teaches that celestial virtues descend through the world-spirit into material things, that words, names, numbers, sentences, images, seals and characters may participate in magical operations, and that an appropriately consecrated religious operator, bearing sacramental power and an impressed spiritual character, may use prayer, consecration, sacrifice and invocation to attract spiritual and celestial powers and imprint them upon things.
Michael Müller, writing not against Catholicism but in defence of the Mass, then places the word “hoc” inside a demonic-possession narrative and explicitly tells his reader that the alleged demon means the words of Eucharistic consecration. Elsewhere Müller says those priestly words produce a “New Incarnation,” that Christ gives “immediate, universal obedience” to every consecrating priest, that the priest stands “as a mediator between God and the people,” and that the continuing sacrifice of the Mass means “the hands of God are bound,” without which humanity would already have been treated like Sodom and Gomorrha. Those are not accusations invented by an opponent. They are Müller's descriptions.
The trail begins centuries before Agrippa in the religious world through which Constantine passed. An imperial panegyric delivered in AD 310 does not describe Constantine as standing before a Christian cross; it celebrates him in relation to Apollo. The anonymous orator says Constantine saw “your Apollo” accompanied by Victory and offering laurel wreaths whose symbolism promised decades of rule. Because this is imperial panegyric it must be read as highly stylised political praise rather than as a clinical transcript of Constantine's private religious experience, but that limitation does not remove its historical importance. It demonstrates that only two years before the Milvian Bridge the emperor could publicly be associated with Apollo, Victory, heavenly favour and imperial dominion, and modern scholarship continues to treat the passage as Constantine's famous Apollo episode.
Nor did imperial solar symbolism disappear the morning after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine's coinage continued to carry Sol. A British Museum solidus struck at Ticinum in AD 316 depicts the radiate Sun god beside Constantine, and the museum specifically comments that Constantine was still shown as the Sun god's “companion” almost four years after his reported Christian conversion. Another Constantinian coin bears the legend SOLI INVICTO COMITI, conventionally understood as “to the Unconquered Sun, companion,” while a London Museum nummus dated AD 314 depicts Sol and preserves the same legend. British Museum This does not prove that Constantine secretly regarded Christ as Sol Invictus. It proves that the Christianisation of the imperial regime occurred during a transition in which older solar-victory imagery and newer Christian claims overlapped.
The later victory-sign tradition must therefore be disentangled from Constantine's earlier Apollo setting rather than merged carelessly with it. Lactantius, the earlier witness, says Constantine was instructed in a dream to place “the heavenly sign of God” upon his soldiers' shields before battle. He does not give the Latin sentence In hoc signo vinces. Christian Classics Ethereal Library Eusebius, writing later and saying Constantine himself had related the event, gives the fuller story of a cross-like sign above the Sun accompanied by words translated as “Conquer by this.” New Advent The famous In hoc signo vinces—“in this (HOC) sign conquer,” or conventionally “in this sign you will conquer”—is therefore the later Latin formulation of the tradition, not a sentence that can honestly be placed in Lactantius's mouth. Yet the development itself is historically noteworthy. Before 312 there is Apollo and Victory; around 312 Christian authors attach victory to a heavenly sign; solar imagery continues in Constantine's public coinage; and later Latin Christian memory preserves the victory tradition through a sentence beginning IN HOC. None of that demonstrates that Constantine deliberately substituted Christ for Apollo, but who can reasonably deny that this Christian imperial transition occurred inside a culture already saturated with solar and celestial symbolism?
The Eucharistic hoc has an independent history, and chronology actually strengthens the exposé by preventing a false claim. Tertullian, writing approximately a century before Constantine, already gives the Latin formula Hoc est corpus meum in Against Marcion IV.40 and follows it with id est figura corporis mei. Tertullian Project Constantine therefore cannot have invented Hoc est corpus meum. Nor was Jesus recorded in the New Testament as speaking the Latin word hoc: the Greek Eucharistic text uses touto, “this.” The historical question is consequently not whether Constantine secretly created the Eucharistic formula. The stronger question arises centuries later: what happens when those Latin letters H-O-C are placed inside Agrippa's explicitly magical celestial alphabet?
Agrippa's answer appears in Book I, Chapter 74 of the supplied edition, pages 108–109, a chapter whose very title concerns “the proportion, correspondency” and “reduction of Letters to the Celestiall Signs, and Planets.” He says letters possess order, number and figure; he discusses names and characters as vehicles carrying the “essence, and vertues” of things; and he says explicitly that voices and words possess efficacy in “Magicall works.” He extends the system from Hebrew into Greek and Latin, stating that Latin vowels correspond to the seven planets, twelve consonants to the zodiacal signs, four further consonants to the elements, while “H the aspiration represents the Spirit of the World.”
What does that prove? It does not prove that hoc is secretly a demon's personal name, that medieval priests consciously knew Agrippa's later table, or that Jesus encoded an occult Latin formula at the Last Supper. Agrippa does not write, “HOC is a spell,” and he does not identify Hoc est corpus meum as a solar invocation. Yet neither can his table be dismissed with the vague comment that Renaissance authors merely played with symbolic letters. Agrippa says the correspondences are part of occult philosophy, speaks of letters carrying virtues, insists that numbers, order, conjunction and revolution can disclose hidden mysteries, and says that knowledge of numerical letter-values can “draw forth wonderfull mysteries by their letters.”
If the same table is mechanically applied to the whole consecratory sentence, an even broader astral sequence appears. Hoc yields Spirit of the World—Sun—Taurus; est yields Jupiter—Aquarius—Pisces; enim yields Jupiter—Scorpio—Mars—Libra; corpus yields Taurus—Sun—Capricorn—Sagittarius—Venus—Aquarius; and meum yields Libra—Jupiter—Venus—Libra. This is a valid application of Agrippa's table to the Latin letters, but it must not be misrepresented as Agrippa's own exegesis of the Mass. He supplies the table; he does not supply a sentence translating those correspondences into a proposition such as “the Sun enters the body through the world-spirit.” That interpretive boundary is essential.
Nevertheless, the result shows why HOC cannot be examined merely as an isolated coincidence: the whole Latin proposition can be passed through a correspondence system in which letters are systematically assigned to planets and zodiacal signs.
The importance of H becomes much clearer in Book I, Chapter 14, page 35. Agrippa's Spirit of the World is not the Holy Ghost of Scripture. It is a cosmological medium, a quintessence, through which celestial souls are joined to gross bodies and communicate their properties. He says this world-spirit is received through “the rayes of the Stars” and that occult properties are conveyed into herbs, stones, metals and animals through “the Sun, Moon, Planets” and stars beyond them.
Chapters 37–38 then make the idea operative, explaining that prepared lower things may receive higher powers and that magicians teach celestial gifts can be drawn down when inferiors are made conformable to their superiors. H therefore signifies, in Agrippa's own cosmology, the mediating principle through which astral virtue reaches matter.
That language requires a very careful biblical distinction. Paul does use the phrase “the spirit of the world,” but he uses it in opposition to what believers have received: “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God” (1 Corinthians 2:12, KJV). In another passage Paul speaks of “the god of this world” who “hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ” should shine unto them (2 Corinthians 4:4), and Ephesians 2:2 describes “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” Scripture does not explicitly declare that Paul's “spirit of the world,” his “god of this world,” and Agrippa's philosophical Spiritus mundi are the same being, and claiming an exact identity would exceed the text. Yet why should a Christian occult philosophy require a world-spirit receiving the rays of stars and transmitting their power into matter, when Paul deliberately contrasts “the spirit of the world” with “the spirit which is of God”?
Agrippa's own solar language makes that concern sharper. In Book II, Chapter 59, pages 94–95, whose title concerns the seven planets and their “various names serving to Magicall speeches,” he places Phoebus, Apollo, Horus and Osiris among the names of the Sun. The oracle he quotes is even more striking than a simple list: it places Sun, Osiris, Apollo and Horus together and then describes this solar complex as one “Who changeth times, who giveth winds and rain”, calling it the King of Stars. Agrippa does not quite write in his own prose, “Apollo alone has the strong power to change times”; rather, in the solar oracle reproduced in his magical-speech chapter, the composite solar identity containing Apollo, Horus and Osiris is credited with changing times and giving wind and rain.
The biblical contrast is striking. Daniel says of God that “he changeth the times and the seasons” (Daniel 2:21, KJV), establishing that authority over times belongs to Him. Yet Daniel later describes a hostile power that “shall speak great words against the most High” and “think to change times and laws” (Daniel 7:25, KJV). Jeremiah likewise asks, “Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain? or can the heavens give showers? art not thou he, O LORD our God?” (Jeremiah 14:22). Agrippa's solar oracle attributes to its Sun-Apollo-Horus-Osiris complex the power that “changeth times” and “giveth winds and rain.” That does not prove Agrippa intended to identify this solar power with Daniel's hostile ruler, but the parallel is difficult to ignore: functions Scripture places under God's authority, and warns may be arrogated by an enemy power, are being assigned in Agrippa's magical text to a celestial solar intelligence. His description even calls the Sun “the prince of the world keeping all the Stars under himself.” That phrase must not simply be equated with Paul's “god of this world,” but it does show how readily Agrippa's occult synthesis grants cosmic titles and functions to the solar power.
Book I, Chapter 33, pages 53–55, treats “Seals, and Characters” of natural and celestial things. Agrippa says stars impress particular seals or characters upon lower things through their rays, that such characters retain the “vertues” and roots of their stars and can “stir up” and assist their influences when made in suitable matter and at appropriate times. He then explicitly lists the “Letters, or Characters of the Sun” alongside those of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The significance is considerable. Agrippa's celestial religion does not consist only of thinking symbolically about the heavens: it possesses planetary characters, seals, materials, appropriate times and methods intended to draw down their influences. That is why his H-O-C table belongs inside a much larger operative system rather than being a curious alphabet puzzle.
The case becomes stronger still when Agrippa explains speech. Book I, Chapters 69–71, pages 103–105, says words convey both the conception and the “vertue of the speaker,” that proper names may carry the power of what they signify, and that sentences possess still greater force because they affirm or deny something. He then discusses enchantments, invocations, adjurations and specially composed speech intended to attract the virtue of a star or deity. Such speech is to be arranged with attention to meaning, celestial correspondence, timing, intention and the object upon which it operates. This is why the responsible comparison with Hoc est enim corpus meum is not merely that one syllable happens to correspond to three occult categories. Agrippa's own magical mechanism concerns a qualified speaker, a meaningful proposition, a properly disposed object, intention, celestial correspondence and an intended transformation or effect.
Book II, Chapter 20, pages 42–43, adds number to that system. Agrippa teaches arithmancy, assigning numerical values to letters and using them in astrological divination. Under that Latin numerical scheme H = 8, O = 50 and C = 3, giving a total of 61. Nothing in the cited procedure authorises us to invent a supernatural meaning for 61, because Agrippa's worked examples concern personal names and astrological calculation. Its significance here is methodological rather than sensational: the same letters H-O-C can be treated by Agrippa simultaneously as linguistic signs, celestial correspondences and numerical values. His occult world is deliberately constructed so that letters, numbers, stars, names and things correspond.
The O correspondence is therefore much more than the physical Sun. Agrippa's Book II, Chapter 59 explicitly gives the chapter's planetary names as material “serving to Magicall speeches.” The Sun becomes Apollo, Horus, Osiris and other divine names. This is not evidence that the oldest Greek and Egyptian religions originally regarded all those gods as one being. It is evidence that Agrippa himself deliberately compresses distinct gods and traditions into one operative solar correspondence.
C then produces the bull. Agrippa states in Book I, Chapter 32 that the terrestrial bull and ox are under celestial Taurus. In his chapter on solar things, page 46 of the supplied Book I, he also places the bull among solar animals, calling it “King of the herd,” and records Egyptian bulls connected with solar and sacred cults; the same passage says the wolf was consecrated to Apollo and Latona. Plutarch independently preserves the episode in which Theseus captures the Marathonian bull and sacrifices it to Delphinian Apollo. That does not establish an Apollo-Taurus mystery doctrine, but it demonstrates that Apollo and the bull could meet in actual classical religious narrative as well as Agrippa's correspondence system. The historically responsible chain is therefore powerful enough without exaggeration: O → Sun → Apollo/Horus/Osiris; C → Taurus → bull; and the bull separately appears among Agrippa's solar things.
Then Agrippa introduces Python. Book III, Chapter 18, page 38, divides evil spirits into orders and says that among the spirits of lies “the Prince of these is the Serpent Pytho; from whence Apollo is called Pythius.” He adds that this class of devils attaches itself to oracles and deludes men through divination and prediction. Apollo inherits the Pythian title through the serpent and the Delphic oracle, while Agrippa's Christian demonology reads the Pythonic spirit behind false divination as a prince of lies.
Acts 16:16 becomes especially revealing when handled accurately. The KJV says Paul encountered “a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination,” not “a Python spirit.” The underlying Greek uses Python terminology, which is why the passage became associated with the Pythian oracle, and Agrippa himself interprets the woman through Pytho. Scripture's theological judgment, however, does not depend on inserting the word Python into the KJV. Deuteronomy had already forbidden divination, observing times, enchantment, witchcraft, familiar spirits, wizardry and necromancy (Deuteronomy 18:10–12). The question is uncomfortable precisely because Agrippa's system formalises practices Scripture condemns and then surrounds them with Christian terminology.
The Bible is equally explicit concerning the celestial host upon which Agrippa's correspondences depend. Deuteronomy warns Israel not to see “the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven” and be driven “to worship them, and serve them” (Deuteronomy 4:19). Deuteronomy 17 condemns serving “the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven.” Israel's apostasy is later described as worshipping “all the host of heaven” (2 Kings 17:16), while Manasseh builds altars to that host inside the courts of the LORD's house (2 Kings 21:5). Josiah's reformation removes priests who burned incense “unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven” (2 Kings 23:5).
Jeremiah condemns those who loved, served, followed, sought and worshipped the Sun, Moon and host of heaven (Jeremiah 8:2), while Jeremiah 10:2 warns, “Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven.” Stephen later says that God gave apostate Israel over “to worship the host of heaven” (Acts 7:42).
Scripture is not condemning astronomy or recognising that planets exist. It condemns turning celestial bodies and signs into religious powers, omens, objects of service or channels of supernatural authority. Agrippa's philosophy does exactly what makes that biblical distinction necessary: it assigns earthly things, letters, names, numbers, materials, images, seals and ritual acts to planetary and zodiacal powers, then explains how their influences may be drawn downward. The disagreement is not between an ancient Bible and modern astronomy; it is between biblical worship and operative astral religion.
Ezekiel 8 makes that problem still more severe because the condemned solar worship occurs within the precincts of the LORD's sanctuary: “they worshipped the sun toward the east” (Ezekiel 8:16). Why does that location matter? Because it destroys the assumption that a celestial practice becomes harmless merely by being placed inside an institution professing the biblical God. The offence in Ezekiel is precisely that alien worship has entered sacred space. Deuteronomy makes the rule even more explicit: Israel was not to ask how the nations served their gods and then say “even so will I do likewise”; “thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 12:30–31). A pagan mechanism does not automatically become biblical worship merely because the name of the LORD is placed above it.
Agrippa's own testimony concerning the origins of his art makes this comparison considerably stronger. In Book III, Chapter 4, he explicitly names Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians and Arabians among the ancient magicians and says their religion was “perverse and polluted idolatry.” His proposed solution is not to discard their occult systems wholesale, but to extract what he regards as truth from their errors and fit what is usable into his own religious philosophy. This is crucial because it removes the need to accuse Agrippa of a pagan ancestry he himself denied. He does not deny it. He openly acknowledges ancient Chaldaean, Egyptian and Assyrian magical material, calls their religions idolatrous, and nevertheless attempts to assimilate selected elements into a Christianised occult system. Could there be a clearer historical example of religious syncretism operating consciously rather than accidentally?
That is also why Egypt cannot be treated merely as picturesque background. Egyptian religion developed sophisticated ritual systems in which divine names, sacred images, spoken formulas, objects and expected supernatural effects functioned together. The British Museum describes heka as a religious-magical power deeply embedded in Egyptian life and the afterlife, while objects such as Horus cippi carried texts and images whose efficacy could be mediated through ritual use. Coptic Magic The point is not that Egyptian heka and Agrippa are historically identical, much less that the Eucharist can be proved to descend directly from Egyptian magic. The point is structural: the ancient world unquestionably contained systems in which speech, divine identity, image, matter, ritual action and supernatural effect were intentionally joined.
Scripture uses Egypt differently but just as seriously. Ezekiel 16:26 accuses Jerusalem, “Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy neighbours,” and Ezekiel 23 develops the metaphor through the two sisters whose “whoredoms” began in Egypt and continued through their dependence upon foreign powers. The language is deliberately covenantal: Israel's problem is not merely bad diplomacy but the giving of what belongs to God to alien religious-political lovers. This imagery prepares the way for Revelation's later language of Babylonian fornication. Jeremiah contributes another strand when households burn incense, make cakes and pour drink offerings to the “queen of heaven” (Isis/Ishtar/Venus/Cybel et al)(Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19). What matters biblically is that a heavenly female power is receiving ritual offerings that belong to God.
The Mesopotamian comparison is nevertheless striking. British Museum objects depict Shamash as the Sun god, Sin as the Moon god and Ishtar through the star of Venus, sometimes together in the same royal religious composition; the famous Sun God Tablet from Sippar places the solar disc of Shamash in a temple scene with the symbols of Sin and Ishtar above it. British Museum The Metropolitan Museum notes that Babylonian theology associated major gods in numerical hierarchies and that Sin, Shamash and Ishtar occupied recognisable places within the divine order, while the University of Pennsylvania's ORACC project identifies Ishtar's astral aspect directly with Venus, the morning and evening star. The Metropolitan Museum of Art This is what makes the biblical condemnation of service to Sun, Moon, planets and host of heaven historically concrete: in the ancient Near East those celestial bodies really were religiously personalised and worshipped.
The Egyptian astral material then produces one of the strongest parallels in the entire investigation. The round Dendera Zodiac, dated by the Louvre to around 50 BC, combines zodiacal imagery, decans, constellations and divine figures within a late Ptolemaic celestial programme. Louvre Collections Egyptologist Joachim Friedrich Quack establishes that Saturn's fuller Egyptian name was “Horus bull of the sky,” later shortened to “Horus the bull.” More remarkably, the Demotic Ostracon Strasbourg D 521 calls Saturn—Horus the Bull—“the star of the Sun.”
The distinction here must be defended, not blurred. Taurus is not Saturn. Agrippa's C corresponds to Taurus, the zodiacal bull, whereas Egyptian “Horus the Bull” is a divine name of the planet Saturn (Kronos/Aion). But this difference does not destroy the comparison; it reveals how astral religion actually operated. Bull symbolism could locate a figure in the zodiac while also providing a divine planetary identity elsewhere. The Egyptian evidence therefore does not supply Agrippa's exact mapping, but it demonstrates a religious environment in which bull, planet, divine name and solar language could coexist inside a single celestial system.
The late-Roman Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, PGM IV, makes that evidence operative rather than merely iconographic. The codex is generally dated to the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century CE and contains bilingual Egyptian-Greek ritual material. Coptic Magic In one operation involving a scarab and the expected manifestation of a deity, the practitioner is instructed to say in Egyptian: “Horus the Bull, Horus the Bull is my name. Horus the Bull is my true name.” The Würzburg commentary identifies Horus the Bull here with Saturn and explains that releasing the scarab forms part of the ritual leading to the deity's manifestation. The papyrus does not contain hoc. It does not mention the Mass or Agrippa. It cannot prove that Eucharistic consecration derives from Egyptian heka. What it proves is something more basic and historically secure: a celestial divine identity could be spoken as ritual language over material apparatus in expectation of a supernatural manifestation.
Osiris gives Agrippa's solar correspondence an underworld dimension. Osiris is not accurately described as simply the Egyptian daytime Sun; he is a god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. Yet Egyptian solar-underworld theology brings him into the Sun's nocturnal journey. In the Amduat, Re travels through the Duat during the twelve hours of night and reaches the deepest stage of renewal through union with Osiris before emerging again at dawn. This gives a genuine historical background for a later syncretist such as Agrippa to place Osiris within a solar complex without pretending Osiris and the visible midday Sun were always identical. Agrippa's synthesis therefore gathers distinct strands: Apollo from the Greco-Roman solar-oracular world, Horus from Egyptian celestial theology, and Osiris from the solar-underworld-renewal complex.
Behind the Egyptian material stands the deeper Mesopotamian astral "tradition". A Late Babylonian tablet in the British Museum associates the twelve months with zodiacal signs and identifies the second month with the Bull of Heaven/Taurus. The museum explicitly notes that the twelve-part zodiac derives from ancient Mesopotamian ideas and that by the end of the first millennium BC the system underpinned Babylonian astrology as well as astronomy. British Museum This allows the term Babylonian star religion to be used with historical precision rather than as a slogan. Babylon's legacy is not that every later Sun image can be called Babylonian; it is that Mesopotamian culture developed a highly organised religious and divinatory interpretation of celestial bodies and signs that profoundly affected the later zodiacal world.
Isaiah 47 is therefore one of the strongest biblical passages in the entire exposé because Scripture itself addresses Babylon in exactly these categories: “Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy sorceries,” followed by, “Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee” (Isaiah 47:12–13, KJV). There is no need to force Babylon, astrology and sorcery together artificially; Isaiah has already done so.
Jeremiah deepens the Babylon motif. Jeremiah 50:38 describes Babylon as “the land of graven images,” while Jeremiah 51:7 says, “Babylon hath been a golden cup in the LORD'S hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine.” That language later reappears with extraordinary force in Revelation 17, where the woman called “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” holds a golden cup and makes the inhabitants of the earth drunk with the wine of her fornication. Historical Babylon and Revelation's apocalyptic Babylon should not simply be collapsed into one later institution, but Scripture itself deliberately carries Babylonian imagery—idolatry, intoxication, fornication, deception and judgment—from the prophets into Revelation.
Agrippa becomes especially significant at this point because he does not merely preserve pagan names; he places Christian vocabulary inside the astral mechanism. Book III, Chapter 3, page 12, describes a person whose spirit has been consecrated through public religion and who possesses authority through imposition of hands and “Sacramentall” power, through which the “Character” of divine virtue and power is stamped upon the recipient. Agrippa says this pertains to “Ecclesiastical mysteries.” Such a qualified person may then, by “praying, consecrating, sacrificeing, invocating,” “attract spiritual and Celestial powers”, imprint them upon chosen things and thereby “vivifie every magicall work.”
The structural comparison deserves to be stated without caricature. Agrippa has described a specially consecrated religious operator, a spiritual character conferred through initiation, prescribed holy rites, prayer, consecration, sacrifice, invocation, a material recipient and an invisible spiritual effect. He then places that entire mechanism inside ceremonial magic. This does not prove the Catholic sacraments are magic merely because similar categories appear. It proves something narrower and historically undeniable: Agrippa himself treats sacramental, ecclesiastical and initiatory categories as compatible components of an operative magical philosophy.
Book III, Chapter 4, pages 13–14, raises the stakes still further. Agrippa says superstition can be a “resemblance of Religion” imitating miracles, Sacraments, rites and observations, and he argues that a person who passionately believes a false religion may assimilate his spirit to the spirits he regards as its leaders and produce effects beyond ordinary nature and reason. He then openly identifies the old magicians as Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Assyrians and others whose religions were “perverse and polluted idolatry.” Agrippa does not identify the Mass as such a counterfeit rite. That conclusion cannot be attributed to him. But his own model destroys the argument that supernatural effects, powerful rites or apparent miracles automatically authenticate a religion. By his reasoning, a false religion may possess imitative sacraments and extraordinary spiritual effects.
That warning sits remarkably close to Christ's own statement that some will say, “have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils?” only to hear, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23). John likewise commands believers, “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). The biblical test is therefore not, “Did something supernatural happen?” The test is whether the doctrine and spirit are of God.
Agrippa makes the problem still more explicit in Book III, Chapters 11–12, pages 29–30, where he incorporates the name of Jesus into the celestial hierarchy itself. He says divine virtue flows through angels and then into the twelve zodiacal signs and seven planets; he claims that no favour can now be drawn from the heavens without the authority and consent of the name Jesu; and he distinguishes merely saying Jesus' name profanely from invoking it with what he regards as proper faith, disposition and pronunciation. He even says power is implanted in the name and speaks of heavenly influence proceeding through these intermediary orders. He significance is profound: Agrippa does not abolish the astral mechanism when he adopts Christian language. He places Jesus inside the mechanism.
That is one of the clearest dangers of syncretism. A system need not abandon the word Jesus in order to cease being apostolic. It can retain the name while changing the structure through which spiritual power is believed to operate. Paul's warning therefore cannot be avoided: “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God,” and “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:20–21). Colossians adds, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men” (Colossians 2:8). That verse should not be abused as a condemnation of scholarship or philosophy as such; its force here lies in testing religious traditions claiming divine authority against Christ rather than allowing inherited philosophical systems to determine how heavenly power supposedly operates.
It is at precisely this point that Michael Müller's The Holy Mass becomes impossible to ignore, because Müller supplies the Catholic side of the structural comparison in language stronger than an opponent might dare to invent. In his story of the alleged possession of Nicola Aubry, the bishop presents the Blessed Sacrament and asks why the demon fears it. Müller places this reply in the alleged demon's mouth: “it is that ‘hoc,’ that ‘hoc,’ that forces me to flee.” He immediately interprets the statement himself, telling the reader that the demon is referring to the words of consecration by which Catholic doctrine says bread and wine are changed into Christ's body and blood.
A Christian cannot logically use the testimony of an alleged demon as a foundation for doctrine, since Scripture identifies Satan as a liar. That is precisely what makes Müller's apologetic use of the episode so disturbing. The significant fact is not that a demon has proved transubstantiation; it is that a Catholic priest defending transubstantiation makes the repeated word “hoc” central to a possession narrative and then expressly tells his readers that it means the consecratory formula.
Set that beside Agrippa. His H-O-C corresponds to Spirit of the World—Sun—Taurus. His world-spirit conveys celestial influence into matter. His Sun bears the magical names Apollo, Horus and Osiris and is praised in an oracle as one who “changeth times” and gives wind and rain. His Taurus corresponds to the bull. His system assigns efficacy to names and sentences uttered with intention toward properly disposed things. His characters and seals retain stellar virtues. His ceremonial magician is a consecrated operator possessing sacramental character and capable of imprinting spiritual and celestial powers upon matter. Müller, independently and centuries later, places hoc at the centre of an alleged demonic reaction to a priestly consecratory act. That still does not prove deliberate encoding, but why pretend there is nothing here to investigate?
The later history of the expression hocus pocus is worth inserting here precisely because it must not be allowed to carry the argument. John Tillotson made the famous late-seventeenth-century conjecture that the conjuror's phrase “hocus pocus” was a mocking corruption of hoc est corpus, describing it as a parody of transubstantiation. Tillotson's own collected works preserve the association, but modern etymology does not treat it as proved; Oxford instead gives a pseudo-Latin conjuring formula such as hax pax max Deus adimax as an origin. Christian Classics Ethereal Library
This is therefore evidence of a later cultural association between Eucharistic Latin and conjuring language, not evidence that Hoc est corpus meum originated as a magic formula. The argument does not need a disputed etymology when Agrippa and Müller provide direct textual evidence of their own.
Müller's description of what the priestly words accomplish makes the structural comparison far stronger. He writes, “Five words of the power of the priest brings the same Eternal Word on our altar,” calls the priest's action the “efficient cause of Transubstantiation,” and describes the result as a “New Incarnation.” Elsewhere he says Christ renders “immediate, universal obedience to every priest who pronounces the words of consecration,” regardless of that priest's personal virtue, and later insists that sacramental efficacy results from “the actions rightly performed and the words properly pronounced by the priest.” These claims are not occult language imported by a critic; they are Müller's Eucharistic apologetic.
Catholic theology will rightly object that the priest is not supposed to possess independent magical power over Christ; Catholic theology would answer that Christ Himself freely instituted the sacrament and remains its principal cause, but that claim itself must still be demonstrated from Scripture; it cannot simply be assumed as the explanation for the mechanism. Agrippa describes a consecrated operator whose spiritual character permits prescribed words and actions to bring about an invisible effect upon matter. Müller describes an ordained priest whose properly spoken words produce what he calls a New Incarnation regardless of the priest's virtue.
Where is that mechanism taught by Christ and the apostles?
Müller intensifies the problem when discussing the priesthood itself. In his chapter defending the Latin Mass, he says that when the Catholic priest stands at the altar, “he stands there as a mediator between God and the people,” offering a sacrifice that, in Müller's words, passes “between God and himself alone.” He immediately links this special mediatorial status with the priest's exclusive sacrificial character and then says the sacramental effect comes through actions rightly performed and words properly pronounced. Whatever theological distinctions Catholic dogmatics may make between Christ's unique mediation and ministerial priesthood, Müller's own wording must be allowed to stand beside Paul's:
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”—1 Timothy 2:5, KJV
That contrast cannot be solved merely by saying Müller uses “mediator” in a lesser ministerial sense. His surrounding description assigns the priest an exclusive sacrificial office operating between God and the people, and his broader work gives that priest efficacious words by which Christ becomes sacramentally present. The biblical reader is entitled to ask why a Christian system needs an additional sacrificial mediator at the altar when the apostle deliberately says there is one mediator.
Then comes Müller's most remarkable statement of all. Discussing why humanity has not experienced judgments comparable to some of the great punishments recorded in Scripture, he attributes this restraint to the continual offering of Christ by Catholic priests. His exact words are that “the hands of God are bound.” Müller immediately tells us what he means: without this propitiatory sacrifice, “we should have been treated long ago as were Sodom and Gomorrha.” He adds that otherwise God would already have punished humanity according to its sins and then says, “The property of this sacrifice, then, is to appease God.”
That context destroys any attempt to dismiss the phrase “the hands of God are bound” as an isolated flourish. Müller himself defines the metaphor. What is being restrained is judgment. The world deserves punishment; the Mass, in his description, prevents the punishment from falling.
So an unavoidable question arises: why would a "Christian" religion require a priestly sacrifice whose continuing effect is described as binding the hand of God so that mankind is not treated like Sodom and Gomorrha?
The question becomes sharper still when Scripture asks us to identify the Judge. Jesus says, “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son” (John 5:22). Paul speaks of “the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom” (2 Timothy 4:1). Müller's Eucharistic picture therefore creates a profound theological paradox: the priest speaks five efficacious words and brings the Eternal Word to the altar in what Müller calls a New Incarnation; Christ gives “immediate, universal obedience” to the priest; this sacrifice then appeases divine wrath and metaphorically binds God's hands so that Sodom-like judgment does not fall; yet Scripture says the Christ whom the priest claims to place on the altar is Himself the divinely appointed Judge.
Who, then, is restraining whom?
If “the hands of God are bound” merely means that God's own mercy, grounded in Christ's willing atonement, averts judgment, why make a repeatedly offered priestly sacrifice the mechanism that binds those hands? If Christ's sacrifice has already accomplished propitiation, why portray humanity as requiring continuing sacerdotal action to prevent the Judge from acting against it? Hebrews does not say Christ repeatedly becomes a new sacrificial victim through successive priests in order to keep divine justice restrained. It says, “this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12), and, “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).
That contrast is much stronger than claiming hoc merely sounds magical. The central question is operative mechanism versus completed atonement. Agrippa says a properly consecrated religious operator can attract spiritual and celestial powers through prescribed acts. Müller says a consecrated priest's prescribed acts and words produce sacramental transformation. Agrippa speaks of sacramental character inside ceremonial magic; Müller speaks of sacerdotal character and power independent of the minister's moral worthiness. Agrippa speaks of superior power entering properly disposed lower matter; Müller describes Christ becoming present through the priest's five words. Agrippa says sentences spoken with intention toward receptive matter can bind and direct influence; Müller says properly performed actions and correctly pronounced words effect the sacrament. Structural correspondence does not prove historical derivation, but once the two texts are placed side by side, the argument can no longer be caricatured as “Catholicism is magic because it uses Latin.” The harder question is why Agrippa's openly magical theory of sacramental operators, impressed character, consecrated matter, efficacious speech and descending power resembles the mechanism Müller attributes to the Mass.
The entire H-O-C correspondence can now be seen in its proper scale. H is Agrippa's mediating Spirit of the World, the medium through which stellar rays communicate occult powers to matter. O is the Sun, whose names in magical speech include Apollo, Horus and Osiris, whose quoted oracle says it “changeth times” and gives wind and rain, and whose characters and seals retain solar virtues. C is Taurus, the celestial bull, while Agrippa independently places the bull among solar things and records Egyptian bull cults. Apollo's Pythian title leads into the serpent whom Agrippa calls the prince of lying spirits and deceptive divination. Horus leads into Egyptian planetary religion, where Saturn is literally Horus the Bull, “the star of the Sun,” and into the magical papyrus in which “Horus the Bull … is my true name” is spoken during a rite expecting divine manifestation. Osiris leads downward into the nocturnal underworld where Re and Osiris unite before the Sun's renewal. Behind the zodiac stands Babylon and Mesopotamia, where the Bull of Heaven becomes Taurus and trained specialists read celestial signs; beside it stand Shamash the Sun, Sin the Moon and Ishtar-Venus as astral divine powers.
Scripture repeatedly tells God's people not to enter that world. The command is not merely “do not kneel before a golden Sun.” It forbids service to the heavenly host, divination, enchantments, observing times, religious dependence upon signs of heaven and the adoption of heathen worship methods. The prophets describe covenant involvement with Egypt as whoredom. Jeremiah condemns offerings to the Queen of Heaven. Isaiah addresses Babylon through its enchantments, sorceries, astrologers and stargazers. Paul says Gentile sacrifice reaches devils rather than God. Stephen says apostate Israel was given over to worship the host of heaven. Colossians warns against religious captivity through human tradition and vain philosophy. The Bible's objection is not to learning about the cosmos; it is to turning the cosmos into a mediating spiritual system.
Revelation gathers those older themes under Babylon with extraordinary continuity. Revelation 17 shows a woman called “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT” with a golden cup of abominations while kings and inhabitants of the earth become drunk through her fornication. The imagery recalls Jeremiah's historical Babylon, the “golden cup” that made the nations drunk. Revelation 18 then says Babylon has become “the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit,” and concludes, “for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived” (Revelation 18:2, 23). Revelation 9:20–21 likewise joins the refusal to repent of worshipping devils and idols with the refusal to repent of “sorceries.”
None of those texts authorises us to identify apocalyptic Babylon mechanically with one modern institution because it uses candles, vestments, Latin or celestial-looking decoration. Revelation cannot substitute for historical evidence. The stronger approach is the opposite: assemble the historical evidence first, and then ask whether its underlying religious categories fit the biblical system of forbidden celestial mediation, idolatry, divination and sorcery.
By that point the evidence is already substantial. Ancient Mesopotamia really did develop a twelve-part zodiac and celestial omen system, with the Bull of Heaven corresponding to Taurus. British Museum Babylonian and Assyrian religion really did employ astral divine symbols of Shamash, Sin and Ishtar-Venus. Egyptian religion really did join gods, planets, sacred images, spoken ritual language and expected supernatural effects. Saturn really was known as Horus the Bull, and a late Egyptian planetary list really did call him “the star of the Sun.” OUP Academic PGM IV really does place “Horus the Bull … is my true name” inside a magical operation involving a scarab and divine manifestation. Coptic Magic Agrippa really does assign H to the Spirit of the World, O to the Sun and C to Taurus; he really does place Apollo, Horus and Osiris among solar names serving magical speech; his solar oracle really does speak of the power that “changeth times” and gives wind and rain; he really does call Pytho the prince of lying spirits; he really does teach planetary characters and seals; and he really does describe consecrated religious operators possessing sacramental power who can attract spiritual and celestial forces to “vivifie every magicall work.”
Müller really does say the alleged demon cried “that ‘hoc,’ that ‘hoc’” and explicitly interpret the word as referring to Eucharistic consecration. He really does teach that five words of priestly power bring the Eternal Word to the altar, describe the act as the efficient cause of a New Incarnation, and say Christ offers immediate obedience to the consecrating priest. He really does say the priest stands “as a mediator between God and the people” and that sacramental effects come through actions rightly performed and words properly pronounced. Most strikingly, he really does say the continual sacrifice means “the hands of God are bound” and that otherwise mankind would long ago have been treated as Sodom and Gomorrha.
None of this proves that Agrippa authored Hoc est corpus meum, that the Latin formula was deliberately created as an occult solar code, that Constantine secretly encoded Apollo into Christianity, that Apollo is literally Python, that Saturn is Taurus, that Osiris is merely the daytime Sun, that Apophis is Python, or that an uninterrupted clandestine organisation transmitted one identical rite from Babylon through Egypt into the Catholic Mass. Those are claims for which direct evidence has not been produced.
They are unnecessary to the case.
What has been demonstrated is more difficult to wave away: an astonishing convergence of mechanism. Ancient astral religions assign divinity and agency to celestial bodies; Babylon develops systematic celestial signs and a zodiac; Egypt joins gods, planets, names, ritual speech, images and material operations; Agrippa deliberately incorporates Chaldaean, Egyptian and Assyrian material into a Christianised occult philosophy of letters, planets, zodiacal signs, seals, characters, divine names, words, numbers, sacramental character and consecrated operators; and Müller describes a Catholic priesthood whose correctly spoken words produce an invisible transformation, make Christ obedient to the priest, place the priest as mediator between God and people, and offer a sacrifice that he says binds the hands of God against judgment.
The question therefore cannot remain simply, “What does HOC spell?” The question is larger: why does a religion claiming the completed gospel of Jesus Christ require a sacerdotal mechanism described in terms so closely resembling the operative structure of the celestial and magical systems Scripture repeatedly forbids? Why would the believer who has “received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God” require a cosmology in which spiritual virtue descends through celestial intermediaries? Why should a solar power in an occult text be credited with changing times and giving rain when Daniel says God changes times and seasons and Jeremiah asks whether the vanities of the Gentiles or the heavens can give rain? Why would the sacrifice declared sufficient in Hebrews require repeated sacerdotal reproduction through “five words of the power of the priest”? Why should any earthly priest be described as a mediator between God and the people when Scripture says there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”?
And perhaps the sharpest question remains Müller's own theology: if the Mass “binds the hands of God” so that mankind does not receive the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrha, whose hands are supposedly being restrained when Christ Himself is the Judge?
The gospel is not the story of priests discovering a ritual capable of holding back the Judge. It is the story of the Judge Himself giving His life for sinners, rising again and accomplishing the sacrifice no earthly mediator could complete. That is why the final contrast is not fundamentally between Latin and English, old ritual and new worship, or Catholic and Protestant labels. It is between the sufficiency of Christ and a system of mediated religious power. Babylon reads divine meaning in the heavens; Egypt ritualises divine power through names, images and sacred matter; Agrippa systematises the correspondences into letters, planets, seals, characters, names and consecrated operators; Müller gives the priest efficacious words, mediatorial office and a sacrifice whose effect he describes as binding God's hands. Scripture points elsewhere: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
That is where this investigation must finally leave the reader—not with the unsupported claim that three Latin letters prove a secret conspiracy, but with something historically stronger and theologically more difficult to evade. When a system of celestial correspondences, planetary powers, divine names, sacred characters, efficacious words, consecrated operators, ritual matter and invisible transformation stands before us, and when Scripture has repeatedly warned against the religious power of the Sun, Moon, planets, host of heaven, divination, sorcery and imported heathen worship, the question has to be asked without fear of where it leads:
are we looking at the apostolic gospel of Jesus Christ, or at an ancient celestial architecture that has learned to speak in Christian names?
Peace & Happy Sabbath
References
The Holy Bible, King James Version. Principal passages used: Deuteronomy 4:19; 12:30–31; 17:2–5; 18:10–12; 2 Kings 17:16; 21:3–5; 23:5; Isaiah 47:12–14; Jeremiah 8:2; 10:2; 14:22; 44:15–19; 50:38; 51:7; Ezekiel 8:16; 16:26; 23; Daniel 2:21; Matthew 7:22–23; Acts 7:42–43; 16:16; 1 Corinthians 2:12; 10:20–21; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; Colossians 2:8; 1 Timothy 2:5; 2 Timothy 4:1; Hebrews 10:12–14; 1 John 4:1; Revelation 9:20–21; 17; 18.
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated from the Latin by J. F. London: R. W. for Gregory Moule, 1651. Relevant passages in the supplied edition: Book I, ch. 14, p. 35, on the Spiritus mundi and stellar rays; ch. 24, p. 46, on solar animals and Egyptian bulls; ch. 32, p. 52, on the terrestrial bull and celestial Taurus; chs. 33–34, pp. 53–55, on stellar seals, characters and celestial influences; chs. 37–38, pp. 58–59, on attracting and drawing down celestial gifts; chs. 69–71, pp. 103–105, on words, names, sentences, intention and magical efficacy; ch. 74, pp. 108–109, on the celestial correspondences of letters, including H, O and C. Book II, ch. 20, pp. 42–43 of the supplied Book II file, on numerical values and arithmancy; ch. 59, pp. 94–95 of the supplied Book II file, on planetary names “serving to Magicall speeches,” including Apollo, Horus and Osiris, and the solar oracle “Who changeth times, who giveth winds and rain.” Book III, chs. 3–4, pp. 12–14 of the supplied Book III file, on “Sacramentall” power, divine “Character,” “Ecclesiastical mysteries,” attracting spiritual and celestial powers, and superstition imitating sacraments; chs. 11–12, pp. 29–30, on the name of Jesus, angels, zodiac and planets; ch. 18, p. 38, on Pytho as prince of lying spirits and Apollo as Pythius.
Müller, Michael. The Holy Mass: The Sacrifice for the Living and the Dead: The Clean Oblation Offered Up among the Nations from the Rising to the Setting of the Sun. New York and Cincinnati: Fr. Pustet, 1874. Use these printed book pages: p. 76 — Nicola Aubry possession account, “that ‘hoc,’ that ‘hoc,’ that forces me to flee,” followed by Müller’s explanation that the demon refers to the words of consecration; p. 177 — “Five words of the power of the priest” and the priest as the “efficient cause of Transubstantiation,” producing the “New Incarnation”; p. 257 — Christ renders “immediate, universal obedience to every priest who pronounces the words of consecration”; p. 287 — “the hands of God are bound” and, without the propitiatory sacrifice, humanity would have been treated “as were Sodom and Gomorrha”; p. 288 — Müller continues that “The property of this sacrifice, then, is to appease God”; p. 501 — the priest at the altar “stands there as a mediator between God and the people,” and the sacrifice passes “between God and himself alone”; p. 503 — sacramental effect is produced by “the actions rightly performed and the words properly pronounced by the priest.”
Tertullian. Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), Book IV, ch. 40. Particularly the Latin Hoc est corpus meum followed by id est figura corporis mei. This is important for establishing that the Latin Eucharistic wording predates Constantine. Tertullian, Against Marcion IV.40
Lactantius. De Mortibus Persecutorum (Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died), ch. 44. Constantine’s dream before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and the instruction to mark the shields; Lactantius does not record the later Latin phrase In hoc signo vinces. Lactantius, chapter 44
Eusebius of Caesarea. Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), Book I, especially chs. 28–31. Constantine’s later reported vision of the sign above the Sun and the accompanying Greek words conventionally translated “By this conquer” or “Conquer by this.” Eusebius, Life of Constantine I.28–31
Panegyrici Latini, 6(7).21.3–6, panegyric delivered to Constantine in AD 310. Primary evidence for the episode in which Constantine is represented in association with Apollo and Victory. For scholarly discussion, see the literature on Constantine’s pre-312 Apollo vision and imperial solar ideology.
Homeric Hymn 3, “To Apollo.” Especially lines 300–374, and most particularly 370–374, where the “holy strength of Helios” causes the slain serpent to decay and the text explains the names Pytho and Pythian. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, trans., Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Perseus Digital Library
Plutarch. Life of Theseus, ch. 14.1. Theseus captures the Marathonian bull and sacrifices it to Delphinian Apollo. Perseus Digital Library
Quack, Joachim Friedrich. “The Planets in Ancient Egypt.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Planetary Science, published 23 May 2019. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190647926.013.61. Principal scholarly source for Saturn as “Horus bull of the sky” / “Horus the Bull” and for the development of Egyptian planetary terminology and its foreign influences. OUP Academic
Quack, Joachim Friedrich. “Astronomy in Ancient Egypt.” In The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, pp. 61–70. Oxford University Press, 2018. Useful for the development of Egyptian astronomy and the later borrowing of Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman astronomical elements. OUP Academic
Musée du Louvre. Zodiaque de Dendéra, inventory E 13482, dated to approximately 50 BC, from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. Louvre catalogue description identifies zodiacal, decanal and constellation imagery. Louvre Collections
The Coptic Magical Papyri Project, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. “Old Coptic Magic II: The Bilingual Divination of PGM IV.” Discussion of the late Egyptian/Greek magical ritual in which the practitioner recites “Horus the Bull … is my true name”, identifying Horus the Bull with Saturn and explaining the scarab and manifestation ritual. Coptic Magic
Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Use for PGM IV as the standard English scholarly collection of the Greek Magical Papyri.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Amduat” Papyrus of Henettawy, daughter of Isetemkheb, object 25.3.28, ca. 990–970 BC. The museum explains that during the deepest hour of Re’s nocturnal journey, Re joins with Osiris, king of the dead, so that the Sun can be reborn in the morning. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amduat (“What is in the Netherworld”) Papyrus Inscribed for Gautsoshen, object 25.3.31, ca. 1000–945 BC. Useful supporting evidence for the Sun’s nocturnal journey through the Duat and encounter with Osiris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
British Museum. Late Babylonian zodiac tablet, museum no. 77824, registration 1885,0430.15, ca. 500 BC. The catalogue states that the twelve-part zodiac derives from ancient Mesopotamian ideas and identifies the Bull of Heaven with Taurus. British Museum
British Museum. Constantine gold solidus, museum no. 1863,0713.1, minted at Ticinum in AD 316. Constantine and Sol are represented together; the museum notes Constantine’s continuing association with the Sun god after the Milvian Bridge. British Museum
British Museum. The Sun God Tablet from Sippar, for evidence of Mesopotamian solar religion and Shamash; use alongside museum material on the astral symbols of Sin, Shamash and Ishtar.
Perseus Digital Library. Primary-text edition of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hugh G. Evelyn-White translation, 1914; and Plutarch, Theseus 14, Bernadotte Perrin translation. Perseus Digital Library
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