If the Light in You Is Darkness: The Hidden Theology of Power

Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata is often introduced as a Renaissance curiosity: a learned book of images, mottos, and classical references meant to train the reader in moral reflection and humanist eloquence. Yet beneath its elegant surface lies something far older and far darker. Alciato was not inventing symbols; he was cataloguing and systematizing an inheritance from the ancient world, one that reaches back into the mystery cults of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Asia Minor. His work preserves, in symbolic form, the language of transformation by which pagan power understood itself.

Alciato, a jurist and classical scholar, lived at a moment when Europe was outwardly Christian but intellectually saturated with revived antiquity. Emblemata draws on coins, statues, myths, animals, and divine figures not as mere decoration, but as carriers of meaning. These meanings were already ancient when Alciato recorded them. They belonged to the same religious world that produced the mysteries of Cybele, Isis, Dionysus, Mithras, and Eleusis. Alciato does not preach these cults, but he does not dismantle them either. He preserves their symbols intact, assuming that educated readers know what they signify.

That world speaks most openly in Metamorphoses, especially in the final book where Isis reveals herself to the initiate. There, Isis declares that she is the one divine power worshiped under many names, including Cybele. This is not mythology in the modern sense; it is initiation theology. The initiate undergoes ritual death and rebirth, and emerges transformed. He is not merely forgiven or enlightened. He is changed in status, identity, and allegiance. This is the central promise of the mystery cults: transformation.

This is why the mysteries mattered so deeply to ancient rulers and elites. Mystery religion was not about repentance; it was about power. It taught that humans could cross boundaries, shed one nature, and assume another. Kings claimed divine origin. Heroes became gods. Emperors were declared divus. The symbols vary; serpent, lion, bull, sphinx; but the logic is the same. The mysteries do not worship transformation; they practice it. They remake the self through ritual, secrecy, and symbolic death.

When the book of Revelation speaks of “Babylon the Great,” it is not only condemning moral corruption; it is exposing a system of spiritual deception rooted in sorcery, secrecy, and counterfeit divinization. “By thy sorceries were all nations deceived,” and “the great men of the earth” are named as participants. Mystery Babylon is not merely a city; it is a method. It is the ancient claim that man can become more than man apart from God, by knowledge, rite, and power.

At the center of this theology stands Cybele, not as a sentimental “mother,” nor primarily as a goddess of fertility, but as the Mother of transformed beings. In the Phrygian and Roman mystery context, Cybele does not generate children in the ordinary sense. She presides over metamorphosis. Her sphere is the crossing of boundaries: wild to ordered, mortal to more-than-mortal, human to divinized. The lions that accompany her are not decorative animals; they are emblems of dominion over untamed life and over death itself. To be associated with Cybele is to be drawn into a process that breaks ordinary human status. This is why kings, cities, and imperial power gravitate toward her imagery.

This logic is never stated openly by Alciato, but it is structurally present. When lions draw the chariot of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother of Rome, whose temple was established on the Palatine Hill, the image encodes sovereignty over nature and the power to enthrone or unmake rulers. When Cybele appears turrita on coins, seated upon or beside a lion, she is not merely a local goddess; she is the Mother who stands behind political and cosmic order. Men do not become gods by Cybele in the way children are born to a mother; they become gods through her domain, by entering the zone of transformation she governs.

The clearest ancient articulation of this theology is given not by Alciato, but by Isis herself in Metamorphoses, Book XI. When Isis reveals herself to the initiate, she declares, in words that were meant to be heard only after ritual death and rebirth: “I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, the first offspring of time, the highest of the gods. The Phrygians call me Cybele, the Athenians Minerva, the Cypriots Venus, the Cretans Diana, the Sicilians Proserpina.” This is not poetic flourish. It is a theological disclosure: the many goddesses are one, and she is the power through whom transformation occurs. The initiate who hears this has passed through symbolic death and has been reborn into a new ontological status. He is not simply forgiven, instructed, or morally improved; he is changed.

This is the operative logic behind claims of divine origin and apotheosis in the ancient world; and it does not end with antiquity. The same pattern reappears in the modern age, most visibly in the George Washington depicted in The Apotheosis of Washington above the rotunda of the United States Capitol. The Capitol itself is consciously modeled on Rome’s Capitoline tradition, complete with a domed heaven above and a deified ruler enthroned within it. This is not accidental ornamentation; it is symbolic continuity. The imagery declares that the ancient language of apotheosis; of men elevated beyond mortality through state-sanctioned symbolism—has not vanished, only adapted. The forms change, the names change, but the logic remains the same: power seeks legitimacy through sacral transformation, presenting human authority as something more than human.

When Alexander the Great associates himself with serpent-generation, he is not inventing a scandalous myth; he is aligning himself with mystery logic, in which divine life enters the human realm through non-human, chthonic, and initiatory forms. The serpent, like the lion, is a mediator of transformation. It sheds its skin, moves between worlds, and belongs to the same symbolic economy as the Mother who governs rebirth.

This same economy explains Augustus Caesar, who is often misunderstood as merely a rational, anti-mystery figure. After the civil wars, Augustus did not reject the mysteries; he was initiated into them, though discreetly and under strict political control. Rome could not afford the unbounded divinization claims that surrounded Alexander, but it could not abandon mystery power either. Augustus submitted himself to initiation, absorbed its authority, and then disciplined its expression. His later designation as divus after death reflects this controlled mystery logic: not a god by nature, not a god among gods, but a man whose status has been permanently altered through ritual, victory, and divine sanction.

In this framework, men become gods not by belief, ethics, or proclamation, but by passing through the Mother’s domain of transformation. Cybele is the Mother of transformed beings because she presides over the passage itself. Isis names this openly in an initiatory voice.

And it is precisely these men; self-transformed through initiation, ritual, and symbolic apotheosis; whom Christians categorically refuse to worship.

Henri Frankfort’s Kingship and the Gods is not a speculative or polemical work. It is one of the most sober and influential studies ever written on ancient Near Eastern religion and political theology. Frankfort was an Egyptologist and historian of religion, and his purpose was not to defend ancient belief but to understand it on its own terms. Precisely because of this restraint, the book becomes extraordinarily revealing. It shows, with clarity and without apology, that in the ancient world kingship was not merely supported by religion; kingship was itself a religious state, and divinity was not an abstraction but a lived, embodied reality.

Frankfort begins from a premise modern readers often resist: ancient peoples did not separate the political, the cosmic, and the divine. The universe was not governed by impersonal laws but by living powers, and society was not an invention of human reason but an extension of cosmic order. Within this worldview, the king was not simply a ruler appointed by the gods. He was the point of contact between heaven and earth. To understand ancient kingship, Frankfort insists, one must abandon modern metaphors and accept that divinity was thought to be present, active, and transferable.

In Egypt, this logic reaches its purest form. The Egyptian king is not a man who later becomes divine. He is divine by virtue of office, and that office is not symbolic. Frankfort explains that Pharaoh is Horus in life and Osiris in death. This is not honorific language. It is ontological. The king’s body, his name, his ka (spirit), and his role in ritual time are all divine realities. When a king ascends the throne, he does not receive power; he manifests a god. The coronation does not confer divinity; it reveals it. The death of the king does not extinguish divinity; it transfers it, as the dead king becomes Osiris and the living successor becomes Horus. Kingship is thus a continuous divine incarnation, renewed generation after generation.

Revelation 13:15

“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”

And is this not precisely what was done to the martyrs; through inquisitions, coerced confessions, and so-called holy wars? Such was their proclaimed piety that blood became its fruit, all carried out under the guise of worshiping Christ, while contradicting His words, His example, and His kingdom at every turn

This is why Egyptian ritual is so central in Frankfort’s account. The Sed festival, jubilees, New Year rites, and royal appearances are not celebrations or propaganda. They are acts of cosmic maintenance. Time itself is regenerated through the king. Creation is reenacted. Order is reasserted against chaos. The king does not pray for the cosmos to endure; he causes it to endure. Frankfort emphasizes that Egyptian thought did not imagine a distant god ruling the world from afar. The god ruled through the king’s presence. To see the king was, in a real sense, to see the god.

The sphinx is not art; it is theology in stone. The human head joined to the lion’s body expresses superhuman sovereignty, mastery over nature, and divine vigilance. The lion is not chosen arbitrarily. It is the animal that dominates without effort, that sleeps with open eyes, that embodies solar and royal force. When the king is shown as a sphinx, he is shown in his god-form. Frankfort stresses that these images are not metaphorical representations of virtues. They are manifestations of being.

Mesopotamia, by contrast, develops a different but no less potent mechanism of divinization. Here, Frankfort shows, the king is not originally a god, but he becomes divine through function, relationship, and ritual integration. The king is the chosen agent of the gods, the shepherd appointed to maintain justice and fertility. Over time, this functional closeness hardens into identity. Kings are called sons of gods, then bear divine determinatives in their names, then receive cultic honors, and finally are worshiped outright. The case of Naram-Sin is decisive: he is depicted with the horned crown of divinity and worshiped during his lifetime. This is not a poetic exaggeration. Frankfort documents offerings to royal statues and temples dedicated to living kings.

Central to this Mesopotamian logic is the sacred marriage. The king unites ritually with the goddess, often Inanna/Ishtar/Isis/Cybele et al, and through this union receives legitimacy, fertility power, and divine favor. This is not a private myth; it is a public act with cosmic consequences. The land flourishes because the king has entered into divine union. The king becomes divine not by nature but by participation. He embodies divine order by performing divine roles.

Across both Egypt and Mesopotamia, Frankfort identifies the same underlying structure. Divinity is not defined by moral perfection or metaphysical transcendence. It is defined by cosmic function. To be divine is to sustain order, fertility, justice, and continuity. A man becomes divine by becoming indispensable to the universe as it is imagined. Ritual, symbol, and office do not point to divinity; they produce it.

This is where the book becomes unsettling for a modern reader, and especially for a Christian one. Frankfort is explicit that this system is coherent, effective, and internally consistent. It is not superstition in the casual sense. It is a total worldview in which men genuinely believed they could cross the boundary between human and divine, and in which societies organized themselves around that belief. Kings were not pretending. They were transformed by rite, by symbol, by communal recognition, and by cosmic narrative.

Frankfort closes the door firmly by contrasting this world with biblical Israel. The Hebrew conception of God destroys the entire mechanism. God is not part of nature. He does not incarnate in kings. Ritual does not regenerate creation. No man sustains the cosmos. Kings are judged, rebuked, and sometimes destroyed. Nature is desacralized. Time is linear, not cyclic. There is no sacred marriage between king and goddess. There is no divine office that transforms human nature. Frankfort does not theologize this difference, but he makes it unmistakable.

Read in this light, Kingship and the Gods is not merely a history book. It is a map of the ancient system Scripture later names and condemns. It shows how men became divine on earth: not by imagination alone, but by ritual transformation, symbolic death and rebirth, union with cosmic powers, and public recognition of a changed status. This is the system Revelation calls Babylon, the system by which “the great men of the earth” are exalted and nations are deceived.

Jeremiah 10:11

“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.”

Frankfort repeatedly describes the king as the living point of contact between the divine and human realms. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, the king’s defining role is mediation. He stands at the junction where cosmic order enters society. He does not merely pray upward; he channels power downward. This is the functional reality behind what Rome later formalized as pontifex (bridge-maker).

In Egypt, this is explicit. Pharaoh is the one through whom maat (cosmic order) flows into the land. The gods do not rule directly; they rule through him. Ritual does not ask the gods to act independently of the king; it requires the king’s presence to be effective. Frankfort emphasizes that festivals, jubilees, and New Year rites only work because the king performs them. Without him, the cosmos is unstable (I bet it is!). That is bridge logic: the king is the crossing point between realms.

In Mesopotamia, the language is different but the function is the same. The king is called the “shepherd” chosen by the gods, the one who “establishes justice,” “restores order,” and “causes the land to flourish.” Frankfort shows that these phrases are not metaphors. They mean that divine order cannot enter history without the king acting as intermediary. The gods speak through him, judge through him, and rule through him. The king becomes divine precisely because he occupies this mediating position.

This is why Frankfort spends so much time on ritual office rather than belief. The king is divine because he functions as the bridge. Divinity is not a substance he possesses privately; it is a role he embodies publicly. When the king dies, the bridge does not disappear ; it is transferred. That is why succession is so critical. The cosmos cannot be left without a mediator. Because creation itself had been fractured by rebellion and placed under a curse, the system could not sustain itself without blood—hence Rome’s relentless need to sanctify the land through sacrifice, violence, and death, mistaking bloodshed for blessing and domination for order.

Genesis 3:17

"cursed is the ground for thy sake"

Now, when Rome later uses the title Pontifex Maximus, it is naming this same ancient role in architectural language. Pontifex literally means bridge-builder, but religiously it means the one who maintains the crossing between gods and men. Rome separates the office from kingship at times, but the logic remains unchanged. Whoever holds the highest religious office controls access between realms.

Why would Christians ever require a bridge-builder between heaven and earth when Christ Himself is our High Priest; when the bridge has already been established by God, once for all, and no human office can add to, replace, or improve what He alone has accomplished?

This is why emperors eventually assume the title. Augustus becomes Pontifex Maximus not because he is personally pious, but because the empire requires a single, supreme mediator. The bridge must be unified. Power cannot tolerate a divided crossing.

Frankfort does not use the Roman term because his focus is earlier and more fundamental. He is describing the ontological necessity that later civilizations institutionalize. The bridge-builder exists wherever kingship is sacred.

From a Christian perspective, this is precisely where the conflict lies. Scripture rejects the idea that any human office can serve as the bridge between heaven and earth. It dismantles the entire system by declaring that there is one mediator, and that no king, priest, or empire can occupy that role. What Frankfort shows historically is what the Bible confronts theologically: the ancient attempt to locate mediation, divinity, and cosmic order in a man.

Frankfort’s central claim is that ancient kingship is cosmic before it is political. That cosmic structure is overwhelmingly solar and vertical. Divinity descends from above, order flows downward, and the king stands upright at the center as the axis through which this descent occurs. Sun imagery is therefore not decorative; it is structural.

In Egypt, the king is inseparable from the sun god. Frankfort explains that Pharaoh is not merely “beloved of Ra” or “chosen by Ra,” but is integrated into the solar cycle itself. The sun does not simply illuminate the king’s reign; the king participates in the sun’s eternal movement. Day after day, the sun rises, triumphs, descends, and returns. This cycle is mirrored in kingship: accession, rule, death, and renewal. The king’s authority is grounded in this repetition. To rule is to stand within the sun’s order.

This is why the obelisk is so important, even when Frankfort does not linger on it as a separate chapter. The obelisk is a frozen ray of the sun. It is vertical, unmoving, permanent, and pointed toward heaven. Frankfort’s broader analysis of Egyptian symbolism makes clear that the obelisk is not an architectural flourish. It is the sun made stone, planted on earth. It marks a place where heaven (not the 7th heaven) touches ground. The king’s presence near or associated with obelisks situates him at the same intersection. The obelisk does not represent the king; it represents the solar power that authorizes him. To erect or control obelisks is to claim mastery over cosmic legitimacy.

Osiris and Horus form the second pillar of this theology. Frankfort is explicit that Egyptian kingship is a dual divine identity. The living king is Horus. The dead king is Osiris. This is not mythology in the modern sense; it is a functional ontology. Horus is the god of rule, sight, height, and sky-order (prince of the power of the air). Osiris is the god of death, regeneration, and continuity beyond decay. Kingship moves endlessly between these two poles.

The bird form of Horus is essential. Horus as falcon or hawk is not a symbol of speed or aggression; it is a symbol of vision from above. The bird sees what humans cannot see. It occupies the sky. Frankfort shows that Egyptian thought did not imagine authority rising from the people upward; authority descended from the heavens downward. Horus as bird embodies this descent. When the king is Horus, he rules because he stands above ordinary human perspective. His authority is aerial, not terrestrial.

At Bohemian Grove Priests in Mitres Venerate (worship) a Giant Bird

Ask yourselves; is this Christian?

This bird logic is inseparable from solar logic. The falcon flies in the sun’s domain. Horus’s eye is solar. His gaze maintains order. Thus, when the king is Horus, he is not merely divine; he is cosmically aligned. His judgments reflect the order of the heavens. This is why rebellion is not merely political crime; it is cosmic disorder.

Osiris completes the transformation cycle. Frankfort emphasizes that Osiris is not a god of escape from the world. He is the god who sanctifies death. When the king dies, he does not lose divinity. He becomes Osiris, ruler of the unseen realm, guarantor of rebirth. This ensures continuity. The dead king still reigns, just elsewhere. The living king becomes Horus. Together they maintain an unbroken divine chain. Apotheosis is therefore not a singular event but a perpetual system.

Trees and groves belong to this same vertical theology, but rooted rather than aerial. Frankfort notes repeatedly that ancient religion does not separate nature from divinity. Trees are not symbols of life; they are living columns that connect underworld, earth, and sky. Sacred groves are not gathering places; they are zones of intensified presence. Divinity is thicker there. Time behaves differently there. Ritual is more potent there.

The pine tree (nothing to do with Christ) is especially important in the Anatolian and later Roman context, which Frankfort touches indirectly through comparative material. The pine is evergreen, tall, and resinous. It does not shed its life in winter. It is vertical persistence. In Cybele’s cult, the pine is not merely sacred; it is bound to death and rebirth. The tree is cut, carried, mourned, and symbolically restored. This mirrors the Osiris logic precisely. A god dies. A god returns. Life is not erased; it is transformed.

And it now sits in billions of living rooms today, broadcast as normal and harmless; courtesy of “Christian” Rome, no less, draped in the language of faith while preserving the symbols and structures of the old order almost untouched.

Frankfort’s framework allows us to see why kings and rulers gravitate toward groves, sacred trees, and solar monuments. These are not aesthetic choices. They are claims of participation in the cosmic structure itself. To rule from a sacred hill, to associate with a sacred tree, to erect solar monuments, to be depicted with bird or animal forms; all of this asserts that the ruler does not merely govern society. He anchors the universe.

Put together, the system is unmistakable. The sun provides eternal order. The obelisk fixes that order on earth. Horus rules from above as living king. Osiris reigns below as dead king. Trees and groves bind heaven and earth organically. Kingship moves through these forms, absorbing their power. A man becomes divine not by belief, but by insertion into this vertical, cosmic network.

Frankfort never moralizes this system. He describes it because it worked. And that is precisely why it stands in direct opposition to biblical theology. Scripture dismantles the entire vertical apparatus. The sun is a created light. Trees are created things. Birds are creatures, not mediators. Kings die and return to dust. No man anchors the cosmos. No grove intensifies divine presence. No obelisk channels heaven. No Horus rules from the sky.

What Frankfort gives you, when read carefully, is the anatomy of the ancient attempt to become divine by alignment with cosmic forces. Sun, stone, bird, tree; these are not metaphors. They are instruments. And they explain, with chilling clarity, how divinity was once believed to walk among men.

Osiris is repeatedly and explicitly identified with barley and emmer, the very grains that become bread. In Egyptian texts quoted by Frankfort, Osiris himself declares that he made the barley and the emmer to nourish the gods and, after them, all living creatures. This is a striking claim. Osiris is not only associated with food; he is the source of food, and food is the medium by which life continues for gods and humans alike. Grain is not a symbol of Osiris. Grain is Osiris in a transformed state.

This belief was not left at the level of words. In temple reliefs from Denderah and Philae, ears of grain are shown growing directly from the body of Osiris as he lies supine, watered by priests. Frankfort stresses that this is ritual enactment, not illustration. The resurrection of the god was believed to take place in and through the sprouting grain. Osiris does not return to life as a walking figure among men. He returns as life that feeds life.

The same logic appears in funerary practice. From the Eighteenth Dynasty onward, figures made of earth mixed with seeds were placed on biers in tombs and watered until they sprouted. These “Osiris beds” or “Osiris gardens” were not symbolic decorations. Frankfort is explicit that the sprouting of these figures signified the resurrection of the god, with whom the dead person was identified. The hope of life after death was materially tied to the same process that produced grain for bread. Resurrection was not imagined apart from food.

Harvest itself was understood as a repetition of Osiris’ death. Frankfort notes that at harvest time the god was said to die again as the grain was cut, and Isis was invoked with mourning. Yet this death was not final. The rebirth of Osiris in the next season’s grain was anticipated and taken for granted. Plutarch describes Egyptians sowing seed with gestures of mourning, as if burying the god, and rejoicing later in the harvest. Agriculture was not merely economic. It was liturgical.

Within this context, participation takes on its full meaning. Grain grown from Osiris’ body was harvested, processed, and eaten. Bread was not neutral nourishment. It was life that had passed through death and returned. To eat was to participate in the god’s victory over annihilation. This is why Osiris is called ruler and lord of food offerings, sovereign of victuals. Sustenance itself was sacramental.

Frankfort also draws attention to mystery rites performed at night on sacred waters, which Herodotus explicitly calls the mysteries of Osiris. These rites reenacted the god’s vicissitudes, his loss and restoration. The god’s body was believed to become grain. Grain became bread. Bread sustained life. Participation in food was participation in Osiris’ continued existence beyond death.

Later sources reinforce this pattern. Frankfort cites accounts of figures of Osiris made from moist earth and grain placed inside hollowed tree trunks or pillars used in Isis cult contexts. These were not inert images. They were living, germinating bodies. The god was present as growth, moisture, and renewal. Osiris was life caught in the spell of death and released again in forms that could be handled, tended, and consumed.

The result is a theology in which salvation is not forgiveness, and immortality is not moral reward. Salvation is participation in a cycle. Life continues because the god has entered death and now sustains the world from within it. To eat is to share in that continuity. Agriculture itself becomes a sacrament, and the boundary between ritual, food, and theology dissolves.

Seen this way, the Osiris cult reveals itself as a fully developed system of transformation through participation in a dead-and-returned god. It is not accidental, not peripheral, and not poetic exaggeration. It shaped how an entire civilization understood life, death, kingship, and hope beyond the grave. Frankfort does not condemn this system, but he exposes it with precision. For a Christian reader, the implications are unmistakable. This is not merely ancient religion; it is a counterfeit gospel enacted in soil, seed, and bread, promising life through a god who dies, is transformed, and is consumed so that his life may continue in those who partake.

I'd like to remind my readers that no ecumenical canon ever defines the Lord’s Supper metaphysically or in mystery-cult terms. Where early Christianity explains the Supper at all, it does so outside the councils, consistently framing it as prayer and thanksgiving rather than as ritual transformation. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian texts, introduces the meal plainly: “Now concerning the thanksgiving, give thanks thus,” and proceeds with prayers of gratitude to the Father, without any language of consuming divine flesh. Likewise, Justin Martyr explains Christian worship by emphasizing that the presider “offers prayers and thanksgivings,” and that Christians do not offer bloody sacrifices but “praise Him by prayers and thanksgivings.” Even when later writers speak of Eucharistic “sacrifice,” authoritative explanations clarify that “all prayers were regarded as a sacrifice,” and that “the real sacrificial act in the Supper consists only in the eucharistian poiein,” the act of giving thanks. Taken together, the earliest witnesses show a deliberate distinction between the Lord’s Supper and the pagan mystery rites that promised transformation through consuming a dying god.

There was no priest performing a ritual act to summon Christ down in His glorified state, no invocation meant to compel a divine presence into a wafer through ceremonial power. Early Christians rejected such practices outright. Their refusal to bow before images was not accidental or merely cultural; it was a conscious rejection of the pagan belief that statues and images could be indwelt by summoned spirits. Christians understood that these images were not neutral art but vessels of spiritual presence, and they refused to participate in a system that sought to localize, manipulate, or materialize fallen powers through ritual means.

Acts 3:21

“Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.”

The context is Peter (remember the apostle not the first pope) preaching publicly, after the resurrection and ascension, making clear that Christ is not repeatedly descending at human command. Heaven has received Him, and He remains there until the appointed time set by God alone.

This passage directly contradicts any idea that Christ can be summoned down from heaven through ritual action, priestly invocation, or ceremonial formula. According to Scripture, Christ’s presence in heaven is not temporary or negotiable; it is fixed by divine decree until the final restoration of all things.

Luke 11:35

“Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.”