The Cage of Every Unclean Bird

Today's post examines ancient symbols, forgotten histories, and the spiritual imagery that still surrounds us today. By comparing archaeology, mythology, and Scripture, we explore how demonic gods, sacred monuments, and hidden motifs continue to shape the modern world; often in places least expected.

When you look carefully at the Dendera image of Osiris, you see something that should not be glossed over. Osiris, the god of the underworld, is shown lying in his coffin with a literal bird head placed where his human head should be. It is not a stylized decoration. The artist intentionally shows the ruling deity of the dead with the face of a bird-like spirit.

Scripture has very specific language for this category. In Isaiah, lands under judgment become dwelling places for ominous birds; owl, hawk, cormorant, vulture; creatures portrayed as markers of the spirit world in a state of divine abandonment. These birds represent unclean presences filling the vacuum where God’s presence once stood. Revelation picks this up directly and calls Babylon “the cage of every unclean and hateful bird,” equating these birds with demonic beings. Paul adds that the adversary is the “prince of the power of the air,” placing the realm of hostile spirits in the same symbolic zone of sky and air where these birds operate.

So when Osiris is depicted with the head of a bird, ruling the underworld yet connected to the air, you have exactly the same pattern Scripture uses: a spiritual entity tied to death, air, and unclean bird imagery. The correspondence is stark.

Now consider the Vatican’s obelisk standing in St. Peter’s Square. This monument is not neutral. It was originally from Heliopolis, the ancient Egyptian center of solar worship. There, it was connected to the earliest creation symbol in Egyptian religion: the Benben stone. And here again, the bird appears.

The Benben stone is the “first mound,” the point of creation, the place where life emerges from the waters of chaos. But Egyptian theology says this mound first manifested when the Bennu bird; often depicted as heron-like or phoenix-like; alighted upon it. The Bennu is the bird of rising, awakening, and rebirth. It is the bird-form of the sun god’s creative spark. In other words, the Benben stone is not just a stone. It is a solar pillar connected to a sacred bird and a presence descending onto a point of rising light. This stone became the prototype for obelisks.

So an obelisk is, symbolically, a Benben stone in stretched form: a solar pillar representing the rising light of the sun god, consecrated by a sacred bird that touched the first mound of creation. The same pattern emerges again: a towering solar symbol, a bird tied to divine power, and a link to the god who rules the realms between earth, sky, and the underworld.

This takes us back to the central question: why would the Vatican place such a monument, with such layered associations, at the very heart of its most important square? And why surround it with lions; sun animals from antiquity; and top it with a cross, a shape used as a solar emblem long before it became Christian? The Bible never instructs God’s people to repurpose pagan sacred architecture. It commands the opposite: tear down the altars, smash the pillars, destroy the images of the gods.

To complicate matters further, the god associated with these obelisks evolves through cultures in a clear line. Osiris in Egypt merges with Amun to form Amun-Ra, the sun god. Greek visitors to Africa identified Amun-Ra with Zeus, calling him Zeus-Ammon. In Libya, Zeus-Ammon was worshiped as a horned sun god, explicitly connected back to the Egyptian source. So the chain runs seamlessly: Osiris → Amun-Ra → Zeus-Ammon → Libyan Zeus. Always solar. Always linked to the sky, the air, and the unseen realm. Always accompanied by bird imagery.

So you have Osiris shown with a bird head, fitting the biblical pattern of air-bound unclean spirits. You have the Benben stone, the first obelisk, receiving the divine touch of the Bennu bird. You have the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square derived from that same tradition. You have solar lions and a pre-Christian solar cross placed on it to "Christianise" it. And you have the clear biblical command not to preserve the sacred symbols of foreign gods, especially those tied to the underworld and to the powers of the air.

The question this raises is not fringe; it is textual, historical, and theological: Why would the center of "Roman" Christianity elevate the phallic solar pillar of a god whose imagery aligns so precisely with the category Scripture warns against; powers of the air marked by unclean birds?

“Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”— Revelation 18:2

The following verse from Isaiah 34:11-15 is quite telling (keep in mind the screech owl is the demonic goddess Lilith/Isis)

“But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it;the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it:and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion,and the stones of emptiness.

They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing.

And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof:and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there,and find for herself a place of rest.

There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered,every one with her mate.”

It raises another question: why do influential figures, including leaders who wear the mitre in religious settings, gather at Bohemian Grove beneath the giant owl statue, participating in ceremonies they describe as ‘mock’ sacrifices, yet framed with imagery long associated with occult or esoteric symbolism?

NB: Babylon stands for a false religious–political order built on deception

Also why would pope Clement I of Rome lean on the story of the phoenix when quoting Job, if the Hebrew text never mentions a phoenix at all? In Job the word is ḥol or chol, which in Hebrew refers to sand, not a mythical bird. The Greek translators introduced the phoenix interpretation, and later writers in Rome carried it forward. Yet the phoenix was never a biblical creature; it belonged to the world of Mediterranean myth. In antiquity the phoenix was closely tied to Venus and to the cycle of death and rebirth associated with her. In Egypt that same imagery was connected to Isis through the Bennu bird, the rising light, and the renewal of the sun. So when Clement uses the phoenix as a symbol of resurrection, he is borrowing from pagan cosmology rather than from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. The question is not whether he intended syncretism, but why early Roman Christianity repeatedly chose symbols rooted in foreign deities; Venus, Isis, the solar cults; over the imagery explicitly provided within the Hebrew text.

Could this explain the antisemitism?

Why would the Vatican claim to have “conquered” paganism through the placement of the Egyptian obelisk, and then in the seventeenth century surround that same obelisk with lions, the very symbols honored in the Isis cult? Plutarch records plainly that the Egyptians revered the Lion because of its connection to the flooding of the Nile and the rising of Sirius, the star of Isis. In his own words: “Of the stars, the Egyptians think that Sirius, the Dog Star, is the star of Isis, because it is the bringer of water. They also hold the Lion in honor, and they adorn the doorways of their shrines with gaping lions’ heads, because the Nile overflows when for the first time the Sun comes into conjunction with Leo.” If the Vatican had truly intended the obelisk to stand as a sign of Christianity’s triumph over the religions of Egypt, why preserve the Egyptian solar pillar at all, and why add lions; precisely the zodiacal and cultic symbols tied to Isis’s rise and the Sun’s power; around its base during the 1600s? This is not the destruction of paganism as commanded in Scripture, but the incorporation of its most recognizable symbols placed openly in the center of "Roman" Christianity.

The presence of lions and eagles does not prove the conquest of paganism; it proves the survival of pagan symbolism. In antiquity both the lion and the eagle were already pagan imperial symbols long before Christianity touched Rome. The lion belonged to the cult of Isis and the solar cycle; the eagle was the standard of Roman emperors and the bird of Zeus. And the symbolism becomes even harder to ignore when you consider that during the entire historical period of Egypt, the sun rose in Leo at the heliacal rising of Sirius; the very moment associated with Isis and the flood of the Nile. This is why, as early as the Fifth Dynasty, the Egyptians carved temple gargoyles and lintels with lion heads. The lion was not a generic animal or a decorative choice; it was a deliberate zodiacal emblem tied to Isis, Sirius, and the Sun. That continuity shows that by placing lions around the obelisk, the Vatican wasn’t defeating paganism at all; it was preserving the exact same solar–Isis symbolism the Egyptians had encoded there thousands of years earlier.

The imagery surrounding Osiris becomes even more revealing when you look at how the priests treated his tomb and the rituals that unfolded around it. According to the traditions, the left leg of Osiris was buried in the Abaton; the “inaccessible,” a sacred zone where ordinary people were forbidden to go. The priests believed that this buried leg was mystically connected to one of the sources of the Nile. The Abaton itself was pictured as a mountain with a cavern, and inside sat Osiris embodied as the Nile, guarded by a serpent and holding two overflowing vases of water, a clear symbol of Aquarius. Long before anyone spoke of the “Age of Aquarius,” the Egyptians were already encoding water-bearer imagery into their god of the underworld.

Nearby stood woods where the soul of Osiris, in the form of a human-headed bird, perched among the branches. Within these woods the priests placed 365 offering tables; one for each day of the year. A high priest served in rotation, one month at a time, entering the woods daily to present milk and water to Osiris. Every ten days, Isis herself was said to visit the site with an offering of milk to rejuvenate the dead god. A cycle of elite priesthood, secluded woods, ritual offerings, and the rejuvenation of a hidden deity; these details call to mind the way powerful groups still conduct symbolic ceremonies in secluded groves, far from public scrutiny.

When you line all this together; the inaccessible tomb, the mitre wearing high priest in the woods, the soul of the god perched as a bird, the Aquarius symbolism, the offerings in a sacred grove; it becomes clear that ancient elites conducted rituals in private wooded sanctuaries centered on the rebirth of a hidden deity. And the uncomfortable question is why modern elites still reenact ceremonies in secluded groves under the watch of totemic figures, just as their ancient counterparts once did around the Abaton of Osiris.

The Stela of the Sphinx of Giza shows a constellation of symbols that consistently appear in Egyptian solar religion. At the top is the winged sun disk, flanked by serpents; one of the oldest depictions of divine solar power in Egypt. The serpents are not incidental. They represent protection, illumination, and danger: the god who brings light is also the god whose power can strike, bite, or scorch. Beneath this, the two sphinxes (with lion bodies and human heads) emphasize the solar connection even further. The Sphinx was a lion, and the lion was the zodiacal marker of the Sun’s rising in Leo at the heliacal rising of Sirius; Isis’s star. Egypt aligned its sacred architecture, its myths, and its ritual calendar around this solar-lion-serpent complex.

When you place this beside the lions placed at the base of the Vatican obelisk in the seventeenth century, the continuity is hard to ignore. The lions are not arbitrary decorations. They stand at the foundation of an Egyptian obelisk; Egypt’s own solar pillar; exactly in the same way lions flank the solar symbols in Egyptian monuments. The claim that the Vatican placed lions because “Christ is the Lion of Judah” falters when you realize that lions were already Egyptian solar creatures thousands of years earlier.

The contrast becomes sharper when you compare the earliest Christian Eucharist with later ritual forms. The Didache, one of the earliest church writings, describes the Eucharist not as a sacrificial transformation but as a thanksgiving meal, a memorial of Christ, and a blessing over shared bread and wine. There is no wafer, no concept of a sun disc-shaped host, and no notion that the bread itself becomes the body of God through a priestly invocation. Those developments came centuries later, especially in the Latin West.

But in Egypt, long before Christianity, priests invoked the presence of their gods into physical vessels; bread, images, statues, and sacred objects; through ritual formulas. The Egyptians had well-developed liturgies specifically designed to “make the god present” in a material form. The transformation of a simple meal into a ritual object identified with the deity looks far more like the Egyptian temple system than like the table of remembrance described in the Didache.

This raises a legitimate symbolic question: why did the Christian host become a circular, disk-shaped wafer; a perfect symbol of the sun? The sun disk was already the central icon of Egyptian worship. When you set that beside biblical warnings, you see why the symbolism is troubling. Proverbs warns that one must be cautious with wine because “in the end it bites like a serpent”; a reminder that what appears like divine light can sting. Jesus Himself says, “Take heed that the light in you be not darkness,” a direct warning that not every “light” is holy. The winged sun disk carried serpents explicitly, and the Bible uses serpents metaphorically for deception, danger, and false illumination.

So the question naturally arises: if early Christians did not use a sun-shaped object for worship, and if Egyptian religion centered on sun disks, serpents, ritual invocation, and lion symbolism, why did later Latin "Christian" ritual adopt forms so closely aligned with those earlier solar motifs? The circular wafer, the lions placed around the Egyptian obelisk, the serpent imagery bound to ancient sun worship, the papal heraldry that has at times incorporated serpents, the "urgent" calendar reform under pope Gregory XIII to realign Easter with the spring equinox despite Isaiah’s condemnation of those who “worship the host of heaven,” and the priestly act of invoking divine presence onto a physical object—these practices resemble the patterns of earlier Egyptian solar religion far more closely than they resemble the simple remembrance meal described in the earliest apostolic writings.

During the time of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic hierarchy placed heavy restrictions on Scripture; not on the Latin Bible itself, but on who could read it and in what form. This is why the Church banned or tightly controlled private ownership of Bibles in the common languages, prohibited unapproved translations, discouraged or punished unsupervised reading, and restricted the distribution of Scripture among ordinary believers. The timing is not accidental. The Reformation spread precisely because people began reading the Bible for themselves, discovering that many church doctrines had no clear foundation in the apostolic writings.

Only the Latin Vulgate was considered safe, and ordinary Christians were barred from having Scripture in their own languages. Vernacular Bibles were confiscated, burned, or placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and councils such as those at Toulouse and Tarragona ordered that laypeople could not possess Scripture in the common tongue. After the Reformation began to spread through printed Bibles, the Church tightened control even further. Private ownership of Scripture was discouraged or forbidden, unapproved translations were outlawed, unsupervised reading was condemned, and distributing the Bible in the language of the people was treated as a threat to church authority. These measures ensured that the Word of God could not circulate freely among believers but remained under the control of an unauthorized hierarchy rather than in the hands of the people of Christ.

The Word of God does not belong to an unauthorized hierarchy. It does not belong to councils, clerics, or systems that developed centuries after the apostles. It belongs to the people of Christ. The earliest Christians did not need a priestly class to interpret Scripture for them; the Holy Spirit was their guide. As Paul says, “You need not that any man teach you, for the anointing teaches you all things.” When a church claims that believers cannot understand the Word without its permission, it contradicts the very nature of the gospel.

So what did they really fear?

They feared exactly what the Reformation revealed: that once ordinary believers could read Scripture without supervision, many would see the distance between the simple faith of the apostles and the complex system that had grown up over the centuries; complete with rituals, symbols, and practices far removed from the earliest pattern of the church.

It could also be because the apostles never taught anything resembling later doctrines such as sacramental penance, purgatory, Marian dogmas, papal infallibility, the ritual consumption of a consecrated wafer, or practices echoing ancient solar religion? They also never taught confession to a priest or the idea that a clergy member could absolve sins “in persona Christi.” In the apostolic writings, every believer is commanded to confess sins directly to God, not through an intermediary priesthood. The farther the later hierarchy drifted from the simplicity of apostolic teaching, the more threatening it would have been for ordinary Christians to read Scripture for themselves and see that none of these doctrines were ever preached by Christ or His apostles.

Back to Egypt.....

To understand how deeply Egypt embedded its theology into architecture, consider the pyramid of Unas, a monument that reveals more than simple burial practices.

The pyramid of Unas stands out among the monuments of Egypt’s Old Kingdom because of a remarkable architectural feature: a long, descending passageway that links the pyramid on the high desert plateau to its valley temple below. This passageway is unusually long; 666 meters; and almost seven meters wide, forming a grand processional route. It was fully paved, and the limestone walls along its length were decorated with detailed reliefs showing religious rites, craftsmen at work, and scenes of daily life and agriculture. These were not random decorations; they reflected the belief that the king’s afterlife required divine rituals, earthly provision, and cosmic order under the god of the underworld.

The pyramid of Unas is also historically important because it is the first place where the Pyramid Texts were discovered. These are the oldest known religious writings in Egypt, carved directly into the walls of the inner chambers. They contain spells, prayers, and ritual formulas intended to guide the deceased king into the afterlife, unite him with the gods, and secure his resurrection.

(It is noteworthy that in the “Apotheosis of George Washington,” he is portrayed among beings presented as "gods"; figures many would regard not as deities but as spiritual powers opposed to the God of Scripture. It is equally striking that major capitals such as Washington D.C., Paris, London, and the Vatican all prominently display an obelisk.)

Notably, these texts form the earliest foundation of what later became the Egyptian “Books of the Dead” and the Osirian resurrection mythology.

Inside the burial chamber, most of the walls are lined with limestone, but the west wall and the ends of the north and south walls; where the basalt sarcophagus is positioned; are lined with alabaster, a stone associated with purity and sanctity. The blocking stones sealing the corridor were made of hard red granite, emphasizing the importance of permanently protecting the king’s body and the sacred texts surrounding it.

The passageway leading from the pyramid of Unas to its valley temple is described as 666 meters long. In Revelation, the number 666 is the number associated with the “beast,” a symbol of human systems raised to divine status, false worship, and a counterfeit of God’s authority. While the number 666 in the Egyptian structure is a simple measurement and not a prophecy, the symbolic parallels become striking when you consider what that passageway represented.

For the Egyptians, the long descent was the ritual path into the afterlife, lined with images of offerings, worship, and the king’s transformation into a divine being. It was part of a religious system where a human ruler was elevated to godhood, required ritual invocations, and relied on sacred texts, spells, and priestly mediation to secure eternal life. In biblical thought, that kind of system; where divine power is claimed through human authority, image-craft, and ritual; is exactly the pattern Revelation warns about.

The fact that this ritualized descent measures 666 meters becomes symbolically noteworthy because it mirrors the biblical idea:human power raised to divine status, ritual worship focused on a human figure, and a system that binds people to a religious authority through controlled access to sacred knowledge.

In Revelation, “666” isn’t just a number; it represents a religious-political system that impersonates God, demands loyalty, and centralizes spiritual power in human hands. In Egypt, the rituals surrounding the pharaoh’s tomb did exactly that: the king was treated as a god; priests mediated salvation; sacred texts were restricted; and the afterlife was controlled through ritual formulas and images carved into the stone.

(In essence, it paints a picture of rulers who would rather reject the authority of God and build systems that keep people dependent on them; systems that elevate their own power and mythic “rebirth”—while enslaving others to them and out of the hope and freedom offered by heaven.)

Revelation 18:23 (KJV):

“And the merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.”