Unmasking the Lion-Serpent: The Solar Cult of Satan Hidden in the Vatican
- Michelle Hayman
- Aug 8
- 25 min read
The Beast 666 and the Devil’s Lion-Serpent Legacy
Aleister Crowley – infamous occultist and self-declared Beast 666 – believed he was born to embody the very archetype of the Devil in rebellion against Christian morality. “Before I touched my teens, I was already aware that I was The Beast whose number is 666,” Crowley reminisces of his early sense of destiny. In Crowley’s view, the Biblical “Devil” was not a foe of humanity but rather its enlightening ally – the serpent of Eden who offered forbidden knowledge. Crowley boldly writes that “this serpent, Satan, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught Initiation”. In his cosmology, the serpent that Orthodox Christianity demonizes is in fact the liberator, urging mankind to open its eyes.
This idea reaches back to humanity’s earliest myths. The image of a lion-serpent, a fierce amalgam of kingly predator and wise reptile, recurs in esoteric lore as a symbol of occult force and forbidden gnosis. In ancient Babylon, the god Nergal embodied this duality. Nergal was a solar deity of the destructive noon-day sun, worshipped as a god of war, plague, and the underworld. His symbols were the lion and the serpent – “bulls and lions were associated with Nergal” in his cult, and he was often portrayed as a hybrid creature, “a lion with a man’s head” in artistic depictions. In Gnostic tradition the demiurge Yaldabaoth – a false god analogous to Satan – is likewise described as a “lion-faced serpent, with its eyes…like lightning fires”. These are the very same symbols Crowley would champion to invert Christian doctrine: the proud lion and the wise serpent, united against the “false light” of pious ignorance.
The Bible itself links the Devil to these predator images. The First Epistle of Peter warns Christians to “be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”. In Eden the Devil appears as the serpent who promises Eve godlike knowledge: “your eyes shall be opened, …ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”. This “opening of the eyes” is precisely what the Bible forbids – the awakening of the third eye, the kundalini serpent power, the knowledge of good and evil. Crowley embraced that forbidden wisdom wholeheartedly. Identifying himself with the Biblical Beast, he adopted the symbols of Pan, Baphomet, and even Babylon’s lion-serpent gods to redefine the Devil not as a monster to fear, but as the solar-phallic life energy that orthodox religion has suppressed.
When Christ came, He repeatedly warned that this path: seeking power, hidden knowledge, or self-deification outside the will of God; leads to ruin:
John 10:1 – “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” This condemns trying to “climb up” to divinity by any path other than through Him; exactly what the serpent offered.
Matthew 6:22–23 – He warns that if your “eye” (symbol of perception) is “evil,” your whole body is full of darkness — a direct caution against false illumination.
Matthew 16:26 – “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The serpent’s offer was to gain godlike knowledge and power at the cost of obedience and life itself.
Matthew 24:4–5 – His first words in the end-times discourse: “Take heed that no man deceive you.” That deception began in Eden, masquerading as enlightenment.
Crowley’s Hymn to Pan: Solar Kundalini and the Goat-God Unleashed
Crowley’s most famous poetic invocation, Hymn to Pan (*see below) is a paean to this raw solar-serpent force. In it, Crowley merges multiple pagan deities – Pan, the Greek goat-footed god of wild nature, Apollo, the solar god of light, and even hints of the dark horned Baphomet – into a single rapturous vision. He summons Pan to “come with Apollo in bridal dress” alongside Artemis, wedding the sun and moon, male and female, in one divine union. The poem brims with lion and serpent imagery to celebrate the Beast within. Crowley exults in the feral strength of his awakened spirit: “I…writhe and wrestle…Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp”. Here the lion’s power and the serpent’s wisdom unite – “strong as a lion” yet “sharp as an asp” (asp being a venomous snake) – to signify the potent, illumined energy he is channeling.
Throughout the Hymn to Pan, Crowley makes explicit references to occult signs of illumination. He cries out for “the sign of the Open Eye” – the opened third eye of insight – and for “the token erect of thorny thigh”, a blatant phallic symbol of generative force. He identifies himself with Pan in blatantly goatish terms: “I am thy mate, I am thy man, Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god”. This line equates Pan with the Goat-God archetype – the same archetype as the medieval Baphomet, the Sabbatic Goat idol later embraced by occultists. Crowley, as Pan’s celebrant, becomes the “goat of [Pan’s] flock,” literally the beast among the herd of humanity set apart to bear the stigma of forbidden knowledge. In calling himself “gold” and “god,” he also links Pan to solar alchemy (gold being the metal of the sun) and divinity. Crowley’s Pan-Baphomet is a solar goat, a personification of the life force and creative chaos that conventional religion chains as “demonic.”
Importantly, Crowley invokes time cycles of the sun in the poem, reinforcing that this energy is solar in nature. He races “with hoofs of steel…through solstice stubborn to equinox”, tracing the path of the sun through its yearly stations. The equinox (a concept Crowley also used to name his occult periodical The Equinox) is a moment of balance between light and dark, day and night – a fitting metaphor for Crowley’s project of uniting opposites (spirit and flesh, heaven and hell). As Pan, Crowley revels in breaking the “galling fetter” of moral restraint. He wants the full flood of natural vitality, unencumbered by guilt. “I am awake in the grip of the snake. The eagle slashes with beak and claw; The gods withdraw; The great beasts come!” he proclaims in a frenzy. This vivid scene shows the old gods (of pious heaven) receding while primordial forces – symbolized by the eagle and the snake – take hold. The snake gripping him is the kundalini serpent uncoiling up the spine to “awaken” the third eye; the eagle attacking is a symbol of the Sun’s fierceness (in some traditions the eagle represents Zeus or Jupiter, a solar sky-force). Crowley thus describes a kind of spiritual battle during his illumination: the “beast” in him (snake, lion, goat) must overthrow the placid gods of the past, the righteous Christ, and His father.
Crowley’s own commentary on the Tarot’s Devil card (which he linked to Baphomet) further clarifies this symbolism. In Magick in Theory and Practice, he asserts that “He is ‘the Devil’ of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is Baphomet, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.... He is therefore Life, and Love”, identified with “the leaping goat” of the zodiac Capricorn and the Hebrew letter Ayin (which means Eye). In other words, Crowley saw the Devil not as a hateful fiend, but as the union of opposites (androgyne), the life force (fertile goat), and the enlightenment of the Open Eye. This is a complete inversion of the Christian view – to Crowley, Lucifer is “the light-bringer” and Baphomet (the goat with a torch between its horns) is a symbol of illumination. In Crowley’s creed, the solar-kundalini serpent energy is the true source of spiritual life, and it stands in direct opposition to the stuffy, lifeless morality of the true Biblical Church.
Thus, Crowley consciously merged Pan, Baphomet, Lucifer, and even the Beast 666 into one composite archetype: a Horned God of the Sun and Earth who invites mankind to embrace joy, knowledge and freedom – “Do what thou wilt,” as the poem repeats, “as a great god can”. This was his antidote to what he saw as the life-denying poison of biblical Christianity. And in crafting this archetype, Crowley was reviving very ancient mythic threads – threads that lead back through occult and pagan lore to Babylon itself.
Nergal and Mars: The War God Who Founded Rome
Long before Crowley’s modern rebellion, the lion-serpent was an emblem of proud empires and their war-gods. The Babylonians feared and venerated Nergal, calling him the “Raging King” of plague, war and pestilence. Nergal was a solar deity, but not of the gentle dawn – he represented the pitiless noon sun that burns and withers. As one scholar notes, “portrayed in hymns and myths as a god of war and pestilence, Nergal seems to represent the sun of noontime and of the summer solstice that brings destruction”. The lion was Nergal’s sacred animal, epitomizing his ferocity. In art he could appear as a mighty warrior with a mace adorned with lion heads, or even as a chimera – part man, part great cat. One Akkadian seal shows Nergal as a figure with a lion’s body and human head, an eerie mirror to the later iconography of the Beast in Revelation. The serpent aspect of Nergal is subtler, but present: as an underworld god of disease, he was linked to the “snake” as an agent of death and as a symbol of healing (since in Mesopotamia as in later cultures, the power to afflict and to cure were two sides of the same coin). In effect, Nergal was an ancient prototype of Satan – a destroyer, yet one who could also ward off evil (Babylonian exorcists would invoke Nergal to protect a house, harnessing his wrathful power against other demons). In the cosmic drama, Nergal personified “inflicted death”, the harsh executor of divine judgment.
NB: Pope Gregory XIII changed the calendar in October 1582, deleting 10 days to realign Easter with the spring equinox — the very celestial marker tied in pagan tradition to the sun’s power and the renewal of the year. In Mithraic belief, Mithras/Kronos was the cosmic force who moved the heavens through the precession of the equinoxes The reform may have been presented as Christian housekeeping, but its timing and astronomical focus follow patterns far older than the Church.
The equinox — particularly the spring equinox — holds profound initiatory power in magical traditions. It marks a moment of perfect balance between light and dark, a gateway used for rites of renewal, initiation, and spiritual ascent. By tying Easter to this celestial threshold, and then repositioning it through papal decree, the Church effectively claimed authority over the timing of cosmic rebirth. It was more than reform; it was the redefinition of spiritual timing according to institutional will.
Crowley saw the equinoxes (spring and autumn) as spiritually charged moments of balance — ideal for initiation, ritual, and magical work.
I digress.....
In Mesopotamian religion, Nergal was not a kindly ancestor spirit or gentle guide to the dead — he was the executioner of the underworld. One hymn says he “cuts down like a scythe,” and another calls him “the raging lion” who devastates lands.
Even when he takes on a “protective” role, it’s the way a warlord protects; you invoke Nergal to destroy your enemies faster than they can destroy you.
A god of the underworld in that system can never be truly benevolent, because his domain is death itself. The underworld in Mesopotamian belief wasn’t heaven; it was a joyless, dusty shadow-land where all souls went, ruled by fear and decrees of the death gods. Nergal’s “benevolence” is like the “mercy” of a hangman who gives you a quick death instead of a slow one.
So when modern occultists or syncretists paint Nergal as some wise, gentle underworld guide, they’re whitewashing a figure who; by his own myths; thrived on war, plague, and the dominion of the grave. That’s the same “angel of death” archetype the Bible warns about, dressed up to look respectable.
When the Bible speaks of Satan as “the destroyer” or “the adversary,” it echoes the role of gods like Nergal. In the Second Book of Kings, the Hebrews encountered Nergal’s cult among the Babylonians and identified him with a carrion beast – the text says the deported men of Cuthah “made Nergal their god,” and the Talmud explains “and what was it? A cock.”. A cock (rooster) is a solar symbol (announcing the dawn) and also akin to Mars (whose sacred animal in Roman times was the rooster). It is striking that both a lion and a cock were associated with Nergal – two animals that later Christian lore would connect with the Devil (the lion as devourer, and the rooster as traitor’s signal in Peter’s denial of Christ). We see an uncanny continuity of symbols: Nergal’s lion, passing through Gnostic myth into the lion-faced serpent Yaldabaoth, and his rooster, passing into folk Satanic imagery (medieval witches were said to sacrifice cocks to the Devil). The solar-serpent cult opposed by Judaeo-Christian tradition had been alive and well in Mesopotamia, long before the rise of the biblical Church.
Nergal’s legacy continued explicitly into the Classical world. The Mesopotamian war-god was identified by the Greeks with Ares and by the Romans with Mars. Through this identification, the lion-faced deity of war and plague became the patron of the Roman state. In myth, Mars sires the founders of Rome: twin brothers Romulus and Remus were the sons of the virgin Rhea Silvia by the god Mars. In other words, Rome – the great empire that later birthed the Roman Catholic Church – traces its paternal lineage to Nergal. The “lion and serpent” thus slither in the very roots of Western civilization.
The early Romans were proud to carry the Aquila, the eagle standard, as the emblem of their legions – an emblem inherited from Jupiter (Zeus), but also an ancient solar totem of empire. (Since antiquity the eagle signified imperial strength; “Roman legions used the animal as their standard”.) Yet the eagle standard was more than just Roman pride – it was a continuation of Babylonian symbolism. In Babylon, bronze reliefs show the eagle with a lion’s head or a lion-demon with eagle’s wings, representing gods like Ninurta or Zu. The lion and the eagle are two faces of the same imperial solar force: the lion embodies conquest on land, and the eagle conquest from the sky.
The golden winged lion above the entrance of "St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice" shows the beast with eagle’s wings, a fierce lion’s head, and a tablet inscribed Pax tibi Marce Evangelista meus. Nowhere in the Bible is Mark ever described this way. Yet this image matches the lion-headed, eagle-winged deity of Babylon and the Mithraic leontocephaline — the head, the wings, the law-tablet all the same; only the name has changed. This is not a Christian creation but the old imperial god of sun and empire, repackaged and enthroned in the Church.
When Rome’s empire gave way to new empires, the symbols persisted. The double-headed eagle of the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors, the black eagle of Nazi Germany’s Reichsadler, and the bald eagle of the United States Great Seal are all iterations of this icon. The eagle that once stood for Jupiter’s dominion came to adorn the banners of the Third Reich – explicitly meant to evoke the Roman Imperial eagle as a sign that the Reich was a successor to Rome’s power. Likewise, the American eagle, clutching arrows and olive branch, consciously links the young republic to the mantle of Rome (the very choice of eagle was because “eagles were an obvious way to express…an ancient Roman symbol of the power of the state”). The predators of empire still spread their wings and bare their teeth on our coins, flags, and architecture.
We find lions and eagles in the crests of nations and the names of military operations. These symbols are solar and Jovian — the trappings of worldly power. The winged lion, in particular, has marched through history on the standards of Venice, the emblems of the Crusader states, the coats of arms of medieval kings, and even in papal heraldry. It has crowned the banners of maritime republics, appeared in the insignia of the British Empire, and still adorns civic seals and military units today; the same Babylonian-Mithraic archetype, carried across time and empire under ever-changing names.
And so we must ask: when Christianity became the state religion of Rome, did the empire truly abandon these symbols – or did it merely baptize them and continue the cult in disguise?
Ivory Panel of Christ and the Four Creatures – St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice
The four creatures carved around "Christ"; man, lion, ox, and eagle; are officially taken from Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 1:10) and John’s in Revelation (4:7). But those visions themselves echo much older Babylonian and Assyrian throne imagery.
In Babylonian religion:
Winged lions and winged bulls (lamassu or shedu) stood at palace gates as protective beings. These were hybrid creatures (nephilim); human-headed, lion- or bull-bodied, eagle-winged; meant to guard kings and mark divine authority.
The lion was linked to the sun god Shamash and to war gods like Nergal, often paired with wings or eagle attributes to show dominion over earth and sky.
The eagle itself was a royal and solar emblem, representing the sky god Anu and the sun’s all-seeing power.
The combination of these creatures around a central enthroned figure is directly paralleled in Babylonian and Assyrian reliefs, where gods or kings sit surrounded by symbolic “living creatures” that embody cosmic order and imperial dominion.
Ezekiel was a Jewish prophet in Babylonian exile, so the imagery in his vision; later adopted into "Catholic" art; mirrors the hybrid guardians and cosmic beasts he would have seen carved into Babylon’s gates and temples.
This ivory panel from St. Mark’s Basilica shows "Christ" surrounded by the man, lion, ox, and eagle — symbols the Church assigns to the four evangelists. Yet at no point in Scripture are Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever described as such creatures. These hybrid forms trace back, not to the Gospels, but to Babylonian and Assyrian throne imagery, where winged lions, bulls, and eagles surrounded kings and gods as emblems of imperial power.
Revelation 17:2, speaking of Babylon the Great:
“With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”
Eagles and Obelisks: Solar Emblems in the Modern “Babylon”
One of the most blatant pagan holdovers in "Christendom" is the obelisk. In the ancient Egyptian religion (which heavily influenced late pagan Rome), obelisks were phallic pillars of the sun god Ra/Osiris– stone needles that connected earth to sky as a conduit of solar virility. It is no coincidence that obelisk monuments stand in the major power centers of the world today: Vatican City, Washington D.C., London, and Paris each boast a prominent Egyptian obelisk as if claiming the solar blessing of empire. The Vatican’s own central obelisk was literally hauled from Egypt: “according to Pliny, [it] comes from the city of Heliopolis on the Nile” – Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. Caligula brought this 25-meter pillar to Rome in the first century, and the Church later erected it in the very heart of St. Peter’s Square. In fact, when pope Sixtus V in 1586 had the Vatican obelisk raised into place, he was consciously performing a magical act of "Christian" triumphalism; or so it was sold to the people. In reality, it was the re-enthronement of a pagan monument to the sun god, crowned with a cross to pacify the masses, and set on a base adorned with four bronze lions and an imperial eagle ; the very beasts of Babylonian and Roman power. The hypocrisy is staggering: treating the public like fools, dressing a solar-phallus idol with Christian trappings while surrounding it with ancient symbols of empire, then insisting this was holy. The truth is, the rituals performed that day were pagan in origin and spirit, not Christian at all. but an act that also bound the Church to the solar cult. Church chronicles admit that Sixtus V considered the relocation a symbolic victory of Christianity over paganism, yet the result is that pagan solar monuments now define the holy geometry of the Vatican.
Likewise, Washington D.C.’s Washington Monument is the world’s tallest obelisk (over 169m), overtly modeled on Egyptian style – a proud testament to American secular power, but also a continuation of the ancient sun worship architecture (even the capstone is made of aluminum to catch the first rays of dawn). London’s “Cleopatra’s Needle” is an actual Egyptian obelisk from ~1450 BC, originally raised at Heliopolis by Thutmose III and now bizarrely flanked by Victorian-era sphinxes on the Thames Embankment. Paris’s Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde comes from the Temple of Amun-Ra at Luxor and today serves as the gnomon of a giant sundial in the French capital. In each case, the modern powers that be have drawn on the talismanic might of the ancient Sun cults to legitimize their rule. They may claim these are mere ornaments or tributes to antiquity, but the symbolic resonance is undeniable: the obelisk is a worldly axis mundi, a world-axis staking a claim that this city, this regime, is the center of illumination and authority.
Consider also the prevalence of sun wheels, solar crosses, and eagles in national seals and flags. Many flags feature a sun (Japan’s Hinomaru, Argentina’s Sun of May) or radiating star. The United Nations logo is essentially a solar wheel (globe flanked by olive branches) as was the Nazi swastika (an ancient solar cross) often shown with eagle’s wings. Even the U.S. one-dollar bill hides an eye of providence within a radiant triangle – the “All-Seeing Eye” atop a pyramid, a motif straight from esoteric Rosicrucian and Masonic design (the eye in triangle being a symbol of Luciferian illumination in many occult traditions). These are the trappings of what the Book of Revelation calls “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” – a cryptic name for the idolatrous world system that opposes God. John’s Apocalypse was written in the Roman Empire and thinly veiled “Babylon” as Rome. Is it any surprise that Rome’s own Church would later inherit Babylon’s symbols?
The Vatican, as the continuation of Roman imperial authority in spiritual guise, has liberally sprinkled sun symbolism into its artwork and rituals. The monstrance that holds the Eucharist host is typically a sunburst. Pope Leo XIII added the Luminari (blazing sun emblem) to papal arms in the 19th century. The very title “Pontifex Maximus”, used by the popes, was inherited from the chief priest of Rome’s pre-Christian religion – the same office that for centuries presided over the worship of Jupiter, Sol Invictus, Mithras, and the emperor’s genius. After Constantine, the emperors (many of whom were initiates of Mithraism or the Sol Invictus cult) simply passed the title to the bishops of Rome. As a result, one can argue the Catholic Church became a vessel for the solar cult of Rome rather than its destroyer.
One glaring example is how the Mithraic cult left its mark on Catholicism. The cult of Mithras (popular among Roman soldiers) revered Sol Invictus – the Unconquered Sun – and had a mysterious lion-headed figure entwined by a serpent in its iconography. This Lion-Serpent god (often identified as Aion or Chronos) was depicted with keys in his hands and a lion’s head roaring atop a human torso wrapped by a coiled snake. It is chilling to note that some of these statues were found in or near Rome and are now displayed in the Vatican Museums. The lion-headed figure often had wings and was associated with time and cosmos. If one were to show a Christian of the early centuries this image, they might identify it with Satan (the winged serpent) or a cherub gone wrong. Yet here it was part of a prestigious cult that dined in caves and underground chapels, breaking bread and sharing wine in sacred meals. When Christianity triumphed, many Mithraic temples were simply repurposed. Some scholars point out the correspondence of Mithraic ritual to Christian practice (Sunday as holy day, December 25 as Sol Invictus’ feast and later Christ’s Nativity, the title of the Pope as Pontifex, etc.). While the historical details are complex, the symbolic throughline is clear: the solar cult didn’t vanish – it put on a new cloak.
Thus the Roman Catholic Church became a paradox – outwardly preaching Christ crucified, inwardly ornamented with the very emblems of the cult it claimed to replace. The lion and eagle – once pagan symbols – were rebranded as emblems of the evangelists (Mark’s winged lion, John’s eagle) and of Christ himself (“Lion of Judah”). The halo of the saints is the halo of Sol; Even Peter’s Basilica itself is built on Vatican Hill, former site of the grove of Cybele (Magna Mater) and near the Mithraic sanctum under San Clemente. The bronze pine cone statue in the Vatican (the Pigna) was an ancient symbol of mystical enlightenment and fertility (linked to Dionysus and Osiris); now it just sits in the courtyard as a “decoration,” its esoteric meaning conveniently ignored.
Is all this mere coincidence, or does it betray something profound? It suggests that institutional Christianity, especially in its Roman manifestation, has never fully freed itself from the solar-serpent worship it ostensibly opposes. On the contrary, it has absorbed and embodied it. The result is a Church that may recite creeds to Jesus Christ, but in pageantry and hierarchy often venerates the cult of empire – the very cult Christ fought against when he called out the Pharisees and money-changers, or when he declined Satan’s offer of “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.”
The Vatican signed its Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany on July 20, 1933, granting Hitler’s regime international legitimacy in exchange for Church protections — and pledging political non-interference. Later, after the war, Nazi fugitives were smuggled to Argentina and other safe havens with Vatican assistance through the “ratlines,” covert escape networks that often operated under the cover of the Red Cross.
As the Second World War ended, not only were Nazis smuggled through Vatican ratlines — wealth moved with them. Nazi gold, much of it plundered from occupied nations and the victims of the Holocaust, flowed into Swiss banks, whose guarded neutrality made them the perfect vaults for stolen treasure. The same Swiss state whose flag bore the white cross on red profited from shielding these deposits, even as the Red Cross name was used to mask clandestine movements of fugitives and funds. Behind the humanitarian façade, the financial arteries of empire and war ran quietly into the mountain vaults, protected by secrecy as ancient as the cross itself.
“Come Out of Her, My People”: Unmasking the False Light
We stand at a precipice in spiritual understanding. The threads we have traced – from Nergal’s lion and plague, to Pan’s goatish revelry, to Mithras’ secret rites, to Crowley’s defiant occultism – all weave together a tapestry of solar lion-serpent worship that has camouflaged itself in different guises across cultures and ages. This pagan legacy is not a dead relic of history; it is alive in the very power structures that dominate the world today. Crowley understood this in part – he saw the hypocrisy of a Church that condemns “Satan” while secretly parading Satan’s symbols. His response was to side openly with the so-called Devil, to revel in the “roaring lion” and “sharp serpent” and throw off the cloak of hypocrisy. In doing so, he arguably went to an opposite extreme – embracing the Beast so tightly that he wore its number as his badge of honor. Crowley claimed that the “true Christ”; a magical, solar figure akin to the Gnostic sun-god Abraxas; had been buried by what he called the slave-god of the priests. In reality, Christ is neither a sun deity nor the distorted figure presented in Catholic tradition, but the living Son of God revealed in Scripture. The church’s version is a counterfeit, a tool for the same old systems of control that Christ Himself opposed.
The real Christ – the one who said “the Kingdom of God is within you” and who shattered social and religious pretenses – has been largely pushed aside by an institution that claims His name but inherited Babylon’s spirit. The Book of Revelation paints a damning portrait of this institution as the “great harlot” clothed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones, holding a golden cup full of abominations, drunk on the blood of saints (Revelation 17:4-6). This harlot is seated on a scarlet beast with seven heads – traditionally interpreted as Rome on seven hills riding the Beast of empire. Her forehead is emblazoned with “Mystery, Babylon the Great.” Could anything more perfectly describe a Church that carries forward the mysteries of ancient Babylon under a Christian veneer? It is a mystery indeed – a secret synchronization of paganism and piety.
No wonder, then, that Revelation commands the faithful to flee from this deceptive union. “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues”. – this urgent cry applies now as ever. It is a call to all who seek the true Light to separate from the faux “light” of the solar cult masquerading as the Church. The true Christ needs no obelisk, no lion’s paw, no Mithraic keys, no jeweled throne. The true Christ speaks in the heart, in humility, in truth. He was the Lamb, not a lion preying on the weak; yet He is also called “the Sun of Righteousness” in Malachi 4:2 though never a solar deity.
In summary, we have followed a long and twisting path: from Nergal, the Babylonian lion-serpent of war, transmuted into Mars fathering Rome; to Mithras and Sol Invictus, whose symbols of lion, serpent, and sun were adopted by Rome’s rulers; to Baphomet and Pan, reasserted by occult visionaries like Crowley as emblems of liberated life force; and finally to the modern Catholic and global institutions, which carry on the pageantry of empire under the banner of Christ. These threads converge on a startling thesis: that much of what passes for “Christian” authority today is in fact the continuation of the imperial solar-serpent cult, dressed in new words. It opposes the true Christ by presenting a counterfeit, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” – or rather a lion-serpent in lamb’s clothing – to deceive the nations.
The apostle Paul urged, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” It is time to put the Church and the world’s powers to that test. Look at the symbols they glorify: are those the symbols of the Carpenter of Galilee, or of the ancient Sun Lord of empire? Look at their works: do they bear good fruit, or the blood-soaked “freedom and truth” that the Golden Bough described as the mixed legacy of magic and power? If it be the latter, then it is time to heed the voice from heaven. Leave Babylon’s embrace – both the literal pomp of Rome and the metaphorical seductions of all systems built on domination, occult or overt. Renounce the lies that invert good and evil, that call dark light and light dark.
Aleister Crowley once signed his name as To Mega Therion, The Great Beast, thinking to fight hypocrisy with a crown of blasphemy. But in truth, one need not bow to the Beast at all – neither the hypocritical beast outside (institutional Babylon) nor the promethean beast inside (our own egoic lust for power). There is another path: the path of the Lamb who faces the lion-serpent and overcomes it not by might or guile, but by sacrificial love and unyielding truth. “Opposing the true Christ,” as our journey shows, is what the solar serpent cult has always done – whether by open violence or by subtle imitation. To oppose the true Christ no more, we must strip away the mask of the Beast.
Let the obelisks fall. Let the lions sleep and the serpents cease their whispering. Let the eagle – symbol of proud empire – be replaced by the dove of the Holy Spirit. It is time to end the counterfeit and reclaim the pure wellspring of faith that nourishes the soul without chains or lies. It is time to do as the Voice commands: “Get out of her…that ye be not partakers of her sins”. Only by leaving the harlot’s house can one truly follow the humble Nazarene. Only by rejecting the solar throne of Caesar can one embrace the wooden cross of Christ – and in that cross find a Light greater than any sun, a light “that shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
1 Peter 5:8:
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Revelation 18:13, in the list of Babylon’s merchandise:
“And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.”
Hosea 4:6:
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
*Hymn to the Pan
Thrill with lissome lust of the light, O man ! My man ! Corne careering out of the night Of Pan ! Io Pan! Io Pan ! Io Pan ! Corne over the sea From Sicily and from Arcady ! Roaming as Racchus, with fauns and pards And nymphs and satyrs for thy gnards, On a milk-white ass, corne over the sea To me, to me, Corne with Apollo in hridal dress (Shepherdess and pythoness) Corne with Artémis, silken shod, And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God, In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount, The dimpled dawn of the amber fount! Dip the purple of passionate prayer In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare, The soûl that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through The tangled grove, the gnarléd bole Of the living tree that is spirit and soûl And body and brain — corne over the sea, (loPan! IoPan!) Devil or god, to me, to me, My man ! my man ! Corne with trumpets sounding sbrill Over the hill ! Corne with drums low muttering From the spring! Corne with flûte and corne with pipe! Am I not ripe? I, who wait and writhe and wrestle With air that hath no boughs to nestle My body, weary of empty clasp, Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp — Corne, O corne! I am numb With the lonely lust of devildom. Thrust the sword through the galling fetter, All-devourer, all-begetter; Give me the sign of the Open Eye, And the token erect of thorny thigh, And the word of madness and mystery, O Pan! IoPan! lo Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan, I am a man: Do as thou wilt, as a great god can, O Pan! IoPan! Io Pan ! Io Pan Pan ! I am awake In the grip of the snake. The eagle slashes with beak and claw; The gods withdraw: The great beasts corne, Io Pan! I am borne To death on the horn Of the Unicom. I am Pan ! Io Pan ! Io Pan Pan ! Pan ! VIII —
I am thy mate, I am thy man, Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god, Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod. With hoofs of Steel I race on the rocks Througli solstice stubborn to equinox. And I rave; and I râpe and I rip and I rend Everlasting, world without end, Mannikin, maiden, mænad, man, In the might of Pan. lo Pan ! Io Pan Pan ! Pan ! Io Pan !
See also The Text of Eclogue IV: Virgil’s Golden Age Prophecy, which the Roman Catholic Church later interpreted — or at least presented — as a pagan foreshadowing of Christ’s kingdom.https://www.rebuildspirit.com/post/apollo-rising-the-pagan-christ-of-virgil-s-eclogue-iv
When the Magisterium claim “divine inspiration” to alter the commandments of God; even to change the day of worship to Sunday; we should ask whose voice they are really following. Scripture is clear that neither Christ nor His Father gave such authority. If this power to rewrite God’s law did not come from Heaven, then we know well enough from where, and from whom, it came.
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