The ancient holy island of Crete has a history that goes back thousands of years. It is a place where legends were made, Gods and Dante PurgatoryGoddesses born, Saints christened, and wars for rulership of the world fought. Both paradise found, and paradise lost.

Now a place in purgatory from the sins of their fathers. A people scattered amongst nations. Tribes kept in captivity.

Dante tells the story of Crete in Purgatorio, where he has a dream that he is on Mount Ida and is carried up to heaven by an eagle. Upon awakening, Dante finds that during his sleep he had been moved to the lowest part of the Mount that he called just below the Gate of Purgatory.

It is here, where the image with the allegory of the “old man” beneath Mount Ida from whom the three mythological rivers spring, and the statue of the Old Man of Crete who is made of gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay. The Old Man of Crete would be the Father of Zeus (Jupiter, Jove), and husband of Cybele (Rhea, Magna Mater), who is known in mythology as Father Time or Kronos (Saturn), and is the King of Crete. It was on Mount Ida, where Cybele raised her son the infant Jupiter secretly in the care of the priesthood of the Curetes (Priests of Jupiter, Pan), and by their frantic dancing and noise of cymbals concealed him from his father Saturn. Dante writes that the statue had his back to Damietta, and gazing toward Rome.

Dante purgatorio-schemaVirgil describes the ancient statue at Mount Ida in the Inferno with imagery of falling tears:

In the mountain’s core an ancient man stands tall;
he has his shoulder turned towards Damietta
and faces Rome as though it were his mirror.
His head is fashioned of the finest gold;
pure silver are his arms and hands and chest;
from there to where his legs spread, he is brass;
the rest of him is all of chosen iron,
except his right foot which is terra cotta;
he puts more weight on this foot than the other.
Every part of him, except the gold, is broken
by a fissure dripping tears down to his feet,
where they collect to erode the cavern’s rock … ( ll. 103-114)

Dante writes, that it is here the tears are represented as the vices and impurities of many ages collected together in one stream, whence the infernal rivers, Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon derive their source, and are disgorged into the lake of Cocytus, situated at the bottom of hell.

The Babylonians were known to have ruled over the Land of the Two Rivers, united by Hammurabi the Lawgiver. The Minoans of Crete with their lawgiver king Minos in the city of Knossus surrounded on three sides by water of what could be called two rivers. In the poems of Homer, the city of Troy was situated near the sea between two rivers “about whose streams the Kydones dwelt” (Homer Odyssey iii. 292). Both these rivers rose in Mount Ida. In the bible under Psalm 46:4, “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.”

In Purgatory, canto xxxi, where, after due penance, the spirits are allowed to procure oblivion of their past crimes by washing in the river Lethe. In this river ” Securos latices, et longa oblivia potant.”—Virgil. JEn. vi. 713.

Virgil also paints a picture of Crete as the island “in the middle of the sea.” He tells of a place that what was once a lush paradise of Crete mapgreenery, now a cold and abandoned desert.

“In the middle of the sea there lies a wasteland,”
he immediately began, “that is known as Crete,
under whose king the world knew innocence.
There is a mountain there that was called Ida;
then happy in its verdure and its streams,
now deserted like an old, discarded thing …” ( ll. 94-99)

The Golden Age was said to have its commencement in Crete under the reign of Saturn. A place I believe to be Mount Ida that later became a desolate desert.

Mount Ida on Crete, a “waste Country” where the many springs are “forsaken now, like some old, smouldering thing (Canto XIV, ln 94-95, 99).”

Roman Senator and historian, Cornelius Tacitus (110 A.D.) had written that the Jews often traveled to Crete to celebrate the festival of Pentecost in Jerusalem and that they eventually were exiled from the island when Saturn was driven from his throne by the violence of Jupiter. The Cretans are called Idaeans, and then Judieans who eventually became fugitives from the island and who then settled on the nearest coast of Africa in the remotest corner of Libya.

Crete in the bible is found in 1 Samuel 30:14 Ezekiel 25:16, and Ze 2:5, the Philistines are described as Cherethites, which is another name for the Cretans. Their city is known as Caphtor and the Caphtorim (Deuteronomy 2:23 Jeremiah 47:4 Amos 9:7) which is connected with Cydonia.

The 1st century Jewish-Roman historian, Josephus Flavius who wrote in “The Works of Flavius Josephus; “The tradition is, that the Jews ran away from the island of Crete, and settled themselves on the coast of Libya, and this at the time when Saturn was driven out of his kingdom by the power of Jupiter: an argument for it is fetched from their name. The mountain Ida is famous in Crete; and the neighbouring inhabitants are named, which, with a barbarous augment, becomes the name of Jud [Jews.]

Some say they were a people who were very numerous in Egypt, under the reign of Isis, and that the Egyptians got free from that burden by sending them into the adjoining countries, under their captains Hierosolymus and Judas.”

This is the mountain of the Nephilim. The French Occultist, Eliphias Levi had written; “The fallen angels gathered around their chief, Samiaxas, on a high mountain, which has been called ever since ‘the mountain of the Oath’, for the Eggregores pledged themselves there one to the other with a sacrilegious vow.”

It was on ‘the mountain of the Oath’ where Pythagoras was initiated into the secret mysteries by the priests of the Idaean Dactyli (Judeans), by whom he was purified with the meteoritic thunder-stone in the cave of Zeus on Mount Ida in Crete. It was here, where he had learned the laws of Minos and was initiated by the Ancient Priesthood of Jupiter (Amon) on the Sacred Mountain of Mount Ida (Zion).

In, The Secret Doctrine: Anthropogenesis by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, she writes;

the teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon, the mount in the land of Mizpeth—meaning “anathema,” “destruction ”—is the same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the “ Lord loved well ” ; and so mixed up are facts and personages in the said scholiasts’ brains, that, when the Zohar explains the “ birds” which inspired Balaam to mean “Serpents,” to wit, the wise men and adepts at whose school he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy—the opportunity is again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the “ winged dragons of Evil, whose chief is Samael ” (the ]ewish Satan).

“ It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scape-goat of Israel, who assumed the name of one of them (Azaz(y)el), was sent ” (Spencer).

In the bible it is said;

“Let the nations be wakened, and come to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the nations all around. Put in the sickle for the harvest is ripe: come down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their light. The Lord will roar from Zion, and his voice from Jerusalem: and the heavens and earth shall quake: but the Lord is a refuge for his people, and a fortress to the sons of Israel” (Joel 3:12-16 Para.).

SOURCES:

Dante: The Inferno By Dante Alighier

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