Sayyid
Gerbert was said to have studied in his youth in the Moorish schools in Spain: later his reputed learning in theology, mathematics and the natural sciences was popularly believed to have been achieved through magic and he was credited with having an ‘oracular head’. As the first French pope, Sylvester II (999-1003), Gerbert presides over western Christendom at the turn of the millennium, but eighty years later Cardinal Benno was to attribute Gerbert’s meteoric rise to his skills in sorcery. Among the feats assigned to Sylvester II was the founding of a ‘papal’ school of magic in eleventh-century Rome.
Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God
Take for example Gerbert, a native of Aurillac in the Auvergne, who went to Spain in search of learning in the 960’s. A French chronicler of the mid-eleventh century tells us that Gerbert went as far as Cordoba ‘in quest of wisdom’, but this seems unlikely. What is certain is that he spent some time at the monastery of Ripoll in Catalonia. Ripoll had been founded by Wilfred the Hairy, it was a well-endowed house and it had used its wealth to build up, among other things, a splendid library which was particularly strong in mathematical and astronomical works. Gerbert made good use of it. He also encountered other people with intellectual interests besides the monks of Ripoll. Some years after his return to France he wrote from Rheims to a certain Lobet of Barcelona asking for a copy of a work on astrology ‘translated by you.’ We know from other sources that Lobet was archdeacon of Barcelona, and though we cannot now identify the work which Gerbert wanted to borrow we do know that Lobet translated another work from Arabic concerned with the use of the scientific instrument known as the astrolabe. Gerbert himself later composed a work on the astrolabe which seems to derive from a similar work (probably not Lobet’s) written in Catalonia in the late tenth century.
Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid
Catalonia, that dark and bloody ground. It saw the turning back of Attilla the Hun against the army of Merovech, Theodoric and Aetius. It saw the battle between Frank and Muslim that was immortalized in the Song of Roland. It was the contentious border between the Almoravide Empire and Western Christendom. It was the place a young man of scholarly bent would learn the secrets that would lead him to the papal see and to his death four years later. Well, perhaps his death wasn’t due to anything other than it being his time…and perhaps not. And Catalonia would also see the rise of one of the most interesting figures in the history of the tectonic conflict between Islam and Christendom, a man who could straddle both worlds, Rodrigo Diaz, better known to history as El Cid. What does a Pope dead forty years before the birth of a warrior have to do with him, you may ask? How were Gerbert of Aurillac and Rodrigo Diaz connected, aside from their contact with Catalonia, where east and west clashed and clashed again, where the combined lore of two civilizations resided?
Let’s start by looking at the career of Sylvester II, formerly Gerbert of Aurillac. From his days in Spain to his tutorship of the boy who would become Otto III, his tenure as head of the Cathedral School at Rheims and his later rise to the papacy, Gerbert was a figure of prodigious learning and even more prodigious legend-mongering. It was generally understood that his efforts to reintroduce Terence, Virgil and Horace to the Cathedral School were part of his love for ancient lore, as was his study of music and the math behind it. Furthermore, it was generally reported that his learning ran even further than merely studying the past…rumors told that he brought out of his travels in Spain the secrets of constructing wondrous devices, having in his life built a clock that could actually tell the individual hours, an armillary sphere that illustrated the the orbit of the planets and the paths of the stars, reintroduced the abacus and the astrolabe to Europe, and even built a hydraulic organ in order to aid his studies in music. Of course, there were other, darker rumors.
Naturally he was regarded as a magician; he was said to have manufactured a head of bass that told him of the future. It said to him: “You will be pope!” And, in fact, he was elected pope as Sylvester II. But beware of necromancy, that tricks its devotees! He died soon after his elevation, and he is said to have repented on his deathbed for selling his soul to the devil.
Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages
According to this fable, Gerbert, who was proficient in mathematical science and the Kabalah, performed an evocation of the devil and required his assistance to attain the pontificate. The fulfillment of his ambition was not only promised by the demon but it was affirmed further that he should not die except at Jerusalem, to which place it will be understood readily that the magician determined inwardly that he would never go. He became pope as promised, but on a certain day, when he was saying Mass in a church at Rome, he fell seriously ill, and remembering suddenly that the chapel wherein he was officiating was dedicated to the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he realised what had come to pass.
Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic
Levi later goes on to demolish the accusations of sorcery against Gerbert, pointing out that he was quite possibly the single most learned man of his century, a former preceptor of monarchs and emperors, friend to two kings of France and three Holy Roman Emperors…it didn’t require sorcery for this man, much respected and incredibly well connected, to get himself seated upon the throne of Peter. And he has an excellent point there. However, to the jaundiced eye of a modern reader, Gerbert’s very connections begin to arouse suspicions. Here was an unquestioned genius, a scholar of the highest order, a man who went into Spain while it was still ruled by the Moorish kingdoms (Gerbert would just miss the rise of vizer Muhammad ibn Abi ‘Amir, better known as Almanzor, who loathed occultism and mysticism so much that he had astrologers tortured and crucified…we’ll get back to that, I promise) and extracted learning unknown in Christendom, introducing it even into the body of the Church. He parlayed that knowledge into positions of influence over rulers, a medieval Aristotle of sorts, and even managed to use that influence to gain control over the edifice of faith itself, the Holy See. Yet within four years, both Almanzor and Sylvester II would be dead, and the final steps on the road to the reconquista and the Crusades would be in place. The century after Sylvester’s death would be one of war between Islam and Christendom. Instead of young scholars descending into Spain to gain knowledge, young warriors would burn Toledo and sack Valencia.
One of those warriors would be Rodrigo Diaz. El Cid. Not many people in history are the heroes of epics. Achilleus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Aeneas, Cu Chullain…and even fewer verifiable, demonstratably real human beings are of such mythic stature. Boudicca, Charlemagne, Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Miyamoto Musashi, Mohammed…a small list, and while it could be made larger, not by a tremendous amount. Still fewer people manage to be both an epic hero and a flesh and blood human at once. One of those was Rodrigo Diaz, the man who was the subject of one of the last epic poems ever written, feared almost more by those supposedly allied to him than those he fought, the man who earned from his moslem enemies the ultimate compliment…the title Sayyid, or lord.
In the summer of 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city of Toledo. At the time, it appeared to be just one more incident on the Christian-Muslim frontier: Alfonso was in league with the Emir of Seville, and was keeping the Emir’s daughter as his concubine. In fact it proved to be the first step in the Christian Reconquista-the 400 year struggle for possession of the Iberian peninsula. Toledo was the largest and most central of some twenty-five taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms into which the old Cordoban emirate had fragmented. Their disunity gave the Christian rulers their chance. Within the decade, Alfonso’s champion, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid, had entered Valencia.
Norman Davies, Europe – A History
In 1043, the year Rodrigo Diaz was born, the descendants of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Almoravids held most of what is now Spain and Portugal. While certainly in no real position to threaten Europe again the way they had before the loss to Charles Martel at Tours, they were the beneficiaries of momentum, position and social advance…it would be hard to look back at the kingdom of Castile-Leon and argue that it wasn’t backward in comparison. It had not been for nothing that the keenest mind in all of Christendom had made his way to Spain less than a century before, because it was in Spain out of all of Europe that the legacy of the ancient world was closest to the surface. Perhaps only in Catalonia could an epic still unfold. Rodrigo Diaz was knighted after 1050 (and considering he was born sometime around 1043, he was very young to his spurs) and made a name for himself in combat across the Iberian peninsula. When King Fernando went to his death in 1065, his three sons fought over his throne, and Rodrigo found himself vassal and warrior for Sancho, the eldest son. After the imprisonment of Garcia and the death of Sancho in October, 1072, Rodrigo found himself serving under King Alfonso VI, his former suzerain’s brother. By 1079, the relationship between them soured when Rodrigo defeated an Almoravid army without Alfonso’s leave. So Rodrigo found himself banished and took up arms in the service of al-Mu’tamin, who was the lord of Zaragoza and who may well have taken it upon himself to school his new warlord in Almoravid sensibilities. It is said that books were studied in his presence: the warlike deeds of the old heroes of Arabia were read to him, and when the story of Mohallab was reached he was seized with delight and expressed himself full of admiration for this hero. It is possible they knew each other before, for Rodrigo’s first military campaign was on behalf of his lord Sancho of Castile in 1063, who actually served alongside al-Muqtadir against the King of Aragon, Ramiro I, brother of Fernando I of Castile and thus Sancho’s own uncle. Ramiro died in the battle, having been slain by a frontier-dwelling moor named Sa’dada who could speak Aragonese and thus penetrate their lines and drive a lance into Ramiro’s face. When King Sancho went to Zaragoza and fought with the Aragonese King Ramiro at Graus, whom he defeated and killed there, he took Rodrigo Diaz with him: Rodrigo was a part of the army which fought in the victorious battle as the Historia Roderici put it. So Rodrigo knew full well the benefit to learning about one’s enemies…and considering that Rodrigo would rejoin a somewhat needy Alfonso VI by 1086, just after the conquest of Toledo, one has to wonder if Rodrigo and Alfonso were really so antagonistic as they seemed. Surely Alfonso would not have granted Rodrigo permission to keep any Muslim lands he conquered as his own if they were at odds?
Of course, considering the first territory he chose to rule was Zaragoza, and also considering that he and Alfonso would split again in 1089, and yet again in 1091, it’s possible that Alfonso was just an idiot. Why else would he risk driving the most powerful noble in his realm, the man who saved his realm for him three times, into the arms of the enemy?
Al-Muqtadir was a cultivated man – ‘a real prodigy of nature in astrology, geometry and natural philosophy’ – and a patron of the arts. He built two famous palaces at Zaragoza. One of them, called the Qasr Dar al-Surur or ‘abode of pleasure’, contained within it a ‘golden hall of exquisite design and admirable workmanship’…At the time of Rodrigo’s arrival in Zaragoza, probably in the late summer of 1081, the elderly al-Muqtadir was in poor health. In the autumn of that year he delegated power to his two sons, though he remained nominal ruler until his death which seems to have occured in about July of 1082. The kingdom was partitioned between the sons…this was Rodrigo’s opportunity. The new ruler of Zaragoza could make use of a distinguished soldier in exile.
Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid
Al-Mu’tamin was very fond of Rodrigo and set him over and exalted him above all his kingdom and all his land, relying upon his counsel in all things. Rodrigo repaid him with victory. Whether or not he earned his title of El Cid in his service to al-Mu’tamin is unknown, but it was a very high honor for a man to becalled Sayyid. It was a title originally belonging to those descended from the Prophet himself. Rodrigo would serve al-Mu’tamin until the coming of fresh invaders from the Sahara healed the breach between him and Alfonso, but it was clear that for the rest of his life he would hold the customs and ideals he learned at his moorish overlord’s side. It was Alfonso’s defeat at Bajadoz that led Rodrigo to rejoin him, and it was clear that these new Islamic invaders, the true Almoravides instead of the taifa lords he was accustomed to, were not to his liking. He never sided with Islam again.
Had he ever sided with it?
When one considered the interesting similarities between Gerbert of Aurillac and al-Muqtadir, men of learning and science and mathematics, men who labored to build as well as educate, and then remember the young man who would be Sylvester II’s travels into Spain, it’s interesting to note that in 991 Gerbert made a profession of his faith as part of his becoming consecrated as Archbishop of Rheims. That’s not especially interesting in of itself. What is interesting is that the profession of faith he made rejected specifically the very tenets of the faith of the Catharist heresy that would, in fact, not exist for another two hundred years. Why would he even be concerned with what was at that time a minor heresy mostly held by Bogomils on the other side of Europe? Possibly because he’d encountered them in a very different form in Spain itself…the faith of the Ismaili, which adopted traditions from Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and which took as a sign the coming of the final era of mankind via the ascension of the final Mahdi, whose coming was foretold in 928 with the conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter. The Ismaili believed this to signal the end of the era of Islam, and also to coincide with the 1500th anniversary of the death of Zoroaster. They also preserved old prophecies of the religious and political restoration of Zoroastrianism, which had been swept away by the spread of Islam itself a few centuries before. It’s possible that Gerbert even knew of the tumultuous years after 930, when the Qarmatians sacked Mecca and stole the Black Stone of the Kaaba in order to help usher in the end of the era of Islam. While a brief Qarmatian reign in Bahrain under a supposed descendant of the Sassanids led ultimately to repression and death for Zoroastrians in the Abbasid caliphate after eight days, it sent shockwaves through Islam at the time. Shockwaves that may well have reached the inquisitive minds of the taifa lords of al-Andalus, the Iberian Islamic realm, and perhaps an equally inquisitive Frenchman who would become pope.
Was Gerbert schooled in Ismaili thought? Did he learn of the abacus and the astrolabe from them? Did he even transcend them and study the religions they syncreticised into their unique blend, looking upon the theories of the ancient hebrews and persians? He was known as a qabbalist (and as an aside, one of the main uses of the practical qabbala of the Sefer Yetzirah is the making of golems, like that brass head he supposedly constructed to help tell him of the future. Shades of Albertus Magnus and his man of brass, who Thomas Aquinas destroyed…was Magnus working with secrets Gerbert left behind?) and he took pains to deny the coeval duality of good and evil of the Cathars…it’s interesting to note that the Cathars themselves would range all over the territory Gerbert walked during his time in France and Spain (on that note, some 200 years later a king of Aragon and Catalonia, Pedro the Catholic, would attempt to prevent the destruction of Raymond Roger, Viscount of Carcassone in northern Spain, during an anti-Catharist heresy) and that they seem to have been anticipated by him.
Perhaps al-Muqtadir was an Ismaili, and perhaps Gerbert was one as well. Or perhaps the Islmaili themselves were merely stalking horses for a much older group, one that taught both men secret lore following the rebirth of Zoroaster’s religion as both a political and religious order…an order that may well have merely used the astrological signs to signal a new rebirth, having never truly gone away.
The Magi are a peculiar caste, quite different from the Egyptian priests and indeed from any other sort of person. The Egyptian priests make it an article of religion to kill no living creature except for sacrifice, but the Magi not only kill anything, except dogs and men, with their own hands but make a special point of doing so; ants, snakes, crawling animals, birds – no matter what, they kill them indiscriminately. Well, it is an ancient custom, so let them keep it.
Herodotus, The Histories
It’s not unknown that the Hashishin were a sect of the Ismaili. It’s also generally understood that they were founded in the late eleventh century by Hassan i Sabbah, right around the same time that Rodrigo Diaz was rampaging through Spain. In 1090 Sabbah became master of Alamut, in Persia. Alamut, the sacred mountain, the Omphalos, wherein Sabbah and the Hashish eaters (partakers in sacred intoxication) would strike forth throughout the Dar al-Islam in the name of their particular version of Ismaili doctrine. As head of the order, Hassan was known as the Sheik al-Gebel, the old man of the mountain. Interestingly enough, the emperor Heilogabalus also derived his name from El-Gabal, the sun god who came to earth in the form of a black meteorite…much like the black stone of the Kaaba that the Qarmatians stole in 930 AD. Hassan’s choice of titles is evocative, for it links him back to the Persian-Roman hybrid religion known as Mithraism, the solar cult of tauroctonous sacrifice by the hands of the transformed Mitras.
Save, of course, that Mitras never slew any bulls.
Thus, to take what is perhaps the most important example, there is no evidence that the Iranian god Mithra ever had anything to do with killing a bull. Faced with the problem of trying to find an ancient Iranian parallel to the Mithraic bull-slaying, Cumont did manage to locate an Iranian myth in which a bull is killed. However, in the myth which Cumont chose the bull is killed not by the expected Mithra but rather by Ahriman, the power of cosmic evil.
David Ulansey, The Origin of the Mithraic Mysteries
The moment Cambyses heard the name, he was struck with the truth of what Prexaspes had said, and realized that his dream of how somebody told him that Smerdis was sitting on the throne with his head touching the sky, had been fulfilled. It was clear to him now that the murder of his brother had been all to no purpose; he lamented his loss, and at last, in bitterness and anger at the whole miserable set of circumstances, he leapt upon his horse, meaning to march with all speed to Susa and attack the Magus. But as he was springing into the saddle, the cap fell off the sheath of his sword, exposing the blade, which pierced his thigh – just in the spot where he had previously struck Apis the sacred Egyptian bull.
Herodotus, The Histories
Imagine if you will a time following the abortive attempt by the Magi themselves, the Medean priesthood of Zoroastrianism, to overthrow Cambyses and take control of the Persian Empire itself under Patizeithes and Smerdis. After Cambyses died, it appeared as though your rule was assured, and that a new theocracy under the Medean priesthood was at hand. Then came Darius, and disaster…and worse, the Achaemenids would then create a theocracy of their own, with themselves as the chosen of Ohrmazd. What to do? Bide your time, and wait, and turn the symbology of Cambyses death to your advantage. The bull-slayer Ahriman was the lord of the lie: let him now be your lord, and change his name by disguising him as Mithras, one of the Amesha Spentas. Invade the lands around the empire, seeking to infect them with malleable thought…so arises Orphism, that unique flavor of dualism that first took the Zoroastrian conflict between cosmic forces and argued even to the division of spirit and body, that the body was the source of corruption and evil, that the world itself was not part of the good creation of Ohrmazd but was rather corrupt and sinful. In short, if the Achaemenids wanted to rule the world as chosen proxies for Ohrmazd, they were themselves corrupt and evil.
Then came the two-horned one, son of the god, Alexander. He burned Sardis, destroyed the writings of the Magi, and drove them even further underground. They took refuge in those religions most likely to shelter them…religions like Judaism, which was already well-disposed to Zoroastrian thought due to Cyrus’ role as the conqueror of Babylon, the one who ended their long exile, the Anointed One spoken of in the books of Daniel. Is it possible that the Zealots and the Sicari were inspired by the Magi? In their reasonably well-researched yet still ineffably crazy The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argue that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves are a documentation of the development of the early years of Christianity, that the Qumran community was the Damascus that Saul of Tarsus was journeying to during his famous conversion (which is somewhat bolstered by the discovery of the Damascus Document among the scrolls found at Qumran) and that there was a militant core of hard-line jews in the years leading up to the Jewish rebellion against Rome who practiced assassination and controlled significant resources (the treasures listed on the Copper Scroll) and that they had two messiahs, the Messiah of David and the Messiah of Aaron, a war leader and a priest. They further go on to argue that Jesus was the Messiah of David and that his brother James was ‘The Righteous Man’, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who was beset by Paul (who they cast in the role of ‘The Liar’, a figure from the scrolls who came to the Qumran community only to betray it) and ‘The Wicked Priest’ (possibly Caiphas, who had Jesus turned over to the Romans…in this version, Jesus would indeed be attempting to be recognized as King of the Jews, a literal heir to David). All of this by itself is a fairly significant revision to the Biblical story, which paints Paul as a hero and apostle. Now, to tie all of this in, the strict battle of the Armies of the Sons of Light vs. the Sons of Darkness also written about in the scrolls is very obviously influenced by Zoroastrian thought…the painting of the ‘Kittim of Ashur’ as sons of Belial, the lie manifest, puts them squarely in the Ahrimanic camp since Ahriman is the cosmic lie itself, literally the Error so feared by Mani and his followers…and now we come to this: in the Bible, Jesus is said to have first been recognized as King by three magi. Specifically, three magi following a star to his birthplace. Were the magi trying again to set up a theocracy in the middle east, using Judaism as a stalking horse to get around Roman polytheism? The Sassanids still pretended to Achaemanid Zoroastrianism to the east, after all, the hated royal version of the creed originally created by Darius to dispossess them.
This of course begs the question…did Paul hijack Christianity away from Judaism as an agent of the magi, or as an opponent? Like Mani after him, Paul would take elements of previous religions and make a whole new one out of them, creating a syncretic, divine Christ who could stack up miracles to rival the other Orphic mystery religions around him. It’s interesting to consider the connection between Saul/Paul’s home of Tarsus and the Mithraic cult, because Plutarch himself who claimed Tarsus as a birthplace for it, and others see in the cult of Perseus that flourished there another seed for Pauline Christianity. (And if we are to believe John Allegro, it’s entirely possible that Paul and his followers like John of Patmos were also getting really high on anamita muscaria around this time, making of Christ a Dionysos rather than the warrior-god the magi seemed to be trying to create) So were the Magi themselves engaged in a two-front war, one a constant attempt to subvert Zoroastrianism to the cult of Ahriman (Armimanus, as the Mithraic cultists called him) and another an attempt to create the Righteous Man and the Ativad in the form of twin Messiahs? For what purpose?
The Magi gave the world the word magic, and magic is the making of symbols. In Mithraism, they created out of the mythology of Zoroastrianism, Orphism and later Roman additions a complicated stellar cycle involving the constellation Taurus and the planets Jupiter and Saturn…a complicated religious clock, if you will, counting down to a future date. Perhaps a future date some 1500 years following the supposed death of Zoroaster himself. And in the infiltration of inter-testamental Judaism, in the creation of Zealots and Sicari, in the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem and the second Diaspora perhaps they simultaneously sought to undo the work of Cyrus, the Anointed One, the father of their hated enemy dynasty and the dissemination of Paul’s altered Christian thought, with the King selected by Magi, a virus of syncreticism to infect the west just as Orphism had so long ago…and even further behind that, perhaps, they sought to bring into being a new creation. A monotheism of their own devising. A union of Ohrmazd and Ahriman. By tying in the twin messiahs to rulership and priesthood, and at the same time making one the instrument of the ascension of the Liar, Paul, betrayer of the Qumran community and having the other, James, the Righteous Man be destroyed…by sacrificing the god himself, and then having the god rise even from death they create a whole new paradigm. Ahriman is forever trapped in this world, the good creation of Ohrmazd…unless the good creation can be made to be considered foul, sinful. Then it becomes Ahriman’s.
Thinking about it…Mithraism serving to unite Ohrmazd and Ahriman by taking one of the Amesha Spentas, who are literally aspects of Ohrmazd himself, his virtues, and investing it with the role of Ahriman while creating a complicated tauroctonic mythology to help conceal a stellar mapping project that would allow them to create prophetic movements in time with whatever changes they want to make, like the supposed return of Zoroaster after their Achaemanid rivals were long gone…Christianity serving as the sharp point of the wedge in Polytheistic Europe, allowing them to convince Celt and German alike that Christ was whatever they needed him to be, whether that be peaceful fisher of men or warrior god, the White Christ or the man who said I come bearing not peace, but a sword. Both movements serving to promote a monotheism born out of syncreticism, a fusion, a subsumption of gods. Islam rises, claims the same god as Christianity, as Judaism before it, and crushes the Sassanids who promote the original, dualistic conception of Zoroaster’s legacy. Then they merely have to set their rivals against each other to create maximun chaos, prevent any from learning who the true puppet masters are, while the Magi continue on their quest to reduce gods down into a God, preferably one they maintain sole control over. Mythology as literal world-building, seeking to control minds by controlling who they pray to and what his tenets are.
In Qabbalistic terms, perhaps they seek to force Qemtiel and Kether together, to bind the Qlippoth and the Sephiroth as one, to hijack the merkabah and edit the shi’ur komah to a new pattern, one they control. Is it any wonder they made use of Manicheanism until Mani became too intractable? Send him forth into the Sassanid domains, to spread his familiar yet disturbingly alien message…then allow a merchant from the Arabian sands who reveres the Kaaba to hear a message from a fiery angel (a sun god, transfigured) and send forth a crusade to destroy the Sassanids and render your Achaemanid-derived rival impotent. Then, to keep from being drowned, drive the Dar al-Islam into world conquest while using them to attempt to create your own artificial pairedaeza in the Iberian mountains, a magical land. Calyferne, the first attempt at Alamut.
Did young Gerbert of Aurillac see it coming? Did he somehow use that magnificent brain of his to piece together the magical invasion that sought to use his faith as a weapon to kill and recreate God? He was a kabbalist, who knew the original form of the discipline from the time of Abraham. Did he indeed use his disciplined mind and his esoteric knowledge to achieve the throne of Peter, hoping to use his position to ally with Almanzor, seeking common ground against the sect that used the stars to nearly topple Islam a mere forty years before? Interesting that both men died within a year of each other. Also interesting to consider Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid himself, who earned the epithet Lord from the taifa kings as an Ismaili plan to create another Ativad, a warrior-king of Ahriman. Did Rodrigo die in 1099 while holding Valencia from the Almoravides because the sect had finally chosen another Alamut, and no longer needed the Sayyid when the Sheik al-Gebel would do?
Another possibility presents itself…that even the Magi themselves are no longer whole and unified in their purpose. After all, Alexander the Great died a long time ago, and perhaps his destruction of the Magi scriptures when he burned Sardis was the result of a war between factions of Magi. It’s entirely possible to imagine the Orphists becoming infected in turn by the viruses of Iamblichian and Neo-Platonic thought, and creating their own school dedicated to their own goals. One remembers the conversion of Constantine via the symbol of the Chi-Rho emblazoned on the sun itself, and the message in hoc signo vinces that convinced him to allow that faith to flourish. Perhaps they chose to recreate God in a different fashion, taking the Pauline message and making a myth of their own, and fighting for it. Christ as the logos, the word, and thus both Gerbert and Rodrigo serve as trojan horses infiltrating the enemy camp to destroy it from within.
On this dark and bloody ground would continue the reconquista for four centuries, as well as the crusade to destroy the Cathars and stamp out dualism. Why was it so important to end the Cathar heresy that the deaths of 20,000 people were necessary? Were the Cathars considered to be a rival to another group, or its catspaws? If one is engaged in trying to pare down all the myriad symbols of divinity into one, the Cathars might well resemble the hated Achamaenid form of Zoroastrian thought that they sought to destroy reborn…and for that matter, if one is engaged in attempt to promote a more expansive view of the divine, thousand-faced Hermes, then the Cathars become useful both as a stalking horse and a means to plant contrary thought. One imagines the Orphic vs. the Mithraic sects of the Magi choosing their proxies and playing chess with lives…did this game cost Gerbert and Diaz theirs, too? By dying, Sylvester II lost the chance to bring enlightenment to Europe, and perhaps prevent the Crusades from ever being fought. By living, Rodrigo Diaz blunted the last great thrust of Islam into Europe by defeating the Almoravide Empire. Were they pawns of a conspiracy still working to pare down the infinite faces of God into a symbol of their own devising, or were they its great enemies? And what happens if someone succeeds in defining the face of God for all? Will Ahriman burst free from his confinement as the stars turn around again, and the bull of the stars dies?
Probably not. It’s probably pretty damn crazy to postulate that there’s a secret cabal of mages, perhaps even competing groups of mages, all trying to create the ultimate symbol for God, to revise the shi’ur komah and edit all of reality, to force into existence a deity that they can then use to breach adam kadmon by realigning the Sephiroth of Tohu and the Qlippothic cracked shells discarded during the shattering. To end the war between Ohrmazd and Ahriman by forcing them to become one, by constantly linking each god to the attributes of the other. And certainly it’s not like we find ourselves in an endless cycle of conflict over the religions born out of a common ground, after all, who all claim to be praying to the God of Abraham and Isaac and yet can’t agree on what that singular God’s attributes are, after all.
And so we come to the end of this musing, having left ourselves with the thought that Gerbert of Aurillac and Sayyid Rodrigo Diaz may have played key roles in the attempt to build a golem out of ideas, and call it God, and in so doing make it so. The clock of the stars ticks ever onward towards the future, if you can read them properly and calculate them accurately enough, and Zoroaster’s been dead for another thousand years.
Postscript: Okay, I admit it, I left about six threads dangling in this one. I mean, crap, all the talk of astrology and mathematics and lost astronomical documents that Gerbert requested of course leads us to wonder if the document in question was Manilius’ Astronomica, which of course is the inspiration behind Lovecraft’s creation of the Necronomicon, and then we start to realize that Lovecraft was in fact an astronomer himself, and then we start to wonder if there evolved another rival sect, perhaps one inspired by shamanic or hermetic antagonists to the magi who began creating the proliferation of syncretic gods like Serapis, and who perhaps inspired Rabelais to write his Garganta and Pantagruel, who were behind Theleme and Blake’s Zoa and Lovecraft’s elder gods…fighting the tide of grim monotheism with an ever expanding horde of new gods, who made use of new means of communication. Was Jack Kirby a high magus of this syncretic order, following in the footsteps of Siegel and Shuster, presenting our age with divinities to forever keep the hermetic pressure up, preventing the fusion of the divine by making sure there would always be novel faces for Hermes to hide behind? I mean, that one’s easy. I could have worked in how Robert Graves added new meanings to old gods, or how Kenneth Grant helped spread Crowleyan ideas through his Typhonian OTO, or how Israel Regardie made the Qabbala accessible and in so doing ripped away the veil of secrecy, or how Tolkien’s complex mythology born out of his Christian ideals and his love for the old Germanic myths helps build in the mass mind of humanity new faces, new ideas about gods. So yeah, I know there’s more to say. There’s always more to say. Hopefully, I’ll say it in another way sometime.
Sayyid
Gerbert was said to have studied in his youth in the Moorish schools in Spain: later his reputed learning in theology, mathematics and the natural sciences was popularly believed to have been achieved through magic and he was credited with having an ‘oracular head’. As the first French pope, Sylvester II (999-1003), Gerbert presides over western Christendom at the turn of the millennium, but eighty years later Cardinal Benno was to attribute Gerbert’s meteoric rise to his skills in sorcery. Among the feats assigned to Sylvester II was the founding of a ‘papal’ school of magic in eleventh-century Rome.
Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God
Take for example Gerbert, a native of Aurillac in the Auvergne, who went to Spain in search of learning in the 960’s. A French chronicler of the mid-eleventh century tells us that Gerbert went as far as Cordoba ‘in quest of wisdom’, but this seems unlikely. What is certain is that he spent some time at the monastery of Ripoll in Catalonia. Ripoll had been founded by Wilfred the Hairy, it was a well-endowed house and it had used its wealth to build up, among other things, a splendid library which was particularly strong in mathematical and astronomical works. Gerbert made good use of it. He also encountered other people with intellectual interests besides the monks of Ripoll. Some years after his return to France he wrote from Rheims to a certain Lobet of Barcelona asking for a copy of a work on astrology ‘translated by you.’ We know from other sources that Lobet was archdeacon of Barcelona, and though we cannot now identify the work which Gerbert wanted to borrow we do know that Lobet translated another work from Arabic concerned with the use of the scientific instrument known as the astrolabe. Gerbert himself later composed a work on the astrolabe which seems to derive from a similar work (probably not Lobet’s) written in Catalonia in the late tenth century.
Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid
Catalonia, that dark and bloody ground. It saw the turning back of Attilla the Hun against the army of Merovech, Theodoric and Aetius. It saw the battle between Frank and Muslim that was immortalized in the Song of Roland. It was the contentious border between the Almoravide Empire and Western Christendom. It was the place a young man of scholarly bent would learn the secrets that would lead him to the papal see and to his death four years later. Well, perhaps his death wasn’t due to anything other than it being his time…and perhaps not. And Catalonia would also see the rise of one of the most interesting figures in the history of the tectonic conflict between Islam and Christendom, a man who could straddle both worlds, Rodrigo Diaz, better known to history as El Cid. What does a Pope dead forty years before the birth of a warrior have to do with him, you may ask? How were Gerbert of Aurillac and Rodrigo Diaz connected, aside from their contact with Catalonia, where east and west clashed and clashed again, where the combined lore of two civilizations resided?
Let’s start by looking at the career of Sylvester II, formerly Gerbert of Aurillac. From his days in Spain to his tutorship of the boy who would become Otto III, his tenure as head of the Cathedral School at Rheims and his later rise to the papacy, Gerbert was a figure of prodigious learning and even more prodigious legend-mongering. It was generally understood that his efforts to reintroduce Terence, Virgil and Horace to the Cathedral School were part of his love for ancient lore, as was his study of music and the math behind it. Furthermore, it was generally reported that his learning ran even further than merely studying the past…rumors told that he brought out of his travels in Spain the secrets of constructing wondrous devices, having in his life built a clock that could actually tell the individual hours, an armillary sphere that illustrated the the orbit of the planets and the paths of the stars, reintroduced the abacus and the astrolabe to Europe, and even built a hydraulic organ in order to aid his studies in music. Of course, there were other, darker rumors.
Naturally he was regarded as a magician; he was said to have manufactured a head of bass that told him of the future. It said to him: “You will be pope!” And, in fact, he was elected pope as Sylvester II. But beware of necromancy, that tricks its devotees! He died soon after his elevation, and he is said to have repented on his deathbed for selling his soul to the devil.
Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages
According to this fable, Gerbert, who was proficient in mathematical science and the Kabalah, performed an evocation of the devil and required his assistance to attain the pontificate. The fulfillment of his ambition was not only promised by the demon but it was affirmed further that he should not die except at Jerusalem, to which place it will be understood readily that the magician determined inwardly that he would never go. He became pope as promised, but on a certain day, when he was saying Mass in a church at Rome, he fell seriously ill, and remembering suddenly that the chapel wherein he was officiating was dedicated to the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he realised what had come to pass.
Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic
Levi later goes on to demolish the accusations of sorcery against Gerbert, pointing out that he was quite possibly the single most learned man of his century, a former preceptor of monarchs and emperors, friend to two kings of France and three Holy Roman Emperors…it didn’t require sorcery for this man, much respected and incredibly well connected, to get himself seated upon the throne of Peter. And he has an excellent point there. However, to the jaundiced eye of a modern reader, Gerbert’s very connections begin to arouse suspicions. Here was an unquestioned genius, a scholar of the highest order, a man who went into Spain while it was still ruled by the Moorish kingdoms (Gerbert would just miss the rise of vizer Muhammad ibn Abi ‘Amir, better known as Almanzor, who loathed occultism and mysticism so much that he had astrologers tortured and crucified…we’ll get back to that, I promise) and extracted learning unknown in Christendom, introducing it even into the body of the Church. He parlayed that knowledge into positions of influence over rulers, a medieval Aristotle of sorts, and even managed to use that influence to gain control over the edifice of faith itself, the Holy See. Yet within four years, both Almanzor and Sylvester II would be dead, and the final steps on the road to the reconquista and the Crusades would be in place. The century after Sylvester’s death would be one of war between Islam and Christendom. Instead of young scholars descending into Spain to gain knowledge, young warriors would burn Toledo and sack Valencia.
One of those warriors would be Rodrigo Diaz. El Cid. Not many people in history are the heroes of epics. Achilleus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Aeneas, Cu Chullain…and even fewer verifiable, demonstratably real human beings are of such mythic stature. Boudicca, Charlemagne, Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Miyamoto Musashi, Mohammed…a small list, and while it could be made larger, not by a tremendous amount. Still fewer people manage to be both an epic hero and a flesh and blood human at once. One of those was Rodrigo Diaz, the man who was the subject of one of the last epic poems ever written, feared almost more by those supposedly allied to him than those he fought, the man who earned from his moslem enemies the ultimate compliment…the title Sayyid, or lord.
In the summer of 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city of Toledo. At the time, it appeared to be just one more incident on the Christian-Muslim frontier: Alfonso was in league with the Emir of Seville, and was keeping the Emir’s daughter as his concubine. In fact it proved to be the first step in the Christian Reconquista-the 400 year struggle for possession of the Iberian peninsula. Toledo was the largest and most central of some twenty-five taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms into which the old Cordoban emirate had fragmented. Their disunity gave the Christian rulers their chance. Within the decade, Alfonso’s champion, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid, had entered Valencia.
Norman Davies, Europe – A History
In 1043, the year Rodrigo Diaz was born, the descendants of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Almoravids held most of what is now Spain and Portugal. While certainly in no real position to threaten Europe again the way they had before the loss to Charles Martel at Tours, they were the beneficiaries of momentum, position and social advance…it would be hard to look back at the kingdom of Castile-Leon and argue that it wasn’t backward in comparison. It had not been for nothing that the keenest mind in all of Christendom had made his way to Spain less than a century before, because it was in Spain out of all of Europe that the legacy of the ancient world was closest to the surface. Perhaps only in Catalonia could an epic still unfold. Rodrigo Diaz was knighted after 1050 (and considering he was born sometime around 1043, he was very young to his spurs) and made a name for himself in combat across the Iberian peninsula. When King Fernando went to his death in 1065, his three sons fought over his throne, and Rodrigo found himself vassal and warrior for Sancho, the eldest son. After the imprisonment of Garcia and the death of Sancho in October, 1072, Rodrigo found himself serving under King Alfonso VI, his former suzerain’s brother. By 1079, the relationship between them soured when Rodrigo defeated an Almoravid army without Alfonso’s leave. So Rodrigo found himself banished and took up arms in the service of al-Mu’tamin, who was the lord of Zaragoza and who may well have taken it upon himself to school his new warlord in Almoravid sensibilities. It is said that books were studied in his presence: the warlike deeds of the old heroes of Arabia were read to him, and when the story of Mohallab was reached he was seized with delight and expressed himself full of admiration for this hero. It is possible they knew each other before, for Rodrigo’s first military campaign was on behalf of his lord Sancho of Castile in 1063, who actually served alongside al-Muqtadir against the King of Aragon, Ramiro I, brother of Fernando I of Castile and thus Sancho’s own uncle. Ramiro died in the battle, having been slain by a frontier-dwelling moor named Sa’dada who could speak Aragonese and thus penetrate their lines and drive a lance into Ramiro’s face. When King Sancho went to Zaragoza and fought with the Aragonese King Ramiro at Graus, whom he defeated and killed there, he took Rodrigo Diaz with him: Rodrigo was a part of the army which fought in the victorious battle as the Historia Roderici put it. So Rodrigo knew full well the benefit to learning about one’s enemies…and considering that Rodrigo would rejoin a somewhat needy Alfonso VI by 1086, just after the conquest of Toledo, one has to wonder if Rodrigo and Alfonso were really so antagonistic as they seemed. Surely Alfonso would not have granted Rodrigo permission to keep any Muslim lands he conquered as his own if they were at odds?
Of course, considering the first territory he chose to rule was Zaragoza, and also considering that he and Alfonso would split again in 1089, and yet again in 1091, it’s possible that Alfonso was just an idiot. Why else would he risk driving the most powerful noble in his realm, the man who saved his realm for him three times, into the arms of the enemy?
Al-Muqtadir was a cultivated man – ‘a real prodigy of nature in astrology, geometry and natural philosophy’ – and a patron of the arts. He built two famous palaces at Zaragoza. One of them, called the Qasr Dar al-Surur or ‘abode of pleasure’, contained within it a ‘golden hall of exquisite design and admirable workmanship’…At the time of Rodrigo’s arrival in Zaragoza, probably in the late summer of 1081, the elderly al-Muqtadir was in poor health. In the autumn of that year he delegated power to his two sons, though he remained nominal ruler until his death which seems to have occured in about July of 1082. The kingdom was partitioned between the sons…this was Rodrigo’s opportunity. The new ruler of Zaragoza could make use of a distinguished soldier in exile.
Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid
Al-Mu’tamin was very fond of Rodrigo and set him over and exalted him above all his kingdom and all his land, relying upon his counsel in all things. Rodrigo repaid him with victory. Whether or not he earned his title of El Cid in his service to al-Mu’tamin is unknown, but it was a very high honor for a man to becalled Sayyid. It was a title originally belonging to those descended from the Prophet himself. Rodrigo would serve al-Mu’tamin until the coming of fresh invaders from the Sahara healed the breach between him and Alfonso, but it was clear that for the rest of his life he would hold the customs and ideals he learned at his moorish overlord’s side. It was Alfonso’s defeat at Bajadoz that led Rodrigo to rejoin him, and it was clear that these new Islamic invaders, the true Almoravides instead of the taifa lords he was accustomed to, were not to his liking. He never sided with Islam again.
Had he ever sided with it?
When one considered the interesting similarities between Gerbert of Aurillac and al-Muqtadir, men of learning and science and mathematics, men who labored to build as well as educate, and then remember the young man who would be Sylvester II’s travels into Spain, it’s interesting to note that in 991 Gerbert made a profession of his faith as part of his becoming consecrated as Archbishop of Rheims. That’s not especially interesting in of itself. What is interesting is that the profession of faith he made rejected specifically the very tenets of the faith of the Catharist heresy that would, in fact, not exist for another two hundred years. Why would he even be concerned with what was at that time a minor heresy mostly held by Bogomils on the other side of Europe? Possibly because he’d encountered them in a very different form in Spain itself…the faith of the Ismaili, which adopted traditions from Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and which took as a sign the coming of the final era of mankind via the ascension of the final Mahdi, whose coming was foretold in 928 with the conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter. The Ismaili believed this to signal the end of the era of Islam, and also to coincide with the 1500th anniversary of the death of Zoroaster. They also preserved old prophecies of the religious and political restoration of Zoroastrianism, which had been swept away by the spread of Islam itself a few centuries before. It’s possible that Gerbert even knew of the tumultuous years after 930, when the Qarmatians sacked Mecca and stole the Black Stone of the Kaaba in order to help usher in the end of the era of Islam. While a brief Qarmatian reign in Bahrain under a supposed descendant of the Sassanids led ultimately to repression and death for Zoroastrians in the Abbasid caliphate after eight days, it sent shockwaves through Islam at the time. Shockwaves that may well have reached the inquisitive minds of the taifa lords of al-Andalus, the Iberian Islamic realm, and perhaps an equally inquisitive Frenchman who would become pope.
Was Gerbert schooled in Ismaili thought? Did he learn of the abacus and the astrolabe from them? Did he even transcend them and study the religions they syncreticised into their unique blend, looking upon the theories of the ancient hebrews and persians? He was known as a qabbalist (and as an aside, one of the main uses of the practical qabbala of the Sefer Yetzirah is the making of golems, like that brass head he supposedly constructed to help tell him of the future. Shades of Albertus Magnus and his man of brass, who Thomas Aquinas destroyed…was Magnus working with secrets Gerbert left behind?) and he took pains to deny the coeval duality of good and evil of the Cathars…it’s interesting to note that the Cathars themselves would range all over the territory Gerbert walked during his time in France and Spain (on that note, some 200 years later a king of Aragon and Catalonia, Pedro the Catholic, would attempt to prevent the destruction of Raymond Roger, Viscount of Carcassone in northern Spain, during an anti-Catharist heresy) and that they seem to have been anticipated by him.
Perhaps al-Muqtadir was an Ismaili, and perhaps Gerbert was one as well. Or perhaps the Islmaili themselves were merely stalking horses for a much older group, one that taught both men secret lore following the rebirth of Zoroaster’s religion as both a political and religious order…an order that may well have merely used the astrological signs to signal a new rebirth, having never truly gone away.
The Magi are a peculiar caste, quite different from the Egyptian priests and indeed from any other sort of person. The Egyptian priests make it an article of religion to kill no living creature except for sacrifice, but the Magi not only kill anything, except dogs and men, with their own hands but make a special point of doing so; ants, snakes, crawling animals, birds – no matter what, they kill them indiscriminately. Well, it is an ancient custom, so let them keep it.
Herodotus, The Histories
It’s not unknown that the Hashishin were a sect of the Ismaili. It’s also generally understood that they were founded in the late eleventh century by Hassan i Sabbah, right around the same time that Rodrigo Diaz was rampaging through Spain. In 1090 Sabbah became master of Alamut, in Persia. Alamut, the sacred mountain, the Omphalos, wherein Sabbah and the Hashish eaters (partakers in sacred intoxication) would strike forth throughout the Dar al-Islam in the name of their particular version of Ismaili doctrine. As head of the order, Hassan was known as the Sheik al-Gebel, the old man of the mountain. Interestingly enough, the emperor Heilogabalus also derived his name from El-Gabal, the sun god who came to earth in the form of a black meteorite…much like the black stone of the Kaaba that the Qarmatians stole in 930 AD. Hassan’s choice of titles is evocative, for it links him back to the Persian-Roman hybrid religion known as Mithraism, the solar cult of tauroctonous sacrifice by the hands of the transformed Mitras.
Save, of course, that Mitras never slew any bulls.
Thus, to take what is perhaps the most important example, there is no evidence that the Iranian god Mithra ever had anything to do with killing a bull. Faced with the problem of trying to find an ancient Iranian parallel to the Mithraic bull-slaying, Cumont did manage to locate an Iranian myth in which a bull is killed. However, in the myth which Cumont chose the bull is killed not by the expected Mithra but rather by Ahriman, the power of cosmic evil.
David Ulansey, The Origin of the Mithraic Mysteries
The moment Cambyses heard the name, he was struck with the truth of what Prexaspes had said, and realized that his dream of how somebody told him that Smerdis was sitting on the throne with his head touching the sky, had been fulfilled. It was clear to him now that the murder of his brother had been all to no purpose; he lamented his loss, and at last, in bitterness and anger at the whole miserable set of circumstances, he leapt upon his horse, meaning to march with all speed to Susa and attack the Magus. But as he was springing into the saddle, the cap fell off the sheath of his sword, exposing the blade, which pierced his thigh – just in the spot where he had previously struck Apis the sacred Egyptian bull.
Herodotus, The Histories
Imagine if you will a time following the abortive attempt by the Magi themselves, the Medean priesthood of Zoroastrianism, to overthrow Cambyses and take control of the Persian Empire itself under Patizeithes and Smerdis. After Cambyses died, it appeared as though your rule was assured, and that a new theocracy under the Medean priesthood was at hand. Then came Darius, and disaster…and worse, the Achaemenids would then create a theocracy of their own, with themselves as the chosen of Ohrmazd. What to do? Bide your time, and wait, and turn the symbology of Cambyses death to your advantage. The bull-slayer Ahriman was the lord of the lie: let him now be your lord, and change his name by disguising him as Mithras, one of the Amesha Spentas. Invade the lands around the empire, seeking to infect them with malleable thought…so arises Orphism, that unique flavor of dualism that first took the Zoroastrian conflict between cosmic forces and argued even to the division of spirit and body, that the body was the source of corruption and evil, that the world itself was not part of the good creation of Ohrmazd but was rather corrupt and sinful. In short, if the Achaemenids wanted to rule the world as chosen proxies for Ohrmazd, they were themselves corrupt and evil.
Then came the two-horned one, son of the god, Alexander. He burned Sardis, destroyed the writings of the Magi, and drove them even further underground. They took refuge in those religions most likely to shelter them…religions like Judaism, which was already well-disposed to Zoroastrian thought due to Cyrus’ role as the conqueror of Babylon, the one who ended their long exile, the Anointed One spoken of in the books of Daniel. Is it possible that the Zealots and the Sicari were inspired by the Magi? In their reasonably well-researched yet still ineffably crazy The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argue that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves are a documentation of the development of the early years of Christianity, that the Qumran community was the Damascus that Saul of Tarsus was journeying to during his famous conversion (which is somewhat bolstered by the discovery of the Damascus Document among the scrolls found at Qumran) and that there was a militant core of hard-line jews in the years leading up to the Jewish rebellion against Rome who practiced assassination and controlled significant resources (the treasures listed on the Copper Scroll) and that they had two messiahs, the Messiah of David and the Messiah of Aaron, a war leader and a priest. They further go on to argue that Jesus was the Messiah of David and that his brother James was ‘The Righteous Man’, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who was beset by Paul (who they cast in the role of ‘The Liar’, a figure from the scrolls who came to the Qumran community only to betray it) and ‘The Wicked Priest’ (possibly Caiphas, who had Jesus turned over to the Romans…in this version, Jesus would indeed be attempting to be recognized as King of the Jews, a literal heir to David). All of this by itself is a fairly significant revision to the Biblical story, which paints Paul as a hero and apostle. Now, to tie all of this in, the strict battle of the Armies of the Sons of Light vs. the Sons of Darkness also written about in the scrolls is very obviously influenced by Zoroastrian thought…the painting of the ‘Kittim of Ashur’ as sons of Belial, the lie manifest, puts them squarely in the Ahrimanic camp since Ahriman is the cosmic lie itself, literally the Error so feared by Mani and his followers…and now we come to this: in the Bible, Jesus is said to have first been recognized as King by three magi. Specifically, three magi following a star to his birthplace. Were the magi trying again to set up a theocracy in the middle east, using Judaism as a stalking horse to get around Roman polytheism? The Sassanids still pretended to Achaemanid Zoroastrianism to the east, after all, the hated royal version of the creed originally created by Darius to dispossess them.
This of course begs the question…did Paul hijack Christianity away from Judaism as an agent of the magi, or as an opponent? Like Mani after him, Paul would take elements of previous religions and make a whole new one out of them, creating a syncretic, divine Christ who could stack up miracles to rival the other Orphic mystery religions around him. It’s interesting to consider the connection between Saul/Paul’s home of Tarsus and the Mithraic cult, because Plutarch himself who claimed Tarsus as a birthplace for it, and others see in the cult of Perseus that flourished there another seed for Pauline Christianity. (And if we are to believe John Allegro, it’s entirely possible that Paul and his followers like John of Patmos were also getting really high on anamita muscaria around this time, making of Christ a Dionysos rather than the warrior-god the magi seemed to be trying to create) So were the Magi themselves engaged in a two-front war, one a constant attempt to subvert Zoroastrianism to the cult of Ahriman (Armimanus, as the Mithraic cultists called him) and another an attempt to create the Righteous Man and the Ativad in the form of twin Messiahs? For what purpose?
The Magi gave the world the word magic, and magic is the making of symbols. In Mithraism, they created out of the mythology of Zoroastrianism, Orphism and later Roman additions a complicated stellar cycle involving the constellation Taurus and the planets Jupiter and Saturn…a complicated religious clock, if you will, counting down to a future date. Perhaps a future date some 1500 years following the supposed death of Zoroaster himself. And in the infiltration of inter-testamental Judaism, in the creation of Zealots and Sicari, in the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem and the second Diaspora perhaps they simultaneously sought to undo the work of Cyrus, the Anointed One, the father of their hated enemy dynasty and the dissemination of Paul’s altered Christian thought, with the King selected by Magi, a virus of syncreticism to infect the west just as Orphism had so long ago…and even further behind that, perhaps, they sought to bring into being a new creation. A monotheism of their own devising. A union of Ohrmazd and Ahriman. By tying in the twin messiahs to rulership and priesthood, and at the same time making one the instrument of the ascension of the Liar, Paul, betrayer of the Qumran community and having the other, James, the Righteous Man be destroyed…by sacrificing the god himself, and then having the god rise even from death they create a whole new paradigm. Ahriman is forever trapped in this world, the good creation of Ohrmazd…unless the good creation can be made to be considered foul, sinful. Then it becomes Ahriman’s.
Thinking about it…Mithraism serving to unite Ohrmazd and Ahriman by taking one of the Amesha Spentas, who are literally aspects of Ohrmazd himself, his virtues, and investing it with the role of Ahriman while creating a complicated tauroctonic mythology to help conceal a stellar mapping project that would allow them to create prophetic movements in time with whatever changes they want to make, like the supposed return of Zoroaster after their Achaemanid rivals were long gone…Christianity serving as the sharp point of the wedge in Polytheistic Europe, allowing them to convince Celt and German alike that Christ was whatever they needed him to be, whether that be peaceful fisher of men or warrior god, the White Christ or the man who said I come bearing not peace, but a sword. Both movements serving to promote a monotheism born out of syncreticism, a fusion, a subsumption of gods. Islam rises, claims the same god as Christianity, as Judaism before it, and crushes the Sassanids who promote the original, dualistic conception of Zoroaster’s legacy. Then they merely have to set their rivals against each other to create maximun chaos, prevent any from learning who the true puppet masters are, while the Magi continue on their quest to reduce gods down into a God, preferably one they maintain sole control over. Mythology as literal world-building, seeking to control minds by controlling who they pray to and what his tenets are.
In Qabbalistic terms, perhaps they seek to force Qemtiel and Kether together, to bind the Qlippoth and the Sephiroth as one, to hijack the merkabah and edit the shi’ur komah to a new pattern, one they control. Is it any wonder they made use of Manicheanism until Mani became too intractable? Send him forth into the Sassanid domains, to spread his familiar yet disturbingly alien message…then allow a merchant from the Arabian sands who reveres the Kaaba to hear a message from a fiery angel (a sun god, transfigured) and send forth a crusade to destroy the Sassanids and render your Achaemanid-derived rival impotent. Then, to keep from being drowned, drive the Dar al-Islam into world conquest while using them to attempt to create your own artificial pairedaeza in the Iberian mountains, a magical land. Calyferne, the first attempt at Alamut.
Did young Gerbert of Aurillac see it coming? Did he somehow use that magnificent brain of his to piece together the magical invasion that sought to use his faith as a weapon to kill and recreate God? He was a kabbalist, who knew the original form of the discipline from the time of Abraham. Did he indeed use his disciplined mind and his esoteric knowledge to achieve the throne of Peter, hoping to use his position to ally with Almanzor, seeking common ground against the sect that used the stars to nearly topple Islam a mere forty years before? Interesting that both men died within a year of each other. Also interesting to consider Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid himself, who earned the epithet Lord from the taifa kings as an Ismaili plan to create another Ativad, a warrior-king of Ahriman. Did Rodrigo die in 1099 while holding Valencia from the Almoravides because the sect had finally chosen another Alamut, and no longer needed the Sayyid when the Sheik al-Gebel would do?
Another possibility presents itself…that even the Magi themselves are no longer whole and unified in their purpose. After all, Alexander the Great died a long time ago, and perhaps his destruction of the Magi scriptures when he burned Sardis was the result of a war between factions of Magi. It’s entirely possible to imagine the Orphists becoming infected in turn by the viruses of Iamblichian and Neo-Platonic thought, and creating their own school dedicated to their own goals. One remembers the conversion of Constantine via the symbol of the Chi-Rho emblazoned on the sun itself, and the message in hoc signo vinces that convinced him to allow that faith to flourish. Perhaps they chose to recreate God in a different fashion, taking the Pauline message and making a myth of their own, and fighting for it. Christ as the logos, the word, and thus both Gerbert and Rodrigo serve as trojan horses infiltrating the enemy camp to destroy it from within.
On this dark and bloody ground would continue the reconquista for four centuries, as well as the crusade to destroy the Cathars and stamp out dualism. Why was it so important to end the Cathar heresy that the deaths of 20,000 people were necessary? Were the Cathars considered to be a rival to another group, or its catspaws? If one is engaged in trying to pare down all the myriad symbols of divinity into one, the Cathars might well resemble the hated Achamaenid form of Zoroastrian thought that they sought to destroy reborn…and for that matter, if one is engaged in attempt to promote a more expansive view of the divine, thousand-faced Hermes, then the Cathars become useful both as a stalking horse and a means to plant contrary thought. One imagines the Orphic vs. the Mithraic sects of the Magi choosing their proxies and playing chess with lives…did this game cost Gerbert and Diaz theirs, too? By dying, Sylvester II lost the chance to bring enlightenment to Europe, and perhaps prevent the Crusades from ever being fought. By living, Rodrigo Diaz blunted the last great thrust of Islam into Europe by defeating the Almoravide Empire. Were they pawns of a conspiracy still working to pare down the infinite faces of God into a symbol of their own devising, or were they its great enemies? And what happens if someone succeeds in defining the face of God for all? Will Ahriman burst free from his confinement as the stars turn around again, and the bull of the stars dies?
Probably not. It’s probably pretty damn crazy to postulate that there’s a secret cabal of mages, perhaps even competing groups of mages, all trying to create the ultimate symbol for God, to revise the shi’ur komah and edit all of reality, to force into existence a deity that they can then use to breach adam kadmon by realigning the Sephiroth of Tohu and the Qlippothic cracked shells discarded during the shattering. To end the war between Ohrmazd and Ahriman by forcing them to become one, by constantly linking each god to the attributes of the other. And certainly it’s not like we find ourselves in an endless cycle of conflict over the religions born out of a common ground, after all, who all claim to be praying to the God of Abraham and Isaac and yet can’t agree on what that singular God’s attributes are, after all.
And so we come to the end of this musing, having left ourselves with the thought that Gerbert of Aurillac and Sayyid Rodrigo Diaz may have played key roles in the attempt to build a golem out of ideas, and call it God, and in so doing make it so. The clock of the stars ticks ever onward towards the future, if you can read them properly and calculate them accurately enough, and Zoroaster’s been dead for another thousand years.
Postscript: Okay, I admit it, I left about six threads dangling in this one. I mean, crap, all the talk of astrology and mathematics and lost astronomical documents that Gerbert requested of course leads us to wonder if the document in question was Manilius’ Astronomica, which of course is the inspiration behind Lovecraft’s creation of the Necronomicon, and then we start to realize that Lovecraft was in fact an astronomer himself, and then we start to wonder if there evolved another rival sect, perhaps one inspired by shamanic or hermetic antagonists to the magi who began creating the proliferation of syncretic gods like Serapis, and who perhaps inspired Rabelais to write his Garganta and Pantagruel, who were behind Theleme and Blake’s Zoa and Lovecraft’s elder gods…fighting the tide of grim monotheism with an ever expanding horde of new gods, who made use of new means of communication. Was Jack Kirby a high magus of this syncretic order, following in the footsteps of Siegel and Shuster, presenting our age with divinities to forever keep the hermetic pressure up, preventing the fusion of the divine by making sure there would always be novel faces for Hermes to hide behind? I mean, that one’s easy. I could have worked in how Robert Graves added new meanings to old gods, or how Kenneth Grant helped spread Crowleyan ideas through his Typhonian OTO, or how Israel Regardie made the Qabbala accessible and in so doing ripped away the veil of secrecy, or how Tolkien’s complex mythology born out of his Christian ideals and his love for the old Germanic myths helps build in the mass mind of humanity new faces, new ideas about gods. So yeah, I know there’s more to say. There’s always more to say. Hopefully, I’ll say it in another way sometime.
Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall 
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