Semiramis, Ishtar, Easter, Mysteries

Ishtar (DIŠTAR; Akkadian; Sumerian) is the East Semitic Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex. She is the counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna, and is the cognate for the Northwest Semitic Aramean goddess Astarte. Her symbols were the lion, the gate and the eight-pointed star

Latin name for Easter, Pascha, which is derived from the Hebrew Pesach, meaning Passover. Greek translation, is ‘pascha’.

Easter Sunday generally falls on the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon – the first full moon of Spring in the northern hemisphere, or the first full moon occurring after the date of the vernal equinox, and as such, can fall on any day between March 22 and April 25.

Every year, on the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring, or after the spring equinox, a celebration was made. It was Ishtar’s Sunday and was celebrated with rabbits and eggs.

Any effort to trace the origins of the myth, legend, and lore of goddess-worship will eventually lead one back to a single historical figure—Semiramis, wife of Nimrod and queen of Babylon, and this is especially true when considering the goddess/planet Venus.

For ancient Greeks Semiramis (Greek: Σεμίραμις, Armenian: Շամիրամ Shamiram) was the legendary queen of king Ninus, succeeding him to the throne of Assyria. Nearly every stupendous work of antiquity by the Euphrates or in Iran seems to have ultimately been ascribed to her

Various places in Assyria and throughout Mesopotamia as a whole, Media, Persia, the Levant, Asia Minor, Arabia and the Caucasus bore the name of Semiramis, but slightly changed, even in the Middle Ages, and an old name of the city of Van was Shamiramagerd (in Armenian it means created by Semiramis).

She restored ancient Babylon and protected it with a high brick wall that completely surrounded the city. Then she built several palaces in Persia, including Ecbatana. Diodorus also attributes the Behistun inscription to her, now known to have been done under Darius I of Persia. She not only reigned Asia effectively but also added Libya and Aethiopia to the empire. She then went to war with king Stabrobates of India, having her artisans create an army of false elephants to deceive the Indians into thinking she had acquired real elephants. This succeeded at first, but then she was wounded in the counterattack and her army again retreated west of the Indus.

According to the Armenian legend, Semiramis had heard about the fame of the handsome Armenian king Ara, and she lusted after his image. She asked Ara to marry her, but he refused; upon hearing this, she gathered the armies of Assyria and marched against Armenia.

During the battle, which may have taken place in the Ararat valley, Ara was slain. To avoid continuous warfare with the Armenians, Semiramis, reputed to be a sorceress, took his body and prayed to the gods to raise Ara from the dead. When the Armenians advanced to avenge their leader, she disguised one of her lovers as Ara and spread the rumor that the gods had brought Ara back to life, ending the war.

Semiramis (Shammuramat) would have thus been briefly in control of the vast Neo Assyrian Empire, which 150 years later stretched from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and western Iran in the east to Cyprus in the west.

The earliest Babylonian legends tell of a conquering people who came up out of the Persian Gulf and established an empire from these cities. This seems to fit well with what we know of the movements of Nimrod in his early career. He was a native of Ethiopia and was widely traveled among the few populated areas of those days. When he set out to build himself an army of conquest, he recruited from his “cousins” the descendants of Sheba and Dedan who had come up through Arabia to settle on the Asian mainland at the Straight of Hormuz and on the Indus river in what is now Afghanistan (these people were the Dravidians who were driven southward into India by the later Aryan invasion). After raising his army, Nimrod ferried them up the gulf in the world’s first naval armada, and conquered his empire. The best estimates place the time of the conquest as about 4000 to 3500 BC, and about 1000 years after the flood of Noah.

Genesis 10:1-12

10 This is the account of the families of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the three sons of Noah. Many children were born to them after the great flood.

In the midst of the tumult of war Nimrod and Semiramis met–and in none too savory circumstances, for tradition states that she was an inn/brothel keeper in the city of Erech—leading one to speculate upon the nature of their initial acquaintance. Semiramis was a native of Erech, which as evidenced by it’s name seems to have been built by a Hamitic family (Ham’s wife was said to have been descended from Cain who built the first Erech in honor of his son). The name Semiramis is a later, Hellenized form of the Sumerian name “Sammur-amat”, or “gift of the sea.”

The initial element “sammur” when translated into Hebrew becomes “Shinar” (the biblical name for lower Mesopotamia), and is the word from which we derive “Sumeria”. This one tarnished woman then, had such a lasting impact upon world history that not only do we call by her name the land from which civilization flowed, but God himself through the sacred writer has let us know that its distinguishing characteristic was that it was “the Land of Shinar,” or Semiramis.

Semiramis was the instigator in forming the religion based primarily upon a corruption of the primeval astronomy formulated by Noah’s righteous ancestors before the flood. In the original this system depicted by means of constellations the story of Satan’s rebellion and the war in the heavens, his subversion of mankind, the fall of Adam and Eve, the promise of One to come who would suffer and die to relieve man from the curse of sin then be installed as Lord of Creation, and the final re-subjugation of the cosmos to God through Him.

These eternal truths were corrupted by her (rather, quite obviously, by the evil one controlling her) into a mythic cycle wherein the great dragon is depicted as the rightful lord of the universe whose throne has been temporarily usurped by One whom we can recognize as the God of the Bible. The serpent creates man in his present miserable state, but promises that a child would one day born of a divine mother—which child would supplant God, become a god himself, and return rulership of the Earth to the serpent. These fables were based upon the then widely-known story of the constellations, and were introduced under the guise of revealing the hidden esoteric knowledge concealed in them (regardless of the fact that the original was quite straightforward).

Although this esotericism was the second element in Semiramis’ cult, it only masked the actual goal which was the worship of the “heavenly host,” which the Bible equates with Satan’s army of fallen angels. Satan was quite willing to receive worship “by proxy”, hence the third major element of the mystery religion was emperor-worship. This religion was propagated by a hierarchy of priests and priestesses, to whom were assigned the task of initiating the populace at large into it’s ascending degrees of revelation, culminating at the highest level in both direct worship of Satan and demon-possession.

During the course of the New Year’s festivities at which the advent of Nimrod’s rule was celebrated, there was a certain feast exclusively for the royal family and the upper echelons of the priesthood. During this feast, which included “courses” of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, a year-old ram was traditionally sacrificed by being torn limb-from-limb while still alive, and it’s flesh eaten raw. This ram symbolized the old year passing into the heavens to allow room for the new year. A new-born lamb was then presented which, symbolizing the new year, would be kept and fattened for the next year’s ceremonies. This year Semiramis directed the ritual according to the formula, with the exception that when the time came for the ram to be slaughtered, it was the king who was torn to pieces at the hands of the drug-crazed priesthood and Semiramis’ bastard son was installed as king. Thus Nimrod, the mighty hunter, died a horrible death as a trapped beast himself.

Semiramis named her son Damu (from the Sumerian “dam,” or blood), which in the later Babylonian language became Dammuzi, in Hebrew Tammuz, and in Greek Adonis. Of course, Semiramis assumed the regency for her infant son, and ruled as absolute monarch for 42 more years. In order to avoid having to kill her son on the next New Year’s Day, she instituted an annual nation-wide sports competition, the winner of which would have the “honor” of taking Damu’s place and ascending into heaven to become a god.

To oppose the accusations of “mere” womanhood laid against her, she had herself deified as the mother of the god Damu (since only a god can beget a god) , and installed as “The Queen of Heaven” pictured in the constellation Cassiopeia, which the ancients had intended as a corporate representation of those people faithful to God who will be enthroned by Him after the end of the age.

Semiramis died after reigning as queen over Babylon for 102 years.

She was worshiped throughout the world by each of the titles associated with Nimrod’s worship, in addition to many titles unique to herself (see table below). For instance, the respective Greek and Roman names applied to the worship of Semiramis include: Aphrodite and Venus, the goddess of love; Artemis and Diana, the goddess of hunting and childbirth; Athena and Minerva, the goddess of crafts, war and wisdom; Demeter and Ceres, the goddess of growing things; Gaea and Terra, symbol of the fertile earth; Hera and Juno, the protector of marriage and women, who was the sister and wife of Zeus in Greek mythology, and the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology; Hestia and Vesta, the goddess of the hearth; plus Rhea or Ops, who was wife and sister of the Greek horned-god Kronos.

In fact, in Tibet, China, and Japan, Jesuit missionaries were astonished to find the counterpart of the madonna and child as devoutly worshiped as they were in Rome. Shing Moo, the holy mother in China was portrayed with a child in her arms and a glory around her, exactly as if she had been fashioned by Roman Catholic artisans.

In Egypt, the mother was styled Athor, the “habitation of god” to signify that all the “fullness of the godhead” dwelt in her womb. She was named Hestia in Greece and Vesta, which is just a Roman variation of the same name, meaning the “dwelling-place of deity.”

Under her title, “mother of the gods,” the goddess queen of Babylon became an object of universal worship. The mother of the gods was worshiped by the Persians, the Syrians, and with the most profound religious veneration by all the kings of Europe and Asia. When Caesar invaded Britain, he discovered the Druid priests worshiping the “mother of god” as Virgo-Patitura.

In Egypt, as the “queen of heaven” she was the greatest and most worshiped of all the divinities. During Egyptian bondage, the Israelites repeatedly departed from the one true invisible Elohim and worshiped the pagan mother. When the Israelites fell into apostasy under King Solomon, they worshiped this mother goddess as Ashtaroth (Asherah), a name by which the pagan Babylonian goddess was known to the Israelites:

And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of YHWH, and served the Baals [various lord gods depicting Nimrod] and the Ashtaroth [Semiramis], the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines; and they forsook YHWH, and did not serve him.

Worship of mother and child spread from Babylon to the ends of the earth, but were called different names in the languages of the various counties where their worship appeared. The ancient Germans worshipped the virgin HERTHA with the child in the arms of his mother. TheScandinavians called herDISA pictured with her child. In Egypt, the mother and her child were worshiped as ISIS with the infant OSIRIS orHORUS seated on his mother’s lap. In India, the mother and child were called DEVAKIand KRISHNA, and also ISI and ISWARA as they are worshiped to this day. In Asia, they were known as CYBELE and DEOIUS; in pagan Rome, as FORTUNA and JUPITER-PUER, or the boy JUPITER; in Greece, as CERES, the great mother with babe at her breast, or as IRENE, the goddess of peace, with the boy PLUTUSin her arms. Even in Tibet, China, and Japan, Jesuit missionaries were astonished to find the Roman counterpart of MADONNA and child. SHING MOO, the holy mother in China was portrayed with a child in her arms and a glory around her.

Semiramis was worshiped in Ephesus as the pagan fertility goddess DIANA who represented the generative powers of nature. She was referred to as a fertility goddess. Diana was pictured with numerous teats so that she could nurse all the pagan gods, and she wore a tower-shaped crown symbolizing the Babylonian tower of Babel.

Another sign or symbol found throughout Babylonia is the obelisk, a phallic symbol. These can also be seen in Egypt, Rome and Washington DC. The obelisk in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican was dragged up to Rome from Egypt. The Washington Monument is a sign that Babylon is alive.

The Battle of the Milvian Bridge took place between the Roman Emperors Constantine I and Maxentius on 28 October 312. It takes its name from the Milvian Bridge, an important route over the Tiber. Constantine won the battle and started on the path that led him to end the Tetrarchy and become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Maxentius drowned in the Tiber during the battle.

According to chroniclers such as Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius, the battle marked the beginning of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Eusebius of Caesarea recounts that Constantine and his soldiers had a vision of the Christian God promising victory if they daubed the sign of the Chi-Rho, the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek, on their shields. The Arch of Constantine, erected in celebration of the victory, certainly attributes Constantine’s success to divine intervention; however, the monument does not display any overtly Christian symbolism.

Protestant minister Alexander Hislop in The Two Babylons (1853) claimed that Semiramis was an actual person in ancient Mesopotamia who invented polytheism and, with it, goddess worship. Hislop believed that Semiramis was a consort of Nimrod, builder of the Bible’s Tower of Babel, though Biblical mention of consorts to Nimrod is lacking. According to Hislop, Semiramis invented polytheism in an effort to corrupt her subjects’ original faith in the God of Genesis. She deified herself as Ishtar and her son as Gilgamesh, as well as various members of her court and her then deceased husband. He maintained that all divine pairings in religions e.g. Isis/Osiris, Aphrodite/Cupid, and others, are retellings of the tale of Semiramis and Tammuz, and that this was then applied to Mary/Jesus in Catholicism, even though Christianity does not support a special divinity of Mary rather the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The figure of Semiramis was later developed into the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to Hislop’s book. Hislop used this in support of his claim that Roman Catholicism is in fact paganism.

Author and conspiracy theorist David Icke also incorporates Hislop’s claims about Semiramis into his book The Biggest Secret, claiming that Semiramis also had a key role in the Reptilian alien conspiracy that he asserts is secretly controlling humanity.

Queen Semiramis also proclaimed that Baal would be present on earth in the form of a flame, whether candle or lamp, when used in worship.

Semiramis became known as “Ishtar” which is pronounced “Easter” referred to as Ashtoreth in scripture, and her moon egg became known as “Ishtar’s” egg.” One of her titles was the Queen of Heaven, and two of her fertility symbols were the rabbit and the egg. She soon became pregnant and claimed that it was the rays of the sun-god Baal (the ascended Nimrod) that caused her to conceive.

She also proclaimed a forty day period of time of sorrow for each year prior to the anniversary of the death of Tammuz. During this time, no meat was to be eaten – this is what became known as Lent” in Roman Catholic tradition. Worshipers were to meditate upon the sacred mysteries of Baal and Tammuz, and to make the sign of the “Tau” (a cross) in front of their hearts as they worshiped. They also ate sacred cakes with the marking of a “T” or a cross, on the top. Every year, on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, a celebration was made. It was Ishtar’s Sunday and was celebrated with rabbits and eggs. Ishtar also proclaimed that because Tammuz was killed by a pig, that a pig must be eaten on that Sunday.

Ishtar, (Semiramis, widow of Nimrod, mother of Tammuz) came to be represented as the bare breasted pagan fertility goddess of the east. The original pagan festival of “Easter” was a sex orgy that celebrated the return of life via the fertility of Ishtar’s conception of Tammuz. Worshipers of the Babylonian religion celebrated the conception of Tammuz on the first Sunday after the Full Moon that followed the Spring Equinox. They celebrated it by baking cakes to Ishtar, getting drunk, engaging in sex orgies and prostitution in the temple of Ishtar. Women were required to celebrate the conception of Tammuz by lying down in the temple and having sex with whoever entered. The man was required to leave her money. Babies were sacrificed in the honor of these pagan gods and their blood was consumed by the worshipers. The priest of Easter would sacrifice infants (human babies) and take the eggs of Easter/Ishtar, as symbols of fertility, and die them in the blood of the sacrificed infants (human babies). The Easter eggs would hatch on December 25th (nine months later), the same day her son Tammuz the reincarnate sun-god would be born.

Many babies would be born around Dec 25 from the sex orgies that began on the feast of Ishtar in the Spring and many of these babies would be sacrificed the following Easter/Ishtar feast .

It was also common for pagans to bake cakes to offer to her (the Queen of heaven) on the Friday before the Easter festival. This is where we gained the custom of ‘hot cross buns’, with the “cross” symbol indicating the female (the Babylonian symbol for the “female” was, and is, a circle with a crux/cross beneath). The cross also indicated the Equinox, when the Earth’s orbit “crossed” the celestial equator.

The celebration of Easter has a long history going back to the time after the Flood. Ham, the grandson of Noah had a son named Cush who married a woman named Semiramis. Cush and Semiramis then had a son and named him “Nimrod.” After the death of his father, Nimrod married his own mother and became a powerful King.

The Bible tells of this man, Nimrod, in Genesis 10:8-10. Nimrod became a god-man to the people and Semiramis, his wife and mother, became the powerful Queen of ancient Babylon. They developed what became the mystery religion of Babylon.

Says Alexander Hislop, “It was an essential principle of the Babylonian system, that the Sun or Baal was the one only God. When, therefore, Tammuz was worshiped as God incarnate, that implied that he was an incarnation of the Sun” (p.96). Connected with his worship was a pagan “Lent” of forty days. Hislop adds, “Among the Pagans this Lent seems to have been an indispensable preliminary to the great annual festival in commemoration of the death and resurrection of Tammuz, which was celebrated by alternate weeping and rejoicing . . . being observed in Palestine and Assyria in June, therefore called the ‘month of Tammuz;’ in Egypt, about the middle of May, and in Britain, some time in April. To conciliate the Pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skillful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity — now far sunk in idolatry — in this as in so many other things, to shake hands”

Baʿal  is a Semitic word signifying “The Lord, master, owner (male), keeper, husband”, which became the usual designation of the great weather-god of the Western Semites. Cognates include Standard Hebrew (Bet-Ayin-Lamed);  Akkadian Bēl and Arabic. In Hebrew, the word ba’al means “husband” or “owner”, and is related to a verb meaning to take possession of, for a man, to consummate a marriage. The word “ba’al” is also used in many Hebrew phrases, denoting both concrete ownership as well as possession of different qualities in one’s personality. The feminine form is Baʿalah (Hebrew בַּעֲלָה Baʕ^alah, Arabic بعلـة baʿalah) signifying “lady, mistress, owner (female), wife”

1 Kings 16:31 relates that Ahab, king of Israel, married Jezebel, daughter of Ethba’al, king of the Sidonians, and then served habba’al (‘the Baʿal’.) The cult of this god was prominent in Israel until the reign of Jehu, who – according to the biblical account in 2 Kings – put an end to it: “And they brought out the pillars (massebahs) of the house of the Baʿal and burned them. And they pulled down the pillar (massebah) of the Baʿal and pulled down the house of the Baʿal and turned it into a latrine until this day.” (2 Kings 10:26-27)

Jeremiah 11:12-21 Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go and cry to the gods to whom they offer incense: but they shall not save them at all in the time of their trouble. For according to the number of your cities are your gods, O Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem you have set up altars to the abominination, altars to burn incense to the Ba‘al.

Ba‘al Zəbûb is variously understood to mean “lord of flies”, or “lord of the (heavenly) dwelling”. Originally the name of a Philistine god, Ba’al, meaning “Lord” in Ugaritic, was used in conjunction with a descriptive name of a specific god. Jewish scholars have interpreted the title of “Lord of Flies” as the Hebrew way of calling Ba’al a pile of dung, and comparing Ba’al followers to flies. The Septuagint renders the name as Baalzebub (βααλζεβούβ) and as Baal muian (βααλ μυιαν, “Baal of flies”), but Symmachus the Ebionite may have reflected a tradition of its offensive ancient name when he rendered it as Beelzeboul.

New Testament

Beelzebub, also Beelzebul, is also identified in the New Testament as Satan, the “prince of the demons”. In Arabic the name is retained as Ba‘al dhubaab / zubaab (بعل الذباب), literally “Lord of the Flies”. Biblical scholar Thomas Kelly Cheyne suggested that it might be a derogatory corruption of Ba‘al Zəbûl, “Lord of the High Place” (i.e., Heaven) or “High Lord”. The word Beelzebub in rabbinical texts is a mockery of the Ba’al religion, which ancient Hebrews considered to be idol (or, false god) worship.

The word “Easter” appears in the KJV translation, but in the Greek from which it is translated, it is ‘pascha’, and it means Passover, from the Hebrew word “Pesach”. All scholars admit that this is an error in translation, and it only appears ONCE, at Acts 12:4. Luke didn’t put it there as “Easter”, he wrote it as “Pesach/Passover”. The KJV is the only one with this error, since translators have since corrected it in all others!

The Epic of Gilgamesh contains an episode involving Ishtar

She asks the hero Gilgamesh to marry her, but he refuses, citing the fate that has befallen all her many lovers:

Listen to me while I tell the tale of your lovers. There was Tammuz, the lover of your youth, for him you decreed wailing, year after year. You loved the many-coloured Lilac-breasted Roller, but still you struck and broke his wing […] You have loved the lion tremendous in strength: seven pits you dug for him, and seven. You have loved the stallion magnificent in battle, and for him you decreed the whip and spur and a thong […] You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he made meal-cake for you day after day You struck and turned him into a wolf; now his own herd-boys chase him away, his own hounds worry his flanks.”

Angered by Gilgamesh’s refusal, Ishtar goes up to heaven and complains to her father the high god Anu that Gilgamesh has insulted her. She demands that Anu give her the Bull of Heaven. Anu points out that it was her fault for provoking Gilgamesh

Acts 7:43

No, you carried your pagan gods— the shrine of Molech, the star of your god Rephan, and the images you made to worship them. So I will send you into exile as far away as Babylon.

1 Samuel 7:3

Then Samuel said to all the people of Israel, “If you are really serious about wanting to return to the Lord, get rid of your foreign gods and your images of Ashtoreth. Determine to obey only the Lord; then he will rescue you from the Philistines.”