Saints Paul and Anthony in the Desert.

The following page examines the esoteric implications of the painting by Teniers, of the Saints Paul and Anthony in Egypt, which is seen by some as a counterpart to the Poussin 'Et in Arcadia'. What is examined in detail is the cultic referances to the 17th of January, in association with the skull and death in general. It can be seen that what attention is being drawn toward is long forgotten placing of sacred events around numeric/calendric considerations.

'In the Holy Land, the Orthodox churches use the old calendar (which has a difference of twelve days) to determine the date of the religious feasts. Accordingly, the Armenians celebrate Christmas on January 18th and the Greek Orthodox celebrate on January 6th. On the day before Armenian Christmas, January 17th, the Armenian Patriarch together with the clergy and the faithful, travels from Jerusalem to the city of Bethlehem, to the Church of Nativity of Christ, were elaborate and colorful ceremonies take place. Outside, in the large square of the Church of Nativity, the Patriarch and his entourage are greeted by the Mayor of Bethlehem and City officials. A procession led by Armenian scouts and their band, advance the Patriarch into the Church of Nativity, while priests, seminarians and the faithful join in the singing of Armenian hymns. Afterwards, church services and ceremonies are conducted in the Cathedral of Nativity all night long and until the next day.

The 16th day of each month was sacred to Mithra, whose cult centred upon the trans-Caucasus region in the vicinity of Armenia.

St Paul is on the 15/1, St Anthony on the 17/1...the 16th was the day of dying to rise again.

The major deities of Egypt were divided into two eneads of 9, based at Heliopolis and Thebes, thus 18 major deities, this corresponded with the notion of the Sun extending down 18 radial arms of light , or oars,as it sailed across the daytime firmament, or as the 18 blessings of the Aten solar disk.

In contrast to this would be the 18 major deities/daemons of the sun in the netherwirld, or the oars on the other side of the boat etc...

The point being to half the circle of the daily journey of the sun into two groupings of 18 relating to day and night, which again corresponded to the Egyptian year of 36 x10(decan periods)=360 days with an additional added 5 at the end.

So 18 becomes 180 degrees and 36 becomes 360 degrees., thus also a basis for geometry, an ennead corresponding to a 90 degree quadrant. If 18 then can represent the sun shining forth during the day, then on the other hand 14 represented the full moon. The Israeli passover was held on the 14th day of the full moon in the first month, which is obviously 2 lunar halfs of 7 days

The crucifixion of Jesus took place on the 16th day of this first month, thus as 2x8, and the resurrection was on the 18th day of the first month, thus 2x9.

The Saint day of Saint Paul of lower Egypt was on the fifteenth of the first month and Anthony on the 17th of the first month...thus in the painting by Teniers they meet, and in a calendric sense what is between them is the 16th, the day of the crucifixion upon the place of the skull (golgotha)...thus in the painting by Teniers this is what structuraly and symbolically brings them together...they are both being fed unleavened bread as these events took place during the feast of unleavened bread, which occured from the 15th to 21st.

Now in the Julian calender the birthday of Jesus was on the 18th of the first month, and this is now only celebrated at the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by the Armenian church...but in the past this was the common date, before the western church switched to 25/12 or the Gregorian calender switched 18/1 to 6/1 for the Orthodox Christmas day.

So not only was the birthdate on the 18/1 but also the day of the resurrection on the 18/1...the inferance of this is that following 'the harrowing of hell' in the tomb on the 17th, then the 18 negative deities/daemons of the underworld have been overcome...the feast day of St Anthony then becomes a day associated with overcoming dark daemons and this made him a popular subject matter in the middle ages.

Both Paul and Anthony are Saints of the Egyptian coptic church which retained the spoken language of Pharonic Egypt and many of its spiritual aspects

St Anthony as representing the lowest serpentine intuition was patron of all dreams and weird experiances as he entered into the deep dark recesses of his cave/mind. and was much portrayed by artists and fantasists, the lowly pig is his symbol..Paul is thus the opposite ever going toward the light and rationalisation. Both of them were fed by a blackbird which represents intuition coming from the deep dark regions of psyche, but both of them must eventually be seen as united.

The Saint day of Anthony is the 17th of January and Paul a day or so earlier, but it was the day of Anthony which the Sion speculators promoted for the reason that as the passover was on the 14th day of the first month and that according to one of the gospel accounts that it was on the day following the passover(the 15th) that the last supper was prepared and as the crucifixion thus takes place on the 16th then the 17th represents the day in the tomb, to be followed by the resurrection on the 18th day of the first month (which is Christmas day in Armenia....).

St Anthony is thus concerned with the hidden things of the tomb, of the skull, of the serpent etc...upper Egypt was 'the red land', whilst Paul was of 'white' lower Egypt (it is the black/Egypt bird that co-joins the two). In the painting Paul directs Anthony from darkness toward light, they are opposite polarities, the drive toward the darkness of the subjective, contrasted with the objective light.

In the old Julian calender Christmas day was on 18th January and this is today only celebrated by the Armenian church in their Jerusalem quarter...but that would have been the date all the churches used at first as 25th December was much later...so the day i derived at from the letters AR/RA was actaully once the normative one...the Gregorian calender shifted the Julian back 12 days so normally one will read that the 6th was the traditional date.

The notion of epiphany, or the 'day of appearance' being on the 6th of January goes back to around 2000bc when the Winter Solstice would have been on that date, then it was shifted to 25th December in the Roman era as it had displaced 12 days and by the time of Dagobert whose feast day is on 23 rd December it had shifted even furthur toward the present around the 21st December...but the mystagogues of Renne go to great lengths to propose the 18th of January.

Thus we have a parchment bearing a tract about David eating the unleavened bread of the temple on the Sabbath day and a tract about Jesus sharing bread with Lazarus and Mary and Martha 6 days before the Passover

'

Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.

Jhn 12:2 There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. '

As the Passover was on the 14th day of the first month then this takes place upon the 7th...

Now the Passover was followed by a week of 7 Sabbaths called the Feast of Unleavened bread..

'In the fourteenth [day] of the first month at even [is] the LORD'S passover.

Lev 23:6 And on the fifteenth day of the same month [is] the feast of unleavened bread unto the LORD: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread. ''

It is on the 15th day following the Passover that the last supper takes place, and the 15th day of our first month is the Saints day of Saint Paul of Egypt...

'Mat 26:17 Now the first [day] of the [feast of] unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the passover? '

The authorities had chosen not to arrest Jesus on the 14th, the actual day of the passover, but on the 15th which was part of the overall passover celebrations but actually the day of the feast of unleavened bread...

Mar 14:1 After two days was [the feast of] the passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put [him] to death. But they said, Not on the feast [day], lest there be an uproar of the people.

{So the last supper and breaking of bread was on the 15th and the crucixion on the 16th and the day in the tomb on the 17th...now it is the 17th day of our first month which is the feast day of Anthony of Egypt and this is the day that attention was drawn toward, with all the tombs and skulls etc...but the actual resurrection date is of course the 18th day of the first month. So in the painting by Poussin the figure in blue picks out the letters in arcadia of 'AR' whilst the figure in red from the opposite direction and slightly over them picks out the same two letters as 'RA'.

Now AR means 'high' in Near Eastern languages such as 'Ar-meggido' meaning the heights of Meggido, this even carries through into Gaelic in words such as 'Ar-magh' meaning high plain, but its very common being found in names such as Armenia or Ararat.

RA was actualy the name of the sun God in Armenia as well as in Egypt , and brings to mind the phrase 'and he shall be called the s(o/u)n of the most high'...

The important information was also in the value of the letters, whether 1,18 or 18,1 they spell out the day of resurrection from the tomb as the 18th of January, which may seem strange to some but is actually Christmas day in ARmenia which means not only born on that day but resurrected also, Easter day and Christmas day rolled into one. The shepherds look upon the letters as if they are gazing upon a nativity scene, they are playing the same role as first witnesses to the resurrection morn, except of course they merely see the day of it.

In the gospels it is of course Mary Magdalene who is the first witness to the resurrection, and as this information looked forward to the resurrection day she was the patroness of this mystery, the story started with her 11 days earlier in Bethany on the 7th.}

 {There exists a monastic Rule that bears St Anthony's name, preserved in Latin and Arabic forms . While it cannot be received as having been actually composed by Anthony, it probably in large measure goes back to him, being for the most part made up out of the utterances attributed to him in the Life and the "Apophthegmata"; it contains, however, an element derived from the spuria and also from the "Pachomian Rules". It was compiled at an early date, and had a great vogue in Egypt the East. At this day it is the rule followed by the Uniat Monks of Syria and Armenia, of whom the Maronites, with sixty monasteries and 1,100 monks, are the most important; it is followed also by the scanty remnants of Coptic monachism. }

Furthur corroborative evidence that this was the date intended to be highlighted can be derived from the fact that the 18th of January was the Feast of the Depositio Assumptio in the Gallican church, which influenced the Merovingian rites in later times, this Feast day celebrating the Glorification of Mary, through giving birth to the Messiah.

With the Merovingian and Carlovingian developments of Christianity in the west came the more authoritative acceptance of Marian devotion as an integral part of the Church's life. It is difficult to give precise dates for the introduction of the various festivals, but the celebration of the Assumption, Annunciation, Nativity and Purification of Our Lady may certainly be traced to this period. Three of these feasts appear in the Calendar of St. Willibrord of the end of the seventh century, the Assumption being assigned both to 18 January, after the practice of the Gallican Church, and to August (which approximates to the present Roman date), while the absence of the Annunciation is probably due only to accident. Again we may quite confidently affirm that the position of the Blessed Virgin in the liturgical formula of the Church was by this time securely established. Even if we ignore the Canon of the Roman Mass which had taken very much the form it now retains before the close of the sixth century, the "praefatio" for the January festival of the Assumption in the Gallican Rite, as well as other prayers which may safely be assigned to no later date than the seventh century, give proof of a fervent cultus of the Blessed Virgin.

http://www.marymediatrix-resourceonline.com/library/files/general/devotion_hist.htm.

In Rome (Batiffol, Brev. Rom., 134) the oldest and only feast of Our Lady was 1 January, the octave of Christ's birth. It was celebrated first at Santa Maria Maggiore, later at Santa Maria ad Martyres. The other feasts are of Byzantine origin. Duchesne thinks (Origines du culte chr., 262) that before the seventh century no other feast was kept at Rome, and that consequently the feast of the Assumption, found in the sacramentaries of Gelasius and Gregory, is a spurious addition made in the eighth or seventh century. Probst, however (Sacramentarien, 264 sqq.), brings forth good arguments to prove that the Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, found on the 15th of August in the Gelasianum, is genuine, since it does not mention the corporeal assumption of Mary; that, consequently, the feast was celebrated in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome at least in the sixth century. He proves, furthermore, that the Mass of the Gregorian Sacramentary, such as we have it, is of Gallican origin (since the belief in the bodily assumption of Mary, under the influence of the apocryphal writings, is older in Gaul than in Rome), and that it supplanted the old Gelasian Mass.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm