Antinoüs the God, Part II
Egypt was first to embrace the new God, they viewed him as the latest embodiment of Osiris. All the Pharaohs were said to have become Osiris in every possible way, even common people could become one with Osiris, provided the priests had recited the long litany of the Book of the Dead over the body. This Book of the Dead was said to have been written by Thoth, the God of wisdom, and special assistant to Isis and Osiris. It was a magical text, born in the earliest and most mythical dawn of civilization on the Nile. The power of the words was to raise the various parts of the soul from the dust, and cause it to "Come forth by Day," or live forever circling the cosmos. Without this charm, the soul would corrode and be destroyed in a lake of fire, where it was lost and forgotten. Without the magic charm of Thoth, the soul of the dead was doomed to oblivion.
The Egyptians had long maintained a thousand Temples to their thousand Gods, to which they regularly added temples to their Pharaohs. Rameses II had a small temple near the place where Antinous died. Along with the knowledgeable Priests who had accompanied Hadrian's Court up the Nile, these priests in the service of Rameses the God, forgotten hermits in the middle of the desert, suddenly found themselves, at the center of a religious revolution. They must have contributed greatly to the New Faith.
The Egyptian element in the religion of Antinous was first and strongest. Antinous had fallen into the Nile, and had therefore been taken up by the God of the River, like Persephone held by the powerful arms of Hades. Antinous became the Nile. All Holy Rivers come into the sphere of his blessedness. Antinous is a River God.
Osiris after being murdered, castrated, and torn to pieces by Set and his seventy-two helpers was scattered along the river. Isis, with the help of Thoth, and the nose of Anubis, ever able to locate death, combs the banks searching for his body. Isis, the great Goddess, his ever-virgin lover, is Hadrian, her tears become the Emperor's. Let us remember the importance Hadrian gave to the misunderstood Goddess Venus. Beginning with the Trojan War, Venus led Aeneus to Italy, it was under her guidance and patronage that Rome was built. The Empire was blessed by the union of the God of War and the Goddess of Love. Rome, the Empire, and her earthly representative, the living God Hadrian, were like the wife and mother of Osiris, searching for the ravaged body of Antinous.
Anubis, the Jackal-Headed God, was the Egyptian Priests, who served the Body of Antinous like scavengers come from out of the desert, to escort the beautiful body from this world to the next. Dogs have always been conceived in one form or another as guardians of the passageway to the underworld. The Greeks spoke of Cerberus, the Norse of Garm, and the Aztecs of Xolotl, all dogs who guarded the entrance to the underworld, or escorted the souls of the dead. Our familiarity with them does not erase this ancient memory of their ferocious and wild aspects. Dogs were the first animals to befriend us, perhaps more than ten thousand years ago. From earliest times, this magical power of dogs and their relatives, to appear out of nowhere at a place of death, must have mystified our ancestors. Always looking for an easy meal, and possessors of a powerful sense of smell, Dogs were the first to come forth from the desert to consume the bodies of our dead. To the Egyptians, ever sensitive to these mystical practices of animals, the rituals of Death were conducted by the Dog headed God, who magically consumed the flesh, and escorted the soul to its fate beyond.
Thoth was embodied by the Greek philosophers and mystics who accompanied Hadrian everywhere. Inheritors of the great learning of the East, Greek culture had spread everywhere, they took interest in and possession of every idea they came in contact with, including the ancient wisdom of the Priests of Egypt. Always seeking to assimilate, the Greeks called Thoth by the name of their own God of wisdom Hermes. The holy city of Thoth, not too distant from Antinopolis, was called by the Greeks, Hermopolis. This union of Greek and Egyptian knowledge was transforming, it became something very new, but still quite in line with the ancient knowledge of the Nile. Bringing to it the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Zoroastrian philosophies. Hellenized Jews also contributed much to the new wisdom, as did the developing Christians. The predominance of Gnostic, and other heretical groups of Christianity in Egypt show the cross-contamination of ideas that was running wild along the Nile with Alexandria as its head. The new knowledge was called Hermetic after its founding God. Thousands of mystical texts were written that urged the believer to break free from the bonds of this world. To rise up through the concentric shells of ignorance that hold the soul prisoner, by sheer force of will. By a concentration of the mind, which alone could lift up the soul and reunite it with its true creator, the denial of this world of illusion, and total entry into these sacred mysteries of knowledge could only be accomplished by denial of the carnal body.
These "Hermits" as they were soon called, retreated to the furthest parts of the desert, away from the distraction of the world. They lived in small communities of monks under the guidance of a master. These Hermits trying to escape from the world were the first revolution to come out the desert. Soon another would follow in their footsteps, following their example in all ways, seeking the same perfect union with God, through denial and concentration. His name, St. Anthony of the Desert, the first Christian Monk, soon the desert was filled with hermits. The little monasteries found their populations swelling into the tens of thousands.
The example for this strange revolution of self-denial, had among its greatest centers the city of Antinopolis, where the Egyptian and Greek religion of Hermeticism was given it's most fertile ground. The older cities were more entrenched in the ancient ways, and resistant to Greco-Roman incursion, but in Antinopolis, the opposite was encourage, and the state funded and protected its development. Hermeticism seems to have circled and encompassed Antinopolis like the petals of a flower. But Christian Monasticism, conveniently forgetting its Hermetic origin, never mentions Antinopolis. Only St. Athanasius, the ultra Catholic Bishop of Alexandria attacks the immorality of the religion of Antinous. After meeting St. Anthony, and publishing a book on his life, Athanasius embarks on a worldwide campaign to eradicate all deviation from the knowledge of Christ, seeking to erase the influence of the Hermetics, and their new Gnostic disciples. Catholicism as we know it begins with the reactionary Creed of Nicea which Athanasius essentially wrote.
The Egypt in which Antinous had entered was rapidly becoming the center of all intellectual controversy. Italy and Greece were comparatively simple and obedient, though not yet ready to accept the strange foreign practices of Christianity, which had not yet embraced their ancient customs. Antinous was the last pagan god spread around the world. He offered salvation of the soul that was more and more a growing desire of the simple hearted country people. Antinous offered this as no other god did before, and without the moral restrictions and threats of eternal damnation that Christianity employed. Antinous softened the Fall of the ancient Gods of Olympus, and perhaps eased the coming of Christ.
In Europe Antinous was not clothed in the dark robe of an Egyptian Death God, nor in the unapproachable flame of wisdom that the Hermetic mystics sought. Antinous was beauty and life.
He was called the "New Dionysus", and lavishly portrayed in this wise on the many statues that Hadrian dispersed across the world. The temperate climate of Italy, Greece, Spain, and France took this incarnation of Antinous to heart. They celebrated him as the ever young, ever joyous, principle of beauty. He was all the intoxicating effects of wine and love, of sensuality, and the admiration of older men for the vigorous youths of the gymnasium.
Theatrical Artists in Rome founded and maintained a Temple to him. He was their special redeemer, their own special God who watched over the joy and tragedy that they brought to the stage. We can assume from what so many ancient Roman writers say, that the theater, then as now, was a home and temple for Homosexuals. Antinous was received most enthusiastically in Rome by the elegant and learned homosexuals of the day. These Roman actors can only have been stunned by the image and story of this new God, they must have fallen in Love.
Antinous, Homosexuality, and Theater would all come under the scrutiny and persecution of the Catholics. After the rise of Constantine, all three still endured, but as Catholicism took on the authority of the State, it began outlawing and punishing them all. Eunuchs had gained a great deal of control in the bureaucracy of the late empire, even after Constantine. The Catholic Bishops were constantly undermined by the efforts of these quasi-homosexual court dignitaries. The persecution by the Church of Homosexuality has been interpreted as a political power struggle between the Bishops and the Eunuchs of the Imperial court.
The statues of Antinous show that his religion took on the forms and institutions of the older Gods that were slowly dying. He was a fresh breath of life into the stagnation that had overcome the high dramas and orgiastic festivals of Dionysus. He was equated with the Wine Gods, Bacchus, Iacchos, Ganymede, and the Satyrs. Their followers easily took to the religion of Antinous that was intimately connected to the cult of the Divine Emperors, a state sponsored religion of ancestor worship. Antinous had become the newest in an ancient line of defenders of the Roman Empire. His fall, and the removal of all these ancient emblems of protection, such as the Black stone of Magna Mater, kept in its shrine on the Vatican, when torn down by the agents of the Catholic faith, was seen as the direct reason for the subsequent fall of Rome and the invasion of the Barbarians. Christianity with its self-destructive turning away from the world, invited ruin, and even prayed for it, warning then as it does now, that the end is near, that the Apocalypse is at hand. The walls of the Empire were deserted, and the Barbarians walked in, almost unopposed.
But Antinous was not just a reevaluation of the old gods. Though compared to many various deities, his own identity was never lost. He was a new unprecedented God. The majority of his statues portray him without any divine attributes at all. He stands completely naked and unadorned. His body alone was his divinity, he was the perfect youth, the perfect beauty that all men love and adore. Though infused with deeper mysteries, the bare surface of his faith was the love of his naked skin, purely carnal, and worldly. Antinous first showed his followers how to love the body, our vessel in this world. In this message was contained the hope and Glory of Hadrian's reign. That this world is just and good, and beautiful. That all men have the right to live in it in peace and splendor. That mankind is a brotherhood, living on and united by the Great Mother, the Earth, and the Roman Empire, beneath a Universal pantheon of Gods. As Rome decayed, so too did Hadrian's dream. But now, as the tide of Christianity slowly subsides, we find these same ideals rising from the sand.
A sacred city was built in the desert on the very bank where Antinous drowned. At the center of the city, his most splendid Temple was built, and his most solemn rituals observed. The priests must have been Homosexuals, only we can have been so deeply drawn to his message. Only we would have reason to devote our lives to his service, and the sustenance of his name. He was held sacred by those subtle admirers of the beautiful form of male human flesh. His beauty was the absolute desire and motivation of his followers. They wanted only to follow him to the stars, to sit beside him on his celestial boat for eternity. His face, the mysterious penetration of his eyes, became a fixation. The mysterious penetration of his eyes became a place where people were transformed into mirrors, into which he gazed, opening up the doors of infinity. Much as though two mirrors were held before each other and the observer stood perfectly in the middle, becoming the observed.
Antinous was given a star in the heavens. Perhaps as the historian Dio Cassius says, a new star appeared, a super nova, within the constellation Aquila, which the court astrologers took to be the soul of Antinous. New lines were drawn between already famous stars in the arms of the Eagle. The meaning of the star is clear, Antinous had been taken up, body and soul, into the heavens to serve at the table of the most high. Pouring out wine to the immortals. Antinous was the new Ganymede.
Pancrates wrote an Epic poem found buried in the sand along with thousands of other papyrus fragments, the battered and deteriorated poem by Pancrates was used as a bottle stopper by its last owner. Only a small part survives. In sumptuous language, it tells of the ritual Lion hunt in the desert of Libya. Antinous, in his fullest, and most vigorous manhood, rides close to the Emperor. Together they corner the beast, Hadrian holds back his horse, letting Antinous move against it with the dogs. He spears the lion but not mortally, so that it rushes upon him in a fury. The strength and skill of Hadrian intervene at the moment of crisis, killing the lion by a careful blow. From the blood, pouring from the neck of the lion, Pancrates tells us that rose-colored lotuses sprouted. Thus Antinous acquired a flower, preserved from death, by the strength of Hadrian, only for a moment out of time. Wreathes of the red lotus were called Antinoeios in his memory.
But the practice of naming beautiful living things after Antinous did not end with the Romans, even if his star is no longer recognized, and his flower is only called a red water lily. There is a species of Brazilian Tarantula named for him, called Pamphobeteus Antinous, one of the largest tarantulas in the world, and one of the most beautiful. It is indeed appropriate that such a creature should be compared to the mysterious boy, now that he has been banished to the shadows by the Church, having been transformed by them into a demon. This tarantula seems to point to the darker side of Antinous as an unpredictable god with hidden dangerous aspects. Walking along the silken threads that join the worlds, moving silently through the underbrush of the surreal forest of our dreams.
These opposed emblems are a poetic intimation of the double nature of the god. Temples of Antinous have been found from Spain to Arabia, and from North Africa to the Danube, every corner of the Empire. But he was received most devotedly by the Greeks. His seven major centers of worship were the cities Antinopolis, Alexandria, Athens, Corinth, Bithynian Claudiopolis, Rome, and the mysterious city of Mantineia. Located in Greece, Mantineia was said to be the original homeland of Antinous's ancestors. This is one possible origin of the name Antinous, as it is said that the mythical founder of the city was a princess named Antinoa, the female form of his name. Some have suggested that it means a flowering or blossoming. A third possibility for his name is the only other Antinous of notoriety in History. The Antinous of Homer's Odyssey, leader of the suitors, who is even said to rape Penelope. This Antinous is the famous coward and parasite whom Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, triumphantly kill with their arrows. Even this side of Antinous must be considered. Homer's lines so prophetically set into motion the fall of the east, the establishment of Greece, and through Aeneus, the eventual rise of Rome. He also sets into motion the Antinoian Mysteries with Antinous, leader of the suitors, carnal and cruel, full of lust and greed, the manifestation of Desire, in the service of Venus and Mars, exacting payment for the horrors of the Trojan War upon Odysseus it's master mind. Antinous, leader of the Suitors is Eros, the beautiful and insatiable son of Venus, his death by arrows is like a sign.
The name Antinous, in vague derivatives, is spread out in the world. Take for example a similar event transpiring while Antinous, leader of the suitors, crowded around the Bridal Chamber. Virgil tells us in the Aeneid that two groups, not one escaped the burning of Troy. Here the Goddess Venus, demands of Jupiter that he keep his promise made at the fall of Troy. She complains that if he allowed Antenor, the nephew of Priam to escape with his followers and settle in Italy, where the Timavus River burst into nine mouths, then surely he must let Aeneas, Her son, settle on the Tiber, on the seven hills. Before Rome was ever built, according to Virgil, Antenor founded the city of Padua. This coincidence of name would be meaningless were it not for the conjunction of yet another. In the eleventh century, a follower of St. Francis was brought to die beside the Timavus River. He was still young but ravaged by disease and a life of pious denial, he had wasted away seeking god. When death was near, he asked to be carried to the city of Padua where a Basilica now stands over his miraculous remains. His name was St. Anthony of Padua, whose golden mouth poured forth the beauty of God. He preached to the fish, and to donkeys, and from treetops. He was able to bi-locate, so that he was seen preaching in two places at once. Late at night, he was observed holding the infant Jesus in his arms, along with a book, the sacred word of God. After he died, his body was exhumed and it was found that his tongue had remained miraculously incorruptible, though the bones all around were completely desiccated.
On this sacred tongue, in the guise of Christ, was a spark that traveled from Asia Minor in the arms of Antenor. The Priests of the Cult of Magna Mater, of Attis, of Adonis, and the first wave of an invasion that would reach it's height with Antinous, arrived before the foundation of Rome. The Deification of Antinous was the culmination of a long-lost faith, that would only carry on in whispers and traces, but would forver be preserved by the images of Antinous himself.
There are so many Gods through all the cultures of men that bear subtle similarities, and meaningful differences. It's very easy to fit Antinous into the mold of the "God of this World." It was Hadrian's intention that our hearts would see through these masks. The lover employs parables of images and doctrines to fool the blind spirits of the cave-world.
It isn't Antinous, or Dionysus, or Jesus, or Mithras, or Buddha, or Kristna, or Jehovah, or any of these gods whom we are searching for, it is not to them that we pray. It is the lover within to whom we speak, for whom we desire. He calls us to him by our own name. It is our true name that we are looking for.
"Endeavor to ascend into thyself, gathering in from the body all thy members which have been dispersed and scattered into multiplicity from that unity which once abounded in the greatness of its power. Bring together and unify the inborn ideas and try to articulate those that are confused and to draw into light those that are obscured."
- Prophery, the Neo-Platonist
Antinous is not contrary to Jesus, but is one with his mystical teachings. The people of Antinopolis seem to have taken to him warmly. They could not have rejected the sayings of the young Jewish prophet, who reflected so much of what Antinous was to them. Almost like lotus flowers, new visions of Jesus spring up all over the Empire, under the Heresiarchs. Participation in the early formation of the Catholic Church, by the Priests of Antinous seems possible. Threatened by Bishops like Athanasius, many perhaps converted, bringing with them their methods of worshipping Antinous completely intact. They began to turn away from the mortal Jesus of Nazareth, as they had the mortal Antinous of Bithynia, and began to worship Jesus Christ, the fully Divine Manifestation of the Creator. They began to doubt whether the Creator being perfect, could ever fully assume the guise of the flesh, as he would no longer be perfect. A thousand heresies were born from this utterly pagan sense of faith.
We are by nature better able to accept gods like Jupiter and Venus, because their consecration comes from the dark and forgotten past. But we are unable to accept the same miracle when the events are well documented and the people involved are completely human. But Jupiter and Venus were instituted by the same authority as Antinous, and even as Jesus and all the Saints. The second King of Rome, successor of the Mythical Romulus, was Numa Pompilius. He was a Priest King who delineated the grand Religion of the Roman People. He consecrated the Gods, and showed the Romans how to pray and offer sacrifice. Chief among these gods was Jupiter, Venus and Mars. With this same authority, Hadrian consecrated Antinous. Numa was the King of a tribe, the Latins, while Hadrian was King of the entire world. Jesus chose Peter as his Rock, and buried him on the Vatican. His successors, the Bishops of Rome soon replaced the Emperors, and still retain the authority of Numa today. We still call the priest king of Rome by the same title as Numa and Hadrian...Pontifex Maximus. Under Pontifical authority, which from the most ancient foundation of Rome has meant supreme blessedness, Jesus was declared Our Lord. If we are willing to accept the authority of Numa to institute the Goddess Venus, and of the Pope to elevate heroic souls to Blessed Sainthood, then we cannot refuse the possibility that Antinous was also truly deified. The Pope is the direct descendant of Numa Pompilius, through an unbroken chain of priestly fathers. Hadrian stands in the middle of this line, and is ultimately the last to use its powers after the fashion of the ancient pagans, before the transition to Christianity. Antinous has the powerful distinction of being the last god of the ancient faith of our fathers.
The Religion of Antinous has always been held by few, those who are able to do away with the many faces and see the true Lover within us all. It isn't about praying to a God seated high above on a throne in Olympus. It isn't about worshipping a beautiful boy who died almost nineteen hundred years ago. The message of Antinous is to find yourself, within yourself, and rise up to godliness, by your own will.
In worshipping Antinous, one becomes self-sacred, learning how to love idols less and the self more. It is about loving the God within...Nothing more. The process of awakening Antinous within the heart of all gay men is called Homotheosis.
The message of Antinous cannot be spread around the world like a seed, because it is a germ that is not of this world. The voice of Antinous falls silent upon those who are not of his kind. But to his children, the name ANTINOUS resonates like a reed in the soul.
© 2002 Temple of Antinous
The Temple of Antinous