Chapter 24 THE MARK OF CAIN: Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format
Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format
Reading time 296 minutes.
Chapter 24 THE MARK OF CAIN
“The mark of Cain is stamped upon our forehead
WE LIVE IN THE New World Order, just as people under Augustus Caesar did. Not a future thing to be feared or avoided, the New World Order is a present reality to be identified, understood, and dealt with in a way most pleasing to God. It was God, after all, who established the New World Order. We can read about it in the Bible. In fact, the Bible is the only record we have that publicly and truthfully sets forth the essentials of the Order’s origins and development through time.
The Bible records the great decisive events in the progress of human life up to the close of the first century AD. Creation of earth and the fullness thereof, creation of man and woman, their turning away from God, the first conception, the first birth, the first sacrifice, the first murder, the first insignia, the first city, the first and only great flood, the surviving family and its peculiar relationship through time with
God – all of this momentous data is given in the Bible with a stark truthfulness that is invariably
supported, often to the surprise of many, by the results of scientific inquiry. The writers of the Bible, Israelite prophets inspired by their God Yahweh, held no monopoly on reporting these events. Priests of other nations reported them, too. But in doing so, they cunningly adapted them to fit prevailing administrative needs. The result of their adaptations is what we call mythology.One very persistent myth, based on a crucial event accounted for in the Bible, explained to people under Babylonian rulership the divine origin of their government. This was the myth of Marduk. 1
The myth of Marduk begins with Annu, “the head deity of Babylonian mythology,”2 looking down upon earth in dismay. The land is in chaos, overrun by flood-waters and monstrous serpents. Annu senses that bringing order to such chaos is a job for Marduk, the first-born son of the moon goddess Ea. So Annu summons Marduk and asks him to organize the earth. Marduk agrees to the task, but “only on the condition that he be made first among the gods and that his word shall have the force of the decree of Annu.”3 Annu accepts Marduk’s terms and vests him with “the powers and insignia of kingship – and Marduk’s word was declared to have the authority of Annu.” Armed with divine power, Marduk goes to earth and separates dry land from sea. He polices the monsters, and any evildoer foolish enough to oppose him receives the wrath of God.
The result of Marduk’s ordination was depicted in the Stele of Naram-Sin, now in the Louvre. In this very ancient Babylonian monument, Annu is shown imbuing Naram-Sin (Enoch to the Hebrews) with power over a mass of other beings. Annu’s name, seen in the tip of the stele, is the cuneiform symbol for “heaven,” the double-cross, or
Marduk wears the Annu signature like a cop with his badge. It makes him a god. In fact, the ordination-of-power iconography of ancient Babylonian nations was never without it. Even today (see Appendix: “Fifty Centuries of the Annu Signature”), we find it in the flag of Great Britain, said to be the union of St. Andrew’s Scottish cross and St. George’s English cross. We find it prominently displayed in the decor of government buildings, especially courtrooms. It forms the motif for much of the decorative architecture of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, interior and exterior. The pavement surrounding the Obelisk of Caligula in St. Peter’s Piazza, where the multitudes stand to receive papal edicts and blessings, is inlaid with a gigantic Annu signature. No doubt about it: a very ancient symbol has remained consistently identified with the presence of rulership. Could it be that a symbol of so much power is based on a myth? Or is it based on the fact from which the myth sprang?
THE sensitive Bible-reader immediately sees in the myth of Marduk a missionary adaptation of the biblical account of Cain. The two protagonists are remarkably similar. Both Cain and Marduk were firstborn sons of mothers bearing almost the same name: Marduk, son of Ea; Cain, son of Eve. Both firstborns were appointed to rule over evil, albeit for different reasons: Marduk because of his heroism, Cain because of his own wickedness.4 So that they might move effectively among evildoers, both were given protective seals of immunity by the God of Heaven. God said to Cain,
Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.5
In Marduk’s case, the evildoers were chaotic beings ruining Annu’s earth. Cain’s evildoers were persons who might slay him because he had become a homeless trespasser. The Bible details exactly why Cain became homeless. His farm refused to yield harvests because he had defiled the soil with the blood of his brother. Cain “rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.” We’re not told why. It may have been jealous rage, and it may not. Nothing in Scripture indicates that Cain hated Abel. The most we know of their relationship is that “Cain talked with his brother,” and afterward, in a field, murdered him.6 Nor are we given details of the murder, except that it was bloody.7 The blood is an important clue as to motive.
We know that Cain was first crestfallen then angry at God for preferring Abel’s sacrifice to his own.8 Abel, the shepherd, sacrificed lambs from his flock.9 Cain, the farmer, apparently thinking sacrifice was about returning the best of his productivity to God, sacrificed the best of his harvest. God found Cain’s sacrifice offensive and Abel’s pleasing.1 0 Elsewhere in Scripture we learn why. It involves a principle that is very difficult for many of us to comprehend. The principle is this: without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.11 Abel pleased God because he shed blood, the blood of sacrificial animals.
The great teaching of the Bible is that the death sentence mankind has inherited from the original breaking of God’s Law by Cain’s parents (“Thou shalt not eat of the fruit…”) is pardonable only by death, by the extreme act of shedding blood fatally. This teaching is the bedrock of the Old Testament and the whole point of the New. In the Old Testament, the people of God were pardoned the sinfulness inherited from Adam by shedding the blood of animals, as Abel had dutifully done. In the New, the people of God were pardoned this same sinfulness by doing exactly as Cain had done, shedding the blood of a man. To this day, according to the Scriptures, all who believe that Jesus Christ’s blood has power to remit sins are imputed sinless by God.12 Imputed sinless, their sentence of eternal separation from God is commuted, and they are given eternal life in Heaven.13
Now, Scripture does not tell us that God ever explained the purpose of blood sacrifice to Cain.14 But we know that God is the greatest of all teachers. And we know he wants the best for mankind. It’s unthinkable, then, that He would want Cain ignorant of the life-saving effect of blood sacrifice. He must have taught Cain as thoroughly as he taught Abel. And Cain must have listened attentively, for we know he was anxious to please God – otherwise, why would he have been angry and crestfallen at learning of God’s dissatisfaction with his sacrifice? But Cain was more creative than obedient. It’s entirely consistent with his character for him to have decided
Okay, if it’s blood sacrifice He wants, I’ll give Him the sacrifice He deserves, a better sacrifice than lambs: I’ll give Him the blood of an innocent man!
Cain’s intent was evil only in that he sought to improve on what God had commanded, in the way Saul improved on God’s commandment to annihilate the Amalekites by sparing their king and certain valuable livestock.15 Cain knew the logic of God – he was, after all, the first human being born with the knowledge of good and evil. And we know from what happened to Jesus that God’s logic calls for the sacrifice of the only One whose perfect innocence overcame death. In his obsession to please God, wouldn’t Cain have regarded spilling Abel’s blood as the ultimate godliness?
What I am suggesting is that, in Cain’s mind, Abel was not so much murdered as sacrificed, nailed to Annu’s very name — — hanged upon a cross! Wouldn’t this explain why Scripture shows no evidence that Cain sensed any guilt? Wouldn’t it also explain the hundreds of ancient, pre-Christian myths of young shepherds (such as Tammuz, Bacchus, Attis, Mithras) who were slain in cold blood by various villains only to rise from the dead, their shed blood having supposedly propitiated original sin and resurrected them to eternal life? The myths, obviously based on the fact of Abel’s crucifixion, all pointed to a universally anticipated event foretold by the Israelite prophets: Messiah’s death and resurrection, which would pardon the sins of mankind and restore eternal life. Thus emerges the possibility that the “lamb slain from the foundation of the world” mentioned at Revelation 13:8 might have indeed been Abel, God’s first obedient servant. For it is a fact that “the World” – by which the New Testament writers meant the ordering of human institutional systems which God admitted into existence – did actually begin, as we are about to see, in the immediate aftermath of Abel’s death. If this is the case, then mankind owes a strange debt to Cain. No Cain, no death of Abel. No death of Abel, no World. No World, no incarnation of God as only begotten Son. No Son of God, no true death and resurrection. No true death and resurrection, no hope of mankind for eternal intimacy with God.
IT was the complaint of an earth outraged by Abel’s spilt blood that moved God to banish Cain from his accustomed habitat forever. Just as Marduk demanded protection from the monsters he had been asked to control, Cain demanded protection from possible assailants in his exile. God graciously accommodated Cain by “set[ting] a mark” upon him which made Cain seven times more powerful than any mortal competitor. The mark served as the very “powers and insignia of kingship” Annu had granted Marduk. It empowered Cain to rule all human beings likely to challenge his protective mark, beings unafraid of Yahweh’s name,1 6 beings who shared Cain’s environs “out from the presence of the Lord.”17
Armed with his mark, Cain began the rulership of evil. The Bible accounts for Cain’s movements after his ordination. He took a wife and sired a son. Then, he built a city and named it after his son, “Enoch.”1 8 Centuries later, Enoch disappeared under the silt of Noah’s flood. It passed from memory to mystery to oblivion, until the 1840s, when archaeologists following the Bible’s descriptions of Babylonia began excavating in present-day Iraq. Along the Euphrates River, near Al Khidr, they discovered numerous strata of ancient settlements. The deepest stratum, beneath which there was nothing but bedrock, had called itself Unuk. “Unuk was founded on the oldest bricks,” declared one of the leading archaeologists, a renowned classical linguist from Queens College, Oxford, named Archibald Sayce.
Having deciphered and evaluated large numbers of clay tablets from the site, Professor Sayce issued the opinion in 1887 that Unuk was indeed biblical Enoch, the city built by Cain and his son.19 Lecturing at Oxford, Sayce also pointed out that one of Cain’s mythological names was Marduk20 – an important contribution to the Marduk-equals-Cain hypothesis. Unuk’s dominant temple bore the title “house of Annu,” further enhancing the probability that Marduk’s myth was spun from Cain’s murder of Abel. As ruler of Unuk, Cain was known as Sargon – or, as other translators have rendered the spelling, Shargani, Sarrukinu, Sargoni, etc.21 These variations of Sargon are composites of the Babylonian shar, meaning “king” and gani, kinu, or goni, meaning “Cain.”22 It would be hard to say Sargon means anything other than “King Cain.”
Unuk had been no primitive village. Encyclopedia Britannica noted that “transparent glass seems to have been first introduced in the reign of Sargon.”23 Sargon built a metropolis of enormous complexity. But what astonished the archaeologists most was the city’s miraculous historical suddenness. Unuk seemed to have materialized from out of nowhere:
We have found, in short, abundant remains of a bronze culture, but no traces of preceding ages of development such as meet us on early Egyptian sites.24
The suddenness factor severely challenged those scholars who viewed history through Darwinian anti-biblicalism, which had become the fashion in Jesuit-influenced academic circles. To fit evolutionary theory, Unuk should have evidenced development from a much older civilization. As a contributor to the London Times’ prestigious Historians’ History of the World grumbled,
Surely such a people as this could not have sprung into existence as a Deus ex Machina [a person or thing introduced or appearing unexpectedly so as to provide an artificial or contrived solution to an otherwise insoluble problem]. It must have had its history – a history which presupposes development of several centuries more.25
But Unuk as a social organization had no previous history. This maddening circumstance drove the British Museum’s H. R. Hall to rationalize that its “ready-made” culture must have been “brought into Mesopotamia from abroad.”26 Modern anti-biblicists find it easier to accept that Unuk’s sudden complexity came from other galaxies than from something as simple as… acquiring divine intelligence from biting into a piece of forbidden fruit. Of course, eating the fruit of disobedience is how the Bible explains the suddenness factor. Cain had extraordinary powers because he inherited from his parents the knowledge of good and evil which the Trickster had encouraged them to obtain at the price of eternal life.27 In Mrs. Bristowe’s words: “Cain was born and bred in the atmosphere of the miraculous; his parents were possessed of supernatural knowledge, some of which must have been imparted to their children.”28
King Cain was no primitive chieftain. On one of his many autobiographical inscriptions, he boasted that “in multitudes of bronze chariots I rode over rugged lands … I governed the upper countries,” and “three times to the sea I have advanced.”29 A brilliant, well-organized military emperor – the prototypical Caesar – Cain controlled a “vast empire.” The Cambridge History tells us he divided his imperium
from the [Persian Gulf] to the [Mediterranean], from the rising to the setting of the sun into districts of five double hours march each, over which he placed the ‘sons of his palace.’ By these delegates of his authority he ruled the hosts of the lands together.30
Cain’s empire was founded on slavery31 – the inevitable result of one man’s retributive power exceeding all others sevenfold. For the most part, however, it appears that Cain exercised his advantage in the public interest. Professor Sayce tells us that his empire was “full of schools and libraries, of teachers and pupils, and poets and prose writers, and of the literary works which they had composed.” Furthermore,
the empire was bound together by roads, along which there was a regular postal service, and clay seals which took the place of stamps are now in the Louvre bearing the name of Sargon and his son…. It is probable that the first collection of astronomical observations and terrestrial omens was made for a library established by Sargon.32
The insignia of power and kingship did not vanish with Cain’s death. That Cain built the original city with his son implies that the mark was intended to be an hereditary entitlement. The son’s name implies that he received the power of the mark from his father. “Enoch” in Hebrew means “the initiated” – to be inducted by special rites, to be instructed in the rudiments or principles of something.” Scripture implies that Enoch and perhaps Cain in turn initiated other deputies and successors. Four generations after Cain’s birth, we find Enoch’s great-great grandson Lamech still exercising, in fact augmenting, the prerogative of divine vengeance:
Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”34
Receiving authority to govern requires taking an oath which binds the initiate to a code of rights and responsibilities. Interestingly, our word “oath” is cognate with the Hebrew WFA (pronounced “oath”), which is the word translated “mark” at Genesis 4:15, “the Lord set a mark upon Cain.” Knowing this, we may accurately say “the Lord put Cain under oath,” an oath visibly represented by the various insignia governments display. The mark, then, stands for a covenant between God and Cain. It is not the all-encompassing sort of covenant which God struck with the humbly obedient Abraham – “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.”3 5 Cain’s unwillingness to obey the letter of Yahweh’s commandments made him unfit for intimacy with the divine. In Cain’s own words, “from thy face shall I be hid.”3 6 The exile covenant was strictly limited to assuring God’s vengeance against anyone who would threaten Cain’s life. In matters of wisdom, correction, instruction in righteousness, Cain was on his own. He was on his own, also, if he should try to attack the peaceful. The mark was a covenant of retribution only.
Early on, Cain saw there was great profit in provoking assailants. The more enemies, the more spectacular the displays of vengeance. The more vengeance, the more justice; the more justice, the more power to Cain; a more powerful Cain could do more excellent public works. Thus, it became essential to the self-interest of the bearer of the mark – which remains to this day a first principle of ordered government – to provoke and encourage evildoing, particularly the form that manifests itself in rebellion.
Cain terrorized evil with awesome dependability. His faith that God would avenge his enemies made him a highly reliable public protector. Down through the ages, righteous people could live secure in the knowledge that the mark-bearer would stop at nothing to persecute evildoers. This fact is marvelously declared in Scripture. In the seventh century BC, the mark-bearing Babylonians were appointed by God to capture the wayward Israelites and show them some harsh discipline. Israel couldn’t understand why God would put a vain, evil Babylonian king over His own chosen people. God explained saying: “See, he is puffed up, and his desires are not upright, but the righteous shall live by his faith.”37
How has the mark managed to remain vibrant for nearly six thousand years? Grand Commander Albert Pike, in his influential Morals and Dogma, threw valuable light on the subject. He declared that “from the earliest time,” Freemasonry has been the “custodian and depository” of the “symbols, emblems, and allegories … erected by Enoch.”38 The Commander was careful to say he meant not Cain’s son Enoch, but the Bible’s other Enoch, Enoch-2, the good Enoch, the Enoch “who walked with God.”39 However, his attempt to dissociate his institution from Cain puts the Commander at variance with Masonic and biblical chronology. For if a biblical Enoch erected the earliest imagery of Freemasonry, it could not possibly have been Enoch-2. It had to have been Enoch-1. Let’s examine the chronology.
Enoch-2 was descended from Seth, whom Eve conceived after the death of Abel – “for God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.”4 0 When Eve conceived Seth, Adam was 130 years old.4 1 According to the scripturally faithful computations of the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher (1581–1656), Adam was created in 4004 BC. Thus, Seth was born in 3874 BC. Genesis 5:6–20 gives us an exact toll of the years between Seth and his great-great-great-great grandson Enoch-2:
|
Father |
Son |
Age of father |
|
Seth |
Enos |
105 |
|
Enos |
Cainan |
90 |
|
Cainan |
Mahaleel |
70 |
|
Mahaleel |
Jared |
65 |
|
Tared |
Enoch-2 |
162 |
|
Total years |
492 |
According to the Bible, Enoch-2 was born 492 years after the birth of Seth, or in 3382 BC. NOW, Commander Pike’s book, Morals and Dogma, reckons its date of publication in both Christian (1871 AD) and Masonic (5680 AM) chronology. To find out the beginning of Masonic history – that “earliest time” in which Enoch erected his “symbols, emblems, and allegories” – in terms of Christian chronology, we subtract the given Christian year from its Masonic equivalent (1871 from 5680) . This gives us a first Masonic year of 3809 BC.42 But the figures show that Enoch-2 was not born until 3382, some 427 years after Freemasonry’s “earliest time”! Enoch-2 could not possibly have erected the prototypical symbolic devices of which Freemasonry has ever been custodian and depository. However, Cain’s son, Enoch-1, very well could have!
Cain began his wandering after Abel’s death, which the Bible marks with Seth’s conception and Adam’s age, 130 years, in about 3876 BC. If we give Cain ten years to find a wife, settle down, and sire a child, Enoch-1 would have been born in 3866 BC. This would make him a 55-year-old man in the first Masonic year, 3809. At that age, Enoch-1 would have been fully equipped to erect symbols and allegories memorializing his father’s divine appointment to rule populations “out from the presence of the Lord.”43
Incidentally, Professor Sayce placed Cain in Masonry’s early years against his previous determinations. Sayce admitted to being compelled by the scholarly diligence of a latter-day Babylonian king to accept the evidence that Sargon lived as early as four thousand years before Christ:
The last king of Babylonia, Nabonidas, had antiquarian tastes, and busied himself not only with the restoration of the old temples of his country, but also with the disinterment of the memorial cylinders which their builders and restorers had buried beneath their foundation. It was known that the great temple of the Sun-god at Sippara … had originally been erected by Naram-Sin [Enoch], the son of Sargon, and attempts had been already made to find the records which, it was assumed, he had entombed under its angles. With true antiquarian zeal, Nabonidas continued the search until he had lighted upon ‘the foundation stone’ of Naram-Sin himself. This ‘foundation-stone’ he tells us had been seen by none of his predecessors for 3200 years. In the opinion, accordingly, of Nabonidas, a king who was curious about the past history of his country, and whose royal position gave him the best possible opportunities for learning all that could be known about it, Naram-Sin and his father Sargon lived 3200 years before his own time, or 3750 BC.
What we see in the Bible’s account of how Unuk came about is nothing less than the foundation of the world’s legal system. That God would ordain an evil man to administer the law makes sublime sense to me. In our final chapter, I shall ask your indulgence in a few personal reflections of my own as to how a system designed to process evil can do as much good as it does.
Continue: Chapter 25 THE TWO MINISTRIES
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