THE MANY

NAMES &

FACES OF

SAMAEL

"My name is Legion." [Mark 5:9]

He is known by many names, the most familiar of which is Satan. Samael is also called Satanail, Shamsiel, Samsapeel and Samiel. We are told that the name 'Satan' comes from the Hebrew word for 'the Adversary' -- ha'shaitan, according to most sources. However, those same sources will also say that Azazel is the ruling angel of the shaitans or bene ha' elohim. Confusing? This is because Satan was a later invention of the Holy Roman Church. The shaitans were not originally considered evil, but part of God's angelic heirarchy known as Judges. It is my feeling that the name of Satan comes from Set -- another attempt to cloak the true origins of the "Jewish mysteries". Like the shaitans, Set was not originally an evil god, until the resurrectionist Osirians got hold of him and blamed him for something that is simply part of the natural process. If the harvest did not ripen and be cut down, how would we feed our physical bodies?

The function of the judges or bene elohim was to watch the Lord's human children and report back to the Lord on their activities. The story of Job is the best known example of this. A shaitan (generally given as Azazel) goes to the Lord and challenges Job's devotion to the Lord. Job had everything anyone could want. He was rich in sheep and cattle (the measure of a man's wealth in those days), many children and fertile fields. It is the Adversary's reasoning that Job has it good and so of course he is devoted to the Lord. It is Jehovah himself who instructs the Adversary to smite Job with misfortune to test his faith and devotion. The Adversary is only carrying out the commands of the Lord when he kills all of Job's children and livestock, smites his fields with blight, and Job's body with boils and putrefaction.

Later versions of the altered Old Testament replaced ha' shaitan with the proper name of Satan, creating a demonic antagonist against Man and God, and bringing duality into the religion of the Church. This idea was probably borrowed from the Zoroastrians, whose religion is dualistic in the extreme. Satan becomes the enemy of God, just as Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) is the enemy of Azhura Mazda (Ormuzd). Whatever God creates, Satan destroys. But that's just how things work in the material world. By introducing the dualism of good and evil into the minds of Men, guilty- fear was born. Men are manipulated and kept in line by their guilty-fears.

In Islamic tradition, the shaitans are djinn -- or fire spirits, who are ruled (again) by Azazel. Some of you may have read mention in these pages that the djinn are connected with the fact that the Middle East is laying on top of one of the most oil-rich reserves on the earth. You may think that's a far-fetched idea, but this next story rather brings the point home.

Meet Nergal....

 

 

LAWYERS, JUDGES AND DEVILS IN HELL

Many mythological scholars will say that Satan's attributes and appearance most likely came from Charun, the Etruscan god of death, who possesses a mighty hammer which he carries into battle, accompanying Mars. Charun is depicted as having the ears of a horse and a large, hooked nose. His flesh is blue, as if decaying. Others will compare Satan to the Babylonian Lord of the Underworld Nergal, who is also a god of death, disease, war and ... judgement.

I happened upon a particularly tasty story about Nergal that ties all of this together. I'd like to share it with you, now....

In southern Iraq, about 90 miles to the south-east of Babylon, archaeologists Paul Zimansky and his wife Elizabeth Stone discovered the site of an ancient city called Mashkan-shapir that was built 4000 years ago, in honor of Nergal. The name Mashkan-shapir means "City of the Dead". Built of mud-bricks, as were all the Babylonian cities, most of it had washed away and eroded from the actions of the wind and water. There was little left to even tell there had been a city there. The tallest ruin jutted only a foot and a half out of the ground. Aerial photos taken early in the morning, while there was still dew on the ground that outlined the remaining mud-brick foundations, helped the archaeologists see the outlines and plan of the city.

What they found were baked clay reliefs showing Nergal carrying a sickle or scythe adorned with a lion's head. Nergal himself was shown to have the ears of a bull and appeared to be the original Grim Reaper. Motifs of serpents and sickles adorned tiles, reliefs and small model chariots. They also found the remains of a great courthouse. It seemed that Mashkan-shapir was the location of the "Babylonian Supreme Court". Tablets from other cities in the area confirmed that some cases had been taken to Mashkan-shapir for trial. The city itself had only one layer of occupation. It had been built, it grew to over half a mile in diameter and was suddenly abandoned in approximately 1896 BCE. Cuneiform tablets tell of the water to the south of the city becoming salty and 'bitter'.

But bitter waters were not the reason Mashkan-shapir was abandoned. As they dug into the ruins, Zimansky and Stone found wide evidence of badly burned bricks, ashes and soot covering the floors, and large quantities of charred and burned animal bones in groups like 'folds' or animal holding areas. Everywhere Zimansky looked, he saw ash, soot and blobs of black tarry matter. Because the city was built of mud-brick and very little wood was used, Zimansky and Stone were puzzled as to how the entire city could have burned like this. It had literally been wiped out by firestorms. Charles Pellegrino concludes:

Where the rivers flowed, the edges of continents were squashing together like sheet metal in a car crash played at such extreme slow motion that only one frame passed every few centuries. This was a zone of earthquakes -- the microscopic creaks and snaps within the crash -- and whenever a new fissure brought a gaseous fountain to the surface, it was usually a harmless event, producing just another tar pool and perhaps polluting the local water supply. But if a gusher emerged into a domestic setting, dotted with ovens for baking pottery and bread, the gases would encounter ignition sources in all directions, every hundred feet or so, and the fountain would become a pillar of fire and soot jetting out of the ground.

If my theory bore currency, the fire could never be put out. It would have burned until the pressures from below stopped pushing petroleum to the surface and until all the erupting fuel had been consumed by the flames...

Sodom and Gomorrah (Sedom and Amora, in the original Hebrew) were said to have met that same fate.... The City of the Dead fitted many requirements of the biblical Sodom and as such might have brought some very real grains of truth to the heart of the legend. ["Return to Sodom and Gomorrah ~ Bible Stories from Archaeologists" by Charles Pellegrino, pgs. 150-182. Random House, 1994

Literally...Hell on earth for a brief moment in Time. One of many.

It is interesting to note too that for many long years in Europe, Britain and America, judges wore wigs of long white curls in imitation of the judge-dreds of the bene elohim. The element of Nergal's harvesting scythe can also be seen in the later usage of the sica, a sickle shaped dagger, by the Sicari. The Sicari were most likely the radical Zealots who were both assassins and spiritual warriors. According to Flavius Josephus, they were the last defenders of Masada in the final throes of the Jewish and Roman wars. The Zealots were aligned with the Nazarites or Nasoreans. Further north, in Britain, the sickle is one of the main icons of the Drui. The word Druj (the Liar) or Druji that is associated with Azazel or a feminine form of Azazel's power, is derived from the same source as the name of the mysterious Druids.

Azazel is called the Liar, only because men fear his accusations in their hearts...that their scapegoat will come back to haunt them.

 

SHAMSIEL AND THE SIGNS OF THE SUN