Despite its name, cedar was always a rarity in Lebanon
and other regions of the Near East, where it was not native, but cultivated
in memory of the primordial Paradise lost.
The fact that the inner sanctum of the
Temple of Solomon was built of cedar wood (erez,
ezrah,
Cedrus
libani) a native of the Himalayas later transplanted to the mountains
of Lebanon is highly indicative of the fact that the Jews, as well as
their god, indeed originated in the Indies, and later moved to the Near
East.
A parallel tradition in temple building
and decoration existed in Egypt, whose sailors regularly went to the region of Punt
(their Paradise) in order to bring the precious wood for the decoration of their temples
and their palaces. Such commercial expeditions to Punt cannot be doubted.
They are recorded in detail since the Old Dynasty in Egypt, and extend to the times
of Queen Hatshepsut, and later. King Sneferu, the father of Khufu (Kheops), brought from there a large shipment of
meru wood, which sufficed both for his own needs and those of his famous son.
Since Solomon's and Hiram's ships departed
from Ezion Geber, in the Red Sea, in order to get to Ophir, it suffices
to look at a map of the region in order to verify that the cedar they imported
came not from Lebanon itself, but from somewhere beyond the Indian Ocean.
And this somewhere can be no other than the Indies, where the so-called
"cedar of Lebanon" grows in abundance, in the Himalayas and its eastern
extensions.5
The Parable of the Eagle and The
Tree of Life
Ezekiel
(ch. 17) tells an enlightening
parable on the origin of the Semites. He recounts how "a great big eagle
with broad wings and multicolored plumage" (the Phoenix) came from Lebanon,
whence it brought a twig of the Cedar Tree (the Tree of Life), transplanting
it to "a land of commerce, a city of merchants". The Eagle (or Phoenix)
represents the sail ships often described as "birds", in antiquity, as
in
Isa. 60:8-10, etc. used to bring the survivors out of destroyed Eden.6
The "Land of Commerce" is Lebanon, rebuilt
in the Near East as a replica of the former one, in Paradise. As innumerous
traditions record, the original homeland of the Phoenicians of Lebanon
and Syria lay beyond the Indian Ocean. It was from there that they originally
came, just as did the Jews and other nations, when their land was destroyed
by a volcanic conflagration. From their sunken Paradise in Indonesia, these proto-Phoenicians passed into India. Expelled from there, they moved to Egypt, where they are known to Egyptology as the Gerzean Civilization (c. 3,500 BC). Expelled once more, probably by King Menes, they again moved, this time to Northwest Africa (Libya, Morocco, Tunisia) and to Palestine (Syria and Lebanon).
The "Sea of Bronze", built in front of
Solomon's Temple by Hiram Abiff, is also telltale of Hindu connections.
Such sacred pools were an invariable feature of Indonesian temples. They
corresponded to the
barays
(or "sources") of Indonesia's pyramidal
complexes, which represented the Fountain of Life (that is, of the Elixir
of Life). One such fountain also existed in the Temple of Ezekiel, and replicated the one of the Celestial Jerusalem (Rev. 22:1).
The Egyptian Temples also invariably had such
a source either as a natural spring or as a cistern filled by the waters
of the flooding Nile. Such sources or cisterns correspond to the
ghats
of the Indus and the Ganges rivers, used even today in India by the worshippers.
They also correspond to the sacred pools excavated by the archaeologists
in the site of the Indus Valley Civilization (Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro),
and which date from far earlier times than those of Solomon.
Even the Medieval cathedrals had, just
as did the temples of Isis everywhere, such magical sources springing inside
their underground crypts and filling their baptismal fonts. As a matter
of fact, the early Christian cathedrals were almost always built upon the
ruins of the temples of Isis which abounded everywhere in Pagan Europe.
Such was the case, in particular, of the cathedrals of Rheims, of Chartres,
and of Notre Dame, among many. Even in the Americas we find precisely the same conception of
barays placed on top the Holy Mountain of Paradise. For instance, the famous Incan pyramid of Akapana (Peru-Bolivia border) had a huge cistern (water reservoir) at the top. This reservoir fed a sophisticate network of hydraulic facilities used in irrigation and internal plumbing of the other buildings, in a way that closely parallels the similar devices of the Egyptian temples which we mentioned above and elsewhere.
