In 2015 the terrorist army calling itself the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’, or ‘ISIS’ captured the historic Syrian desert city of Palmyra and soon began to trash its ancient ruins which included carved references to an anonymous deity mentioned in numerous Aramaic inscriptions as “lord of the universe.” Ironically, whatever, the terrorists intended for this ‘unknown’ god, he and other pre-Islamic religious figures found in Palmyra have recently emerged from obscurity, at least among scholars.
Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wrocław in Poland, compared the inscriptions from Palmyra to others throughout Mesopotamia from the first millennium BC and discovered that the gods worshiped in Mesopotamia were referred to by names similar to the anonymous god from Palmyra like, “Bel-Marduk”—the supreme god of Babylon—who was also referred to as “merciful.” The phrase “lord of the world”—a title similar to “lord of the universe” was sometimes used to indicate “Baalshamin,” a sky god. The anonymous “god” mentioned in the Palmyra inscriptions she says was not a single god, but rather multiple deities including Bel-Marduk and Baalshamin. She also contends that the reason people did not mention the names of such deities, was to signify respect.
The Palmyra story is reminicent of the Unknown God or Agnostos Theos mentioned in the New Testament. According to the Book of Acts, when the apostle Paul visited Athens, he saw an altar with an inscription dedicated to the ‘unknown god’, and, when invited to speak to the Athenian elite at the Areopagus, he contrasted this “unknown god” with his own.
To some, the attempt to wipe out the “idolatry” of ‘infidels,’ implies severe psychological dysfunction and a hysterical, defensive, need to rid the world of any knowledge of the very existence of earlier times to induce, and reinforce, what some have termed collective amnesia (“Fighting to Forget,” by Martin Ruggles, Atlantis Rising Magazine #113).
Our world today, it has been argued, is the product of a series of forgotten catastrophes. Like the ancient priests of Sais, whose story to the Greek lawgiver Solon, is the basis of Plato’s account of Atlantis, modern ‘catastrophists’ tell us that the story of humanity is a cycle of great ascents, followed by cataclysmic falls, and ensuing great forgetings—also known as ‘amnesia.’ Palmyra was not the first or the last time that one religion has tried to repress another, but it may have been the first where the attempt was put on display in real time for the entire world see.
AR #111
Catastrophism Reconsidered
