The Scythians were riding horses a thousand years before the Greeks and there’s a good reason. Scythians lived on the steppes, a great flat ocean of grass easily crossed with horses and carts. The Greeks lived in mostly mountainous terrain where runners could travel faster than horses over steep rocky trails. Both cultures descended from the Yamnaya, but the ones who preferred sailing and a southern climate moved south, while the others settled in the shadow of Mt. Elbrus, where Heracles was born, or at least where he went looking for his stolen cattle.
The greatest piece of Scythian art is a three-ring, gold breastplate intended for a high-ranking royal Scythian, with fantastic mythological creatures attacking real animals on the bottom. All details were created separately and then soldered to the frame. The center contains spirals on spirals, flowers, leaves, and a few birds.
The top ring shows two men stretching a golden fleece, while another man milks a sheep, and a colt drinks from his mother. The distinctive Scythian quivers for holding arrows and bow are liberally distributed around.
If you melt this down you can get around $150k, while the breastplate is priceless and would sell for many hundreds of millions if ever auctioned, which will never happen as it is a Ukrainian national treasure.
Tragically, most of the Scythian art was melted down after the kurgans were raided, starting around 200 BC and continuing until 1715 when Peter the Great pleaded with the raiders to sell him the artifacts intact rather than melt them.
Nobody knew anything about the Scythians. History ignored them. Maybe because they had no alphabet, only runes. Or maybe it was the cannabis.
The three bands I was most interested in copying were the Sonics, Chocolate Watchband and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. I called this synthesis “psychopunkadelia.” David Bither was lured into a rehearsal. I already had a guitar player in mind who I knew from the garageband scene back in C-U, Illinois. So I was hoping David would play keyboards as he had recently left a band he’d been playing keyboards in. Dave could also sing like a bird and was a potential lead vocalist. But Dave only wanted in if he played guitar.
When Dave Allen left as art director, I brought in Flick Ford, who had designed my Art After Midnight book and been art director at the East Village Eye during my brief tenure there. I thought the publisher/editor had assembled a great staff, most of whom worked for free, but he was shortsighted and incapable of taking the publication to the next level. So Flick and I (along with John Howell) ended up creating New York Beat, a weekly covering the downtown scene. That only lasted a few wonderful weeks before the investor pulled the plug. And that’s when Howell moved over to High Times. I soon followed.
I ended up going solo to the Minnesota National Rainbow Gathering, which is where I learned a ton about pagan ceremony and participated in numerous OM circles. The OM is the only thing the original stoners in the Ukraine have handed down to us. That and the myth of the holy grail. When Wagner created his ring cycle, he opened with the grail descending from heaven. He was using the Scythian version of the story. There is no Jesus in King Arthur because Arthur was built on top of Heracles. Both were sun avatars, and had twelve labors (battles) to win, a reference to the sun’s progression through the zodiac. Of course, Jesus is also a sun avatar, which is why he has 12 mythical disciples.
When he failed to respond to the email, and never broached the topic with me, and continued his campaign to have me de-toothed and dethroned, I knew something was terribly wrong.
By eliminating the Gnostic versions of Christianity, Rome successfully wiped rational deists out of Christianity, but the belief came back when Europe discovered the classics. There is no need to worship at any altar or blindly accept rules from anyone. There is only one rule: don’t hurt anybody.
In Catholic Bavaria, the publishing industry was under strict supervision, and spreading the wrong info got you tortured and murdered pretty fast. Not so much in France and even less in England. Voltaire inspired a generation by attacking censorship, slavery, and religion, especially Catholic dogma. He became Elvis overnight and was sought out by the most enlightened rulers in Europe. His books were in French and slipped through the Bavarian censors.
The spy and the mystic decided to revive Weishaupt’s order of the Illuminati. Just as Weishaupt had invented a phony story about the order’s origins, claiming the order was led by a council of intellectual giants descended from the Magi, the spy and mystic made identical claims (even though Weishaupt had later admitted his origin story had been fabricated).
But did the Illuminati network really disappear when Weishaupt retired? In the 1840s, William Huntington Russell, cousin to the heir of the North American opium empire known as “the China trade,” so as not to mention the word opium, visited Germany and joined a fraternity, and he brought the Illuminati rituals back to Yale.
A few years after Reuss announced the Illuminati revival, co-founder and Christian mystic Leopold Engel was bounced by Christian mystic Karl Kellner and the name of the society changed to O.T.O. Soon, a British intelligence agent would join and hijack the society, leading it to great infamy. That agent was a 33-degree mason who’d recently been kicked out of the Golden Dawn after trying to hijack that society.
The Nazis seized all masonic documents and assets. As many as 200,000 masons may have been killed as part of the final solution. Those who escaped the dragnet were forced deep underground and used the forget-me-not flower to signal each other. One lodge was established in secret inside the Esterwegen concentration camp. It’s possible the Bavaria Illuminati were wiped out by the Nazis during their takedown of masonry, which would be ironic since a Bonesman-connected bank helped finance Hitler.