Sun and Lunar Worship: Adonai, Baal and Moloch in the Mysteries explores nineteenth-century American writer, orientalist and lawyer Samuel Fales Dunlap’s who followed the history of how names of gods changed across cultures, and the meaning of multi-layered “keys” (interpretive methods) of the Mysteries,. I take it further by being specific in arguing that monotheistic bias created a false hierarchy between “primitive paganism” and “superior Abrahamic truth.” It is based on Dunlap’s thesis in Sōd: The Mysteries of Adoni (1861) and The Ghebers of Hebron (1894), and modern scholarship on the Ugaritic Tablets1 (13ᵗʰ c. BCE), including Mark S. Smith, Jan Assmann, Francesca Stavrakopoulou and others.
Modern discoveries have made it impossible to maintain the old picture of a neat early monotheism (e.g., inscriptions of Yahweh and Asherah, and astral and solar symbolism tied to Yahweh worship). A divine council structure, which includes a pantheon with ‘El (or ‘Al), Baal, Asherah (Athirat), Anat and others still features in the Hebrew Bible. These modern discoveries place Yahwistic religion in a shared regional polytheism, and clearly reveal the West‑Semitic pantheon, which Israel grew out of. Hence, comparative West‑Semitic religion (Ugarit, Phoenicia, etc.) provided the template for Israel’s religious environment, and we should not read Deuteronomistic theology (Yahweh alone) back into all periods of Israel’s history. Still, Christians will insist that Yahweh was and is “the one true God.”
Sōd and Ghebers attempt to strip away the later theological veneer that Judaism and Christianity place over their origins, and one of the reasons Dunlap is not used today is because of his symbolic and esoteric view of religion through the lens of mystery‑religion syncretism. Dunlap argues that the early Israelite cult was not monotheistic, but part of the broader West‑Semitic religious world of Phoenicia, Syria and Mesopotamia. In his reconstruction, Adonai (Adoni) is a veiled form of Adonis or Dionysus, the youthful dying‑and‑rising god; Baal (Bel) is the solar‑Saturnian “lord of fire”; and Moloch is simply another manifestation of the same fiery Dionysian power worshipped on the Israelite high places.
Dunlap’s point is not merely that Israel once worshipped multiple gods, as this is also acknowledged even in the Biblical sources, but that later Jewish and Christian interpreters worked hard to obscure the period when Yahweh was one deity among many, competing with Baal, Asherah, Chemosh and Moloch. The prophets themselves testify to this struggle, yet later theology retroactively imposes a pure monotheism that did not exist in practice. Dunlap’s work was not just to “unmask” names, but to show that Israelite religion was originally polytheistic and syncretistic.
The purpose of any related papers and commentary to this topic is to (a) disarm Jewish, Christian and Islamic polemics which are not based in facts, (b) demonstrate the royalist and monarchic origins of the Jewish Mashiach and Christos concepts and the Mashiach’s connection to Adonis and Baal (the storm-God or cloud rider), (c) counter exclusivist Christian claims (opinion) of Jesus as the prophesied Messiah and the greatest sage despite the staggering contributions and record of sages like Nagarjuna, Śaṅkarācārya, Siddhartha Gautama and many others, (d) analyze the problems with the ancient royalist construction of the Jewish Mashiach. The U.S. Founders (e.g., Jefferson, Madison, Paine) feared European-style theocracy where a “King of Kings” (Rev 19:16) justifies absolute rule, and the Jewish Mashiach was an ancient royalist construct built upon the anointed divine king of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, absorbed into Jewish monarchy, then repurposed in the construct of “Jesus Christ the King” as monarchism in disguise. The U.S. Republic was founded on the rejection of kings (George III and any divine Christ-king). Christian nationalism’s “Kingdom of God” or “Christ rules America” is precisely the royalist ideology the scholarship and Ugaritic tablets peel, which is high-place divine-right rule transferred to the Church or “Christian nation.”
The Gods and their Names in the ancient world are intimately tied to the history of ancient peoples, cities, and the meanings those people ascribed in their world. In Dunlap’s works, he demonstrates that the famous God-names have a linguistic connection, which was covered in this initial introduction that simplifies the Ancient Origin of Names of Great Gods, Cities, Rivers and Countries.
The monotheistic biases results in a dichotomous worldview and ranked hierarchy of the evolution of religious thought from ignorant and primitive animism, shamanism and paganism to the supremacy of monotheism. However, Dunlap disproves the notion, that the so-called “Abrahamic religions” and beliefs are unconnected from the old high places that the Israelites displaced. The basis of the high religio-philosophical thought can be found throughout ancient India, Persia, among the pre-Homeric Hellenes and more.
THE LONG HISTORY OF ANCIENT RELIGIOUS INITIATORY AND ORAL TRADITIONS
Dunlap’s focus was “the MYSTERIES” and Dunlap frames the Mysteries through the Hebrew word Sōd (סוד) meaning the Secret or Arcanum. He argued that early Christianity, Judaism and pagan cults all preserved elements of hidden initiatory systems shared across Hebrew, Greek and Near Eastern religions. The Mysteries comprises a long history of ancient religious secret traditions — esoteric rites, doctrines, and symbolic teachings, and those who study, protect, promulgate and embody them. These mystery traditions were central, he argues, to many religions in antiquity, including Hebrew sects, Greek mystery cults, Syrian and Phoenician rites and early Christian groups. The Mysteries are shared across ancient religions involving symbolic teachings, rituals, philosophical and mythic structures and this does not exclude Judaism and the offshoot Christianity.
In Sōd: The Mysteries of Adoni, Dunlap explores the cult of Adoni/Adonis, which he interpreted as a dying-and-rising god mystery connected to the Hebrew Adonai by utilizing the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria (5ᵗʰ-6ᵗʰ century CE), which Franz Carl Movers drew from showing Adonis as understood by the Greeks aligned with the Semitic root, ’adon / adonai, and symbolically linked to early Christian interpretations of Jesus. He suggests that the parallels between Adonis and Christ are not accidental but reflect a shared mystery tradition. So, Dunlap proposes, that Christianity has an occult, initiatory origin. Sōd is at the core of early Christianity, and Jesus may have been connected to a Nazarene sect with esoteric teachings. He demonstrated that early Christianity preserved initiatory doctrines, and its symbolism (sacrifice, resurrection, sacred names) reflected older mystery patterns.
Sōd (סוד) or the Arcanum is defined as
- a secret or religious mystery.
- a congregation of initiates participating in a sacred secret.
Related modes of the Mysteries that one repeatedly comes upon in studies include:
- Numbers, or the metaphysical meaning of number, proportion, and cosmic structure.
- Correspondences
- Cycles, or periodicity
- Nature of Motion, Colors and Sounds
- Symbolism
It is not enough, that the dominant religions carry certain ideas from systems before it, as the Theosophist and Buddhist, Helena Blavatsky who drew upon Dunlap’s thesis stated:
“The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations. The Puranas, the Zendavesta, and the old classics are full of them; but no one has ever gone to the trouble of collecting and collating together those facts.” (Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 307)
Reliance on the narratives we have been told in the Sunday schools, by priests, theologians, etc, and through these biases from the main three monotheistic religions have bred and perpetuated long generations of conflict and ignorance about the beliefs of our ancestors, their value and the origins of these beliefs. The significance in the meanings and archaic symbolism connected with Solar and Lunar mysteries are in fact of one worship, and carry meanings related to the natural and invisible world.
THE MULTI-LAYERED SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF THE MYSTERIES
The lawyer and 19ᵗʰ century American writer James Ralston Skinner (1830-1893) expressed a synthesis of Freemasonry and Kabbalism as a symbolic philosophy. Skinner postulated an ancient language that appears to have been lost, though its proofs abundantly exist.
Firstly, language can mean a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings. Language in the first sense describes ordinary human languages, which can be either speech or writing, and in the second sense, a nonlinguistic sort of symbolic system. This should be taken into account when describing the Mysteries throughout antiquity among the ancient nations, where such means and traditions of communicating developed. The systems contain multi-layered interpretations of singular symbols or ideas, which mean multiple correct interpretations (called “keys”) associated with sciences, or branches of knowledge.
It is believed that certain texts are deliberately written with literary devices that include these interpretive methods and which makes reading a perceptive enhancing tool, that enables them to protect their work, make it laborious, or unveil the layers in meaning of ancient scriptures, myths and symbols.
THE INTERPRETIVE METHODS BY WHICH ANCIENT MYTHS ARE WRITTEN
These are “keys” or interpretive methods that can be identified:
- Spiritual, or Metaphysical: The spiritual key becomes the search for the fundamental principle from which all things arise. Every philosopher sought the ultimate principle.
- Psychical or Mystical: Understanding the soul as a natural force, or as a subtle form of matter or motion.
- Measures, i.e., Numbers and Geometrics: the Measure (metron) is the architecture of reality, and its paradoxes reveal the structure of space and time.
- Astronomical and Astrological, i.e., Kosmic, or the Order of the Heavens: cosmic order as revealed in celestial motion.
- Ethical and Moral: reveals the great Harmony, reveals cosmic justice. Ethics lead to the study of equilibrium, or the way nature restores proportion.
- Symbolical and Allegorical: insight of patterns, symbolism becomes the recognition of underlying structure, the invisible logic that shapes the visible world.
- Literal, or Historical: the “literal” level is the world as it presents itself to the senses, i.e., one is encouraged to learn to “read the book of nature,” observe the elements in all their forms, study their mixtures, watch how the river changes, etc. This is direct observation of natural phenomena. It is the most basic thing that opens the senses, widens the perception.
Considering this as a brief introduction, one would not conclude, that all mythologies were built on the worship of the physical sun, because of the prevalence of sun symbolism, or say that Christos, Mithras, Baal or Adonis is merely the sun. Before the mythicists of our day, there were scholars with this position in the nineteenth-century, that relied heavily on one interpretation, or another.
There are seemingly conflicting, yet equally true interpretations about the nature of the SUN and what is the meaning of ancient Fire and the Sun-gods. Much of the confusion about these things still has its roots in Orientalist interpretations, which you have to untangle yourself.
The sun in the Mysteries has a multi-faceted meaning and was considered divine, because ancient peoples knew the Sun was a life and fructifier of life. There is also taught a teaching of a “hidden Sun,” the divine fire that lay behind its power, but which also lives in man. The Primal Sun, the sacred mysteries also taught, holds in latency the reservoir of all the energy of our kosmos, of which the physical orb and the planets serve as its medium.
This indicates that concepts typically seen as far abstract were conceived as being related to forces and phenomena in nature, that created a bridge or connection between the world of the gods, the natural world and spaces, and the body. This cannot be fully understood through the lens of monotheistic doctrine.
YAHWEH THE PROTECTOR STORM-GOD OF THE ISRAELITE WARRIOR
It is very difficult to have this conversation without challenging long-held concepts about the history of religion, the nature of “God,” and the basic arguments about the monotheistic god of the “Abrahamic religions.” Some have traced Yahweh to being a volcano or mountain god, as opposed to the sky-god, El. This attempts to perhaps confusingly demonstrate the names and titles of the Gods were more than just names and titles, but masks of different aspects of the Sun-God, or an eclectic meaning of God collected from surrounding cultures.
Samuel Fales Dunlap referred to Judaism as an offshoot of the old Phoenician worship, owing its ideas and concepts to “paganism,” and that it shrouds this under the constructed blind of “monotheism.” The tutelary god Yahweh had succeeded El in worship, which appropriated the consort, Asherah, and survives in Christianity under a Father-Son-Mary combination.
“The Jews contend that their God, Yahweh or Jehovah, is the Supreme Being, who deigned to communicate with them and them alone in the covenant at Sinai. Christians and Muslims, their spiritual descendants, have taken up the claim—while insisting that their revelations are the final and complete versions. All of these religions, in their dominant forms, insist that any other god either does not exist or is a demon in disguise.
Sometimes, however, the charges have been reversed to say that the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic faiths is not what he is claimed to be. One of them was H.P. Blavatsky. She writes: “If we are taken to task for believing in operating ‘Gods’ and ‘Spirits’ while rejecting a personal God, we answer to the Theists and Monotheists: Admit that your Jehovah is one of the Elohim, and we are ready to recognize him. Make of him, as you do, the Infinite, the one and the Eternal God, and we will never accept him in this character. Of tribal Gods there were many; the One Universal Deity is a principle, an abstract Root-Idea which has nought to do with the unclean work of finite Form” (Secret Doctrine, I, 492n.; emphasis here and in other quotations is in the original). Blavatsky is not denying that the God of the Abrahamic religions exists; rather she is saying that, contrary to what these religions claim, he is not the sole and unique Supreme Being.” (Richard Smoley,God and the Great Angel, Quest 99. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 24-28.)
Taken together, Dunlap and Blavatsky treat Abrahamic monotheism not as a unique unveiling of the Infinite, but as the later elevation of a Levantine tribal god with Yahweh succeeding El, taking over Asherah’s place, and then being recast as the sole Supreme Being. On this view the constructed blind of exclusive monotheism hides an older Phoenician-Canaanite pattern that Christianity, they argue, only rearranges into Father, Son, and Mary. Jehovah or Yahweh may exist as one of the Elohim; but he is not, they insist, the nameless Root-Idea itself.
FOOTNOTES
- The Ugaritic culture (centered in the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern Syria) was a Bronze Age society known for its rich mythology and early alphabetic writing. Its cycles, especially the Baal Cycle told symbolic stories of gods battling chaos, death, and renewal, reflecting the rhythms of nature and human life. In simple terms: Ugaritic myths used gods and battles as a multi-layered language of seasons, fertility, and cosmic order, showing how people understood the balance between life, death, and rebirth. The Ugaritic Tablets give us a window into Bronze Age religion and society, showing how myth, ritual, and politics were intertwined. They preserve myths that parallel later biblical themes. ↩︎
