Every day, when I’m home, I take a walk back in time to visit the copy of Athena’s ascension temple, the Parthenon, in Centennial Park, beside where Clare and I live in Nashville, TN. First built in 1897, and reconstructed in the early 20th century, it became the symbol of a city that prides itself as a center of learning and enlightenment. “The Athens of the South”, it was called. Inside the Parthenon is a ‘living image’ of the Virgin Warrior Goddess of Light. Clad like Revelation’s woman clothed with the sun, beaming bedazzling rays from her golden robe of light, Athena is a beacon calling all to embrace their true selves and to step up in humanity’s continuing battle against darkness in all its forms and in our quest for enlightenment.
During the past 8 years that we have lived next door, my angel and I have witnessed Nashville’s emergence as ‘It-ville” and the Parthenon’s rapid rise as one of the hottest vortexes in the world, certainly on this side of the world. Combined with the ultra-mysterious Bicentennial Capitol Mall, the living temple that encodes the secrets of ‘the Wand of the Messiah’, it puts Nashville at the top of the list of ‘must go to’ urban portals.
The Parthenon, Nashville. Temple of the Light Body.
Athena, Nashville. Warrior Goddess of Light/Wisdom.
THE NEW ATLANTIS
The spirit of Pallas-Athena has had a remarkable influence on Nashville and American history. The primary influence is found in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, whose The New Atlantis was published one year after his death in 1626. This prophetic work of fiction imagined the appearance of a technologically and spiritually advanced civilization in America from which a ‘perfected’, meaning more Christ-like, humanity would emerge.
When Sir Francis Bacon became Lord Chancellor of England under King James I he adopted the symbol of Pallas-Athena, who was called “The Spear-Shaker,” as his emblem. Athena appears on many of the headings of Bacon’s writings and on the headings of his alter ego, William Shake-speare’s plays and sonnets.
Athena became the symbol of the most enlightened democracies. The flags of the state of Virginia, the first colony in America, and the Carolinas bear her likeness. The seal of the State of California also depicts Athena. Her temple’s presence in Nashville opens the possibility that if America is the New Atlantis its capitol is, hey y’all, Nashville.
As we witness the birth of or transition into a new humanity and the emergence of the New Atlantis, it is apropos that this Goddess, who the Greeks said had a hand in the creation of the first woman, and who embodies the keys to our ascension, and her temple, which celebrates the perfection of humanity and our union with the Divine, should, simultaneously, be rising. Athena clearly has a message for us. One that is vital for us to understand.
TO THE TEMPLE
The original Parthenon, built in 447 B.C. by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, under the supervision of the sculptor Phidias, atop the Acropolis in Athens, is one the most studied books in stone in the world.
Nashville’s Parthenon (completed in 1931) is a scale replica (accurate to an eighth of an inch) of this remarkable tome. It’s better than the real thing in my opinion. Stargate Nashville’s Parthenon is intact…and functioning.
The East side entrance to the Parthenon.
A board meeting of the gods. Zeus sits on the throne. He is the chairman of the board. Beside him is Hephaestos, the god of alchemy. Athena receives a golden laurel crown from Nike.
The gryphon (part lion, part eagle) is the symbol of the Chariot of the Gods. Gryphon heads adorned chariot poles and wheel hubs on many Greek chariots and were known to pull the chariots of the gods Apollo, Nemesis and Zeus. In Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, the Sacred Gryphon, the symbol of Christ, pulls the chariot of the Church. So, with the gryphons at each corner on the roof, we are to think of the Parthenon as a rectangular vehicle that can take us to the stars.
Inside Nashville’s Parthenon is the tallest indoor statue in the western world, a 42 foot tall statue of Athena, Goddess of Light/Wisdom and War.
Over the past 20 years I have taken thousands of guests on tours to experience Athena. I love to watch their faces as they emerge from the stairs leading into Athena’s holy of holies.
At first, a column obscures the view of Athena from the top of the stairs.
It is only when one takes a few steps and looks right that, suddenly, they can see the towering statue.
Millions of people have visited Nashville’s Athena. I’m sure many of them have had the same reaction. She is a giant! Looking up at Athena evokes awe and a bit of terror.For scale, Clare is five feet nine inches tall and Nike, the angel Athena is holding in her hand, is six feet four inches tall and weighs four hundred pounds.
Master sculptor, Alan LeQuire’s, statue is considered an accurate reproduction of the original sculpted by Phidias. The statue, known as Athena Promachos, Athena the Champion, was made of wood, gold and ivory and could be seen from a distance of many miles. 2,400 pounds of gold covered the original statue. Around 295 a tyrant of Athens named Lachares actually stripped the gold off the Athena Parthenos to pay his troops. Nashville’s Athena is gilded with 8 pounds of 23.5 carat gold leaf.
Athena wears a collection of accoutrements, including a crown with a Sphinx flanked by gryphons, and a breastplate given to her by Zeus that could turn a man to stone and makes her impervious to her enemies weapons. Two serpents hold her garment in place. She holds a spear, at the base of which is a coiled serpent (the symbol of Ericthoneous, the half human, half serpent, son of Hephaestus). A shield of gold rests upon the spear. She is ready for battle.
Athena is not so much about winning terrestrial battles, rather she is about overcoming spiritual struggles.
This struggle began with Adam and Eve, who Athena represents. In the esoteric version of the biblical story, Adam and Eve were originally perfect beings of light. After Eve ate the wisdom of the serpent they (and we), were evicted from Eden (the place of pure light and love) and were given coats of skin that cover our true nature. We fell. All of human history has been a quest to return or ascend or reverse the fall and to reacquire our light bodies, which are symbolized by a robe of light.
Pallas (‘the Virgin’) Athena’s story is all about this robe. With her serpent and spear or tree she was the ‘new Eve’ of c. 450 B.C. She is a foreshadowing of the Woman of the Apocalypse or the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Revelation 12. The woman gives birth to a male child who is threatened by a dragon, identified as the Devil and Satan. This woman is widely believed to be the Virgin Mary.
The description “clothed with the sun” is sometimes rendered by rays emanating from her figure. Virgin of Guadalupe. Athena’s Robe of Golden Light and Mary’s cloak of stars are the same.
The woman’s “male child” is a reference to Jesus (Revelation 12:5), who is destined to “rule all nations with a rod of iron” (Revelation 12:5)…that is embedded like King Arthur’s Excalibur in the ground of Nashville.
Mary was regarded as a ‘second Eve’ whose purity restored her to the paradise from which Eve had been driven. She was considered the perfect example of our union with God. Christians believe that Jesus is the ‘Second Adam’ who came to show us the Way to our original perfection (and light bodies).
Jesus calls the higher state of ascended consciousness “the tree of life.” “…To him that overcometh (the lower egoic/flesh nature) will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7).
All human growth and development is aimed at returning humanity to this pure state of being, our original state of perfection and existence in our light bodies.
SYMMETRIA
From my experiences leading seekers through the Parthenon I can confidently say that it always leaves you feeling better than when you arrived. It is literally true that one could arrive here as a human and leave as something more.
There is a reason for this.
The ancients knew how to imbue temples and works of art, including statues, with the essence of a divine being. They did this through architectural intention and design and prayer. The god could be present in the statue and devotees could ‘worship’ or commune with the deity through the image or idol as if the deity were physically there.
This belief/understanding explains why when the apostle Paul went to ancient Athens he called the Athenians a bunch of Idol worshipping hillbillies. From the altar of the “Unknown God” Paul started telling the Athenians about the resurrected man, Jesus. They summoned him to court on Mars Hill to explain himself.
Right on cue, Nashville has a Temple of Mars on the hill beside the Wand of the Messiah. I call it Mars Hill.
Paul was wrong. The Parthenon is not an idol. It is an ideal. Jesus, the carpenter or master craftsman who crafted a light body in his resurrection, would have well understood how it is a perfect lesson in golden ratio geometry that evokes harmony, peace and, even, bliss.
The Fibonacci spiral shows the way. The golden ratio is embedded within the Fibonacci sequence, and can be shown to be at the core of how many organic processes unfold. Famously, the branching patterns of many plants seem to be guided by the golden ratio. So it’s clearly a part of the organic world.
An even better fit. This is not a coincidence. For an excellent explanation please see goldennumber.net.
As a disciple of the Essenes who taught the teachings of these ‘Perfected Ones’, as the Essenes called themselves, Jesus also would have been quite comfortable discussing with the Athenians, and the Greeks in general, their understanding of human perfection; they had a philosophy they called Symmetria, the harmonious relationship of part to part and of the part to the whole.
The quest for perfection is the quest to become more whole, holy, complete and compassionate in order to ascend to the level of the divine or holy ones.
For the Greeks, Symmetria was an ascension philosophy that unified them with nature. It manifested in an artistic movement whose aim was to express what its chief proponent, the sculptor Polykleistos (whose skill rivaled Phidias), called to eu, ‘the perfect’ or ‘the good’, and what others labeled to kallos, ’the beautiful’. Good. Beautiful. Perfect. This is the human ideal. It is achieved in body, mind and spirit.
The idea(l) of Symmetria came from Pythagoras, the 6th century B.C. wonder philosopher, master mathematician and scientist who deeply influenced the great Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, and hence, Western philosophy. Some even claim Pythagoras was an Essene or Therapeutae, if not the order’s founder. Like these Jewish mystics he saw our goal as purifying the soul and preparing for a higher state of being.
Pythagoras taught that if someone can purify his light body (made of an intangible substance like light) he can journey to the stars and beyond. This light body of celestial flesh— symbolized by the golden robe of light — is within our flesh. By certain musical sounds it rides on beams of light to the stars, says Pythagoras. Jesus manifested it with pure love.
Pythagoras viewed reality as having a pattern of oppositions that needed to be balanced. As summarized by Aristole in Metaphysics:
limited and unlimited
odd and even
one and plurality
right and left
male and female
rest and movement
straight and curved
light and darkness
good and bad
square and oblong
To this list we can add:
human and divine.
This elegant mindset is depicted in the sculptures in the Parthenon’s friezes, which directly tell us this temple celebrates the newly blurred line between the divine and the human and, for the first time, showed the gods among the mortals and the humans mingling in the divine realm.
THE SPLENDID BLENDED
I say ‘newly blurred line’ as this mingling had tentatively begun in Babylon in c. 600 B.C. when ascension minded scholars had gathered around the step pyramid devoted to Enki, the god of craftsman. The counterpart to the Greek god of craftsman, Hephaestos, the Sumerians claimed Enki made the human body from clay and delivered key ascension teachings to his creation. He sought to uplift us to the level of the gods. With Enki’s boost, suddenly it was okay for humans to cross the forbidden boundary separating us from space, time and other worlds.
Opposing Enki was his half-brother, Enlil, who sought to keep us ‘down on the farm’ as slaves and sex objects and to keep the gate to heaven closed. He is one of a number of gods who play this role, including Zeus, with whom he is often compared.
The fact that humans can hang in harmony with the gods is the key point of the Parthenon friezes.
Today, the moment when humans go up to meet the gods and the gods come down to meet humans is called Contact. In the case of the ancient Greeks, contact with these gods was a close encounter of all kinds, especially the Ninth Kind…the one that results in human transformation into a celestial being.
The Parthenon’s frieze is a profound statement about human contact and cohabitation with the holy ones or ones holier (more complete and compassionate) than we are.
It says we can hang with one another.
Part of the reason why is because we are their children. We are fractals of them, micros of their macro. Just as we now make robots in our image, their pattern is our pattern. The difference between us in them is a matter of tone, degree and frequency. We can become perfect, just like them.
Some may say it is hubris for a human to portend to become a holy one. Not so, would say Jesus, who also taught the Symmetrical ideal that we were fractals or holograms of our Creator.
11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. 12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.
Remembering that we are fractals of our Creator is the key to our ascension.
THE FESTIVAL OF THE ROBE OF LIGHT
Even more importantly than showing the blending of humanity with the gods, the Parthenon friezes depicted the Panthenaic games and festival in which a symbolic robe of light called a peplos is brought to Athena every year in celebration of her birthday. Every four years, the Greater Panathenaia was held, which was even grander than the annual festival, and included the Panathenaic Procession. Again a peplos was taken to Athena.
On this mid-summer’s night the most ‘perfect’ Athenians processed to the Erichthaneum, a temple beside the Parthenon devoted to the legendary early ruler of Athens, who was raised by Athena.
The procession delivers a peplos or woven robe to the small statue of Athena inside. The robe is woven by the virgins dedicated to the goddess Athena exclusively for use during the procession.
The original Parthenon’s Panathenaic Frieze told the story of the Athenian’s quest for perfection in order wear this robe…and utlimately, to become a god or ascend to the level of the gods, who themselves sit on the east frieze.
According to ancient sources, a scene from the battle of the gods against the Giants was woven into this precious garment.
Originally, the Giants were the nefilim, the offspring of the “fallen” sons of heaven, heavenly beings, holy ones or angels and human females.
The nefilim are also known as the “mighty ones”. This appellation derived from a power cloak they possessed which gave these children of the angels mighty powers and made them luminous or radiant. In the Sumerian stories of Enki we learn he transmitted it to humans. The lesser and Greater Panthenaia is a carry over or celebration of this older tradition.
In my view this robe of light is the same as the light body of Pythagoras that turns a perfected human into a god. It is symbolized by Athena’s peplos.
Interestingly, this peplos was so large that it was carried on the mast of a ship on wheels (like a float in a modern parade).
This reminds me of the garment of the Israelite High Priest, which was woven of the same material as the Veil of Stars woven by the Virgin Mary and other temple priestesses at the Temple of Solomon. Legend says this Veil was so heavy it required 300 men to carry it.
Mysteries abound with this wildly cosmic veil, including that it represented (or facilitiated) the dematerialization of our bodies into celestial flesh and our ability to enter the heavenly realms (where all wear the Robe of Light) and return to earth alive.
On the day of Atonement, the Israelite high priest entered the Most Holy Place of Solomon’s Temple. Before entering he put on the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the belt of truth and the sandals of peace. Then the High Priest crossed over the veil separating the holy place from the Most Holy Place, leaving earth, crossing into the heavenly realms, and returning alive to shed light to the people.
This story reflects a change in the high priest’s state of being. Was this metaphorical or literal? Did he morph from a human priest radiate light, meaning wisdom? Or, did he literally shine?
Adding to the mystery of the veil of Solomon’s Temple is the fact that it was split in half at Jesus’s crucifixion (Matthew 27:51) and why it is said that with his resurrection and ascension into a being of light his flesh became the veil (Hebrews 10:20). All that was left of his dematerialized body was his image on a linen burial shroud, which is equated with the Robe of Light.
ATHENA : HIGH PRIESTESS OF LIGHT
As I am sure you have observed, Athena and the High Priest are identically attired. They are both dressed for success in the same ‘battle’ — crossing the boundary between the human and divine.
Athena is the goddess of wisdom and of war, the two sides of humanity. These accoutrements make sense in a battle setting, but how do we interpret them through the eyes of wisdom?
For an answer, I defer to the apostle Paul. Writing to the people of Ephesus in Turkey he tells them they are involved in a cosmic battle. Dark powers seek to control their/our soul. To combat them we must put on our Armor of God, says Paul. That is, our crown of salvation, breastplate of righteousness, belt of truth, sandals of peace, along with our shield of faith.
I have long proposed that these items — Athena’s Kit, the High Priest’s Kit, the Armor of God — are spiritual capabilities we can activate.
The helmet of salvation is our activated crown chakra, enablng cosmic intelligence or ascension intelligence to guide us. The breastplate of righteousness is the opened heart chakra. The belt of truth is exactly that, as are the sandals of peace.
Then there is the spear she is holding. This symbolizes the cosmic axis and the tree of life or the Tree of Light. The serpent, of course, can be seen as the bright, shining tempter of Eden. Athena is a retooled Eve. When she lifts this serpent coiled at her feet on her spear of light she would make a Nehushtan or a serpent on a pole, the work of art made by Moses that healed the Israelites.
When we activate the ‘apps’ for the soul and lift the serpent within, this how we enlighten the robe of light.
That is my meditation, anyway.
On my visits to the Parthenon I visualize Athena assisting me in lifting the serpent of healing (Holy Spirit, Kundalini) within me and sealing my body in a skin of gold.
My intention is to create a seal of protection around my body but also to beam rays of light and love to all who I meet during my day.
Ultimately, my light body practice is aimed at helping me become a higher degree human, a higher frequency being of love, that will emerge fully functioning and armored with a pure light from within me.
Thank you, Athena, for showing me this practice.
Please join me in Nashville and experience this sacred space face to face, soul to soul.
2 Comments
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William, I noticed a lot of BLUE besides the beautiful GOLD and it had me thinking about another article you wrote. Maybe we should all take a look and read it again.
https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/wisdom/article/why-is-krishna-blue
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I live in Nashville (since 2013) and was excited to learn that you live in Nashville. I have watched many of your shows on Gaia TV. I have been a life long seeker. What would cost to have you take me on a tour of the Parthenon? I am only off on Tuesdays and Wednesday’s, and once in a while a Sunday.
I have always wanted to visit the Parthenon. I found your web site this AM and was thrilled.
I was also on another internet quest this AM. My super intelligent daughter-in-law from Lithuania, and smart grandchildren, Jude age 7 and Juliet age 4, are coming to visit next Tuesday and Wednesday. I am searching for ways to entertain them. Depending on cost and your availability perhaps we could discuss a shortened introductory tour next Tuesday (Feb. 19) afternoon, or Wednesday morning.
I am grateful to have found your website and will be interested to know what you have to offer here in Nashville. I would love to meet like-minded people. I have been a seeker of spirituality-history-Masons-all religions etc., most of my 65 years. It has been a lonely journey, mostly. As part of my journey I obtained a masters in psychology and at one point started a masters in theology.
I realize that you are very busy and travel often. I look forward to hearing from you.