Introduction: The Essene High Priest among the Candlesticks

        ESSENE HIGH PRIESTS wore only totally white robes, like the rest of the Essenes.  In place of the ordinary rope girdle of ordinary Essenes, they wore a golden girdle.  But no mitre and no ephod.   The gaudy attire of gold, and blue, and purple, with heavy crown and massive breastplate of the High Priest of Herod’s Temple was kept locked up by the Romans, who only allowed the Jewish high priest to wear it on closely guarded and supervised occasions.   In John’s description of Jesus walking among the candlesticks of Revelation chapter one, there is no altar, and no ark of the covenant.   Only a white-dressed “High Priest” and the seven candlesticks.   This is an Essene ceremony, and the “Lord’s Day” of verse 10 is not a Sunday, as so many claim, but Yom Kippur.   “Yom Kippur” means “the DAY:”, in Hebrew.   And John is merely answering the question any Gentile would ask.    “The DAY?”  “Which day?”  “Whose day?”   The answer: Yom Kippur!  The Lord’s DAY!”

       In a sub-plot that provides a framework for the first part of the book of Revelation, Jesus, the Essene “High Priest” is standing in the so-called “Holy Place” of the Essene Sanctuary or tabernacle in Chapter one.    Here the letters to the seven churches of Asia are sent to each individual church.  But by chapter four, Christ is invited by a voice from the Most Holy Place to “come up hither.   (Revelation 4:1)    When he does, he finds himself surrounded by the night sky.    The “calf” of Taurus, the “lion” substituting for the “lamb” of Aries.  The “eagle” substituting for the “fishes” of Pisces.  And the man for Aquarius, the only symbol kept in original Zodiac constellation form.    The 4 and 20 elders of the entire Essene leadership, both priestly Essenes and lay Essenes, are there with Jesus in the Divine “throne room”.  He, as the bleeding Lamb is found worthy to open the seven seals of chapter five, as the Essene scroll, the scroll of history, unrolls.

      It was customary during the Yom Kippur ceremony for all those in Jerusalem to stand in the courtyard of Herod’s temple while the High Priest ventured through the curtain into the Most Holy place swinging the golden censor before him filling the room with smoke and incense.   The bells and pomegranates on the hem of his robe would let the other priests know he was still alive and moving about.    The Essene ceremony was just as solemn, but on a different date, and no sheep or goats were killed.   In chapter seven 144,000 Essenes are waiting for their “high Priest” to come out of the Most Holy place, and in chapter 8 as the seventh seal is torn off the Essene scroll, there was a silence in heaven “about the space of half an hour.”  In verse 3, another angel stood at the altar and was given much incense.  He placed the incense in his censor and offered it up with the prayers of the saints.   This, too, was the Essene way.   They offered to God not the blood of animals, but their own prayers and good works.

      In Revelation 8:5 Jesus Christ, that “other angel with the censor” casts it down to the earth, and the seven trumpets begin to sound, showing the Yom Kippur ceremony is over.   The trumpets sound through chapters eight, nine, and ten.   But in chapter 10, the long expected “End of the World” fails to occur, and instead everyone welcomes the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.  As in the Jewish Yom Kippur, God gives everyone another chance.

    One must understand that Essenes are responsible for Revelation, and that Essenes understood themselves to be “angels”, or at least to have their minds possessed by, or communicating with “angels” while they were sitting in their “Holy Meals” at  Qumran, Ain Feshkha, Khirbet Mird, Khirbet Mazin, or Mar Saba.    The Mar Saba monastery, now maintained by the Greek Orthodox church a few miles from Bethlehem, is a good example to this very day of what an Essene monastery was like.   In Jesus’ time it was known as “the Nazara”, only Nazarenes and their families could live there, and it was the Nazareth of the Gospels.   Jesus grew up there as a child, but was born about 7 miles away at a place called “the Queen’s House” two kilometers south of Qumran.   Known as the stable, or “manger”, a shed next to the Queen’s house was where a donkey or ass was kept that the priestly Essenes at Qumran used to ride on festive occasions.

     Revelation 1:1 “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants (including me and you) things which must shortly come to pass (after 1844, not in 33 AD); and he sent and signified it by his angel (Jesus was that Essene “angel” originally, but anyone can assume that “angel” status who passes along the true meaning of Revelation, the “original message”) unto his servant John.”

   Just a few words about “John”, the first recipient of part of the message of Revelation.  As three of the Gospels begin, John of Zebedee, who co-wrote part of Revelation, is “fishing” in the Dead Sea for men, not fishes, because no fishes can live in the Dead Sea.  The Essenes renamed the Dead Sea the “Sea of Galilee” because Peter and Andrew were from Galilee, and brought their fishing boat with them down the Jordan River from the real Sea of Galilee.   Not without some heavy lifting here and there, but they managed to do it.  Since the water of the Sea of Galilee, at least in those days, eventually reached the Dead Sea  through the Jordan River, the Essenes could and did think of the Dead Sea as a southern extension of the Sea of Galilee.    And Peter and Andrew made themselves right at home at their new location.   “Galilee South”!  Zebedee was an influential charismatic preacher and magician, and he paid Peter and Andrew well for their boat, and hired them to “fish for men”.  The ruins of this Essene “fishery” can still be seen  6 Km. South of Qumran.   

      Zebedee’s “fishery” was a very successful tourist venture that performed Essene-style baptisms on Gentiles and Jews who wanted whatever magical benefits baptism might confer without joining the Essenes.    When Jesus Christ became an Essene Messiah in 29 AD, he firs convinced these “Fishers of Men” to join him as his disciples, along with John Mark (Bartholomew of the Gospels) and Zebedee himself.   John of Zebedee was a Roman, and he shows up in Acts under his real name of Aquila.    He and his wife Priscilla put up Saint Paul as a "tent-maker" in a story familiar to the readers of Paul's adventures in Acts. 

Aquila and Priscilla

      Revelation 1:2 “Who bare record of the word of God, (the phrase “word of God” almost always refers to Jesus Christ and his family in Acts and Revelation – it is a “Code-Name” and our first real indication that Reveation is “coded” or written in the code commonly called “Gospel Pesher”), and of the testimony of Jesus Christ (not of “John” a mistake almost everyone has made in assigning authorship), and of all things that he (Jesus not John) saw.”  Here it is important to understand that John (Aquila the Roman Essene) saw nothing, and Jesus (the revealing “angel”) saw everything!

        Revelation 1:3 “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein; for the time is at hand.”

Here the important “key words” are “Blessed” (which identifies Jesus, the author of the “Beatitudes” of Matthew and Luke as the author of this present “blessing”, now given much later).   “Readeth” points forward to the time when printing presses will make Revelation available world-wide.  “They that hear” is even later.  The time when missionaries (19^th century), radio (early 20^th century) and television (mid 20^th century) will provide everyone with Revelation’s prophecies.  “The words” here refers to “Gospel Pesher” and the “Bible Computer Codes” which allow the “words” of Revelation to be for the first time clearly understood, and thousands of other unreadable prophecies in the Old Testament Hebrew text to now be deciphered revealing day to day events.   “Keep those things that are written therein..” refers not to Revelation, but to the Torah.  Not until Israel again became a nation, in May of 1948, was it possible for a majority of Jews to keep the regulations of the Torah as an entire people, if they wished to.   Most notably this has occurred in Israel in regards to the Sabbath.   As any recent visitor to Israel is well aware.  We now are able to identify “..the time is at hand…” as being after 1948.

      Here we can’t dawdle, or we’ll never finish Revelation in one hour, my goal here.  But we’ll deal with the introduction, which reveals the Astrology involved to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Astrology, and a bit of puzzle-solving ability.   John, the Roman named Aquila, knows his Astrology, and as the disciple of Zebedee of the “Magi” of  the Essenes, honed his skills still further.    So Jesus lets him write this part of Revelation with just a little prompting here and there.

     The above order is a geographic one: in Revelation 2 and 3 the order is a different one.

  Revelation 1:4 “John to the seven churches which are in Asia: (everyone understands that these are not literal churches in literal cities, and at least in this particular aspect, everyone is right!): Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is (the human Jesus at his side as John writes this on Patmos about 50 AD), and which was, (the Jesus of Qumran, Essene Messiah, portrayed in the Gospels of 29 AD to 33 AD), and is to come (Jesus as Pravarasena I, king of Kashmir from 59 – 89 AD, and “Time-Traveler” from 25 AD until some as yet undetermined date still in the future!).

     Revelation 1:4c “..and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne;..”  This has a deeply coded Astrological meaning that I understand, but which is hard to explain. The “seven spirits” are the Pleiades, mentioned in Job 38:31. “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?  The “bands of Orion” show him as the mighty hunter, and the “sweet influences” of Pleides, show them as “Seven sisters”.As females, their influence is “Sweet” (feminine).   The main point Jesus is making here is that Astronomy is in the Old Testament, whether or not we like it or will admit it, and  he and the Essenes have a precedent, and the right to use it extensively in Revelation.   Thank you, Job!    You’ve done a good job there!

       Further meanings to “the seven Spirits …before his throne” are even more problematic to today’s male-dominated sexist theologians.    A totally male “God” surrounded by the feminine goddesses, the Pleiades, is at least a Gnostic concept, and perhaps even more heretical than that!   But of course in Greek theology, later adopted by Romans such as Aquila, the writer here, the chief male God, name Zeus, loved goddesses and human females whenever he got the urge to do so.    And being all-powerful, and able to disguise himself as anything he chose to, this was quite often.    Thus, as a swan, he seduced Leda, and she laid two eggs, out of which popped Castor and Pollux, the sons of Zeus!    Castor and Pollux can still be seen as the Zodiac constellation Gemini.

      Finally, it was Jesus’ very real relationship with Shiva, one of the Elohim Gods who had a fully operational space-ship capable of “Time-Space” travel in the first century AD, that the Book of Revelation, and the accurate prophecies of Isaiah 66 and Matthew 24 became possible and a reality.    Shiva was a descendent of El Shaddai, the original Father-God of the Elohim, whose cult animal was “the Bull”.   Jesus is here leading the descendents of El, the Elohim, around symbolically with the ring of Taurus, although in reality, the Elohim were using Jesus for their own purposes.    Which is one more try to preserve the human race, their errant children.