Dear Jill

 By Anna Von Reitz

I don’t often take time out for personal correspondence, other than writing thank you notes to express gratitude for gifts and donations, but your latest letter requires much more of a response.

In “Begin at the Beginning” I am recounting western history --- at least as multiple cultures and records report it to us in this far distant time. We are as certain as it is possible to be that idolatry, money, and temple prostitution were all the inventions of Semiramis, the wife of Nimrod, and Queen of the corresponding city and region in Ancient Mesopotamia.

It’s what was directly recorded by numerous different civilizations at the time.

The credit or blame for these inventions rests with her for the simple reason that she, as an individual, is the one who introduced these ideas and practices, not because she was a woman.

It is arguable that by introducing the concept of ritual purging of sins by having sex with a temple prostitute (who then earned money for the temple from the contrite sinner), Semiramis was empowering women by teaching them the value of sex in the marketplace.

Since Semiramis and her husband, King Nimrod, got a cut off this business, I would rather characterize her as an imaginative and calculating Madam circa 7,000 BC.

I would argue that anything that reduces sex to the level of a commercial transaction is evil, just as viewing marriage as a Joint Venture is evil. Both sex and marriage are meant to be so much more than that --- the foundation of a family and lifelong love relationships is not “the same as” a couple people getting together to produce widgets.

In this and with her other inventions, Semiramis displayed a high degree of what the Bible calls “double mindedness” – the ability to redefine things according to different contexts and think in abstract, symbolic ways. While there is nothing wrong with this in-and-of-itself, we have to judge the tree by its fruits when it comes to the results.

--- Temple prostitution led inevitably to secular prostitution, which led to the entire industry of sex for sale, and that in turn led to pimps profiting themselves from women’s bodies, that led to harems that treated women like breeding stock instead of individuals of divine value, that led to forced prostitution and rape and kidnapping, as women who didn’t care to participate were forced into it against their will.

And when, inevitably, the temple prostitutes got pregnant as a result of their services, it led to other evils as well. Now you’ve got unwanted babies by unknown Fathers. Instead of a woman treasuring a child as a reflection of her beloved husband, a temple prostitute could not view the product of her job in the same way.

She viewed the entire process of being pregnant and giving birth as an incredibly unfortunate event. She was out of work during the later phases of it, went through the pain and danger of childbirth, and ended up with a child she didn’t know or want, enjoyed a brief period of prosperity afterward in which the grown men lined up to suck the milk out of her breasts, and then wanted nothing more than to get rid of the baby that was an economic burden to her.

So, then, the tradition of child sacrifice was born to get rid of all the unwanted, unknown babies that the temple prostitution industry produced. Just like dominoes, one evil perpetuated another. All over the Ancient Near East, huge furnaces in the shape of an owl were erected. Fires were stoked in the belly of these stone or iron effigies and the babies were thrown into the fire as an offering to this owl god called Molloch.

You can see exactly such an effigy at the Bohemian Grove in California to this very day. The participants, mostly uber-wealthy politicians and business elites wear robes and officiate at a pseudo-ritual they call “The Death of Dull Care” where a child is sacrificed and loss of innocence is celebrated and the men all heave a sigh of relief because they don’t have to be responsible for what they’ve created.

Soon, the religious zealots of this cult were demanding that every couple sacrifice their first-born child to their evil blood-thirsty god and teaching that terrible things would befall the whole community if this sacrifice wasn’t made.

Obviously, many young parents couldn’t stomach throwing their baby into the furnace and watching it burn alive, so the zealots decreed that one of the parents must sacrifice their life in exchange for keeping the baby. Thousands of funerary “jars” have been found throughout the Mideast, Asia Minor, and North Africa, containing the charred corpses of parents who made this choice and threw themselves into the furnace instead of their babies.

If you are finding all of this horrifying, the use of sex for “ritual cleansing” ---and profit--- was to take yet another ugly turn. Men learned that with enough olive oil and incense, they could make money as temple prostitutes, too. Homosexual sex temples of both kinds soon dotted the landscape.

Some societies like the Ancient Greeks went so far as to pair up grown men with young boys starting at about age eight, and these mentors ritually raped these young boys at their convenience until they, too, grew up and starting raping other boys in turn. It was considered a coming of age ceremony for grown men to rape little boys.

And all of this developed and became institutionalized because of Semiramis. Unknown millions of people were traumatized both as children and as adults by the things this woman spawned --- and you wonder why she is singled out and called “the Great Abomination” by everyone with a brain, then and now?

It is no honor to associate yourself with this “goddess” and anyone who teaches you otherwise is a liar or a fool. With this one invention, she reduced the bodies of both men and women to being mere objects, and the act of intercourse to nothing more than a commercial transaction with dire results.

I think I have made my point, without going into a dissertation on the evils of idolatry in general and the evils of money idolatry in particular. Though she was adored by all those looking for an excuse to dip their wicks without being held responsible for the results, Semiramis brought a great deal of suffering, death and destruction into the world.

Today, she is still worshiped by self-absorbed psychopaths and nymphomaniacs who have nothing better to do than indulge their base instincts behind a veneer of holiness and sacrifice--- of others.

I am afraid that I have no patience with her followers. The historical record is clear. We know the fruits of this tree already and have no reason to go back for a second helping, no matter what men like Bill Gates and Gavin Newsom may think or say or do.

No, I am certainly not going to make the mistake of worshiping an idiot whose only apparent talent was an ability to exchange reality for a hall of mirrors and find hypocritical, profitable excuses for doing so.

She has been known by many names – Semiramis, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Isis, Cybele, and Columbia among them. She has even been confused with the Sumerian Great Mother Goddess, Inanna.

I am sorry if you have interpreted my antipathy for this individual and her teachings as any generalized hatred of pagan people or pagan women, either. This is incorrect. I respect everyone’s right to believe what they believe and do what they wish --- so long as it doesn’t harm someone else or destroy someone else’s property.

Our bodies are our property and when someone harms or destroys this most basic property, in my view, it is a capital crime against the individual being harmed, and an act of violence or murder against mankind. It lessens all of us.

This is why I am against abortion. It demeans and devalues human life if we destroy it for convenience. It says that we are less, that our lives mean less, that we are expendable. Not sacred. Not precious.

We toss away garbage, don’t we? And what happens when we toss away babies in furnaces or deny them life as fetuses because we don’t want to deal with the results of our own actions? We demean ourselves and everyone else around us to the level of garbage, just so much detritus.

There is a principle at work here that I must observe to you --- what we do to others, we do to ourselves.

When we murder our own children, when we rape children, when we discount their rights as living individuals --- we also violate our own rights and demean our own value. When we allow someone else to be enslaved, we open up the whole possibility that we will be enslaved. And when we censor them, we censor ourselves.

Your letter was quite a diatribe in favor of the Sacred Feminine and matriarchy -- and full of assumptions that I am an advocate for patriarchy and conventional Christianity. Not so. I critique all religions with equal ferocity based on the results of their doctrines. I am quick to see and value what is good, and equally quick to recognize what is evil.

No, I am targeting Semiramis and her Cult for the known evils they’ve brought into the world, just as I decry the Doctrine of Transubstantiation – barely veiled cannibalism -- being accepted and taught by the modern Church.

We are not here to blindly follow. We are here to discern. Let us discern therefore what is good in all teaching and what brings health and happiness and joy and honor --- and choose that with all our hearts. Let us equally recognize evil and turn away from all things that are demeaning to our bodies and our souls--- and not be meek in our objections to ideas and practices that harm any one of us, for in harming one, these things harm us all.

Much love and a prayer for your understanding for who I am and where I am coming from,

Anna Maria

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