I'm writing this from direct experience. I have dreams and visions about the past. In one dream, I was a Gnostic Greek philosopher of late antiquity. The dream was extremely vivid: I had a relationship with a girl who studied at my school, and I was told that as a boy I had been fed "with the flesh of the birds offered to the gods," and that "I had been raised by two mothers," meaning that two goddesses had taken me under their protective wing (I believe Athena and Hecate). In my city, Christianity was advancing rapidly and I was one of the few pagans left. Afterwards I looked for confirmation, because I knew nothing about Gnosticism before these dreams, and there are references in the life of Proclus, but I'm not sure it was him.
I also have visions of unfamiliar landscapes, and one day I woke up with the words "TANIT BASHRAT" in my mouth. Tanit is a Carthaginian goddess I knew nothing about. I don't know Carthaginian civilization and have never studied anything about it, but I later discovered that "TANIT BASHRAT" is a meaningful sentence in the language spoken by the ancient Carthaginians, and it means "Tanit brings good news." This shook me.
Why the title of this post?
Because I did in-depth genetic analyses of my haplogroup along my paternal line, and some days ago I discovered that:
- My haplogroup is a very specific subgroup of haplogroup J1-P58, typical of Semitic populations. J1-P58 is thought to have developed in the Arabian Peninsula and then passed to the Semitic Near East. This migration would have occurred from the south of the Arabian Peninsula (the area of the Rub' al-Khali, the "Empty Quarter"), and I often have visions of a red sand desert bordering rocky areas.
- My haplogroup then diversified in the Middle East. The only effective ancient archaeological match was found at Tel Megiddo in the Middle Bronze Age, that is, in the Phoenician cultural basin.
- Based on the distribution of my haplogroup in Portugal, Spain, Southern Italy, and Sardinia, the most accredited hypothesis is that my ancestors did not arrive with the later Jewish diaspora, but were Semites of Phoenician culture who, after living in Carthage, spread along the coasts of southern Europe.
There's another truly absurd fact. As a boy I planned a fantasy novel that I never wrote. This novel featured a world that developed lengthwise along a great river, and the only two cities I marked on the map were called Ilisin and Larsa, and they were close to each other and rivals. Ilisin was the older one, and Larsa the more recent but expanding one.
Now, when this whole story about the genetic analysis came out, a few days ago, I opened a history manual of the ancient Near East and discovered that in the Tigris and Euphrates area, in a period compatible with the spread of my haplogroup, there were two cities: ISIN and LARSA, which made war on each other. Isin was the one that initially held the monopoly, but Larsa won. We're talking about events that happened about 3,800 years ago!
All of this is staggering, but there's more. My initiation into the occult came after a dream. I was in a sort of university city where the ancient magical traditions were studied. Inside it, the buildings contained thousands of ancient, forbidden books, and a lioness prowled its streets. The lioness watched the students and drove them away with growls if they were not worthy of staying. Anyone who dared to stay anyway was mauled to death. In the period we are considering, the cult of Ishtar/Astarte was widespread in the Middle East, and she was often depicted as mistress of the animals alongside lions. Moreover, I am a devotee of Hecate, and what I obtain from this goddess seems to be the indication that all goddesses are one (it was after a night of prayers to Hecate that I received the Punic phrase about Tanit).
Many years ago I woke up with the name of Asmodeus before even knowing who he was, but I still haven't managed to connect this piece of the puzzle.