The Black Cube
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is the founder of the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran, and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which the CIA and others saw as the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran and the end of the 2,500-year-old Persian monarchy. Many Iranians claim that the Shah of Iran was a puppet of Western intelligence agencies and that the revolution was meant to liberate Iran from this covert external influence.
I would argue that a deep state entity infiltrated and influenced all sides. While they like to bribe, blackmail, and pay off politicians, they prefer totalitarian dictatorships, whether theocratic, which means rule by religious figures, or communist regimes where the state owns all property and there's no individual freedom or rights.
The primary difference between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims stems from a split that happened almost 1,400 years ago after Muhammad, the founder of Islam, died in the year 632. A great dispute arose over who would claim the position as the leader of the new religion. The successor to Muhammad would have a powerful influence over society, government, and trade.
Some people thought that anyone with qualifications could take over, and they became Sunnis, while others believed that only Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali, should be the leader, and they became known as Shiites. In the end, the majority Sunni sect got their way, and Abu Bakr became the first official successor, or Caliph, to the Prophet Muhammad.
Shiites see themselves as the followers of Ali and his descendants, whom they call the family of the house. Genetically speaking, this original family was composed of redheads and blondes. The Prophet Muhammad himself was a redhead in his youth, and after the age of 40, he started dyeing his gray beard with red henna to gain a more youthful appearance.
Henna remains popular amongst Muslims, as the Prophet Muhammad was reported to have had red hair, and in respect for their prophet, many people dye their hair with red henna, even though it's not their natural hair color. During his lifetime, Aisha, the Prophet's beloved wife, gained the epithet Humaira, a word that has been translated as "light" or "fair" but whose meaning has also been understood as "blond."
Ali, Muhammad's first cousin and son-in-law, was also renowned for his blond hair, as were his descendants, who founded the Shiite branch of Islam. There appears to have been a blond, racially Nordic element among the leadership of the Arabic people from the very earliest times.
Harvard anthropologist Carlton S. Coon has noted that Nordic-looking people are usually confined to the social stratum from which civil officers and religious men are drawn. It's more than a coincidence that the acknowledged descendants of the Prophet are lighter-skinned and show greater evidence of blondness than the rest of the population. There may perhaps have been a Nordic strain associated with the holy family.
Professor C.S. Coon has also stated that among the people of Morocco, the ordinary city Arabs are little different from their pastoral and agricultural brethren, but this rule does not apply to aristocratic families. These merchant princes are sometimes blond and of Nordic appearance; others of them look like mean aristocrats in Arabia.
Of course, the original Berber tribes were fair-skinned, blond, and ginger Moors. I'm talking about the actual tribes and not the modern Afrocentric influence and global propaganda. Andalusian Berbers around Mount Atlas, especially before Islam, share genetic affinities with the tall, Caucasian mummies of the natives of the Canary Islands, the coast of West Africa, as well as with the Basque people of the Pyrenees in France and Spain.
The term "Berber" comes from "Barbar," a Latin term used to describe bearded Germanic tribes or barbarians. Their society was essentially matriarchal, and they managed to hold their women in high esteem despite being considered barbarians by their Roman conquerors.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, a goddess worshipped under various associations throughout the entire peninsula, including Mecca, was held sacred as part of her cult. The goddesses Al-Uzza, Al-Lat, and Manat formed a triad in pre-Islamic Arabia and were very popular goddesses in Mecca at the time of Muhammad. Sometimes the three were referred to as the daughters of Allah, and one of them had the title of Goddess of the Morning Star, Venus.
Al-Uzza is mentioned by Herodotus as Alilat, whom he identifies with Aphrodite. She is sometimes also equated with Athena and is called the Mother of the Gods or Greatest of All. She is the goddess of springtime and fertility, the earth goddess who brings prosperity.
Mother Goddess is a personification of motherhood, usually equated with the Earth or the natural world, often referred to as Mother Earth or the Earth Mother. The concept complements that of a Sky Father or Father Sky. In Theosophy, the Earth Goddess is called the planetary logos of Earth, sometimes identified with the Triple Goddess which takes the form of Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes.
She is described as Mother Earth, Mother Nature, associated with the full moon and Venus, the Earth, and the sea, sometimes called Gaia. Carl Jung suggested that the archetypal mother was a part of the collective unconscious of all humans and a doorway to the unseen.
The Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines have sometimes been explained as depictions of an Earth Goddess, and in Norse mythology, Frigg or Freyja is described as the wife of the god Odin, and where we get the name for Friday from. Friday is also a day of congregational prayer in Islam, performed just after noon, replacing the second of the usual five daily obligatory prayers.
The sun sets over Friday. On it, Allah created Adam, on it he was made to enter paradise, on it he was expelled from it, and the last hour will take place on no other day than Friday. Historically, however, some imams demanded that Shiites should observe these Friday prayers in an effort to bridge the gap with the Sunnis.
The Kaaba, or the big Muslim cube, is the building at the center of Islam's most important mosque, the Great Mosque of Mecca. The Black Stone of Mecca, or Kaaba Stone, is a Muslim relic that, according to some Islamic traditions, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve and was found by Abraham and his son Ismail. This is the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba, the ancient sacred stone building towards which Muslims pray in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
The stone is a dark rock polished smooth by the hands of millions of pilgrims. It has been broken into a number of fragments cemented into a silver frame in the side of the Kaaba. Often described as a meteorite, many Muslim pilgrims try to kiss it as they circle the Kaaba as part of their yearly ritual of Hajj or holy pilgrimage, trying to emulate the kiss that it received from the Prophet Muhammad.
Some Muslims believe that the stone itself has some supernatural powers and that it fell from the sky during the time of Adam and Eve with the power to cleanse worshippers of their sins by absorbing them into itself. While I personally can't verify if the stone is a meteorite, most anthropologists are aware of the history of stone, and especially meteorite, worship in pre-Islamic Arabia.
That said, the original temple at Mecca contained 360 idols used for ritual worship before the Prophet Muhammad was born, with astro-theological significance. In fact, the Kaaba is accurately aligned to the cycles of the moon, which speaks to its pagan origins.
Pagan implies polytheism, meaning more than one god, and in ancient times, celestial objects such as the moon were venerated as gods or goddesses. The Kaaba is also aligned to the sun at midsummer, as well as to Canopus, a bright star named after a navigator for a king of Sparta. The cube represents Earth in the Pythagorean, Hindu, Egyptian, and Platonic traditions. It's even realized as a sacred symbol today by the Freemasons.
The earliest reference we have to a mother goddess worshipped as a cube-shaped stone is from Neolithic Anatolia. The ideograms for Kubaba in the Hittite alphabet are a cube, a double-headed axe, a dove, a vase, and a gate, all images of the goddess in Neolithic Europe. Kubaba means "hollow vessel" or "cave," which would still be a supreme image of the goddess.
Deities of other cultures known to have been associated with black stones include Aphrodite, Cybele in Rome, Ishtar in Byblos, and the famous Artemis or Diana of Ephesus, whose most ancient sculpture was, and is said to be, carved from a black meteorite. These stone statues were brought out during annual processions where ecstatic rites of her worship were conducted in the streets of the city, which involved dancing, trance states, and entering into altered states of consciousness.
For humans, the most exalted state of love is a union with the beloved, and this ritual practice exists to create that state of divine union for the dervish. The combination of movement and sound has been used in Egypt since the most ancient times. Many of these practices are forms are meditation, and a strong spiritual awareness can be discovered through it. The symbol of the Kaaba stone has a vast cultural and historical influence that unites us all, and it's an image that exists deep within our collective unconscious. It serves as a bridge to help us connect the sacred with the profane, the ancient with the modern, and the celestial with the earthly.