Some further thoughts on the Mother of Harlots:

The sculptor of the idol on Liberty Island, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, called his creation “La Liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World)”. During the period he was crafting it, the other famous French sculptor of the day, François-Auguste-René Rodin, was working on a sculpture named “The Gates of Hell” (shown below). The Rodin museum told me that Bartholdi and Rodin never worked together, but if the “Statue of Liberty’s” torch does indeed represent Demeter peering into the Gate of Hell looking for her daughter Persephone the two sculptures make an interesting contemporaneous pair. Maybe someday Rodin’s sculpture can replace the doors currently on the sally port of Fort Wood to complete the symbolism of Bartholdi’s idol.

The idol on Liberty Island was intended for the centennial of the United States in 1876 but was not ready until ten years later. The big news at the centennial celebration was the death of George Armstrong Custer and members of the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) a few days earlier. The forty shields at the top of the pedestal on which the idol is mounted represent the forty states in existence when the idol was dedicated. The statehood of the final two, North and South Dakota, was made possible because Custer had led the geological expedition which found gold in the Black Hills. The subsequent violations of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 started the chain of events which led directly to Custer’s death.

I am struck by the similarity between the following three phrases:

• Liberty Enlightening the World (Bartholdi’s name for the idol),
• I lift my lamp beside the golden door (final line of Emma Lazarus’s sonnet),
• Konx Ompax, translated variously as “light in extension”, “light rushing out in one ray”, “light is strength”, or “attainment of the star” (a phrase from the Great Eleusinian Mysteries and the ceremonies of other secret societies).

If the golden door to which Lazarus refers is Rodin’s Gate of Hell, then symbolically the light with which the idol is “enlightening the world” is the burning fires of hell.

America’s first great Crusade in Europe (World War II) began with the successful invasion of North Africa known as “Operation Torch”. Symbolically, that invasion which brought the “torch of liberty” to Africa and Europe began on November 8, 1942 (a date on which the Gate of Hell was open). General Eisenhower’s chief of Staff during the invasion was Walter Bedell Smith. Smith was born on October 5, 1895, another date on which the Gate of Hell was open. He went on to become one of the early directors of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Whose light are we bringing into the world: that of Lucifer or that of Jesus Christ? Turn on your TV, surf through the channels, and the answer to this question should be painfully obvious.