Fallen stone

"The meteorite has always exerted a powerful influence over the imagination. What child, nay, what adult, has not marvelled under those graceful arcs of fire, so transient, so tantalizing, that are shooting stars? Is it any wonder that with our contemporary sense of the marvellous, the ancients took the shooting star for something even greater? A stone from the roof of the sky, perhaps even a piece of heaven itself?"

--Nigel Witherspoon, The Origins of Mormo Worship in Chaldean Mythology (1932)

Twinkle Twinkle

Witherspoon associates Mormo with a minor Chaldean demigod called Mommo, a great warrior, but human. One day he set out to look for a stone which he had seen fall to earth. He recovered the stone, which is traditionally said to have originated from Sirius, and acquired great powers. He made of himself a king, so arrogant as to challenge the very gods. As powerful as he had become, however, he was no match for them; he was banished by Enlil and forced to roam the planet forever. To protect himself and the other gods, Enlil then hid the fallen stone inside the head of another wandering immortal. In his bitter state of earthbound immortality, Mommu sent his followers in search of the stone; when they found a likely candidate for the living hiding place, they naturally cut the person's head off to look inside for the stone. Witherspoon claims that Mormo, then, is merely Mommo by another name, and that the sacrifices associated with the former are the result of a misreading by Ankaran worshippers of Mommo's purpose: they knew nothing of a fallen stone but believed their god was demanding sacrifice to augment his power and satiate his thirst for death, as in the Mormo Death Cycle.

Witherspoon's theory, although far from widely accepted, still inspires provocative questions. An entire sub-genre of occult literature has grown up around his rather modest and rigorously scholarly book which has unfortunately caused many to look upon Witherspoon as some sort of crank who merits no attention whatsoever. But this is unfair to the mild-mannered professor, who in no way intended to posit what many have sought to ascribe to his writings.

That which was lost

One of Witherspoon's "wild step-children" is self-styled "investigative mythologist" William Henry, whose article "Shock ‘n Awe: We Will Rock You" (21 March 2003) contains quite a bit of clever word play linking the current war in Iraq with ancient Babylonian mythology.

As Henry points out, it is widely believed that during the period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian exile, Chaldean mythology had a great influence on the development of the mysticism found in the Kabbala. Starting with "Shock and Awe," the phrase used by the US military to describe the first phase of its Iraq invasion, Henry sees a reference to the Kabbalistic name of the feminine presence of God: "Shakina," who was exiled after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. In her exile, she has variously been referred to as "the Widow" the "Stone of Exile" and the "Precious Stone." Arguably, her return from exile will precipitate the reconstruction of the Temple, which--according to the fundamentalist Christians George Bush associates himself with--is necessary before the Christ can make his encore performance.

According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor (6 August 2003), Iraqi folklore credited Saddam Hussein's occult powers to a "magic stone" he wore around his neck. What if the whole point of the Iraq war was to recover that stone? Shakina, the Precious Stone, was associated with the Ark of the Covenant, which makes any army who bears it invincible. Henry also points out that another element of the Shock and Awe campaign were the much-vaunted "decapitation strikes."

In Grail Romances, Percival is almost always, despite all other differences among their various authors, called the "Son of the Widow Lady." In Wolfram Von Eschenbach's version, the Templars are the Grail guardians, which is a stone called "lapsit exillis." This is bastard Latin which can be interpreted as "stone fallen from heaven."

Freemasons are also referred to as "Widow's Sons," and a lost stone plays an important part in their mythology. A lost keystone, for example, is the whole point of the highest degree of the Royal Arch. Hiram Ibiff, the Fremason's martyred hero, is finally killed by a wound to the head.

Decapitated heads are often associated with the grail legends as well as the Templars. The Templars were said to worship before heads and to hold something which guaranteed fertility and protection, much as decapitated heads have figured in Celtic and Welsh mythology (one of Shakina's places of exile is rumored to be Ireland). This could be the Grail or the Ark, both of which were said to hold these powers.

Still Crazy After All These Years

It seems as that with all these references, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, an exiled widow, a fallen stone and a decapitated head are one and the same. It is no wonder that much has been made of Witherspoon's theory. If Mommo went arount cutting off heads in order to "get his groove back," the Gnomic, Mormo-infested US government would do the same. Plastic Tub believes that if true, the US didn't find what they were looking for when they pulled a gaunt Saddam Hussein from his hole in the ground. Decapitations are still in fashion all over the place as so-called "insurgents," most likely CIA operatives hunting for the fallen stone, make their gruesome home movies in a rather clumsy revelation of their search.

"I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary confinement, was spending his time writing poetry, reading the Koran, eating cookies and muffins, and taking care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he had placed a circle of white stones around a small plum tree."

Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard about Iraq (2005)

See Also

• Desert Shield II
• Opened Head
• Ritual Murder

The Holiest Mosque of Islam contains the Kaba, a fallen stone.

Desiderata