Nazi-acquired Buddha statue came from space

By: Stephanie Pappas

 (LiveScience) It sounds like a mash-up of Indiana Jones’ plots, but German researchers say a heavy    Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite that likely fell 10,000   years ago along the Siberia-Mongolia border.

This space Buddha, also known as “iron man” to the researchers, is of unknown age, though the best estimates date the statue to sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. The carving depicts a man, probably a Buddhist god, perched with his legs tucked in, holding something in his left hand. On his chest is a Buddhist swastika, a symbol of luck that was later co-opted by the Nazi party of Germany.

“One can speculate whether the swastika symbol on the statue was a potential motivation to displace the ‘iron man’ meteorite artifact to Germany,” the researchers wrote online Sept. 14 in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

The Saitic Isis

It is especially fitting that a study of Hermetic symbolism should begin with a discussion of the symbols and attributes of the Saitic Isis. This is the Isis of Sais, famous for the inscription concerning her which appeared on the front of her temple in that city: “I, Isis, am all that has been, that is or shall be; no mortal Man hath ever me unveiled.”

Isis is derived from the Hebrew ישע, Iso, and the Greek ζωω, to save. Some however believe the word to be of Northern extraction, possibly Scandinavian or Gothic. In these languages the name is pronounced Isa, meaning ice, or water in its most passive, crystallized, negative state.

She was known as the goddess with ten thousand appellations and was metamorphosed by Christianity into the Virgin Mary, for Isis, although she gave birth to all living things–chief among them the Sun–still remained a virgin, according to the legendary accounts.

The statues of Isis were decorated with the sun, moon, and stars, and many emblems pertaining to the earth over which Isis was believed to rule and the guardian spirit of Nature personified.