The first task Ptolemy had to accomplish after seizing control was to avoid internal conflicts, assassinations and conspiracies raging in all the other parts of Alexander’s empire. Ptolemy believed that his rule in Egypt would remain peaceful as long as Alexander remained a God. So Ptolemy resolved that the worship of Alexander would be kept intact. He created a death cult that worshipped the god, Serapis and the goddess Isis. Serapis was a fusion of Osiris and Apis. But since Alexandria was a European city the image of the god, Serapis had to be European. So Ptolemy sent his men to the town of Sinope which sat on the southern coast of the Black Sea to steal a huge Grecian statue which Ptolemy identified as the god, Serapis. It was from the town of Sinope that Diogenes came. Alexander had once said that if he had not been Alexander he would have wanted to be Diogenes. And Diogenes the Cynic had said: “Scruple not to perform the deeds of darkness in broad daylight.” Having secured the stolen image, Ptolemy housed the Sinopean statue in a great temple named the Serapion, which became a wonder and the site of pilgrimage for Europeans throughout the Mediterranean world. Ptolemy had the statue declared to be the god, Serapis, by the authority of a hierophant of the Eleusinian Mysteries and an Egyptian priest, Manetho. Serapis was enshrined as the dread god of Hades and his priests, the eunouchos, practiced ritualistic murder and other diabolical practices. And the worship of Serapis, known as the god of the living dead, and Isis became so successful for the Ptolemies that in the 5th century A.D. Macrobius says in his Saturnalia that: “In the city on the borders of Egypt which boasts Alexander of Macedon as its founder, Sarapis (sic) and Isis are worshipped with a reverence that is almost fanactical.” And indeed the pilgrims took this savage worship back to Europe where in the fifteenth century A.D. it found adherents among those opposing Egyptian culture personified by the Ottomans in the wilds of Transylvania.
Empowered by this new religion and protected by their army of castrates, the first three Ptolemies were able to peacefully plunder Egypt without any undo interference from the native Egyptians. But this peaceful interlude was shattered sometime during the reign of Ptolemy IV as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone demonstrates. Because it was then that the Macedonian plunderers learned how to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphics into Greek and as they began to unlock the secrets of the pyramids, the Ptolemies learned of new sources of fabulous wealth. From that time onward, the dynasty had to fight off attempts by Alexander’s other descendants and nobles, the Seleucids of Syria and the Antigonids of Greece, to grab Egypt’s newly found treasures for themselves. Rome also began to covet the wealth of Egypt and began to conspire with the Seleucids and Antigonids against the Ptolemies. No outrage was too great, no sacrilege too unholy for the Ptolemies to keep control. Ptolemy IV, himself, murdered his mother, his brother and his uncle to stay on the throne. In order to withstand these conspiracies, the beleaguered Ptolemies needed the assistance of several Cleopatras.
Ptolemy V married Queen Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus, king of Greece, but to no avail. He was poisoned in 181. Ptolemy VI married Queen Cleopatra II of the noble Seleucid family. His brother Ptolemy VII had him killed and then married his widow. Afterwards Ptolemy VII had Cleopatra II, his brother’s widow killed and he married Cleopatra III, his niece, the daughter of his murdered brother and his murdered wife. Ptolemy VIII ruled jointly with his mother Cleopatra III. But his mother Queen Cleopatra III dethroned him in favor of her younger son Ptolemy IX. After the coup, Ptolemy IX promptly had his mother, Queen Cleopatra III, murdered. Cleopatra IV and Cleopatra V were daughters of Cleopatra III and Ptolemy VII. Ptolemy XI son of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra V had children, Ptolemy XII, Ptolemy XIII, Berenice VI, Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra VI and Queen Cleopatra VII the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Guarded within the royal enclave of Alexandria by eunuchs, both guards and priests, initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries and adherents to the practices of a European death cult with its foundational commitment to racism, all of these Cleopatras were of noble birth and direct descendants of Macedonian families. None of them, least of all Queen Cleopatra VII were black.
It was the historian, J. A. Rogers who made the assertion that Queen Cleopatra was black in his work, World’s Great Men of Color . A scholar who did pioneering research in the area of black history, Rogers is responsible for bringing a sense of pride to black people when whites were depicting African-Americans as ‘sambos’ and ‘coons’. However, in this case, Rogers is wrong. The reason that white scholarship has not been more forceful in disproving his thesis is that they would have to admit to a death cult that still exists and reveal how theories of enclaves and segregation are imposed using religious principles for the purposes of colonization and oppression. It is these principles that can be used to trace European … as well as Islamic … expansion throughout history. In this case Rogers makes a number of errors that leads him to the wrong conclusion. Rogers incorrectly identifies Ptolemy XIII as Queen Cleopatra’s father. This mistake results from his identifying Soter II as Ptolemy XI instead of Ptolemy VIII. In reality, the father of Queen Cleopatra VII is actually Ptolemy XI. Ptolemy XIII who Rogers identifies as Cleopatra’s father is actually her brother. Rogers also states that there are no bonafide portraits of Cleopatra . This may be true in the strictest sense; however, there are plenty of pictures of Queen Cleopatra VII. For me the most striking picture of her is on a coin that she, herself, minted. On one side of the coin is the face of Mark Antony, on the opposite is Cleopatra’s face rendered in a classical Grecian image. The only way it could be argued that Cleopatra VII was black is to say that she deliberately gave herself a European image.
One of the most effective arguments against the notion that Cleopatra was black comes from contemporary sources. When Julius Caesar took Cleopatra back to Rome with him the last Punic War had been concluded less than one hundred years. Romans as well as Italians still remembered how Hannibal, a black man, had ravaged their country and how they avoided total starvation only through the goodwill of Ptolemy who supplied Rome with wheat. Cato was not alone in his opinion that “it was the right way to bring Rome to flourish, when noble-born citizens would not suffer mean-born men and upstarts … to go before them in honor…”. Certainly there would have been some protest against Caesar’s Numidian mistress as she would have been called. But none was raised. Cleopatra was accepted for what she was the Macedonian Queen of Egypt. But her attempt to make Caesar a king ended with his assassination. Certainly, if she had been black, someone would have mentioned it. And again when Plutarch describes Cleopatra’s beauty, he makes no mention of her being black. “Now her beauty (as it is reported) was not so passing, as unmatchable of other women, nor yet such as upon present view did enamor men with her …” .
There is one reference to Cleopatra VII from Plutarch that should be considered. When Octavian and Mark Antony squared off against each other in a war that will decide whether Rome or Egypt will be the center of power of the new European empire, Plutarch reports that Octavian thought little of Mark Antony chances. Caesar, correctly as it turned out, believed that Cleopatra’s domination of Antony would be his undoing despite his superior military force. In ridiculing Mark Anthony, Plutarch says: “And Caesar said furthermore, that Anthony was not master of himself, but Cleopatra has brought him beside himself by her charms and amorous poisons, and [Anthony’s war council is made up of] Mardian the eunuch … and Iras, a woman of Cleopatra’s bed chamber that frizzled [Cleopatra’s] hair and dressed her head …”. But Plutarch explains why Cleopatra needed her hair ‘frizzled’. When they appeared in public, Plutarch describes the dress of Cleopatra’s sons and then that of the queen, herself: “… she brought out Alexander in a long gown after the fashion of the Medes, with a high copped tank hat on his head, narrow in the top, as the kings of the Medes and Armenians do use to wear them; and Ptolemy appeared in a cloak after the Macedonian manner , with slippers on his feet and a broad hat, and old attire of the ancient kings and successors of Alexander the Great. “… Now for Cleopatra, she did not only wear at that time, but at all other times else when she came abroad, the apparel of the goddess Isis, and so gave audience unto all her subjects as a new Isis.” Queen Cleopatra was an initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries and the high priestess of the Ptolemaic death cult dedicated to the god Serapis as depicted by the cynic Diogenes. No black woman could have been initiated into these rites as a high priestess of those mysteries that have been the foundation of white European culture from ancient times to the present
