Journey through the Kur.

By all accounts The Kur is dead; its body covered in a mountain of stones holding back the waters of the flood.

All I know is that here the compass spins around in a dissolute kind of way. North/South/East and West have no meaning on the disc of the black sun of Saturn.

The next location is the pillars that guard The Temple originally at the sea palace of King Hiram of Tyre; found on card 2 of the tarot, within the lodges of the Freemasons, as the entrance to the temple of Solomon.

King Hiram seems to have made a conscious effort to manipulate the archetype embodied in the Phoenician gods, so that he himself appeared to be a flesh and blood incarnation or extension of them. His throne sat before large windows opening upon the sea and crashing waves. Visitors to his palace may well have thought they'd entered the domain of Poseidon (or Enki) himself.

What I love most in this story is the description of one pillar as made of emerald, possibly green glass containing flame:

Solomon's famous Temple, built by Hiram, is so well-known for its pillars of Jachin and Boaz (representing creative force and destructive force, respectively) that one would assume that it was wholly unique. In fact, it was patterned on three temples that existed on Tyre: one for Baal, one for Asarte, and one for Melqart. All three had the duel pillars of Jachin and Boaz. This lead one author, Gerhard Herm, to conclude that the Jachin/Boaz concept central to the qaballah was of purely Phoenician origin, and had no "connection to any part of Jewish liturgy." Similar pillars were found at the Temple of Baal on Cyprus, and in Samaria, Megiddo, and Hazor. The descriptions of such pillars are invariably identical: Jachin is covered with gold and Boaz is covered with some emerald-colored material. Such descriptions also mention that the emerald pillar "shone brightly at night." This bizarre-seeming observation has lead to the speculation that the emerald pillar may have been constructed out of some kind of green glass tube in which there was a flame.
Reference.

Green glass reminds me of the tektite, moldavite sometimes called an "extraterrestrial gemstone" though there are theories about it being pulled from the moon, my favored theory is that moldavite is glass made from the heat of a meteor impact...which leads on into fire and 'the burning man'.

You can translate burning as radical self expression and self-reliance, or look for the older antecedents of this image, back down the years to Hercules.

In contemporary mythology Hercules is Melqert/Nergal. Red (Mars) blind with rage, a Lord of the underworld, consort to Ereshkigal, bringer of plague and pestilence. To put Him on is to get 'The Berserker' to burn from the inside out.

Reminding me of Cuchulain (Culian's hound- named thus because he killed the great hound of Culain) who was finally driven mad by visions of flame and murder.

Cuculain was famous for his battle-frenzy:

First he quivered all over, and then his body began to twist backwards. His knees and shins shifted themselves to the back, as did the frontal sinews of his neck, where they protruded out like lumps. One eye receded back into his head, and the other bulged out upon his cheek. His mouth widened until it met his ears, and sparks flew out of it. His heart pounded as loud as a great metal drum, and his locks stood up on end, with a spark of flame at the end of every hair. A great horn jutted out of his forehead, and a vast spurt of black blood jetted up from his skull, where it spread out like a cloud of dark gloom over the battlefield.

Back to Hercules-Melqert-Nergal:

When Nergal disappears by setting with the setting sun, he can be absent for many months because Mars can be travelling at the same speed as the sun and thus slow to get away from its light. However, if he sets with the rising sun, he is absent for just a few days before we begin to see him rising just after sunset.

The connection of Saturn and Mars as represented by the two pillars keeps reoccurring. It is a shame that to travel through the pillars without invitation is, if I read the image correctly, to enter death.

The great city of the underworld is Cuthah which had an earthly counter part called unsurprisingly Cuthah.

The Sumerian name was Gudua 'Entrance to the nether world' it is here that Nergal's temple was to be found (in the real world of what is now Tell Ibrahim (not the one in Egypt, though!).

Gudea your quay is a low quay which bestows water, your interior is artfully built, your mace is a ... mace released from heaven, your platform is a lustrous platform spreading over Mešlam (the name of the temple was Mešlam -Nergal was called Meslamtaea, "the one that rises up from Meslam". Your prince, the mighty god, the sovereign of Mešlam, the fierce god of the underworld, the sovereign of Ud-šuš (Sunset), Nergal, Mešlamta-ea, has erected a house in your precinct, and taken his seat upon your dais.

The two pillars refer to an Egyptian symbol called Djew ('Primordial mountain'). The eastern mountain (not a tower, as in the Crowley card) was called Bakhu, the Western mountain was Manu. The way was guarded by two lions protectors of the the sun as it rose and set each day.

The peaks supported the sky, and the symbol, like the Kur, represented heap, a massive, powerful thing.

The Egyptian necropolis was typically located in the mountainous desert and so the djew was also closely associated with the concepts of the tomb and of the afterlife.

But what is beyond the pillars?