St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery
You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.
Wendell Berry
One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.
Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.
My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.
The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.
I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.
‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?
Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.
Rather like Christianity, in fact.
In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.
This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:
Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.
Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?
More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.
But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:
If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?
I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.
Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.
And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:
Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.
What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.
Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.
St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.
Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.
Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.
Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.
There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.
What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.
Damn, activism was so much easier.
Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.
Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.
What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.
More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:
Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.
Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:
Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.
Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.
This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.
I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.
Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.
Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.
Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.
Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.
We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.
Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.
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Zionism is the state ideology of Israel. Why do Jews believe they are the chosen people? What is the significance of the Jewish diaspora as a Jewish tradition? Why is Zionism, on one hand, a continuation of Judaism and, on the other, its refutation?
Like any religion, Judaism has many dimensions. Speaking about it simplistically, either in praise or condemnation, is primitive.
Judaism is tied to the belief that Jews are the chosen people (primarily in a religious sense). Their goal is to await the Messiah, who will be the King of Israel. Thus, their religion is associated with the anticipation of the Messiah.
According to Judaism, at the beginning of the first millennium, Jews went into the diaspora. The Second Temple was destroyed, marking the start of a two-thousand-year history of their dispersion. This era is part of the Jewish tradition. The purpose is to atone for Israel’s sins accumulated during previous historical periods. If this atonement is genuine and the repentance profound, then according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will appear, signifying the blessing of the chosen people. In this case, the return of Jews to Israel, the establishment of an independent statehood, and the creation of the Third Temple will ensue.
This is the structure of the Jewish culture of anticipation. The most consistent representatives of this approach are the fundamentalists from the Neturei Karta movement. They say that the Jewish God commanded to endure the hardships of exile, so one must wait for the end and atone for sins. And when the Messiah comes, one can return to the Promised Land.
Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations.
How did it happen that the state has already been established and prohibitions have been violated? To understand why modern Israel is in complete contradiction with the Jewish religion, one needs to go back to the seventeenth century, to the era of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbtai Tzvi, the herald of Zionism. He claimed he was the Messiah, and therefore Jews could return to Israel. The fate of Shabbtai Tzvi is sorrowful. When he arrived at the Ottoman sultan with claims to Palestine, he was given a choice: either be beheaded or convert to Islam. Then something strange happened: Shabbtai Tzvi converted to Islam. At that time, this was a major disappointment for Jewish communities.
However, followers of Shabbtai Tzvi (Sabbateanism) appeared – especially his teachings spread among Ashkenazi and Eastern European Jews. The Hasidic movement developed in parallel, which had no eschatological or messianic orientation but disseminated Kabbalistic teachings among ordinary people.
In some Sabbatean sects (particularly among the Frankists in Poland), a theology arose: supposedly, Shabbtai Tzvi was the real Messiah and made the transition to Islam deliberately; thus, he committed a ‘sacred betrayal’ (he betrayed Judaism to hasten the coming of the Messiah).
By such logic, one can easily convert to other religions. Jacob Frank, for instance, first converted to Islam, then to Catholicism, arguing that Jews consume Christian infants. He completely violated all forms of Talmudism and betrayed his faith – but Frank’s secret doctrine suggested that after the seventeenth century, the very notion of the Messiah changed. Now, the Jews themselves became the Messiah – there is no need to wait for him, so even if you betray your religion, you are holy – you are God.
Thus, an intellectual environment for Zionism was created. Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations. If in Judaism one must await the coming of the Messiah, then in Zionism, a Jew is already God. This is followed by violations of the Talmudic commandments.
This leads to specific relations between Zionism and Judaism. On the one hand, Zionism is a continuation of Judaism; on the other, it is its refutation. Zionists say there is nothing left to repent for; they have suffered enough, and they are God.
This explains the peculiarity of the modern Zionist state, which relies not just on Israel but also on secular Jews, Jewish liberals, Jewish communists, Jewish capitalists, Jewish Christians, Jewish Muslims, Jewish Hindus, etc., all of whom represent the network of Frankism – each of them can comfortably commit a sacred betrayal, build a state, assert global dominance, and establish a ban on criticising Zionism (in some American states, criticising the state of Israel is equated to anti-Semitism).
The only step left for them is to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and begin the construction of the Third Temple. Incidentally, funds for the investigation of the Temple Mount have already been allocated by the Knesset – everything is moving in this direction.
How can one quell a conflict with such deep metaphysical roots through appeals to the UN, with phrases like ‘let’s reconcile’ or ‘let’s observe human rights’? In the Palestinian conflict, they have long disregarded these human rights. Moreover, we hear increasingly absurd statements from them – for instance, accusing people of anti-Semitism who are actually defending the Semitic Palestinians.
If we step beyond the hypnosis, the fog of nonsense, and the postmodernist defragmentation of consciousness, we shall see a very intriguing and terrifying picture of what is happening in the Middle East.
More than 500 Jewish activists were arrested in the US for taking over one of the Capitol buildings. This was announced by the organisation “Jewish Voice for Peace” - initiator of the protest in the American capital, which made a lot of noise last week.
On 18 October, activists protesting against the bombing of Gaza stormed the Cannon Building, the oldest US Congress building. They were dressed in T-shirts that read “Not in our name”. Many of them wore Jewish religious attributes: talits, kippahs and tefillin - boxes with Torah texts tied to their foreheads and hands.
Formally, the seizure of a Congress building and the protest march of 10,000 people had a secular basis. The protest was against the oppression of Palestine. But it was Jews who were protesting. It would seem that it was only leftists.
Leftists all over the world have traditionally supported Palestine. “Jewish Voice of the World” is an organisation that makes no secret of its “left-wing” political orientation, with philosopher Noam Chomsky among its founders. Why shouldn’t Jewish socialists and internationalists support an oppressed people?
But these left-wing Jews wear the kippah, the organization is based on the principle of Jewish ethnicity and has a board of directors composed of rabbis, most of whom are interested or involved in Kabbalah. So, it is a bit more complicated than that.
However, there is a Kabbalistic code phrase that explains what it is all about: “tikkun olam” - “collection of the world”.
These two words have become a kind of watchword for left-wing pro-Palestinian American Jewry. They also explain the deep foundations of Zionism, against which the Jewish Voice of the World protests. And they are also what many of the Orthodox Jews who, like their left-wing brethren, do not accept the State of Israel turn to.
Light gatherers
In the mid-16th century, the Kabbalist Isaac Luria developed an original metaphysical concept.
In it, the creation of the world was explained by the “compression” of God. In the resulting vacuum, the “vessels” of the ten Kabbalistic sefirot are formed and filled with divine light. However, the vessels cannot withstand the light and break. Light pours into the divinely forsaken world of the “shells”.
To gather the light, the Shechina, the divine presence, i.e. the Jewish people, is sent into this world of demonic entities and nations (goyim). His task from now on is to gather the light and restore the world to its pristine paradisiacal state - “tikkun olam”.
Then the end of the world will come, the Shechina will return to its place (sefira Malkut – “Kingdom”) and the promised king to Israel, the Mashiach, will arrive.
Thus, in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria the expulsion of the Jewish people from Palestine receives a new and elevated significance. The Jews are expelled from their home not only to repent before God, as the Talmud said, and passively await the messiah. They are called to gather the divine light dispersed in the world. It was worth waiting and enduring.
Some, however, could not wait.
In the second half of the 17th century, a Jew from Izmir, Shbtai Zvai, declared himself Mashiach and led a movement of thousands of Jews in the Levant and Europe. Shabtai Zvi promised that the Turkish sultan would give him Palestine, from where he, the Mashiach, would rule the world. Instead of Palestine, Zvi was sent to prison, after which he converted to Islam under threat of death. Shabtai was not the first Jewish false Messiah, but his actions were the first to be justified in the light of the Lurianic Kabbalah.
According to the Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, Shabtai Zvi committed a “holy sin” and decided to descend into hell to become the king of demons and collect the divine light from the depths of creation. “Tikkun olam”.
Other followers of the false Messiah believed that the actions of Shabtai Zvi should be repeated.
The light should be gathered among Muslims and Christians, go to them, while committing the “holy sin”, so that then with its holiness (and a Jew is always holy) and the fullness of the light gathered to destroy kingdoms and faiths and bring about the coming of Mashiach.
This was the opinion, for example, of Jacob Frank, a representative of the European branch of Sabbatism, who in 1759 converted to Catholicism in the Austrian city of Lemberg. The newly-baptised man later declared: “I came to Poland to destroy all religions, all laws”.
As the famous researcher of Jewish tradition Gershom Sholem shows, the Frankists went from words to deeds rather quickly: they took an active part in revolutionary events in Europe and also influenced the Jewish Enlightenment - Haskalah and the formation of Liberal Judaism - Reform.
Two tendencies manifested themselves vividly in Sabbatism. The first is the justification of descent to the underworld, to the “goyim”, to gather light (mystical power, knowledge, values), to restore the world to its heavenly proportions, to build paradise on earth. The second is the idea that if the Mashiach does not come, the Jews themselves must become the Mashiach or prepare a place for him, the wait for the messiah can be active.
The Jewish mystics who founded the religious movement of Chassidism in the first half of the 18th century in Podolia took a different path.
For them too Isaac Luria was an authority, but they understood the gathering of divine light differently, as an inner, mystical process in which the figure of a spiritual master and at the same time the pole of divine presence in the world - the tzadik - plays a special role.
The “Tikkun olam” in religious Zionism
In the 20th century, the concept of “tikkun olam” - “restoration of peace” - moved from Kabbalah to politics in an open form.
First and foremost, Zionism.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate of Israel in the 1920s, stated that the restoration of the Jewish state was for the purpose of “tikkun olam”.
Rebbe Kook interpreted the Lurianic Kabbalah in this way: the essence of Judaism is the dialogue between man and God that stems from Jewish monotheism. This dialogue takes place on two levels: the level of the individual and the level of the nation. Judaism developed the idea of dialogue between God and the people before the destruction of the Second Temple. Christianity and Islam developed the idea of dialogue between man and God. The sparks of the Jewish light - monotheism - were scattered throughout humanity and Jews were scattered throughout the world.
The creation of the State of Israel is the gathering of these sparks and the restoration, the healing of the world - “tikkun olam” - first at the level of restoring the full dialogue of the people of Israel with God, with the State and with the Temple, and then at the level of gathering the other nations around Israel.
After that, according to the logic of Jewish doctrine, the end of the world should come.
The most radical branches of religious Zionism today are the organizations that advocate the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans 2000 years ago. They believe that the Temple is necessary for a complete dialogue between Israel and God.
The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosques, venerated by Muslims, stand on this site today. They must therefore be demolished. And to begin with, to clear the site of filth.
For this purpose, it is necessary to sacrifice “a red heifer without blemish, [and] on which there was no yoke” (Book of Numbers 1-10). Heifers have already been bred with the help of radical American Protestants from Nebraska and Texas. They believe that they will bring about the end of the world, when Muslims, Jews and Russians will fight in the Holy Land and Americans will ascend into heaven (Rapture).
The “restoration of the world” on the left
The “tikkun olam” has been interpreted differently by liberal Jews in America.
During the Second World War, Jewish educator Alexander Dushkin identified the idea with “social service” and the promotion of the ideals of democracy. The “Tikkun olam”, he said, placed the Jew “as a child of God and a partner of the Almighty” before the ongoing task of reordering the world.
In 1949, the representative of American liberal Judaism, Rebbe Abraham Feldman, defined it even more definitively: “the establishment of the kingdom of God”, “social justice, the reign of God on earth”.
According to Rebbe Feldman, God”s reign on earth was facilitated by the establishment of Israel.
But the more radical “enlightened” Jews disagreed with him. In the 1980s, representatives of the left-wing Jewish movement in the United States founded the New Jewish Agenda, whose platform stated: “We are Jews who firmly believe that authentic Judaism can only be complete with serious and consistent attention to tikkun olam (the right ordering of human relations and the physical-spiritual world).
The right ordering of human relations requires the establishment of a Palestinian state, the protection of the environment, the defense of the rights of sexual minorities, etc. One of the most influential representatives of this current is Rabbi Michael Lerner, close to the US Democratic Party, who publishes the magazine Tikkun.
Both left-wing liberals and religious Zionists, although at odds with each other, have much in common. They believe, as the Sabbatians once did, that the expectation of Mashiach must be active, that the Jewish people themselves must transform the world - in fact, act as a collective Mashiach, to make “tikkun olam”.
The main disagreement is only about what counts as divine light and where to gather it - among Jews alone or among all nations, and what the messiah’s kingdom will be - a global left-liberal kingdom of “justice” or a Jewish nation-state that will arise among other nations.
The orthodox answer
Among Jewish believers, however, there are those who are convinced that both are in a hurry.
These tend to be the ultra-Orthodox Jews. Technically, they are now in the same ranks protesting against Israel as the liberals. However, their reasons are different.
For example, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization Naturei Karta (Guardians of the City) opposes Israel as such, whether it is “fair” to the Palestinians or not. There should be no Israel, because the Zionists have committed the same sin as the heretic Shabtai Zvi: the sin of pride and self-righteousness, equating themselves with God, deciding that it is possible to return to the Holy Land before the coming of Mashiach, to “hasten God”.
But it is not Mashiach that will come to these people, but the wrath of God.
According to the leaders of “Naturei Karta”, the Zionists have violated three Talmudic commandments: not to rebel against the peoples of the world, not to approach the end of the world and, finally, not to return together to the Land of Israel.
Another religious community, much more numerous than the “Naturei Karta”, although less often mentioned, the Satmar Hasidim (named after the city of Satu Mare, in present-day Romania), hold similar views. They number over 100,000 and are the largest Chassidic community in the world. By comparison, the most famous, the Lubavitch chassidim, number 20,000.
The Satmar Hasidim live mainly in the United States and are engaged in the diamond trade. And this largest and richest community in Chassidism considers the State of Israel illegal.
At the beginning of the last century, the founder of the community, Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, ruled that the Zionists were violating the commandments of the Talmud by rebelling against non-Jewish authorities and trying to conquer the land of Israel by force. Therefore, the Satmar, even when living in Israel, refuse to deal with this state. For example, they do not take the shekels into their hands. And the most radical are sure that only the destruction of Israel will pave the way for the true Mashiach,
Even for this part of the Jewish people, Lurianic Kabbalah and “tikkun olam” are important, but as inner work, not as politics. However, Isaac Luria taught that until all the sparks of divine light are brought together, Mashiach will not come.
***
The protests of part of the Jewish community against Israel’s policies and even against Israel’s existence as such demonstrate that there is no monolithic “world Jewry”, regardless of what anti-Semites may think.
The divergence is not just at the level of specific policies, but of metaphysics, of the very meaning of the Jewish people’s existence.
All are certain that they have a special mission in this world, somehow linked to the idea of the fulfilment of world history and the establishment of a special messianic era, but there is no agreement on what exactly this mission should express, where and how to look for the lost light of the Sfirot.
In such a rift, paradoxically, lies the strength of the Jewish people.
One hundred years ago, the stars of world geopolitics aligned in such a way that, thanks to the support of first the British and then the American empire, a group of Jews - the Zionists - rose to prominence.
However, even if Israel disappears from the world map with the decline of the United States, the Jews will remain. Moreover, many of them, some with a hat and a lapserdak and others with a hippie yarmulke and a rainbow flag, will say with satisfaction, “Well, we warned you!”
When a fictional world becomes sufficiently complex and sketched out, you can typically start to recognize almost all of the basic concepts of a philosophy within it. Someone has already explained this for Taoist concepts with Winnie the Pooh.
I like Spongebob Squarepants, it’s lighthearted and you can see some important principles illustrated too if you look carefully enough. I hope to write a series of articles in which I explore these from a Dharmic angle. To start with, you must ask yourself what the three main characters, Spongebob, Patrick and Squidward, personify.
If you look carefully, you can see, they illustrate the three Gunas, the three qualities that permeate all life. Everything is made up of Rajas, Sattva and Tamas. Rajas is becoming, Sattva is being, Tamas is ceasing to be.
Food similarly can be fitted into one of these categories. I have been over this before, but just to give some examples again, spicy foods will be Rajasic, they stimulate the senses. Sattvic foods are things like most fruit and vegetables, they provide clarity of mind. Tamasic foods sedate, they insulate us from understanding how things really are.
And you can see these same three principles illustrated in the deities of the Trimurti. Brahma is the creator. He is not really worshipped. Then comes Vishnu, the sustainer. Finally comes Shiva, the destroyer. Most Hindus primarily worship either Vishnu or one of his avatars, or Shiva.
Now I want you to take a look at Spongebob, Squidward and Patrick. Can you see, who illustrates which of the three gunas? It’s easy.
Spongebob is Rajasic in nature. He is young, adventurous, still full of plans, desires and ambitions. He starts out looking to get a job, he wants to get his driver’s license and he wants to get a girlfriend (Sandy). He doesn’t yet know how the world works, so in all his endeavors he depends on Squidward and Patrick. Squidward and Patrick are ultimately much more mature and they have chosen two of the spiritual paths that people most commonly take.
Because Spongebob is still young and full of desire, he has not yet had to find a spiritual path. Spongebob is bad at everything he does: He can’t lift weights, he can’t drive a car, he can’t think of a better joke than ripping his pants, he plays the Bassinet, but happens to be terrible at it. But because he is young and full of Rajasic energy, his lack of talents and skills does not harm his self-esteem.
Children have to be Rajasic. Parents generally don’t like this. They tend to wish their child was more like Squidward. But if you take away the Rajasic element from a child, the child will burn out. It’s easy to extinguish the flame, by drowning the child in your own desires. Many parents in our age are guilty of this.
Squidward is Sattvic. Squidward knows exactly how the world functions, which is why he is so disappointed and miserable. How Squidward deals with this reality, is by attempting to follow what Krishna, avatar of Vishnu recommends to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: To go through the motions, to perform his duties, without attachment.
He works at the Krusty Krab, he hates it, but he tries to the best of his ability to accept the hand that life has dealt him. He is a Vaishnavist. The Vaishnavists encourage the life of a householder, that of the nuclear family. Squidward tries to preserve the things he values. Hence he lives in an Easter Island head, he orients his mind towards his ancestors. He values the classical arts, although, like Spongebob, he has no innate talents for them. In contrast to Spongebob, Squidward has developed self-awareness with maturity. But this self-awareness, is also what limits him. Often he imagines things to be impossible, that Spongebob and Patrick proceed to go on doing.
You can understand the philosophy of Squidward, through one sentence from the episode Slimy Dancing:
“SpongeBob, dancing isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be ART. And art is suffering!”
Squidward aims to teach Spongebob to prepare for a life of duty.
Finally, there is Patrick. Patrick is in the process of forgetting, of extinguishing. Unlike Spongebob and Squidward, he has no job. He is a Shaivist: He follows the path of Shiva, the destroyer. He is a renunciate.
Patrick makes no attempts to preserve any tradition he inherited. He has the least fancy of the three houses, being content living underneath a rock. The Shaivists are the most ascetic among the main Hindu traditions. Because he is in the process of forgetting, of renouncing the world, he is easily fooled. As an example, Squidward can fool him into thinking Spongebob does not want to be his friend. By indulging in Tamasic foods, he has gained a lot of weight.
To understand Patrick’s philosophy, think of this sentence:
“Dumb people are just blissfully unaware of how dumb they are.”
Now the most interesting thing, is to look at how the three interact. When Spongebob and Patrick come together there is happiness, but nothing productive is achieved. They go jellyfishing, or they go out and eat icecream. In contrast, when the energy and enthusiasm of Spongebob is combined with the realism and understanding of Squidward, work can be done. Things can be created, based on a tradition that predates Spongebob’s arrival, like a Krabby Patty. It is through the interaction between Spongebob and Squidward, that the world can be sustained.
On the rare occasions Squidward and Patrick interact, there is typically just destruction and chaos. Take the previously mentioned example, of Squidward fooling Patrick into thinking he’s not his friend. Or, consider what happens when Patrick answers the phone, which is normally Squidward’s job: “Is this the Krusty Krab?” “No, this is Patrick.” They lose the customer.
This happens because Patrick and Squidward ultimately represent conflicting but complementary traditions. The world can’t exist without Patrick, because the life of Squidward in isolation is one of suffering. It is to be aware at all times, of all the limitations. He knows he has a shit job. He knows he can’t properly play the clarinet. He knows he has no wife.
The world can not exist without Squidward either, because Patrick alone, would plunge the world into darkness, decay, ignorance, nihilism, chaos and destruction. There would be no Krusty Krab. There would be no Krabby Patty. Patrick is the man who solves the problem of there being too much in life. But Patrick without Squidward, means there would eventually be nothing.
So the question you’ll find yourself faced with is: Alright, we have Squidward who worships Vishnu. We have Patrick who worships Shiva. So who worships Brahma? Spongebob? And that’s the thing that makes Hindu philosophy so different from the Western philosophical tradition. Although Shaivists have the tendency to ascribe qualities of creation and sustaining of everything to Shiva, the creator of the Trimurti, Brahma, isn’t really worshipped.
In most Abrahamic traditions, we’re enthusiastic about the creation of the world. But like Gnostic Christians, the Dharmic religions are much more ambivalent about its creation. Brahma generally just isn’t worshipped much, he has a handful of temples, but there exists no specific tradition devoted to him. And the reason for that may tie into the fact that the Dharmic religions see incarnation as self-evident.
In contrast to the Christian tradition, in which we are promised eternal life after death, you don’t have to accomplish anything in the Dharmic religions to live forever. Die and you will simply become another living being. It is escaping the creation, that is a challenge. So why worship the creator?
If you want the equivalent of a Brahma worshipper in Spongebob Squarepants, the closest thing would be the relationship between Spongebob and Mr. Krabs. Mr. Krabs created the Krusty Krab. He created the Krabby Patty. How he accomplished it is a secret that must be kept safe at all cost from the invisible demon (Plankton).
But he is not a character worthy of worship. And Squidward knows this. His relationship is one of reluctant subservience. Patrick presumably knows it too. It’s Spongebob, who is still young, naive and keen to dance to the tunes of Mr. Krabs.
And the trick as a viewer, is to balance the three gunas. You can be like Squidward, you can develop full awareness. And you should strive for awareness, the Sattva guna is held in highest regard. But with full awareness comes suffering, unless you can imbibe yourself with the naive energetic enthusiasm of the sponge, or can sedate yourself like the starfish who lives under a rock.
You may think to yourself: “How can Squidward be held in high regard? He’s mean and cynical.” But ultimately, all the three characters are flawed beings, who are in themselves good. Patrick is useless and stupid, but he means well. Spongebob is destructive and incompetent, but wants to do good. And Squidward is cynical and disillusioned. But whenever someone genuinely mistreats Spongebob, like the man who ordered a pizza and then complained about not receiving a drink, Squidward intervenes on his behalf.
Squidward only looks like the bad guy of the three, because he was given the heaviest weight to carry in life. And in carrying this burden, he is actually the most noble. The souls of the three characters are ultimately pure and unblemished. The challenges life casts upon them are just so severe it makes them look like flawed beings. Mr. Krabs is more explicitly morally flawed, his soul is tainted by greed.
Then finally, we have to consider that all three characters, Squidward above all, are losers. They have all achieved just a shadow of what a human being can achieve. Patrick just does nothing all day. Squidward works at a fast food restaurant he hates. And Spongebob fails at just about everything he attempts.
Why is that? Well fundamentally, they’re born into a flawed world. It is a world that puts good people at the bottom, literally and metaphorically. They live at the mercy of the human Gods high above, who can fish them out of the ocean at any moment, or annihilate Bikini Bottom with nuclear weapons. In this world the powerful are evil, the powerless are good.
This ties into another concept I hope to elaborate upon in a future article, the dark era that these three noble men found themselves born into: The Kali Yuga.
Antiochus I had the temple site at Nemrut Dag constructed on the anniversary of his coronation as king. But what else did he have in mind besides a celebration of his greatness? Perhaps there is a deeper mystery here – one handed down through the ages, hidden in plain sight, and one to which most of mankind is not privy.
Commagene – A Confluence of Persian, Babylonian and Macedonian Traditions
The Kingdom of Commagene was a Greco-Persian state which resided along the headwaters of the Euphrates River in modern-day Turkey, both during and before the times of the early Roman Empire. By 60 BCE
Commagene had been a Greek vassal state since the collapse of The Neo-Assyrian Empire about 609 BCE
and the rise of the Seleucid Empire around 312 BCE
.1 2 Although the Seleuicid Empire was regarded as a Hellenistic State, it ruled under its own authority and controlled much of the former lands spanning Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Indus River region.3 After the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE
, Commagene transferred authority to reside under the Roman Empire.4 Nonetheless, the Kingdom maintained its autonomy as a culture descended from the Uartu (Ararat) peoples of the Old Assyrian Empire (2600 BCE
– 609 BCE
), which included Sumer, Persia (Parthian Empire in the lower right quadrant of the map above), the Akkadian Empire, and Babylon. Its most ancient roots formed from the city-state of Ur, circa 3800 BCE
. Commagene was situated in a sub-region of modern Turkey called Anatolia, a name which is derived from the Greek term ἀνατολῇ (anatolē), meaning ‘the East’.5 6
Nemrut Dağ
Located inside the eastern extent of the ancient state of Commagene is a tall mountain called by various names, including Nemrut Dag (which I will use herein). ‘Nemrut Dağ’ (Mount Nemrut/Nemrud), at 7000 ft is one of the highest peaks in the east of the Taurus Mountains (which range east through Cilicia on the map above). It maintains one of the best views of the eastern sky in the entire region. The mountain is located in modern day Turkey (see Exhibit 1 below), about 85 km directly north of another UNESCO World Heritage Site and site of the World’s first temple, Göbekli Tepe.7 8
Exhibit 1 – The Four Rivers Region – Nemrut Dag shown in relation to other geographic features of the ancient lore of the Levant and Fertile Crescent (the cradle of civilization as well as farming/animal domestication). As well, the image shows the birthplace of the Aramaic-speaking peoples called the Arameans. Paddan Aram – Field of (Aram) the Arameans (Aramaic-speaking common people of Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel). This group included the Biblical Abraham, his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot.
Antiochus I Theos Epiphanes of Commagene
Basileus Megas was the title of the great king and inheritor of the sole rule handed down from the Seleucid Empire. Antiochus of Commagene (full title Theos Dikaios Epiphanes Philoromaios Philhellen, with ‘Theos’ signifying his divinity), was a Seleucid ruler and Basileus Megas from 69 (or, less probably, 64) to ca. 31 BCE
, the son of Mithradates Callinicos and Laodice, the daughter of the Seleucid king Antiochus VIII Grypos. He reigned from the seat of the fomer Empire in Commagene.9 Antiochus, as ‘Theos Epiphanes’ was the ruling keeper of the ancient wisdom of the Magicians (Persian, Babylonian and Macedonian tradition ‘Magi’). Accordingly, Antiochus I had the Hierothesion (temple-observatory) site at Nemrut Dag constructed on the anniversary of his coronation as king (see Exhibit 2 below – click on image to enlarge in a separate window).
Specially designated days are the birthday of “the king’s body” and his coronation. Antiochus dedicated these two days, to the revelations of demons (daimones), which led him during the successful reign over the kingdom. At this point it is worth noting that in ancient times the term “demon” was ambivalent and defined both positive and negative superhuman beings – in this sense, demons often served as guardian spirits, to which role Antiochus clearly referred.
~ Turkish Archaeological News, Mount Nemrut, 5 Feb 201810
Exhibit 2 – The Nomos – Antiochus I explains the purpose of the temple and stellar observatory (Hierothesion) set up at Nemrut Dag. This was not simply a place to honor himself and act as a burial site, rather it was to house an ancient priesthood who made observations in accordance with the ancient Magi traditions.
Antiochus I Observatory at Mount Nimrut (Nimrod)
The Hierothesion at Nemrut, also called in various languages ‘Nimrud/Nimrut/Nemrud/Nemrut Dag/Dagh’ or ‘Nemrut Dağ/Daği’ as an historical site (distinct from the Turkish dormant volcano named Mount Nemrut) comes replete with its own mountain of crushed stone (the Tumulus), backing the observatory itself. The reader should note that the observatory is built to observe the morning eastern sky in the late summer (August) time frame of each year, and is as a result, aligned at 65° to 70° azimuth from true north (as outlined in Figure B later in this article).11 This is the average azimuth of the rising celestial ecliptic (the average path of the sun moon and planets across the sky) during that time of the year. The persons who built this observatory, apparently knew a little something about what they were looking for. It is also constructed so as to observe the western sky as that same yearly time frame’s ecliptic sets below the horizon.12 (The reader should note that the ecliptic, is the pathway which the Sun takes through our sky. All the planets and our Moon loosely follow this line as they make their journey from east to west each day and night. Throughout this article, you will notice the ecliptic as a thin line placed below Leo’s paws.)
Exhibit 3 – An artificial mound of crushed rock (The Tumulus) backs the observatory’s East Terrace and set of five kings statues.
Exhibit 6 – The east horizon view from the observation platform. Nemrut Dag’s elevation is around 7000 ft. The temple site was the go-to location for stellar observations at sunrise and sunset. The three priests (Persian, Babylonian, and Macedonian) would have likely taken 8-hour watches each, in order to maintain the observatory each day, keep the time, and wake the others for their watch rotation. They might have even ‘dogged’ (shortened) a watch, to ensure that each received an even rotation in daily duties, as well as the monitoring of both a sunrise and a sunset on a regular basis. These Magi would have been rich from the ‘gifts of herbs and spices’ (see Exhibit 2) which were custom in the day – and more importantly, were mandated by Antiochus I. (Source: Google Earth)
The Horoscope of the Lion (Leo)
During my investigation into the site and the features of the Hierothesion it became clear to me that, while Nemrut Dag was a relatively new religious construction during this time of Roman ascendancy, the wisdoms upon which it was founded, were not new at all. They were ancient Uruk-Bablylonian in their heritage. Whether boast, shell game, or reality, nonetheless Antiochus I had set his mind and resources to the task of preserving, or acting upon those mystery school teachings. Thus, by means of mostly Exhibit 2 (and other resources which are not the focus of this article), we were able established four things regarding the very straightforward history of this relatively noteworthy UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- The site was commissioned to celebrate the anniversary of the crowning of Antiochus I,
- The site was to be used to monitor and commission festivals and celestial events,
- The site was declared to be the burial site for Antiochus I, and finally
- The site was observing a tradition which called for the attending (and wealthy) Magi Priests to monitor for a future event.
But what future event was that?
But is this Assumed Horoscope Indeed Correct?
Read the whole article here ...
Under an ubiquitous, toxic atmosphere of cognitive dissonance drenched in Russophobia, it’s absolutely impossible to have a meaningful discussion on finer points of Russian history and culture across the NATO space – a phenomenon I’m experiencing back in Paris right now, fresh from a long stint in Istanbul.
At best, in a semblance of civilized dialogue, Russia is pigeonholed in the reductionist view of a threatening, irrational, ever-expanding empire – a way more wicked version of Ancient Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India.
The fall of the USSR a little over three decades ago did hurl Russia back three centuries – to its borders in the 17th century. Russia, historically, had been interpreted as a secular empire – immense, multiple and multinational. This is all informed by history, very much alive even today in the Russian collective unconscious.
When Operation Z started I was in Istanbul – the Second Rome. I spent a considerable time of my late night walks around Hagia Sophia reflecting on the historical correlations of the Second Rome with the Third Rome – which happens to be Moscow, since the concept was first enounced at the start of the 16th century.
Later, back in Paris, banishment to soliloquy territory seemed inevitable until an academic pointed me to some substance, although heavily distorted by political correctness, available in the French magazine Historia.
There’s at least an attempt to discuss the Third Rome. The significance of the concept was initially religious before becoming political – encapsulating the Russian drive to become the leader of the Orthodox world in contrast with Catholicism. This has to be understood also in the context of pan-Slavic theories springing up under the first Romanov and then reaching their apogee in the 19th century.
Eurasianism – and its several declinations – treats the complex Russian identity as double-faced, between east and west. Western liberal democracies simply can’t understand that these ideas – infusing varied brands of Russian nationalism – do not imply hostility to “enlightened” Europe, but an affirmation of Difference (they could learn a bit from reading more Gilles Deleuze for that matter). Eurasianism also weighs on closer relations with Central Asia and necessary alliances, in various degrees, with China and Turkey.
A perplexed liberal west remains hostage to a vortex of Russian images which it can’t properly decode – from the two-headed eagle, which is the symbol of the Russian state since Peter the Great, to the Kremlin cathedrals, the St. Petersburg citadel, the Red Army entering Berlin in 1945, the May 9 parades (the next one will be particularly meaningful), and historical figures from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great. At best – and we’re talking academic level ‘experts’ – they identify all of the above as “flamboyant and confused” imagery.
The Christian/Orthodox divide
The apparently monolithic liberal west itself also cannot be understood if we forget how, historically, Europe is also a two-headed beast: one head may be tracked from Charlemagne all the way to the awful Brussels Eurocrat machine; and the other one comes from Athens and Rome, and via Byzantium/Constantinople (the Second Rome) reaches all the way to Moscow (the Third Rome).
Latin Europe, for the Orthodox, is seen as a hybrid usurper, preaching a distorted Christianity which only refers to St. Augustine, practicing absurd rites and neglecting the very important Holy Ghost. The Europe of Christian Popes invented what is considered a historical hydra – Byzantium – where Byzantines were actually Greeks living under the Roman Empire.
Western Europeans for their part see the Orthodox and the Christians from the East (see how they were abandoned by the west in Syria under ISIS and Al Qaeda) as satraps and a bunch of smugglers – while the Orthodox regard the Crusaders, the Teutonic chevaliers and the Jesuits – correctly, we must say – as barbarian usurpers bent on world conquest.
In the Orthodox canon, a major trauma is the fourth Crusade in 1204 which utterly destroyed Constantinople. The Frankish chevaliers happened to eviscerate the most dazzling metropolis in the world, which congregated at the time all the riches from Asia.
That was the definition of cultural genocide. The Frankish also happened to be aligned with some notorious serial plunderers: the Venetians. No wonder, from that historical juncture onwards, a slogan was born: “Better the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s tiara.”
So since the 8th century, Carolingian and Byzantine Europe were de facto at war across an Iron Curtain from the Baltics to the Mediterranean (compare it with the emerging New Iron Curtain of Cold War 2.0). After the barbarian invasions, they neither spoke the same language nor practiced the same writing, rites or theology.
This fracture, significantly, also trespassed Kiev. The west was Catholic – 15% of Greek catholics and 3% of Latins – and in the center and the east, 70% Orthodox, who became hegemonic in the 20th century after the elimination of Jewish minorities by mainly the Waffen-SS of the Galicia division, the precursors of Ukraine’s Azov batallion.
Constantinople, even in decline, managed to pull off a sophisticated geo-strategic game to seduce the Slavs, betting on Muscovy against the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian combo. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 allowed Muscovy to denounce the treason of Greeks and Byzantine Armenians who rallied around the Roman Pope, who badly wanted a reunified Christianity.
Afterward, Russia ends up constituting itself as the only Orthodox nation that did not fall under Ottoman domination. Moscow regards itself – as Byzantium – as a unique symphony between spiritual and temporal powers.
Third Rome becomes a political concept only in the 19th century – after Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had vastly expanded Russian power. The key concepts of Russia, Empire and Orthodoxy are fused. That always implies Russia needs a ‘near abroad’ – and that bears similarities with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision (which, significantly, is not imperial, but cultural).
As the vast Russian space has been in constant flow for centuries, that also implies the central role of the concept of encirclement. Every Russian is very much aware of territorial vulnerability (remember, for starters, Napoleon and Hitler). Once the western borderland is trespassed, it’s an easy ride all the way to Moscow. Thus, this very unstable line must be protected; the current correlation is the real threat of Ukraine made to host NATO bases.
Onward to Odessa
With the fall of the USSR, Russia found itself in a geopolitical situation last encountered in the 17th century. The slow and painful reconstruction was spearheaded from two fronts: the KGB – later FSB – and the Orthodox church. The highest-level interaction between the Orthodox clergy and the Kremlin was conducted by Patriarch Kirill – who later became Putin’s minister of religious affairs.
Ukraine for its part had become a de facto Moscow protectorate way back in 1654 under the Treaty of Pereyaslav: much more than a strategic alliance, it was a natural fusion, in progress for ages by two Orthodox Slav nations.
Ukraine then falls under the Russian orbit. Russian domination expands until 1764, when the last Ukrainian hetman (commander-in-chief) is officially deposed by Catherine the Great: that’s when Ukraine becomes a province of the Russian empire.
As Putin made it quite clear this week: “Russia cannot allow the creation of anti-Russian territories around the country.” Operation Z will inevitably encompass Odessa, founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great.
The Russians at the time had just expelled the Ottomans from the northwest of the Black Sea, which had been successively run by Goths, Bulgars, Hungarians and then Turkish peoples – all the way to the Tatars. Odessa at the start was peopled, believe it or not, by Romanians who were encouraged to settle there after the 16th century by the Ottoman sultans.
Catherine chose a Greek name for the city – which at the start was not Slav at all. And very much like St. Petersburg, founded a century earlier by Peter the Great, Odessa never stopped flirting with the west.
Tsar Alexander I, in the early 19th century, decides to turn Odessa into a great trading port – developed by a Frenchman, the Duke of Richelieu. It was from the port of Odessa that Ukrainian wheat started to reach Europe. By the turn of the 20th century, Odessa is truly multinational – after having attracted, among others, the genius of Pushkin.
Odessa is not Ukrainian: it’s an intrinsic part of the Russian soul. And soon the trials and tribulations of history will make it so again: as an independent republic; as part of a Novorossiya confederation; or attached to the Russian Federation. The people of Odessa will decide.
Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket, Italy. Frankly, as a mystical experience, it left much to be desired.
On September 13, 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was imprisoned on the orders of the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus. The public examination of Cyprian has been preserved.
Galerius Maximus: "Are you Thascius Cyprianus?"
Cyprian: "I am."
Galerius: "The most sacred Emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rites."
Cyprian: "I refuse."
Galerius: "Take heed for yourself."
Cyprian: "Do as you are bid; in so clear a case I may not take heed."
Galerius, after briefly conferring with his judicial council, with much reluctance pronounced the following sentence: "You have long lived an irreligious life, and have drawn together a number of men bound by an unlawful association, and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome; and the pious, most sacred and august Emperors ... have endeavoured in vain to bring you back to conformity with their religious observances; whereas therefore you have been apprehended as principal and ringleader in these infamous crimes, you shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you; the authority of law shall be ratified in your blood." He then read the sentence of the court from a written tablet: "It is the sentence of this court that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword."
Cyprian: "Thanks be to God.”
There are plenty of documents about martyrs from early Christianity that look to us as naive and exaggerated. But this one, no. This is so stark, so dramatic, so evident. You can see in your mind these two men, the Imperial procurer Galerius Maximus and the Bishop of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, facing each other in anger, a clash that reminds to us the story of the aircraft carrier that tried to order a lighthouse to move away. It was an unstoppable force, the carrier, meeting an unmovable object, the lighthouse. It is the kind of clash that leads to human lives blown away like fallen leaves in the wind.
Galerius plays the role of the carrier, bristling with weapons, power, and movement. He is not evil. He does what he has to do. For him, just as for most Romans of the time, performing the "sacred rituals" was a simple way to show that one was part of society, willing to do one's duty. It implied little more than small offerings to the deities that would bring luck and prosperity to everyone. Doing that was the basis of the virtue carried "pietas," a virtue that later Christians would call "Caritas" and that in our terminology we might call "empathy." Why would anyone refuse to do such a simple thing? He had to be truly evil, wicked, and a criminal.
But Galerius must also see that he has a force in front of him that he cannot overcome. The lighthouse doesn't move. It cannot be moved. A man like Cyprianus, alone, was worth more than a Roman Legion. It was worth more than all the Roman Legions. A few decades later, the Empire would be ruled by a Christian Emperor, Constantine. More decades in the future, the Empire would collapse and be replaced by Christianity to start the flowering of that delicate and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" in Europe.
In the end, the essence of the conflict that put Galerius and Cyprianus in front of each other was about the role of a totalitarian state. By the 3rd century AD, when this story took place, the Roman Empire had been a prototypical totalitarian state for at least three centuries. It means that the state recognizes nothing but itself as a source of law: there is nothing, strictly nothing, that can stop the state from doing what the state wants to do. In the Roman laws, there was no such thing as "human rights," and nothing like a "Constitution." The law was the law, and it had to be obeyed.
It was only much later that the Roman Emperors started understanding that the laws that they cherished so much had been turned into a tool of oppression and mistreatment of the poor and the weak. It was Empress Galla Placidia the first to say that "That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself."
Nowadays, we tend to see religion as a set of various superstitions, something that gives people some delusionary belief on the after-death world, maybe some philosophic reasoning on how to live a virtuous life. But if you think about the clash between Galerius and Cyprianus, you see what it was about. Religion was a tool to keep people free from the arbitrary laws of the totalitarian state. Christianity established the basic dignity of every human being, and gave people an alternative social structure that they could use to fight back. The holy books were the "Constitution" of the Christian state.
Over the years, this concept of what it means to be a Christian in a secular state has been gradually lost. The last time when Christianity and the State clashed against each other was with the "Controversy of Valladolid," when the Christian Church tried to prevent the European States from enslaving and exterminating the Native Americans. It was a victory for the Church that led to its disappearance as an independent force in the Europe we call "modern." Under the onslaught of the state propaganda that completely inverted the roles in the common perception, we thought that we needed different structures to defend the people from oppression. That the totalitarianism of the state could be kept at bay using popular parties, constitutional laws, statements about human rights, and the like.
It didn't work, Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as when Emperor Decius imposed on every Roman Citizen to demonstrate his/her pietas by performing sacrifices to the sacred deity that, in our case, is called "science." But, unlike the times of Decius, we have nothing to oppose to the totalitarian machine of the state that is marching on to crush all of us.
I have been thinking a lot about the Gaian religion, fashionable among Western intellectuals. Would anyone follow the example of Cyprianus and offer his life for his Gaian faith? Right now, obviously not. Gaians had a good occasion with the Covid story to take an independent position about an issue that the ordinary Christian religion was not equipped to take. Facing an epidemic, Christianity could only say that it was the result of the wrath of God because someone had sinned heavily. Gaianism has much more powerful intellectual tools that could have been used. Gaians could have told people that they were damaging their health just while trying to save themselves. That their immune system is a gift from Gaia herself that they must keep strong by keeping it in contact with the external environment. Exactly the opposite of trying to isolate themselves by wearing masks, disinfecting everything, and keeping social distance.
Unfortunately, right now Gaianism is little more than a vaporous set of good feelings. But it is shallow, lightweight, and easily blown out by the first serious gust of wind created by the state machine. And yet we desperately need something that will save us from being crushed by these monstrous machines we call states that are destroying everything. Will Gaia ever gain the strength of Christianity? I am doubtful, but also not without some hope. Things always change, sometimes so fast.
Here is a reflection on Gaianism that I published two years ago on my "Chimeras" blog when the situation was not yet as dramatic as it is today.
Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess
House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by Lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)
Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, the opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.
It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.
And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?
I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain
What is this thing called "religion," anyway?
Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".
A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught to them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me," a bewildering variety of concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods. Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.
The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live on fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.
Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.
Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.
We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.
So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and, as a reward, the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).
Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the local God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice called korban Olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.
In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually, not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low-quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.
This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerians were communists, it is just that the lack of a method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the Holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.
But there is more. In the case of burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.
And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)
The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.
So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.
The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be commercial centers any longer, so they reinvented themselves as lofty places for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."
Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times, peasant rites were seen with suspicion. The Romans had one deity: money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.
The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.
So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.
The Problem With Money
Our society is perhaps the most monetized in history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans, it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.
So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.
Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?
Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.
Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.
And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.
Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call the "market". If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose.
The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.
Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)
There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed simply getting rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity called money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.
What does it mean limits to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor-based definition, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires, or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess, and even thinking of touching them is evil.
Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, then we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.
Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).
Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?
Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.
Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money-based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected.
All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.
Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it
In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the word "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express.
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
“Khazaria” is our name for a polity in the Northern Caucasus and around the lower course of the Volga plus subject territories to the north and west that existed between the mid-seventh century until about 970 CE. As such, Khazaria was among the most long-lived of the steppe empires.
The term “Khazars” is misleading. Like the Mongol Empire, or Imperial Russia or USSR, and like Poland-Lithuania, the Khazar realm was a multiethnic entity. We don’t know the percentage of Eteo-Khazars (Khazars proper, members of the ruler’s own tribe) in the population of the realm, or who exactly they were. When we say “Khazars adopted Judaism,” we cannot be certain who we are talking about—the Khazars proper, or also the ethnic relatives of Alans, Volgan Tatars and Eastern Slavs. We simply don’t know and never will. Whoever tells you that he or she found “the Khazar gene” is a charlatan.
Early historians writing in Arabic anachronistically refer to the Khazars as enemies or allies of the late Sasanian kings; they simply projected the situation of their own days into the past and called the ancient western Turks by the contemporary name of “Khazars.” We know nothing about any actual Khazars till the second half of the seventh century when they first appear on the scene, destroying the polity of their neighbors and, possibly, blood relatives and linguistic brothers, the Bulgars.
The Khazar victory over the Bulgars prompted the dispersion of the Bulgars to places like Moesia (today’s Bulgaria); the territory of the present day Tatarstan; the gorges of the northern Caucasus, where Balqars, or Malqars, can be still found; and even to Hungary and to Rimini in Italy. The last case, anecdotally, is reminiscent of an episode of the end of WWII, when a pro-Nazi Cossack Stan was established in the vicinity of Rimini. Cossacks had a history of claiming to be Khazars’ descendants; the names of two peoples can be related and this author believes they definitely are—the names meant something like “freebooters” or “people who roam around.”
The Khazar Empire was established through the expulsion of the Bulgars from Bulgaria Magna, somewhere between the rivers Don and Kuban. As every empire, Khazaria was multiethnic, and this implies that the imperial tribe or nation was doomed as Milorad Pavić put it, thinking, of course, of his fellow Serbs in the former Titoist Yugoslavia, “there were many nations in Khazaria, but there was no Khazar nation.” Pavić’s great novel The Khazar Dictionary was inspired, as he hinted somewhere in his book, by the two-volume long doctoral thesis by Peter Benjamin Golden published in Budapest in 1980; Golden’s book is, basically, a dictionary of almost 200 Khazar or Khazar-related words.
This brilliant work notwithstanding, we don’t know what language the Khazars proper spoke. Some Arabic-writing authors claimed that the Khazar language was like that of the Turks, meaning Turkic peoples in general, not the Turks of Turkey who were not yet around. Others said that the Khazar language was not like Persian or Turkic, and was in fact different from all the languages. There are some reasons to believe that the Khazar language belonged to the same small “deviant group” among the Turkic languages as Turco-Bulgar, the dead language of those Bulgars who had fled to Bulgaria and to Tatarstan of today, or the living Chuvash language on the Volga Curb.
Some claimed that the Khazars spoke the language of the Slavs—and I incline to take this claim seriously, at least for the latest period of the Khazar history; this is what the oldest source on the early Polish history, from the time of Mieszko I (circa 930-992), written by a Jewish spy from Muslim Spain, claims. The author of this document had seen Khazar merchants in Prague and Krakow who spoke Slavic.
I can explain this briefly by referring to two telling parallels: After a couple of centuries on the Danube, the Turco-Bulgars who had fled the Khazars from the Voronezh Hills, adopted the Slavic speech of their subjects, and it was that Slavic type of speech that became the common literary language of all the Slavs. The one Slavic language that does not continue the Cyrilo-Methodian tradition is Polish.
There were two Arab-Khazar wars, both long and bloody, the First Arab–Khazar War (сirca 642/652) and the Second Arab–Khazar War (circa 722–737). Sometimes it is stated that the Khazars prevented Islam from being introduced into Eastern Europe, but this is far from being accurate. Two Byzantine emperors were married to Khazar princesses, Justinian II, “the Slit-nosed,” 685-695 and 705-711, and Constantine V “the Dung-named,” 741-775. One was called “the Khazar” (Leo IV “the Khazar,” 775-780) because of his mother.
Khazars had several cities. One of them was Semender, somewhere in the north Caucasus, possibly in the vicinity of Makhachqala, the capital of Dagestan. The name of this city was somehow connected to the name of the Serbian town Smederevo, famous for its Judeo-Avar relics. Another Khazar city—once their capital—was Balanjar, possibly between Derbent and Semender, or else near Buynaksk, in Dagestan.
The Khazars were in possession of a fortress, Sarkel; the name means the White House in Chuvash, an aberrant Turkic language which is probably a dialect of the dead Khazar language. This stronghold was possibly the same as Belaja Vezha, “the White Encampment/Tower,” of the Russian Primary Chronicle. This Khazar fortress, built of white bricks, was constructed by a Byzantine engineer, Petronas Kamateros, whom the then emperor, Theophilus, had sent to assist both his Khazar allies and the Byzantine interest against some common enemies—probably the Proto-Magyars.
Sarkel was built at a vital portage between the Don and the Volga, where these two rivers come close to each other, in the mid-840s. Archeologists have found at the site designs similar to Jewish symbols. Under Stalin’s rule, the site was submerged by the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, on the shores of which the Russians grow grapes for what they called Soviet Champagne. Possibly, this fortress was taken by the Kievan Vikings and their Slav subjects in the late 960s; later, the Russian Primary Chronicle made references to Belaja Vezha and to the people of Belaja Vezha as semi-independent from Kiev and as interfering in the internal affairs of Kievan Rus. Whether these people were descendants of the Khazar warriors or not remains an open question.
But the most important city of the Khazars, their last capital, lay on both shores of the lower course of the Volga; some believe this was the site of Samosdelka, where interesting archeological works have been under way during the last decade. This city was composed of three different cities: the western part, on the western shore of the Volga, the eastern part, on the eastern shore of the river, and an island, where the Khazar ruler had his residence built of bricks; no other was allowed to use bricks but him. The name of this triple city was generally given as Atil or Itil, Turkic for “a big river” (the Kazan-Tatar for Volga is still Idel). Some authors writing in Arabic and Persian give other names of the city: Khazarān, Khamlij, possibly also Khanbaliq, “the city of the sacral ruler,” and Sarighshin. Indeed, the city of Saqsin is mentioned in the area by the 12th-century traveler from Granada in Andalusia, Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, and may be a continuation of Sarighshin; the Old Russian form Sorochin possibly relates to the same place.
In the center of the river there was, as said, an island; one Byzantine source calls this island Atech, which is obviously, a copyist’s error; it should be of course “Atel”; however, this error is the source of the name of the Khazar princess Atech in Pavić’s Khazar Dictionary.
Between 733-746 a bishopric seat was established at Atil (ho Astēl), and a Muslim youth from Baghdad, Abo, who chose for himself a Georgian identity and the faith of Christ, was able to convert at Atil to Christianity around 780; later, he returned to Tiflis and was there executed for his apostasy from Islam. Abo is now the patron saint of Tbilisi.
What is important here is the fact that in 780 there was a bishop sent as a missionary messenger to the Khazars; the non-Christian Khazars were described in Abo’s Vita as the “Khazars, Sons of Magog.” They were Mongoloid (sašinel p’irita, “with horrible faces”), pagan (“having no religious law”), blood-eating and savage (k’ac velur). However, there is no bias in this description, for they worshipped the Creator (šemokmedi), the Turkic God of Heavens Täŋri. Certainly, they were not Jewish or Muslim by 780, thus being at odds with a unique and somewhat blurred reference in Arabic that in 737, 40-some years earlier, the Khazar Qaghan had been forced to convert to Islam. The Khazar Qaghan is said by Judah Halevy to have converted in 740 to Judaism, but Halevy’s work, The Book of Khuzari, is a purely polemical and philosophical work and the date he sets for the Khazars’ conversion, 400 years before he composed his book, is meant simply to say “very long ago.”
Al-Mas’udi, one of the best Arabic sources, said that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the times of Harun al-Rashid (766-809) and promised to tell the circumstances; the promise was never fulfilled and we have no such description. Al-Dimashqi, quoting al-Mas’udi (he said it was Ibn al-Athir), said that the Jews, persecuted in Byzantium in the times of Harun al-Rashid, fled to Khazaria. He adds that these Jews found there a skillful but unsophisticated bunch of folks to whom they proposed their own religion; allegedly, the Khazars found this religion better than the one they had and accepted it. Jews are said to have come to Khazaria in numbers from Byzantium because of the politics of persecution during the reign of Romanus I Lecapenus (r. 920-944). They also came from Khwarazm and other places.
Khazar coin, the so-called Moses coin, from the Spillings Hoard at Gotland Museum, Visby, SwedenW.carter/wikimedia
In the 830s, coins were minted in Khazaria bearing the Arabic text “There is no God but Allah, and Musa (Moses) is His messenger.” These coins can be seen as evidence that the Khazars—or some of them—had converted to Judaism. However, we should recall, that the first Polish coins, from the time of Mieszko I had Jewish references, too—they had Mieszko Krul Polski written in Hebrew characters. Still, these Polish coins tell nothing about the religious adherence of Mieszko or Polish peasantry or gentry. The same can be true for the Khazar coins with a Jewish-like text—in both cases, the coins were minted by Jews for their purposes, and that’s all we know.
In 860, the Byzantine Emperor Michael III and the fiercely anti-Roman Patriarch of Constantinople Photius sent two monk brothers, Constantine and Methodius, to convert the Khazars to Christianity. Their mission was a failure, but from the description we have we can see that the Khazar Qaghan took a conciliatory position toward Cyril, the Christian missionary. He tells “the Byzantine” (unclear who he talks to) that ultimately we all believe in the same things; nothing specifically Jewish is described. One year later, the brothers were sent on a much more successful mission, to the Slavs of Great Moravia, and invented the Glagolitic alphabet, which is not to be confused with the Cyrillic (called after the second name of Constantine-Cyril).
The Arabic texts from the first quarter of the 10th century state that the Khazars and their rulers were Jewish, but had become Jewish only recently. The Jews were the smallest religious community in Khazaria, where Muslims, Christians and Pagans constituted the majority. The sacral ruler, the Qaghan, lived in his brick-built palace on the Volga, but he possessed no real power and was subjected to a series of taboos—he was forbidden to do this or that, he could leave his island only four times a year, etc. If he trespassed the time limit, he was strangled; when he died, they built a giant complex for his burial with multiple false tombs. Then they let a river overflow the burial complex and killed all those who had taken part in building the graves and in the burial of the Qaghan.
It seems fair to say that nothing in the above practices is reminiscent of any forms of Judaism. However, when the news arrived in 922 that the Muslims destroyed a synagogue somewhere, the Qaghan gave orders to destroy the minaret in his own capital, killed the _muazzin_s and added, that “if I did not fear that not a synagogue would be left in the lands of Islam, I would destroy the mosque.” About the same time a very similar utterance was made by the Buddhist Qaghan of the Uigurs (not to be confused with the modern nation in western China) who learned about the threats against his co-religionists in Muslim Khorasan.
The real power among the Khazars was in the hands of the Qaghan’s deputy, called ishad (a term of Iranian origin) or later, bek. This deputy had, in turn, his own deputies. This system of dual kingship is called diarchy, and was found, at about the same period more or less, among the Hungarians, Vikings, the Merovingian kings and the Carolingian majordomos, the Kieavan _kniaz_s and their _vojevoda_s, the Abbasid _Khalifa_s and the Suljuk _sultan_s, the Japanese Mikados and Shoguns, etc.
There was a Khazar High Court, with two judicial appointments reserved for the Jews, two for the Christians, two for the Muslims, and one for the pagans. Muslims had a kind of autonomy and were represented by a Khaz (from *Khwaja). This word would become the source of the Russian word khoziain (“owner, topman”), which is what Stalin was called by both his cronies and by the inmates of his gulags.
In the middle of the same 10th century, just one generation later, the picture is quite different: there is a nominal Qaghan and his deputy, the king. There is also a Muslim vizier, Ahmad ibn Kuweih, possibly a Khwarazmian, along with a standing army of Muslim mercenaries from the vicinity of Khwarazm who are allowed not to fight their fellow Muslims. A minaret overshadows the Qaghan’s palace.
All the slaves coming into the lands of Islam from Khazaria are from among the pagans, “for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims do not enslave those of their own faiths.”
There are a few references to the Khazars on the first pages of the Russian Primary Chronicle: The Khazars taxed several eastern Slavic tribes, most importantly Kiev; in 965, according to the Russian Chronicle, Sviatoslav of Kiev, the pagan son of Princess Olga (who became Christian), made war on the Khazars who came forth against him with their own kniaz, the Qaghan; Sviatoslav won and took their city Belaja Vezha, which was most likely Sarkel. Sviatoslav then waged war on the Danubian Bulgaria, in 967, according to the Chronicle, and perished in 972 on his way back, defeated. Meanwhile, in 968, when Sviatoslav was out in Bulgaria, the nomadic Turkic Pechenegs attacked the Russian lands for the first time, a feature which would become recurrent in the next two centuries.
We know that the chronology of the pre-11th century events in the Russian Primary Chronicle is absolutely arbitrary. However, there are some three or four correct dates derived from foreign sources used by the compiler of the Chronicle. 972, the date of Sviatoslav’s death, is one of them. 968, the date of the first Pecheneg attack, could have been the other. But the dates of Sviatoslav’s Bulgarian campaigns and the descriptions of these campaigns as they appear in the Chronicle are all inaccurate.
Two excellent Arabic sources relate that the Russians destroyed the Khazar capital of Itil and the cities of Khazarān and Semender in 358h/968-9 CE, and also Bulghar on the Volga, a Muslim entity with a troubled relationship with Khazaria. One of the sources said (the incongruences of the English reflect those in Arabic): “there were in Semender many gardens, and it is said that it used to contain 4,000 (or 40,000) vineyards. I asked a man who had recently been there, while in Jurjan in the year 358. He said: ‘There is not an alms for the poor in any vineyard or garden, if there remains a leaf on the bough. For the Russians descended upon it, and neither a grape nor a raisin remained. The Muslims used to live there, as well as other groups of people of different faiths, including idolaters, but they all flee. Because the land there is rich and fertile, one need to wait three years before it becomes again what it had been.’” This description and the date are at odds with the Russian Chronicle.
There are two old theories that attempt to reconcile these contradictory narratives: first, there were two Sviatoslav raids against the Khazars, one, the minor, recorded by the Chronicle, whereas the major one, that of 968, the Chronicle omitted. However, the chronology of Sviatoslav’s campaigns in Bulgaria, which is known well from reliable Byzantine sources, does not allow any window for such a campaign.
The second theory says that the campaign of 968 was carried out not by Sviatoslav, but rather by unspecified Russians other than Sviatoslav. However, another excellent source in Arabic, Ibn Miskaweih, says that in 354h/965 a body of Turks attacked Khazaria; the Khazars called the Khwarazmians, their main trade partners, for military help. The Khwarazmians answered that “you are Jews and if you like our help, you should submit yourselves to Islam.” The Khazars agreed, with the exception of their king—apparently, their sacred Qaghan who a couple of years earlier had exchanged letters with the leader of Andalusian Jewry and the Spanish Omayyad vizier Hasdai Ibn Shaprut. In the end, the Qaghan converted to Islam as well. In 985, al-Muqaddasi, another excellent source, wrote that the people of Khazarān were no longer Jews but Muslims.
This is, basically, all we know for sure about the Khazars, though I have spared you some additional details, such as how many wives the Qaghan had in 922 and how many in 956. Anything else bombastic you might read about the Khazars would be partisan speculation.
The first modern historian of Russia, Karamzin, stated that the Russian State has been born from Khazaria and the Khazar “yoke” was good for the eastern Slavs; he needed the good Khazar yoke in order to oppose it to the bad Mongol yoke—because of which, Karamzin argued, Russia needed autocracy. Stalin, aka P. Ivanov, wrote in a Pravda article in 1952 that Khazaria was a parasitical cancerous growth of Judeo plutocracy on the body of the peoples of the USSR. In our own days, claims are made that Ashkenazic Jews are descendants of the Khazars; needless to say, we have no Khazar genetic material to substantiate such claims. In short, Khazar studies are an excellent game for armchair scholars with a bent for occasional excursions in the field with a bunch of Russian and Daghestani archeologists who enjoy “one cold tent, three warm vodkas.”
On the sidelines of the China-US summit in Rome on 15 March 2022, the United States exerted heavy pressure on the Holy See, in their intent to transform the conflict in Ukraine into a religious war.
In association with Bernard Lewis, under the George Bush Sr. administration, the Straussians [1] had dreamt of mobilizing Muslims against Russia. This deliberate strategy was later taken up by Lewis’s assistant, Samuel Huntington, who promoted it as an inevitable scenario : the clash of civilizations.
However, this strategy which was implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then in Chechnya, is ineffectual in Ukraine where both camps are Christian. The Straussians, therefore, want to fan the flames of the Catholic/Orthodox divide. To this end, they intend to revive the theology evolved from the visions of Fatima.
During the thirties and the Second World War, the anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic “nationalist” Stepan Bandera was a Uniate, that is Greek-Catholic, who celebrated an Orthodox rite while being affiliated with Rome.
Three years ago, the Straussians broke up the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by creating the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, not recognized by the Patriarch of Moscow, but by that of Constantinople [2].
In 1917, during the First World War and just after the Russian Revolution, three Portuguese psychics claimed they had received a message from the Virgin Mary, saying:
You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go, To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. (...) The war is going to end but if people do not cease offending God, a worse war will break out during the reign of Pius XI.
When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions against the Church and against the Holy Father.To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays.
If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.
In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph, the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
On 24 March 2022, President Joe Biden will travel to Europe to chair a special summit of NATO heads of state and governments against Russia.
On the following day, 25 March at 5 p.m. (12 p.m. Washington time; 6 p.m. Kiev time; 7 p.m. Moscow time), Pope Francis will consecrate Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as per the wishes of the psychics of Fatima. Accordingly, Russia will be portrayed, as the troublemaker. Fighting against her will become the sacred duty of all Catholics.
The faithful who participate in religious wars lose all thinking capacity and show unparalleled determination and cruelty. For twenty years, the Muslim world has been paying the price. The Christian world is preparing to follow suit.
[1] “Russia declares war on the Straussians”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.
[2] “Washington ready to blow up the Orthodox Church”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 28 September 2018.
I recently spoke at a gathering for medical freedom advocates in a little community center in the Hudson River Valley. I cherish this group of activists: they had steadfastly continued to gather throughout the depths of the “lockdown,” that evil time in history — an evil time not yet behind us — and they kept on gathering in human spaces, undaunted. And by joining their relaxed pot-luck dinners around unidentifiable but delicious salads and chewy homemade breads, I was able to continue to remember what it meant to be part of a sane human community.
Children played — as normal — frolicking around, and speaking and laughing and breathing freely; not suffocating in masks like little zombies, or warned by terrified adults to keep from touching other human children. Dogs were petted. Neighbors spoke to one another at normal ranges, without fear or phobias. Bands played much-loved folk songs or cool little indie rock numbers they had written themselves, and no one, graceful or awkward, feared dancing. People sat on the house’s steps shoulder to shoulder, in human warmth, and chatted over glasses of wine or homemade cider. No one asked anyone personal medical questions.
(While I believe that all decisions about how you live your life vis a vis an infectious disease are intensely personal, and I would never recommend to others to assume any specific level of risk or to pursue any specific strategy of risk reduction; I think it’s worth noting, by the way, that to my knowledge, they had gone through the last two years without having lost a soul to COVID.)
Meanwhile, what had been human community outside of that little group, and outside other isolated normal communities — and outside of a handful of normal states in America — became more and more surreal, terrifying and unrecognizable.
The rest of the world, at least on the progressive side in the United States, became increasingly cult-like and insular in its thinking, since March of 2020. As the months passed, friends and colleagues of mine who were highly educated, and who had been lifelong critical thinkers, journalists, editors, researchers, doctors, philanthropists, teachers, psychologists — all began to repeat only talking points from MSNBC and CNN, and soon overtly refused to look at any sources - even peer-reviewed sources in medical journals — even CDC data — that contradicted those talking points. These people literally said to me, “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.” It became clear soon enough that if they absorbed information contradictory to “the narrative” that was consolidating, they risked losing social status, maybe even jobs; doors would close, opportunities would be lost. One well-educated woman told me she did not want to see any unsanctioned information because she was afraid of being disinvited from her bridge group. Hence the refrain: “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.”
Friends and colleagues of mine who had been skeptical their whole adult lives of Big Agriculture — who only shopped at Whole Foods, who would never let their kids eat sugar or processed meat, or ingest a hint of Red Dye No 2 in candy, or eat candy itself for that matter in some cases — these same people lined up to inject into their bodies, and then offered up the bodies of their dependent minor children for the same purpose, an MRNA gene-therapy injection whose trials would not end for two more years. These parents announced on social media proudly that they had done this with their children. When I pointed out gently that the trials would not end til 2023, they yelled at me.
The progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — my people, my tribe, my whole life — became more and more uncritical, less and less able to reason. Friends and colleagues who were wellness-oriented, and who their whole adult lives had known the dangers of Big Pharma — and who would only use Burt’s Bees on their babies’ bottoms and sunscreen with no PABAs on themselves— lined up to take an experimental gene therapy; why not? And worse, it seemed, they crowded around, like the stone throwers in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” to lash out at and to shun anyone who raised the most basic questions about Big Pharma and its highly compensated spokesmodels. Their critical thinking, but worse, their entire knowledge base about that industry, seemed to have evaporated magically into the ether.
Whole belief systems were abandoned painlessly and overnight as if it these communities were in the grip of a collective hallucination, like the witch craze of the 15th to 17th centuries in Northern Europe. Intelligent, informed people suddenly saw things that were not there and were unable to see things that were incontrovertibly before their faces.
Feminist health activists, who surely knew perfectly well the histories of how the pharmaceutical and medical industries had experimented ad nauseam on the bodies of women with disastrous results, lined up to take an injection that by March of 2021 women were reporting was wreaking painful havoc on their menstrual cycles. These same feminist health activists had spoken out earlier, as they should have, about Big Pharma’s and Big Medicine’s colonization of women’s reproductive health processes, and had spoken out about issues ranging from women’s access to safe contraception to abortion rights, to the rights of mothers to a midwifery delivery or to a birthing room, or to the right to labour or the right to store milk at work or the right to breastfeed in public.
But these formerly reliable custodians of well-informed medical skepticism and of women’s health rights, were silent, silent, as such voices as former HHS official Dr Paul Alexander warned that spike protein from MRNA vaccines may accumulate in the ovaries (and testes), https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-delivers-less-long-term-protection-from-hospitalization-after-four-months/, and as vaccinated women reported hemorrhagic menses — double digit percentages in a Norwegian study reported heavier bleeding (https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2021/menstrual-changes-following-covid-19-vaccination/). Many women also reported blood clotting, and women even reported post-menopausal bleeding — and mothers reported their vaccinated twelve year olds suddenly getting their periods; but it was two periods a month some girls endured.
Almost no one out of the luminaries of feminist health activism who had spent decades speaking out on behalf of women’s health and women’s bodies, raised a peep above the parapet. Those two or three of us who did were very visibly smeared, in some cases threatened, and in many ways silenced.
When I broke this story of menstrual dysregulation post-vaccination on Twitter in Spring of 2021, I was suspended. Matt Gertz works at CNN and Media Matters. The former is a channel on which I had appeared for decades; the latter, a group whose leadership members I’ve known for years, and in one instance, with whom I’ve worked.
In spite of both of his employers having sought out professional association with me, Matt Gertz publicly and repeatedly called me a “pandemic conspiracy theorist” upon my first having reported on menstrual dysregulation, and elsewhere accused me of “crack-pottery” https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-keeps-hosting-pandemic-conspiracy-theorist-naomi-wolf.
Shame on me for doing journalism. I broke the post-vaccination menstrual dysregulation story by doing what I always do: by using the same methodology that I used in writing The Beauty Myth (about eating disorders) and Misconceptions (about obstetrics), and Vagina (about female sexual health): I listened to women, that radical act.
The New York Times just re-broke my story of menstrual dysregulation, ten months later, January 2022, in a different year, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/health/covid-vaccine-menstrual-cycles.html, after perhaps millions of women readers may have been physically harmed by their lack of decent reporting and their uncritical acceptance of soundbites from captured regulatory authorities. There has been no retraction or apology from Mr Gertz, from The New York Times, or from other news outlets such as DailyMail.co.uk, who all then called me crazy but are now reporting my story as if it is their own — now that it’s clear that, once again, sadly, I was right.
Feminist health advocates who know about routine hysterectomies at menopause, about vaginal mesh that has to be removed, about silicone breasts implants that leaked or burst and had to be recalled or replaced, about Mirena that had to be removed, about Thalidomide that deformed babies’ limbs in utero, about birth control pills at hormonal doses that heightened heart attack risks and stroke risks and that lowered the female libido; about routine c-sections to speed up turnover at hospitals, about the sterilization of low income women and girls and women and girls of color without informed consent — were silent about the unproven nature of MRNA vaccines, and about coercive policies that violated the Nuremberg code and other laws, as a whole generation of young women who have not yet had their babies, was forced to take an MRNA vaccine (and sometimes second vaccine, and booster) with unproven effects on reproductive health, in order simply to return to campus or to get or to keep a job. The Our Bodies Ourselves collective? Nothing on vaccine risks and women’s health as a subject category: https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/. NARAL? Where were they? Crickets. Where were all the responsible feminist health activists, in the face of this global, unconsenting, uninforming, illegal experimentation on women’s bodies, and now on children, and soon, on babies?
People who had been up in arms for decades about eating disorders or about the coercive social standards that led to — horrors — leg shaving, were silent about an untested injection that was minting billions for Big Pharma; an injection that entered, according to Moderna’s own press material, every cell in the body, which would thus include involving uterus, ovaries, endometrium.
The sudden amnesia extended to feminist legal theory. Feminist jurists such as Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan debated President Biden’s vaccine mandates on January 7 — as if they had never heard of the legal claims for Roe v Wade: privacy law. As Politico reported of Justice Kagan, “The Supreme Court’s ruling on privacy rights served as a basis for its later decision, Roe v Wade” and as former Sen. Barbara Boxer had stated, “I have no reason to think anything else except that [Kagan] would be a very strong supporter of privacy rights because everyone she worked for held that view.” https://www.politico.com/story/2010/06/kagan-must-explain-abortion-stance-039096.
Except…now they seemingly don’t, and now Justice Kagan magically doesn’t. With medical mandates, there are no privacy rights for anyone ever.
But Justice Kagan seemed suddenly, after decades of this view, not to see a contradiction. Her career-long philosophical foundation that resulted in a consistent view, when it came to abortion rights, that citizens had a right to physical privacy in medical decision-making — “My body, my choice” — “It is between a woman and her doctor” — vanished, along with her expensive education and all of her knowledge of the Constitution.
Justice Sotomayor, for her part, said, in an article reported on Dec 10 2021, that it was “madness” that the state of Texas wanted to “substantially suspend[ed] a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body.” Her tone was, rightly, one of high dudgeon at the thought that anyone might override this right. But when it came to Justice Sotomayor’s discussion on Jan 7 2022, less than four weeks later, of President Biden’s vaccine mandates, that clear Constitutional right was now nowhere to be seen; it too had vanished into the ether. A part of Justice Sotomayor’s brain seems to have simply shut down at the word “vaccines” — though it was the same woman in the same Court, with the same Constitution before her, the Justice could no longer manage the Kantian imperative of consistent reasoning. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/10/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-texas-ban
Lifelong activists for justice and inclusion, for the Constitution and human rights and the rule of law — friends and colleagues of mine who are LGBTQ rights activists; the ACLU itself; activists for racial inclusion and equality; Constitutional lawyers who teach at all the major universities and run the law reviews; activists who argue against excluding anyone from any profession or access based on gender; almost all of them, at least on the progressive side of the spectrum (almost all: hello, Glenn Greenwald) — were silent; as a comprehensive, systematic, cruel, Titanic discrimination society was erected in a matter of months in such cities as New York City, formerly the great melting pot, the great equalizer; and as whole states such as California adopted a system pretty much like the apartheid systems based on other physical characteristics, in regimes that these same proud advocates for equality and inclusion had boycotted in college.
And yet now these former heroes for human rights and for equal justice under law, stood by calmly or even enthusiastically as the massive edifice of discrimination was constructed. And then they colluded. Without even a fight or a murmur.
And they had their “vaccinated-only” parties, and their segregated fashion galas, and their nonprofit-hosted discussions in nice medically-segregated New York City midtown hotels over expensive lunches served by staffers in masks — lunches celebrating luminaries of the civil rights movement or of the LGBTQ rights movement or the immigrants’ rights movement, or the movement to help girls in Afghanistan get access to schools which they had been prevented from attending— invitations which I received, but of which I could not make use, because — because I was prevented from attending.
And these elite justice advocates enjoyed the celebrations of their virtues and of their values, and did not seem to notice that they had become — in less than a year — exactly what they had spent their adult lives professing most to hate.
I could go on and on.
The bottom line, though, is that this infection of the soul, this abandonment of classical Liberalism’s — really, it’s not even partisan; modern civilization’s — most cherished postwar ideals, this sudden dropping of post-Enlightenment norms of critical thinking, this dilution even of parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their helpless minor children, this acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship, these suddenly-manifested structures themselves that erected this demonic world in less than two years and imposed it on everyone else, these heads of state and heads of the AMA and heads of school boards and these teachers; these heads of unions and these national leaders and the state level leaders and the town hall level functionaries all the way down to the men or woman who disinvite a relative from Thanksgiving due to social pressure, because of a medical status which is no one’s business and which affects no one — this edifice of evil is too massive, too quickly erected, too complex and really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness.
Months before, I had asked a renowned medical freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%206%3A12&version=KJV
I had thought of that a lot in the intervening time. It made more and more sense to me as the days passed.
I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.
I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.
I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This — this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.
In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.
So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.
And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world, — to say these things out loud.
Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters — at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and are certainly are not supposed to talk about evil or the forces of darkness.
As a Jew I come from a tradition in which Hell (or “Gehenom”) is not the Miltonic Hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quieter interim spiritual place (https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/183). “The Satan” exists in our literature (in Job for example) but neither is this the Miltonic Satan, that rock star, but a figure more modestly known as “the accuser.”
We who are Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battle between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago; about eighty years ago.
Other faith traditions of course also have ways to discuss and understand spiritual battle taking place through humans, and through human leaders, and here on earth.
It was not always the case that Western intellectuals were supposed to keep quiet in public about spiritual wrestling, fears and questions. Indeed in the West, poets and musicians, dramatists and essayists and philosophers, talked about God, and even about evil, for millennia, as being at the core of their understanding of the world and as forming the basis of their art forms and of their intellectual missions. This was the case right through the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the 20th, a period when some of our greatest intellectuals — from Darwin to Freud to Jung — wrestled often and in public with questions of how the Divine, or its counterpart, manifested in the subjects they examined.
It was not until after World War Two and then the rise of Existentialism — the glorification of a world view in which the true intellectual showed his or her mettle by facing the absence of God and our essential aloneness — that smart people were expected to shut up in public about God.
So - it’s not wacky or eccentric, if you know intellectual history, for intellectuals to talk in public about God, and even about God’s adversary, and to worry about the fate of human souls. Mind and soul are not in fact at odds; and the body is not in fact at odds with either of these. And this acceptance of our three-part, integrated nature is part of our Western heritage. This is a truth only recently obscured or forgotten; a memory of our integrity as human beings that had been, only for the last seventy years or so, under attack.
So — I am going to start talking about God, when I need to do so, and about my spiritual questions in this dark time, along with continuing all of the other reporting and nonfiction analysis I always do. Because I have always told my readers the truth of what I felt and saw. This may be why they have come with me on a journey now of almost forty-three years, and why they keep seeking me out — though I have in the last couple of years — after I wrote a book that described how 19th century pandemics were exploited by the British State to take away everyone’s liberty, hm — been pulped, deplatformed, cancelled, re-cancelled, deplatformed again, and called insane by dozens of the same news outlets that had commissioned me religiously for decades.
It is time to start talking about spiritual combat again, I personally believe. Because I think that that is what we are in, and the forces of darkness are so big that we need help. Our goal? Perhaps just to keep the light somehow alive - a light of true classical humane values, of reason, of democracy, inclusion, kindness - in this dark time.
What is the object of this spiritual battle?
It seems to be for nothing short of the human soul.
One side seems to be wrestling for the human soul by targeting the human body that houses it; a body made in God’s likeness, so they say; the temple of God.
I am not confident. I don’t have enough faith. Truth is, I am scared to death. I just don’t think just humans alone can solve this one, or can win this one on their own.
I do think we need to call, as Milton did, as Shakespeare did, as Emily Dickinson did, on help from elsewhere; on what could be called angels and archangels, if you will; on higher powers, whatever they may be; on better principalities, on whatever intercessors may hear us, on Divine Providence — whatever you want to call whomever it is you can hope for and imagine. As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language — I don’t think forms really matter. I think intention is everything.
I can’t say for sure that God and God’s helpers exist; I can’t. Who can?
But I do think we are at an unheard-of moment in human history — globally — in which I personally believe we have no other choice but to ask for assistance from beings — or a Being — better armed to fight true darkness, than ourselves alone. We’ll find out if they exist, if He or She exists, perhaps, if we ask for God’s help.
At least that’s my hope.
Which I guess is a kind of a prayer.
Excerpt from the book Jason Louv. "John Dee and the Empire of Angels. Enochian Magic and Occult Roots of Modern World." Rochester; Toronto: Inner Traditions, 2018.
As of the twenty-first century, Drake’s Bay lies thirty miles northwest of the hyperreal technological mecca of San Francisco, California, a short drive across the Golden Gate Bridge through the low, mist-covered hills and forest of Marin County. The bay stretches along eight miles of coast, and centers at Drake’s Beach, a small cove that looks out onto the Pacific, surrounded by sandstone hills and ice plant.
Here, in 1579, a privateer named Francis Drake landed after circumnavigating the tip of South America in a clandestine mission, proving that it could be done for the first time. He named the coast he had alighted upon Nova Albion. The man who had masterminded Drake’s mission was John Dee.
While Dee’s previous work had been theoretical, in the 1570s he involved himself in Elizabeth’s geopolitical planning, laying the ideological framework for building a new world empire. This empire—which would spread the new ideals of the Reformation and lead to the birth of America—would soon grow to compete with the Spanish Catholic efforts at colonization. It was to be a cold war for a New World.
An omen of this war came seven years earlier, in 1572, when a new star appeared in the heavens, remaining visible night and day for seventeen months—we now designate it SN 1572, a Type Ia supernova that occurred in the constellation Cassiopeia.1 Dee, who rushed to make observational measurements of the supernova, thought that it confirmed that the final restoration of the world—the eschaton—was at hand.2 The astronomer, alchemist, and astrologer Tycho Brahe, for whom the supernova is now named, believed that it was the first new star to appear in the sky since the birth of Christ. Five years later, in 1577, a great comet arrived above England, also observed by Brahe—confirming for the populace that the end of the world was nigh, fears upon which Dee was called to consult by Elizabeth.3
Indeed, it was the end of the world. By Dee’s time, Luther’s Reformation had initiated sea changes in Europe that broke a centuries-long status quo. Inheriting a tiny and vulnerable country, Elizabeth had pursued a strategy of avoiding war with the Catholic powers. To do so, she had kept France and Spain out of conflict by offering to increase support for whatever country was threatened by the other; both religion and Elizabeth’s own marital status were drawn into this delicate political maneuvering. Yet the gambit could only last so long before war did break out, dragging England into the fray.4 Concurrently, the Netherlands had erupted into open revolt against the Roman Catholic King Philip II of Spain, which would result in the formation of the Protestant Dutch Republic by 1581.
England was also economically insecure, besieged by desperation, homelessness, and plague. As England still grew its own food, it was vulnerable to famine if a wheat crop failed. Although the country’s food supply never ran out, famines would later make the 1580s and ’90s miserable for many, with the poorest potentially resorting to eating bark and grass; French peasants from the same time period are recorded as feeding on unripe grain, roots, and the intestines and blood left over from animals slaughtered for those that could afford them.5 One of the primary reasons for England’s failing economy was the massive amount of silver that Spain was extracting from its New World colonies, massively tipping the balance of economic power toward Spain. By contrast, England relied on textile exports, the manufacture of which had kept its population employed, and Continental demand was now minimal, leaving much of the country out of work. Trade with Russia, the Mediterranean, and Guinea had brought in some funds, but the real prize would be wresting at least partial control of the New World from Spain.6
Fig. 1. Francis Drake. Portrait by Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, 1598.
It is in this context that Dee gave the world the concept of a “British Empire,” a phrase he coined. After Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Pope Alexander VI had divided the Americas between Portugal and Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, handing them dominion over the Atlantic. Dee, with his back pocket full of superior knowledge of geography, navigation, and optics, would soon suggest Elizabeth contest this, and expand into the New World not just to rival Catholic domination, but for economic growth. Dee’s knowledge of optics, as well as the geographic and cartographic information he had absorbed under Mercator and his other mentors, at a time when accurate cartographic information was largely confined to the Continent, made him invaluable in not only conceptualizing but actualizing this plan. Yet for Dee himself, exploration of the New World had little to do with mercantile or even political goals. His fascination with imperialism pertained more to his occult calculations. It was clear to Dee, if no one else, that America had been colonized by King Arthur—even that still-existing Arthurian colonies might be found in the Northwest Passage. If this was the case, England had just as much spiritual claim to America as Rome did.7
The Muscovy Company, however, was already engaged in making real profits from trading with the tsar in Russia, and wasn’t seeking to take further risks on exploring west. Martin Frobisher got Elizabeth to lean on the company, and they in turn granted Frobisher a license with the proviso that he accept a company man, Michael Lok, as his treasurer. Dee was brought in to minimize risk by examining the plans for the voyage and imparting his knowledge of geometry, cosmography, and navigational instruments to the expedition leaders; Dee had spent fifteen years planning logistics for just such a voyage.8 Lok quickly warmed to Dee after realizing Dee wasn’t interested in competing with him. Since Lok had outfitted the expedition with expensive new navigational technology, he also had to make sure that Dee explained to his men how to use it without breaking it. Two ships were next commissioned—the Gabriel and Michael, named after the archangels that Dee would later record extensive traffic with during the angelic conversations.
Despite mishaps along the way, the Michael being forced back to port, and the near loss of the Gabriel (it was only heroics by Frobisher himself that saved the ship, nearly killing him) the voyage found land—the cyclopean ice walls of what Frobisher called Meta Incognita, the Unknown Limit, which we now know as Baffin Island in Canada. While exploring the coastline, Frobisher’s expedition came into conflict with Inuits, capturing and marooning one individual on a rock. An exploratory mission of Frobisher’s men went missing shortly thereafter. After taking an Inuit as a hostage with a boat hook, Frobisher abandoned hope for the return of his men and reversed course to England. The Inuit captive would be recorded as an object of great wonder and fascination for the English, before vanishing into the annals of history and a probably unpleasant fate.9
Fig. 2. Later map of Meta Incognita by Sir Robert Dudley and Antonio Francesco Lucini, c. 1647.
Even more interesting to the Crown was a sample of black ore that Frobisher had found in Meta Incognita, and that English alchemists claimed to have found gold in. For Dee, this discovery validated that the 1572 supernova foretold the discovery of the philosopher’s stone. For the English government, it was a galvanizing reason to return to Meta Incognita for more, under the cover of secrecy, to avoid claim jumping. Funding was no longer an issue—even the cash-poor Dee, seeing the potential for return, invested £25 (about £6,000 or $7,700 in 2017 terms).10
A crew of 140 was raised, including several prisoners who were to again board the Michael and Gabriel, along with a third ship entitled the Aid, and then to be left in the New World to try and win the “good will” of the locals, in much the same way that America and Australia would later be colonized. After six weeks, the expedition reached what is now known as Frobisher’s Strait and moored in what they named Jackman’s Sound, which Frobisher claimed for England in the country’s first act of colonial conquest of the New World. Setting out to search for more of the gold ore, the crew found nothing but a dead narwhal, which they called a “sea unicorn.” Immediately thereafter, the sailors found more of the black ore, which they began loading into the ship, all while fighting off violent attacks from the now-incensed Inuits.11
In all, Frobisher hauled over 140 tons of the ore back to England, presenting news of his find to Elizabeth, along with the narwhal’s horn. The ore was put under lock, key, and security detail, and tests on it commenced, whereupon only minute quantities of gold and silver were extracted, to Frobisher’s dismay.12
Despite the low yield of precious metals, a third voyage was sent back to Canada to claim what profits could still be salvaged. The crew returned with 1,150 tons, but by this time Lok’s Cathay Company was severely over budget; as a result of the expeditions, Lok declared bankruptcy and was thrown into debtor’s prison. After countless salvage attempts, the final extracted yield from the black ore was one single pinhead of silver.13
To Dee, however, the political value of the English voyages to Newfoundland and Baffin Island was immense—and not only because they were gathering data in the search for the Northwest Passage.14 In November 1577, Dee presented a new imperial plan to Elizabeth, suggesting that England wrest control of the New World from Spain—General and Rare Memorials, a set of documents laying out plans and technical guidelines for a new era of English colonization.
The Memorials continued the occult inquiry Dee began in the Propaedeumata aphoristica and Monas hieroglyphica; as with those books, Dee thought the Memorials divinely inspired (also by the angel Michael, in the case of the Monas). For Dee, the Memorials were a revelation from the angels, divine guidance on the creating of a British Empire, through a Royal Navy that would hold the world in its sway.15
In the text, Dee argued that Britain had the greatest need of any country for a continually operational navy, and that it also had the world’s greatest supply of timber, shipbuilders, willing volunteers for shipyard labor and staffing ships, and even suitable harbors. Establishing such a navy would make Britain nigh-on invincible (it did), and expansion of the British Navy and colonization of the New World not only had historical precedent but would surely raise vast riches for the Crown (it did).16 Such a plan would establish Elizabeth as the world ruler before the end times arrived; the money raised for the naval effort, Dee later added, could also be used to help build a new alchemical institute to produce the philosopher’s stone—the final perfection of which would reestablish the empire in full.17 In his partially lost 1577 manuscript “Famous and Rich Discoveries,” Dee speaks of how he would ascend above the heavens, to look down upon the earth and divine the Northwest Passage.
The cover of the Memorials depicts Elizabeth helming a ship representing British imperialism, with the angel Michael flying before her with sword and shield in hand and the Tetragrammaton above her, the ship being drawn forth by “Lady Occasion” toward freshly conquered territories. Following this are several pages rebuking Dee’s reputation as a sorcerer—Murphyn and Prestall’s attacks had been so successful that Dee was forced to address their slander upfront.
The four volumes of Dee’s imperial magnum opus were as follows:
-
General and Rare Memorials, completed and still extant. This addressed raising funds for and constructing a Petty Navy Royal of sixty 120-ton to 200-ton “tall ships” and twenty small warships weighing between twenty and fifty tons each, staffed by 6,600 well-paid men, the funds to be raised through taxation, as the wealth gained by imperial expansion would trickle down to the English people. This navy, Dee thought, would be the “Master Key” that would solidify English dominance, a “war machine”10 to guard England against its enemies. Although Dee was not originally concerned with state affairs, court politics would later force Dee to rewrite the Memorials to encourage the support of Holland and Zealand. The combination of the Dutch and English militaries would solidify control over the Narrow Seas in the wake of Spain’s withdrawal from the Low Countries. Also disgusted by the state of the Thames (upon which Mortlake was situated), Dee added an ecological broadside against the improper use of nets to fish the river.18
Fig. 3. Cover of Dee’s General and Rare Memorials, 1577.
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A set of navigational tables, calculated using Dee’s paradoxical compass, which would have been larger than the English Bible. This was unpublished and is presumed lost. (Dee’s paradoxical compass could have been used along with these tables to keep navigation precise; unfortunately, the newly drafted sailors found it too complex, and resisted training in its use.)19
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A volume so secret that Dee stated it “should be utterly suppressed or delivered to Vulcan’s custody” (i.e., burned).20 Also lost, this manuscript may well have dealt with angelic magic or other occult or astrological calculations relating to imperial expansion. It may also have had to do with Rome or the Spanish, which would have necessitated even greater secrecy than occult material.
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Of Famous and Rich Discoveries, which survived, albeit in a partly fire-destroyed form. Here Dee set forth the case for English expansion and territorial claims, and suggested exploratory voyages.21
Following the exploration of Newfoundland, Dee became concerned with discovering if America was a separate continent from Asia. Abraham Ortelius had suggested that a “Strait of Anian” connected the Northwest Passage to the Pacific; however, North America was suspected to be so large that anybody who tried to discover this passage by entering Newfoundland where Frobisher had and continuing to sail west would run out of supplies and freeze to death long before hitting the Pacific. Yet if one were to sail south, rounding the tip of South America, conditions would be far more favorable to continued sailing, and an expedition could look for the outlet of the Northwest Passage on the other side of North America. In the pages of Of Famous and Rich Discoveries, Dee made a compelling case that England should do exactly that.22
To undertake this perilous voyage, Dee and Elizabeth looked to an unlikely candidate: the privateer and slave trader Francis Drake. Drake undertook the mission between 1577 and 1580, taking a fleet of six ships, including his own Pelican. The voyage was beset by storms, loss of personnel, mutiny, and ship rot—by the time Drake reached the Pacific, only the Pelican remained, which he rechristened the Golden Hind. Drake proceeded up the coast of South America, attacking Spanish settlements and capturing ships as he went, looting treasure, wine, and maps in the process. Had Drake been commanding an official English fleet, this would have been an act of war, but his privateer status lent England plausible deniability, making Drake’s raids a form of naval black ops. In June 1579, he landed at what is now called Drake’s Bay, north of San Francisco, before reversing course, and returning to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the Sierra Leone. Upon his arrival, the logs of the expedition, and therefore the route Drake had discovered, were immediately ordered classified.23 Drake returned to England a celebrity, and was knighted soon thereafter.
As soon as Drake returned, plans for another voyage began to coalesce. In September 1580, Humphrey Gilbert and Dee drew up a plan that, should Gilbert gain control of the northern New World, Dee would receive everything above the fiftieth parallel—granting him Alaska and the majority of Canada.24 Two years later, Dee still suspected that a Northwest Passage existed across the top of North America, and drew a map for Gilbert depicting it, in which he placed the West Coast of North America only 140 degrees west of England.25
Meanwhile, on February 5, 1578, Dee had married Jane Fromoundes. Supported by Elizabeth, he had proposed only a few months after the death of his first wife, Kathryn Constable, in March 1575. Jane was a member of court, a gentlewoman servant to Lady Katherine Howard, Elizabeth’s best friend. Fromoundes’s Catholic family hardly approved of the “arch-conjuror”; her father, Bartholomew Fromoundes, died of a stroke the day after John and Jane Dee’s son Arthur was born.26 Dee may have had one eye on securing a better position for himself by marrying into court. Unfortunately, to Dee’s lifelong disadvantage, there was no patronage for scientists during Elizabeth’s reign—unlike the Continent—explaining Dee’s quest for patronage abroad. The best Dee could hope for in England was an academic or Church position, and even these he was regularly frustrated in attaining.27
In the meantime, sectarian conflict was only intensifying. Over the previous decade, the Protestant Low Countries had exploded into open revolt against Spain’s Catholic rule, which would soon result in the formation of an independent Dutch Republic, and suggest strategic alliances with England. This added to the backdrop of war between the Protestant and Catholic spheres. Dee was soon called upon to defend Elizabeth from Catholic magical attack yet again, when wax images of Elizabeth and members of the Privy Council were discovered in a dunghill—as the dunghill melted the wax, by the logic of sympathetic magic, so would Elizabeth and her council come to harm.
Though the Council was as alarmed by Dee’s countermagic as they were by the original sorceric attack, Dee found himself well positioned: Dudley needed him to dig up as much evidence as possible on Catholic magical attacks, as this would assist Dudley against his Catholic rivals at court. Those captured thanks to Dee’s detections were held and tortured.28 Among those arrested on Dee’s cue was John Prestall, who was tied to a suspected Catholic conspiracy to magically attack the queen. Elizabeth was indeed ailing, but the cause was probably poor dental hygiene, not the occult. Prestall—whom Dee may have had arrested at least partially out of desire for revenge—was tortured for over a month, but no information on any conspiracy was forthcoming. The Council subsequently fetched Prestall’s cosaboteur Vincent Murphyn for interrogation.29
While Dee was sent to seek a cure for Elizabeth’s ailment from the German alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser, Dudley whipped up a propaganda war against Catholic sorcery, which could be lurking around any corner. But Dee and Dudley’s occult pogrom collapsed when it was revealed that the magician Thomas Elkes had made the wax dolls as part of a love spell for a client. Dee was revealed to have been wrong the entire time.30
After long decades of theoretical work, Dee was now turning his attention to actual operative magic—he had embarked on a series of alchemical experiments with an assistant named Roger Cook, as well as attempts at angelic contact with Humphrey Gilbert’s brother Adrian.31 The court, perhaps impressed with any magic Dee had performed to alleviate perceived attacks against the queen, also furnished Dee with a new scryer, Bartholomew Hickman.32
In the meantime, Dee’s enemies were plotting their revenge against the “arch-conjuror.” Prestall was now locked in the Tower under a death sentence, where he would stay until 1588; this left Murphyn to counteraccuse Dee of being a Catholic conspirator who was himself working magic against the queen. Dee’s occult experiments at Mortlake would furnish Murphyn with new ammunition. Dee sued in response.33
So alarmed was Elizabeth with Dee’s absence from court that on September 17, 1580, she traveled to Mortlake to roust him from his studies herself, riding by coach and appearing in his garden; as Dee recorded in his diary, “She beckoned her hand for me. I came to her coach side: she very speedily pulled off her glove and gave me her hand to kiss: and to be short, willed me to resort to her Court.”34 Two weeks later, Dee arrived at court to hand deliver a new manuscript, the Brytanici imperii limites or “Limits of the British Empire.”
Addressed solely to Elizabeth and her Privy Council, the Limits sought to establish a spiritual mandate not only for giving Elizabeth control of both the Low Countries and America, but for establishing her as the sovereign of a new global order. Dee now privately elaborated the occult and esoteric dimensions of the Memorials that he had wisely withheld from the general public.35 Just as he believed the Memorials to have been divinely inspired by angels, Dee thought he had been moved to write the Limits by the Holy Trinity itself. The same angelic idea that had inspired him, he believed, had inspired Edgar I’s naval expansion in the tenth century.36
Dee argued that during his reign King Arthur had held dominion not only of America, but of thirty countries.37 If this was indeed the case, then England had at least as much of a spiritual claim to world power as Rome, and all Elizabeth had to do was assume his mantle and become the Arthurian world empress. Even Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, whose court circle Dee had connections with during his time at Louvain, had long seen Arthur as the model on which the future world ruler would be based. After the Dutch Revolt, it was hoped that Elizabeth would claim Dutch sovereignty—and that she, and not a Habsburg, would become the Arthurian world emperor, uniting the globe under the banner of a reformed Christendom.38
Mercator himself had written to Dee that King Arthur had sent an expedition of four thousand men into the seas near the North Pole, and that some of the members of the team had survived, with their descendants appearing at court in Norway in 1364. Also of interest was the Welsh legend of Madoc, a prince who supposedly explored the New World in 1170; Dee not only feverishly sought to discover evidence of Madoc’s existence in Spanish records of America, but believed that he was descended from the prince. Claims by Dee that Arthur had ruled over “Hollandia” only added to the case for Elizabeth becoming the world emperor of Christendom. Maps drawn up by Dee on the foundation of the Arthurian claim to the New World sprawled from Florida to Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.39
Save the Arthurian angle, this was not a new idea—the hope for a last world emperor had long been part of Catholic eschatology, with the long-expected monarch reestablishing a new Roman Empire with dominion over the entire globe, as a bulwark against the Antichrist. This final emperor had been predicted in the widely known seventh-century Syriac text Apocalypse by Pseudo-Methodius, a product of Eastern Christianity, which prophesied that Christendom would be savaged by Muslim invaders as God’s retribution for widespread sexual licentiousness, including homosexuality and even transgenderism. This onslaught would be overcome by the final Roman emperor, who would push back the forces of the Antichrist to come, who would be born in the village of Chorazin.*11
An earlier individual who had connected this apocalyptic prophecy with European exploration of the New World was none other than Christopher Columbus. After the completion of his voyages, Columbus composed a religious text entitled El libro de las profecias, the “Book of Prophecies,” which suggested (following Joachim of Fiore) that four critical events were necessary to prompting the Second Coming. These were the Christianization of the planet, the discovery of the physical Garden of Eden, a final Crusade to recover Jerusalem from Islam, and, ultimately, the election of a last world emperor to ensure the crushing of Islam, the retaking of the Holy Land, and the return of Christ to the world.40
While Columbus had held out for Ferdinand and Isabella to assume this world emperor role, Dee’s plan marked a radical departure by suggesting that the world emperor should be Protestant, not Catholic—Elizabeth. Where the Catholic and Protestant vanguards of exploration differed was not in their goals, but in jockeying for control. As a result, Dee set to work building a case for Elizabeth-as-emperor, using the Arthurian claim to the New World.
Dee was further encouraged in his belief that Elizabeth should assume world power by Trithemius,41 whose De septem secundeis concerns itself not with terrestrial empires but rather with the course of history. For Trithemius, history was ruled by seven angels corresponding to the seven planets, each of which held regency over a period of 354 years and 4 months, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. Trithemius’s scheme held a deep appeal for Dee, who nevertheless recalculated the senior initiate’s math, assigning the Elizabethan period to the angel Anael, Venus, on account of the great number of female leaders in Europe, as well as the 1572 supernova. And though Elizabeth’s regency was currently guaranteed by the angel of Venus, a shift to the age of Jupiter was imminent. Dee felt it his sacred duty to initiate British expansion before Jupiter arrived and the window passed.42
Like Dee’s later Monas, De septem secundeis had been addressed to the Holy Roman emperor—in this case Maximilian I, not II; Trithemius’s introduction to the work suggests that he was delivering it to the emperor not as his own work but as an emissary of a body of initiates who concurred that, indeed, seven spirits corresponding to the seven planets, proceeding from the first Intellect, ruled the world in successive periods. This concept was not unique to Trithemius—some early Gnostics held to a doctrine of seven Archons, or evil “rulers” of reality, who were arguably related to the seven planets.[43][43] In the nineteenth century, the dispensationalist evangelical John Nelson Darby would propose that there were seven distinct periods or dispensations of world history, beginning with the Fall and culminating with the Second Coming, a belief system now adhered to by the majority of American evangelical Christians.
Just as with the similar Hindu system of Yugas,44 Trithemius’s scheme outlines rising and falling curves in the quality of the overall consciousness in humanity, with debased periods marked by witchcraft, the worship of multiple gods, and even the worship of princes and rulers as gods. The great drama of history, for Trithemius, hinges on celestial events as well as terrestrial political shifts, with comets and other events in the skies marking the progress of history—like (as Dee did not fail to note) the supernova of 1572 and the Great Comet of 1577.
Remarkably, De septem secundeis, composed in 1508, predicts “the institution of some new Religion,” that “a strong sect of Religion shall arise, and be the overthrow of the Ancient Religion. It’s to be feared least the fourth beast lose one head.”45 The fourth beast is the fourth beast of Apocalypse from Daniel, a world kingdom that devours the earth. As Trithemius was writing the Septem, Martin Luther had only just been ordained a priest. It was not until 1517 that he would post the Ninety-Five Theses and spark the Reformation. Even if Trithemius was extrapolating future events from pre-Luther European sentiment, his prescience was outstanding. And thanks to Dee, a world kingdom was indeed about to arise to devour the world.
If Dee’s calculations were correct—and Elizabeth had both a legal mandate for imperialism, following Arthur, and an astrological one, following Trithemius—then this opened the way for the true apocalyptic goal of establishing an evangelical British Empire: converting the entire world to Christianity, and thereby assuring that the souls of the world’s inhabitants were accounted for prior to the Second Coming. While the new empire would be a Protestant one, Dee was not exclusively Protestant in his imperial scheme, suggesting that Elizabeth convert the American Indians partly to Protestantism, partly to Catholicism. The idea that Elizabeth would convert the world to Christianity and lead it into the eschaton as its reigning sovereign was not unique to Dee; it was broadly circulating in English society at this time, with the end of the world predicted for 1588 by the author and translator James Sandford.46
As payment for his intellectual contribution, Dee requested free reign in the dominions under Elizabeth’s absolute protection, to fulfill unspoken services for the empire—not for Elizabeth, but under the direction of God himself.47 This would have meant the expansion (or recovery) of the now-named British Empire, including America. Dee’s use of the term British Empire long predated the use of the word British to mean the British Isles; it referred instead to Arthur’s legendary Britain, reaching to North America.48
Though Dee’s occult expansionism captivated the Privy Council, including Dudley and Philip Sidney, Cecil was underwhelmed. Despite the grandiose patriotism of Dee’s plan, Cecil scoffed at Dee’s claims of Elizabeth’s Arthurian genealogy, and, most of all, the foreign policy disaster that overtly pushing Elizabeth as the world sovereign would create. Part of the reason Cecil may have soured on Dee was that shortly before their meeting he had entertained Vincent Murphyn, and heard the cunning man’s concocted story of Dee’s Catholic plotting. Whether he believed Murphyn or not, enough of a germ of suspicion was raised that Cecil decided he was unable to take even the slightest security risk. Patiently sitting through Dee’s arguments, Cecil grew irritated and finally stonewalled Dee altogether.49
Dee, now fifty-three, had offered up the fruit of his youth and of his Great Work; the Memorials and Limits had been the culminating achievement of his laborious studies, his burning patriotism, his far travels, and even the tortures he had endured for staying loyal to England. He had given everything to advance the cause of his country. Despite little to no recognition or recompense, Dee had continued toiling in Elizabeth’s service for decades, producing the imperial plan that would save his nation from poverty and conquest, for which Dee regarded himself a “Christian Aristotle.”50 Yet the response from Elizabeth’s court in general, and Cecil in particular, had been to say “thank you very much,” take his work, and show him the door. Dee must have been heartbroken.
Returning to Mortlake in defeat, Dee found his mother seriously ill. She died soon thereafter, compounding the sorrow of one of Dee’s darkest hours. Elizabeth visited him personally the same day to console him, telling him that all was not lost, and that she would study his plan in greater detail—even that Cecil had been impressed by his historical reasoning. Cecil later sent Dee a joint of venison—small payment for the gift of an empire. Yet no reversal of Cecil’s (apparent) decision to shut Dee and his plan out would be forthcoming, and Dee, who shrank in fear from Cecil, would find himself progressively estranged from court. Shifting European politics would make Dee’s apocalyptic imperial thinking less relevant, and further voyages to the New World would fail to turn up any evidence of Arthurian settlements, undermining Dee’s claims. In the midst of this, Murphyn attacked Dee yet again, although Dee now had an ally in Elizabeth, as Murphyn was later brought up on charges for slandering the queen.
While Dee himself was shut out of Elizabethan geopolitical strategizing, his plan itself would soon be enacted. England would develop great naval might, take the New World, triumph over the Spanish, and establish a British Empire. But Dee, the initiating magus, would enjoy no part of it, not even as a commercial partner; Dee’s place in the “Fellowship of New Navigations Atlantical and Septentional” would be taken by the younger Sir Walter Raleigh.51 History itself would forget Dee’s role in establishing the empire, passing over his legacy in favor of that of Richard Hakluyt, Francis Drake, and Raleigh—despite the fact that Dee was far more central to planning.52 Dee’s contribution was providing the justification and story behind why expansion was important, christening the nascent British Empire and giving his child a life script and ideology.53
In time, this single idea of a British Empire, dreamed up by an eccentric English academic—or given to him by the archangel Michael, as Dee believed—would come to dominate the planet. Following World War I, the “Empire on which the sun never sets” claimed over 458 million subjects, somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of the world’s population,54 and covered a full fourth of the land on Earth as well as most of the world’s oceans.55 What had once been a tiny nation that would today be considered developing—wracked by poverty, hunger, religious terrorism, and fearful superstition—now dwarfed the achievements of Alexander, Caesar, or the Khans. During its time, the empire controlled Canada, the eastern colonies in America, parts of the Indies and British Guiana, a large swathe of Africa, much of the Middle East including Palestine and Iraq, India, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Antarctica, and many more territories around the world.
If we are to consider the American empire to be the logical successor of the British one, to which global power was transferred when its progenitor began to collapse due to financial overextension, then we must also hold John Dee as the great-grandparent of the modern world. This Anglo-American world order is ruled not by a single world sovereign but by a bureaucratic centralization of power, united not under the banner of Protestantism but under that of its crowned and conquering child, the single world religion of global capitalism, yet with the exact same Protestant eschatology operating in the background.
And if all of this can be said to stem from revelations given to Dee by Michael, it fires the imagination to consider that the Islamic world stems from the utterance of Michael’s companion Gabriel, who gave Muhammad the Quran, and would also be present at Dee’s later angelic conversations. It is also Gabriel who told Mary of the coming birth of Christ. Angels guided Abraham and were present at the delivery of the Law to Moses, creating Judaism; Michael is said to safeguard the state of Israel. Yet if all of these things were indeed created by the same beings, why do they consistently come into conflict with each other?
If geopolitics are a “grand chessboard,”56 as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, then the players are the angels, and they play multiple sides. God works, we are told, in mysterious ways, though God’s workers should look to store up for themselves “treasures in heaven,”57 rather than this world, if Dee’s payment with a single haunch of meat is any indicator.
Can all of this be said to serve a greater good? It depends on whether one accepts a teleological view of history. If, like Teilhard de Chardin or John Dee, you believe that time is moving toward an Omega Point or eschaton—the Second Coming of Christ—it all comes into focus.58 After all, the angels who exiled mankind east of Eden also, through the British occupation of Palestine, laid the groundwork for the modern state of Israel east of the Mediterranean, upon which both Judaic and evangelical Christian eschatology, and the final redemption of mankind, thereby hangs.
As to the empire itself—how to even begin assessing the effects of Dee’s creation on the world?
The archly conservative English historian Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was the best of all possible empires; it was considered a leading light in the world, the “global policeman” before America inherited the mantle, and by comparison, its rival empires—the French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and others—were even more monstrous. Indeed, Ferguson argues, the British Empire was a liberal one, built on the principles of Edmund Burke, with occupied territories expected to come to self-governance.59
But the empire was not without its atrocities. Among them were the ongoing rape of India under the Raj and tens of millions of continual starvation deaths, including the 1760s Bengal famine in which one-third of the Bengali population died (with some victims resorting to cannibalism) while England grew fat on the spoils,60 and the nineteenth-century policies that resulted in the hunger deaths of twenty-nine million Indians.61 There were the massacres of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by British colonists, including the use of smallpox blankets as biological warfare during the Siege of Fort Pitt—an estimated two to eighteen million Native Americans died during European colonization of North America, in part thanks to English settlers.62 In the Oceania region, Tasmanians and Australian aborigines were genocided by the English en masse.
Then there was the role of the slave trade in building the empire—until the 1807 British abolition of slavery, the English transported over 3.5 million Africans to the Americas to be used in forced labor, one-third of the total transatlantic slave traffic.63 Once colonies were established, British efforts toward crushing rebellions were severe, as in the Sudan, Ceylon (where 1 percent of the population was killed in a single retribution), Jamaica, Burma, the detainment of almost the entire Kenyan population in camps (in which thousands were beaten to death or died from disease, including almost all of the children),64 South Africa (where one-sixth of the Boer population died in English concentration camps, primarily children), Afghanistan, and Iraq.
These are, of course, only some of the crimes we know about. Many of the archived records detailing the abuses committed during the final years of the empire were intentionally and illegally destroyed by the Foreign Office before they could be moved into the public domain, allegedly including records of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents; the massacre of unarmed Malayan villagers by the Scots Guard; records of a secret torture center in Aden, Yemen; and all of the sensitive records pertaining to British Guiana.65 While the empire spread across the globe, racism, cruelty, and genocide followed in its shadow.
Perhaps the nineteenth-century British politician Lord Salisbury summarized the empire best when he quipped, “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.”66
[43]: #0xx0oA “On the Origin of the World, Nag Hammadi Codex 2, 5, in Barnstone and Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, 416–37."
Adolescence is the phase of conflict par excellence with parents. Many blahblahgists attribute this critical phase to youth hardships, to media education, and instead the reason is much more prosaic. The adolescent, actually a man (or woman) in all respects, enters into competition with the parents who at that moment become rivals. This settles down as parents age, drop hormonally and become, as it were, children of their children.
The son is not spoilt or something else. Adolescence is a product of civilization which, as such, projects forward a life path that, conversely, would see man become a father at fourteen and die at thirty-five-forty. To push the so-called problematic teenager is his testosterone which places him in conflict with his parents. Who, on the other hand, have total responsibility for his person and are obliged to put a stop to him.
The young man would already like to copulate with the nymphet he met on the street, the young woman would already like to be penetrated by the hypertrophic bull she met in the discos, both would like money, motorcycles, travel, benefits but father and mother institutionally represent the brake that prevents them from living fully their own sexuality, their own well-being. Things that in a jungle they would be gained through conflict with other congeners but that in civilization they are limited by the laws.
If the adolescent is in a position to take care of himself, he can safely leave his father's home. But since this is never the case, the abandonment of father and mother is a whim that, especially if taken to the extreme (as unfortunately in the sad cases of patricide that the news shows us) is paid dearly. The other side of freedom is responsibility. When you no longer have a father and a mother, you are not only free to do what you want, you are also at the mercy of any storm that life throws in front of us.
The relationship between man and God is something similar. The “core business” of every religion is to provide the human being with an illusion that makes more bearable the sad fate that awaits him. A guide. Support. A father, a mother. It is not by chance that God is called as Father. And Our Lady, it goes without saying, mother. As our fathers and mothers age and die and are human, therefore fallible, we realize that, not for this reason, we stop being children. Those who have the misfortune of being an orphan and of not being a believer thus find themselves in a situation of very serious inner crisis, dictated by the awareness of their own fragility. If he/she goes through a moment of economic difficulty or, worse still, is unable to support himself or herself because he/she is too young or because of a job crisis, he/she gets a terrible blow from the loss of parents, realizing at that moment how stupid teenage riots were.
Similarly, those who are unable to keep their soul upright realize that God's death is not the so-hoped-for “free lair”. For centuries, Man has tried to kill God, to free himself from that inner restraint constituted by the presence of robust and pervasive rules which, even if they were to be based on a fantasy, still constituted a foundation, a guide. Man in adolescent crisis, with blows of progress, democracy, egalitarianism, has killed God. But he did this deicide before being able to find his own spiritual independence, his ability to know how to accept his own destiny, characteristic of every true layman, just like the reckless one of Pietro Maso [1], killed his parents to pocket the family inheritance and delude himself to lead a life based solely on the narcissistic cult of his own person.
Above all, one thing happens to every orphan and every atheist. Often it is crossed by many profiteers, ready to illegally occupy that role. The orphan is forced to identify in each future partner a father or a surrogate mother, not realizing that, however much he/she may take on appearance, he/she is not and will never be a father or a mother.
The atheist believes in magicians, witches, ideologies, including that of a paternal State, which takes care of all.
Behind many wrong marriages there is just this, behind the belief that a magician can succeed where a good doctor has failed, behind political tyrannies: despair, fear of physical and spiritual loneliness, the inability to know how to take care not only of our body but also of our spirit. Thus, what Chesterton said is fulfilled:
“Whoever does not believe in God is not that he or she no longer believes in anything, from that moment on he or she believes in everything.
By killing God without really becoming adults, with all the burden of suffering that this entails, we realized that we are not free, we are simply poor. We are rafts wandering aimlessly in the ocean, with forces that are about to run out and that will soon be swept away by the waves. And all this I say as a non-believer. As an orphan, in every sense.
In short, with respect speaking, I am, we're, in a bad patch.
Those who feel excluded from this speech and are tempted to insult me, know that instead they have my most sincere congratulations: I would like to be filled with insults if this meant a happier mankind.
[1] Italian patricide. With the help of three friends of him, In 1991 he killed both his parents.
Original column by Franco Marino:
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo
This article is a follow-up to :
"Understanding International Relations (1/2)", by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, August 18, 2020.
The Great Mosque of Damascus is the only place of worship in the world where every day for centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have prayed to the same one God.
A historical region, artificially divided
Contrary to popular belief, no one really knows what the Levant, the Near East or the Middle East is. These terms have different meanings depending on the times and political situations.
However, today’s Egypt, Israel, the State of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf principalities have several millennia of common history. Yet their political division dates back to the First World War. It is due to the secret agreements negotiated in 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes (British Empire), François Georges-Picot (French Empire) and Sergei Sazonov (Russian Empire). This draft treaty had fixed the division of the world between the three great powers of the time for the post-war period. However, as the Tsar had been overthrown and the war did not go as hoped, the draft treaty was only applied in the Middle East by the British and French alone under the name of the "Sykes-Picot agreements". They were revealed by the Bolsheviks, who opposed the Tsarists, notably by challenging the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and helping their Turkish ally (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk).
From all this, it emerges that the inhabitants of this region form a single population, composed of a multitude of different peoples, present everywhere and closely intermingled. Each current conflict is a continuation of past battles. It is impossible to understand current events without knowing the previous episodes.
For example, the Lebanese and the Syrians of the coast are Phoenicians. They commercially dominated the ancient Mediterranean and were overtaken by the people of Tyre (Lebanon) who created the greatest power of the time, Carthage (Tunisia). This was completely razed to the ground by Rome (Italy), then General Hannibal Barca took refuge in Tyre (Lebanon), and in Bithynia (Turkey). Even if one is not aware of it, the conflict between the gigantic self-proclaimed coalition of the "Friends of Syria" and Syria continues the destruction of Carthage by Rome and the conflict of the same so-called "Friends of Syria" against Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Resistance, continues the hunt for Hannibal during the fall of Carthage. In fact, it is absurd to limit oneself to a state reading of the events and to ignore the trans-state cleavages of the past.
Or again, by creating the Daesh jihadist army, the United States magnified the revolt against the Franco-British colonial order (The Sykes-Picot agreements). The "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" claims no more and no less than to decolonize the region. Before trying to disentangle the truth from the propaganda, one must accept to understand how the events are felt emotionally by those who live them.
Perpetual War
Since the beginning of history, this region has been the scene of wars and invasions, sublime civilizations, massacres and more massacres of which almost all the peoples of the region have been victims each in turn. In this context, the first concern of each human group is to survive. That is why the only peace agreements that can last must take into account their consequences for other human groups.
For example, for seventy-two years it has been impossible to reach an agreement between the European settlers in Israel and the Palestinians because the price that other actors in the region would have to pay has been neglected. The only peace attempt that brought all the protagonists together was the Madrid conference convened by the USA (Bush senior) and the USSR (Gorbachev) in 1991. It could have been successful, but the Israeli delegation was still clinging to the British colonial project.
The peoples of the region have learned to protect themselves from this conflicting history by hiding their true leaders.
For example, when the French exfiltrated the Syrian "Prime Minister", Riad Hijab, in 2012, they thought they could rely on a big fish to overthrow the Republic. However, he was not constitutionally the "Prime Minister", but only the Syrian "President of the Council of Ministers". Like the White House chief of staff in the United States, he was just a senior government secretary, not a politician. His defection was of no consequence. Even today, Westerners still wonder who the men around President Bashar al-Assad are.
This system, indispensable for the country’s survival, is incompatible with a democratic regime. Major political options should not be discussed in public. The states of the region are therefore asserting themselves either as republics or as absolute monarchies. The President or Emir embodies the Nation. In the Republic, he is personally accountable to universal suffrage. The large posters of President Assad have nothing to do with the cult of personality that is observed in some authoritarian regimes, they illustrate his office.
All that lasts is slow
Westerners are used to announcing what they’re going to do. Orientals, on the contrary, declare their goals, but hide how they think they will achieve them.
Shaped by the streaming television news channels, Westerners imagine that every action has an immediate effect. They believe that wars can be declared overnight and situations resolved. On the contrary, Orientals know that wars are planned at least a decade in advance and that the only lasting changes are changes in mentality that take one or more generations.
Thus, the "Arab Springs" of 2011 are not spontaneous eruptions of anger to overthrow dictatorships. They are the implementation of a carefully crafted plan by the British Foreign Office in 2004, revealed at the time by a whistleblower, but went unnoticed. This plan was modelled on the "Great Arab Revolt" of 1916-18. The Arabs were convinced that it was an initiative of the Sheriff of Mecca, Hussein ben Ali, against the Ottoman occupation. It was actually a British plot, implemented by Lawrence of Arabia, to seize the oil wells on the Arabian Peninsula and put the Wahhabi sect in power. The Arabs never found freedom there, but the British yoke after the Ottomans. Identically, the "Arab Springs" did not aim to liberate anyone, but to overthrow governments to put the Muslim Brotherhood (secret political brotherhood organized on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England) in power throughout the region.
Religion is both the worst and the best
Religion is not only an attempt to link man to the transcendent, it is also a marker of identity. Religions therefore both produce exemplary men and structure societies.
In the Middle East, every human group identifies with a religion. There are an incredible number of sects in this region and creating a religion is often a political decision.
For example, the first followers of Christ were Jews in Jerusalem, but the first Christians - that is, the first disciples of Christ who did not consider themselves Jews - were in Damascus around St. Paul of Tarsus. Identically, the first disciples of Muhammad were in the Arabian Peninsula, they were considered Christians who had adopted a particular Bedouin rite. But the first disciples of Mohammed to differentiate themselves from Christians and to call themselves Muslims were in Damascus around the Umayyads. Alternatively, Muslims divided into Shiites and Sunnis depending on whether they followed the example of Muhammad or his teachings. But Iran did not become Shia until a Safavid emperor chose to distinguish Persians from Turks by converting them to this sect. Of course, today every religion ignores this aspect of its history.
Some states today, such as Lebanon and Iraq, are based on a distribution of posts according to quotas allocated to each religion. In the worst system, Lebanon, these quotas apply not only to the main functions of the State, but to all levels of the civil service down to the lowest civil servant. Religious leaders are more important than political leaders. As a result, each community places itself under the protection of a foreign power, the Shiites with Iran, the Sunnis with Saudi Arabia (and perhaps soon with Turkey), the Christians with Western powers. In fact, each one tries to protect itself from the others as it can.
"Other states like Syria are based on the idea that only the union of all communities can defend the Nation regardless of the aggressor and their links with any of the communities. Religion is a private matter. Everyone is responsible for the security of all".
The population of the Middle East is divided between secular and religious. But words have a special meaning here. It is not a question of believing or not believing in God, but of placing the religious domain in public or private life. Generally speaking, it is easier for Christians than for Jews and Muslims to see religion as a private matter, because Jesus was not a political leader while Moses and Mohammed were.
Mixing perceptions of God and group identity, religions can provoke irrational and extremely violent reactions, as political Islam has amply demonstrated.
The "Islamic State" (Daesh) is not a crazy fantasy, but is part of a political conception of religion. Its members are mostly normal people with the will to do good. It is a mistake to demonize them or to consider them as part of a sect. Rather, we should ask ourselves what blinds them to reality and makes them insensitive to their crimes.
Conclusion
Before making a judgement about a particular regional actor, it is necessary to know his or her history and trauma in order to understand his or her reactions to an event. Before judging the quality of a peace plan, one should ask not whether it benefits all those who signed it, but whether it will not harm other regional actors.
President Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ has been published this week. Mostly, it has been examined as a purely political project – whether in terms of the domestic needs of Trump and Netanyahu, or as a maximum squeeze on Palestinians, which may, or may not, work. But there is another (implicit) dimension, lying – a little out of sight – behind these explicit politics.
It has been argued, by at least one US historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a ‘civilizational power’ – like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘system leader’, historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant ‘lands’ that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as ‘our’ inevitable destiny.
It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics – and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America’s full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational ‘win’.
What has this to do with what happened in the East Room of the White House this Tuesday? Well, it gives us a better vantage point to perceive something less obvious than just the explicit politics to the spectacle. Something more often ‘felt’, than explicitly considered.
That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).
Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).
Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His immersion in the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation, and the next. And the Israel of today, is no longer as secular as it once was, but rather, is in transit back towards Yahweyism — which is to say, away from the law of a secular state founded by the Zionists, towards traditional Hebraic law as revealed in the Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christians). Netanyahu implicitly reverts to Hebraic tradition (from secular norms), when he states flatly that as ‘leader’, he should not be removed from power. In other words, Israel is becoming more, not less, ‘biblical’.
So, back to last Tuesday, when an Israeli leader speaks of Trump having secured Israel’s destiny, he is not just resorting to flowery flattery for the US President. The emphasis on ‘destiny’ is flagging something lurking in the background: “Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others”, Guyénot writes, “because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an empire”.
An ‘empire’ – as in Isaiah, which describes the messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob”; when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”
Further on in the same book, we read: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). Pretty clear: this is not just run of the mill nationalism.
Aren’t such quotes just too historically arcane? What has this to do with last Tuesday? Well, a lot. Because these notions of election, of an exceptional mission and destiny are literally believed by many Americans, as well as by Jews. The point about last Tuesday – from this implicit vantage point – is that it then becomes evident that Trump’s “deal” is not about any two-state solution. Why would Trump encourage a rival state to emerge, or for that matter anything that would impede the path towards Israel’s becoming the dominant civilisational power in the Middle East? What Tuesday was about was firstly, conditioning the Palestinians – squeezing them – to accept that they have no alternative, but to offer their fealty to the regional ‘system leader’ (Israel). And secondly, as phase two, to assimilate subordinated Sunni components, under the regional Pax Judaica umbrella.
These old prophesies may not be uppermost in the daily consciousness of many contemporaries. But they are alive, and present in the Hebraic world. And they are wholly present in one key US constituency: Trump’s Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). They see the actualisation of Israel’s destiny as an eschatological necessity: It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported the Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA. The Evangelicals may be unlikely to switch to vote Democrat, but if enough simply sit on their hands and don’t vote Trump, it could tip ‘swing constituencies’ in the November US Presidential elections.
The Evangelicals were, of course, very happy with Tuesday’s outcome. Israel’s civilisational imperium is, they believe, now assured – at least between the west bank of the River Jordan and the sea. The actualisation of these prophesies has the effect of hastening the arrival of the Redeemer (for these Christian Zionists).
And here again, our vantage point helps to understand a wider paradigm, which centres around the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. American leaders today increasingly refer to the US as having a Judeo-Christian culture. Might the term not seem something of an oxymoron: Wasn’t Christianity supposed to represent a fundamental break with Jewish textual law? Certainly, Saint Paul proclaimed Christianity was exactly that. The question is: does this Judeo-Christian self-labelling imply some subtle change: That some American élites are becoming unconsciously more Hebraic? In which direction is the core cultural ‘vision’ travelling? Israel originally was viewed as a recipient outpost for western Christian ‘values’ (in the days when Zionism largely was secular). Tuesday’s events suggests that the travel of values may be reversing.
But why this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ nomenclature in the first place? What is going on here? After the fall of Rome, circa 800, the leaders of the Frankish church precisely turned to the Old Testament as the basis to legitimise cultural war on Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, which the Franks then labelled (pejoratively) as ‘Greek’ – with its clear connotation of eastern ‘paganism’ and apostasy. And they further leveraged the Old Testament in order to reign Dei Gratia: as divine sovereignty, whether as Popes or Emperors (i.e. Charlemagne), demanding the unreserved fealty and discipline of their subjects. This Frankish ‘turn’ towards a ‘Judeo-Christianity’ gave Europe its feudalism; resulted in the obliteration of the Cathars as an exemplar punishment for ill-discipline; and saw the imposition of its Civilisational model (Judeo-Christianity) on the Middle East, via militarised Crusades. West Christianity was infused with the Hebraic textual tradition, then – and again, of course, with the rise of Protestantism. East Christianity (Orthodox Christianity) never was. The two Churches were split asunder at the Great Schism (1054).
This is the point: The Israeli civilisational vision may not be exactly the same as America’s, but America’s archetypal cultural stories – Abraham commanded to sacrifice his son – come from the Hebrew Bible. In short, the American exercise of power has never been more ‘Frankish’, as it were. And the exercise of it, increasingly is justified in terms of Israeli language – viz the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani.
This is the principal message to Tuesday’s events: When those on the American Right (such as Steve Bannon) speak incessantly of the need to sustainAmerica’s Judeo-Christian heritage, they almost certainly would see an Israeli project to spread its Pax Judaica right across the Middle East as a clear civilisational ‘win’ for America too. Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.
And this latter understanding perhaps offers yet another vantage point onto today’s politics. Why are American Evangelists so hostile to Iran? Because Iran presents the greatest obstacle to Israel’s Pax Judaica hegemony; or, is it more the case that the demise or implosion of the Islamic Republic, would constitute a civilisational ‘win’ for America and Israel, almost on a par with America’s Cold War ‘win’ over Communism? Is that what the withdrawal from the JCPOA – for the Evangelists, at least – was all about? A step on the way towards America, starting to ‘win again’ – towards Judeo-Christianity maintaining ‘system leadership?
On October 14, 2019, President Evo Morales told a GigaVision television interview that he had recordings of the preparation of a coup by far-right figures and former military personnel if he won the presidential election [1].
However, it was not exactly a coup d’état, but a simple overthrow of the constitutional president. There is no reason to believe that the new regime will be able to stabilize the country. This is the beginning of a period of chaos.
The riots that have driven the President, Vice-President, President of the Senate, President of the National Assembly and First Vice-President of the Senate to flee one after the other since October 21st have not ceased with the induction of the Second Vice-President of the Senate, Jeanine Áñez, on November 12th as Acting President. Her political party has only four deputies and senators out of one hundred and thirty. On the contrary, the appointment of a new government without indigenous people led the Indians to take to the streets instead of the killers who drove out the Morales government.
Everywhere, there is inter-ethnic violence. The local press reports public humiliations, rapes and counts the deaths.
While it is clear that President Áñez is supported by the army, it is not clear who drove her predecessor out. It could be a local force or a transnational corporation or both. The cancellation of a mega-lithium exploitation contract could have pushed a competitor to invest in the overthrow of the president.
Only one thing is certain: the United States of America, which is pleased with the turn of events, has not provoked them, even though US citizens and officials are probably involved, as the director of the Russian SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, has indicated.
The publication of a recording of a conversation between Colombian Foreign Minister Claudia Blum and her ambassador in Washington, Francisco Santos, in a café in the US capital leaves no doubt [2]: today US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is against any intervention in Latin America. He has already abandoned Venezuela’s self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó, plunging anti-Maduro Colombia into disarray, and refuses any contact with the many Latin American coup apprentices.
It appears that the appointment of Elliott Abrams as US Special Representative for Venezuela was not only a bargaining chip for the closure of the Russian investigation by Prosecutor Robert Mueller [3], but also a way to put an end to the neo-conservatives in the administration. This "diplomat" behaved so badly that in a few months he destroyed any hope of US imperialist intervention in Latin America.
Moreover, the US State Department is a field of ruins: high diplomats come to testify against President Trump before the House of Representatives committee charged with dismissing him.
But if the Trump administration is not leading the way, who is? Obviously the networks installed by the CIA in the 1950s to 1970s have beautiful remnants. Forty years later, they are still alive in many Latin American countries and can act on their own with little external support.
The shadows of the past
Ante Pavelić, leader of the Ustasa militia, and his protector, the Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb, Mgr. Alojzije Stepinac. The former is considered one of the worst criminals of the Second World War, the latter a Blessed One because of his fight against Titism.
When the United States decided to contain the USSR, the first director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and his brother the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, exfiltrated Axis militiamen all over the world to fight against the Communist Parties. They were brought together in an association, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) [4], which organized in Latin America the "Condor Plan" [5] aimed at organizing cooperation between pro-US regimes and at assassinating revolutionary leaders wherever they sought asylum.
Bolivian general-president Alfredo Ovando Candia (1965-70) entrusted the Nazi militiaman Klaus Barbie (the "butcher of Lyon") with the hunt for the Argentine Che Guevara, whom he succeeded in eliminating in 1967, as he had done, in 1943 with the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin. During the dictatorships of General Hugo Banzer Suárez (1971-78) and Luis García Meza Tejada (1980-81), the same Klaus Barbie, assisted by Stefano Delle Chiaie (a member of the Gladio who organized Prince Borghese’s failed coup), restructured the police and secret services.
However, after the resignation of US President Richard Nixon, the United States engaged in a major unpacking of the Church, Pike and Rockefeller commissions on the CIA’s secret activities. The world only discovered the foam of the waves, but it was already far too much. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as head of the CIA with the mission to clean up the service of its Axis collaborators and change pro-US regimes from "dictatorships" to "democracies". Hence the question: how were Klaus Barbie and Stefano Delle Chiaie able to supervise the repression in Bolivia until August 1981?
Clearly, they had managed to organize Bolivian society in such a way that they could do without the support of the White House and the CIA. They could be satisfied with the discreet help of a few senior US officials and the money of a few multinational companies. This is probably the same way the 2019 putschists acted.
During the anti-communist period, Barbie had facilitated the installation of Croat Oustachis who had facilitated his flight from Europe. This terrorist organization, created in 1929, claimed above all a Catholic identity and had the Holy See’s support against the Soviets. During the inter-war period, it carried out many political assassinations, including the one in France of the Orthodox King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, it allied itself with fascists and Nazis, while preserving its specificity. It massacred the Orthodox, but enlisted Muslims.
In total contradiction with original Christianity, it promoted a racialist vision of the world, not considering Slavs and Jews as human beings in their own right [6] The Ustashi, including their leader Ante Pavelić, fled Europe at the end of the Second World War to Argentina where they were welcomed by General Juan Perón. But some refused his policy and split. It was therefore the hardest group of people who emigrated to Bolivia [7].
For the neo-Oustachi Luis Fernando Camacho, "Bolivia belongs to Christ! "; a truism that no one disputes in a country where 98% of the population is Christian. What is he talking about exactly?
The Ustashi in Bolivia
Whatever the ethical reasons, it is always difficult to deprive oneself of a weapon. It is therefore not surprising that the collaborators expelled from the CIA by President Carter still collaborated with Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President and former CIA Director George Bush Sr. Some of them formed the "Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations" [8] mainly Ukrainians [9], Baltics [10] and Croats. All these criminals are in power today.
The Bolivian Ustashi have maintained links with their brothers in arms in Croatia, particularly during the 1991-95 war when they supported Franjo’s Christian Democratic Party (HDZ) Tuđman In Bolivia, they created the "Santa Cruz Youth Union", a militia known for its ratonades and murders of Aymara Indians. One of its former leaders, lawyer and businessman Luis Fernando Camacho, is now president of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee. He is the one who openly leads the nerves that drove the Aymara Evo Morales out of the country.
Identically, it seems that the new Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Iván Patricio Inchausti Rioja, is of Croatian Ustasa origin. It is he who leads the repression against the Indians with carte blanche to kill from President Jeanine Áñez.
The strength of Bolivian Ustashi does not come from their numbers. They are only a small group. Yet they managed to drive out President Morales. Their strength comes from their ideology: the instrumentation of religion to justify crime. In a Christian country, no one spontaneously dares to stand in the way of people claiming to be with Christ.
All Christians who have read or heard the new president announcing the return of the Bible or the Four Gospels to the government - she does not seem to make the difference between the two books - and denouncing "the satanic rites of the Indians" have been shocked. All believed that she came from some kind of sect. No, she’s a fervent Catholic.
For several years now, we have been warning against supporters at the Pentagon of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy who wish to do in the Caribbean Basin what they have done in the broader Middle East. Technically, their plan came up against the lack of a Latin force comparable to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. All the manipulations were the traditional opposition of "liberal capitalists" against "21st century socialists". Not anymore, I don’t. From now on, a political current within Catholicism advocates violence in the name of God. It makes chaos possible. Latino Catholics are in the same situation as Arab Sunnis: they must urgently condemn these people or be caught up in their violence.
This page, supplementing my page on the morality of liberalism, is an introduction to the idea of privilege, focusing mainly on race and sex. It's intended for the “nice guys” of privilege: people who don't want to be sexists and racists, but feel confused and uncomfortable when people point out that these are still problems.
It probably won't help your racist uncle. Don't send it to him; I don't need more mail from right-wingers.
I'll talk about what privilege is, how you can tell if you have some, and what you might do with that information.
I'll also cover the most common objections that come up, time after time, when these issues are discussed.
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Increasingly, we are seeing insistences that Social Justice has become a new religion. The purpose of this essay is to explore this topic [See video] in some depth. Because this essay is inordinately long—because the topic is inordinately complicated—it is broken into sections, as listed below. The reader is encouraged to engage with it in pieces and to treat it as he or she would a short book on this topic.
Table of Contents
- Social Justice and Religion – What I intend to say and not say about whether Social Justice is best thought of as a religion—mostly housekeeping and a bit dry
- Ideologically Motivated Moral Communities – A Durkheimian view of the religion-like sociocultural phenomenon to which both Social Justice and religions belong
- Religions Meet Needs – An elaboration on the previous section that explains why human beings organize into ideologically motivated moral communities
- Social Justice Institutionalized – A presentation of how Social Justice exhibits institutionalization, which is central to organized religions
- The Scholarly Canon – How academic scholarship in “grievance studies” serves as a scriptural canon for Social Justice
- Faith in Social Justice – An exposition on faith and its role in the Social Justice ideology
- The Mythological Core of Applied Postmodernism – A lengthy discussion of mythology inside and outside of religion and how postmodernism and its currently ascendant derivatives fit into this framework. (If you really want to understand the deepest part of this essay, it’s probably in this section, which can be read first if desired.)
- Pocket Epistemologies – A discussion of the means by which an ideological tribe aims to legitimize the “special knowledge” that serves it and how this manifests in Social Justice
- A Focus on the Unconscious – A more focused discussion upon the methods of special knowledge production of ideological tribes and the postmodern numinous experience
- Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer – A short section about the role these play in ideological tribes and how they manifest in Social Justice
- Gender Nuns and the Grand Wizards of the Diversity Board – Addresses the function of the priest caste within ideological tribes, including Social Justice, and how they put their faith into practice
- Summary – A short summary of the case made about whether Social Justice constitutes a religion. TL;DR: Yes and no, and mostly yes.
- What Can We Do with This? – A brief discussion of secularism, construed much more broadly than usual, and how it applies to dealing with a very religion-like Social Justice
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[Over 1 hour of very worthwhile reading]
James A. Lindsay is a thinker, not a philosopher, with a doctorate in math and background in physics. He is the author of four books and his essays have appeared in TIME, Scientific American, and The Philosophers’ Magazine. He led the "grievance studies affair" probe.
On October 11, 2018 a statement was released jointly by the two claimants to the title of Karmapa, His Holiness Ogyen Trinley Dorje and His Holiness Trinley Thaye Dorje.
The statement reads:
We are both very pleased to have had this opportunity to meet and get to know each other in a peaceful and relaxed environment. We both had this wish for many years, and we are gratified that this wish has now been fulfilled.
The purpose of our meeting was primarily to spend time together so that we could establish a personal relationship. We were able to talk together freely and to learn about each other for the first time. We were thus able to begin what we expect will develop into a strong connection.
While we were together we also talked about ways that we could work to heal the divisions that have unfortunately developed within our precious Karma Kagyu lineage in recent years. We view it as our duty and responsibility to do whatever we can to bring the lineage together.
This undertaking is critically important for the future of the Karma Kagyu lineage as well as for the future of Tibetan Buddhism and the benefit of all sentient beings. We therefore ask everyone within the Karma Kagyu community to join us in our efforts to strengthen and preserve our lineage. We view it as our collective responsibility to restore harmony to our tradition which is a lineage of wisdom and compassion.
His Holiness Ogyen Trinley Dorje
— His Holiness Trinley Thaye Dorje
The statement indicates a new era dawning for the Karma Kamtsang lineage, based on both Karmapas reaching out to each other and seeking to build a relationship based on understanding and compassion.
HH Ogyen Trinley Dorje is followed by a majority of Karma Kagyu devotees, but His Holiness Trinley Thaye Dorje has a significant following in India and a large network of centres in the West. The dispute over the Karmapa title polarized the lineage, and it entered a period of division and enmity, with significant teachers falling into both camps.
Several eminent lamas, such as H.H. the Gyalwang Drukpa or Beru Khyentse Rinpoche, have issued statements supporting this reconciliation.
Two Tibet experts have commented for Tibet Sun on the unexpected meeting of both Karmapas.
For Tibetologist Vijay Kranti from Delhi it is “a big welcome development on the Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhist front.” He comments further:
This development becomes more important because supporters of both religious gurus have been exchanging rival claims for the past many years. This had, unfortunately, done more harm to the Tibetan cause and image of Mahayana Buddhism in general, and the unity and image of Karma Kagyu school and its great lineage in particular. Non-Tibetan friends of Tibet, especially Indian well-wishers like myself, see it as a great positive sign.
The meeting reflects for Vijay Kranti an “admirable maturity and wisdom on the part of both spiritual masters.”
Tibetologist Thierry Dodin from France says that for him “it is still too early to make really qualified comments.” He stresses that nevertheless, “some points can be made already now to highlight the situation”:
First of all, this happens at a time when both find themselves in a phase of orientation in their personal lives, with decisions to take that will have a lasting impact.
Second, so far this was only a meeting to “establish a personal relationship” between the only two individuals who can repair the schism.
But, third, at the same time, however good a relationship may develop between them, the way ahead is going to be stony. Persons and institutions who lived from the schism a quarter of a century long are not going to simply disappear. Besides, there can be only one Karmapa really, and the facts which have been established in this time cannot be undone.
Through both Karmapas bringing forth the wisdom of reconciliation, may the lineage heal for the benefit of all its practitioners, and may the spirit of harmony carry long into the future.
Against Hell: A Refutation of the Buddhist Hell Realms, Based on Their Historic Origins, Political Purpose, Psychological Destructiveness, Irrationality, and Demonstrable Inconsistency With the Original Buddhist Teachings, Framed as A Searching Review of Sam Bercholz’s After-Death Memoir, "A Guided Tour of Hell"
We're all familiar with fire and brimstone preachers, and most of us associate that brand of religion with fundamentalist Christianity that still percolates with aggressive heat down in the Bible Belt. But fire and brimstone Buddhism? Who's into that? Well, there comes a time in the development of every religion when some dark and difficult secrets have to be revealed, and for Tibetan Buddhism, that time came in 2016, when Sam Bercholz decided to publish an account of his near-death experience ("NDE") of ten years before.
While it may come as a shock to American Buddhists weaned on the sweetened pap of the Dalai Lama’s message, that carefully avoids revealing the medieval roots of his religion, Buddhists have been notably aggressive about systematizing, concretizing, and inculcating the belief in hell in their followers. The most shocking example accessible online is the Thai Buddhist Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden, built in 1986. Two twenty-foot statues, a man and a woman, tower over the garden, their tongues protruding to below their waists, surrounded by twenty-one animal-headed demons. These are surrounded by a great number of life-sized torture scenes depicting naked men and women being disemboweled, having their tongues pulled out with pincers, being force-fed boiling liquids, having heads and limbs hacked off, being penetrated genitally with huge, bloody implements, being boiled, sawed in half, and in all too many other ways, having their bodies used as vehicles for the infliction of inconceivably severe pain.[2] Chinese Buddhists have created equally ghastly sculptures to terrorize the faithful.[3] By comparison with the Thai and Chinese depictions, Japanese hells are tasteful; however, the motivation behind their creation, and their ultimate effects, are equally disturbing.[4]
Hell Detail from Wheel of Life Thangka, Nechung Oracle Temple
Old Tibet was stuffed with grisly depictions of beings suffering in hell, like this one taken from a wheel-of-life thangka at the monastery of the state oracle at Nechung, that depicts the crushing, disembowelment, impalement, and boiling of the damned, finely adorned with gleaming gold leaf.[5] But until Bercholz recruited an artist to supercharge the traditional Buddhist descriptions of hell with a series of terrifying, surrealistic acrylic paintings, and fired up his printing press to disseminate those lurid visions around the globe, Tibetan Buddhists here in America had gotten by almost entirely without any visual depictions of hell. Now that we have received this questionable gift, however, we have to deal with it.
Who is Bercholz? He's the founder and owner of the world's largest publisher of Buddhist literature -- Boulder-based Shambhala Publishing.[6] It's no coincidence that Shambhala Publishing shares a name, personnel, and agenda with Shambhala International, the Tibetan Buddhist group founded by Bercholz's lama, Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala International was originally named "Vajradhatu," but changed its corporate name to Shambhala after Trungpa's Vajra Regent, Thomas Rich, brought the name into disrepute by infecting two people with the AIDS virus before dying of the disease himself. Shambhala International is now a spiritual monarchy, led by its "spiritual king," the Sakyong Mipham, who recently fled to Nepal after becoming the focus of a wide-ranging sex scandal. The Sakyong's sexual misdeeds range from drunken groping of party guests, to serial one-night stands with hundreds of willing and unwilling devotees, to rape and child abuse. These facts have been documented in three investigations conducted by his own disciples and attorneys, that strive to avoid revealing unsavory facts, but nonetheless ooze sleaze.
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In interview on 18 March with the 14th Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and most influential Buddhist leader in the world – a correspondent from Reuters raised a question which would seem very simple on the surface; the question of where and how the Dalai Lama’s impending reincarnation will take place, which directly affects China’s domestic policy, as well as issues in Chinese relations with other leading countries, especially India and the United States.
The 14th Dalai Lama has long been portrayed as the “head of the Tibetan Separatists’ Faction” in Beijing. We should not forget that in the wake of a serious revolt in Tibet, the Dalai Lama has been living in the city of Dharamsala in Northern India since 1959. The city is referred to as the “capital” of the Central Tibetan Administration.
It is worth noting that current Dalai Lama announced his departure from politics to focus on being the spiritual leader of all Buddhists in early 2011. In the same year, he articulated his position on questions concerning his future reincarnation for the first time, which is the ceremony for appointing the successor who will assume the post of the most famous leader of the Buddhism world.
The 14th Dalai Lama said then that he intends to make a decision on this issue when he is “about ninety years old”. The Dalai Lama is now 83 years old, which means that based on his time frame, he is still fairly far off the deadline he has set for himself. However, the statement he made in the interview with Reuters has not been the first of this kind.
A few years ago, the Dalai Lama did not rule out the possibility of a spiritual transformation into a kind of insect “or even a woman”, which goes to show that the Buddhist leader is in step with the today’s most forward-thinking schools of postmodern political and philosophical thought.
At the same time, this statement gave Beijing a chance to openly suggest that the country’s political opponent is incoherent and therefore, suggest that the Dalai Lama is unfit to perform the “extremely responsible” task of providing Buddhists with spiritual guidance, a great number of whom live in what is now the Tibet Autonomous Region of China.
This was followed by their logical conclusion that given the difficult situation that has unfolded, the reincarnation of the incumbent major Buddhist leader is too important to be left to his discretion. In light of the Dalai Lama’s inconsistency, the appropriate Chinese state authorities and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China are prepared to do the work to provide Buddhists with the care they need.
However, the Chinese leadership’s close involvement in every significant aspects of Buddhists’ spiritual life (as well as other religious denominations present in the country) has been observed for a long time and has long been subject to sharp criticism from the current Dalai Lama. Again in 2011, he used particularly strong words (such as “shame”) when he commented on China’s strict control of his Buddhist followers.
In the interview with Reuters that we have previously mentioned, the Dalai Lama did not rule out the possibility of “two Dalai Lamas”, of whom the “true” leader will be born in India this time, and not in his native Tibet.
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