WHY NOT CHRIST

By Jason / February 20, 2021

A recent review of Prometheism has become an opportunity for me to
address the question of Christianity head on, in a decisive and definitive
manner. Richard (Rik) Storey’s review, “Prometheism – A Libertarian
Religion”, published in The Warden Post on January 30th of 2021, is so
superficial that it really does not deserve a response. The following reply to
the review’s central question, “Why Not Christ?” (rather than Prometheus),
will certainly give Storey’s admittedly “reactionary” misreading of my book
much more traction than it has received and than it merits.

I am willing to let that happen because, around the same time that Storey
published his review, I began to notice that a number of otherwise
intelligent people in my intellectual circles seemed to be losing their minds
and giving their hearts to Jesus Christ – or at least cynically entertaining the
possibility of using Christianity as an ideological umbrella. I prefer not to
call out anyone by name, but this tendency needs to be confronted before
those who exemplify it wind up misguiding “the movement.” We call it the
“the movement” these days because after the implosion of the Alt-Right,
the New Right, which increasingly includes anti-“woke” disaffected leftwing
thinkers, is in the midst of a serious identity crisis. It is in this desperate
search for an overarching identity to unify disparate factions and deeply
divergent schools of thought that some are turning to a reaffirmation of
Christianity – in certain cases out of sincere (albeit pathetic) spiritual
desperation and in other cases with a view to political expediency.

In the wake of what many of us believe was a massive election fraud

perpetrated by a Deep State that has now seized total control of the US
government with the help of an entirely coopted and controlled media
(including Fox News), in light of the total destruction of freedom of speech
and expression, and a declaration of a “domestic war on terror” against
dissenters who have been painted with the broad brush of “white
supremacy”, defining an ideological basis for longterm resistance – and
eventual revolution – has become a priority. Those who are deluded
enough to believe that #Trump2024 or for that matter #Tucker/Tulsi2024 or
#Rand/Tucker2024 or any such near-term correction is a solution are of no
concern to me here. Rather, I am concerned with the thinkers who
understand that we are, in all likelihood, going to see two and a half terms
of President Kalama Harris (i.e. until the year 2033) as the face of an
orchestrated deconstruction of the United States of America, which frankly,
has already been so corrupted at every level of its constitutional structure –
including the Supreme Court – that the country has lost its legitimacy as a
sovereign nation, let alone as a superpower. What has me worried are those
people in “the movement” who think that the right response to this grim
reality is to move further in the direction of Populism, at least as a
machination for the seizure of power. In America, when your aim is resisting
leftist cultural relativism and a cancel culture that has become genocidal in
its will to “abolish whiteness,” becoming more populist means becoming
more Christian – with a focus on the southern Bible Belt.

I have always had my problems with Traditionalists on the Right, to the

extent that I’ve been quite clear in identifying my thought as explicitly
Counter-Traditional (in Guenon’s sense), but I hardly imagined the day
when I would see Traditionalists (even the most Catholic among them) sink
to the level of becoming such rabble-rousers that they reach out to
American Evangelical Christians or somehow see these despicable scum as
constituting their “base.” To be clear, I am not accusing Richard Storey,
who identifies himself as a “Catholic reactionary”, of doing this. Again,
Storey’s “review” of Prometheism is only an opportunity to clarify matters
regarding Christianity as such and in general. Let me say a few things about
the “review” first, though, by way of an introduction.

The pith of Storey’s “critique” of Prometheism has to do with the classic

philosophical categories of Truth, Beauty, and Justice – or, to put it in more
contemporary terms, the relationship between ontological,
epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and political positions and claims.
Storey asserts that my empiricist ontology and epistemology, which he
insultingly compares to that of Jordan Peterson (does Peterson really even
have an ontology?), fails to ground my aesthetic judgments, which
consequently become arbitrary, and most importantly, this alleged
misunderstanding of “Truth” leads to an ethics and politics that is
libertarian in the most rootles, subjective, and decisionist way. Storey even
sees my adoption of the Prometheus figure as nothing more than a
placeholder for a Hobbesian Leviathan in a political theology comparable
to “the divine command theory of Islam.” Despite his claim to have “put a
lot of thought” into this “review”, Storey has not done his homework.

To begin with, Storey fails to understand the place of Prometheism  in my

philosophical oeuvre. The book is little more than a fleshed out manifesto,
akin to The Futurist Manifesto  of F.T. Marinetti or the Manifesto of
Surrealism  penned by Andre Breton – with the one very significant
difference that this manifesto is written by an actual philosopher. By
contrast with 99% of so-called “philosophers” in academia today – who are
mere “professors” of philosophy – I actually agree with Storey in his
classical commitment to the criterion that a “philosopher” worthy of the
name should think in all three formal dimensions of Truth, Beauty, and
Justice and that the concepts of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics,
and politics consequent to this contemplation ought to be internally
consistent and even possessed of something resembling an organic unity.
Throughout seven books to date, published over the course of the past five
years, I have developed a handful of original philosophical concepts, which
have just this kind of unity as part of what Gilles Deleuze described as a
single “plane of consistency” or “plane of imminence.” These concepts are:
(1) Being Bound for Freedom; (2) The Spectral Revolution; (3) World State of
Emergency; (4) Novel Folklore; (5) Destructive Departure from Worldview
Warfare. That some of my books have titles named after these concepts,
and others have chapters titled based on them, does not mean that those
are the only places where I develop one or another of these ideas. Almost
all of these concepts are developed to some degree in every one of my
books to date.

It is even more ridiculous to expect that the aesthetic, ethical, and political
propositions of Prometheism  would be thoroughly grounded by an
ontological and epistemological framework intrinsic to that book than it is
to expect Karl Marx to defend the deepest grounding for his analysis of
Capital in The Communist Manifesto. Taking up Marx’s manifesto as a
banner of revolt, without having read any of his more serious writings, is
perfectly fine. It is, in fact, what he and Engels were aiming for with that
booklet. But to critique Communism as an economic and political theory
on the basis of The Communist Manifesto, without having read Capital, is
preposterously presumptuous and embarrassingly
irresponsible. Prometheism is not the founding text of Prometheism. That
would be Prometheus and Atlas (Arktos 2016).

Had Storey even attempted to seriously grapple with that groundbreaking

philosophical text he would not have so easily misinterpreted so much of
what I wrote in Prometheism. To be clear, Prometheism  does not lend itself
to such misinterpretations. They are a product of projections from Storey’s
own dogmatically entrenched belief system and some very confused
second-hand scholarship that he leans on to shore up his makeshift
worldview (more on this, momentarily). But struggling to
understand Prometheus and Atlas would have disrupted these projections
and dogmatic distortions, forcing him to actually “put a lot of thought” into
fathoming my arguments and aims.

For example, far from being a mere aesthetic figurehead adopted by fiat to
authorize a “libertarian religion” as artificially contrived as Robespierre’s
Cult of the Supreme Being, in my thought Prometheus is revealed from out
of a profound contemplation of the essence of technological science and its
revolutionary world-historical power. This is not an exclusively
Heideggerian analysis. In Prometheus and Atlas it is developed in a context
that draws as much from Immanuel Kant, F.W.J. Schelling, Henri Bergson,
William James, and even Ludwig Wittgenstein as it does from Martin
Heidegger. Furthermore, in the essay “Philosophy, Science, and Art” that
appears in Lovers of Sophia, which essay preceded Prometheus and
Atlas and was its matrix, it becomes clear that Gilles Deleuze’s concept of
“aesthetic ideas” and their relationship to scientific theories and
philosophical concepts was indispensable to my recognition of
“Prometheus” as the spectral essence of Technoscience. This development
even owes something to Marx’s conception of the spectral, and to the place
that Prometheus had in his life, as is evident from my essay “Prisoners of
Property and Propriety” (published in Lovers of Sophia), which also
predates Prometheus and Atlas.

Had Storey taken the time to see what “Prometheus” means in these earlier
writings, he would have understood (even if not accepted) that in my
thought Prometheus is a living, active force at work in the world through
the transformative power of technological science that we mistakenly
believe to be value-neutral and objective. He would have realized that,
from the start, the question “Why Prometheus, Why Not Christ?” is
nonsensical in this context. Prometheus is not a savior figure set forth to
deliver us from the demonic danger of the Technological Singularity.
Prometheus is  the daemonic specter of the Singularity. The question,
which I am raising, is what relationship we want to have to Prometheus and
whether, as Heidegger suggested, the passively destining power of
technology can be consciously owned and thereby transformed and
redirected in its essence – which is a poetic essence, one which precedes
the distinction between poesis as technical craft and as creative art.

The ontology and epistemology in the background here is very subtle,

complex, and novel. While it would be well beyond the scope of this
response to even summarize it, this much can be said rather succinctly: I
draw on the ontology of F.W.J. Schelling, Henri Bergson, and William
James, as well as empirical research by Rupert Sheldrake and Cleve
Backster to develop a notion of formal structures and of formative
causation that is not purely transcendental in a Platonic or Kantian sense
but that involves a quasi-Aristotelian recognition of non-efficient types of
causality and purposiveness at work in nature. In Prometheism, this idea of
what “ideas” are is further developed in a critical dialogue with Carl Jung
and his confused conception of “archetypes.” All of this is lost on Storey, so
naturally he cannot begin to understand what I even mean by
“Prometheus” and he reduces this titanic specter to a Hobbesian
Leviathan.

You would think that if Storey were going to bring up the Leviathan of
Hobbes in a review of Prometheism he would have been responsible
enough to go take a look at what I have to say about the political theory of
Thomas Hobbes in a tome (several times the size of Prometheism, and even
longer than Prometheus and Atlas) which I titled Iranian Leviathan  (Arktos
2019). There, I subject Hobbes to a scathing critique that is much more
penetrating than what Storey himself has to say about Hobbes in his essay,
“Modern Statism as Western Gnosticism” – a piece that sets forth the
intellectual framework on the basis of which Storey thinks he is “critiquing”
Prometheism, a framework that is not his own but that Storey has inherited
at third hand from secondary sources whose confusions and perversely
convoluted interpretations of Gnosticism, Hobbes, theology, and political
theory he has made his own.

In Iranian Leviathan, I expose the soulless materialism that lurks behind

Hobbes’ cynical appropriation of Christianity, and how his disingenuous
defense of absolute monarchy actually prepares the way for rootless
modern positivist conceptions of law and the state. But Leo Strauss could
have told you that much. What is most relevant about my critique
of Leviathan when it comes to Storey’s idiotic misreading of me is that I
draw on Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Max Weber, and the ancient
Iranian political theory of Mithraic Imperium in order to contrast Hobbes’
soulless simulacrum of monarchism with a conception of the Divine Right
of Kings based on the mystical unity of sacred and royal glory (Persian farré
izadi  and farré kiâni) as expressed in the shamanic charisma of a true king
who, when he is the founder or revolutionary re-former of a state, is also a
sacrificial figure. By the end of Iranian Leviathan, I argue that the last true
king (Persian Shahriâré Râstin) that we have had in this sense was Adolf
Hitler. (That is not a value judgment, but an analysis of political form.) No
one who contemplates these parts of Iranian Leviathan (which is as much a
book of political theory as it is a “monumental history” in the Nietzschean
style) could come away with the misperception of my political philosophy
as “libertarian.”

If there are parts of Prometheism that appear as if they are “libertarian”,

then perhaps the reader who is interested in advancing a serious critique of
the book ought to read a little more carefully and take care to set this book
into the broader and deeper context of my more substantive writings. I am
an esoteric writer in the way that Plato was, and so when a passage like the
following one immediately precedes the presentation of a political
platform that superficially resembles certain features of Libertarianism, a
serious reader (and certainly one looking to level a serious critique) ought
to pause and think twice:

So what would a Prometheist society look like?

What would the policies of a Prometheist regime
consist of? It is possible to venture  some
provisional suggestions,  at least  with a view to
the transitional phase on the way towards a
radical transformation of consciousness and an
engineered psycho-biological evolutionary leap
into a positively Posthuman condition.  The
following rough sketch of Prometheist policies,
which admittedly borders on sloganeering, is not
meant to be a definitive platform… (p. 216)
 

Please note the lines that I have italicized here for emphasis (which is not in
the original). If the Spectral Revolution leads to the end of private property,
how am I libertarian? Undoubtedly, mean spirited morons will now take
this question out of context and claim that “Jorjani is for abolishing private
property.” No, I am not. But my in-depth discussion of the Spectral
Revolution in Prometheus and Atlas, as well as in the essay “Prisoners of
Property and Propriety” in Lovers of Sophia, made it clear why the
culmination of convergent advancements in technological science,
including Parapsychology breakthroughs considered as techne, will
necessarily mean the end of any kind of society with private property. In
fact, it would mean a society without any type of enforceable privacy
whatsoever – even the privacy of one’s own thoughts or emotions. How, in
the face of this prospect, we might be able to defend individuality and the
creativity that it makes possible, is one of the most fundamental questions
around which my ideas revolve.

Not only is a “libertarian” interpretation of Prometheism indefensible in

light of the conception of Divine Right monarchy developed in Iranian
Leviathan and the development of the concept of the Spectral Revolution
in Prometheus and Atlas, it is also the case that in World State of Emergency I
engage in an explicit critique of Libertarianism and of modern liberal
democratic political theory in general. In Chapter 2 of that book, titled
“Planetary Emergency”, I dynamite the foundation of liberalism – including
its libertarian variant – on the basis of a conception of sovereign authority
that I adopt from Carl Schmitt before adapting it into one element of my
own concept of a “world state of emergency.” No one can come away from
reading World State of Emergency, the one of my books most focused on
political philosophy, with the misconception that I am a libertarian. My
political thought is more Schmittean than Schmitt in its understanding of
the nature of sovereign authority.

In this connection it is worth noting that Storey’s claim in Modern Statism

as Western Gnosticism that Schmitt thought a reaffirmation of Catholicism
was the proper grounding for a future political order is a terrible disservice
to Schmitt. If he ever made such a claim, it belongs in the category of stupid
self-undermining remarks made by serious thinkers to the detriment of our
appreciation of their deepest insights. Carl Schmitt is best understood as
someone who rigorously demonstrated what a Nietzschean or
Heideggerian political theory would look like, on the basis of a Heraclitean
worldview that he shared with those fellow Germans. The ontological
significance of strife in Heraclitus is the common denominator of those
elements of the political thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt,
which I adopt and adapt, and this Heraclitean ontology is far from proto-
Christian. It is positively diabolical.

That brings me to the question of the Satanic as compared to the Gnostic,

and to the confusedly convoluted interpretive framework that Storey uses
to misunderstand Prometheism in a way that will reaffirm his dogmatic and
admittedly “reactionary Catholic” faith. This framework is laid out in his
essay Modern Statism as Western Gnosticism, Part 1 and Part 2, published in
the Arktos Journal. Like a good Catholic scholastic who shields himself
from the stark truth by getting lost in layers of “interpretive” apologetics,
Storey is entirely dependent on secondary sources here for his claims about
what Gnosticism is and how it relates to modern theories of state power as
compared to the traditional political position of the Catholic Church. I
could go on at great length about how badly mistaken those theorists are
who Storey allows to lead him astray. These include Henrik Bogdan and
Jacques Barzun, but the main culprit here is Eric Voegelin whose widely
influential interpretation of Gnosticism is a total disaster.

Following Voegelin and these other scholars, Storey claims that modern
theories of the state, which are at least implicitly totalitarian (whether in
the form of Liberalism or Communism) and have a positivist conception of
law, are not only based on the denial of an objective nature and natural
law, but that this denial is Gnostic. On the one hand, Storey and the
scholars that he is leaning on claim that Gnostics have a materialistic and
deterministic view of the world, one which denies human free will just as it
rejects any natural order. On the other hand, they claim that those who
consider themselves a Gnostic “elect” have a pathologically willful
ambition to remake the entire world – including any putative “human
nature” – replacing what was presumed to be a “natural” order with an
artificial structure that is total or totalitarian in scope, in the context of
which freedom and fulfillment can finally be attained. Supposedly, every
elitist secret society with political ambitions from antiquity up through the
Renaissance and Enlightenment – even including Nietzsche – has been
motivated by this kind of Gnosticism, including the French Revolution.

This is patently absurd. Only an unthinkingly dogmatic Catholic would

brand as “Gnostic” every esoteric current in the West other than the
Church’s misappropriation of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. It is even more
preposterous than the medieval Catholic persecution of every heterodox
heretic as a “Manichee.” While Gnosticism is admittedly the most diverse
and eclectic religious movement in history – and it has a long history, if we
begin in classical Alexandria and end in medieval Occitan – there are
certain essential characteristics shared by almost every Gnostic sect. These
are all fundamentally at odds with Storey’s analysis, which again is not his
own but that of Voegelin and company.

To begin with, Gnosticism is neither materialist nor determinist. The

Gnostic rejection of the material world is a rejection on the basis of an
affirmation of a spiritual world, the pleroma. Owing a huge debt to
Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism also fundamentally affirms free will. It is non-
Gnostic Christianity, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, that has a
problem of free will on account of its claim that God is omnipotent and
omniscient. The transcendent “Wise One” of Gnosticism, modeled on Ahura
Mazda, is not such an entity. S/he does not encompass the fallen, material
world. Granted, in some Gnostic systems, the archons are associated with
deterministic astrological influences, but the entire point of these systems
is that the person who strives for gnosis is on a quest to overcome these
archontic forces and be liberated from them. Such forces only operate
through lower, animalistic passions and reactive emotions. Finally, and
most importantly, all Gnosticism worthy of the name categorically rejects
political power as an expression of archontic influence.

The kind of “elitist” political project of forging a utopia governed by an

Illuminati that we see in Plato’s Republic is a project that has been totally
abandoned by Gnosticism, despite how much else Gnostics may owe to
Plato’s metaphysical account of the demiurge and the relationship
between the material world and non-material realities. From the Gnostic
standpoint, “the god of this world” will always be evil and, as I will
demonstrate below, the Bible is clear that this is the “Lord God” of
Abraham and Moses. Any political project like the French Revolution can
have nothing whatsoever to do with Gnosticism, in principle. Never mind
the fact that a penetrating analysis of the French Revolution, of the kind
that I carry out in “Reason and Terror”, Chapter 3 of Prometheus and Atlas,
reveals that the horrific mayhem of the Cult of Reason and Reign of Terror
was an outgrowth of Christian pathology and duplicitous Jesuit
machinations that intended to nip Liberty in the bud by setting up the
psychotic Cartesian paradigm.

While we are on the subject of the French Revolution, let it be noted that
Storey says this about what the revolutionary regime did to Catholics:
“Having fled the unspeakable atrocities committed against Christians and
clergy during the French Revolution, Barruel wrote against it from the
safety of England.” But he glosses over the medieval inquisitorial Catholic
holocaust of entire towns of pacifistic Cathars in southern France with the
following one-liner: “There are some instances where no direct connection
can be confirmed, such as the prevalence of Cabalists in Provence at the
same time that the Gnostic Cathars problematically arose to trouble the
unity of the Church in Southern France.” His wanting to brand the French
revolutionaries as Gnostics is pure projection based on a subconscious
shame over what Catholics did to actual Gnostics in France.
Storey can forgive me for psychologizing here, since my psychoanalysis of
his apologetics is certainly less niggardly and condescending than what he
has to say about my Iranian heritage and its relationship with
Prometheism:

For full disclosure, I am a reactionary Catholic

and I am also very fond of Jason Reza Jorjani,
whose work I have quoted and with whom I have
had friendly correspondence. He does not share
my view of Christ, to the extent that he
is  not  fond of Goethe’s  Faust  and the
Spenglerian coining of the psychopathic
European spirit as “Faustian” – note, Faust
repents and goes to heaven, thus baptising the
restlessly persistent soul of our Indo-European
heritage. Given the history of Jorjani’s people, as
an Iranian man with more than a little bitterness
left in his mouth about anything remotely Semitic
about my religion, his attitude is entirely
understandable. I, nevertheless, have as much
time and patience for Jorjani as the story of Faust
could encourage…
 

If Storey had read Iranian Leviathan or even watched the numerous video

interviews where I discuss the main ideas in this book, he would have
realized how simplemindedly mistaken he is in thinking that, as an Iranian,
I have such a pathological hatred of Islam that my view of Christianity is
tainted by it. Maybe if I had been incarnated in the Islamic Republic of Iran I
could not have escaped developing such a pathology. But I was born and
raised in New York City – a different kind of Babylon – where I have spent
almost all of the past 40 years, as an Iranian-American with a mother, who
is also a native New Yorker, of Northern European ancestry. I am hardly the
kind of “Iranian man” that Storey imagines, and Rik should know that by
now (as he notes, we have long been acquainted on social media). Far from
being pathologically opposed to Islam, in Iranian Leviathan I take a very
nuanced and sophisticated view of the geopolitical utility of Shi’ism as a
quasi-Imperial state ideology for modern Iran. More importantly, my
scandalous interpretation of the occulted origin of Islam and its hidden aim
involves claims that could never be made by the kind of person who would
reactively dismiss Christianity simply because Jesus and the Gospels were
incorporated into the theology “revealed” to Muhammad.

Since I have quoted the passage above in full, let me also make a few
remarks on what Storey – so condescendingly – says about me with
reference to Faust. He is right that I find Goethe’s version of the Faust tale
to be pathetically disappointing, especially considering that this is the
same Goethe who wrote a beautiful poem about Prometheus. Faust,
especially Part II, is a story that ultimately appeals to someone who wants
to have his cake and eat it too. I am reminded of the saying of Rasputin to
the effect that: “To be saved, one must first become a sinner.” I am writing
this lengthy piece to put to rest any hopes on the part of Storey and other
more intelligent and insightful individuals on the Right that I will ever be
welcomed up into their Christian heaven as a “baptised” Faust. I belong in
hell. As Nietzsche said, that is where all the interesting people are.

Storey should not have accused me of Gnosticism, he ought to have

branded me a Satanist. He is wrong when he concludes his “review”
of Prometheism with the claim “Jorjani, like Jordan Peterson, must decide
which side of the fence he will come down on – traditional Christianity or
Western gnosticism; there is no third way.” The definition of Gnosticism
that he has adopted from Voegelin is overly broad to the point of
attributing to Gnostics the very characteristics and aims that Gnostics see
in the demiurge and his archons, and on account of which Gnosticism has
refused to seize political power. The Gnostics actually accept the way this
world works. They just want out of this world and into another, higher
world that is also conceived of as unchanging.

The “third way,” which is neither Catholic nor Gnostic is Satanic – from a
Christian standpoint. I have chosen to call it “Prometheist” (Prometheus +
Theist) for a number of reasons, explained in numerous interviews. To
briefly restate a couple of them: The figure of Prometheus is older than that
of Lucifer and not dependent upon Christianity. Also, there is a rampant
misconception of the Satanic – especially among conservatives or those on
the Right – which sees the prevailing power elite in the word as adherents
of Satanism. That kind of delusion, which is endemic to QAnon today and
which fanned the flames of the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s, has no
relationship with any of the serious literature about Satan or Lucifer – from
the Bible through John Milton to Jack Parsons. Lucifer is in hell, like
Prometheus chained to the rock in the earlier iteration of the Satan
archetype. The unjust Lord who put him there is the ruler of this world.

That is the view that you will have to consider if you put the time and effort
into seriously reading the five sections of this piece, all of which are
ultimately aimed at answering the central question posed by Storey’s
review of Prometheism, namely “Why Not Christ?” I am about to tell you
why not. It is an answer once and for all, which will draw a red line between
my philosophical project and anyone who thinks that Christian Populism is
a path forward – whether in its Evangelical form in America, its Catholic
form in Europe, or even Russian Orthodoxy.

The first section makes the case that the biblical Jesus was sent by the
same Lord God who banishes Adam and Eve from Eden and who
commands the biblical prophets from Abraham and Moses to Joshua and
Job. The second section is an examination of the character or ethos of this
God as exemplified by everything from the Tower of Babel to the Conquest
of Canaan, the Exodus, and the trials and tribulations to which Job was
subjected. The third section looks at passages in the Gospels where Jesus
contradicts the message of the Old Testament that he endorses in so many
other passages, with these contradictions being interpreted as a textbook
example of cognitive dissonance. Gnosticism is presented as a
rationalization developed to cope with this dissonance. The fourth section
demonstrates that Westerners owe nothing whatsoever that is positive in
their civilization to Jesus Christ, and that every development of Western
Civilization usually misattributed to Christianity has some pagan Aryan
origin, in most cases an origin in Mithraism, or in the cultures of Indo-
European “barbarians” associated with Mithraism. The final section focuses
on the catastrophic harm that Christianity did to the higher intellectual
culture and techno-scientific development of our civilization, resulting in
the thousand-year long intellectual retardation of medieval Europe. All of
this material has been adapted from my various books, and retailored for a
direct critique of Christianity. Anyone who wants scholarly references for
the various claims made here should refer to those texts, especially Iranian
Leviathan with respect to the debt that Christianity and medieval European
culture owe to Mithraic Iranians.

1. JESUS, SON OF ABRAHAM

Jesus says that he has come to confirm that preached by the Jewish
prophets before him and to fulfill the law of the Torah, which law he claims
will be valid in its every injunction until the end of the world. (Matthew 4:4;
5:17-20) The following verses sum up his relation to Judaism:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law

or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them
but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you, until heaven
and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not
the least stroke of a pen, will by any means
disappear from the Law until everything is
accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18)
 

He describes following the law as the ‘straight path’ and suggests that all
others stray towards destruction. (Matthew 7:12-14) However, he demands
that the spirit of the law be obeyed and not merely the letter of the law.
(Matthew 15:7-8) One’s righteousness must be more profound than that of
the religious lawyers. (Matthew 5:20) For one who observes the spirit of the
law, certain infractions are forgiven such as eating what is unclean
(Matthew 15:10–19) or doing good works on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:11–
12).

Jesus tells people not to praise him, but to know that there is one God, and
He alone is ‘good’ and worthy of worship. (Matthew 19:16-17) He also
repeats the first of the Mosaic commandments to this effect. (Mark 12:28)
Jesus uses a miraculous power given to him by God in order to heal the
sick, lame and possessed and even to raise people from the dead. (Matthew
10:1,5-8; Mark 5:35-43) Especially in light of these miraculous signs having
been shown to them, those who witness Jesus’ ministry, and do not repent,
are cursed by him. (Mathew 12:34; 17:17) He damns town after town that
rejects his message and that of his apostles to a terrible judgment from
God, a destruction worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Matthew
10:15; 11:23-24) Please note, with a view to what will follow in the next
section, that Jesus endorses the destruction of these cities by his father,
Yahweh, the Lord of the Elohim.

We hear Jesus tell people not to fear their adversaries, who can only kill
their bodies, but to fear God who can send both their bodies and souls to
burn in Hell. (Matthew 10:28) People are also warned to perpetually be on
guard, in fear and hope, for the coming Day of Judgment, which will arrive
when they are least expecting it. (Matthew 24:42-51) On that day when the
angels descend from heaven to reap the harvest of men and their deeds
(Matthew 13:34-43), everyone will be held accountable for every word they
have ever spoken (Matthew 12:36), and every person will be rewarded with
heaven or punished with misery in hellfire according to their own actions
(Matthew 16:27; 13: 47-50).

In response to Peter’s question about what those who have sacrificed their
families to follow Jesus (more on this in the next section) will gain, we see
that Jesus and his devout disciples will themselves act as judges deciding
on the reward or damnation of the souls of the 12 tribes of Israel:

Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold,

we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what
shall we have therefore? And Jesus said unto
them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have
followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of
man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also
shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve
tribes of Israel. And everyone that hath forsaken
houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my
 name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and
shall inherit everlasting life. (Matthew 19:27-29)
 

Indeed, this Jesus acknowledges himself to be a messenger sent to a

specific community, the Israelites. (Matthew 15:22-28; 10:5-6) From the
opening lines of the book of Matthew, Jesus is identified as “the son of
David, the son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1) A detailed genealogy is
produced to root him firmly in the Abrahamic tradition. In Luke 1:55, even
before Jesus is born, the Lord on whose behalf Gabriel has promised Mary
that she will conceive “the Son” of this God is clearly identified as the Lord
of Abraham: “As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed
forever.”

When the three men from the East come to Israel following the Star, they
explicitly state that they have come in search of the King of Jews. (Matthew
2) Of course, later, when he is executed, the inscription above his head
nailed to the cross reads: “This is Jesus the King of the Jews.” (Matthew
27:37) Just after Jesus is born, and his mother Mary has to go through the
period of ritual purification stipulated in the commandments of the Torah,
he is welcomed into the world as Jew:

And when eight days were accomplished for the

circumcising of the child, his name was called
Jesus, which was so named of the angel before
he was conceived in the womb. And when the
days of her purification according to the law of
Moses was accomplished, they brought him to
Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord… And to
offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in
the law of the Lord… (Luke 21-23)
 
During his childhood, Jesus sneaks away from his parents, who after three
days of searching for him, “found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of
the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that
heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers [i.e. with
respect to the Tanakh or Jewish Bible]. And when they saw him, they were
amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with
us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto
them, How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my
Father’s business?” (Luke 3:46–49) So the Jewish temple is the place of the
business of Jesus’ Father and he is already so well instructed in the Jewish
scriptures that he can carry on an extensive conversation with the rabbis.

Jesus is intended to redeem the Jews but in the end he accuses them, and
especially their religious leaders, of having forsaken their covenant with the
Lord. As a consequence, says Jesus, His kingdom will be taken away from
them, ‘the chosen people’, and instead whoever from whatever nation who
is faithful shall join the prophets in dwelling there. (Matthew 8: 8,10-12) In
John 14:2 we are given a more specific reference to the “many mansions”
that have been prepared for the faithful in the heavenly house of Jesus’
Father.

Jesus even interacts with biblical prophets who are his forerunners, such as
Moses. In the so-called Transfiguration incident, Jesus introduces his
disciples to both Elijah and Moses on a mountaintop is another instance
wherein a bright luminous object appears, and it is the white light of this
object that makes the face and garments of Jesus shine so brightly; it acts
both as a conveyance for these apparently still-living ancient prophets and
to broadcast the message, once again: “This is my beloved Son, with whom
I am well pleased; listen to him.” (Matthew 17:1–8) It is, presumably, by
means of such conveyances that those who believe in Jesus will journey to
the celestial abodes prepared for them.

From start to finish, the formative phase of the Christian religion is just as
thoroughly conditioned by manifestations of the UFO-type as the careers of
the Jewish prophets who paved the way for the coming of this alleged
Messiah. Some of these biblical Close Encounters will be detailed in the
following section, but to begin with let us glance at those that are
specifically relevant to the birth and ministry of Jesus.

Mary conceives after a visitation, and perhaps an insemination, by Gabriel

that she finds terrifying; he appears plainly in the form of a man just as the
elohim of old. (Luke 1:26–29) The relevant passages of scripture are clear
that the so-called “star” that the three Magi from the Persian Empire
followed to the birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem is a moving luminous
object under apparently intelligent control and not an actual star or planet
that crosses the heavens in a fixed manner together with other stars; it
finally stops flying and comes to stand over where the newborn child is so
that the shepherds there are also filled by fear at its radiant glory. (Matthew
2:9; Luke 2:9)

When Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan, “the heavens were opened”
and the spirit of God descends in physical form, flying down like a dove – in
other words, relatively motionless despite its wings being spread – before
assuming a stationary position and hovering directly over him. (John 1:32;
Luke 3:22) Regarding the metaphor of the “dove” it is worthy of note that it
is directly connected to the pillar of fire and “cloud” of Exodus in a verse
from Isaiah that reads: “Who are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves
to their windows?” (Isaiah 60:8) A voice emanates from the object to
declare, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”,
whereupon Jesus is lifted straight up out of the water and carried into the
sky – as if by a tractor beam – to be deposited some distance away, in the
desert wilderness, where he is to be tempted by the devil. (Matthew 3:16–
4:1) This kind of abduction and dislocation by the “whirlwind” that God
rides in would often happen to Elijah. (II Kings 2:16)

The same ‘angels’ or elohim that are present at the birth of Jesus, that saw
to his needs during his lifetime (Matthew 4:11), and one of whom Mary
Magdalene encounters at the open tomb on Easter Sunday (Matthew 28:1–
7), are also present at the so-called Ascension wherein the resurrected
Jesus is carried up and away by a UFO for the last time before the promised
Second Coming and in full view of his astonished disciples who are gazing
skywards with their mouths agape. (Acts 1:6–11)

Nor did the interventions cease with the departure of Christ. The text of
Acts 9, 22, and 26 when taken together make it quite clear that the other
men who were traveling with Paul on the road to Damascus, while he was
still a chief Jewish adversary of the nascent Christian movement,
experienced the same stunning light descending from the sky, brighter than
the sun. Moreover, the voice that Paul hears is not one readily identifiable
by him, so that the interpretation that he was simply experiencing a pang of
conscience translated into an auditory hallucination is unwarranted. It is
only once Paul asks the voice emanating from the luminous aerial object
what lordly person it is that says, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
that he receives the answer that it is Christ. Apparently Jesus was still
traveling around in his heavenly Father’s aerial object that he boarded at
the Ascension.

2. WHO’S YOUR DADDY, JC?

By now it is clear that, despite the claims of Marcionites and other Gnostics
(whose apologetics will be addressed in section 3), the text of the Gospels
in any standard Bible found throughout the West clearly indicates that
Jesus is the son of the Lord of Abraham and other Jewish prophets.
Granted, that Lord has apparently decided to make some modifications to
the Revelation that he disclosed to Abraham, which is of course nothing
new. Even in the Old Testament, what was “revealed” to Moses was not
coextensive with the original Abrahamic revelation in an isomorphic
manner. Furthermore, by the time we get to later prophets such as Job,
there are clearly doctrinal developments beyond the Mosaic Law. It is at the
Lord’s discretion that He reveals (and conceals) what he wills to whomever
he pleases whenever he pleases to do so. That being the case, what is of
most concern to us here is the character (ethos in Greek) of the Lord of
Abraham and Father of Jesus. Let us begin at the beginning, where Storey
does, with what happens in the Garden of Eden.

The first thing that we will notice by carefully attending to the text of
the Tanakh or Old Testament, rather than the history of subsequent
interpretations that have overlaid and occluded it, is that the so-called
‘God’ of this scripture is not a single omnipotent and omniscient deity. Two
Hebrew words are predominately used for ‘God’ in the Old
Testament, elohim and adonai. The latter, adonai, is a title; it simply means
‘Lord’ as in a feudal lord or chieftain. The Hebrew word elohim is the plural
of el and its translation as ‘God’ in the Old Testament is terribly misleading;
it actually means “the gods” or as your edition puts it in Genesis 6 ”the
divine beings”. The word elohim is derived from ellu, which means: “the
shining”. So the gods of the Old Testament are literally “The Shining Ones.”
Interestingly, this is exactly the same descriptor that the Hindus use to refer
to the “gods” of their pantheon. They are called devas and the Sanskrit
words deva (god) or devi  (goddess) also mean, “shining one”.

There are numerous passages throughout the Old Testament where it

becomes clear that the ‘Lord’ or adonai of the Israelites is simply the
chieftain of a band of gods, comparable to Zeus as the leader of the
Olympian pantheon of the Greeks. The earliest and most important of these
passages are in the book of Genesis. They concern the humanoid form of
the elohim and the godlike potential of mankind. At Genesis 1 :26-27 we
read: And elohim said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …
And elohim created man in their image, in the image of elohim He [adonai]
created him; male and female He [adonail created them.”

Most translations obscure the distinction between the creator, who is the
Lord of the elohim or “the gods”, and the gods and goddesses in whose
image men and women were created by translating elohim as ‘God’
(singular), whereas it is really plural in the text, and by conflating this ‘God’
with “He” which refers to the Lord (adonai) or chieftain of the elohim. In
fact, the phrase “chief of the gods” or adonai elohim, which is improperly
translated as “the Lord God”, appears repeatedly in the Torah. (It is also
noteworthy that since this passage precedes the creation of Eve as a
“helper” to Adam at Genesis 18-24, it is possible that the elohim in whose
image man was originally created were androgynous or hermaphroditic
beings. (This was the view of many Gnostics who thought that sexual
difference had to be overcome in order to realize our divine potential.) The
other evident implication of the statement that mankind was wrought in
the image of the elohim is that we have the potential to be gods.

In fact, the second passage in Genesis where it is very clear that we are
dealing not with an all-knowing or all-powerful ‘God’ but with gods who are
ruled by a single sovereign has to do with the first step taken by man – or
rather, by woman – to realize this godlike potential. At Genesis 3:4-6, the
serpent explains to Eve that the Lord of the elohim lied when he told her
and Adam that eating of the “tree of knowledge” and the “tree of life” in
”the middle of garden”, or even touching them, would result in death.
Rather, “You are not going to die,” the serpent explains, “but God knows
that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like
divine beings [elohim] who know good and bad.” Once they have eaten of
the “tree of knowledge” of good and evil, Adam and Eve make loincloths for
themselves to hide their nakedness.

Now, this is not on account of prudishness. When we are told at Genesis

2:25 that the “two of them were naked … yet they felt no shame” we have
to remember that in the culture and epoch to which this scripture belongs
nakedness was a sign of slavery. Slave laborers went about naked. Humans
were created “because … there was no man to till the soil” in the garden of
the gods at Eden. (Genesis 2:5)
When the newly enlightened couple hears the sound of the Lord
approaching they hide themselves. Once again it is clear that ‘God’ is a
man, one walking about in Eden, who might not notice the couple hiding in
the bushes: “They heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the
garden at the breezy time of day; and the man and his wife hid from the
Lord God among the trees of the garden. The Lord God called out to the
man and said to him, “Where are you?” He replied, “I heard the sound of
You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” Then He
asked, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree from
which I had forbidden you to eat?” (Genesis 3: 8-11)

Now the Lord’s reaction to this supposed transgression of seeking

knowledge and defying enforced ignorance is also very revealing of the all-
too-human character and motivations of the elohim. (Genesis 3:15-19) The
serpent is cursed for enlightening man. Its legs are taken away so that it has
to crawl in the dust of the earth, and this suggests that before being
punished in this manner it was a Dragon – a suggestion that will be
confirmed in the New Testament (Revelation 12:8) when Satan is referred
to as “the great dragon… that old serpent.” Eve or womankind is punished
with pain in childbearing and subservience to men – to fathers, husbands,
and brothers. Men are sentenced to hard labor, quite literally to working
themselves to death. Most revealing, however, are these lines from Genesis
3:22-24: “And the chief elohim (or: the leader of the gods) said, “Now that
the man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he
should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and
live forever!” So the leader of the gods banished him from the garden of
Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and
stationed east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-
turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.” This god is jealous and
fearful that the men who have been created in the image of the gods that
he rules might actually live up to their godlike potential – in other words,
that they might become his equal. The cherubim or angelic beings that,
together with some blazing sword-like device (akin to a double-bladed light
saber), guard the tree of life are there to prevent human beings from
attaining the immortality of the gods in addition to the godlike ability to
know or discern things, such as good and evil, from one another.

Apparently, not all of the gods agreed that we should be punished for
having sought knowledge and prevented from attaining the godlike
immortality that is our birthright. This brings us to the third passage in
Genesis where the humanoid character of the elohim and their leader
becomes clear. It is one of the most fascinating passages in the entire
Tanakh. The key lines, in Genesis 6:1-8, read as follows:

When men began to increase on earth and

daughters were born to them, the divine beings
[elohim] saw how beautiful the daughters of men
were and took wives from among those that
pleased them … It was then, and later too, that
the Nephilim appeared on earth – when the
divine beings [elohim] cohabited with the
daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They
were the heroes of old, the men of renown. The
Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on
earth, and how every plan devised by his mind
was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord
regretted that He had made man on earth, and
His heart was saddened. The Lord said, “I will
blot out from the earth the men whom I created –
men together with beasts, creeping things, and
birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.”
But Noah found favor with the Lord.
 

What follows is the account of Noah’s flood. A few things are immediately
apparent here. First, the elohim – who are obviously subject to sexual lust –
are capable of mating with human women so as to spawn a hybrid race of
“heroes” or as the Greek translations of the Old Testament have it, a race of
“giants.” The word Nephilim derives from the Hebrew root nph-l meaning
“fall”, so that it has been interpreted as “the fallen” ones, i.e. the elohim or
gods who descended from the heavens or the stars to spawn the gigantic
hybrids. This reading is the source of the term “fallen angel” since the so-
called ‘angels’ of later Christian tradition are simply the elohim or “the
gods” themselves.

Others have interpreted Nephilim to mean those who cause men to “fall” in
battle – i.e. violent conquerors or slayers, namely the giants or titans
themselves. In any case, what is clear is that some among the elohim
rebelled against the Lord by spawning an earthly civilization that was
superhuman and, from the Lord’s perspective, preoccupied with wicked
and evil deeds. In fact, the Lord finds the godlike empowerment of mankind
on the earth so offensive that he “regrets” the entire Creation and decides
to wipe it clean with the deluge that Noah is chosen to survive. What kind of
‘God’ makes a mistake like this? Certainly, not one who is omniscient and
omnipotent.

Something seems to be missing here. In only a few lines the Bible tells us
that the Lord has suddenly decided to wipe out the entirety of Creation?
What are these evil acts on the part of the rebel gods or fallen angels and
their titanic offspring that have supposedly consumed humanity and that
constitute a defiance of divine laws? Should not more have been said about
them, especially given the fact that it is clearly stated that they began to
take place after gods came down and interbred with humans?

Well, as it turns out more was said, but it was excised from the Bible as
many other parts of it were over time. The text is known as the Book of
Enoch. This is the same Enoch referred to at Genesis 5:21-24: “When Enoch
had lived 65 years, he begot Methuselah. After the birth of Methuselah,
Enoch walked with God 300 years; and he begot sons and daughters. All the
days of Enoch came to 365 years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no
more, for God took him.” What this mysterious passage means is made
clear in the Book of Enoch, where this prophet is taken up and away into
the heavens in one of the chariots of the elohim and is shown apocalyptic
scenes of the future judgment of the world. It details the rise of a hybrid
civilization of demigods on the Earth. It is made clear that the gods who
breed with mortal women are an army of angels who revolt against the
Lord and attempt to enlighten humans by teaching them all kinds of arts
and sciences. This especially improves the lot of women, whose innate
psychical superiority to men is cultivated to turn them into powerful
sorceresses, and who are taught both methods of birth control and of
abortion so that they can take pleasure in sex as they wish and with whom
they wish. It is probably with a view to this antediluvian liberation of
women that the Bible specifically targets female practice of the occult arts
in that famous injunction at Exodus 22:17 that was used by those in Europe
and America who burned witches at the stake for centuries: ”Thou shalt not
suffer a sorceress to live.”

There is a war between the hybrid human civilization that the rebel angels
spawn and the army of the Lord, and these giants lose. Their civilization is
wiped out in a worldwide deluge and the fallen angels themselves are
bound to remain incarcerated beneath the Earth. Later in European history,
John Milton develops this theme of war between God and the rebel leader
Lucifer in Paradise Lost. One mention of the war amongst the gods in the
Bible itself is at Revelation 12: 7-9: “And there was war in heaven: Michael
and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his
angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in
heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the
Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the
earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”

Once humanity builds itself back up again after the Flood, what seems to be
a cosmopolitan civilization – an urban culture with a single world language
– undertakes a project to build something like a tower by means of which
they will be able to ascend to the heavens. The Lord is once again afraid
and jealous of their progress and decides to destroy this unified human
civilization, scatter its survivors, and set them against each other. Here are
the passages on the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1-9:

Everyone on earth had the same language and

the same words … And they said, “Come, let us
build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky,
to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be
scattered all over the world.” The Lord came
down to look at the city and tower that man had
built, and the Lord said, “If, as one people with
one language for all, this is how they have begun
to act, then nothing that they may propose to do
 will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down
and confound their speech there, so that they
shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus
the Lord scattered them from there over the face
of the whole earth; and they stopped building the
city. That is why it was called Babel, because
there the Lord confounded the speech of the
whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered
them over the face of the whole earth.”
 

Babel or Babylon was the site of the great ziggurat or multi-tiered step
pyramid that was intended to be a “stairway to heaven.” Bab means
“gateway” or “portal” in the Semitic languages and El as we have seen
means “shining one” or “god”, so that Babylon might be the place of the
shining portal or the gateway to godhood – clearly a door that the Lord
does not want man to walk through.

Babylon lies at the heart of Mesopotamia, and it is from this land that the
next two figures central to the account of Genesis emerge. We are told that
both Abraham and his nephew, Lot, are from “Ur of the Chaldeans.”
(Genesis 11:28) The Chaldeans of Ur were Mesopotamians, dwelling in
nearby Babylon, in what is now Iraq. Frequent reference is also made to
Elam and its king, Chedorlaomer, who leads a confederation of chieftains in
a great battle during Abraham’s lifetime. (Genesis 14) The Elamite kingdom
was the oldest civilization of present-day Iran, a land that would soon be
dominated by the Persians. Mention is made of the Hittites as well, another
Aryan tribe who were ancestors of the Iranian Medes. At one point, later on,
the Hittites even refer to Abraham as the elect of the Lord among them.
(Genesis 23:3-6) In the opening of Genesis 24 we are also told that Abraham
demands his servants send for a wife from his native land, namely Ur, for
his son Isaac. So the line of Abraham, including Ishmael (whom Abraham
fathers by his wife’s servant, Hagar), issues forth from the area between
Iraq and Iran – a cradle of civilization and the core of what would centuries
later become the Islamic world.
This is significant because the Lord not only promises to make the
descendants of Abraham, whose wife is thought to be sterile, into a nation
as multitudinous as the stars, but the angel who meets Hagar in the desert
promises to do the same for Ishmael, who marries an Egyptian woman, “a
wild ass of a man; His hand against everyone, And everyone’s hand against
him; He shall dwell alongside of all his kinsmen.” (Genesis 16:11) At no
point in the course of human history have the Jews constituted a significant
percentage of the earth’s population, but if we take the Muslims to be the
great nation that the Lord promises to make of the descendants of Ishmael
(Genesis 21:13, 18), then the prophecy concerning the descendants of
Abraham appears to be one that was fulfilled. Three major “pagan”
civilizations in this part of the world would have to be destroyed by those in
the line of Abraham for this to come to pass: Babylonia, Egypt, and Persia.
Note that Egypt also features in the origin story of Abraham, who takes
refuge from a famine in Canaan there for a while, during the course of
which he gets wealthy – apparently with the Lord’s blessing – by whoring
his wife to the Pharaoh. (Genesis 12:14-20)

After leaving Mesopotamia for Canaan, the land that would become Israel,
Abraham and his nephew Lot agree to spread out. (Genesis 13) Lot settles
in Sodom, which was on the plain of Jordan together with its twin city of
Gomorrah. Both men have encounters with the Lord that further illuminate
the very finite, humanoid character of the Abrahamic God who sends Jesus
as a Messiah.

One evening the Lord visits Abraham to promise him the land of Canaan
and a multitude of descendants who would eventually prosper despite a
prophesied period of four centuries of slavery in Egypt. This encounter
elapses from the hours just before sunset into the twilight and the early
nighttime. ‘God’ appears in the guise of a real estate agent, so that when
Abraham asks how he knows that he has closed his contract with his god,
the Lord replies that he should provide him with an animal sacrifice.
(Genesis 15) The acceptance of this sacrifice, which Abraham does not
allow birds of prey to devour, is the first of many instances in the Bible
where we are given a strange account of a machine that the chroniclers of
the tradition seem somewhat at a loss to accurately describe within their
cultural context: “When the sun set and it was very dark, there appeared a
smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces.”
(Genesis 15:17)

Also take note of the fact that the Lord demands that Abraham, his kinfolk,
and all of his slaves be marked in their flesh – like cattle – as a sign that they
now belong to Him. Anyone who refuses to be branded in this way will be
totally ostracized from his family and the community at large. Making this
mark, namely circumcision, not only on Abraham’s family but also on his
slaves is apparently more important to the Lord than asking Abraham to
free his many slaves. (Genesis 17) This is tantamount to evidence of the
Lord’s approval of the institution of slavery.

The next visitation of the Lord is even stranger, if we have been falsely
conditioned into abstractly thinking of the Abrahamic ‘God’ as an all-
knowing and all-powerful Creator of the cosmos. Three men appear outside
Abraham’s tent and the Lord is clearly one of them: “The Lord appeared to
him by the terebinths of Mamre; he was sitting at the entrance of the tent as
the day grew hot. Looking up, he saw three men standing near him. As soon
as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them and,
bowing to the ground, he said, ‘My lords, if it please you, do not go on past
your servant.”‘ (Genesis 18:1-5) As Abraham and his wife Sarah hurry to
cater to these guests, one of them tells Sarah that, despite being an old and
“withered” woman far past menopause, when he returns in the following
year she will have had a child by her 100-year old husband. While she
conceals any outward expression of how ridiculous she finds this, the man
is able to read her mind and confronts her for faithless skepticism with the
rebuke: “Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:9-15)

The three men then take Abraham up to a hill wherein they can overlook
the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abraham’s nephew Lot has
settled. Since he has now been chosen as an insider, the Lord decides to
reveal to him the divine plan for the imminent destruction of these cities
whose inhabitants are supposed to have become so sinful that the outcry
against them has reached the Lord. The transition from this scene, where
the three men are with Abraham, to the next one wherein the two elohim –
the “angels” or literally messengers of the Lord – enter the town of Sodom
to retrieve Lot is key. The text of Genesis 18-19 reads: “The [three men] set
out from there and looked down toward Sodom, Abraham walking with
them to see them off… The men went on from there to Sodom, while
Abraham remained standing before the Lord. …The two angels arrived in
Sodom in the evening, as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom.”

In other words, the Lord is definitely one of the three men who visit
Abraham and Sarah at their encampment. While he remains behind with
Abraham, he sends his two lieutenants into Sodom to evacuate Abraham’s
nephew and his family before he subjects Sodom and Gomorrah to an
aerial attack. The details in the description of this fiery assault from the sky
witnessed by Abraham as Lot and his family head for the hills are
noteworthy:

As dawn broke, the angels urged Lot on, saying,

“Up, take your wife and your two remaining
daughters, lest you be swept away because of
the iniquity of the city. Still he delayed. So the
men seized his hand, and the hands of his wife
and two daughters – in the Lord’s mercy on him –
and brought him out and left him outside the city.
When they had brought them outside, one said,
“Flee for your life! Do not look behind you, nor
stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, lest
you be swept away.” But Lot said to them, “Oh
no, my lord! You have been so gracious to your
servant, and have already shown me so much
kindness in order to save my life; but I cannot flee
to the hills, lest the disaster overtake me and I
die. Look, that town there is near enough to flee
to; it is such a little place! Let me flee there – it is
such a little place – and let my life be saved.” He
replied, “Very well, I will grant you this favor too,
and I will not annihilate the town of which you
have spoken. Hurry, flee to there, for I cannot do
anything until you arrive there.” Hence the town
came to be called Zoar [“a little place”]. As the
sun rose upon the earth and Lot entered Zoar, the
Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah
sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven. He
annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and
all the inhabitants of the cities and the
vegetation of the ground. Lot’s wife looked back,
and she thereupon turned into a pillar of salt.
Next morning, Abraham hurried to the place
where he had stood before the Lord, and, looking
down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and all the
land of the Plain, he saw the smoke of the land
rising like the smoke of a kiln. Thus it was that,
when God destroyed the cities of the Plain and
annihilated the cities where Lot dwelt, God was
mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the
midst of the upheaval. Lot went up from Zoar and
settled in the hill country with his two daughters,
for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar; and he and his
two daughters lived in a cave. (Genesis 19:15-30)
 

This cannot but evoke, in the mind of a modem reader, the image of a
mushroom cloud and the poisonous radioactive fallout following a nuclear
strike. Although one of the gods promises Lot that the little town nearby
Sodom and Gomorrah will be spared, he is still afraid to dwell there on
account of its proximity to the recently destroyed cities. What natural
catastrophe could prompt such a fear after it had destroyed the two cities?
While Lot and his daughters make it to a cave where they are safe from the
proverbial ‘fallout’ in the days after the strike, Lot’s wife who turned back
undergoes a strange transformation that the chronicler grasps at a
metaphor in order to express – perhaps it is a deadly metamorphosis akin
to that suffered by victims of atomic mutation.

Just as the three men eat and drink the meal prepared by Sarah, the two of
them that continue on to Sodom also eat a feast and have their dirty feet
washed. They are carnal enough to be lusted after by the men of Sodom,
although they have the seemingly magical power to blind this mob with a
flash of light once the mob attempts to storm Lot’s house. (Genesis 19:11)
Interestingly, Lot’s sons-in-law find the warnings from the men ridiculous
and think that Lot is joking when he asks them to leave with him before the
city is destroyed by the Lord. (Genesis 19:12-14) This means that, despite
their telepathic and psychokinetic abilities, there was nothing so evidently
‘divine’ about these men that they would be believed without question. The
elohim who act as “angels” or messengers of the Lord in the Old
Testament, for the most part, do not have wings. This is a much later
artistic convention.

Finally, as in the case of the place of slaves in the covenant of Abraham, we

have to ask about the ethics of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Before the two of the three “men” arrive at Sodom, Abraham negotiates
with their leader who stays behind, namely the Lord, over how many
righteous people would have to be in this supposedly wicked city in order
for the Lord to spare it for their sake. Abraham gets the Lord to keep
lowering the number. (Genesis 18: 22-32) However, in the end we know that
only Lot and his family are forcibly evacuated by the Lord’s two agents, and
at that not his whole family but only his daughters. His sons stay behind
and his wife turns back. This means that the Lord considers Lot the only
righteous man in Sodom. But how virtuous is a man who offers up his two
virgin daughters to be raped by a mob of lecherous men gathered around
his house? (Genesis 19:6-8)

After the destruction of Sodom, the same man has sex with these two
daughters. We are told that they get him so drunk that, on two nights in a
row, he does not realize that he is having sex with first his older daughter
and then his younger one. (Genesis 19 :31-3 5) Now this is an old man. If he
were that drunk he would not have been able to go through with the act so
that he fathered children by both of these girls. Is it then not much more
likely that Lot is spared because he is the nephew of Abraham rather than
on account of his own virtue?

This, however, only begs the question of Abraham’s own virtue or lack
thereof? No episode in the narrative of Genesis is more relevant to this
question than the famous (or infamous) offering up of Isaac as a sacrificial
animal. The story is told in Genesis 22, which begins with these lines:

Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the

test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he
answered, “Here I am.” And He said, “Take your
son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and
go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a
burnt offering on one of the heights that I will
point out to you.”
 

Once Abraham arrives at Mount Moriah and begins to ascend with the
firestone and knife, having left his servants behind with their mules, Isaac,
who is carrying the logs on which, unbeknown to himself, his father plans
to sacrifice him, the boy hauntingly asks:

“Father! … Here are the firestone and the wood;

but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”
And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for
His burnt offering, my son.” (Genesis 22: 7-8)
 

The narrative reaches its culmination with Abraham’s evident willingness

to murder his son on the command of the Lord, and the Lord’s approval of
this sign of Abraham’s absolute obedience, as expressed through one of His
angels:

 
 They arrived at the place of which God had told
him. Abraham built an altar there; he laid out the
wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the
altar, on top of the wood. And Abraham picked up
the knife to slay his son. Then an angel of the
Lord called to him from heaven: “Abraham!
Abraham! ” And he answered, “Here I am.” And
he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy,
or do anything to him. For now I know that you
fear God, since you have not withheld your son,
your favored one, from Me … Because you have
done this and have not withheld your son, your
favored one, I will bestow My blessing upon you
and make your descendants as numerous as the
stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore;
and your descendants shall seize the gates of
their foes. All the nations of the earth shall bless
themselves by your descendants, because you
have obeyed My command.” (Genesis 22:9-12, 15-
18)
 

All of this is as much as to say that the conquest of the world by the
Abrahamic peoples, the Judeo-Christians and the Muslims, with the
support of a Lord who appears now for the first of many times to come as a
heavenly or celestial warlord, is founded on the willingness of Abraham to
unquestioningly slaughter his own son as if he were a sacrificial animal in
obedience to a voice from the sky.
The final testimony to the very human character of the gods of Israel,
including their Lord, which I would like us to dwell on in Genesis is the
encounter between Isaac’s son Jacob and the god who wrestles with him
by the ford of a river. The context for the story is that Jacob, who steals the
blessing of his brother Essau from his father Isaac, makes a journey to a
land by the name of Paddan-aram to work for his uncle Laban, and then
after many years of labor heads back to Canaan a wealthy man with
Laban’s two daughters as his wives. (Genesis 27-28)

Let it be noted, if only in passing, that Jacob’s interactions with his uncle
over these two women are among the most blatant displays of the Biblical
view that women are nothing more than property to be handed over from
their father to their husband. Jacob works for Rachel instead of for ‘cash’
and Laban shrewdly decides to use Jacob’s lust as an opportunity to get rid
of Leah as part of the same package-deal, since she is not likely to bring in
much on her own in the market for wives. (Genesis 29:17-27) Later on
Rachel and Leah define themselves as property when asked by Jacob to
seek the monetary aid of their father: Then Rachel and Leah answered him,
saying, “Have we still a share in the inheritance of our father’s house?
Surely, he regards us as outsiders, now that he has sold us and has used up
our purchase price.” (Genesis 31:14-15)

On his way back to Canaan, Jacob sends his wives ahead with his other
property across the river Jabbok, some of which is meant to serve as a
peace offering to his slighted brother Essau. Earlier in his journeys, Jacob
has already had a dream of angels ascending and descending a “ramp”,
“stairway”, or “ladder” that he takes to be ”the gateway to heaven” from
one of the abodes of God on the earth (Genesis 28: 12-17) and he has also
encountered angels in person. (Genesis 32:2-3) These events are heralds of
the striking vignette that we are presented with at Genesis 32:25-33, when
he spends the night alone at the riverbank after having sent his property,
including his wives, ahead of him:

Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with

him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he
had not prevailed against him, he wrenched
Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his
hip was strained as he wrestled with him. Then he
said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he
answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless
me.” Said the other, “What is your name?” He
replied, “Jacob.” Said he, “Your name shall no
longer be Jacob, but Israel (Yisra-El), for you have
striven with beings divine [El-ohim] and humans,
and have prevailed.” Jacob asked, “Pray tell me
your name.” But he said, “You must not ask my
name!” And he took leave of him there. So Jacob
named the place Peniel, meaning, “I have seen a
divine being face to face [or “I have seen the face
of God”], yet my life has been preserved.” The sun
rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping on
his hip. That is why the children of Israel to this
day do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the
socket of the hip, since Jacob’s hip socket was
wrenched at the thigh muscle.
 

The importance of this event cannot be overestimated, since it is the origin

of the name of the nation of Israel whose chronicle this scripture is meant
to be in the first place. The word Israel, which includes El or “a god” – the
singular of elohim – means “having striven (or wrestled) with a god and
come out alive.” This feat is all the more remarkable on account of the fact
that this god is evidently a dirty wrestler; he dislocates Jacob’s hip so that
he can have an unfair advantage. Take note of how the god wants to be
released before the morning light fully illuminates his face and figure and
remember how he refuses to identify himself by name. This will become
more significant as we now tum to Exodus.
In Moses’ first encounter with elohim  he is spoken to from amidst a
luminous object that settled within a thicket, an object whose white light is
so striking that Moses is astonished that it does not burn the thicket as
would a fire (which is the only thing within his sphere of knowledge, that is
capable of producing such a light). (Exodus 3:2) As we have seen,
the elohim  of the Old Testament are simply visiting strangers who have
unusual abilities, like being able to render fertile an old woman such as
Abraham’s wife Sarah (Genesis 18:1,2) set Jacob’s hip bone out of joint
simply by touching it (Genesis 32:24-25), or strike down the Sodomite mob
amassed at Lot’s house by projecting a blinding flash of light, sometime
shortly before the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are subjected to
aerial bombardment by the elohim. (Genesis 19)

It is with a contest in the use of such unusual abilities that the foundational
narrative of the religion of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad begins. Moses
and his associate Aron are in Pharaoh’s court, demanding freedom for their
people, and a battle in the display of psychic abilities ensues between them
and Pharaoh’s practitioners of alchemy  (al-khemi, “the art/craft [i.e. techne]
from Khemit”; Khemit  being the indigenous name of Ancient Egypt). They
both throw down their rods or ‘magic wands’ and have them turn into
serpents. (Exodus 7:8–13) It becomes clear that both sides are adept in
wielding the ‘serpent power’ and so the Lord eventually resorts to plagues
and the overnight slaughter of innocent Egyptian newborns in order to
intimidate Pharaoh to free the Jews.

When the Lord hears the cry of his people the Israelites and decides the
time has come to free them from slavery in Egypt, He himself ‘hardens
Pharaoh’s heart’ and that of his courtiers into the unbelievably obstinate
stubbornness we see as Pharaoh fails to take a lesson from the plagues
administered and cleansed through Moses. The Hebrew Lord claims to have
done this in order that it might provide an excuse to show ‘His signs’ to
mock and strike fear into the hearts of the Egyptians. (Exodus 10:1-2) We
then hear that even though most of the common Egyptian people take
kindly to Moses and the Israelites, the Lord punishes them terribly for the
(divinely predetermined) recalcitrance of Pharaoh and his royal court. Their
innocent firstborn children are mercilessly slaughtered as Egyptian
mothers and fathers are left crying out in terror like never before into the
darkness of the desert night. (Exodus 11:3-7)

Apparently, familiar with the malevolent use of psychic ability, and

regretful of having been intimidated by such parlor tricks, Pharaoh repents
of this decision to free the Jewish servants and sends his army into the
Sinai desert in pursuit of them on their way to the “promised land”.
Throughout their years-long exodus in the Sinai, the Israelites are led by a
purposively guided aerial object that appears as “a pillar [‘ammud, column]
of cloud” by day and as “a pillar [or column] of fire” by night. (Exodus
13:21,22) The column is low-flying enough for them to observe its
cylindrical structure, which has a steel-grey “cloud”-like hue during the day
and glows with a fiery light after sunset. We are told that the Lord, in all his
glory, is inside (aboard?) the pillar of fire and cloud (Exodus 16:10; 14:24).
The “tent of the meeting” – the center-point of the Israelites’ pitched camp
during the exodus – is set up and removed, based on where the cylindrical
object comes to a halt and hovers at a stationary position (Exodus 40:33-38)
or where it occasionally even touches down (Numbers 9:17).

There is one particular night when the object does not emit its usual fiery
glow. The Egyptian army has come up the rear of the Israelites, who are
effectively cornered at the Red Sea, with no place to run unless they can
cross it somehow. “The cloud” then takes a position between the Egyptians
and the Israelites, and remains there throughout the night, as if to block the
Egyptians from attacking the Israelites and – by effectively ‘turning off its
light’ – it prevents the Egyptians from even seeing  the Israelite camp as
they might have, had the object been hovering above them in its usually
luminous nocturnal mode that allowed the Israelites to march at night.
(Exodus 14:19,20; 13:21) The following morning the Israelites awake to see
the object hovering over the Red Sea, and directly beneath it is a channel
cut into the Sea with the water neatly piled up into walls on either side.
(Exodus 14:24; 14:22; 15:8)

Even more surprisingly, when the Israelites cross the channel – probably
expecting to be wading knee deep in mud – they find that the seabed is dry
and firm underfoot. (Exodus 14:22) Once the Egyptian army enters the
channel in pursuit of the Israelites, Moses is told (telepathically?) by the
Lord to raise his hand over the sea (as if he were about to command it by
his own ‘magical’ powers), whereupon two very striking events take place.
First, the Egyptians appear as if they are suddenly struggling greatly. Their
horses look as if they require the strain of a gallop just to move at all, and
their chariots are crushed as if under an invisible weight that rips their
wheels off. (Exodus 14:24,25) Then the walls of water on either side of the
Egyptians gives way, collapsing the channel through the Red Sea, but only
in the area behind the Israelites who are still advancing through the artificial
channel. (Exodus 14:26-29) (All of the phenomenological descriptions of the
channel are consistent with the projection of some kind of anti-
gravitational beam from out of the cylindrical object hovering over the Sea.
Such a beam might have pressed down so hard on the seabed after having
cleared the water aside into walls, that it compressed all the moisture out
of the mud into a dry crossing path. The beam could then have been
phased out at its center, to allow the Israelites to cross, and then filled in
again to crush the Egyptians by artificially increasing their weight, before
the beam was removed altogether in that portion of the channel, so as to
drown Pharaoh’s army.)

Our narrative culminates, and its socio-political significance becomes clear,

once the Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai. The cylindrical object comes down
upon the mountain in an illuminated state, causing great tremors and
raising up smoke or dust. (Exodus 19:16-18) This cannot be a description of
volcanic activity because the pillar comes down and sits at the top of the
mountain (which would have been blown open by a volcanic eruption).
(Exodus 19:20) The Israelites are warned in advance not to come too close
to the mountain when ‘the cloud’ lands on it (Exodus 19:12, 21, 24), and
Moses – although apparently shielded in some way from said danger –
would return to the people with a peculiar glow about him after prolonged
proximal exposure. (Exodus 34:29-35) Finally, Moses actually enters ‘the
cloud’ (Exodus 24:15-18), and comes out having received stone tablets that
the Lord has engraved with commandments (Exodus 24:12) that are to
ground, not only the political state of the Jews, but the entire Abrahamic
tradition of revealed religion – Jesus included.

Of course, Moses broke the first set of tablets in a rage, upon finding that
his people had reverted to boisterous pagan rites during his long stay inside
the object on the mountain. After pleading with the Lord not to destroy the
entire Israelite camp as a punishment, and in order to assuage the Lord’s
anger with a lesser punishment, Moses rounds up his faithful men and has
them massacre hundreds of their own brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers,
and children, all for some singing and dancing around the idol of a golden
calf. (Exodus 32) In evident approval of the massacre, the Lord then
descends again in ‘the cloud’ to meet with Moses and engrave a second set
of tablets. (Exodus 34:5) Specific orders are also given for the construction
and style of furnishing for a Tabernacle to house the stone tablets engraved
with the Law, and once constructed, the Tent of the Meeting would be filled
with light from the pillar at night and elohim  would even come down into
the structure to receive sacrifices and give commands in person, face to
face or “mouth to mouth”. (Exodus 40:34, 38; Numbers 11:25; Numbers
12:4-8) At one point, angered with the Israelites, the Lord strikes out from
the Tabernacle and sets fire to parts of the Israelite camp. (Numbers 11:1)

What was on the tablet inscribed by the Lord on Mount Sinai? While it is
commonly thought that the tablet featured ten  commandments, the text of
Exodus, especially taken together with Leviticus and Deuteronomy, clearly
states that the ten widely known commandments – set apart by
subsequent tradition as “the Decalogue” – were only the first ten of a much
more extensive set of commandments constituting an entire system of
‘divinely revealed’ law and order. Let us begin with the broadest of these
fundamental principles, one that encompasses the others: Justice.

To the Lord of Moses ‘Justice’ is synonymous with the commensurate

recompense delivered up to a person that has wronged another in the
community: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:23-35) It
would appear that we are presented with a cold but rigorously logical
system whereby each person is held accountable for the precise measure of
his or her own transgression against others. However, in the opening lines
of the Lord’s greatest decree to Israel, in fire and smoke upon Mount Sinai,
we learn that those who violate the laws of the Lord thereby place a curse
upon their blood descendants which endures for centuries, while the
grandchildren of the righteous are graciously rewarded for no good deeds
of their own: “I the Lord your God am an impassioned [or jealous] God,
visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and fourth
generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the
thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My
commandments.” (Exodus 20:5-6) Thus in the Torah’s conception of
Justice, one is not judged on the basis of one’s own conscience, but on the
basis of the community’s obedience to the Lord.

We see the code of supposedly commensurate Justice established in the

Torah at work more specifically in the regulations defining property rights.
In the forbidding of a person to covet or steal another’s house, wife, slaves,
beasts of burden or goods, we have an implicit declaration that each
person has an exclusive right to private property (Exodus 22:1-4). This
means that ‘things’ can be inscribed with a person’s ownership, and a
person defined by the things that he owns. Only the latter can explain the
sanction of killing a thief caught in the act by the owner of the property he
was attempting to steal (Exodus 22:1-4), for the only other sanctioning of
killing is as a recompense for having murdered a person. Thus for a Hebrew
to violate a man’s property was to profoundly violate his sense of self. If a
thief is not caught in the act, he is to pay back double what he stole, or if he
cannot afford to do so he will be sold into slavery. (Exodus 22:1-4) Indeed,
the right to property includes ownership of people, as well as objects, and
the right to treat them brutally as property: “When a man strikes his slave,
male or female, with a rod, and he dies there and then, he must be
avenged. But if he survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, since he is
the other’s property.” (Exodus 21:20; my emphasis).

While it is disturbingly odd today to think of woman’s rights as part of the

question of private property, it is so defined within the Torah. For Moses
and his Lord, women, one half of the human race, were in the last analysis
the most prized property  of their fathers, husbands and masters. We see
that a man ‘wears’ his women like adorning garments when the Lord
commands that: “No man shall marry his father’s former wife, so as to
remove his father’s garment.” (Deuteronomy 23:1) In the very code given by
the Lord on Mount Sinai we hear him sanction the ‘selling’ of women:
“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not [ever] be freed as
male slaves are.” (Exodus 21:7) In this form of economic exchange women
who have lost their virginity are not only considered damaged goods, they
are publicly shamed then stoned to death for having spoiled their father’s
property and challenged his authority over use of their sexuality.
(Deuteronomy 22:13,20-21) If the man who seduced the woman is known
this fate can be avoided if he pays her ‘bride-price’ to her father, whether or
not the father actually gives her to him to take home. (Exodus 22:15-16)
Women who are engaged and then raped and are too afraid to cry out for
help are condemned to death. In this case the rapist is also condemned to
death but only because he stole another man’s property. (Deuteronomy
22:23) Most shockingly, if a woman is raped in a deserted place and tries to
cry out but there is no one to hear her she is not killed, but the rapist must
“pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver” and is forced to marry her and
forbidden from ever divorcing her. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) The Lord of
Israel apparently gives no thought to how she might feel about being forced
to live under the authority of her rapist, and sleep in his bed, every night for
the rest of her life. Of course, while women’s sexuality is the property of one
man, men are entitled to take many wives to entertain themselves so long
as they are wealthy enough not to diminish the food, clothing or conjugal
rights of those that they already possess (Exodus 21:10-11).

One might note in the passage above that women are provided for by men,
and some might make an argument that their duties towards men are
justified on this basis. However, it is only because a woman is forbidden
from participating in the public sector that a man must provide for her, not
necessarily because she does not want to work to meet her own needs. This
ban of women from public and religious offices (often indistinguishable in
the Temple-state) is on account of the severe impurity the Lord thought her
to incur during her monthly period. Not only is it forbidden to touch a
menstruating woman, but anything that she touches, sits on, or otherwise
comes into contact with is contaminated by her. If these objects are
touched by someone else, that person contracts the impurity and can in
turn pass it on to others, until the contaminated person bathes and washes
thoroughly and then waits for the sun to set. (Leviticus 15:19-27) We might
note that a woman is also considered unclean after giving birth, and that
the period of both severe and minor contamination for giving birth to a girl
(two-weeks and sixty-six days) is double that for a boy (seven days and
thirty-three days). (Leviticus 12:1-5)

Perhaps it is in part due to this kind of impurity that women are outsiders in
the relationship between Man and his Lord. The Lord of Israel only speaks
to women concerning their husbands and sons, and very rarely at that.
When Moses first hears the Lord he is told: “Thus shall you speak to the
Israelites: The Lord, the god of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you…” (Exodus 3:15; my emphasis)
Covenant makers are always only men. In fact a woman with spiritual
power, sorcery the like of which Moses practices, is to be killed: “You shall
not tolerate a sorceress.” (Exodus 22:17)

One of the so-called ‘Ten’ Commandments that stand at the heart of the
Torah is: “…Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long
upon the land which the Lord giveth thee.” (Exodus 20:12) We also learn at
Mount Sinai that it is a commandment whose violation is punishable by
death: “He who insults his father or his mother shall be put to death.”
(Exodus 21:17) Later on in Deuteronomy 21:18-21 the subject is broached in
more vivid detail and we learn that the specific circumstances of the death
sentence for disobedience to one’s parents are that the person is brought
into the public square, before the town elders, to be shamed and then
stoned to death by the men of the community.

After the rite of circumcision, which symbolizes the Lord’s covenant with
Abraham, the most important aspect of worship defined by the Torah is
arguably the observance of the Sabbath. It commemorates the completion
of the Lord’s cosmic creation. (Exodus 20:8-11) It is to be a day “…of
complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does work on the Sabbath day
shall be put to death.” (Exodus 31:12-15) The Sabbath also symbolizes the
Lord’s ‘consecration’ of Israel, and it is clear throughout the Torah that this
God may have created heaven and earth, but he is the Lord of the Hebrews.
They are his “treasured possession among all the peoples.” (Exodus 19:5)
Aside from circumcision and the Sabbath, dietary laws and those governing
ritual purity play a huge role in Judaism. Virtually the entire book of
Leviticus in the Torah concerns itself with them. Animals such as camels,
damans, hares, swine, sea creatures that are not fish, and some types of
birds are unclean and forbidden to eat, or even to touch. (Leviticus 11:2-19)

The Lord defines Israel as a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6), in other

words, as a Temple-state. The heart of Israel is the “Tent of Meeting” or
later “the Holy of Holies”, a most sacred space where the Ark of the
Covenant is housed. This is the official place where the Lord descends to
meet with the priesthood, and thereby speak to Israel. (Exodus 29:42) The
Lord ordains the line of Aaron as the priests who guard the Lord’s
tabernacle, and He even decrees how their robes and adornments are to be
made. (Exodus 28:1-5) The priests’ clothing is to include “linen breeches” to
“cover their nakedness”, which if it were at all revealed in the “Tent of
Meeting” would mean a vengeful death sentence from the Lord. These
regulations regarding the ordination of the priesthood are to be eternally
inviolable. (Exodus 28:42-43)

The chief task of the priests is to administer the many kinds of bloody
sacrifices that the Lord demands. One standard sacrifice, which is to be
carried out “throughout the generations”, is of two lambs a day, one in the
morning and one at evening. Precise mixtures of spices and wine are
offered up into the fire together with the lambs, so that the odor of the
offering would be pleasing to the Lord. (Exodus 29:38-41) There are even
traces within the Torah of a tradition that may later have been purged from
the text, that of human sacrifice of first born children to the Lord. (Exodus
22:28-29)

Moses was not the only one of the Israelites who was permitted to be inside
the Tabernacle while the elohim were visiting it. Joshua was also allowed
to do so as a young man. (Exodus 33:11) So it is unsurprising that after the
death of Moses the Lord appoints him the next leader of the Israelites
(Joshua 1:5), the general who will actually conquer the land that Moses
merely promised them. Success in this conquest is contingent on strict
obedience to the law that was revealed to Moses. (Joshua 1: 6–8) The Lord
commands Joshua to leave the livestock and other possessions of the
Israelites (including their women) on the near side of the Jordan river and
to send an army of “fighting men” across it to conquer the land. (Joshua
1:14) When Joshua conveys this directive to his men they swear to obey his
commands just as they obeyed those of Moses, so long as he is “strong and
resolute”, and they also threaten to put to death anyone who disobeys the
orders of Joshua – that would include anyone who might conscientiously
dissent with respect to the plan to invade and conquer Canaan. (Joshua
1:16–18)

The seizure of the fortified city of Jericho is to be the beachhead of the

Israelite invasion of Canaan and it begins when two spies enter the city on a
reconnaissance mission. These find refuge in the house of a harlot named
Rahab, who relates to them how the entire population is already
intimidated by the Israelites on account of having heard of the ‘miracles’
performed by the Lord on their behalf – such as the parting of the Red Sea.
(Joshua 2:9–11) In exchange for her collaboration, including her
misdirection of a search party trying to capture the spies, the spies promise
Rahab that her family will be spared by the invading Israelites as long as
they do not step outside of her house – “which is to be marked with a
crimson cord. (Joshua 3:13–19) Later we learn that only Rahab and her
household are spared in the destruction of Jericho. (Joshua 1:17, 22, 24–25)

On the way towards Jericho, the Israelites are told to march at a fixed
distance behind the Ark of Covenant – which is being carried by priests
wearing special garments – and the Ark apparently acts as a pathfinder or
guidance system to help the Israelites march along a route that they have
never traveled before. (Joshua 3:1–4) As they are encamped along the
Jordan river, Joshua tells his people to purify themselves since the Lord is
about to, once again, “perform wonders” in their midst. (Joshua 3:5) The
first of these wonders concerns the manner in which the Israelites are to
cross the Jordan River into the territory that Lord has promised to them
and intends to help them conquer. Here is what Joshua relates to his
people concerning this impending act of God:

“Come closer and listen to the words of the Lord

your God… you shall know that a living God is
among you, and that He will dispossess for you
the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites,
Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites: the Ark of
the Covenant of the Sovereign of all the earth is
advancing before you into the Jordan. Now select
twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one man
from each tribe. When the feet of the priests
bearing the Ark of the Lord, the Sovereign of all
the earth, come to rest in the waters of the
Jordan, the waters of the Jordan – the water
coming from upstream – will be cut off and will
stand in a single heap.” (Joshua 3:9–13)
 

The text of this chapter goes on to explain the distinctly paranormal, not to
say ‘supernatural,’ character of this event:

Now the Jordan keeps flowing over its entire bed

throughout the harvest season. But as soon as
the bearers of the Ark reached the Jordan, and
the feet of the priests bearing the Ark dipped into
the water at its edge, the waters coming down
from upstream piled up in a single heap a great
way off, at Adam, the town next to Zarethan; and
those flowing away downstream to the Sea of the
Arabah (the Dead Sea) ran out completely. So the
people crossed near Jericho. The priests who
bore the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant stood on dry
land exactly in the middle of the Jordan, while all
Israel crossed over on dry land, until the entire
nation had finished crossing the Jordan… As
soon as the priests who bore the Ark of the Lord’s
Covenant came up out of the Jordan, and the feet
of the priests stepped onto the dry ground, the
waters of the Jordan resumed their course,
flowing over its entire bed as before. (Joshua
3:15–16, 4:18)
 

In other words, Joshua’s crossing of the Jordan River is described in similar

terms as the parting of the Red Sea by ‘the cloud’, except that since it is a
flowing river rather than a sea, the water is dammed up into an invisible
wall only on one side of the Israelites. The Lord tells Joshua to demand that
the Israelites commemorate this wonder by setting up a monument of
twelve stones in the drained out riverbed of the Jordan, one for each of
Israel’s twelve tribes. (Joshua 4:1–9) These stones, which are supposed to
have been there underwater to the day this narrative was put into writing,
constitute a sacred site or consecrated place. Ask yourself what then it is
that makes a place consecrated to the “Sovereign of all the earth”?

Or listen to the prophet Joshua when explains that: “In time to come, when
your children ask their fathers, ‘What is the meaning of those stones?’ tell
your children: ‘Here the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry land.’ For the
Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you
crossed, just as the Lord your God did to the Sea of Reeds, which He dried
up before us until we crossed. Thus all the peoples of the earth shall know
how mighty is the hand of the Lord, and you shall fear the Lord your God
always.” (Joshua 4:21–24)

As “forty thousand shock troops” cross the Jordan “at the insistence of the
Lord, to the steppes of Jericho for battle” we are told that: On that day the
Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, so that they revered him all his
days as they had revered Moses. (Joshua 4:13–14) This establishes that the
same Lord guiding Moses is now acting as the supreme commander of
Joshua’s troops as they begin the conquest of Canaan (the land that is to
become Israel) with the sacking of Jericho.

If there were any remaining doubt as to the fact that the plunder, rape, and
wholesale slaughter of an entire civilian population that we are about to
witness is taking place under the order of the Lord of the elohim – the
Father of Jesus – the next episode in the book of Joshua makes this crystal
clear. On the far side of the river crossing, a man claiming to be the “captain
of the Lord’s army (the word ‘host’ means military force)” meets Joshua in
order to brief him on coordinating with the Lord for the military task ahead.
(Joshua 5:13,14) The very human-like appearance of this god is clear from
the fact that at first Joshua thinks that he might be an enemy soldier.
(Joshua 5:13) Once it becomes clear who this is, Joshua prostrates himself
face down on the ground in front of the god who is standing there with his
sword drawn and asks: “What does my lord command his servant?” and the
“captain of the Lord’s army” asks Joshua to remove his sandals in respect
because, on account of his very presence, the ground on which they are
standing is holy ground. (Joshua 5:14–15) All of this amounts to a
deputizing of Joshua and a divine mandate for his mission.

The Lord’s intervention here, however, continues in an even more direct

fashion. He gives specific instructions to Joshua, again involving use of the
Ark, to bring down the legendary fortifications of Jericho so that the
Israelites can storm the city. This is the second of the promised “wonders”.
The Lord’s Ark has already been used as a navigational instrument and as
the source of a force capable of repelling water. Now it is used as a sonic
weapon: it interacts with vibrations of sound, possibly amplifying and
concentrating the sonic waves before directing them at the walls of
Jericho. The Lord gives specific instructions for how this is to be
accomplished:

“Let all your troops march around the city and

complete one circuit of the city. Do this six days,
with seven priests carrying seven ram’s horns
preceding the Ark. On the seventh day, march
around the city seven times, with the priests
blowing the horns. And when a long blast is
sounded on the horn – as soon as you hear that
sound of the horn – all the people shall give a
mighty shout. Thereupon the city wall will
 collapse, and the people shall advance, every
man straight ahead.” (Joshua 6:2–5)
 

The Israelites follow these instruction and after marching around the city
the designated number of times with the Ark of the Covenant carried at
their head, the army of Israel – who have been ordered to remain silent
until the last circuit on the last day – shout out at once on the order of
Joshua, when the ram’s horns are sounded, and the walls of Jericho
suddenly come crumbling down. (Joshua 6:20)

This allows for the army of Israel to rush in and capture the city. Here is
what we are told about the conduct of the men under Joshua’s command,
and thus ultimately under the command of the Lord of the elohim: “They
exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman,
young and old, ox and sheep and ass. …They burned down the city and
everything in it. But the silver and gold and the objects of copper and iron
were deposited in the treasury of the House of the Lord. Only Rahab the
harlot and her father’s family were spared by Joshua… For she had hidden
the messengers that Joshua sent to spy out Jericho. …The Lord was with
Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.” (Joshua 6:21–27) So
every civilian, including innocent children, were slaughtered in a lighting
war directed by the Lord himself and accomplished with his wondrous
instrument, the Ark. The only persons judged worthy of survival are the
family of a prostitute who treasonously collaborated in the slaughter of her
fellow citizens, again, including the women and children in her city.

We are told that the conquest of the rest of Canaan by the Israelites, who
turn Canaan into the land of Israel by decimating its native population,
proceeds in a comparably merciless manner. One more particularly
noteworthy episode in the course of this conquest takes place when the
king of Jerusalem (this is Jerusalem before it becomes an Israelite city)
assembles an alliance five kings, himself included, to meet Joshua’s army
and halt their advance. In the face of this massive alliance Joshua remains
undismayed:

Joshua addressed the Lord; he said in the

presence of the Israelites: “Stand still, O sun, at
 Gibeon, / O moon, in the Valley of Aijalon!” / And
the sun stood still / And the moon halted, / While
a nation wreaked judgment on its foes / … Thus
the sun halted in midheaven, and did not press
on to set, for a whole day; for the Lord fought for
Israel. Neither before nor since has there ever
been such a day, when the Lord acted on words
spoken by a man. (Joshua 10:12–14)
 

Once Joshua and his men capture the five kings allied against them, he has
his officers place their feet on the kings’ necks as a sign of victory and then
he impales the five kings on stakes throughout the evening before throwing
their corpses in a cave. (Joshua 10: 24–27)

Not all of the prophetic figures in the Bible are as unquestioningly obedient
as Joshua. In the books of Ezekiel and Job we see, in the first case a
prophet, and in the second case his close companions, questioning the
Lord’s conception of Justice, Law, and Order. In neither case does this end
well for those who second guess God. Let us begin with the book of Ezekiel,
where we also see some of the clearest depictions of what are now
recognizable as phenomena of the Close Encounter type – namely UFOs or
UAPs – as “vehicles” of the Lord.

Ezekiel is chosen by the Lord as a prophet of the tribulations that Israel will
suffer on account of its defiance of the law and order that the elohim
revealed through Abraham and Moses. One of the main concerns of the
book of Ezekiel is to give an account of the transgressions for which the
Israelites are being punished. Especially relevant in this regard are Ezekiel
6, 8, 16, and 23. These passages charge the Israelites with setting up altars
to gods other than the Lord of the elohim, burning precious oils and scent-
producing materials as incense in honor of these fetishes, shaping the gold
granted by the Lord as war booty into phallic objects that feature on these
altars and that they used as dildos, decorating these altars with fine fabrics
and the images of various animals or gods in the shamanic shape of
animals (like the golden calf during the exodus in the desert, which was a
symbol of Hathor), building these shrines in various natural settings
(mountaintops, large trees, springs, etc.), carrying out ritual sexual acts or
orgies, emulating the peoples surrounding them by engaging in such pagan
practices, and intermixing with these various aliens – in other words,
abandoning their revealed law in favor of an eclectic cosmopolitan culture.

Throughout Ezekiel 16, the Lord uses some very sexually charged language
to compare Jerusalem to a whore on account of these syncretizing
practices. Of particular interest in this chapter is the idea that the Lord
found the people of Israel in a state of extraordinary vulnerability, like a
naked and abandoned girl child. He claims that this girl, whom He took it
upon Himself to become the guardian of until she became a beautiful and
self-confident woman, repaid him by playing the whore and, moreover, a
“self-willed whore” who does not serve men for money but freely takes
whatever lovers she wishes for her pleasure. (Ezekiel 16:30–34)

Since Ezekiel as a whole is especially concerned with the Babylonian exile

community and the conquest of Israel by the Babylonians (Ezekiel 11–12),
the language of this chapter can be seen to foreshadow that of the “whore
of Babylon” (i.e. the goddess Ishtar) later on in the Bible. This is also the
implication of the verses in Ezekiel 23 that compare the two great Israelite
territories of Samaria and Jerusalem to two whores who lust after and
breed with Assyrian and Chaldean governors and warriors from greater
Babylonia. This cosmopolitanizing harlotry is compared to the early
Egyptian influence on the Jews.

The Lord repeatedly describes these allegedly perverse “abominations” as

acts of “rebellion” and he goes so far as to call the Israelites a uniquely
“rebellious” people. He demands that Ezekiel prophecy to Israel the
vengeance that he is going to exact on them and he reveals some of these
acts of vengeance to the prophet in visions of the future. So the prophet
Ezekiel is exemplary of prophecy in the sense of a warning of things to
come. At Ezekiel 4–5 and 37 we see the Lord instructing Ezekiel in the use of
sympathetic magic to help actualize these prophecies. These are
essentially the same methods that, when used without the Lord’s
authorization, are condemned as sorcery or black magic. The episode of
sorcery at Ezekiel 37 is especially noteworthy since it prefigures the
resurrection of the dead in Christianity. The Lord carries Ezekiel to a valley
filled with dry bones and he is told to utter incantations over them that
cause them to reassemble, be covered with flesh, and filled with the breath
of life. The specific language of a future opening of the graves and a raising-
up of the dead is first used here.
Two of Ezekiel’s prophecies are of particular note insofar as they have been
especially influential on Christian expectations of a future Apocalypse.
These are the prophecies concerning Gog of Magog and the Third Temple at
Jerusalem. We are presented with these, respectively, at Ezekiel 38–39 and
40–45. These prophecies are supposed to concern “the distant future”
(38:8) when the Israelites, after having been scattered all over the world,
are reunited in the land Israel – at the center of the world – where they live
with great wealth amassed in towns without walls or gates. On this “distant
day” when the people of Israel are living in apparent security (14–16), there
will be an invasion of Israel by a leader named Gog from an empire called
Magog to the east and north of Israel – which apparently includes Persia
among other unidentifiable kingdoms. (5) This is the territory at the heart of
the present-day Islamic world. This massive ground invasion of Israel will
result in raging fires and earthquakes as part of a battle that liters Israelite
territory with corpses and incinerates the cities of Magog. Following this a
Third Temple will be built in Jerusalem. Ezekiel is taken to the future and
given a tour of this temple by a copper man who measures all of its
proportions for him. It is in this context, from Ezekiel 40–45 that we meet
with some of the best examples of the biblical idea of the “sacred and the
profane” – a phrase explicitly introduced at Ezekiel 44:23. The plan of the
temple and of the society that it is intended to sanctify exemplifies a notion
of spaces and objects in them that are clearly demarcated as sacred and
separated off, sometimes by numerous buffers, from profane areas. We
even have the introduction of a sacred system of weights and measures for
commerce. (Ezekiel 45) Ezekiel reveals the template for the future Kingdom
of God on the earth.

Several things are particularly worthy of note with respect to the

prophecies of Ezekiel. Firstly, at Ezekiel 17 the Lord asks Ezekiel to
“propound a riddle and relate an allegory to the House of Israel.” This
allegory in which a vine or tree and two eagles feature as symbols the
significance of which the Lord himself interprets is significant insofar as it
allows us to see that the author of this text is very clear on the distinction
between an allegory with symbolic significance, which is set apart as such,
and non-allegorical narratives characteristic of most of the prophecies in
the book. This example is also relevant to the biblical literature in general.
The authors of these books of the Bible were in many cases aware of what
is allegorical or symbolic imagery and so we are distorting the text if we
read narratives that are intended to be historical, including those setting
forth a precognitive history of a future yet to come, as purely allegorical or
symbolic rather than factual.
Secondly, when Ezekiel prophesies he appears to be very directly under the
control of the Lord. Towards the end of Ezekiel 3 we are told that the Lord
makes Ezekiel mute except at times when he is to convey a specific
message on behalf of the elohim. The prophet is, quite literally, struck
dumb and unable to speak in his own voice. This foreshadows the Muslim
claim that Muhammad was chosen by the Lord in part because he was
illiterate and untrained in the poetic arts, so he supposedly could not have
composed the Quran on his own. Several passages throughout the book of
Ezekiel also speak of the prophet being controlled, in body and mind, as if
he were a puppet. (Ezekiel 2:1–2) He is fed a scroll featuring the
“lamentations, dirges, and woes” that he is going to speak like an old
computer being fed a punch card. (Ezekiel 2:9–10) Overall, the impression
we are given of Ezekiel is that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Ezekiel is ethically appalled by some of the

things that the Lord reveals that He intends to do to the Israelites. We see
this very clearly at Ezekiel 9, especially 9:8–11, when, in a passage
reminiscent of Abraham (unsuccessfully) negotiating with the Lord for
sparing the inhabitants of Sodom, the prophet Ezekiel asks the Lord in
horror how or why he could treat people the way that he intends to. The
specific act of vengeance that catalyzes Ezekiel’s protest is the Lord’s
command to five armed men accompanied by a sixth who is a scribe
dressed in the manner of a Levite priest to go through the city and murder
everyone including old men, women, and little children, who do not object
to the various practices of pagan idolatry that the Israelites are engaging in:

Then He called loudly in my hearing, saying,

“Approach, you men in charge of the city, each
bearing his weapons of destruction!” And six men
entered by way of the upper gate that faces
north, each with his club in his hand; and among
them was another, clothed in linen, with a writing
case at his waist. They came forward and
stopped at the bronze altar. Now the Presence of
the God of Israel had moved from the cherub on
 which it had rested to the platform of the House.
He called to the man clothed in linen with the
writing case at his waist; and the Lord said to
him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem,
and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who
moan and groan because of all the abominations
that are committed in it. To the others He said in
my hearing, “Follow him through the city and
strike; show no pity or compassion. Kill off
graybeard, youth and maiden, women and
children; but do not touch any person who bears
the mark. Begin here at My Sanctuary.” So they
began with the elders who were in front of the
House. And He said to them, “Defile the House
and fill the courts with the slain. Then go out
killing. I remained alone, I flung myself on my
face and cried out, “Ah, Lord God! Are you going
to annihilate all that is left of Israel, pouring out
Your fury upon Jerusalem?” He answered me,
“The iniquity of the Houses of Judah and Israel is
very very great, the land is full of crime and the
city is full of corruption. For they say, ‘The Lord
has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see.’
I, in turn, will show no pity or compassion; I will
give them their deserts.” And then the man
clothed in linen with the writing case at his waist
 brought back word, saying, “I have done as You
commanded me.”
 

Before Ezekiel registers this complaint we have already been told that the
Lord plans to annihilate his ‘chosen’ people by letting loose pestilence or
diseases upon them, subjecting them to a famine on account of which they
will turn to cannibalism, and setting numerous foreign armies against them
to slay them by the sword and drive them into exile in disparate lands; the
Lord seems very proud of the fact that he will do all this in wrathful passion
and without showing the least bit of compassion for anyone:

Thus said the Lord God: “I set this Jerusalem in

the midst of nations, with countries round about
her. But she rebelled against My rules and My
laws… On account of all your abominations, I will
do among you what I have never done…
Assuredly, parents shall eat their children in your
midst, and children shall eat their parents. I will
execute judgments against you, and I will scatter
all your survivors in every direction. Assuredly, as
I live – said the Lord God – because you defiled My
Sanctuary with all your detestable things and all
your abominations, I in turn will shear you away
and show no pity. I in turn will show no
compassion: One third of you shall die of
pestilence or perish in your midst by famine, one-
third shall fall by the sword around you, and I will
scatter one-third in every direction and will
 unsheathe the sword after them. I will vent all My
anger and satisfy My fury upon them; and when I
vent all My fury upon them, they shall know that I
the Lord have spoken in my passion. I will make
you a ruin and a mockery among the nations
roundabout you, in the sight of every passerby.
And when I execute judgment upon you in anger
and rage and furious chastisement, you shall be
a mockery and a derision, a warning and a
horror, to the nations roundabout you: I the Lord
have spoken.” (Ezekiel 5:5–15)
 

One way that the Lord intends to spread disease seems to be by making the
Israelites eat unclean bread that they have to bake on their own excrement,
so that he is in effect telling them to “eat shit and die.” (Ezekiel 4:12–13)
Another, obviously, would be children eating their parents and vice versa.

Ezekiel has numerous distinct encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects

and the beings associated with them and he describes these on at least ten
occasions in his book, often referring back to the first encounter at the
Chebar Canal in Babylonia to assert that the phenomena witnessed are the
very same as those experienced there. These ten instances are Ezekiel 1:4–
28; 3:12–15, 22–27; 8:2–4; 9:3; 10:1–21; 11:22–25; 37:27; 40:2–4; 43:1–7; 44:1–
4. By setting these complex and often confusing descriptions side by side
we can form a somewhat adequate phenomenological description of the
objects and beings in question. It would be helpful to analyze the account
of the sights, sounds, and sensations that Ezekiel experienced in terms of
the visual appearance of the objects and associated beings, their situation
in terms of surrounding environment and their effect on their environs, and
their capabilities to interact with persons. There seem to be three or four
types of objects described, although a couple of these might be the same
object or objects viewed from different vantage points or under varied
conditions.
The first is a fiery “whirlwind” with a glowing amber light within it. This is a
flying object that makes a roaring or whooshing sound. It may also cause
the earth to tremble. This whirlwind can abduct a person and carry him up
and away against his will, depositing him elsewhere – for example, on a
mountaintop or a different city – in a state of shock and disorientation. The
second object is a “wheelwork” consisting of four freestanding wheels that
can revolving in any direction, each of which is cut through by another such
wheel. In other words, each of the four wheels described consists of two
rings, one set within the other, each revolving in any direction – so that the
two rings revolving together often appear as if they are cutting through
each other. This sounds something like a gyroscope. The wheels are
described as made of a material similar to beryl – a crystalline material.
They have markings that look like eyes inscribed all around them. These
wheels are flying objects that can move in any one of the four cardinal
directions at any point in their flight. This means that they can alter
direction instantaneously – without veering or swerving, like contemporary
UFOs. Although there does not appear to be any material connection
between the four wheels they seem organizationally associated into a
“wheelwork” consisting of all of them, and it is possible for a man to step
within this wheelwork.

Each of these wheels is associated with a being of humanoid form, except

that they have four faces (that of a human, a lion, a bull, and an eagle) each
facing in one of the four directions, and they have two pairs of wings, one
pair extending outward to touch the wingtips of the other “cherubs” and
two wings that cover their arms and hands when these are not extending
toward someone or something. When their wings move, for example during
ascent into the sky, loud sounds like the “din and clattering” of an army are
heard. This sound is described as the voice of the Almighty, when he
speaks.

These beings handle objects like hot coals inside the wheelwork, and
flashes of lighting and fire flare up around them. Note that these winged
beings, which are identified as “cherubim”, are the same beings that the
Lord appoints to guard the garden of the elohim at Eden, with similar
rotating fiery swords or thunderbolts. At one point, one of them gives some
of the glowing coal-like things to a man. Whenever these beings move, the
wheels adjacent to them move as well, and vice versa; we are told that this
is because the “spirit” of the beings is in the wheels.

Another object closely associated with these wheels is a platform that

appears somewhat like sapphire. Above the platform is a fiery being whose
upper parts are human in shape but whose lower extremities fade into fire.
In the upper part of the being, the fire seems contained in a man-shaped
glassy form or perhaps the fiery-appearing man is inside a glassy dome.
There is a great deal of rainbow-colored light radiating around this being.
One final type of object described seems to be the very same pillar of cloud
from the Exodus. This is also a flying or hovering object that, at one point,
comes to rest within the court of the Temple at Jerusalem and, when it
does so, it illuminates the entire area – just as the pillar of cloud did when it
became a pillar of fire by night guiding the Israelites through the Sinai
desert by its light. The voice of the Lord is said to emanate from within this
cloud. It is also associated with its own type of being, a man who looks like
he is made of copper and who guides Ezekiel around the Third Temple
precisely taking all of its measurements and teaching him its blueprint. I
cannot help but to think of this metal man as a robot or android, especially
since his sole task is precise measurement.

The phrase “the Presence of the Lord” is used with reference to one or
more of these objects, and in one instance we have a description of the
roaring sound and rumble as this “Presence of the Lord” lifts off from where
it is standing and takes to the sky. (Ezekiel 3:12) At Ezekiel 37:27 the
translators of the Jewish Publication Society’s scholarly edition of the Bible
have clarified that this word “Presence” literally means: “dwelling place” –
i.e. the Lord of the elohim is inside the object referred to and seems to be
using it to travel from place to place and interact with the prophet and
others. It is clear from numerous passages that this Presence, within which
the Lord is located, moves from one distinct place to another:

“But when the Presence of the Lord moved from

the cherubs to the platform of the House, the
House was filled with the cloud, and the court
was filled with the radiance of the Presence of the
Lord. The sound of the cherub’s wings could be
heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of
the Almighty when he speaks… Then the
Presence of the Lord left the platform of the
 House and stopped above the cherubs. And I saw
the cherubs lift their wings and rise from the
earth, with the wheels beside them as they
departed; and they stopped at the entrance of
the eastern gate of the House of the Lord, with
the Presence of the God of Israel above them.
They were the same creatures that I had seen
below the God of Israel at the Chebar Canal; so
now I knew they were cherubs.” (Ezekiel 10:4-5,
18–20)
 

“Then the cherubs, with the wheels beside them,

lifted their wings, while the Presence of the God of
Israel rested above them. The Presence of the
Lord ascended from the midst of the city and
stood on the hill east of the city.” (Ezekiel 11:22–
23)
 

“Then he led me to a gate, the gate that faced

east. And there, coming from the east with a roar
like the roar of mighty waters, was the Presence
of the God of Israel, and the earth was lit up by
His Presence. The vision was like the vision I had
seen… by the Chebar Canal. Forthwith, I fell on
my face. The Presence of the Lord entered the
 Temple by the gate that faced eastward.”
(Ezekiel 43:1–4)
 

“Then he led me back to the outer gate of the

Sanctuary that faced eastward; it was shut. And
the Lord said to me: This gate is to be kept shut
and is not to be opened! No one shall enter by it
because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered
by it; therefore it shall remain shut.” (Ezekiel
44:1–2)
 

Passages such as these explicitly state that the Lord of Israel is a finite
being that occupies one or another definite space at any given time.
Moreover, setting them in the context of the other passages cited above, we
see that He does so by means of a conveyance that gives off light when it
flies and produces loud sound and vibrations when it is lifting off or
landing.

Our last character study of the Lord God who sends Jesus into the world as
his son and Messiah is from the Book of Job, where Satan makes a very
provocative appearance. Job is a very wealthy man who is also exceedingly
virtuous, indeed we are told that the “man was blameless and upright; he
feared God and shunned evil.” (Job 1:1) He is “blessed” with vast
landholdings, abundant livestock, and thriving children, so much so that he
“was wealthier than anyone in the East.” (Job 1:2–3) Job is, however,
perpetually concerned for the righteousness of his children and on this
account, as well as in a sign of gratitude for all he has, Job often offers up
sacrifices and prayers to the Lord. (Job 1:4–5) The book of Job begins with
the elohim or the gods assembling before their Lord together with a figure
referred to as ha-shaytan or Satan, which in Hebrew means “the
Adversary.” (Job 1:6–8)

The Lord is proud to have such a devoted servant as Job and is bragging
about this to the other gods. Satan replies that Job is only so faithful
because God has secured such a comfortable life for him and his family. If
his prosperity were to be taken away, argued the Adversary, even Job
would curse the Lord. So as to test Satan’s claim, the Lord authorizes him
to destroy all of Job’s property and to stop short only of laying a hand on
his person. (Job 1:9–12)

We are then told that military raids and seemingly natural catastrophes are
conjured up to divest Job of all of his property. The most important point
here is that this destruction of property, which the Lord has authorized,
includes not only the theft of livestock and the destruction of buildings, but
also the murder of Job’s sons and daughters – including the slaughter of
some “boys” who were tending his sheep. (Job 1:13–19) In other words,
these people are viewed as his property rather than as persons in their own
right. Their death is “collateral damage” in this test of the unconditional
quality of Job’s faith.

Despite this sudden stroke of terrible misfortune, the now impoverished

Job refuses to curse God since he sees everything he had as having been
granted by the Lord and therefore being Lord’s to take away as He pleases:
“Then Job arose, tore his robe, cut off his hair, and threw himself on the
ground and worshipped. He said, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I return there; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken
away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20–21)

At this point, the Adversary among the elohim ups the ante on the Lord by
claiming that a man can tolerate the loss of property but if a hand is laid on
his own person he will surely blasphemy on account of what he is forced to
suffer for no apparent misdeed. Answering this challenge, the Lord gives
Satan permission to severely afflict Job’s body and deprive him of his
health. (Job 2:1–8) Job finds himself covered by foul-smelling boils from
head to toe and he sits around in terrible pain covered in ashes and
scrapping his skin with potshards; even his servants won’t go near him and
his wife asks him why he doesn’t just curse God and put himself out of his
misery. (Job 2; 19:15–18) Nevertheless, he replies to her: “You talk as any
shameless woman might talk! Should we accept only good from God and
not accept evil?” (Job 2:10)

At this point Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar three of Job’s friends arrive
together with a younger man named Elihu. They can barely recognize their
friend in this poor wretch. For the first seven days and nights of their visit
they sit with Job silently, in respect for the evidently unspeakable misery
that he is suffering. (Job 2:11– 13) Finally, Job cries out cursing the day he
was born, and he begins to question God as to why he has been made to
suffer so terribly despite his extraordinary righteousness as compared, for
example, to people who seem to thrive even though they are wicked. Yet,
this does not amount to cursing God. Rather, Job’s lamentations underline
the unquestionable authority of the Lord. These verses often involve the
imagery of finding oneself in an unwinnable legal trial against God and the
impossibility of questioning the Almighty’s sense of justice:

“Indeed I know that it is so: / Man cannot win a

suit against God. / If he insisted on a trial with
Him, / He would not answer one charge in a
thousand. / Wise of heart and mighty in power – /
Who ever challenged Him and came out whole?
– / …Who performs great deeds which cannot be
fathomed, / And wondrous things without
number. / He passes me by – I do not see Him; /
He goes by me, but I do not perceive Him. / He
snatches away – who can stop Him? / Who can
say to Him, “What are You doing?” / God does not
restrain His anger; / Under Him Rahab’s helper’s
sink down. / How then can I answer Him, / Or
choose my arguments against Him? / Though I
were in the right, I could not speak out, / But I
would plead for mercy with my judge. / If I
summoned Him and He responded, / I do not
believe He would lend me His ear. / For He
crushes me for a hair; / He wounds me much for
no cause. / He does not let me catch my breath, /
 But sates me with bitterness. / If a trial of
strength – He is the strong one; / If a trial in court
–”who will summon Him for me? / Though I were
innocent, / My mouth would condemn me; /
Though I were blameless, He would prove me
crooked. / I am blameless – I am distraught; / I
am sick of life. / It is all one; therefore I say, / “He
destroys the blameless and the guilty.” / When
suddenly a scourge brings death, / He mocks as
the innocent fail. / The earth is handed over to the
wicked one; / He covers the eyes of its judges. / If
it is not He, then who? (Job 9:1–24)
 

The hopelessness of arguing with the Lord is emphasized in a number of

lines wherein Job conceives of Him as the Almighty in a much more literal
sense than we see in the earliest layers of the Tanakh. God is viewed not
only as powerful enough to have command of all natural phenomena, but
also as the one who bestows any wisdom that we can hope to have – a
wisdom, moreover, that is so limited as to never afford us sufficient
knowledge to judge God. Passages such as these verge on a denial of free
will, especially when they are taken together with ones that explicitly state
that the will of the Lord is the cause of both the righteous acts of men and
the wicked ones on account of which they are, nonetheless, punished:

…But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; /

The birds of the sky, they will tell you, / Or speak
to the earth, it will teach you; / The fish of the sea,
they will inform you. / Who among all these does
not know / That the hand of the Lord has done
 this? / In His hand is every living soul / And the
breath of all mankind… Whatever He tears down
cannot be rebuilt; / Whomever He imprisons
cannot be set free. / When He holds back the
waters, they dry up; / When He lets them loose,
they tear up the land. / With Him are strength and
resourcefulness; / Erring and causing to err are
from Him. …God hands me over to an evil man, /
Thrusts me into the clutches of the wicked…
Darkness covers my eyes / For no injustice on my
part / And for the purity of my prayer!” …Yet
know that God has wronged me; / He has thrown
up siege works around me. / I cry, “Violence!” but
am not answered; / I shout, but can get no
justice.” (Job 12:7–16; 16:11,17; 19:6–7)
 

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar all speak against their friend Job for what they
take to be blasphemy on his part. The common denominator in the various
speeches that they deliver is that God cannot punish someone in the
manner that Job has been afflicted without that person having sinned in
some way. God rewards the just and punishes the unjust. Period. This
means that, despite his claim to be “blameless”, Job must have committed
sins sufficient to account for his afflictions, although the men are at a loss
to identify what these sins could possibly have been in the life of such an
evidently righteous man.

Elihu, the younger man accompanying these three older friends of Job, has
deferred to them on account of their seniority but once they are finished
with their speeches he expresses his frustration over their inadequate
responses to Job’s lament, prefacing this with the claim that age is not
necessarily a measure of understanding. (Job 32) Elihu’s response seems to
epitomize what is soon revealed more explicitly as the moral of the story –
might makes right, god works in mysterious ways, and the humanly
unforeseeable end will justify the divine means:

Therefore, men of understanding, listen to me; /

Wickedness be far from God, / Wrongdoing, from
the Almighty! / For he pays a man according to
his actions, / And provides for him according to
his conduct; / For God surely does not act
wickedly; / The Almighty does not pervert
justice. / Who placed the earth in His charge? /
Who ordered the entire world? / If He but intends
it, / He can call back His spirit and breath; / All
flesh would at once expire, / And mankind return
to dust. / If you would understand, listen to this; /
Give ear to what I say. / Would one who hates
justice govern? / Would you condemn the Just
Mighty One?” …Do you think it just / To say, “I am
right against God”? …Surely it is false that God
does not listen, / That the Almighty does not take
note of it. / Though you say, “You do not take note
of it,” / The case is before Him; / So wait for Him. /
But since now it does not seem so, / He vents his
anger; / He does not realize that it may be long
drawn out. / Hence Job mouths empty words, /
And piles up words without knowledge. / …See,
God is beyond reach in His power; / Who governs
 like Him? / Who ever reproached Him for His
conduct? / Who ever said, “You have done
wrong?” / Remember, then, to magnify His
work, / Of which men have sung, / Which all men
have beheld, / Men have seen, from a distance. /
See, God is greater than we can know… / He
keeps turning events by His stratagems, / That
they might accomplish all that He commands
them / Throughout the inhabited earth, / Causing
each of them to happen to His land, / Whether as
a scourge or as a blessing. / … Inform us, then,
what we may say to Him; / We cannot argue
because [we are in] darkness. / Is anything
conveyed to Him when I speak? / Can a man say
anything when he is confused? / …The splendor
about God is awesome. / The Almighty – we
cannot attain to Him; / He is great in power and
justice / And abundant in righteousness; He does
not torment. / Therefore, men are in awe of Him /
Whom none of the wise can perceive. (Job 34–37)
 

This moral of the story is confirmed when the Lord finally appears to Job in
person amidst a whirlwind. God essentially asserts that his almighty power
is sufficient justification for whatever he does with it: He compares his
power over the “Leviathan” to the helpless terror of man and even of other
gods in the face of this “behemoth” – a hulking, grass-eating creature that
is a swamp-dweller and also seems capable of plunging into the depths of
the sea, which some have speculated is a primordial sea monster (like the
Plesiosaur) that is responsible for cryptozoological sightings at places such
as Loch Ness or Lake Champlain:

Then the Lord replied to Job out of the tempest

and said: “Who is this who darkens counsel, /
Speaking without knowledge? …Where were you
when I laid the earth’s foundations… Have you
ever commanded the day to break… Have you
penetrated to the sources of the sea, / Or walked
in the recesses of the deep? / Have the gates of
death been disclosed to you? / Have you seen the
gates of deep darkness? / Have you surveyed the
expanses of the earth? … Can you tie cords to
Pleiades / Or undo the reigns of Orion? / Can you
send up an order to the clouds / For an
abundance of water to cover you? Can you
dispatch the lightning on a mission / And have it
answer you, “I am ready”? / Who put wisdom in
the hidden parts? / Who gave understanding to
the mind? / Who is wise enough to give an
account of the heavens? … Shall one who should
be disciplined complain against the Almighty? …
Would you impugn My Justice? / Would you
condemn Me that you may be right? / Have you
an arm like God’s? / Can you thunder with a voice
like His? / Deck yourself now with grandeur and
 eminence; / Clothe yourself in glory and
majesty. / Scatter wide your raging anger; / See
every proud man and bring him low. / See every
proud man and humble him, / And bring them
down where they stand. / Bury them all in the
earth; / Hide their faces in obscurity. / Then even I
would praise you / For the triumph your right
hand won you. / Take now behemoth, whom I
made as I did you… He is the first of God’s
works; / Only his Maker can draw the sword
against him… Can you draw out Leviathan by a
fishhook? …Can you fill his skin with darts / Or his
head with fish-spears? / Lay a hand on him, / And
you will never think of battle again. / See, any
hope of capturing him must be disappointed; /
One is prostrated by the very sight of him. / There
is no one so fierce as to rouse him; / Who then can
stand up to Me? …His protective scales are his
pride, / Locked with a binding seal. / One scale
touches the other; / Not even a breath can enter
between them. / Each clings to each; / They are
interlocked so they cannot be parted. / His
sneezings flash lightning, / And his eyes are like
the glimmerings of dawn. / Firebrands stream
from his mouth; / Fiery sparks escape. / Out of his
nostrils comes smoke / As from a steaming,
boiling cauldron. …Divine beings are in dread as
he rears up; / As he crashes down, they cringe…
His underpart is jagged shards; It spreads a
threshing-sledge on the mud. / He makes the
depths seethe like a cauldron; / He makes the sea
[boil] like an ointment-pot. / His wake is a
luminous path; / He makes the deep seem white-
haired. / There is no one on land who can
dominate him, / Made as he is without fear. / He
sees all that is haughty; / He is king over all proud
beasts.” (Job 38, 40–41)
 

Job accepts this argument that God’s might makes him Right and that a
measly little mortal such as himself ought not to have questioned the Lord:

“See, I am of small worth; what can I answer You?

…I know that You can do everything, / That
nothing you propose is impossible for You. / Who
is this who obscures counsel without
knowledge? / Indeed, I spoke without
understanding / Of things beyond me, which I did
not know. / Hear now, and I will speak; / I will ask,
and You will inform me. / I had heard You with my
ears, / But now I see You with my eyes; /
Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust
and ashes.” (Job 40:4, 42:2–6)
 

We are told that the Lord restores Job’s fortune and gives him even more
than he had at first, although there is no explanation given for how it could
possibly have been just to murder the little children that are viewed as part
of his property that is slated for destruction. (Job 42:9–16) They are
certainly not “restored.” Meanwhile, God chastises the three men who
claimed – against Job – that the Lord had to always be just and that Job
must be being punished for some sin he committed. He demands that they
atone for this blasphemy. (Job 42:7–8) Their crime is having presumed that
God has to abide by any standard of Justice beyond himself; again, this
emphasizes that the Lord’s supposedly almighty Power is its own
justification. In the end Job’s lamentations reaffirm his righteousness by
recognizing this.

3. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

As was clearly demonstrated in the first section, there are many passages in
the Gospels where Jesus unequivocally endorses the Jewish Bible,
including its “Law”, and where he is identified as the culmination or
fulfillment of the Abrahamic prophetic line. There are, however, numerous
passages in the Gospels that blatantly contradict the Torah. In other words,
passages in which Jesus quite simply contradicts himself. Furthermore,
these passages involve statements so extreme that they target the pillars of
every civilized society: criminal justice, private property, and even the
family. It is astounding that conservatives can embrace the Bible, and in
Jesus in particular, despite these unambiguous statements. Not only are
the statements unambiguous, they are also unequivocal in their demand
for “perfect” adherence. Every one of the passages to follow in this section
should be prefaced by these sayings of Jesus:

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father

which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)
“But as many as received him [Jesus], to them
gave he power to become the children of God…
 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of
the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
(John 1:12–13)
“For whosoever shall do the will of God; the same
is my brother, my sister, and my mother.” (Mark
3:35)
 

The famous passages on non-violence from the ‘Sermon on the Mount’

begin, in Matthew’s version, begin with the words: “Ye have heard that it
hath been said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto
you…” (Matthew 5:38-45) The teaching that is presented in the following
verses is radically at odds with the Torah’s general conception of Justice.

“And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other…”
(Luke 6:29) Abiding by this injunction requires only physical non-violence.
One can still hate a transgressor or even wish the person dead, but one
does not physically retaliate against them.

“…[F]orgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” (Luke 6:37) To ‘forgive’ goes beyond

a refusal of physical retaliation for perceived abuse at the hands of another,
but it still entails judging the other, and their acts against oneself, to be
wrong or misguided in the first place. Something that is not a transgression
cannot be ‘forgiven’.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1) In the injunction not to
even ‘judge’ others we see that something more is meant by forgiveness in
the previous citation than the relative sense in which we are accustomed to
the word. The ‘forgiveness’ must be such that others are always already
forgiven. One cannot even look at others or their actions with a judgmental
eye, no matter how much our dear ones or we ourselves suffer at their
hands.

“… [D]o good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you…” (Luke
6:27-28) Here we see that this refusal to judge those who do wrong or abuse
us cannot only be passive but must be active. Since in general we are
meant to help people in the world, we must help those who hurt us just as
readily as everyone else. Furthermore, to “Love your enemies…” (Luke
6:27) means that doing good through one’s words, deeds or even thinking
well of our self-sworn adversaries is not enough. One must actually ‘love’
them in one’s heart. In other words, one must passionately sense oneness
with them just as much as with our other ‘neighbors’ (fellows).

Finally, in the injunction to “…resist not evil…” (Matthew 5:39) we see that
it is not only one’s own ‘enemies’, or individual transgressors against
society, whose violence one must absorb into one’s all-embracing love, but
‘evil’ itself as a principle and force in the world. By this is meant all of the
greatest atrocities: murder, rape, child rape, infanticide, genocide,
mutilation, torture, and the like. The reason to do so, according to Jesus, is
that God is as kind and giving to the ‘evil’ and ‘unjust’ as to the ‘good’
people of the world, and so by making God’s ‘Justice’ our own we will be
rewarded by being the ‘children of God’: “…That ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and
on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew
5:45) “But love your enemies…and ye shall be the children of the Highest:
for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.” (Luke 6:35)

We see the code of commensurate Justice established in the Torah at work

more specifically in the regulations defining property rights. In the Gospels
we see Jesus completely disavow this notion of private property. He
declares the pursuit of wealth to be diametrically at odds with obedience to
God (Luke 16:3), and says that it is virtually impossible for the rich man to
enter the ‘kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19:24). Those who wish to follow
Jesus must give up absolutely everything that they ‘own’ (Luke 14:33),
preferably by selling it and giving the revenue as alms to the poor (Matthew
19:21). While this injunction is directed at those who would be his
‘disciples’, in the Sermon on the Mount he preaches to masses of ordinary
people: “…and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat
also. Give to every man that asketh of thee, and of him that taketh away thy
goods ask them not again.” (Luke 6:29-30) Taken together these two
statements essentially destroy the notion of ‘private property’ altogether.
Everything that one ‘has’ belongs to anyone else to take when they wish
and one is not to ask for it back.

Jesus preached that for the kingdom of God to come the family must be
abolished. He says that his message is not one that seeks to artificially
“impose” peace, but a sword that tears families apart by dividing blood
relatives from each other, presumably based on which of them understand
and take up its revolutionary call and which of them do not. In the same
breath it is also compared to a fire, which blazes in the heart of the seeker
and consumes his household in strife (Luke 12:49-53). In fact, Jesus
assumes that a profound person who understands his call will necessarily
have contempt for the superficial kin to which s/he was bound by no choice
of he/r own or by senseless deeds done while still blind. This is a part of the
general contempt for one’s ordinary life that is a prerequisite of embarking
on Jesus’ dangerous path to doing God’s will alone: “If any man come to
me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
(Luke 14:26)

Those who leave their ignorant family members behind will find true
spiritual kin among others who have paid the same price to serve God.
Jesus sets the example for this himself by publicly disowning his ignorant
mother Mary and his brothers, to whom Jesus is an embarrassment who
they have come to condescendingly ‘take back home for his own good’.
Refusing to acknowledge their presence or even know who they are, he tells
his followers that they, who do God’s will are his true kin. (Mark 3:31-35)
When one man wants to follow Jesus but asks to first be allowed to bury his
newly deceased father, he is told to “Let the dead bury their dead” and
when another man who wants to follow Jesus asks to first take leave to say
farewell to his family back at home, he is told that he does not have the
necessary commitment to be a follower because he did not leave them
behind then and there without a second thought. (Luke 9:58-62) These acts
surely constitute insults to one’s mother, father and siblings, of the highest
degree possible – transgressions that carried the death penalty in Jewish
law.

Anyone who insists that there must be some way to reconcile these
statements of Jesus with those quoted in the first section, or to square
them with decent conduct in a civilized society in general, is suffering from
cognitive dissonance. This is a psychological state of acute discomfort
caused by the attempt to hold contradictory ideas, beliefs, or values to be
true at the same time. The extreme stress of this state, predominately on a
subconscious level, is usually relieved in one of three ways – which are not
mutually exclusive.

One response is an attempt at rationalization that adds new elements of

belief that one pretends were part of the original, contradictory
information in the hope that these artifices will smooth over blatant
contradictions or make them appear to be aspects or facets of a larger and
more complex phenomenon. The second response is when, without
necessarily adding any new elements, a cognitively dissonant person tries
to blind himself or herself to the most glaring contradictions between their
tacitly held beliefs, ignoring those features of their dogma or internalized
data that clash most sharply with one another and instead emphasizing
platitudes with the least degree of dissonance. Third, and finally, a person
suffering from cognitive dissonance will abandon attempts at
rationalization, or at selective blindness, and instead irrationally commit to
blindly in believing patently contradictory statements, ideas, or values “on
faith.” In fact, deliberately induced cognitive dissonance is a technique
used to destroy a person’s rational faculties by forcing that person into just
such a position where the stress of psychological dissonance and failed
rationalizations can only be resolved by commitment to “blind faith.”

In the history of Christianity – whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant –

the latter response to the cognitive dissonance of the Gospels has generally
prevailed, although the Catholic Church in particular has resorted to taking
Plato and Aristotle hostage in order to engage in some level of
rationalization along the lines of the first of these three responses to
cognitive dissonance. However, there was one type of Christianity that
categorically rejected “blind faith” in favor of a very bold attempt at the
elimination of dissonance by means of rationalization. This was the
approach of the Gnostics.

Contrary to what Storey claims in his ‘review’ of Prometheism, it is not an

approach that I endorse. Rather, the Gnostic interpretation of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ is as pathological as the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant
versions of Christianity. The only thing that can be said for it is that since it
is much more honest, Gnostic Christianity nakedly exposes the lengths to
which one must go in order to render the Gospel of Jesus remotely
coherent. The symptomology of the disease that is Christianity can be seen
more clearly in Gnosticism than in other sects, and this is probably why the
Gnostics had to be eliminated by their fellow Christians – who wanted to
hide their sickness from the gentlemen of the Classical world who they
aimed to convert.

I said that I do not endorse the Gnostic standpoint. Let me qualify that
statement. There is one fundamental insight of Gnosticism that I do find
tremendously useful. In order to definitively resolve the cognitive
dissonance caused by attempting to parse the blatantly contradictory
statements attributed to Jesus Christ, the Gnostics simply identified the
God of the Old Testament, namely Yahweh or Jehovah as the Demiurge and
chief of a group of evil archons who help this deluded and sadistic Lord
manipulatively tyrannize over humanity. In other words, they flat out
rejected the many things that Jesus said, and that the editors of the
canonical Gospels wrote, that unequivocally identify him as an Abrahamic
messiah who is here to fulfill the Torah. Since there would be hardly
anything left in the Gospels once one edit all of this out of one’s conception
of Jesus, the Gnostics had to write alternate Gospels – and they wrote tens
of them, all of which were rejected by the Council of Nicea. One of the four
accepted Gospels, John, does overlap considerably with some of these
Gnostic Gospels, especially Thomas, and there is one passage of John in
particular that the Gnostics seized upon to make their case that the God of
the Jews is the Devil. At one point, addressing a group of Jews who
disbelieve in his Gospel, Jesus says:

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of

your father ye will do. He was a murderer from
the beginning, and abode not in the truth,
because there is no truth in him. When he
speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a
liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the
truth, ye believe me not.” (John 8:44–45)
 

There is, to my mind, great value in this Gnostic viewpoint – whether or not
it was authentically held by any historical figure named Jesus. If what this
expresses is an internal Jewish critique of the monstrous inhumanity and
despicable servility of Judaism as we find it exemplified by Old Testament
prophets from Abraham through Job (and especially in the murderous cult
leader, Moses), then such a recognition (or confession) is very useful
indeed. That is, however, as far as I go in being a fellow traveler with any
Gnostics.

The Gnostic rationalization that aims to resolve the cognitive dissonance of

anyone who grapples with the incoherent Gospel of Jesus Christ includes
several other fundamental features that I not only reject, but that my
philosophical writings have explicitly targeted, critiqued, and
deconstructed. These include: (1) a metaphysical dualism according to
which the material world is a fallen realm distinct from a spiritual plane, or
pleroma, where perfection and eternal life are possible; (2) that all political
power is archontic in nature and that socio-political struggle to bring about
revolutionary change in this world will inevitably turn one into a tool of the
archons; (3) these archons, and those who refuse to be saved from being
their servants, are as irredeemably Evil as the demiurge, since there is a
fundamental dualistic moral opposition at work in the world. Even the
most monistic of the diverse Gnostic sects, the Valentinians, tended to hold
these three positions, although they attempted to resolve these
metaphysical and ethical dualisms with a view to an eventual reintegration
of fallen or alienated aspects of existence back into the Godhead in line
with the apocalyptic eschatology that they, together with Christianity in
general, adopted from Zoroastrianism.

According to the Gnostics, the radical pacifism and voluntary poverty

preached by Jesus in the Gospels follows from a recognition that Nature is
a prison and this world is a fallen existence to be altogether transcended.
This earthly world belongs to those who rule by force, the evil archons of a
deceptive demiurge. It is beyond saving and to fight archons on their own
terms is to remain ensnared by them. Power and property belong to the
fallen life of the flesh, and the spirit exiled in this world must transcend
them on its way back home.

One of the passages where this is most clear is from the Gospel of John 3:5:
“Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit.” This calls to mind saying 112 from the
apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Damn the flesh that depends
on the soul. Damn the soul that depends on the flesh.” The spirit of saying
87 from Thomas seems similar: “How miserable is the body that depends
on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.”
There are numerous passages on the duality of Spirit and Flesh that
canonical gospels, such as John, share in common with Gnostic texts such
as the Gospel of Thomas. As in a Gnostic scripture titled The Revelation of
Adam, these passages suggest that we are strangers or exiles in this
material world. We did not come from here and our goal is to return to
where it is that we came from.

This view of the truly spiritual person as an alien in this world can be seen
at John 17:16 in the canonical gospels: “For they are not of the world, even
as I am not of the world.” It is also a view found in several passages of the
Gospel of Thomas. In saying 49 Jesus says: “Congratulations to those who
are alone and chosen, for you will find the kingdom. For you have come
from it, and you will return there again.” In saying 75, Jesus says: “There are
many standing at the door, but those who are alone will enter the bridal
suite.” In saying 80, Jesus says: “Whoever has come to know the world has
discovered the body, and whoever has discovered the body, of that one the
world is not worthy.” This is a repetition, with slight variation, of saying 56
wherein Jesus says: “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered
a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world
is not worthy.” Saying 86 from the Gospel of Thomas, which is paralleled by
Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58 in the canonical gospels, depicts the truly
human being as homeless in this material world in a way that animals are
not: “Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings
have no place to lay down and rest.”

This Jesus is that embraced by the Gnostics who believed that the Jewish
creator god is the Devil and arch-deceiver. He is here to abolish organized
religion and free the spirits of the elect from the material world of pain and
power. These Gnostics were for a time dominant in the cosmopolitan
capital of the Greco-Roman world, the city of Alexandria. Their scriptures
were consigned to flames after the Council of Nicea and only rediscovered
in a cave in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945. Some of them, such as the Gospel
of Thomas, are as old or older than the gospels of the New Testament.
Despite this initial attempt at suppression, the anti-Jewish Gnostic Jesus
was also worshipped by the Bogomils of Southeastern Europe and the
Cathars of southern France – so that the Catholic Church first invented the
institution of the Holy Inquisition in order to exterminate them and only
later applied it to Jews, Muslims, and Protestants.

By the Middle Ages some of the Gnostics equated their Christ or Messenger
of Light with Lucifer, whom they in turn distinguished from Satan, which is
a polemical term that simply means “the adversary.” These were the
Cathars whose culture was centered at Occitan in what is now the
Mediterranean coast of France. Recently, they have been popularized as the
protectors of the Holy Grail. The Grail – which will be discussed at greater
length in the next section – was a pagan symbol that was adopted by
Christianity, like so much of the rest of its symbolism. Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzival and Richard Wagner’s adaptation of it inspired Otto
Rahn’s researches, which culminated in his first book, Crusade Against the
Grail. According to Rahn, the Grail was in the possession of the Cathars of
Montségur, whose eradication was the principal motivation for the Catholic
Church’s establishment of the Holy Inquisition.
Cathar is a word of Greek origin, meaning “pure.” The Cathars were Gnostic
Dualists who thought that the material world had to be transcended
altogether and that Jesus was not a corporeal being, but an emissary of the
Light, who had come to teach the elect how to purify themselves and attain
his state of being. He most certainly was not a Jew, since the God of the
Jews is the demiurge who created the material world in order, together
with his archons, to blind and imprison the souls of the elect. For example
the Cathar saint, Esclarmonde, which Otto Rahn takes to have been “one of
the noblest women of the Middle Ages” believed that Jehovah was actually
Satan himself.

The Cathars were the perfect underdogs. They fought against the Judeo-
Christian perversion of Christ’s true teaching knowing that it was a futile
battle, at least in this world, one that could only end in martyrdom. Ritual
suicide was prominent among them, as a more noble death than falling
into the impure hands of the enemy. According to Otto Rahn, the Cathars
were Luciferians. Rahn argued that certain Cathars escaped the destruction
of Montségur with the Grail – which came into the hands of the Templars,
who then used it to finance and build so many of the great cathedrals of
Europe in only a hundred years (1170–1270 CE). This Templar tradition was
bolstered by Fulcanelli in his 1925 Le Mystère des Cathédrales. Before
founding the Thule Gesellschaft, Baron Sebottendorf was a member of a
Germanenorden occult lodge that claimed to be an underground survival
or revival of the Knights Templar.

As late as January 1938, Rahn gave a lecture based on his second

book, Lucifer’s Court at the Dietrich Eckart House in Dortmund, Westphalia,
which a local newspaper summarized in the following terms: “The
Albigensians were exterminated. 205 leading followers of Lucifer were
burnt on a huge pyre by the Dominicans in the South of France after a large-
scale priestly Crusade in the name of Christian clemency. With fire and
sword, the Lucifer doctrine of the Light-Bearer was persecuted along with
its followers.” The Holy Inquisition and the Crusades were invented to
exterminate these fellow ‘Christians’ and such torturous persecution and
conversion by conquest was only later applied to Jews and Muslims.

In Lucifer’s Court, Rahn recounts the Mexican legend of how Montezuma

mistook Cortez and his conquistadors for the “white god” Quetzalcoatl
(also known as Kukulkan or Viracocha in the Andes) who had promised to
return some day with his entourage of refugees from Tullan – the homeland
of the white gods that had been subsumed by ice, i.e. Thule or Atlantis. The
“feathered serpent,” or dragon, was the symbol of these gods. This is also
an ancient Germanic symbol; it appears, for example, on the flag of the
Saxons (in gold on a blue field) at the battle of Hastings. The Serpent, which
is one of the Judeo-Christian representations of the Devil, is a sacred
symbol of the Aryans.

According to Rahn, these gods had also gone to the Andes Mountains in
South America, because they stood above the floodwaters unleashed by
the great cataclysm that had rendered their homeland uninhabitable. Rahn
heaps scorn on Cortez and his gang as emissaries of the Church, rather than
of the Light-Bringer, Lucifer or the Gnostic Christ, whose return the Aztecs
had been expecting. Rahn discovered other traces of the way of the stars
and doctrine of the Light, for example among the Celts and the Persian
mystics, and took these to also be signs of a suppressed tradition of
reverence for Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. Rahn concluded that the deity of
love, i.e. Venus/Mehr, and the Light-Bearer Apollo/Mithras, were the same
figure as Lucifer – who is the accursed “Apollyon” that appears in the
Apocalypse of John as the Antichrist ruling the world in the end times. This
brings us to the relationship between Christianity and Mithraism, which
was becoming the dominant religion of the entire Aryan world when the
evangelists of the Gospel of Jesus appeared in the Roman Empire.

4. CHRISTIANITY AND ARYAN CULTURE

Everything positive about the seemingly “Christian” contribution to the

evolution of European culture – in every domain from mysticism and
chivalry to art and architecture – is actually Mithraic in origin. Not only had
Mithraism become dominant during the last years of the pagan Roman
Empire, but many of the so-called “barbarians” who invaded the collapsing
Imperium after its Christianization were not Germanic people but Iranian
“Alans” (Sarmatians) or Gothic-Iranian hybrids such as the “Saxons” (who
were half-Scythian).

This was a second wave of Mithraism in Europe, which brought all of the
praiseworthy elements of what became Medieval European culture
together with it. Had Europe not been Christianized, we would still have
had “Gothic” art and architecture, Grail Mysticism, and Arthurian Chivalry –
but without the destruction of the intellectual sphere of Greco-Roman
Philosophy, Science, and Technology. Moreover, the establishment of
Mithraism in Europe before the Islamic Conquest of Second Persian Empire
(which included Northern India) in 651 BCE, could potentially have led to
the unification of the entire Indo-European world under a single industrious
Aryan Imperium speaking Latin, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit.

Mithra (Old Persian Mitra,  Middle Persian Mehr) means “sun,” “friendship,”

and “love.” The earliest inscription referring to Mithra is in a contract
between the Hatti king Shuppiluliuma and the north Mesopotamian
Mitanni ruler Kurtiwaza, which dates to circa 1375 BCE. Mithra is also
apparently depicted as a bull-slayer on a Mittanni royal seal around 1450
BCE. The Mitanni were from the Indic branch of the Indo-Iranian group of
Indo-Europeans and they entered Mesopotamia as a military elite before
invading India (in other words, the Sanskrit language of these invading
Aryans came to  India from a cradle between Anatolia and the Caucasus).
Mithra’s name also appears in the earliest of the Vedas  (not native to India),
which are dated to about 1500 BCE. In these earliest contexts he appears as
the god of oaths and contracts. Oath breakers may attempt to flee, but no
one can outrun his Justice, any more than a person can hide from the sun’s
light. Yaldâ or the Winter Solstice was seen as the death and rebirth of
Mithra, whom Mithraists would help to be reborn on the following day
(originally December 25th), by staying up through the longest night (shabé
yaldâ) and eating red or “solar” fruits such as watermelons and
pomegranates.

Anahita is the female counterpart of Mithra, and she is invoked together

with the war god on Achaemenid inscriptions. Like Mithra, she drives a
chariot with four horses into battle against the daevas. This also suggests
that she is an Ashura or Ahura, a titan (or titaness). The four horses of her
chariot are rain, snow, hail, and wind. Anahita was “the great virginal-
wanton-motherly-warrior goddess.” She is one of those goddess figures
who was mysteriously conceived of both as a virgin and as a mother.
Anahita was hailed as the “Mother of the Lord,” which is the source of the
Virgin Mary later being called “the Mother of God.” In Lydia, the cult of
Anahita was assimilated into that of the great mother goddess Cybele. The
largest Mithraeum in the entire Near East, which was at Kangavar, in
Western Iran, bore the following dedication to “Anahita, the Immaculate
Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras.”

The “Persian religion” of Mithraism was deliberately injected into the

continental European Empire of the Romans by their Parthian rivals as a
means of psychological warfare and social engineering. One of the main
instruments for this was an ostensibly pirate Navy based in Cilicia. The
pirates of Cilicia were no ordinary pirates. At the zenith of their power,
having established particularly close relationships with the aristocracy and
intellectual elite of the port cities of the Roman Empire, they controlled the
entire Mediterranean. They were known for their strange mix of
scientific/intellectual erudition and cut-throat enterprise. The inviolable
oath of loyalty taken by Mithraists, and enforced by a merciless lord of
contracts, would have been appealing to pirates, bands of thieves, or
mercenary soldiers. It is also not hard to understand that a deity thought to
control the stars would be revered by mariners, who are most dependent
on the stars for navigation.

According to Apian, the Cilician pirates were actually a black ops or false
flag Parthian Navy established by Mithradates II, who ruled from 88–66 BCE
(when he was defeated by Pompey). Whenever he was in danger of
shipwreck, Mithradates had no hesitation in transferring himself to the
Cilician pirate fleet, who would safely sail him to his destination. In his
book Piracy in the Ancient World, H.J. Ormerod claims that the Romans
considered the war against Mithradates equivalent to the crackdown on
Cilician piracy in the Mediterranean. Franz Cumont was one of the first
scholars to note that the pirates of Cilicia played a significant role in
introducing the Persian mystery religion to the Roman Empire. Cumont
colorfully remarks: “Supported by its bellicose religion, this republic of
adventurers dared to dispute the supremacy of the seas with the Roman
colossus.” By the time they were somewhat restrained by Pompey, the
pirates of Mithra had already done their work.

The “Jolly Roger” or skull and crossed-bones pirate flag is Mithraic in origin.
The crossed bones represent the Greek letter chi  or the X of the intersecting
zodiacal circle and celestial equator, and the skull designates this earthly
plane of astrologically marked time as the realm of fateful death. The mock
interment rituals of the Skull and Bones fraternity can be traced back
through Freemasonry all the way to the ordeals of being buried alive that
the initiate into the first grade of Mithraism, the grade of the Raven, had to
undergo in order to transcend this realm of death.

By the end of the Parthian period, Mithraism was the dominant religion
within the Roman military and even counted a few Caesars among its
initiates. Roman centurions were stationed in places other than their region
of origin, and moved often, so that any one legion of them was “a sort of
microcosm of the empire.” These included soldiers who were natives of
countries where Mithraism was dominant, for example, Cappadocia,
Pontus, Commagene, Syria, and Cilicia. Besides recruiting centurions from
territories often governed by the Parthians, the Romans on occasion even
recruited defeated Parthian cavalry into their own ranks. These recruits
formed brotherhoods to preserve their Mithraic religion, and owing to the
humanistic character of Mithraism, these brotherhoods were open to their
fellow Roman soldiers, men who no doubt found the mysteries of the
Orient alluring – especially when the god in question was believed to secure
martial victory. When these converts were transferred, they themselves
recruited others to the faith in a realm of Roman military power extending
from the Black Sea to the Scottish highlands and the Sahara desert. Aside
from the Cilician pirates, there were Mithraic initiates in the Roman Navy
itself and these spread Mithraism across Europe through the river systems
that ran through Rome’s continental empire. No less than 420 Mithraea
have been unearthed, from the Middle East to northern England.

Throughout the Roman Empire, Mithra was unequivocally referred to as

“the Persian god” and Romans, often suspiciously, saw Mithraism as “the
Persian cult.” Firmicus Maternus, writing circa 350 CE, sees Mithraism as a
Persian fifth column, and he also makes interesting observations about the
Gorgonic goddess figure in Mithraism:

The Persians and all the Magi who dwell in the

confines of the Persian land give their preference
to fire and think it ought to be ranked above all
the other elements. So they divide fire into
potencies, relating its nature to the potency of
the two sexes, and attributing the substance of
fire to the image of a man and the image of a
woman. The woman they represent with triform
countenance, and entwine her with snaky
monsters. …The male they worship is a cattle
rustler, and his cult they relate to the potency of
fire, as his prophet handed down the lore to us,
saying:  mysta booklopies, syndexie patros
agauou  (initiate of cattle-rustling, companion by
hand-clasp of an illustrious father). Him they call
Mithra, and his cult they carry on in hidden caves.
…Him whose crime you acknowledge you think
to be a god. So you who declare it proper for the
cult of the Magi to be carried on by the Persian
rite in these cave temples, why do you praise only
this among the Persian customs? If you think it
worthy of the Roman name to serve the cults of
the Persians, the laws of the Persians…
 

Firmicus Maternus was a devout Catholic and his book on The Error of
Pagan Religions  looks back on Mithraism as a diabolical invention. Caesar
Julian, “the Apostate” (336 AD), was a Mithraist who attempted to
disestablish Christianity and establish Mithraism as the official religion of
the Roman Empire. From this it is clear that Mithraism was very close to
becoming the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, rather than
Christianity. Moreover, although it was never a state religion, the religious
influence of Mithraism in Rome was as institutional as that of the Church as
it rose to power. Like Churches today, Mithraic communities were juridical
bodies capable of holding property. Private benefactors would put up the
cost of digging the subterranean chambers, or would volunteer their own
cellars. The similarities of Mithraism to Christianity frightened the Christian
writers who became aware of them, and they resorted to claiming that the
devil, who had the demonic power to attain foreknowledge of the coming
of Christ, had imitated elements of what would become Christianity and
introduced them into the world so as to denigrate Christ’s gospel and
misguide people.

The Mithraic Communion feast was the prototype of the Christian

sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, with sacred wine and circular loaves of
bread marked with an equilateral cross. The equilateral cross inside of a
circle (what is contemporarily known as the Celtic cross) was probably the
main symbol or standard of the religion. The Mithraic Communion was a
banquet held with Mithra to celebrate his imminent ascension. Mithra is the
“savior and conductor of the soul,” who assists the ascension of the soul
just as he does the rising sun. Sunday, or the day of the sun, was the holiest
day of the week for Mithraists. Each of the seven planets was associated
with a day of the week, with a particular metal, a degree of initiation, and a
certain potency. The planet of the day of the week was invoked in front of
its effigy in the crypt on that day.

The egalitarian spirit that later became characteristic of socialistic and

progressive movements in European civilization, and which is mistakenly
believed to have begun with Christianity in the late Roman period, is
actually a legacy of Mithraism. Merchants were on an equal footing with
upstanding citizens, who treated slaves as their equals and in this occult
order even a common soldier who had attained the highest rank of
initiation could be looked up to by an emperor. So-called “aristocracy”
based on wealth was replaced by a spiritual aristocracy wherein all
brothers pledged loyalty to one another, and a slave could even be a
wealthy man’s superior depending on their respective grades of initiation.
This is why the French Revolution adopted the red Mithraic hat as a “liberty
cap.” This “Phrygian cap” was also the basis for the mitre (Latin mitra) worn
by Christian bishops and abbots, another element of Mithraism adopted by
Christianity. It survives in popular culture as the red Santa Claus hat and
even as the hat of the smurfs, who not accidentally live amongst
mushrooms and are engaged in a struggle against tyranny.

The evergreen tree ornamented with red and white, which became the
Christmas tree, was originally a Mithraic symbol as well. The evergreen tree
was a symbol of Truth in ancient Iran (especially the Sarv). It hosts the
psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria, which is red and white. This
mushroom was ingested by Mithraists, particularly admixed with wine, as
crushed psychedelic mushrooms still are today in rural parts of Iran where
crypto-Mithraic rites survive. The tricolor of the Iranian flag shares the
green, white, and red commonly associated with the Christmas season on
account of this origin. White, red, and green also stand for the three main
castes in ancient Iranian society: royalty, the warrior caste, and the farming
peasantry. One finds this color scheme on the flags of many nations of
ethnically Iranian origin, including Tajikistan, Kurdistan, Bulgaria, and
Hungary. The legacy of Mithraism in Rome is to account for its also having
become the flag of Italy.

One of the major sources of Mithraic influence on the formation of

Christianity must have been Paul (formerly Saul), who was from Tarsus.
According to Plutarch, Mithraism entered the Roman world in Tarsus, the
capital city of the province of Cilicia, from which the Cilician pirates get
their name. The lion attacking the bull was an important symbol of the city
of Tarsus. According to Strabo (64 BCE–21 AD), Tarsus had “surpassed
Athens, Alexandria, or any other place” in terms of its educational system,
and the influence that Philosophy or the sciences had on social order and
political administration. Two of the chief administrators of the University of
Tarsus, Athenodorus and Nestor, became political leaders of the city. It is
fair to characterize it as a city-state that was ruled by a university. Stoicism
was the predominant philosophical school in Tarsus, and one of the main
beliefs of the Stoics is that a conflagration will engulf the world at the end
of a Great Year. It should go without saying that the Stoics, for whom
Heraclitus was an intellectual wellspring, adopted this idea under Persian
influence in the first place. This idea can be seen reflected in numerous
Gospel passages. For example:

I am come to send fire on the earth, and what will

I, if it be already kindled? (Luke 12:49)
Jesus said, “I have cast fire upon the world, and
behold, I am guarding it until it blazes.” (Thomas
10)
Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever
is far from me is far from the kingdom. (Thomas
82)
Jesus says: “Men indeed think I have come to
bring peace to the world. But they do not know
that I have come to bring the world discord, fire,
sword, war.” (Thomas 16)
 “Do not assume that I have come to bring peace
to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but
a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)
 

Many Mithraic ideas besides that of an apocalyptic global conflagration

were appropriated by Christianity in its formative phase. For example, the
third grade of Mithraic initiation, the grade of Miles or the soldier, is the
basis for the Christian rite of confirmation and the chrism of Ash
Wednesday. Its symbols are the lance and the helmet, and its astrological
sign is the planet Mars. The initiate, decked out in leather military attire and
a breastplate, is conscripted to serve as a soldier of Mithra on the cosmic
battlefield. The crown of earthly kingship and worldly power is presented
to the initiate on the point of a sword in the form of a wreath. He places this
on his head, but then throws it off as he proclaims “Mithra is my Crown; my
Crown rests with my god.” At this point the initiate’s face is slapped and he
is given a brand on the forehead by his immediate superior, a brother of the
grade Leo. This brand or seal takes the form of an ashen X and represents
the xvarneh or farr, the divine royal glory, flaming from the forehead of
Mithra. We see on the sarcophagus of the Emperor Hostilian, Trajan’s
youngest son, that he was a Mithraic initiate branded on the forehead with
this X. Thereafter the soldier of Mithra (Christ) would refuse to wear a crown
of any kind, including a wreath crown at banquets, phrasing his refusal to
whomever wanted to bestow him with one in the following terms: “It
belongs to my god.” The Christian theme of Christ resisting the temptations
of the devil for ruling the kingdoms of this world, and his later statement in
the course of being questioned by Pilate, namely “My kingdom is not of this
world” (John 18:36), probably have this Mithraic rite as their true origin. We
could add to that injunction these sayings of the same spirit from the
Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world

has discovered a carcass, and whoever has
discovered a carcass, of that person the world is
not worthy.” (Thomas 56)
 Jesus said, “Let one who has become wealthy
reign, and let one who has power renounce it.”
(Thomas 81)
 

The other main symbol of Christianity besides the cross, and the one that
was used by the earliest Christians at least as much as the cross, if not
more, is also Mithraic in origin. The geometric symbol of the Vesica Pisces,
stylized by early Christians as a fish, evokes at least two powerful ideas that
connect it to Mithraism. First of all, Mithra is the Lord of Precession. The
tauroctony image is a legacy of Mithraism at its historical origin, in the
epoch of the transition between the Age of Taurus and the Age of Aries. By
the first century AD, Mithraists would have needed a new symbol that
would appropriately signal Mithra shifting the star globe of the body of
Zorvan (the Persian version of Chronos), the Sepehr, from a spring equinox
in Aries to a spring equinox in Pisces. What better symbol of the astrological
age of Pisces than the fish. Secondly – and perhaps on a metaphysical level,
this is even more important – the Vesica Pisces also symbolizes a mediation
between two opposed spheres, in other words Mithra as the mediator
between Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman.

This brings us to the most radical teaching attributed to Christ, which

makes little sense in a Judeo-Christian context, against the backdrop of the
Jewish Bible or “Old Testament,” but makes perfectly good sense in the
context of Mithraism. That is the aforementioned set of maxims that
includes “Resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39) and “Love your enemies” (Luke
6:27). Orthodox and Catholic Christians ensconced these sayings in the
context of a Sermon on the Mount, which includes the servile and spineless
injunctions to “turn the other cheek” and forgive every act of violence or
injustice suffered at the hands of others. Of course, this did not stop them
from carrying out brutal inquisitions and persecutory crusades. In their
original Mithraic context, these maxims of not resisting evil and loving one’s
enemies mean something completely different, which can only be
understood with a view to what has been revealed throughout this chapter
as the hidden cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, and
sociopolitical content of the Mithraic mysteries. Moreover, the teaching
needs to be placed in the context of other Gnostic sayings that
kaleidoscopically reveal the light of the Unconquerable Sun of God, the
light that continues to illumine the human mind even in the most
encompassing heart of darkness.

Members of a Mithraic secret society were bound together by oaths of

loyalty that demanded greater devotion to one another than to their own
kin, and the soldiers – or pirates – who became initiates were often far away
from their families and even from their native country. In this case,
water was actually thicker than blood. Those baptized into a Mithraic way
of life were born again of a different mother. This ought to be considered as
the context for understanding the following words put into the mouth of
“Jesus,” despite their evidently radical contradiction of Judeo-Christian
“family values.” Luke 12:49–53, which is mirrored by Saying 16 in the
Gospel of Thomas, reads:

Perhaps people think that I have come to impose

peace upon the world. Little do they know that I
have come to set the earth on fire, that I bring the
sword of division, conflict, and war. For there will
be five in a house that is divided, with three of
them against the other two, and vice versa: The
father will be divided against his son, and the son
against his father, the mother against her
daughter, and the daughter against her mother,
mother-in-law and daughter-in-law against one
another, and each of them will stand alone.
 

The significance of setting the earth on fire has been addressed above, so
let us focus on the destruction of the family.

The same message is repeated over and over again in the Gospels. Luke
14:26 reads, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother,
and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,
he cannot be my disciple.” Saying 55 of the Gospel of Thomas employs an
almost identical turn of phrase, “Whoever does not hate father and mother
cannot be a disciple of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters
and bear the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me.” The cross that is being
referred to here is not the one on which Jesus was crucified. This is clear
both from the fact that the Christ saying this has yet to be crucified, and
from the fact that Thomas is a Gnostic gospel and the Gnostics do not even
believe that Jesus died on the cross. “The cross” that the Gnostic savior is
referring to – rather than the formulation “his” cross, which is a corruption
of this saying in the later, canonical gospels – is the  one and only cross that
there is to bear in this world: the crossing of the celestial equator by the
ecliptic, which was the main symbol of Mithraism and was represented by
the crossed bones beneath a skull. It is Time and Death.

As the Lord of Time and primordial progenitor of both the first-born

Ahriman and the late-comer Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), Zorvan (Chronos) is
an androgynous deity. Restoring the shattered unity of the godhead
through a Mithraic mediation between Ahrimanic and Mazdean forces also
requires the devotee of Mithra to overcome the gender binary. We see this
in the initiation rite for the second degree in a Mithraic secret society, the
degree of the Nymph or the Veiled One, wherein the male initiate becomes
a transvestite. In this connection, note Saying 22 from the Gospel of
Thomas:

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his

disciples, “These nursing babies are like those
who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Then
shall we enter the kingdom as babies?” Jesus
said to them, “When you make the two into one,
and when you make the inner like the outer and
the outer like the inner, and the upper like the
lower, and when you make male and female into
a single one, so that the male will not be male nor
the female be female, when you make eyes in
place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot
 in place of a foot, an image in place of an image,
then you will enter the kingdom.”
 

Mithraism has been accused of being an all-male religion, and Franz Cumot
claimed that the alleged exclusion of women from Mithraic “brotherhoods”
put the cult at a disadvantage in terms of its proselytizing power as
compared to early Christianity. First of all, if this were true, it would only be
true of the shape that Mithraism took in the more patriarchal Roman
Empire, as compared to its original Iranian form – both among the
Parthians and their Achaemenid predecessors, and especially among the
northern Iranians. The feminine or, at the very least, androgynous aspects
of Mithra “himself,” which are preserved in Roman iconography, are traces
of a primordial tradition in which Mitra was a goddess figure – one and the
same as the Sarmatian or “Amazon” archetype of Artemis or Satana. When
this Mitra was appropriated by the somewhat more patriarchal Persians,
the feminine aspect of the deity was split off and recast as the mother and
companion of Mithra, namely Anahita. The cult of Anahita is as integral to
the classical Iranian form of Mithraism as Mithra and Zorvan.

Furthermore, in point of fact, there is ample reason to question the claim

that women were not part of Mithraic “brotherhoods” even in the Roman
Empire. First of all, a burial inscription concerning a woman named Aelia
Arisuth, which was found in a Roman tomb in North Africa, uses phrases to
honor her that suggest she was a Mithraic initiate. In De Abstinentia,
Porphyry mentions female initiates who were counterparts of male
Mithraists of the lion grade. These counterparts of the “lions” (Persian shiré
mardân) were called “hyenas.” This is because the hyena species is
matriarchal and female hyenas have suggestively male genitalia. As Robin
M. Weare observes:

It is true that the female hyena’s genitals look

just like the male’s; she has a huge clitoris she
can erect at will and even has a sack of fibrous
tissue that looks like testicles. This has led to the
notion that hyenas can change sex!
…The notion that hyenas changed sex from male
to female and back again and again dates back
at least to ancient Greece, although Aristotle
refuted it. The idea probably comes from the fact
that the genitals of the two sexes look nearly
identical. In fact, Europeans often associated
hyenas with sexual “perversion,” especially
homosexuality. …[T]here are cultures that
believe some witches can turn themselves into
hyenas.
 

It is in the context of such beliefs that we should read the otherwise cryptic
Saying 114 of The Gospel of Thomas, which is the last saying in the book,
and should be placed alongside Saying 22 above. The passage begins with
the misogynistic Simon Peter remarking, in reference to the presence of
Mary Magdalene among the first rank and inner circle of the male disciples
of Christ, “Let Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” In response
to this Jesus says, “Behold, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she
too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who
makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

While seeming to be patriarchal on the face of it, this passage ought to be

interpreted in the context of the metaphor of sex-changing matriarchal
hyenas as well as the injunction in Saying 22 for males to become female
just as females become males – so that the gender binary is alchemically
overcome in a superior and trans-human form of embodiment. What is
meant here by Mary being guided to “become male” is a maleness defined
by what is called Javânmardi or mardânegi in Persian, a quality that the
Sarmatian women of the northern Iranian realm had in equal or even
greater measure than their male counterparts.

Sarmatian women are the people mythologized by the ancient Greeks as

“Amazons” – the clan from which the American super-heroine Wonder
Woman hails. Excavations around the Black Sea, where Greek heroes were
said to have encountered these warrior women, have revealed the graves of
Sarmatian women buried with their armor.

The origin of the term Amazon is debated. Some think that it is a linguistic

corruption of the Iranian Hame-Zan or “all women.” This, however, is
debatable, since the Sarmatians were not actually a society consisting only
of women. It is just that the patriarchal Greeks were so shocked by a society
where women were warriors and even rulers that they mythologized the
Sarmatians as a man-hating matriarchal society. Others believe “Amazon”
is a Greek word meaning “without breast,” coined to describe the alleged
Sarmatian practice of cutting the left breast off in order to pull back a bow
more effectively. The Sarmatians, together with their Scythian cousins,
were the greatest archers in history. Their goddess is also depicted as an
archer.

Whether or not it is accurate, the Greek etymology is interesting insofar as

Artemis, the archer, was the chief deity of the Amazons. The majority of
Greek writers who refer to Anahita, the Virgin Mother of Mithra, equate her
with Artemis. Roman authors also identified Anahita with Artemis/Diana.
For example, Tacitus refers to her as the “Persian Diana.” The most famous
surviving statue of Artemis depicts her with many breasts. These could be
the severed breasts of the warrior women being offered to the goddess.
Then again, these ‘breasts’ have also been interpreted as testicles, since
the castration of males was practiced in the cult of Artemis. This probably
terrified the Greeks into telling tall tales about what would happen to men
who fell into the hands of the Amazons. The reality is that the males who
underwent this ritual were trying to emasculate themselves so as to
become fit receptacles for the overpowering force of the divine feminine;
they also grew their hair long and wore women’s clothing as part of an
effort to attain feminine intuition or psychic abilities that were known to be
stronger in women than in men. It is somewhat paradoxical that although
she is a virgin goddess, Artemis is also the “child’s nurse” (kourotrophos)
and “nurse of children” (paidotrophos), a goddess who presides over
childbirth.

Young Sarmatians would be subjected to various other initiation rituals,

such as a trial of strength wherein a horseback rider would have to pull a
sword up out of earth, where it had been firmly planted. Taken together
with the worship of cruciform sacred swords with special names set on
stone altars, this is the origin of the chivalric symbol of the “sword in the
stone.”
The Amazon queen Otrera was the founder of the original Temple of
Artemis at Ephesus, which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world. This is where Heraclitus took refuge after the anti-Persian coup in
Ephesus, instead of accepting Darius the Great’s invitation to become the
court philosopher of Iran. Artemis appears to be an Iranian name meaning
“Truth, the Immortal” or the “Undying Right Order,” a contraction
of Artâ  (i.e. Ashâ), meaning “Truth” or “Right Order” and Ameshâ or
“immortal” as in the Ameshâ Spentâs. Iranians symbolized Artâ  as an
undying fire, and Artemis was also the torch-bearing (propolos) “crafty…
infernal one” who is a light-bearer or light-bringer
(selasphoros, phosphorus). She brings the light into darkness with the
crescent Moon and the planet Venus, also known as “the morning star” or
Lucifer. This crescent Moon and ‘star’ was her most widely recognized
symbol. The hunting bow of Artemis resembles the new moon; she
sometimes wore a lunar crescent as her crown, which, put through her hair,
made her appear to have horns; and she was referred to as shooting arrows
from her “silver bow.”

The word Satan  made its way into Hebrew and Arabic but it is actually
Iranian in origin. It is another name of the female deity of the Sarmatians,
whose honorific title was Artâ Ameshâ  (Artemis) or “Immortal
Truth.” Satana is something like the greatest of the Gorgons, and is
depicted entwined by serpents or with serpentine limbs. Her cult survives
in Ossetia to this day. She is the guardian of a Holy Grail, the mythical cup
of Shah Jamshid (jâmé jâm) by staring into whose depths one can observe
anything going on in any part of the world (jâmé jahân-namâ). Satana
dwells under a lake and is responsible for anointing great heroes. It is this
goddess figure who travels with the Alans deep into Europe and becomes
the “Lady of the Lake” of the Arthurian grail legends. The Sarmatians or
Alans believed that Satana emerged, sacred sword in hand, from a realm
beneath the waters – whether those of a sea or lake – a realm wherein
heroes are raised before being sent as saviors into this world of ours. Like
Anahita, Satana wears white garments. Satana and the Dame du Lac are the
same goddess figure, and both are northern Iranian versions of Anahita.

The oldest version of the Dame du Lac of ‘Celtic’ Brittany is in fact Anahita
or Artemis. Anahita was responsible for carrying out the investiture of the
Achaemenid sovereigns. Like Mithra, she is depicted in reliefs bestowing
the farr  to a monarch bearing a broadsword. Bestowing the royal glory
upon a broadsword-bearing king, such as Arthur, is also one of the main
functions of the Lady of the Lake in the chivalric mysticism that was
brought to Britannia by the Alans. The Dame du Lac conferring Excalibur
upon King Arthur is an investiture by the bearing of a sacred broadsword, in
accordance with the most archaic Iranian tradition. Anahita stands to the
left of the sovereign and raises her right hand to him, just as the Dame du
Lac does in some depictions of her investiture of King Arthur, such as is
preserved in the artwork of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley. Âbân Yasht, the fifth
Yasht of the Avesta, is devoted to Anahita, who is also known as Âbân or
“the waters.” Therein the goddess is described as “a beautiful, glorious, tall
and strong woman, mistress of all waters of the earth and the source of the
cosmic ocean,” as well as “the sources of fertility for humans, animals, and
plants, and the purifier of the seed of all men and the wombs of all
women.” Similarly, the Lady of the Lake of the Arthurian legends is the
guardian of a realm of “eternal spring… eternal joy… eternal youth…
eternal health.”

A Sarmatian prototype has been found for almost every major theme and
symbol in this tradition, from the legend of Lancelot, to the Lady of the
Lake, the Sword in the Stone, serpentine and dragon symbolism, the kingly
glory of the Holy Grail, and the idea of a Once and Future King
(the Saoshyânt Bahrâm Varjâvand,  Avenger of Mithra, in the original Iranian
version). The mistaken attribution of the Arthurian mythos and Grail
mysticism to the Celts is understandable considering the intimate kinship
of the Celts and the Nordic Iranians, whether Scythians or Sarmatians. The
Gaelic text Lebor Gabala Erenn claims that the Scots Irish are of Scythian
origin. Of the bard and record keeper Fenius Farsaid, it says that his father,
a man named Baath Mac Magoc Iathfed, was of “the men of Scythia” and
that “from him came the Gael.”

This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that on the western side of
the Caspian Sea coast in northern Iran, which was an area heavily trafficked
by Scythians since the Median period, there are a group of people known
as Gelacs who speak a language called Gelac. A study comparing this
northern Iranian language to Gaelic might yield very interesting results. It
has already been noted by linguists that despite its (mistaken) classification
as a Centrum branch of the Indo-European languages, Gaelic actually has
many parallels to the Scythian language, as well as some grammatical
features and vocabulary that are shared with Thracian.

Both Scythian and Thracian are part of the Satem branch of Indo-European
languages that were spoken in an area of southeastern Europe and the
Caucasus dominated by Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians for most of
antiquity. Here are just a couple of examples. The word for hen is cearc  in
Gaelic and kark  in the Ossetian, Kurdish, and Hyrcanian (Gilaki and
Mazandarani) languages that are heavily influenced by, or descended from
the Scythian language. Then there is the name of Ireland itself, Erin, which
comes from Eire  or Aire. In both Gaelic and Old Persian this word means
“freeman” or, by extension, one not enslaved to or in the service of anyone,
namely a “nobleman.” In other words, Eire-an  is Ir-an, the land of the free
or realm of the noblemen. The Gelacs of northern Iran share a number of
cultural traits in common with the Irish, including their peculiar wit and
sense of humor. They also play the bagpipe or Nay-anbân, the origin of
which is generally acknowledged by musicologists to be Iranian. In Pre-
Islamic times they even wore clothes with plaid patterns. Not incidentally,
their region of the Caspian coast is very rainy and densely forested.
Moreover, Gelacs believe their local forests to be inhabited by paeris or
faeries.

The wisdom goddess Satana was the mother of these Nârtik or “Nordic”

people. The name Satana is a compound of the Old Iranian words Sat  or
“one hundred” (which is still Sad in contemporary Persian) and na or
“mother”. This is meant to signify that she is “the mother of a hundred
sons,” namely the Narts. The Narts had great feasting and drinking halls
called Nykhas that are the same as those of the Scandinavians, which
became the basis for the conception of Valhalla in “Nordic” religion. In
Iranian Vâl Hâl would mean “highest enjoyment” or “loftiest state of being.”
The Alans would introduce the long-hall banqueting culture to Medieval
Europe. Batraz was the leader of this superhuman Nartik  race. The story of
the love affair between Guinevere and Lancelot is based on the romantic
rapport of Satana with Batraz, who is her own son in a spiritual as well as a
biological sense. The parallels to the “Arthurian” mythos that we find in the
Japanese legends of the swordsman Yamato Takeru can most likely be
accounted for by a common Scythian origin, since we know that the
Scythians reach deep into northeastern Asia.

These prototypical Iranians of the Caucasus, who resemble Europeans in

every respect, never mixed with the various non-Iranian peoples that some
of the Persians interloped with, such as the Elamites and Babylonians. The
Cyrus Cylinder draws a racial distinction between Iranians and those
governed by them in a way that suggests that black hair was not common
in the phenotype of Iranians at the time of Cyrus: “And he [Cyrus]
shepherded with justice and righteousness all the black-headed people,
over whom he [Marduk] had given him victory.” As exemplars of the original
Iranian ethnic stock, the Scythians possessed “Caucasian features”
including “tall stature,” with numerous corpses recovered
from kurgans  being “over six feet tall,” as well as “blondish hair, and fierce
eyes” that were often blue or green. From the Roman perspective the
Scythians were so Germanic in appearance, and so much more ‘Nordic’ in
phenotype than the majority of Italians themselves, that it became
common for Romans to refer to the Germanic Goths as simply another
group of Iranians. The remains found in the graves of Goths are so similar to
those found in Scythian burials that anthropologists often cannot tell them
apart. It was only much later in their history, especially in the areas near
China, that Scythian warlords interbred with their Asian slaves to produce
Mongoloid or Turkic offspring.

The Scythians had a predominately oral culture, so their arts and crafts are
key to unlocking their mentality, worldview, and way of life. These northern
Iranians loved to work in gold. Their gold-crafted objects, such as
hairbrushes or mead horns, are richly decorated with sculptured figures
and motifs – including accurate depictions of the people themselves.
Scythian gold is full of depictions of both men and women wearing shirts
and trousers. As the predominant horseback riders of antiquity, these
northern Iranians invented pants. Their fashion of clothing is one of the
many cultural elements that they introduced into Europe. A layman
untrained in art history would easily mistake most of the imagery on
Scythian gold for European artwork. The people look ‘Germanic’, some of
the lyrical design elements call to mind Celtic weave patterns, and animals
such as griffins and reindeer have an ornate proto-Gothic flare to them that
would remind a Westerner of Norse art. Except that all of the Iranian
imagery in this style predates the European points of comparison.

The Persian art of the Achaemenid Empire was an imperial style that
explicitly aimed at a cosmopolitan synthesis of the art of many non-Iranian
(i.e. non-Aryan) peoples who became subjects of the empire, including the
Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and ancient Egyptians. So the purest
form of ancient Iranian art is actually Scythian. Consequently, to the extent
that we want to see the Iranian soul, including that of the earliest Persians,
reflected in arts and crafts, we need to look to the north.

Furthermore, since the Parthians eventually branch off of the Scythians and
engage in an Iranian Reconquista of the Hellenized territories of what was
the Achaemenid Empire, Parthian art and architecture must also be
considered a development of the Scythian style. It is a terrible mistake on
the part of both art historians and Iranologists to consider Parthian
sculptures or buildings “European” in style and attribute this solely to the
Seleucid legacy. On the contrary, Parthian art is Scythian art elevated to a
monumental scale. Parthian sculptures, in particular, are much more
Scythian than they are Greek.

If they call to mind late Roman or Gothic European art, that is because
beginning in late antiquity the European continent was overrun by a group
of Scythians or Sarmatians called the Alans. Gothic “cathedrals” are a
natural architectural evolution of Scythian and Sarmatian decorated tents,
including the cross-structured plan (since the cross was the sacred symbol
of Mithraism). Even the iconography in these cathedrals (such as the
forward-facing enthroned Christ with a hallow-crowned head, flanked by
angels) owes so much to Mithraic artistic conventions that developed in
Parthian and Sassanian Iran that the Christian narrative content is
essentially secondary to the aesthetic forms depicted in the stained glass
and carved into the stones.

The similarities between the style of Celtic art and the older motifs found
on the gold crafts products of the Scythians and Sarmatians are so striking
and extensive that, given the massive penetration of northern Iranians into
continental Europe, a mere parallel is out of the question. The weave
patterns and lyrical depictions of chimerical animals so characteristic of
Celtic art are very likely Iranian in origin. It is also noteworthy that this
artistic style influenced the rise of “Gothic” art and architecture in Europe
precisely in the period when the shattered Roman Empire was inundated
by Alans, who represented the last wave of northern Iranians mass-
migrating into Europe. The European culture of chivalry would have been
inconceivable without the Scythian, Sarmatian, and Alanic influence on the
Germanic “barbarians” and Vandals who, only together with these Iranians,
conquered large parts of France and established Visi-Gothic and Goth-
Alanic Spain. (More on Goth-Alania or “Catalonia” below.)

The Sarmatians not only mixed with the Germanic population of Europe,
they also heavily intermixed with various groups of Slavs and shared broad
swaths of territory with them. The Serbs (Sorbs) and Croats of the former
Yugoslavia are both ethnic groups of northern Iranian origin. Croat  is an
Iranian word that is the origin of cravat  or neck-tie, an Iranian fashion item
that, together with pants, belt, jacket, and all other main elements of post-
Roman ‘Western’ fashion, was brought into Europe by Iranian horseback
riders. Poland is Sarmatian, not Slavic, in its ethnic foundation and the
Iranian influence on heraldry and the chivalric martial tradition among the
Poles remains evident.
When Marcus Aurelius defeated one invading group of Alans in the second
century AD, instead of killing them he recruited them as elite guards to
defend the empire against “the barbarians.” This is quite interesting, since
it suggests that Marcus Aurelius, who was a philosopher as well as a Caesar,
had sufficient discernment to recognize not only the extraordinary military
competence of these Sarmatians, but also the fact that they ought not to be
lumped in with half-savage aliens such as the Germans and Celts, who were
threatening the civilized order of imperial Rome.

The Alan tribes that invaded Gaul featured horseback-riding women

warriors who were both capable archers and who also wielded
broadswords. Legends about these women warriors survived in
Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh, for example the legend of Gordafarid, whose
combat with Rostam’s son, Sohrab, is famous in Greater Iran: “As she was
turning in her saddle, [Gordafarid] drew a sharp blade from her waist,
struck at his lance, and parted it in two.” The Sarmatians or Alans who were
settled in Britain by Marcus Aurelius were settled in the area of Chester and
RiBCEhester, with their 5,000 cavalry being given the task of guardian
Hadrian’s Wall. They were put under the command of a Roman general by
the name of Artorius Bastus, whose name, Anglicized to “Arthur,” became
associated with the legendary king of the Alans.

What the Alans brought with them was the ‘Arthurian’ culture of Chivalry,
which is known in Iran as Javânmardi  or Farhangé Pahlavâni. The stories
of Guiw and of Kay-Kavus that have survived in the Shâhnâmeh of Ferdowsi
are derived from Scythian or Sarmatian legends that were the basis for the
development of the legends of “Gawain” and “Kay” in Britain. Batraz had to
pull a sacred broadsword out of a tree and the Sarmatians had a ritual of
thrusting swords into the earth or into stones piled into a platform on the
earth, and then setting up a trial of strength to pull this sword from out of
where it had been lodged. Pahlavâns or Iranian chivalric knights
customarily thrust their qamehs or daggers into the earth before dueling.
Batraz asks his comrade Sainag-Alder to throw his sword into the ocean
after his death, just as Arthur makes a similar request of Percival that the
latter throw Excalibur into the lake. In both cases a goddess figure rises up
out of the water to catch the magical sword.

The name “Alan,” widely adopted by Europeans, is a variant of Arân. In the

phonetics of Iranian languages l and r are interchangeable (think of the way
that Japanese people pronounce the word “really”). So Arâni or a “person
from Arân” became Alâni. The word Arân is simply a different pronunciation
of Irân, i.e. “Aryan,” one local to the Caucasus, which is where the
Sarmatians originally lived. Note that white people are referred to as
“Caucasians” because many scholars of Indo-European linguistics and
anthropology believe the Caucasus region, between the Black Sea and the
Caspian Sea, to be the point of origin for the entire Aryan or Indo-European
community. So the Sarmatians, close cousins of the Scythians, are the
Aryans who remained for much longer in the cradle of the “Indo-European”
community while others branched out into northern India, Western Europe,
and of course, the “Iranian plateau” (which only then became “Iranian”).
Their only remnant today is the nation of Ossetia. Ossetians refer to their
language as Iron, in other words, “Iranian.” That it calls the metal “iron” to
mind is not at all incidental; ironwork may have begun here.

The Sarmatians invented scale armor. Lance-wielding knights in shining

armor are Iranian in origin and only became a feature of European cultures
much later, through direct Sarmatian or Alanic influence. Actually, the
contrived Greek etymology for the name of these people reflects the fact
that Europeans had never seen scale armor before, let alone people
covered in it from head to toe and riding on horses that were also armored.
It reminded the Greeks of snake scale. This, taken together with the fact
that the standard or war banner of the Sarmatians was a dragon,
compelled the Greeks to refer to the Sarmat as Sauromatae, a word with
the same Greek root as “Dinosaur,” which conveys the sense of “lizard
people” or reptilians. The whole European lore of people with “dragon
blood” begins here, since it is these same “reptilians” who, after the fall of
the Roman Empire, assumed leadership of the other “barbarians” and
formed the leading aristocratic houses in large parts of Germany, northern
Italy, France, and Spain.

Together with the Goths, the Alans formed a kingdom in Spain that was
named Goth-Alania, the pronunciation of which eventually became
“Catalonia.” This was the point of origin for the Troubadour culture, which
spread throughout the rest of Spain and French Occitan. The bloodline of
the Carolingian dynasty traces back to these Iranians, and they also served
as top advisors to the Merovingian kings. Alan families settled in Gaul
(France) as early as the fifth century and maintained their dominance until
the 1200s, and it is in this place, during this period, that the Grail romances
were written. The Goths, Franks, and Celts lived under the Alan elite, as
village peasantry, and were also employed as shock troops.

Together with the Germans, the Alans served as the upper echelon of the
Crusader knights, and these Iranians also fought to defeat Attila the Hun so
as to protect Europe from non-Aryans. The infamous Order of the Dragon
(Draculae) was Sarmatian in origin. Together with neighboring Bulgaria, so-
called “Hungary” was actually part of the core Sarmatian homeland around
the Black Sea, before the Turkic Huns invaded this part of Sarmatia and
replaced its Indo-European language and Aryan culture with a Finno-Ugric
one. In other words, Hungary was more European when it was still solidly
Iranian. To this day, the Hungarians and Bulgarians retain the tricolor flag
common to other Iranian territories, from Persia and Kurdistan to
Tajikistan. Ancient Greek and Roman maps mark the region of Hungary and
Bulgaria as inhabited by the Roxalanoi or “white Alans.”

All of this is driving at the point that Jesus Christ and his disciples added
nothing whatsoever to European culture. Every positive development of
European culture that has been misattributed to the Christian religion that
was institutionalized after the Council of Nicea in 325 CE is actually
attributable to some other factor internal to the Aryan world, especially to
the spirituality, traditions, and aesthetics of Mithraism, which fellow Indo-
Europeans brought to Europe in two waves – the first during the pagan
Roman Empire and the second in the course of the “barbarian” invasions.

Furthermore, the claim that these mass migrations of Celtic, Germanic

(especially Gothic), and northwestern Iranian (Alanic and Saxon) people
into the Mediterranean core of the Roman Empire is what led to the
destruction of a high level of civilization is absolutely indefensible. On the
contrary, had Christian Church (then not yet divided by the Catholic and
Orthodox schism) not waged war against the “pagan” literature, arts, and
sciences of European “heathens”, this infusion of fresh “barbarian” blood
would have actually accelerated the advent of the modern industrial age.
The following, and final, section will make this argument on the basis of
two factors: first, the genetic characteristics of the white “barbarians” with
relevance to cultural creativity and intellectual production and, second, the
state of intellectual culture, science, and technology in places such as
Roman Alexandria.

5. CHRISTIANITY AS RETARDATION

In his book, Human Achievement, Charles Murray has brought together a

treasure trove of evidence for the genetic superiority of Europeans in the
domains of science and technology, literature and the arts, exploration and
voyages of discovery. When one defines “the explorer” as a distinct
category that is not to be confused with conquerors who crossed vast
swathes of land, such as Genghis Khan (or Alexander), one finds that there
are only about 15 non-European men out of a total number of
approximately 300 explorers in recorded human history. These explorers
include naval navigators who sailed previously uncharted seas, and thereby
discovered new lands, mountain climbers who scaled peaks, the vistas of
which had never been beheld by anyone before them, as well as those
individuals who led expeditions to conquer the poles of the Earth, both in
the Arctic and Antarctica. Whether these men were ancient Greeks, with
their extraordinary maritime culture, or the Vikings who made it to America
long before Christopher Columbus, or Renaissance Italians such as Amerigo
Vespucci, after which “America” was named, Portuguese and Spanish
merchants, British mountain climbers in Africa and India, Germans in the
jungles of the Amazons or the Himalaya mountains, or their Germanic
kindred in Scandinavia who braved the Antarctic and named large swaths
of the frozen continent – they were almost all white men.

This is entirely inextricable from the incomparable accomplishment of

whites – European and American – in the arts, literature, the sciences and
technological innovation. For example, from out of painters and other
visual artists of which we have any historical records, whether in Western,
Islamic, Indian, or Asian histories, 479 were Westerners as compared to a
total of 293 from all non-Western cultures combined (the total population
of which far exceeds that of the West, meaning that the 479 Western artists
represent a much larger percentage of the population of their own
civilization and not just of the world at large). When it comes to great works
of literature, 835 Western writers penned works that became historic
whereas East Asia, India, and the Muslim world taken together only
produced 293 notable authors (again, despite having a much larger
combined population than Europe and its colonial territories in the
Americas). The imbalance is even more significant in music, although
harder to compare with any precision, since non-Western cultures do not
even have a tradition of music composition with identifiable individual
composers (at least not until they were Westernized very late into
modernity).

Finally, as far as science and technology are concerned, “white supremacy”

is undisputed. Even when taking the considerable accomplishments of the
“Islamic Golden Age” into account, where it must be admitted that 90% of
the scientists and inventors were Persians who at that time (800–1100)
were still genetically (and not just linguistically) Indo-European, we still
arrive at the conclusion that 97% of techno-scientific achievements in
history are by white men – whether in Europe, North America, or Russia.
This does not include the negligible number of Jews, whose contributions,
especially in late modernity, are always overstated.

What is also evident from this statistical analysis is that IQ is only one part
of this puzzle when it comes to comprehending the excellence of Faustian
man. It should go without saying that, with an IQ that is in some cases 20 to
30 points below that of Westerners, the native peoples of Africa, Arabia, and
India (as compared to the small Aryan minority who brought higher culture
there) could not possibly hope to compete with Faustian man in any area of
human achievement. However, the Chinese have a very high average IQ,
comparable to the most intelligent Western populations, but as can be seen
most clearly in their attempts at exploration, they lack all of the other
personality traits that account for Faustian achievement. What one gleans
from the chronicles of the voyages of Cheng Ho, and the burning of the
Chinese ships that may have made it to the Americas, is a terror in the face
of the unknown and its potential for destabilization of society. “May you
live in interesting times,” is a Chinese curse.

This genetic evidence for the excellence of European (or broader Indo-
European) achievement as compared to that of other genetically clustered
populations is already a very strong piece of evidence in favor of the thesis
that the decline of European greatness between the Christianization of
Rome and the Italian Renaissance had nothing to do with the mass
migration of whites into the heart of the Roman Empire – the same
Nordic/Germanic and Anglo-Saxon whites who would be most responsible
for the greatest achievements of “Faustian” modernity. Rather, Christianity
was a mind virus that resulted in the debilitation of mental retardation of
European civilization for centuries – a disease that is still distorting our
culture and rendering us vulnerable to a program of deliberately
degenerative deconstruction at the hands of resentful, slavish souls.

In The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche recognizes the spirit of Science as the

antithesis of the Christian mentality. Christianity, in Nietzsche’s view, extols
foolish ignorance and condemns the “wisdom of this world” as sinful. In
fact, as Nietzsche recognizes, the Bible begins with the story of a jealous
god who is terrified at the human attainment of knowledge of life, of
Nature, as symbolized by the Serpent and by the serpentine woman, Eve
(Hava), whose Hebrew name means “life.” By contrast, the Promethean
advocate of Science strives in the spirit of the Antichrist as the mortal
enemy of God:
 

A religion like Christianity, which is at no point in

contact with actuality, which crumbles away as
soon as actuality comes into its own at any point
whatever, must naturally be a mortal enemy of
the ‘wisdom of the world’, that is to say of
science…
Paul wants to confound the ‘wisdom of the
world’: his enemies are the good philologists and
physicians of the Alexandrian school – upon them
he makes war. In fact, one is not philologist and
physician without also being at the same time
anti-Christian.
…Has the famous story which stands at the
beginning of the Bible really been understood –
the story of God’s mortal terror of science? …God
had created for himself a rival, science makes
equal to God… Moral: science is forbidden in
itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first
sin, the germ of all sins, original sin. This alone
constitutes morality. – ‘Thou shalt not know’ –
the rest follows. …all thoughts are bad thoughts.
Man shall not think. …Distress does not allow
man to think. …And none the less! Oh horror! The
structure of knowledge towers up, heaven-
 storming, reaching for the divine – what to do! –
The old God invents war, he divides the peoples,
he makes men destroy one another… War –
among other things a great mischief-maker in
science! – Incredible! Knowledge, emancipation
from the priest, increases in spite of wars. – And
the old God comes to a final decision: ‘Man has
become scientific – there is nothing for it, he will
have to be drowned!’
 

In The Anti-Christ Nietzsche identifies the Jewish mentality as an epitome of

the falsification of life that one sees in the conception of the Fall as a
rightful punishment for the sin of knowledge-seeking that was committed
in Eden. This is reiterated in The Birth of Tragedy. Given that
the Promethea trilogy of Aeschylus was a supreme work of the tragic age of
the Greeks that Nietzsche so admired, and that becomes the subject of The
Birth of Tragedy, it ought to be no surprise that we find his most extended
meditation on Prometheus there. He contrasts the Prometheus mythos of
the Aryans with Semitic religiosity in the most striking terms. The passages
deserve quoting at length:

Let me now contrast the glory of activity, which

illuminates Aeschylus’ Prometheus, with the glory
of passivity… Man, rising to Titanic stature, gains
culture by his own efforts and forces the gods to
enter into an alliance with him because in his
very own wisdom he holds their existence and
their limitations in his hands. But what is most
wonderful in this Promethean poem, which in its
 basic idea is the veritable hymn of impiety, is the
profoundly Aeschylean demand for justice. The
immeasurable suffering of the bold “individual”
on the one hand and the divine predicament and
intimation of a twilight of the gods on the other…
In view of the astonishing audacity with which
Aeschylus places the Olympian world on the
scales of his justice, we must call to mind that the
profound Greek possessed an immovably firm
foundation for metaphysical thought in his
mysteries, and all his skeptical moods could be
vented against the Olympians. The Greek artist in
particular had an obscure feeling of mutual
dependence when it came to the gods; and
precisely in the Prometheus of Aeschylus this
feeling is symbolized. In himself the Titanic artist
found the defiant faith that he had the ability to
create men and at least destroy Olympian gods,
by means of his superior wisdom which, to be
sure, he had to atone for with eternal suffering.
The splendid “ability” of the great genius for
which even eternal suffering is a slight price, the
stern pride of the artist – that is the content and
soul of Aeschylus’ poem…
 But Aeschylus’ interpretation of the myth does
not exhaust the astounding depth of its terror.
Rather the artist’s delight in what becomes, the
cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies all
misfortune, is merely a bright image of clouds
and sky mirrored in a black lake of sadness. The
Prometheus story is an original possession of the
entire Aryan community of peoples and evidences
their gift for the profoundly tragic. Indeed, it does
not seem improbable that this myth has the same
characteristic significance for the Aryan
character which the myth of the fall has for the
Semitic character, and that these two myths are
related to each other like brother and sister. The
presupposition of the Prometheus myth is to be
found in the extravagant value which a naïve
humanity attached to fire as the true palladium
of every ascending culture. But that man should
freely dispose of fire without receiving it as a
present from heaven, either as a lightning bolt or
as the warming rays of the sun, struck these
reflective primitive men as sacrilege, as a robbery
of divine nature. Thus the very first philosophical
problem immediately produces a painful and
irresolvable contradiction between man and god
and moves it before the gate of every culture, like
a huge boulder. The best and highest possession
mankind can acquire is obtained by sacrilege
and must be paid for with consequences which
involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows
with which the offended divinities have to afflict
the nobly aspiring race of men. This is a harsh
idea which, by the dignity it confers on sacrilege,
contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the
fall in which curiosity, mendacious deception,
susceptibility to seduction, lust – in short, a series
of pre-eminently feminine affects was considered
the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan
notion is the sublime view of active sin as the
characteristically Promethean virtue. With that,
the ethical basis for pessimistic tragedy has been
found: the justification of human evil, meaning
both human guilt and the human suffering it
entails.
…Whoever understands this innermost kernel of
the Prometheus story – namely, the necessity of
sacrilege imposed upon the titanically striving
individual… [who, like] the swelling… tide…
takes the separate little wave-mountains of
individuals on its back, even as Prometheus’
brother, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth. This
Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas
 for all individuals, carrying them on a broad
back, higher and higher, farther and farther, is
what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in
common.
 
Returning to The Anti-Christ, there Nietzsche observes how the Church links
the Christian embrace of ignorance as bliss with an affirmation of
submissive weakness. As a world-historical force, Christianity has made war
on the rare and higher type of person who seeks knowledge and worldly
wisdom above all else. Nietzsche, who was by profession a classicist, sees
the classical world as having, after centuries of struggle, established a
foundation for the flourishing of this type in Alexandrian Rome. Here all of
the key elements of the scientific orientation towards life were already
developed.

Alexandria was a Greek colony established in Egypt and named after

Alexander of Macedon. Aristotle personally tutored Alexander, who went on
to reverse the power dynamic between the Greeks and Persians and to
colonize not only the core of the Persian Empire, but Egypt and northern
India as well. Alexander died young, at the age of 33 in Babylon, before
having a chance to secure the long-term political unity of his new empire.
Alexander’s generals divided up his empire after his death. Nevertheless,
his dream of establishing a cosmopolitan world civilization was realized in
some measure insofar as the cultural milieu that he created with his
conquests allowed for a hybridization of the Greek way of life and thought
with cultures of the colonized peoples to produce what is known as
“Hellenistic” (vs. Hellenic) civilization. The cultural capital of this
cosmopolitan civilization was Alexandria, in northern Egypt. This territory
had fallen under the command of General Ptolemy, who went on to
establish his own Ptolemaic dynasty there. The Ptolemies were great
patrons of the arts and sciences, in many ways establishing the model of
aristocratic patronage of the quest for knowledge and technical innovation
that was resurrected by the Medici family and others during the Italian
Renaissance.

Numerous scholars from Athens and elsewhere in the classical world were
drawn to the Museum that Ptolemy established in Alexandria. This
“Museum” or temple dedicated to the Muses featured a library that, by
some estimates, contained some half a million scrolls. The Ptolemies even
forced ships docking at the port of Alexandria from the far corners of the
Hellenistic world to turn over any books that they might have on board to
be copied by the librarians of the Museum before they could resume their
journeys.

Among the hundreds of thousands of scrolls in the Library of Alexandria

was the work of Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BCEE) who, working in the
Pythagorean tradition, had rejected the Platonic and Aristotelian model of
the cosmos and devised a heliocentric model of the solar system that
correctly placed the Earth in orbit around the Sun.

Meanwhile, a geographer and mathematician by the name of Eratosthenes

(fl. 235 BCEE), who headed the Library of Alexandria himself, had managed
to calculate the earth’s circumference to within a very small margin of error
of the number that we now know to be correct. Eratosthenes arrived at a
figure of 252,000 stades or 24,000 miles, strikingly close to the true number
of 24,901. Consistent with the Alexandrian spirit, on the basis of his
discoveries concerning the dimensions of the spherical earth Eratosthenes
not only argued that it could be circumnavigated by sailors but also that
such voyages could act to demolish racial prejudices and promote
universal human brotherhood.

We know that, among other eclectic cultural influences, Babylonian

astrology and astronomy made it to Alexandria and was assimilated by
Greek astronomers in such a way as to effect a fundamental advance that
left obsession with aesthetic considerations such as the geometrical form
of the cosmos behind in favor of more accurate quantitative measurements
and predictions of celestial phenomena. It also spurred the design of high
precision instruments geared to this purpose. By the first century BCE, a
device designed to measure the apparent diameter of the sun and moon.
The astrolabe, with its stereographic projection, had been invented. The
precession of the equinoxes had been discovered and the rising and setting
times of the major constellations at a given location had been determined
together with times of the equinoxes and solstices. Such advances in
knowledge, facilitated by technical innovation, not only afforded the
Hellenistic peoples more accurate calendars but also allowed for the
compiling of massive star catalogues or atlases of the heavens. These
would draw on observations going back hundreds of years to calculate the
average length of the lunar month to within one second of the modern
value, and to predict solar and lunar eclipses for any given location.
Although Aristarchus had grasped that the Earth actually revolves around
the Sun, his heliocentric model had less predictive power than the most
sophisticated refinement of the Earth centered one. The Alexandrian
astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (fl. 150 CE) introduced a number of
innovations to the Platonic/Aristotelian model of the cosmos to arrive at
the system that would not be overthrown until the Copernican Revolution
in the sixteenth century.

Ptolemy [not to be confused with the General and founder of the dynasty]
was answering a challenge that is supposed to have been first posed by
Plato, namely whether the occasionally retrograde motion of the planets
and the variations in speed that they undergo in their apparent orbits
around the Earth could somehow be translated into a composite of uniform
and perfectly circular motions. Yet, while Plato may have set this task on
account of aesthetic assumptions about the perfection of the celestial
realm, of the same kind that seduced Parmenides into thinking that the
One must be spherical in shape, Ptolemy would have to carry out this task
in a way that retained the new standard of quantitative precision in
predictive power that was set by the Hellenistic assimilation of Babylonian
astronomical techniques. We must also bear in mind that the kind of
trigonometry used to make accurate predictions in this époque could not
readily be applied to shapes other than circles.

Advances in astronomy are obviously also going to call for breakthroughs in

optics. Early in the Alexandrian period, Euclid (fl. 300 BCEE) developed
optics into a science that drew on the geometrical principles of the
Elements for which he is most famous. In a propositional form similar to
that of this earlier and more widely known work, Euclid’s Optica analyzed
an object’s appearance based on its spatial relationship to the observer,
with special emphasis on a geometrical cone of vision with its base on the
visible object and its vertex in the eye of the perceiver. Rays extending from
the vertex to the object at various angles marked the elements of the first
scientific theory of perspective or the apparent size of an object viewed as a
function of the angle from which it is perceived. This is a development with
significant psychological implications, considering the broader
connotation of perspectival perception in the context of the rising
cosmopolitan inter-cultural context of the Greeks in the wake of
Alexander’s conquests.

In fact, Claudius Ptolemy was actually working at the Museum in Alexandria

when he used Euclid’s groundwork to elaborate a more sophisticated
optical science. Again, we are dealing with an astronomer who is
elaborating optics for the purpose of astronomical observation. In
his Optica Ptolemy did not restrict himself to Euclid’s narrow geometrical
approach. Rather, Ptolemy’s theory of vision included explicit
consideration of the physiological and psychological dimensions of the
visual process in a way that allowed for experimental tests with
quantitative results. Although he adopts Euclid’s cone of vision, he extends
it to account for both monocular and binocular vision and interprets its
rays as physically real. These rays take on the color of objects and transmit
visual information on the shape, size, and location of objects back to the
brain of the perceiver. Most impressively, Ptolemy develops a
comprehensive account of reflection and refraction in surfaces such as
mirrors and bodies of water, developing equations that accurately project,
for example, by exactly what angle a stick will appear ‘bent’ when it is
refracted in water or how an image will be distorted in both concave and
convex mirrors of spherical or cylindrical shape.

Optics was by no means the only area of scientific experimentation in the

Hellenistic milieu of Alexandrian civilization. It only stands to reason that
mechanics would yield the greatest hands-on efforts in the laboratory and
ones that would lead most directly to technological innovation. Drawing
from Mechanical Problems considered by the school of Aristotle,
Archimedes (287–212 BCEE) laid out the principles of mechanics in the form
of Euclidean proofs and the way in which he mathematized nature in terms
of the dynamical movement of the parts of things set an example that,
while it fell on deaf ears throughout the Middle Ages, would be a powerful
influence on the founders of modern science. Archimedes is said to have
designed machines capable of lifting naval vessels out of water and burning
these ships using focused beams of light produced by an array of mirrors.
Researchers at Alexandria cited his work extensively and used it for their
own mechanical inventions. One of these was Hero of Alexandria who
designed the first steam engine and gear train; he also wrote a treatise on
robotics.

The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Alexandria made it possible for the

Ptolemies to break with conservative Greek funerary traditions in allowing
human autopsies at the laboratories of the Museum and Library beginning
in the third century BCEE, which led to vital advances in medicine and
biological science. Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 460–370 BCE) is usually regarded
as the founder of Greek medicine in a formal sense, although physicians
such as Aristotle’s father had been practicing for centuries before his time.
It is to Hippocrates that we owe the “Hippocratic oath” of modern medical
practice. Beginning with Hippocrates, “seizure” producing diseases such as
epilepsy and cerebral palsy that had been seen as the product of being
seized by a god were given naturalistic explanations; a very conscious
attempt was made to put “witch-doctors, faith-healers, quacks and
charlatans” out of business by establishing standards for formal medical
study and private practice.

As in Pre-Socratic Physics, the key turn here was toward naturalistic

accounts that assume that nature acts uniformly and according to universal
principles that are not subject to the caprice of supernatural entities.
Within this framework, disease is often diagnosed as some imbalance in the
body due to an interference with its  natural state such as blockages of
veins or the overabundance or dearth of some bodily fluid or humor.
Standard examination procedures were established, including the
examination of the patient’s face, eyes, hands, posture, breathing, sleep,
and emissions and excretions from all bodily orifices. This served not only
to diagnose the disease responsible for symptoms such as coughing,
sneezing, fever, convulsions, tumors, and lesions, but also to discern the
pathology of the disease in question so as to offer a prognosis of its
probable future course. In addition to diagnosis and prognosis, classical
physicians were of course also in the business of treating various ailments,
especially with the regulation of diet, exercise, sleep, and sex, special baths
and massages, and hundreds of herbal medicines used as laxatives,
purgatives, emetics, narcotics, expectorants, balms, and powders.

The Greeks who inaugurated the Olympic games, founded many of the
sports still practiced in Western civilization, and so sports medicine was a
key part of the practice of physicians. Modern physicians have been quite
impressed with the skill with which their Greek predecessors administered
treatment of wounds, fractures, and dislocations. Despite the emphasis on
naturalistic diagnosis, we must remember that Greeks as brilliant as Plato
and Aristotle understood Nature very differently from modern materialists
and so practices such as dream healing remained an important part of
Hellenistic medicine.

Unfortunately, Greek medical writings of the Alexandrian period seem to

have been among the greatest casualties of the holocaust of the writings of
classical antiquity epitomized by the burning of the Library of Alexandria,
the city whose relatively liberal atmosphere allowed medical practice to
advance most rapidly. We have considerable writings from early Greek
medical practice, centered on places such as Athens, and then there is a
black hole in our knowledge until the early Christian period. We are often
left to reconstruct the brilliant innovations of the intervening period from
later and often biased authors. Two of the most accomplished physicians of
the Hellenistic period were actually based in Alexandria. Herophilus (d. ca.
255 BCEE), a native of Asia Minor, came to Alexandria to work under the
patronage of the first two sovereigns of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Galen who
was born in 129 CE at Pergamum (another center of learning in the classical
world) traveled widely in Asia Minor, Corinth, and the Greek mainland
before settling in Alexandria during the most productive phase of his
career. He would go on to become the personal physician of famous Roman
gladiators and three Caesars in Rome: Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and
Septimius Severus. The aforementioned legality of human autopsy in
colonial Alexandria under the Ptolemies, which broke with traditional
Greek and Roman religious customs, allowed these men to make
tremendous advances in anatomy. They mapped the brain and nervous
system, including its connection with the spinal cord; distinguished veins
from arteries in the heart and carefully examined the function of its valves;
they described the ovaries and Fallopian tubes, laying the foundation for
the practice of obstetrics. Galen is known to have even carried out brain
surgery. Great physicians such as Herophilus, Erasistratus, and Galen did
not go unchallenged. While they were respected by those who studied their
works, both their method and their findings were also challenged by
independent investigations that yielded a healthy debate in the scientific
literature of the Hellenistic period.

The connection between political authoritarianism and scientific progress

in this cosmopolitan cultural milieu was very real. When in 307 BCEE
Demetrius Phaleron, a student of Aristotle’s Lyceum was overthrown as
dictator of Athens, a city with a strong democratic tradition (and one whose
democracy had sentenced Socrates to death), Demetrius was invited to
Alexandria by Ptolemy and probably influenced the latter’s plans to
establish his own center of learning there. It would become the intellectual
beacon of the entire classical world, a spiritual complement of Alexandria’s
famous lighthouse, until the Christian seizure of the Roman Empire ushered
in the dark ages. Roman emperors such as Antonius Pius and Marcus
Aurelius endowed imperial chairs for teachers of philosophy. Caesar Marcus
Aurelius (reign, 218–222 CE), an accomplished philosopher himself,
endowed chairs for each of the four major schools of thought. The Platonic,
the Peripatetic (Aristotelian), and Epicurean schools, all competitors to his
own Stoic path to knowledge, were equally encouraged by him.
The extraordinary intellectual culture of the Hellenistic period, centered on
Alexandria, was brought to an end with the Judeo-Christian takeover of the
Roman Empire. In the first third of the fourth century AD, around the year
325 CE, the Caesar Constantine adopted the Christian religion and
convened a council at Nicea to organize the fractious religion into an
established Church with a clearly defined canon and dogma. The city of
New Rome was named Constantinople in his honor and became the capital
of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium. Within a generation
of Constantine’s Christianization of the Roman Empire, which established a
persecuted fringe cult as the official state religion, Bishop Cyril of
Alexandria was waging a vicious campaign to establish Christian
dominance over this beacon of scientific learning in the pagan world.

At that time Hypatia of Alexandria (335–405 CE) was the director of the Neo-
Platonic Academy in the city and, in that capacity, a key guardian of its
Museum and Library. That such a status was attainable by a woman at that
time in human history attests to the extraordinarily progressive and
humanistic cultural milieu of Alexandrian civilization. Although she was
very attractive and garnered many suitors, Hypatia was more interested in
pursuing scientific exploration than in the household duties of a married
woman. Cyril saw her as an epitome of pagan impiety, not only because she
was an independent woman with a prominent position in the public sphere
but also because she was so accomplished in the sciences that the rising
Judeo-Christian Church viewed as worldly vanity by comparison to the
content of its revealed scriptures. Cyril accused Hypatia of witchcraft on
account of her work with celestial instruments such as the astrolabe.

Under Cyril’s orders, Hypatia was seized by a Christian mob on her way
home, stripped naked and flayed to death. Her skin was scraped off her
flesh with shards of pottery and seashells, until she bled to death. Then
they took her corpse and torched it on a pyre in a herald of the future witch
burnings. The Christian mob went on to burn the Library of Alexandria to
the ground and to smash the idols of the Serapium, the temple to Serapis –
the patron deity of the Museum and Library, whose cult the Ptolemies had
set up as a synthesis of Greek and Egyptian beliefs. Half a million scrolls
went up in flames.

What we know of the accomplishment of classical antiquity in the arts and

sciences, such as the voluminous writings of all the Greek dramatists, the
Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle, is about 1% of what was contained in
that library and at other sites that suffered similar, albeit less dramatic
fates, during the rise of the Church of Rome. That percentage has been
calculated based on a detailed study of every textual reference, on the part
of Classical authors and writers of the early Christian period, to books that
did not survive into the Middle Ages or to authors whose entire corpus of
writings perished in the Christian cultural genocide of European
civilization. Bishop Cyril was canonized as a saint. So the classical age
ended and the medieval dark age of Europe began.

Since the destruction of the classical academies, scientific geniuses and

heroic spirits have been viciously persecuted and inquisitorially tortured as
something intolerably lower than what the Hindus call Chandala – those
that they tolerate as “untouchables.” The harbingers of the Superman have
been associated with everything Evil. In Nietzsche’s view, it is now time for
a reversal of this grotesque Christian inversion of a rightful ethical order
wherein those with the strength to boldly seek wisdom and knowledge are
recognized as sovereign. He intends for the true Chandala to retake their
rightful place as robots that build a broad foundation for the self-directed
evolution of the intellectual elite beyond the merely ‘human’ and into a
superhuman condition. Whoever said that interdependence entailed
equality had no sense of relations in nature or the evolutionary force of life.

In The Gay Science and The Will to Power, Nietzsche elaborates on this

interdependence of the “last man” and the Promethean “masters of the
earth.” There he sees the transformation of the teeming rabble into a
machine as a platform on which a new nobility of renaissance men erect a
new world order unifying Science, Art, and Politics:

So many things have to come together for

scientific thinking to originate… Their effect was
that of poisons… Many hecatombs of human
beings were sacrificed before these impulses
learned to comprehend their coexistence and to
feel they were all functions of one organizing
force… artistic energies and the practical
wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to
form a higher organic system in relation to which
 scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators – as
we know them at present – would have to look
like paltry relics of ancient times.
…Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the
great task and question is approaching: how
shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to
what end shall “man” as a whole – and no longer
as a people, a race – be raised and trained? …as
the consumption of man and mankind becomes
more and more economical and the “machinery”
of interests and services is integrated ever more
intricately, a counter-movement is inevitable…
the production of a synthetic, summarizing,
justifying man for whose existence this
transformation of mankind into a machine is a
precondition, as a base on which he can invent…
this higher form of aristocracy… that of the
future… a hothouse for strange and choice
plants.
 

What Nietzsche was prophesying here, with this description of the

Übermensch as a product of future techne, is the superhuman Promethean
race that my writings are working to conjure into the world as we approach
the imminent Technological Singularity. My “Prometheism” is, in this
sense, not only a legitimate heir to Nietzsche’s project but the very same
Anti-Christian messianic baptism by fire that he heralded as some kind of
Satanic John the Baptist. The coming Prometheist World Order can only be
led by The Anti-Christ.